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.
But she hadn't been on the train. She hadn't seen with her own eyes that Aunt Abby knew something about Zach. And Zach knew something about Boston. And someone knew something about that emblem. As Liz started for the labs and Macey started for Encryption, Bex and I boarded the elevator to Sublevel Two, and I couldn't help but ask, "What good is it having elite spying abilities if the people who have the highly classified information are even more elite?"
Bex smiled at me. "Because where would be the fun in that?" The spiraling ramp seemed steeper as it carried us deeper and deeper into Sublevel Two. When we reached the bottom, she stopped and looked at me. "And maybe there are some things"—she spoke slowly, and I knew the words were almost painful as she said—"we aren't supposed to know."
"Motivation," Mr. Solomon said as we settled into our chairs around the old-fashioned tables of the Covert Operations classroom. For weeks I'd been coming to that room, studying our teacher, trying to find some clue in his eyes about Zach and the train and a million other questions that swarmed my mind.
"It's why people do the things they do," our teacher said, the sentence as simple and basic as any lesson we had ever learned; and yet something in Joe Solomon's tone told me it was also the most important.
"What, ladies"—he took a step, scanning the dim room—"is almost always tied to why. There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear …" he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge."