"Liz," I snapped, "protocol says that we're supposed to report any suspicious activity to the security department immediately! We were being tailed in Roseville!" The words felt heavy. "And Zach recognized one of them." I took a deep breath before I finished, "And he lied to me about it."
I remembered the expression on my mother's face as we'd sat in the red glow of the emergency lights during the Code Black. Someone or something had already threatened our school once this semester, so I didn't worry about Zach's feelings or what Madame Dabney would say about leaving a boy during the middle of a date. I didn't ask my friends if they knew the reasons why a boy might try to kiss a girl, and all the reasons a girl might let him.
We'd had a tail in Roseville—that was all that mattered. I felt my feet pounding the pavement. As we reached the mansion, I finally turned to see almost the entire sophomore class running down the lane behind me. "You were right," Courtney told us, swallowing hard, gasping for air. "We had a tail, too."
And whatever hope I'd had that I was wrong—that it was all some bizarre misunderstanding—vanished in the wind.
We pushed open the mansion's doors, and I immediately felt the silence that's usually reserved for the days before classes start and after they end, when I'm the only Gallagher Girl there to roam the halls.
"Mom!" I called, but my voice echoed in the empty corridors.
Courtney and Eva went into the Grand Hall. Mick and Tina started for the library. I headed for the Hall of History.
"Mom!" I called again, but my voice was swallowed by screeching sirens as the lights went out and the words "CODE BLACK CODE BLACK CODE BLACK" filled the air.
Gilly's sword disappeared into its impenetrable case, the bookshelves around us became vaults, and metal shutters covered the windows.
"Cammie!" Bex called over the sounds of the sirens and my raging thoughts. "Cammie, come on!"
My best friend took my hand and pulled me toward my mother's office, but my mother wasn't there. No one said, "Hey, kiddo," and no one told me everything was going to be okay.
We turned and ran down the Grand Staircase while the mansion transformed itself into a tomb.
"Cam, where's your mom?" Liz said, as if I knew but wasn't telling.
"Where are the teachers?" Bex said, spinning, looking in every direction. Tina and Eva came running down the hall. Mick, Kim, and Courtney came out of the Grand Hall. Soon, almost the entire sophomore class was standing in the echoing foyer, but there were no teachers. No guards. The entire school must have been out, savoring their freedom in Roseville. We seemed to be entirely alone.
Then I saw a shadowy figure moving down the hall, stumbling, holding the wall to support himself.
"Mr. Mosckowitz?" Liz yelled, then rushed forward with Bex.
Our teacher fell into their arms. Blood stained the side of his face, and his voice was faint as he lay on the floor and said, "He got it."
"Got what?" I asked through the roar of the sirens.
"The list—a disc with the alumni list." He sat up and gripped my shoulders. "He got it. And it's…out there."
And then Mr. Mosckowitz passed out cold.
It's easy to look at the Gallagher mansion with its tall stone fences and ivy-covered facade and imagine the riches it must hold. Even people who know the truth about who we are and what we do probably think about the science labs where some of the world's greatest inventions have been born. Our library has been described as priceless. Still, our most precious resources aren't behind our walls at all—they're out in the world. Undercover. The real legacy of the Gallagher Girls lives not behind stone and glass but in flesh and blood. The other stuff—that's just for burn bags.
As we carried Mr. Mosckowitz to a cushy chair and checked his pulse, I couldn't shake the feeling that an entire sisterhood was riding on our shoulders.
The last rays of sunlight were disappearing from the mansion, so Tina pulled a lantern from the wall and struck a match. "Will somebody please tell me what's going on?" she demanded in frustration.
"The boys," I said. Even in the dark I could feel my friends looking at me, soaking in my every word. "Zach lied about seeing a tail in town—tails that were probably there to make sure we didn't come back too soon."
"And Mr. Mosckowitz said he got the disc," Bex added.
"Which boy?" Mick asked. "How are we supposed to find him?"
That seemed like a very good question until I heard Liz beneath the roar of the sirens. "Well, it might be easier than you think."
She held out her hand, and for the first time I noticed that she wasn't wearing an ordinary watch. Instead, it was one of her custom designs. Tiny red dots on the screen shone like beacons in the dark. I thought back to our mission in the East Wing—the fingerprints, the DNA, and finally…Bex managed a triumphant grin. "We've got trackers."
Immediately we all turned and started outside, but stopped just as quickly. Steel covered every window—every door. The very security measures that were supposed to keep intruders out were keeping us in.
"We can't get out," Tina said, dismayed.
Hope seemed to fade. The dot on Liz's monitor—the signal from the trackers we'd planted in the boys' shoes weeks ago—grew farther and farther away. I thought of my mother's advice, and I knew that, more than ever, I had to be myself.
So I looked at my friends. "Yeah," I said slowly, "we can."
I told myself that I'd been training my whole life for something like this—that we weren't as helpless as I felt, and for the first time that night my heart stopped racing; I took a deep, cleansing breath. Liz handed me her watch, and I peered down at the dots. Mick went in search of CoveOps essentials. Five minutes later we were pushing through cobwebs, smelling the dusty air of my favorite passageway.