“But…I brought gummy bears,” Liz said as if that should be enough to neutralize any potential problem.
“If you leave now, you won’t get to come back. Go to class.” I looked at Liz. “Graduate. Leave, and we don’t know what will happen. Which is why the three of you should stay.”
“You really think we’re going to do that?” Macey sounded like she might laugh.
“I think the three of you have never run away before.” I looked down at the ground, the only memory I had of last summer flashing through my mind.
“Leaving can’t be nearly as hard as being left, Cam,” Bex warned. Something in her voice said she still hadn’t forgiven me—that maybe she never would.
I looked at our stone walls and iron fences, and even though we were perfectly dry, I had to shiver a little, thinking about Rome, about when my friends and I had been stuck on opposite sides of the river, no safe way to cross. I felt like my sisterhood and I were about to be on different sides of a vast expanse. I’d have to keep swerving, dodging, running, hoping someday to meet again.
“If we’re going, we have to go now,” Macey said.
And with that it was decided. We couldn’t stay at school forever. After all, we’d spent years preparing for life beyond its walls. We just never knew we’d be rushing out to meet it quite that quickly.
“This way,” I said, pulling back the branches of a rosebush that, rumor said, had been planted by Gilly herself during the Civil War. Behind it was one of the oldest passageways at our school. It dated back to the Underground Railroad, and I knew we weren’t the first desperate people to find it, to need it, to enter into darkness hoping to find a little light at the tunnel’s end.
Zach went first. Then Bex and Macey and Liz. I was supposed to bring up the rear, yet I stopped for a moment, took one last look at the gray stone building, the lacrosse field, and the frost-covered line of trees. In the moonlight it looked almost like a painting. Like a dream. And maybe it had been that for me once. But now, whether I liked it or not, it was time to wake up.
“Cammie!” someone called through the dark. I turned to see Professor Buckingham standing at the door. She was looking at me. Her hair was a mess and her dress was ripped.
Part of me thought that I was in trouble, grounded, facing detention for life. But then Buckingham smiled and raised her hand in something that wasn’t quite a wave, not quite a salute. It was more like she was reaching up to grab a fistful of that night air, to hold it like a memory.
“Good luck,” she yelled, then turned and hit a button on the wall.
Instantly, the sirens began to screech. “Code Black. Code Black. Code Black.”
Lights swirled. Titanium shutters covered all the windows. Barriers slid into place over every door, blocking me off from my teachers, my school. My home. Locking the men and women who’d been sent to find me inside one of the most secure buildings on the face of the earth.
There was only one way left to go, so I turned and started down the dark and dusty tunnel. And for the second time in my life, I ran away.
Chapter Twenty-two
I’ve never been a fugitive before.
I’ve been a runaway, a chameleon, an amnesiac. A spy. But fugitive was new to me, though I have to admit, not entirely unexpected.
We took shifts, driving down two-lane blacktop and interstates, winding mountain roads. We backtracked and sidetracked and did every countersurveillance thing any of us had ever learned. But, most of all, we drove. Not stopping, not resting through the night.
“We’re here.”
I heard Macey’s voice and felt the van come to a stop, bolting upright despite the weight of Liz sleeping across me.
“Ten more minutes,” Liz mumbled. Part of me wanted to let her go back to sleep. Part of me wanted any excuse I might have to think the night before had been a dream.
“Uh, Macey,” Bex asked, straightening. She scooted up to lean between the front seats. “Where exactly is here?”
And then I saw what Bex was seeing. Miles of white-sand beaches stretched out on either side of us. The van sat in the center of a circular driveway. There were intricate iron gates and a massive fountain that was dry and full of leaves. The sky was gray, just like the ocean, and as soon as Macey opened her door I heard the waves crashing into land.
But all of that paled in comparison to the house. (And when I say “house” what I really mean is “mansion.”) It was at least three stories tall with balconies and shaker shingles, and something about that moment made me feel like I’d fallen asleep in an old Dodge minivan and woken up in another world. In Macey’s world.
“Come on,” Macey said.
“Macey…” Bex sounded cautious. “We probably shouldn’t stop.”
“Well, I’m stopping,” Macey said, spinning on us. “And I’m eating a real meal and finding a real bed. So…we can rough it. Or we can rough it.” She pointed at the mansion. “And I, for one, need a shower.”
She was out of the van and starting toward the doors. Bex and I began to run after her, but Zach was already there.