“The fact that he isn’t here just proves that I’m right!” I shouted, then lowered my voice. “You don’t get it, Bex. Eventually, we all end up alone.”
Bex glanced into the woods and back again. “In what scenario is you on your own preferable to you with backup?” I realized then that Bex might understand why I hadn’t been a very good friend, but she’d never be able to forgive me for not being a very good spy.
And I couldn’t help myself. I got angry.
“You know, I never got to ask how you spent your summer, Rebecca.” Was invoking the power of her given name taking it a bit too far? Maybe. But I didn’t care. “Do anything special?”
“You know…the usual. Swimming. TV. Scanning CIA bulletins for signs that my best friend was dead.”
I spun and started walking through the trees, climbing to the top of the hill.
“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t all gloom and doom,” I shouted over my shoulder to Bex, who followed behind. “Zach seems like quite the travel buddy. I mean, you did go to Budapest, right?”
“How did you know about—”
I stopped and wheeled on her. “I’m a spy, Rebecca.” I saw my shadow on the ground, felt my too-short hair blowing around my face as I said, “So what was it? Mission with your parents? Vacation? Romantic getaway?”
“What do you think we were doing in Budapest?” Bex shouted. “Who do you think we were trying to find? If you have to ask, then you really don’t know us at all.”
And in that moment Bex didn’t look like a girl who was after my boyfriend. She looked like a girl who had been terrified of losing her best friend. She and Zach weren’t together—of course they weren’t. They were just the people who most wanted to be with me.
Right then I realized that, to Bex, I was still gone.
“What do I have to do, Bex?” I yelled, following her down the other side of the hill and into a small clearing. “Tell me what I have to do or say or prove.”
I stood shaking, my hands balled into fists as my best friend opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words.
She turned slowly and started to walk away.
“The Circle needs me alive!” I yelled, and watched her stop, but she didn’t face me. “They would have killed you, Bex. They would have killed anyone but me without a second thought. But me…they need me alive.”
“That’s funny”—Bex turned—“because you look half dead from here.”
And that was when the shot rang out.
Chapter Thirteen
My first thought was that I was wrong. In spite of everything—the sound of a rifle on that hillside seemed an almost ridiculous thing to hear. I told myself that the tree limb behind me had always been shattered. The loud noise was just a door slamming back at the cabin, the sharp crack carrying toward us on the wind.
It wasn’t really a gunshot.
But then I was on the ground with Bex, sheltered behind a log, breathing in the rich, pungent smell of the decaying bark. Wet leaves clung to my skin. Toadstools sprouted from a knot in the log, and I knew it wasn’t a dream.
It. Wasn’t. A. Dream.
I wanted to scream or cry, but nothing came except the cold, certain knowledge that they’d found me. I’d run halfway around the world and lost all memory of the journey, but they’d found me.
“Cam,” Bex said, her voice barely breaking through my mind. “Cam!” Her hand was on my arm, shaking me. Damp earth clung to her palms, and the dirt bit into my skin as she squeezed. “Cam, how far?”
“A hundred and fifty yards.”
Had my mother heard the shot? I couldn’t be sure. The trees were thick, and Bex and I had run farther than I’d thought, and we found ourselves on the other side of the ridge, the cabin and lake hidden from view by the rise of the hill behind us. We hadn’t bothered with comms units. The tracking devices that Liz had spent hours perfecting last spring were all back at school.
When another shot rang out, piercing the trunk we lay behind, I knew that help may as well have been a million miles away.
“That was closer,” I said.
Bex’s eyes were wide as she nodded. “They’re coming.”