I heard the word. I knew the voice. There was a pale hand reaching slowly toward my own.
“Cam,” Liz said softly. “That’s Dr. Steve. You remember Dr. Steve, don’t you? He’s from Blackthorne—Zach’s school. You remember Blackthorne.”
I did remember Blackthorne. Blackthorne made killers. Assassins. Blackthorne was where Mr. Solomon had almost died, so I squeezed harder.
But then Liz’s hand touched mine. Her skin was warm against my fingers. “The trustees said that Zach could stay if he had a faculty adviser, so Dr. Steve came. It’s okay, Cam. You know him, don’t you?”
Only then did I see the look in Dr. Steve’s eyes; did I feel the terror pulsing through the crowd.
I must have pulled him from the railing, placed him gently on the floor, but all I remember was the way my hands shook, as if resisting. My hands were not my own.
“Cameron!” Professor Buckingham was at Liz’s side. “Cameron Morgan, what happened here?” She turned to Dr. Steve. “Dr. Steve, are you—”
“I’m fine,” he choked out, his face as white as a sheet. He looked like he’d just seen a ghost. It took me a moment to realize that the ghost…was me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
And then I stepped back, and for probably the millionth time in my life, I ran away.
Chapter Nine
Covert Operations Report Summer
Summary by Cameron Ann Morgan
On the fourth of June, Cameron Morgan, a junior at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, left the school via the passageway behind the tapestry with the Gallagher family crest, which hangs in the basement corridor.
On September 30, The Operative woke up in a convent on the Austrian border, high in the Alps. She had nothing but a threadbare top and pants. At some point, The Operative had lost her shoes, her late father’s journal, and her memory.
And that is everything The Operative remembers about her summer vacation.
I looked down at the page and tried to pinpoint the exact moment when homework became more about questions than answers. I’d never felt less like a Gallagher Girl in my life. Even in the library, sitting in one of my all-time favorite window seats with the heavy velvet curtains drawn around me, it still seemed like I was a long, long way from home.
My breath fogged on the glass, mimicking the windows of the convent, and it might have been easy to think I was still there had it not been for the voice on the other side of the curtains saying, “Yeah, well, I heard the trustees were really worried about letting her back in.”
“I know,” another girl said. “She missed a lot of school.”
I froze. I didn’t want to move or breathe or do anything that might make the girls stop talking—or, worse, realize that the person they were talking about was two feet away and listening to every word.
“No, not the school part,” the first girl replied, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “The memory-loss part. I mean, my mom graduated with one of the trustees, and according to her, that is a really big deal. You saw what she did today.” I felt my heart speed up. My hands shook. “No one knows if Cammie Morgan can be trusted.”
I listened to the girls walk away, then gathered my things and slipped out as quietly as I could. I certainly didn’t tell them they were wrong. Probably because I was afraid they were right.
There are fourteen routes a person can take from the library to the suite where I’ve lived since my first day of seventh grade. I knew which one was fastest, which was busiest, which one had the most awesome views, and the route that was most likely to make a girl freeze to death in winter.
But that night I didn’t settle for any of those. Instead, I went straight for the part of the mansion that no one but the teachers ever used. The halls were long and narrow and empty, nothing but faculty living quarters and the occasional bookcase to mark the way.
It was easy to feel like I was the only person in the mansion (which was totally what I was going for), right up until the point when I heard a voice say, “Cammie?”
Zach was there. Zach was there, wearing nothing but a towel.
Blood rushed to my cheeks.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I—”
“What are you doing here?”
And just that quickly, the being there part became far more embarrassing than the towel part, to tell you the truth, because something in the way he was looking at me told me that I had completely and totally failed in my attempt to hide.