“Can you turn that down, please?”
“What?” the girl asked.
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the melody I didn’t know how to sing.
“Make it stop. Can you please make it stop?”
“Make what stop?”
“That music. It’s so loud.”
“Gillian”—the girl slowly shook her head—“there is no music.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. I wanted to run, but I had no clue to where. All I seemed able to do was sit quietly as Mary picked up my feet and gently placed them back on the bed.
“You’ve got quite a bump there. I’m not surprised you’re hearing things. You’ve been saying things, too, just so you know. But I wouldn’t worry about that. People hear and say all kinds of crazy things when they’re sick.”
“What did I say?” I asked, honestly terrified of the answer.
“It doesn’t matter now.” She tucked the covers in around me, just like Grandma Morgan used to do. “All you need to do is lie there and rest and—”
“What did I say?”
“Crazy things.” The girl’s voice was a whisper. “A lot of it we didn’t understand. The rest—between us all—we pieced together.”
“Like what?” I gripped her hand tightly, as if trying to squeeze the truth out.
“Like you go to a school for spies.”
The woman who came to me next had swollen, arthritic fingers and gray eyes. She was followed by a young nun with red hair and a Hungarian accent, and a pair of twins in their late forties who huddled together and spoke Russian, low and under their breaths.
At my school, they call me the Chameleon. I’m the girl nobody sees. But not then. Not there. The sisters who surrounded me saw everything. They took my pulse and shined a bright light into my eyes. Someone brought a glass of water and instructed me to sip it very slowly. It was the sweetest stuff I’d ever tasted, and so I downed it all in one long gulp, but then I started choking—my head kept on throbbing—and the nun with the swollen fingers looked at me as if to say, Told you so.
I don’t know whether it was the habits or the accents or the stern order that I should lie perfectly still, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d found myself surrounded by another ancient and powerful sisterhood. I knew better than to go against them, so I stayed where I was and did exactly as I was told.
After a long time, the girl who had been there at the beginning eased toward me and took a seat at the foot of my bed. “Do you know why you’re here?”
Where’s here? I wanted to say, but something in my spy blood told me not to.
“I was doing a sort of project for school. I had to split off from the others. I must have…lost my way.” I felt my voice break and told myself it was okay. Even the Mother Superior couldn’t blame me. Technically, it wasn’t a lie.
“We’re a bit worried about that head of yours,” Mary said. “You may need surgery, tests, things we can’t do here. And someone must be looking for you.”
I thought about my mother and my friends, and finally, about the Circle of Cavan. I looked down at my broken body and wondered if maybe I’d already been found. Then I studied the innocent faces that surrounded me and felt a whole new surge of panic: What if the Circle finds me here?
“Gillian?” Mary said. It was an embarrassingly long time before I realized she was speaking to me. “Gillian, are you okay?”
But I was already moving, pushing off the bed and across the room.
“I’ve got to go.”
Six days I’d been in one place, defenseless. I didn’t know how I’d come to be there or why, but I knew that the longer I stayed, the closer the Circle would be to finding me. I had to leave. And soon.
The Mother Superior, however, didn’t seem very concerned about ancient terror organizations. She had the look of a woman who might tell ancient terror organizations to bring it on.
“You will sit,” she spat in heavily accented English.
“I’m sorry, Mother Superior,” I said, my voice still raw. But the clock was ticking, and I couldn’t stay any longer. Summer. I’d given myself until the end of the summer to follow in my father’s footsteps, and I didn’t dare waste a minute more.