Surely that wasn’t the longest night of my life, but it felt like it.
Not one of us protested when Liz insisted we stop and clean our wounds in the bathroom of a gas station outside the city. They were inconsequential, really. Scrapes and bruises. I had a pretty nasty cut on my shoulder, but nothing any worse than any of us had had before. We’d been on the perimeter of the blast radius. Ten feet closer to the king, and we wouldn’t have been so lucky.
Once we were back in the van, I risked a glance at Zach. No one had tended to his scrapes and burns. No one had tried to. He just kept staring out the window, looking for what, exactly, I didn’t really know.
Maybe a way out.
Maybe a chance to turn back time.
We kept the radio of the van turned low. News of the king’s assassination swept across the globe. Riots were spreading throughout Caspia and beyond, crossing borders, a whole region on fire. Chaos was the new norm. The world was a powder keg, and I rubbed my sore body, afraid I’d just felt the spark.
We drove all night, heading south along the coastline until I was almost convinced Zach was going to drive us out to sea.
Finally there was a dock with a small ferry that you had to push with a long pole, like it was still 1850. At last there was an island and an overgrown pathway and a house surrounded by tall trees filled with Spanish moss, a massive wraparound porch and a scene befitting Scarlett O’Hara.
“What is this place, Zach?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. He just kicked the front door; but it didn’t put up a fight, splintering easily, swinging open. Liz carried her computers protectively like there might be an alligator or a monster after her hard drive. But Zach said nothing. He just kept looking at the staircase as if waiting for a ghost to descend from the second floor.
It had been a grand old house once, a mansion. But everything about it had fallen into rubble from decades of disuse and neglect.
“Is this one of Joe’s houses?” I waited, but Zach was speechless. “If it’s Joe’s house, Zach, we probably shouldn’t stay. Someone may track us here.”
“Not Joe.” Zach shook his head.
“But you know it.” It wasn’t really a question, not a guess. I inched slowly closer. “Whose house is it, Zach?”
“It’s safe.” He turned. “We’ll be safe.”
“Zach…” I reached for him, but he pulled away and walked to the corner of the room, measuring his footsteps carefully, listening until one step sounded slightly different from the others. Then he knelt to the floor and removed one of the boards and reached inside to pull out six birthday candles and a G.I. Joe, a rumpled five-dollar bill and an assortment of broken crayons—and only then did I know where Zach had brought us. After all, that wasn’t the covert stash of an operative; it was the hiding place of a child.
“This was your mother’s safe house,” I whispered.
But Zach just looked around the big, dusty rooms that must have been so grand, once upon a time. “No. It was her house,” he said.
Spies aren’t like normal people. No one expects us to have houses and mortgages, tire swings and barbecues on the Fourth of July. But every spy is somebody’s child, and I stepped across those dusty floorboards, wondering what kind of place had given birth to the woman we called Catherine.
“This was my room.” He looked into the small space. “There were bedrooms upstairs, of course, but I didn’t like being alone. I was scared of the dark and the wind and the storms.… There were such bad storms.”
“Can it be traced to you, Zach? To her?”
“There’s natural gas on the property, and the rooms are still lit with gaslight. I think there might be a generator. A water well, but no phone. The whole house is off the grid.” Zach gave a gruff laugh. “It doesn’t even know there is a grid.”
“When was the last time you were here?”
“I don’t know. Ten years ago? Maybe longer. She used to talk about fixing it up—making it like it was in its prime. But I don’t know how it was. I just know this.”
He motioned around the derelict rooms, and I don’t know if he meant it or not, but it sounded like he was saying he didn’t know anything other than a vagabond way of life. “This is all I know.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay here, Zach,” I tried. “We could keep driving.”
“You don’t get it, Gallagher Girl.” He shook his head slowly. “The king is dead. There’s nowhere else to go.”
I grew up in an old mansion. I know the chill that creeps through stone walls, the sounds a roof can make in a hard wind. But that night was different. Everything creaked and moaned. When the rain started, it fell in heavy waves, beating against the house and dripping through the ceiling. There was a steady, even ping as fat drops fell on the keys of the old piano. And the longer the storm pounded outside, the more I expected the house might blow right off its foundation and out into the waves.
There must have been debris in the chimney, because when we built a fire, smoke backed into the house, filling it with an eerie haze. We propped open the front door, and for a while the smoke mixed with the wet wind while Preston and Macey surveyed the contents of the kitchen. Liz was unpacking equipment, and Zach stoked the fire.
But I just sat at the bottom of the stairs, rubbing my palms against my jeans, dried blood smearing onto dark denim, wondering, Is that it? Is it really over?
“What happens now?” I looked up to find Bex leaning against the banister, looming over me. It was like she’d read my mind.