I mean, we had three perfectly viable options: 1) We could forget what we'd heard and go to bed. 2) We could embrace the whole "honesty" thing and tell my mother all we knew. Or 3) I could be … myself. Or, more specifically, the me I used to be.
"The forbidden hall of the East Wing is almost directly beneath us," I began slowly. "All we have to do is access the dumbwaiter shaft on the fourth floor, maneuver through the heating vents by the Culture and Assimilation classroom, and rappel fifty or so feet through the ductwork." But even as I said it, I knew it couldn't be nearly as easy as it sounded.
"So…" Macey said, "what are we waiting for?" She jumped to her feet and started for the door.
"Macey! Wait!" Everyone looked at me. "The security department did a lot of work over the break." I pulled my legs closer, wrapped my arms tighter. "I don't know what kind of upgrades they made, what they might have changed. They were all over those tunnels and passageways, and …" I trailed off, grateful that Bex was there to finish for me.
"We don't know what's in there, Macey," she said, even though the fact that we didn't know what lay waiting in the East Wing was kind of the point, and I could tell by the look on her face that Macey was getting ready to say so.
"Surprises," I finished slowly, "as a rule … are bad."
Macey sank to the floor beside me while I told myself that everything I'd said was true. After all, it was a risky operation. We didn't have adequate intel or nearly enough time to prep. I can list a dozen perfectly logical reasons why I stayed on that stone floor, but the one I didn't tell my friends was that I had promised my mother that my days of sneaking around and breaking rules were over. And I'd kind of hoped my vow would last longer than twenty-four hours.
"So, what do we do now?" Liz asked.
Bex smiled. "Oh," she said mischievously, "we'll think of something."
Covert Operations Report Summary of Surveillance By Cameron Morgan, Rebecca Baxter, Elizabeth Sutton, and Macey McHenry (hereafter referred to as "The Operatives")
When faced with the knowledge that faculty members of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women were planning a rogue operation, The Operatives began a research and recognizance mission to determine the following:
What was such a big freaking deal that no one wanted
The Operatives to know about it?
Why were The Operatives no longer allowed in the East
Wing? (A change that had added ten and a half
minutes to their average daily commute between classes!) 3. Who or what was Black Thorn? Or maybe Blackthorne?
(Is it possible that Headmistress Morgan and Mr. Solomon were taking on a group of terrorists-slash-florists?)
4. What does Mr. Solomon look like with his shirt off?
(Because, if you're going to set up an observation post,
you may as well be thorough.)
When I woke up the next morning I tried not to think about the night before, but it's kind of hard to forget covert and potentially dangerous missions when A) The dirty tower floor left a stain on your best school skirt. B) At breakfast, your mother says, "Good morning, Cam. Did you girls have fun last night?" which everyone knows translates to I'm acting perfectly normal because I totally have something to hide. And C) Avoiding the mysteriously off-limits East Wing means you have to find alternate routes to sixty percent of your daily destinations.
On my way downstairs I walked slowly past the door that opened into the East Wing. It was just another door—dark, solid wood, an old brass knob. There were hundreds of doors like it in the mansion, but this one was forbidden, so like any good spy, I wanted to open that one.
I felt Kim Lee fall into step beside me as she glanced at the door and said, "Going around is such a pain." Of course she didn't think about the fact that half of our teachers could have been behind that very door at this very moment, planning an attack on some rogue florists!
I, of course, was having trouble thinking about anything else.
Not even the sight of Mr. Smith appearing in Countries of the World (COW) with a jar of coins, telling us to make change for a dollar in eight different currencies while factoring in exchange rates, could make me stop obsessing about that door and the secrets it was masking.
Even Madame Dabney's lecture on the art of perfect thank-you notes and their obviously underutilized coded message potential couldn't pull my mind away from the East Wing.
We already had two hours' worth of homework and the promise of a pop quiz on the poisonous plants of Southeast Asia; all the teachers were acting like they either had no idea what was going on, or had sworn to take the secret to their graves (which could have been true, actually).
It was business as usual at the Gallagher Academy, and as we started downstairs after Culture and Assimilation (C&A), it almost felt like the break had never happened.
Almost.
"Well, this is it," Liz said. Bex and I started for the elevator that was concealed in the narrow hallway beneath the Grand Staircase.
"What is it?" I asked. Then I turned and saw that Liz wasn't following us to our next class.
Instead, she hooked her thumbs in the straps of her backpack and took a step away. "I've got Advanced Organic Chemistry."
But Bex and I didn't have Advanced Organic Chemistry. Bex and I had Covert Operations. From that moment on, the two of us were going to be training for a life of missions and fieldwork while Liz prepared for a career in a lab or an office. I thought about the forms we'd filled out last semester, the choice I'd made to walk away from any hope of a safe, normal life—from boys like Josh. So it wasn't any wonder that my voice cracked when I said, "Oh. Okay."
Bex and I stared into the mirror that hid the elevator's entrance, then waited for the red beam to scan our retinal images and clear us for our second semester in Sublevel One. I tried not to think about how, for the first time since seventh grade, Liz wouldn't be beside us.
Bex must have been thinking the same thing, because pretty soon she said, "Are you sure you want to spend the next two and a half years doing experiments and cracking codes?" A wicked twinkle appeared in her eye as she studied Liz's pale reflection. "Because the CoveOps class is gonna do underwater exercises eventually, and you know Mr. Solomon will have to take his shirt off."
A portrait of Gillian Gallagher hung on the wall behind us; I saw her eyes flash green, then the mirror slid aside, revealing the small elevator to the Covert Operations classroom. Liz watched the doors slide closed behind us, then Bex turned around and yelled, "But Mr. Mosckowitz might go topless sometime, too!"
And then I heard Liz laugh.
"She'll be okay without us, right?" Bex asked.
We heard the clanking of a suit of armor falling to the floor and Liz's distinctive "Oopsy daisy."
As the elevator started to move, Bex said, "Don't answer that."
Here's the thing you need to know about Sublevel One: It's big. Like, I've-seen-football-stadiums-that-are-smaller big. And while the rest of the mansion is made of old stone and ancient wood, there's nothing about the frosted-glass partitions and stainless steel furniture of the Covert Operations classroom that could ever be confused with a two-hundred-year-old mansion that housed privileged girls.
Bex and I stepped off the elevator, our footsteps echoing as we passed the CoveOps library, full of books so sensitive you can never ever take them out of the Subs. (They're made out of paper that will disintegrate if it's ever exposed to natural light, just to be on the safe side.) We passed big burly guys from the maintenance department, who smiled and said, "Knock 'em dead, girls." (Knowing the guys from our maintenance department, they may very well have meant it literally.)
I slid into my chair, trying not to think about Liz or the door or anything other than the fact that I was finally back in the one part of the Gallagher Academy that never pretended to be anything other than what it is.
That was before Tina Walters leaned toward me, grinning and snapping her gum as only a third-generation spy-slash-gossip-columnist's daughter can do. "So, Cammie, is it true they sent a SWAT team to drag you out of your grandparents' house on Christmas morning?" Tina didn't wait for a response. "Because I heard you put up a good fight, but that they eventually pulled your Christmas stocking over your head and rolled you up in the tree skirt."
There will probably come a day when national security will rest in the hands of Tina Walters. Luckily, that wasn't the day.
"I was with her, Tina," Bex said. "Do you honestly think they could have taken both of us?"
Tina nodded, conceding the point. Before she could dig further, a deep voice said, "Static surveillance." Mr. Solomon came strolling into class without so much as a hello. "It is the root of what we do, and it has one golden rule—name it!"
And then, despite everything, I half expected to see Liz's thin arm shoot into the air, but of course it was a different voice that answered. "The first rule of static surveillance is that the operative must use the simplest, least-intrusive means possible."
Well, my first thought was that Sublevel One had become contaminated with some kind of hallucinogenic chemical, because the girl who spoke sounded like Anna Fetterman. She looked like Anna Fetterman. But there was no way Anna Fetterman belonged on the Covert Operations track of study!
Don't get me wrong, I love Anna. Really, I do. But I once saw her give herself a bloody nose while opening a can of Pringles. (I'm soooo not even making that up.) And that's not the kind of thing that usually screams Let me parachute onto the roof of a foreign embassy to bug the ambassador's cuff links, if you know what I mean.
But did Mr. Solomon act shocked? No, he just said, "Very good, Ms. Fetterman," as if everything were perfectly normal—which…hello … it wasn't. I mean, Anna was taking CoveOps, my mom was hiding something from me, and there was an entire section of our school that even I couldn't access! Everything was not perfectly normal!
Joe Solomon had been an undercover operative for eighteen years, so naturally he was completely calm as he relaxed against his desk and said, "We deal in information, ladies. It's not about operations—it's about intelligence. It's not about cool gadgets—it's about getting the job done." Mr. Solomon looked around the room. "In other words, don't bother to plant cameras in the living room if your target never shuts the blinds."
I started writing everything down, but then Mr. Solomon slid Eva Alvarez's notebook off her desk and into her open bag. "No notes, ladies."
No notes? What did he mean no notes? Was he serious? (By the way, it was probably a good thing Liz wasn't on the CoveOps track, because her head would have been exploding about then!)
At the front of the room, Joe Solomon turned to the board and started diagramming a typical static surveillance scenario. Anna was gripping her pen so hard it looked like she was about to pull a muscle, but Mr. Solomon must have that whole eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head thing, because he said, "I said no notes, Ms. Fetterman," and Anna jerked away from her pen as if it had shocked her. (It might have—we do have some very specialized writing instruments here at the Gallagher Academy.)
