“This place is clean,” he said.
But I just turned to the small door that led to the narrow cellar stairs, and said, “Down there.”
Zach was at my back, following me into the musty cellar. There was one tiny window high on the wall, barely peeking over the ground.
“Come on, Gallagher Girl,” he said. “Don’t do this to yourself. The Circle never leaves anything behind.” My fingers traced the walls beside a narrow bed. “They never use a safe house twice.”
And then my fingers found the letters scratched into the mortar between the stones.
C.A.M
Cameron Ann Morgan
My hand began to shake as it pushed the mattress aside, revealing three more letters hidden below.
M.A.M.
Matthew Andrew Morgan
“Yes,” I told Zach, my voice flat and cold and even. “They do.”
* * *
Zach couldn’t hold me in the room. Agent Townsend couldn’t stop me on the stairs. I was too strong in that moment. I wasn’t running from that place or its ghosts. I was running to something, for something, as I burst through the door and out into the snow.
The woods were alive with flashes and beats, images that came in black-and-white, like I’d seen it all before in a dream. But not a dream, I realized. A nightmare.
Bring the girl, a voice said.
Show her what happens to spies who don’t talk.
My mind didn’t know where I was going, but my legs did. They took me over banks and around pine trees. My body was impervious to the cold and the boy at my back yelling, “Cammie!”
Zach was struggling to keep pace behind me, but all I heard was the music, and the cold voice saying, The least we can do is take her to her father.
I skidded to a stop at the edge of the trees, exhaling foggy, ragged breaths, staring into the small clearing. But it wasn’t a clearing—I knew it. The outline of the trees was too precise, the corners too square to be random.
Snow covered the ground, and yet I knew that patch of earth. I’d felt it calling to me for weeks, pulling me back to that mountain.
“It’s real,” I said.
Abby was behind me, panting from the altitude. Zach tried to put his arms around me. He didn’t know my shaking had nothing to do with the cold.
When I began to say, “No. No. No,” he didn’t know I was revolting against, not a memory, but a fact.
“What is this?” Townsend was there finally, Bex at his side.
But it was Macey who stood apart from the others, seeing the small clearing at a distance. And that’s why she was the first to realize, “It’s a grave.”
“No. No.” I fell to my knees and began to scrape blindly through the white.
“Cammie.” Townsend’s hands were on mine, but Abby was already on her knees beside me, scraping too.
“Cammie!” Zach yelled, and pulled me to my feet and into his arms. “Stop.”
“He’s there,” I said, the words blending into sobs. “He’s there. He’s there.”
Abby didn’t scream, but she kept clawing, her bare hands bleeding in the snow.