"There are people I could hire to kill you and make it look like an accident."
I gripped the banister and propelled myself up a couple of steps. "He's not so bad."
"Seriously. There wouldn't even be an inquest." Macey took a step then added, "Besides, do I have to tell you that secret boyfriends are the hottest?"
In spite of everything, I smiled. "Point taken."
Chapter Twenty-one
I still remember the day—the moment—when I found my very first secret passage. I had been at school three days. My mom had just started her job. My dad had just died. And I'd just arrived at the school I'd heard about my entire life (or, well, the parts of my life that came after the part where I figured out that my mom and dad had more covert reasons for missing my kindergarten graduation).
I was wandering the hallways, wondering about this building that was bigger and older and more beautiful than anything I'd ever seen. Wondering how long it would take for me to realize that my mom would never go away again and my dad would never come back.
Wondering if I really belonged at the Gallagher Academy and if I was truly worthy to carry both the Morgan and Cameron family names.
But then I stopped in the hallway by the library.
A window was open. The school still had the stale feeling of a building that had been underoccupied for a long time, and I watched as a breeze blew through the windows and pushed some dust along the stone-tiled floor, rolling dirt through the cracks like water in a river. But at one point, instead of rolling along, it dropped out of sight as if there were a waterfall in the grout that could barely be seen by the naked eye, disappearing beneath a wall of solid stone.
I pushed and pulled for five minutes before the wall slid open, and I found my first way of disappearing in plain sight.
Three days before I'd found it. Three days I'd been at this place I loved. Three days…
And already I was looking for ways out.
And that was before I was forbidden to leave.
PROS AND CONS OF BEING GROUNDED INSIDE THE MOST AWESOME GROUNDS IN THE WORLD:
PRO: It's a lot easier to protect your roommate from the people who want to kidnap her if she spends most of her time in your room.
CON: When Mr. Mosckowitz asks you to help him proof his paper for the Excellence in European Encryption seminar on Friday night, you can't say "Sorry, I'm going to be out of town."
PRO: Staying out of secret, ancient tunnels means you don't get nearly as many questionable stains on your white blouse.
CON: When your roommate tests a landmark discovery in clean-fuel technology (that happens to reside inside a Dodge minivan), you don't get to ride shotgun.
PRO: You don't have to worry about running into the boy who may or may not have been stalking you.
CON: You don't get to run into the boy who may or may not have been protecting you. (Even though you don't really need protecting, it totally is the thought that counts.)
PRO: You have plenty of time to think.
CON: You don't always like what you're thinking about.
Zach hadn't tried to kiss me.
Of course, there are bigger mysteries in the world, and I'm sure the CIA would have classified that information as a low-level concern (I know … I asked Liz). Maybe it was the way the walls felt close and the grounds felt small, but for some reason that fact kept pressing down on me, day after day.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think I'm so completely kissable (because, believe me, I don't), but every morning I walked past the place where he had dipped me in front of the entire school. In the Grand Hall every night I ate in the exact same place where we had danced. And every day, with every step, new questions filled my mind:
• Why had Zach been in Boston (among other places)?
• What had he meant when he'd said that he was someone who didn't have anything left to lose?
• Who had set all this in motion? And why?
For three weeks I wandered the halls, wondering about people who had hurt me and a boy who hadn't tried to kiss me: two great mysteries. But there was only one of them that I had any hope of solving.
"Did you check again?" I asked Liz as we left Culture and Assimilation. "Professor Buckingham told me that MI6 registers a dozen new terrorist groups in their database every week."
"I know," Liz said. "But Cam, there's nothing there. I've run the image of that woman's ring through MI6, MI5, CIA, NSA, FBI. Believe me, if they've got initials, I've hacked them, and that image isn't anywhere."
"I didn't make that symbol up! It's got to exist …" I snapped, but the look that my three best friends in the world were giving made me stop short.
"Cam, darling," Bex said. "Is something…bothering you?"
"Well, I …" I started, but Macey was the one who answered.
"She's still freaked out about Zach."
I may be a pavement artist, but Macey McHenry will always know more about boys and all things boy-related than I can ever comprehend.
"What?" Macey asked with a shrug when I stared at her. "I'm intuitive." She took a step. "Plus, you talk in your sleep."
She was right. Zach and I had fallen out of that train berth together, and the world had been upside down ever since.
"Boys!" I cried, but luckily the halls were loud, and girls were hurrying, and the word got lost in the crowd. Would we ever understand them?
"He can't be…bad?" Liz asked softly. "I mean, didn't we establish last year that Zach is not bad?" She wasn't asking as a girl, she was asking as a scientist who really didn't want to reevaluate her models, duplicate her research, and change any of the things that she thought she'd once proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.