Her voice was full of mischief when she cocked a hip and said, “Sublevel Three.”
Okay, not to sound braggy or anything, but after five full years, I was pretty sure I knew every part of the Gallagher Academy. I mean, seriously—all the parts (including the ones that got condemned due to an unfortunate uranium incident in 1967).
So I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. After all, Sublevel One was all research books and classrooms, massive training stations comprised of steel and glass and secrets. Sublevel Two was more like a maze—long spiraling corridors filled with our most precious artifacts and dangerous files. The first sublevel looked like something straight out of the future; the second looked like it had been ripped from the past. But as soon as the elevator opened into Sublevel Three, I knew I’d found my way into a place far older than the school itself.
Shadows and stone stretched before us. Dim, old-fashioned bulbs hung from a low ceiling. There was nothing but the sound of footsteps and the drip-drip-drip of falling water coming from somewhere I couldn’t see. We weren’t just in a different part of the mansion—it felt like we were in a different part of the world. And yet when I touched the wall, there was something so familiar about the feel of the stone beneath my fingers, the smell of the musty air.
“The classroom’s this way.” Macey started down a narrow hallway, and I followed slowly behind. But with every step, I found it harder and harder to breathe. My gut was telling me, Run. Fight. Flee. Get out of here before it’s too late, before—
“It’s okay, Cammie.”
Zach was alone in the corridor behind me. How long he’d been standing there, I couldn’t say, but it must have been long enough to know, or at least guess, what I’d been thinking, because he said, “You’re not crazy.”
“I’m not?” I asked, honestly not sure of the answer anymore.
“No.” He shook his head, looked at the low stone ceiling and too-close walls. “It’s just like the tombs.”
I breathed in the musty air, and my mind flashed back to the cramped, abandoned tunnels that ran through the mountains that surrounded the Blackthorne Institute. There had been a time when I would have done almost anything to find out the secrets Zach had been hiding about his school, but a lot of things had changed during that fateful mission last semester.
The path was clear ahead of me. Only Zach blocked the way behind. And yet I couldn’t move.
I just stood, staring. I didn’t mention the fact that his mom had spent the last year trying to kidnap me.
It didn’t seem like the time to ask why he’d never told me that Blackthorne was really a school for assassins.
All the things that had been weird the last time I’d seen him had just gotten weirder. I’d been running for months, for miles, but those unsaid things were still there, exactly where we’d left them.
“Cammie, we’re in here,” Abby yelled through a hole in the stone that could best be described as a doorway. So I turned and went inside.
I’d always suspected that my aunt Abby was the kind of woman who would be good at almost anything she tried. With one glance at her walking through the classroom, handing back old assignments, I could tell that teaching would be no different.
“I hope everyone enjoyed last week’s little lesson in overt surveillance countermeasures. It’s a very important subject, regardless of what Agent Townsend thinks,” Aunt Abby added to the senior CoveOps class. “Ms. Walters, please remember that setting a suspected observation point on fire is effective but perhaps a little too overt in most cases.”
Tina shrugged, and I looked around. Classroom didn’t really seem like the right word to describe the space. It was more like a cave outfitted with long, tall tables, each with a pair of stools. I stood by the entrance, realizing there was no room at any of the tables for me.
“Come on up here, Cam.” Abby pulled a stool from the corner and placed it behind the table at the very front of the class. “You can share with me.”
Climbing onto that stool, I felt entirely too visible, conspicuous. It wasn’t just the chameleon in me who wanted to hide. It was the Gallagher Girl who’d broken the rules, been foolish—gotten caught. I couldn’t help feeling that Sublevel Three might spit me out because I hadn’t earned the right to be there.
Then my aunt moved to the corner of the tall table and leaned against it, like I’d seen Joe Solomon do about a million times.
“Professor Townsend,” she said, with a roll of her eyes, “suggested that this section of the curriculum be postponed—I don’t think he even bothered to teach it to the seniors last year. Not that he taught anything else,” she added under her breath. “But I say you need to know.”
She walked to a corner of the room, picked up one of the wooden crates that were stacked there, carried it to the front table, and set it down beside me.
“I say it’s time for you to know”—she held the crate by its ends and flipped it, sending at least a dozen objects skidding across the table—“about this.”
There were springs and tubes, small cylinders I’d never seen before. The whole class leaned closer to get a better look—everyone but Zach, who didn’t move, didn’t stare.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Abby asked him.
He seemed almost ashamed when he said, “Yes.”
“I thought so.” There was no judgment in Abby’s voice. “Do you feel like telling us about it?”
Zach shook his head. “No.”
Abby looked as if she couldn’t really blame him. “The Gallagher Academy takes protection and enforcement seriously. And for good reason,” my aunt said, and I could have sworn that, for a split second, her gaze drifted to me. “But there are certain things we have not covered…until now.” She stepped away from the table and moved closer to the rest of the class. “These boxes contain long-range, high-powered rifles, and they are part of the most controversial topic that we will cover at this school. So why is that?” she asked, moving down the aisle, all eyes trained on her. “Why do people like Agent Townsend think you shouldn’t be around”—she gestured to the weapon on the table—“these?”
Tina Walters raised her hand. “Because they’re dangerous?”
“Yes,” Abby said. “But not exactly in the way you think.”