Chapter One
“Where am I?”
I heard the words, but I wasn’t sure I’d said them. The voice was too rough, too coarse to be mine. It was as if there were a stranger in my skin, lying in the dark, saying, “Who’s there?”
“So it’s English, is it?”
As soon as the young woman moved to stand at the end of the bed, I could see that she was beautiful. She had an Irish accent and strawberry blond hair in a shade that could never be anything but natural. Soft curls framed a slightly freckled face with blue eyes and a wide smile. Maybe it was the terrible throbbing in my head—the piercing pain behind my eyes—but I could have sworn I saw a halo.
“And American too, by the sound of it. Oh, Sister Isabella is going to be very upset about this. She wagered a week’s worth of kitchen duty you were Australian. But you’re not, are you?”
I shook my head, and it felt like a bomb went off. I wanted to scream, but instead I gritted my teeth and said, “You were betting on me?”
“Well, you should have heard yourself, talking in all kinds of tongues—like the devil himself was after you. French and German, Russian and Japanese, I think. A lot of languages no one here even speaks.” She walked to the small wooden stool beside my bed and whispered, “You’ll have to forgive us, but it was either bet…or worry.”
There were soft sheets beneath my hands, a cold stone wall beside my right shoulder. A candle flickered in the corner, pale light washing partway across a sparsely furnished room, leaving it mostly in shadow.
Worry seemed appropriate under the circumstances.
“Who are you?” I asked, scooting backward on the thin mattress, retreating into the cold corner made of stone. I was too weak to fight, far too unsteady to run, but when the girl reached for me, I managed to grab her hand and twist her arm into a terrible angle. “What is this place?”
“It’s my home.” Her voice cracked, but she didn’t try to fight. She just leaned closer to me, brought her free hand to my face, and said, “You’re okay.”
But I didn’t feel okay. My head ached, and when I moved, pain shot down my side. I kicked off the covers and saw that my legs were a solid mass of bruises and gashes and scrapes. Someone had bandaged my right ankle, packed it in ice. Someone had cleaned my cuts. Someone had brought me to that bed and listened, guessing where I had come from and why.
Someone was looking right at me. “You did this?”
I ran my hand down my leg, fingering the gauze that bound my ankle.
“I did.” The girl placed a hand over my fingers as they picked at the threads. “Don’t you go undoing it, now.”
A crucifix hung on the wall behind her, and when she smiled, it was perhaps the kindest look I’d ever seen.
“You’re a nun?” I asked.
“I will be soon. I hope.” She blushed, and I realized she wasn’t much older than I was. “By year’s end, I should take my vows. I’m Mary, by the way.”
“Is this a hospital, Mary?”
“Oh, no. But there isn’t much in these parts, I’m afraid. So we do what we can.”
“Who is we?”
A kind of terror seized me then. I pulled my knees close to my chest. My legs felt skinnier than they should have, my hands rougher than I remembered. Just a few days before, I’d let my roommates give me a manicure to take their minds off of finals week. Liz had chosen the color—Flamingo Pink—but when I looked at my fingers then, the polish was gone. Blood and dirt were caked under the nails as if I’d crawled out of my school and halfway across the world on my hands and knees to reach that narrow bed.
“How long…” My voice caught, so I tried again. “How long have I been here?”
“Now, now.” Mary straightened the covers. She seemed afraid to face me when she said, “You don’t need to worry about—”
“How long?” I shouted, and Mary dropped her voice and her gaze. Her hands were, at last, still.
“You’ve been here six days.”
Six days, I thought. Not even a week. And yet it sounded like forever.
“Where are my clothes?” I pushed aside the covers and swung my feet to the floor, but my head felt so strange, I knew better than to try to stand. “I need my clothes and my things. I need…”
I wanted to explain, but the words failed me. Thought failed me. Once I got back to school, I was pretty sure my teachers would fail me. My head swirled, but I couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of the music that filled the little room, pulsing too loudly inside my ears.
“Can you turn that down, please?”
“What?” the girl asked.
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the melody I didn’t know how to sing.
“Make it stop. Can you please make it stop?”
“Make what stop?”
“That music. It’s so loud.”
“Gillian”—the girl slowly shook her head—“there is no music.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. I wanted to run, but I had no clue to where. All I seemed able to do was sit quietly as Mary picked up my feet and gently placed them back on the bed.
“You’ve got quite a bump there. I’m not surprised you’re hearing things. You’ve been saying things, too, just so you know. But I wouldn’t worry about that. People hear and say all kinds of crazy things when they’re sick.”
“What did I say?” I asked, honestly terrified of the answer.
“It doesn’t matter now.” She tucked the covers in around me, just like Grandma Morgan used to do. “All you need to do is lie there and rest and—”
“What did I say?”
“Crazy things.” The girl’s voice was a whisper. “A lot of it we didn’t understand. The rest—between us all—we pieced together.”
“Like what?” I gripped her hand tightly, as if trying to squeeze the truth out.
“Like you go to a school for spies.”
The woman who came to me next had swollen, arthritic fingers and gray eyes. She was followed by a young nun with red hair and a Hungarian accent, and a pair of twins in their late forties who huddled together and spoke Russian, low and under their breaths.
At my school, they call me the Chameleon. I’m the girl nobody sees. But not then. Not there. The sisters who surrounded me saw everything. They took my pulse and shined a bright light into my eyes. Someone brought a glass of water and instructed me to sip it very slowly. It was the sweetest stuff I’d ever tasted, and so I downed it all in one long gulp, but then I started choking—my head kept on throbbing—and the nun with the swollen fingers looked at me as if to say, Told you so.