“Cam!” I heard Bex call my name. She had a death grip on my arm and was dragging me to my feet. But I couldn’t move. I was frozen, staring through the shattered window at the woman who stood atop the building across the lawn, picking up a grenade launcher and pointing it in our direction.
“Catherine,” I said.
And then my boyfriend’s mother took aim at our window again. And fired.
Glass crunched beneath my feet.
Blood ran into my eyes.
The grenade must have struck a gas line, because smoke swirled all around me and I could feel the heat of the explosion at my back. But Bex’s hand was still in mine, and the two of us stayed low, crouching beneath the black air, running down the hall, away from the body and the flames.
When we reached the end of the hall, I looked out the window and saw Zach’s mother running across the lawn. She must have sensed me there, because she stopped and turned, raised her hand and waved, almost like she’d been expecting me, hoping to see me.
And then she was running again, and I knew I had to find her, make her pay—that as long as she was out there, a part of me would never, ever heal.
“Cam!” Bex yelled as sirens started to sound.
Classes might not have been in session, but it was still one of the most prestigious places in all of England. There were smoke detectors and glass-break detectors, and someone was going to come looking for whoever had done this thing, and we needed to be far away when they did.
“Cam, come on!”
“She’s here!” I yelled, trying to break free.
Bex held tightly to my hand—didn’t let me go. “She’s gone.”
Chapter Three
I’ve been to Bex’s home before. She is my best friend, after all. But when your best friend is the daughter of two superspies, then that pretty much means your best friend moves. A lot. So walking inside the Baxter flat, I couldn’t help myself. I looked around. New rooms. New walls. Same feeling.
Even though every spy I knew (which was a lot of spies) had spent the past few weeks telling me I was safe—that as soon as I remembered the names on the list, there was no reason for the Circle to try to silence me—it was still kind of weird to walk inside the Baxters’ flat and have no one clear the rooms and pull the draperies tight over the windows. Instead, Bex’s mother hugged me. Her father kissed my cheek. They asked my mom about Sir Walter Knight and told us everything everyone at MI6 was saying about the explosion at one of the most famous universities in the world.
But no one was worried about me. Or…well…no one was worried until I asked, “So what do we do next?”
“Now, girls,” Mr. Baxter started, “I thought you knew that today was an exception.”
“Knight is dead,” Bex said. “Crane is dead. Dubois is missing. Along with her two kids,” Bex added pointedly. “So I think Cam has a good point: What do we do next?”
“We go back to school,” my mom said, taking over. “We go back and leave it to—”
“To who?” Bex asked.
“Rebecca!” her mother snapped.
“Sorry.” Bex shrugged. “To whom,” she corrected herself, even though I highly doubted that had been her mother’s point.
“You didn’t hear Knight.” I shook my head. “He wasn’t just spooked. And it wasn’t just Catherine. Whatever the Inner Circle is planning, it’s so big and awful that even he was terrified of it. And this coming from a man who has been a member of the Circle most of his life.”
That was when I pulled the crumpled piece of paper from my pocket. It was in Liz’s handwriting. Tiny pieces of paper clung to the left-hand side of the sheet from where she’d ripped it out of a spiral-bound notebook just a few weeks before. I’d folded it in quarters and put it in my pocket, and it had stayed there ever since, never leaving my side, always within reach.
The paper had grown soft and worn, and even though I knew every word by heart, I kept it. Part of me thought I might keep it forever. Part of me couldn’t wait to watch it burn.
“Here,” I said, slamming the paper down on the table where the adults could see. “Seven names. Seven,” I practically shouted. In spite of everything, I still felt like I had to make them understand.
I looked down at Liz’s feminine cursive, at the names I’d carried in my subconscious for years.
Elias Crane
Charles Dubois
Thomas McKnight
Philip Delauhunt
William Smith
Gideon Maxwell
Samuel P. Winters
“These men formed the Circle with Iosef Cavan in 1863,” I told them.
“We know,” my mother said, but I continued as though she hadn’t spoken at all.
“These men survived him. And then their kids took up the family business. And then their grandkids. And so on. And so on. And now… Now Elias Crane the sixth is dead.” I took a marker and drew a line through the name Elias Crane at the top of the list.
“Dubois’s great-great-great-great granddaughter is probably dead,” Bex added, and I drew another line.
“And now McKnight’s heir is gone too,” I finished with one more line.
“We’ve found three heirs, girls,” Mr. Baxter told us. “Three is a good start.”
I knew what Mr. Baxter was saying. The men and women represented on that list weren’t good people. They’d sold arms to extremists and assassinated world leaders—terror for profit was what Agent Townsend always called it. And I hated them. I hated them more than almost anyone on earth. But there was one person I despised more.
I thought about the woman on the rooftop. She had kidnapped me—tortured me—to get those names, and now she was killing them off one by one, eliminating the competition in the most hostile takeover possible. And I knew that if Catherine wanted the leaders of the Circle dead, then maybe we needed at least one of them to be taken alive.
“Three of them are dead,” I said, drawing in a deep, slow breath. “But we still have four more names. Now we have to find the descendants of these men. We have to find them and stop them before they can do whatever it is they’re planning next. Because, according to Knight, it is something bad and it is something big.”
“That’s not for you to worry about, girls,” Mrs. Baxter said, and Bex threw her hands into the air.