“Zach,” I said, easing closer. “What are you doing here? Are you…? Is it…?” The questions didn’t matter, so the words didn’t come. “You’re here!”
“Funny, I was about to say the same about you.”
Just to reiterate: I was alone. With Zach. In my school.
Crazy was taking on a whole new meaning.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I sort of…go…here now.”
“You do?” I asked, then nodded, the facts settling down around me. Zach’s mother was a prominent member of the Circle. The fact that he had chosen to work against her meant that the same people who were after me were after him. The Gallagher Academy was one of the safest places on earth—probably the safest school. It made sense that he would come back and enroll full-time after the summer.
“Cammie,” a woman behind me said. “I’m Dr. Wolf. We’re ready for you.”
I knew I was supposed to turn—to go take their tests, answer their questions, and start trying to unravel the mystery of my mind—but I just stood, feeling Zach’s fingers play with the ends of my hair.
“How…are you?” I managed to mutter.
“It’s different,” he said, looking at my new short locks as if he hadn’t heard my question at all. “It’s different now.”
Chapter Five
Over the course of the next four hours, there were nine tests and three doctors. I spent thirty minutes strapped inside a metal tube, listening to a mechanic whirring so loud I couldn’t even hear myself think. They X-rayed every part of my body, scanned every part of my mind. I leaned against a metal brace, squinted into a light, and recited all the prime numbers between one and a thousand in Japanese.
I kept waiting for words like concussion or trauma, but there was nothing but hasty scribbling on notepads. The doctors’ expressions didn’t betray a single thing. They were all Gallagher grads, after all. Their poker faces stayed as blank as my memory.
“Well, Cammie,” Dr. Wolf said, after I’d changed into clean clothes, “how are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said, relieved that at least my lying ability had made it through the summer intact.
“Dizziness?” she asked, and gave me knowing look.
“Some,” I admitted.
“Nausea?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Headaches?” she guessed, and I nodded. “These things are normal, Cammie. That’s quite a bump you’ve got there.” She pointed to the knot on my head.
“What is it, Cammie?” the doctor asked when I didn’t say anything, reading me as clearly as if I were still hooked up to one of her machines.
“You’ve seen my file?”
“Of course,” she said with a nod.
“Well, it’s just that I’ve been hit on the head a lot in the past,” I told her. “I mean a lot a lot.”
The woman nodded and raised an eyebrow. “I know. That’s quite a bad habit you’ve got there.”
I wanted to laugh at the joke, to smile, to do as my mother asked and just let it be over, but all I could do was search the doctor’s eyes and say the thing that, until then, I hadn’t admitted to a single soul. “This feels different.”
“Does it?” the doctor asked.
Sitting there in only a tank top and shorts, I felt naked as I said, “Yes.”
“I see.”
The doctor placed a hand on my shoulder and answered the question I hadn’t quite had the strength to ask. “If your memory comes back, Cammie, it will be on its own time. It will be when you are ready. Now, why don’t you go get settled in? I’ll tell the kitchen to send a tray to your room. You should try to get some sleep.” Dr. Wolf smiled. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
I hadn’t forgotten my mother’s words—my mother’s warning—but in spite of them, I had to ask, “Is there anything I can do…to make myself remember?”
“You can rest, Cammie.” Dr. Wolf smiled. “And you can wait.”
Waiting. Like it or not, it’s a skill all spies have to master eventually.
Walking through the halls, I closed my eyes and tried to test my memory. I knew there was a squeaky floorboard on my right and a nick in the base of the bookshelf on my left. I could have made it all the way to my room like that, eyes closed, memory guiding my way. Everything felt and sounded and smelled so familiar that the convent seemed a million miles away—like it had happened to some other girl.
But then I heard the music.
It was coming from the west, I was certain, filling the corridor. Soft and low but too clear to be a figment of my mind.
It was real, the notes clear and strong and drifting through the hall.
It was almost like a waltz, but I didn’t want to dance.
It sounded like an old-fashioned organ. But there were no organs in the mansion. Or at least I didn’t think there were. All I knew for certain was that, right then, the pain in my ankle subsided; my head stopped swirling, and I followed the sound until it was suddenly replaced by the opening of a door and heavy footsteps. Voices.
“I can’t go to the room. She’ll be there.”
It was Bex, but the tone was one I’d never heard before. I hated it. And, most of all, I hated how sure I was that “she” was me.
I felt myself creeping closer to the cracked door, and peeking into the nearly abandoned classroom, listening as Zach told her, “You’re going to have to talk to her eventually.”
“I can’t do it,” Bex said.
Zach laughed. “I find that hard to believe. I’m the guy who was with you and your parents all summer, remember? I was in Budapest. I saw you in action in Greece. So don’t pull that on me. I know exactly what you’re capable of.”
“Budapest was an exception,” she told him, but then she laughed too. She was sitting next to him on top of a desk, her bare leg pressing against his khakis, and I thought I might be sick.
“What about Macey and Liz?” Zach asked.
“They think we have to act like nothing’s wrong—that we have to pretend so maybe she’ll get her memory back or whatever.”
My breath was coming so hard I feared it might betray me as I stood there realizing that Liz and Macey had been pretending. Pretending what, I didn’t know. Not to hate me? To be happy I was home? That my mother was right and it was over? Whatever it was, they were good at it. Bex, evidently, wasn’t even going to bother.