It was Zach’s voice calling to me through the haze.
Cammie.
I heard it drawing closer, and so I fled, past closed doors and heavy gates. The fog grew thicker, and I ran.
“Cammie, wait!” Zach yelled, but I couldn’t trust the words. Didn’t trust my own mind. There were sirens and horns and the feel of the wind.
“Cammie, stop!” he yelled.
Another horn. The rush of air.
“Cammie!”
And then arms grabbed me, pulled me from my feet. I wanted to hit and claw and keep running, but my feet no longer struck the pavement. I tried to toss and turn—to break free—but the covers must have been tangled around me. There was no escape.
“No,” I said to myself, panting. “No. No. No.”
“Cammie!” Zach’s voice was stronger. I began to shake. “Gallagher Girl, wake up!”
“No, no,” I said, certain I could stop the dream. Change it. I was so sure there were answers at the end of that dark walk, and I had to stay there—stay sleeping to find them.
“Cammie!”
My back slammed into a wall, and only then did I bolt awake.
A car horn screamed out. The wind I felt was the rushing air of the passing traffic as Zach held me on a narrow sidewalk.
“Cammie, are you okay?” he asked, searching my eyes. “Cammie, wake up,” he shouted, shaking me again. “Tell me you’re okay. Tell me—”
“Where am I?” I asked, but then the last day came rushing back to me. I knew where I was, and most of all, who I was supposed to be with. “Zach?”
“Cammie, are you hurt?”
“Why are you here, Zach? Why aren’t you at school? Why are you…” I remembered Abby’s hushed conversation behind closed doors, the look that had passed between Macey and Bex when I’d asked why my mom couldn’t just ask Zach where he’d gone last summer.
“You ran away.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking about now or about last summer. It didn’t really matter.
“I was worried about you.” He glanced up and down at the dark street. “Looks like I was right to.”
“So you just…left?”
Zach huffed. “All the cool kids are doing it.”
When he reached for me, I pulled away, started to go back the way I’d come. Then I realized I had no idea which way that was. I was wearing Macey’s shoes and Bex’s jeans and a T-shirt with a tear on the sleeve. My hair was blowing all around my face. Sleep clung to the corners of my eyes, and I had no idea how far I’d wandered through the night.
“Cammie, what are you doing—”
“I don’t know, okay?” My voice echoed down the street, and I hated those words almost as much as I hated the Circle.
“Come on.” Zach gripped my hand. “We’ve got to get you back to Abby before she—”
“Were you here with me, Zach?” I couldn’t look at him when I said it. “Last summer…”
“What are you talking about, Gallagher Girl?”
“I know you left the Baxters’. I know you ran away. And…I know I was in Rome. And I wasn’t alone.”
“Someone else was with you?” The first look that filled his face was shock, as if he’d heard me wrong. And then the expression shifted into a simmering rage. “Someone was with you?”