The facts were still the same—I'd remembered them correctly all along. But I understood something else then. When the film played in my mind I didn't focus on the hits or the kicks. That night I saw the eyes, the way arms were ready to parry our punches. The way no one seemed shocked as Macey performed a textbook Malinowski Maneuver on a guy twice her size.
A spy is only as good as her cover—as her legend. The
bad guys weren't supposed to know the truth about us.
But they did.
"You're sure," Bex asked me. Again. We huddled together in the nearest, quietest, safest place I could find, surrounded by the remnants of the first-ever covert carrier pigeon breeding program. Liz sat on an overturned pigeon coop. A soft wind blew through the open gaps in the wall, which looked out into the night.
Roseville was just two miles away. And Josh. And normalcy. But somehow my first boyfriend and his perfectly ordinary life seemed like a different world entirely as I looked at Bex and then at Liz and, finally, at Macey.
"They really weren't surprised," Macey said again, almost laughing now. She looked at me. "Why didn't we see that?"
It was as if we'd both missed an easy question on a pop quiz and Macey couldn't help having a good laugh at our stupidity.
"So …" Bex spoke slowly, carefully. "They know."
She looked out the glassless windows as if they might have been out there even as we spoke, because if they knew who we were…they knew where we lived.
"But that can't be," Liz protested. "No one knows the truth about the Gallagher Academy."
But I just followed Bex's gaze into the darkness and thought about another night in another room, when Zach had asked me about the mystery surrounding my father's death. I found his words coming back to me as I wrapped my arms around myself and whispered, "Somebody knows."
"So they knew Macey would have training, and they came after her and Preston anyway?" Liz asked.
I saw my best friends looking at me—and even in the dark I couldn't hide the truth any longer.
"Well …" I started slowly, "on the roof, Preston was with us."
"Yeah," Bex said. I could feel her impatience building, so I spoke faster.
"I got him out of there—got him off of that roof—and they didn't really…care."
"What do you mean, Cam?" Liz asked.
"She means they didn't want him," Macey said. "They didn't want us," she added, growing stronger. And then she stopped. She shrugged. "They wanted me."
I'd been fearing that moment for days, thinking about the girl at the lake. I'd worried what the knowledge might do to her—to us. But from the time she'd stepped foot out of her parents' limousine, Macey had been a surprise, and this was no exception.
She squinted at me. She shook her head. It was the exact same look she got when she mastered a formula for Mr. Mosckowitz's class, as if things were finally starting to make sense.
"I'm gonna get my mom and Aunt Abby." I started for the door, but then Macey spoke.
"You think they don't know already?"
And it hit me—the truth. Of course they knew. They'd always known.
"So either they came after Macey in spite of her training…" Liz started.
"Or because of it," Bex replied.
But the strangest thing was happening. The moon was rising, full and clear. The lights of Roseville shone in the distance. Everything felt alive again, and I could see that in Macey. It was as if she knew it wasn't random anymore—there was purpose. And that made all the difference.
"So I guess the question is," Bex said, crossing her arms, "what are we gonna do about it?"
Covert Operations Report
By Cameron Morgan, Macey McHenry, Elizabeth Sutton, and Rebecca Baxter (hereafter referred to as "The Operatives")