"Cammie!" someone said.
"I think I see her!" someone else called.
I could hear my classmates' voices in my ear. I knew they had crossed the fence and were running closer, but Zach's gaze never left mine.
"Look at me." Zach's hands felt like a vise. "Read the journal, Gallagher Girls. Read it all."
And then he pulled me closer, squeezed me so tightly that I could barely breathe. He pressed his lips hard against my forehead for a split second - nothing more - and when he finally let me go and disappeared back into the trees, I thought that I might fall.
"Oh my gosh, Cam, are you okay?" Eva Alvarez was screaming. "Are you -"
I heard Eva stop, Breathless. I watched her pull up short and turn to stare with the rest of my classmates at the scene that lay behind me. The agents. The chaos. The blood. And the way our former teacher lay on his stomach in the middle of it all, hands bound, legs shackled. Unconscious.
"Is that Mr. Solomon?" Anna asked.
"Yes." Bex's voice was low.
"What . . ." Tina's voice caught. "What is that?"
"It was a trap."
Chapter Twenty-Eight
You may think it would be impossible for a van full of teenage girls to be completely quiet for the duration of a two-hour drive, but that night I didn't hear a single voice. A soft rain fell, and only the sloshing of the windshield wipers - the sound of water splashing against the undercarriage of the car - could break the stifling silence on the long ride back to school.
I recognized the sound. I'd heard it once on our Arlington town house as neighbors brought casseroles and condolences. I'd felt it at the ranch as relatives I barely knew spilled onto my grandparents' porch, the four walls of the house too thin to hold us and the news that my father was never coming home. The junior CoverOps class was mourning, and one by one, every girl in the van came to realize what my roommates and I had known for weeks - that Mr. Solomon hadn't been on a mission. Mr. Solomon was a whole different kind of gone.
When we pulled through the gates that night, it seemed like every light in the mansion was on. I could imagine girls inside, laughing and heading downstairs for supper, talking about papers and tests. But as we crawled from the van and watched Agent Townsend stride through the front doors, we all stayed perfectly still, a heavy drizzle and the memory of all we'd seen settling down around us, no one wanted to carry in all inside.
"I never knew," Anna Fetterman said. "I never even guessed. I'm making a mistake, aren't I?" She looked right at me as if I should know. "I shouldn't be on the CoveOps track. I shouldn't . . . I never knew."
"No one knew." Eva Alvarez placed an arm around Anna's shoulders. "No one knew what he was."
"Is."
No one heard me whisper, but that was just as well. After all, no one else had stood in the amusement park graveyard and heard him say the Circle was coming. No one else had felt his warm hands on the bridge. I might have been the only Gallagher Girl in the world at that moment who knew that Mr. Solomon wasn't in the past tense.
So I walked toward the doors and stepped inside, certain of one thing: Joe Solomon was very much alive.
Well, actually, technically, I tried to step inside.
Girls filled the entryway and covered the stairs, and it took all the strength I could muster to press out the rain and into the crowd that was staring as my mother and Agent Townsend stood in the middle of the foyer floor.
"What's going -"
"Shhh," a senior hissed, stopping Tina midsentence.
"You're welcome, by the way," Townsend said, turning toward the stairs, but my mother blocked him, looking anything but graceful.
"You had no right to take my daughter out of my school -"
"Your school?"
He should have been afraid. The last time I'd seen my mother look that way had been on a street in Washington, D.C., as he sister lay bleeding.
He should have been terrified.
"My daughter is not some pawn to be used on a whim!"