“Do you guys remember the tests? Before we started school?” Liz asked.
Bex shook her head. “There were no tests, Liz. We’ve been on break. Remember?”
“No. Not now. When we were sixth graders? Before we started here at all? There were those tests. Remember those?”
“Sure. We took a few tests,” I said.
“Well, I took more,” Liz said. “I took dozens. Hundreds. Probably because my parents weren’t spies. I don’t know why. I just know that I was poked and prodded and questioned for months. Personality tests. IQ tests. Psych profiles.”
“What about them, Lizzie?” Bex asked.
“The butterfly effect.” Again, Liz’s voice cracked. She brought her hands to her face.
“Sit down,” I told her, but she didn’t move. She just kept shaking her head back and forth, over and over, until I thought she might get dizzy.
“A butterfly flaps its wings over the ocean and there’s a hurricane in Asia.”
“We know what the butterfly effect is, Liz,” Bex said, but it was like Liz never even heard her.
“All things are connected,” Liz said. “Like dominoes. Like a house of cards. Like—”
“We’re going to need more facts and fewer similes, Lizzie,” I tried.
“It’s all my fault!” she shouted again.
“Liz, am I going to have to hit you?” Bex asked. “Because I’m totally willing to hit you.”
“I’m not hysterical, Rebecca.” I don’t know if it was the use of Bex’s full name or the tone of Liz’s voice but I knew right then that whatever Liz was worried about—it was real. And it was bad.
“Liz, calm down,” I tried. “Breathe. What is your fault?”
“Think about it,” Liz went on after a minute. “One of the tests I had to take was on abstract thinking. You know—big questions. Crazy theories. If the earth were in the path of a meteor made of cheese, how would you stop it? That kind of thing.”
“Your tests had cheese meteor questions?” Bex asked. I shushed her, and Liz talked on.
“Well, one of the questions was ‘How would you start World War Three?’ That was it. A hypothetical. A crazy notion.” Then her eyes got even bigger, her voice clearer. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even know what the Gallagher Academy really was at the time. I just knew that it was really exclusive and I wanted to get in. I wanted to get in so badly.… So when they asked me how I’d start World War Three, I told them.”
The idea washed around the room, settling on us all slowly, like someone had left a window open and the fog was rolling in.
“I thought it was just a hypothetical. It was supposed to be a hypothetical! But now…”
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
She looked up at me, absolute terror in her eyes. “I told them that World War Three would start with a tanker blowing up on the Iranian coast of the Caspian Sea and a bridge going out in Azerbaijan.”
We’d talked about those tragedies at the Welcome Back Dinner, and I thought back to that night—how quiet Liz had been. How worried. And I realized how long Liz had been carrying that weight.
“Liz, I’m sure it’s nothing,” Macey said. “It was just a ship. It wasn’t even a military ship. And that bridge was just—”
“A trade route,” Liz cut her off. “More importantly, that bridge and the ports along the Caspian coast are Iranian trade routes. And with every route that gets cut off, the Iranians have to start using other routes that go through more and more volatile territories. Like Turkey or Afghanistan or Caspia.”
Liz seemed exhausted, as if the sheer act of admitting it all out loud was about to be too much for her.
“I’ve been wondering about it for a while now. What if I was right? What are the odds of those things just randomly happening? And then…what if they weren’t random?” Liz trembled, the last bit of color draining from her face. “Remember what Knight told you in Cambridge? That the Circle is planning something terrible and it has already begun?”
“Liz,” I asked, “are you saying…”
“I think the Circle has my test. And I think they’re using it to start World War Three.”