Gallagher Girls Digital Omnibus

by Ally Carter

Genres: YA Action & Adventure; YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Don't miss a single moment of the beloved, bestselling Gallagher Girls series in this ebook collection, where spies-in-training navigate secret missions, friendship, betrayals, and first love.

Cammie Morgan is a student at the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, a fairly typical all-girls school -- that is, if every school taught advanced martial arts in PE and the latest in chemical warfare in science, and students received extra credit for breaking CIA codes in computer class.

The Gallagher Academy might claim to be a school for geniuses but it's really a school for spies. Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man in seven different ways, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl. Sure, she can tap his phone, hack into his computer, or track him through town with the skill of a real "pavement artist" -- but can she maneuver a relationship with someone who can never know the truth about her?

Cammie Morgan may be an elite spy-in-training, but she's on her most dangerous mission yet -- falling in love. This ebook collection includes all six Gallagher Girls books: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover, Only the Good Spy Young, Out of Sight, Out of Time, and United We Spy.

Release date: August 25, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 1399

Sample

“Just be yourself,” my mother said, as if that were easy. Which it isn’t. Ever. Especially not when you’re fifteen and don’t know what language you’re going to have to speak at lunch, or what name you’ll have to use the next time you do a “project” for extra credit. Not when your nickname is “the Chameleon.”

Not when you go to a school for spies.

Of course, if you’re reading this, you probably have at least a Level Four clearance and know all about the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women—that it isn’t really a boarding school for privileged girls, and that, despite our gorgeous mansion and manicured grounds, we’re not snobs. We’re spies. But on that January day, even my mother…even my headmistress…seemed to have forgotten that when you’ve spent your whole life learning fourteen different languages and how to completely alter your appearance using nothing but nail clippers and shoe polish, then being yourself gets a little harder—that we Gallagher Girls are really far better at being someone else.

(And we’ve got the fake IDs to prove it.)

My mother slipped her arm around me and whispered, “It’s going to be okay, kiddo,” as she guided me through the crowds of shoppers that filled Pentagon City Mall. Security cameras tracked our every move, but still my mother said, “It’s fine. It’s protocol. It’s normal.”

But ever since I was four years old and inadvertently cracked a Sapphire Series NSA code my dad had brought home after a mission to Singapore, it had been pretty obvious that the term normal would probably never apply to me.

After all, normal girls probably love going to the mall with their pockets full of Christmas money. Normal girls don’t get summoned to D.C. on the last day of winter break. And normal girls very rarely feel like hyperventilating when their mothers pull a pair of jeans off a rack and tell a sales-lady, “Excuse me, my daughter would like to try these on.”

I felt anything but normal as the saleslady searched my eyes for some hidden clue. “Have you tried the ones from Milan?” she asked. “I hear the European styles are very flattering.”

Beside me, my mother fingered the soft denim. “Yes, I used to have a pair like this, but they got ruined at the cleaners.”

And then the saleslady pointed down a narrow hallway. A hint of a smile was on her face. “I believe dressing room number seven is available.” She started to walk away, then turned back to me and whispered, “Good luck.”

And I totally knew I was going to need it.

We walked together down the narrow hall, and once we were inside the dressing room my mother closed the door. Our eyes met in the mirror, and she said, “Are you ready?”

And then I did the thing we Gallagher Girls are best at—I lied. “Sure.”

We pressed our palms against the cool, smooth mirror and felt the glass grow warm beneath our skin.

“You’re going to do great,” Mom said, as if being myself wouldn’t be so hard or so terrible. As if I hadn’t spent my entire life wanting to be her.

And then the ground beneath us started to shake.

The walls rose as the floor sank. Bright lights flashed white, burning my eyes. I reached dizzily for my mother’s arm.

“Just a body scan,” she said reassuringly, and the elevator continued its descent farther and farther beneath the city. A wave of hot air blasted my face like the world’s biggest hair dryer. “Biohazard detectors,” Mom explained as we continued our smooth, quick ride.

Time seemed to stand still, but I knew to count the seconds. One minute. Two minutes…

“Almost there,” Mom said. We descended through a thin laser beam that read our retinal images. Moments later, a bright orange light pulsed, and I felt the elevator stop. The doors slid open.

And then my mouth went slack.

Tiles made of black granite and white marble stretched across the floor of the cavernous space like a life-size chess-board. Twin staircases twisted from opposite corners of the massive room, spiraling forty feet to the second story, framing a granite wall that bore the silver seal of the CIA and the motto I know by heart:

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

As I stepped forward I saw elevators—dozens of them—lining the wall that curved behind us. Stainless steel letters above the elevator from which we’d just emerged spelled out WOMEN’S WEAR, MALL. To the right, another was labeled MEN’S ROOM, ROSLYN METRO STATION.

A screen on top of the elevator flashed our names. RACHEL MORGAN, DEPARTMENT OF OPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT. I glanced at Mom as the screen changed. CAMERON MORGAN, TEMPORARY GUEST.

There was a loud ding, and soon DAVID DUNCAN, IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS REMOVAL DIVISION was emerging from the elevator labeled SAINT SEBASTIAN CONFESSIONAL, at which point I totally started freaking out—but not in the Oh-my-gosh-I’m-in-a-top-secret-facility-that’s-three-times-more-secure-than-the-White-House sense. No, my freak-outedness was purely of the This-is-the-coolest-thing-that’s-ever-happened-to-me sense, because, despite three and a half years of training, I’d temporarily forgotten why we were here.

“Come on, sweetie,” Mom said, taking my hand and pulling me through the atrium, where people climbed purposefully up the spiraling stairs. They carried newspapers and chatted over cups of coffee. It was almost…normal. But then Mom approached a guard who was missing half his nose and one ear, and I thought about how when you’re a Gallagher Girl, normal is a completely relative thing.

“Welcome, ladies,” the guard said. “Place your palms here.” He indicated the smooth counter in front of him, and as soon as we touched the surface I felt the heat of the scanner that was memorizing my prints. A mechanical printer sprang to life somewhere, and the guard leaned down to retrieve two badges.

“Well, Rachel Morgan,” he said, looking at my mother as if she hadn’t been standing right in front of him for a full minute, “welcome back! And this must be little…” The man squinted, trying to read the badge in his hand.

“This is my daughter, Cameron.”

“Of course she is! She looks just like you.” Which just proved that whatever terrible nose incident he’d experienced had no doubt affected his eyes, too, because while Rachel Morgan has frequently been described as beautiful, I am usually described as nondescript. “Strap this on, young lady,” the guard said, handing me the ID badge. “And don’t lose it—it’s loaded with a tracking chip and a half milligram of C-4. If you try to remove it or enter an unauthorized area, it’ll detonate.” He stared at me. “And then you’ll die.”

I swallowed hard, then suddenly understood why take-your-daughter-to-work day was never really an option in the Morgan family.

“Okay,” I muttered, taking the badge gingerly. Then the man slapped the counter, and—spy training or not—I jumped.

“Ha!” The guard let out a sharp laugh and leaned closer to my mother. “The Gallagher Academy is growing them more gullible than it did in my day, Rachel,” he teased, then winked at me. “Spy humor.”

Well, personally, I didn’t think his “humor” was all that funny, but my mother smiled and took my arm again. “Come on, kiddo, you don’t want to be late.”

She led me down a sunny corridor that made it almost impossible to believe we were underground. Bright, cool light splashed the gray walls and reminded me of Sublevel One at school…which reminded me of my Covert Operations class…which reminded me of finals week…which reminded me of…

Josh.

We passed the Office of Guerrilla Warfare but didn’t slow down. Two women waved to my mother outside the Department of Cover and Concealment, but we didn’t stop to chat.

We walked faster, going deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of secrets, until the corridor branched and we could either go left, toward the Department of Sabotage and Seemingly Accidental Explosions, or right, to the Office of Operative Development and Human Intelligence. And despite the FLAME-RESISTANT BODYSUITS MANDATORY BEYOND THIS POINT sign marking the hallway to my left, I’d much rather have gone in that direction. Or just back to the mall. Anywhere but where I knew I had to go.

Because even though the truth can set you free, that doesn’t mean it won’t be painful.

“My name is Cammie.”

“No, what’s your full name?” asked the man in front of the polygraph machine, as if I weren’t wearing the aforementioned (and supposedly nonexplosive) name badge.

I thought about my mother’s words of wisdom and took a deep breath. “Cameron Ann Morgan.”

The room around me was completely bare, except for a stainless steel table, two chairs, and a mirror made of one-way glass. I probably wasn’t the first Gallagher Girl to sit in that sterile room—after all, debriefs are a part of the covert operations package. Still, I couldn’t help squirming in the hard metal chair—maybe because it was cold in there, maybe because I was nervous, maybe because I was experiencing a slight underwear situation. (Note to self: develop a wedgie theory of interrogation—there could totally be something to it!) But the efficient-looking man in the wire-rim glasses was too busy twisting knobs and punching keys, trying to figure out what the truth sounded like coming from me, to care about my fidgeting.

“The Gallagher Academy doesn’t teach interrogation procedures until we’re juniors, you know?” I said, but the man just muttered, “Uh-huh.”

“And I’m just a sophomore, so you shouldn’t worry about the results coming out all screwy or anything. I’m not immune to your powers of interrogation.” Yet.

“Good to know,” he mumbled, but his eyes never left the screens.

“I know it’s just standard protocol, so just…ask away.” I was babbling, but couldn’t seem to stop. “Really,” I said. “Whatever you need to know, just—”

“Do you attend the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women?” the man blurted, and for reasons I will never understand I said, “Uh…yes?” as if it might be a trick question.

“Have you ever studied the subject of Covert Operations?”

“Yes,” I said again, feeling my confidence, or maybe just my training, coming back to me.

“Did your Covert Operations coursework ever take you to the town of Roseville, Virginia?”

Even in that sterile room beneath Washington, D.C., I could almost feel the hot, humid night last September. I could almost hear the band and smell the corn dogs.

My stomach growled as I said, “Yes.”

Polygraph Guy made notes and studied the bank of monitors that surrounded him. “Is that when you first noticed The Subject?”

Here’s the thing about being a spy in love: your boyfriend never has a name. People like Polygraph Guy were never just going to call him Josh. He would always be The Subject, a person of interest. Taking away his name was their way of taking him away, or what was left of him. So I said, “Yes,” and tried not to let my voice crack.

“And you utilized your training to develop a relationship with The Subject?”

“Gee, when you say it like that—”

“Yes or no, Ms.—”

“Yes!”

Which, I would like to point out, is not nearly as bad as it sounds since, for example, you don’t need a search warrant to go through someone’s trash. Seriously. Once it hits the curb it is totally fair game—you can look it up.

But somehow I knew that the Office of Operative Development and Human Intelligence was probably far less concerned about the trash thing than it was about what came after the trash thing. So I was fully prepared when Polygraph Guy said, “Did The Subject follow you during your Covert Operations final examination?”

I thought about Josh appearing in the abandoned warehouse during finals week, bursting through walls and commandeering a forklift to “save” me, so I swallowed hard as I said, “Yes.”

“And was The Subject given memory-modification tea to erase the events of that night?”

It sounded so easy coming from him, so black-and-white. Sure, my mom gave Josh some tea that’s supposed to wipe a person’s memory blank, erase a few hours of their life, and give everyone a clean slate. But clean slates are a rare thing in any life—especially a spy’s life—so I didn’t let myself wonder for the millionth time what Josh remembered about that night, about me. I didn’t torture myself with any of the questions that might never have answers as I sat there, knowing that there is no such thing as black-and-white—remembering that my whole life is, by definition, a little bit gray.

I nodded, then muttered, “Yes.” Like it or not, I knew I had to say the word out loud.

He made some more notes, punched some keys. “Are you currently involved with The Subject in any way?”

“No,” I blurted, because I knew that much was true. I hadn’t seen Josh, hadn’t spoken to him, hadn’t even hacked into his e-mail account over winter break, which, given present circumstances, turned out to be a pretty good thing. (Plus, I had spent the last two weeks in Nebraska with Grandpa and Grandma Morgan, and they have dial-up, which takes forever!)

Then the man in the wire-rim glasses looked away from the screen and straight into my eyes. “And do you intend to reinitiate contact with The Subject despite strict rules prohibiting such a relationship?”

There it was: the question I’d pondered for weeks.

There I was: Cammie the Chameleon—the Gallagher Girl who had risked the most sacred sisterhood in the history of espionage. For a boy.

“Ms. Morgan,” Polygraph Guy said, growing impatient, “are you going to reinitiate contact with The Subject?”

“No,” I said softly.

Then I glanced back at the screen to see if I was lying.

If you’ve ever been debriefed by the CIA, then you probably know exactly how I felt two hours later as I sat in the backseat of a limousine, watching city give way to suburbs and suburbs to countryside. Dirty piles of blackened ice became thick blankets of lush white snow, and the world seemed clean and new—ready for a fresh start.

I was through with lying (except for official cover stories, of course). And sneaking around (well…except when involved in covert operations). I was going to be normal! (Or as normal as a student at spy school ever gets a chance to be.)

I was going to be…myself.

I looked at my mother and reiterated the promise that I would never let a boy come between me and my family or my friends or matters of national security ever again. Then I realized that she’d hardly said a word since we’d left D.C. “I did okay, didn’t I?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Of course, sweetie. You aced it.”

Which, not to sound conceited or anything, I kind of already knew, because A) I’ve always tested well, and B) people who fail polygraphs don’t usually walk out of top-secret facilities and get driven back to spy school.

Then I thought about the one-way glass. “You got to watch, didn’t you?” I asked, fully expecting her to say, You were great, sweetie, or I think this might be worth some extra credit, or Remember, breathing is key when you’re being interrogated with a TruthMaster 3000. But no. She didn’t say any of those things.

Instead, my mother just placed her hand over mine and said, “No, Cam. I’m afraid I had some things to do.”

Things? My mother had missed my first official government interrogation because of…things?

I might have asked for details, begged her to explain how she could miss such a milestone in a young spy’s life, but I know the things my mother does typically involve national security, fake passports, and the occasional batch of weapons-grade plutonium, so I said, “Oh. Okay,” knowing I shouldn’t feel hurt, but feeling it anyway.

We sat in silence until there was nothing to see outside my window but the tall stone fences that circle the Gallagher Academy grounds. Home.

I felt the limo slow and stop behind the long line of nearly identical chauffeured cars that brought us back to school each semester. It had been more than a century since Gillian Gallagher had decided to turn her family’s mansion into an elite boarding school, and even then, after more than a hundred years of educating exceptional young women, no one in the town of Roseville, Virginia, had a clue just how exceptional we really were.

Not even my ex-boyfriend.

“Tell me everything!” someone cried as soon as I opened the limo door. Sunlight bounced off the snow, blinding me before I could focus on my best friend’s face. Bex’s caramel-colored eyes bore into me, her brown skin glowed, and, as usual, she looked like an Egyptian goddess. “Was it awesome?”

She stepped aside as I crawled out of the car, but didn’t pause because…well…Bex doesn’t exactly have a pause. She has a play and a fast-forward and occasionally a rewind, but Rebecca Baxter didn’t become the first non-American Gallagher Girl in history by standing still.

“Did they grill you?” she continued. Then her eyes went wide and her accent grew heavy. “Was there torture?”

Well, of course there wasn’t torture; but before I could say so, Bex exclaimed, “I bet it was bloody brilliant!” Most little girls in England grow up wanting to marry a prince. Bex grew up wanting to kick James Bond’s butt and assume his double-0 ranking.

My mom walked around the side of the car. “Good afternoon, Rebecca. I trust you made it back from the airport okay?” And then, despite the bright sun that glowed around us, a shadow seemed to cross my best friend’s face.

“Yes, ma’am.” She pulled one of my bags from the open trunk. “Thanks again for letting me spend winter break with you.” Most people wouldn’t have noticed the slight change in her voice, the faint vulnerability of her smile. But I understand what it’s like not to know what continent your parents are on, or when you’ll see them again. If ever. My mother was standing right beside me, but all Bex had was a coded message saying her parents were representing England’s MI6 in a joint project with the CIA, and that, like it or not, they couldn’t exactly come home for Christmas.

When Mom hugged Bex and whispered, “You’re always welcome with us, sweetheart,” I couldn’t help thinking about how Bex had both of her parents some of the time, and I had one of my parents most of the time, but right then, neither of us seemed entirely happy with the deal.

We stood in silence for a minute, watching my mother walk away. I could have asked Bex about her parents. She could have mentioned my dad. But instead I just turned to her and said, “I got to meet the woman who bugged the Berlin Embassy in 1962.”

And that was all it took to make my best friend smile.

We started for the main doors, pushing through the crowded foyer and up the Grand Staircase. We were halfway to our rooms when someone…or rather, something…stopped us in our tracks.

“Ladies,” Patricia Buckingham called as I reached for the door to the East Wing—and the fastest route to our rooms. I tried the knob, but it wouldn’t budge.

“It’s…” I twisted harder. “…stuck!”

“It’s not stuck, ladies,” Buckingham called again, her genteel British accent carrying above the noise in the foyer below. “It’s locked,” she said, as if we have locked doors all the time at the Gallagher Academy, which, let me tell you—we don’t. I mean, sure, a lot of our doors are protected by NSA-approved codes or retinal scanners, but they’re never just…locked. (Because, really, what’s the point when there are entire sections of our library labeled Locks: The Manipulation and Disabling of?)

“I’m afraid the security department spent the winter break fixing a series of…shall we say…gaps in the security system.” Professor Buckingham eyed me over the top of her reading glasses, and I felt a guilty lump settle in my gut. “And they discovered that the wing had been contaminated with fumes from the chemistry labs. Therefore, this corridor is off-limits for the time being; you’re going to have to find another way to your rooms.”

Well, after three and a half years of exploring every inch of the Gallagher mansion, I knew better than anyone that there are other ways to our rooms (some of which require closed-toe shoes, a Phillips-head screwdriver, and fifty yards of rappel-a-cord). But before I could mention any of them, Buckingham turned back to us and said, “Oh, and Cameron, dear, please make sure your alternate route doesn’t involve crawling inside any walls.”

This whole fresh-start thing was going to be harder than I thought.

Bex and I started toward the back stairs, where Courtney Bauer was modeling the boots she’d gotten for Hanukkah. When we passed the sophomore common room we saw Kim Lee showing off the derivation of the Proadsky Position she’d mastered over break. We saw girls of every size, shape, and color, and I felt more and more at home with every step. Finally, I pushed open the door to our suite and was halfway through the throw-your-suitcase-onto-the-bed maneuver when someone grabbed me from behind.

“Oh my gosh!” Liz cried. “I’ve been so worried!”

My suitcase landed hard on my foot, but I couldn’t really cry out in pain because Liz was still squeezing, and even though she weighs less than a hundred pounds, Liz can squeeze pretty hard when she wants to.

“Bex said you had to go in for questioning,” Liz said. “She said it was Top Secret!”

Yeah. Pretty much everything we do is Top Secret, but the novelty has never worn off for Liz, probably because, unlike Bex and me and seventy percent of our classmates, Liz’s parents drive Volvos and serve on PTA committees and have never had to kill a man with a copy of People magazine. (Not that anyone can prove my mom actually did that—it’s totally just a rumor.)

“Liz, it’s okay,” I said, pulling free. “It was just a debrief. It was normal protocol stuff.”

“So…” Liz started. “You aren’t in trouble?” She picked up a massive book. “Because article nine, section seven of the Handbook of Operative Development clearly states that operatives in training may be placed on temporary—”

“Liz,” Bex said, cutting her off, “please tell me you didn’t spend the morning memorizing that book.”

“I didn’t memorize it,” Liz said defensively. “I just…read it.” Which, when you have a photographic memory, is pretty much the same thing, but I didn’t say so.

Down the hall, I heard Eva Alvarez explaining how Buenos Aires on New Year’s Eve is awesome. A pair of freshmen rushed by our door talking about who would make a better Gallagher Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Veronica Mars (a debate made much more interesting by the fact it was taking place in Farsi).

Bright sunlight shone through our window, bouncing off the snow. It was a new semester and my best friends were beside me. All seemed right with the world.

Thirty minutes later I was in my uniform, making my way down the spiral staircase, toward the Grand Hall with the rest of the student body. Well, most of the student body.

“Where’s Macey?”

“Oh, she’s back already,” Liz said, but I knew that much. After all, it was kind of hard to miss Macey’s closetful of designer clothes, her stash of ridiculously expensive skin care products (many of which are legal only in Europe), and the fact that someone had very recently been sleeping in her bed.

The last time I’d seen our fourth roommate, she’d been preparing for three weeks in the Swiss Alps with her senator father, her cosmetics-heiress mother, and a celebrity chef from the Food Channel; but Macey McHenry had come back early. And now she was nowhere to be seen.

Bex was looking around, too, staring over the heads of the seventh graders walking in front of us. “She said she had a bit of research to do in the library, but that was hours ago. I thought she’d meet us down here, but…” she trailed off, still looking.

“You guys go eat,” I said, stepping away from the crowd and starting down the hall. “I’ll find her.”

I pulled open the heavy library doors and stepped inside the massive bookshelf-lined room. Comfy leather couches and old oak tables surrounded a roaring fire. And there, in the center of it all, was Macey McHenry. Her head was resting on the latest edition of Molecular Chemistry Monthly, pink highlighter marks were on her cheek, and a puddle of drool had run from her mouth to the wooden desktop.

“Macey,” I whispered, reaching out to gently shake her shoulder.

“What? Huh…Cammie?” She struggled upright and blinked at me. “What time is it?” she cried, jumping up and knocking a stack of flash cards to the floor.

I bent down to help her pick them up. “The welcome-back dinner is about to start.”

“Great,” she said, sounding like someone who didn’t think it was great at all.

Her glossy black hair stuck out at odd angles, and her normally bright blue eyes were dazed with sleep. Even though I knew better, I couldn’t help but say, “So, did you have a nice break?”

She cut me a look that could kill (and will—just as soon as our head scientist, Dr. Fibs, perfects his looks-can-kill technology).

“Sure.” Macey blew a stray piece of hair away from her beautiful face and pulled the last of the flash cards into a pile. “Right up until my parents saw my grades.”

“But you got great grades! You covered nearly two semesters’ worth of work. You—”

“Got four A’s and three B’s,” Macey finished for me.

“I know!” I cried. After all, I had personally tutored Macey in the finer points of macroeconomics, molecular regeneration, and conversational Swahili.

“And according to the Senator,” Macey said, keeping up her unspoken vow never to call her father by name, “there’s no way I am capable of earning four A’s and three B’s, so therefore I must be cheating.”

“But…” I struggled to find the words. “But…Gallagher Girls don’t cheat!” And it’s true. Not to sound dramatic or anything, but a Gallagher Girl’s real grades don’t come in pass or fail—they’re measured in life or death. But Senator McHenry didn’t know that. I looked at the gorgeous debutante who had flunked out of every prep academy on the East Coast and was now earning A’s and B’s at spy school, and I realized the senator didn’t know a lot of things. Not even his own daughter.

The library was empty around us, but I still lowered my voice as I said, “Macey, you should tell my mom. She could call your dad. We could—”

“No way!” Macey said, as if I never let her have any fun. “Besides, I already know what I’m going to do.”

We’d reached the heavy doors of the library, but I paused for the answer. “What?”

“Study.” Macey cocked a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Next time I’ll get all A’s.” And then she smiled as if, after sixteen years of practice, she’d finally found the ultimate way to defy her parents.

I heard voices in the corridor outside, which was strange because at that moment the entire Gallagher Academy student body was waiting in the Grand Hall. Something made us freeze. And wait. And despite the heavy doors between us, I could clearly hear my mother say, “No, Cammie doesn’t know anything.”

Well, as a spy (not to mention a girl), there are many, many sentences that will make me stop and listen, and, needless to say, “Cammie doesn’t know anything” is totally one of them!

I leaned closer to the door while, beside me, Macey’s big blue eyes got even wider. She leaned in and whispered, “What don’t you know?”

“She didn’t suspect anything?” Mr. Solomon, my dreamy CoveOps instructor, asked.

“What didn’t you suspect?” asked Macey.

Well, of course the whole point of not knowing and not suspecting is that I neither knew nor suspected, but I couldn’t point that out because, at the moment, my mother was on the opposite side of the door saying, “No, she was being debriefed at the time.”

I thought back to the long, quiet ride from D.C., the way my mother had stared at the frosty countryside as she’d told me that she hadn’t watched my interrogation—that she’d had things to do.

“We can’t tell her, Joe,” Mom said. “We can’t tell anyone. Not until we have to.”

“Not about black thorn?”

“Not about anything.” And then Mom sighed. “I just want things to stay as normal as possible for as long as possible.”

I looked at Macey. Normal had just taken on a whole new meaning.

After they left, Macey and I slipped back to the Grand Hall and the sophomore table. Mom had already taken her place at the front of the room. I know that Liz whispered, “What took you so long?” as we sat down. But beyond that, I wasn’t sure of anything, because, to tell you the truth, I was having a little trouble hearing. And talking. And walking.

All moms have secrets—mine more than most—and even though I’ve always known that there are lots of things my mother can never tell me, it had never occurred to me that there were things she might be keeping from me. It may not sound like a big difference, but it is.

Mom gripped the podium in front of her and looked out at the hundred girls who sat ready for a new semester. “Welcome back, everyone. I hope you had a wonderful winter break,” she said.

“Cammie,” Bex whispered, eyeing me and then Macey. “Something’s going on with you two. Isn’t it?”

Before I could answer, my mother continued, “I’d like to begin with the very exciting news that this semester we will be offering a new course, History of Espionage, taught by Professor Buckingham.” Light applause filled the Grand Hall as our most senior staff member gave a small wave.

“And also,” my mother said slowly, “as many of you have no doubt noticed, the East Wing will be off-limits for the time being, since recent work to the mansion revealed that it has been contaminated by fumes from the chemistry labs.”

“Cammie,” Liz said, scooting closer, “you look kind of…pukey.”

Well I felt kind of pukey.

“And most of all,” my mother said, “I want to wish everyone a great semester.”

The silence that had filled the hall a moment before evaporated into a chorus of talking girls and passing plates. I tried to turn the volume down, to listen to the thoughts that swirled inside my mind like the snow that blew outside. I closed my eyes tightly, forcing the room to dissolve away, until suddenly, everything became clear.

And I whispered the fact that I’d known for years but only just remembered.

“There is no ventilation access from the chem labs to the East Wing.”

There are many pros and cons to living in a two-hundred-year-old mansion. For example: having about a dozen highly secluded and yet perfectly inbounds places where you can sit and discuss classified information: PRO.

The fact that none of these places are well heated and/or insulated when you are discussing said information in the middle of the winter: CON.

Two hours after our welcome-back dinner, Macey was leaning against the stone wall at the top of one of the mansion’s tallest towers, drawing her initials on the win-dow’s frosty panes. Liz paced, Bex shivered, and I sat on the floor with my arms around my knees, too tired to get my blood flowing despite the chill that had seeped through my uniform and settled in my bones.

“So that’s it, then?” Bex asked. “That’s everything your mom and Mr. Solomon said? Verbatim?”

Macey and I looked at each other, recalling the conversation we’d overheard and the story we’d just told. Then we both nodded and said, “Verbatim.”

At that moment, the entire sophomore class was probably enjoying our last homework-free night for a very long time (rumor had it Tina Walters was organizing a Jason Bourne-athon), but the four of us stayed in that tower room, freezing our you-know-whats off, listening for the creaking hinges of the heavy oak door at the base of the stairs that would warn us if we were no longer alone.

“I can’t believe it,” Liz said as she continued to walk back and forth—maybe to keep warm, but probably because…well…Liz has always been a pacer. (And we’ve got the worn spots on our bedroom floor to prove it.)

“Cam,” Liz asked, “are you sure the East Wing couldn’t have been contaminated by fumes from the chem labs?”

“Of course she’s sure,” Bex said with a sigh.

“But are you absolutely, positively, one hundred-percent sure?” Liz asked again. After all, as the youngest person ever published in Scientific American, Liz kind of likes things verified, cross-referenced, and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“Cam,” Bex said, turning to me, “how many ventilation shafts are there in the kitchen?”

“Fourteen—unless you’re counting the pantry. Are you counting the pantry?” I asked, which must have been enough to prove my expertise, because Macey rolled her eyes and sank to the floor beside me. “She’s sure.”

In the dim light of the cold room I could see snowflakes swirl in the wind outside, blowing from the mansion’s roof (or…well…the parts of the roof that aren’t protected with electrified security shingles). But inside, the four of us were quiet and still.

“Why would they lie?” Liz asked, but Bex, Macey, and I just looked at her, none of us really wanting to point out the obvious: Because they’re spies.

It’s something Bex and I had understood all our lives. Judging by the look on her face, Macey had caught on, too (after all, her dad is in politics). But Liz hadn’t grown up knowing that lies aren’t just the things we tell—they’re the lives we lead. Liz still wanted to believe that parents and teachers always tell the truth, that if you eat your vegetables and brush your teeth, nothing bad will ever happen. I’d known better for a long time, but Liz still had a little naïveté left. I, for one, hated to see her lose it.

“What’s black thorn?” Macey asked, looking at each of us in turn. “I mean, you guys don’t know either, right? It’s not just a me-being-the-new-girl thing?”

Everyone shook their heads no, then looked to me. “Never heard of it,” I said.

And I hadn’t. It wasn’t the name of any covert operation we’d ever analyzed, any scientific breakthrough we’d ever studied. Black thorn or Blackthorne or whatever could have been anyone, anything, anywhere! And whoever…or whatever…or wherever it was, it had made my mother miss some quality mother-daughter interrogation time. It had also forced my Covert Operations instructor to hold a clandestine conversation with my headmistress. It had crept inside the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women (or at least its East Wing), and so there we were, not quite sure what a Gallagher Girl was supposed to do now.

I mean, we had three perfectly viable options: 1) We could forget what we’d heard and go to bed. 2) We could embrace the whole “honesty” thing and tell my mother all we knew. Or 3) I could be…myself. Or, more specifically, the me I used to be.

“The forbidden hall of the East Wing is almost directly beneath us,” I began slowly. “All we have to do is access the dumbwaiter shaft on the fourth floor, maneuver through the heating vents by the Culture and Assimilation classroom, and rappel fifty or so feet through the ductwork.” But even as I said it, I knew it couldn’t be nearly as easy as it sounded.

“So…” Macey said, “what are we waiting for?” She jumped to her feet and started for the door.

“Macey! Wait!” Everyone looked at me. “The security department did a lot of work over the break.” I pulled my legs closer, wrapped my arms tighter. “I don’t know what kind of upgrades they made, what they might have changed. They were all over those tunnels and passageways, and…” I trailed off, grateful that Bex was there to finish for me.

“We don’t know what’s in there, Macey,” she said, even though the fact that we didn’t know what lay waiting in the East Wing was kind of the point, and I could tell by the look on her face that Macey was getting ready to say so.

“Surprises,” I finished slowly, “as a rule…are bad.”

Macey sank to the floor beside me while I told myself that everything I’d said was true. After all, it was a risky operation. We didn’t have adequate intel or nearly enough time to prep. I can list a dozen perfectly logical reasons why I stayed on that stone floor, but the one I didn’t tell my friends was that I had promised my mother that my days of sneaking around and breaking rules were over. And I’d kind of hoped my vow would last longer than twenty-four hours.

“So, what do we do now?” Liz asked.

Bex smiled. “Oh,” she said mischievously, “we’ll think of something.”

Covert Operations Report

Summary of Surveillance

By Cameron Morgan, Rebecca Baxter, Elizabeth Sutton, and Macey McHenry (hereafter referred to as “The Operatives”)

When faced with the knowledge that faculty members of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women were planning a rogue operation, The Operatives began a research and recognizance mission to determine the following:

1. What was such a big freaking deal that no one wanted The Operatives to know about it?

2. Why were The Operatives no longer allowed in the East Wing? (A change that had added ten and a half minutes to their average daily commute between classes!)

3. Who or what was Black Thorn? Or maybe Blackthorne? (Is it possible that Headmistress Morgan and Mr. Solomon were taking on a group of terrorists-slash-florists?)

4. What does Mr. Solomon look like with his shirt off? (Because, if you’re going to set up an observation post, you may as well be thorough.)

When I woke up the next morning I tried not to think about the night before, but it’s kind of hard to forget covert and potentially dangerous missions when A) The dirty tower floor left a stain on your best school skirt. B) At breakfast, your mother says, “Good morning, Cam. Did you girls have fun last night?” which everyone knows translates to I’m acting perfectly normal because I totally have something to hide. And C) Avoiding the mysteriously off-limits East Wing means you have to find alternate routes to sixty percent of your daily destinations.

On my way downstairs I walked slowly past the door that opened into the East Wing. It was just another door—dark, solid wood, an old brass knob. There were hundreds of doors like it in the mansion, but this one was forbidden, so like any good spy, I wanted to open that one.

I felt Kim Lee fall into step beside me as she glanced at the door and said, “Going around is such a pain.” Of course she didn’t think about the fact that half of our teachers could have been behind that very door at this very moment, planning an attack on some rogue florists!

I, of course, was having trouble thinking about anything else.

Not even the sight of Mr. Smith appearing in Countries of the World (COW) with a jar of coins, telling us to make change for a dollar in eight different currencies while factoring in exchange rates, could make me stop obsessing about that door and the secrets it was masking.

Even Madame Dabney’s lecture on the art of perfect thank-you notes and their obviously underutilized coded message potential couldn’t pull my mind away from the East Wing.

We already had two hours’ worth of homework and the promise of a pop quiz on the poisonous plants of Southeast Asia; all the teachers were acting like they either had no idea what was going on, or had sworn to take the secret to their graves (which could have been true, actually).

It was business as usual at the Gallagher Academy, and as we started downstairs after Culture and Assimilation (C&A), it almost felt like the break had never happened.

Almost.

“Well, this is it,” Liz said. Bex and I started for the elevator that was concealed in the narrow hallway beneath the Grand Staircase.

“What is it?” I asked. Then I turned and saw that Liz wasn’t following us to our next class.

Instead, she hooked her thumbs in the straps of her backpack and took a step away. “I’ve got Advanced Organic Chemistry.”

But Bex and I didn’t have Advanced Organic Chemistry. Bex and I had Covert Operations. From that moment on, the two of us were going to be training for a life of missions and fieldwork while Liz prepared for a career in a lab or an office. I thought about the forms we’d filled out last semester, the choice I’d made to walk away from any hope of a safe, normal life—from boys like Josh. So it wasn’t any wonder that my voice cracked when I said, “Oh. Okay.”

Bex and I stared into the mirror that hid the elevator’s entrance, then waited for the red beam to scan our retinal images and clear us for our second semester in Sublevel One. I tried not to think about how, for the first time since seventh grade, Liz wouldn’t be beside us.

Bex must have been thinking the same thing, because pretty soon she said, “Are you sure you want to spend the next two and a half years doing experiments and cracking codes?” A wicked twinkle appeared in her eye as she studied Liz’s pale reflection. “Because the CoveOps class is gonna do underwater exercises eventually, and you know Mr. Solomon will have to take his shirt off.”

A portrait of Gillian Gallagher hung on the wall behind us; I saw her eyes flash green, then the mirror slid aside, revealing the small elevator to the Covert Operations classroom. Liz watched the doors slide closed behind us, then Bex turned around and yelled, “But Mr. Mosckowitz might go topless sometime, too!”

And then I heard Liz laugh.

“She’ll be okay without us, right?” Bex asked.

We heard the clanking of a suit of armor falling to the floor and Liz’s distinctive “Oopsy daisy.”

As the elevator started to move, Bex said, “Don’t answer that.”

Here’s the thing you need to know about Sublevel One: It’s big. Like, I’ve-seen-football-stadiums-that-are-smaller big. And while the rest of the mansion is made of old stone and ancient wood, there’s nothing about the frosted-glass partitions and stainless steel furniture of the Covert Operations classroom that could ever be confused with a two-hundred-year-old mansion that housed privileged girls.

Bex and I stepped off the elevator, our footsteps echoing as we passed the CoveOps library, full of books so sensitive you can never ever take them out of the Subs. (They’re made out of paper that will disintegrate if it’s ever exposed to natural light, just to be on the safe side.) We passed big burly guys from the maintenance department, who smiled and said, “Knock ’em dead, girls.” (Knowing the guys from our maintenance department, they may very well have meant it literally.)

I slid into my chair, trying not to think about Liz or the door or anything other than the fact that I was finally back in the one part of the Gallagher Academy that never pretended to be anything other than what it is.

That was before Tina Walters leaned toward me, grinning and snapping her gum as only a third-generation spy-slash-gossip-columnist’s daughter can do. “So, Cammie, is it true they sent a SWAT team to drag you out of your grandparents’ house on Christmas morning?” Tina didn’t wait for a response. “Because I heard you put up a good fight, but that they eventually pulled your Christmas stocking over your head and rolled you up in the tree skirt.”

There will probably come a day when national security will rest in the hands of Tina Walters. Luckily, that wasn’t the day.

“I was with her, Tina,” Bex said. “Do you honestly think they could have taken both of us?”

Tina nodded, conceding the point. Before she could dig further, a deep voice said, “Static surveillance.” Mr. Solomon came strolling into class without so much as a hello. “It is the root of what we do, and it has one golden rule—name it!”

And then, despite everything, I half expected to see Liz’s thin arm shoot into the air, but of course it was a different voice that answered. “The first rule of static surveillance is that the operative must use the simplest, least-intrusive means possible.”

Well, my first thought was that Sublevel One had become contaminated with some kind of hallucinogenic chemical, because the girl who spoke sounded like Anna Fetterman. She looked like Anna Fetterman. But there was no way Anna Fetterman belonged on the Covert Operations track of study!

Don’t get me wrong, I love Anna. Really, I do. But I once saw her give herself a bloody nose while opening a can of Pringles. (I’m soooo not even making that up.) And that’s not the kind of thing that usually screams Let me parachute onto the roof of a foreign embassy to bug the ambassador’s cuff links, if you know what I mean.

But did Mr. Solomon act shocked? No, he just said, “Very good, Ms. Fetterman,” as if everything were perfectly normal—which…hello…it wasn’t. I mean, Anna was taking CoveOps, my mom was hiding something from me, and there was an entire section of our school that even I couldn’t access! Everything was not perfectly normal!

Joe Solomon had been an undercover operative for eighteen years, so naturally he was completely calm as he relaxed against his desk and said, “We deal in information, ladies. It’s not about operations—it’s about intelligence. It’s not about cool gadgets—it’s about getting the job done.” Mr. Solomon looked around the room. “In other words, don’t bother to plant cameras in the living room if your target never shuts the blinds.”

I started writing everything down, but then Mr. Solomon slid Eva Alvarez’s notebook off her desk and into her open bag. “No notes, ladies.”

No notes? What did he mean no notes? Was he serious? (By the way, it was probably a good thing Liz wasn’t on the CoveOps track, because her head would have been exploding about then!)

At the front of the room, Joe Solomon turned to the board and started diagramming a typical static surveillance scenario. Anna was gripping her pen so hard it looked like she was about to pull a muscle, but Mr. Solomon must have that whole eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head thing, because he said, “I said no notes, Ms. Fetterman,” and Anna jerked away from her pen as if it had shocked her. (It might have—we do have some very specialized writing instruments here at the Gallagher Academy.)

“This is not a required course, ladies. You no longer have to be here.” Mr. Solomon turned around. His green eyes bore into us, and at that moment Joe Solomon wasn’t just our hottest teacher, he was also our scariest. “Six of your classmates have already chosen a relatively safe life on the research and operations track of study. If you can’t remember a fifty-minute lecture, then I’d encourage you to join them.”

He turned back to the board and continued writing. “Your memory is your first and best weapon, ladies. Learn to use it.”

I sat there for a long time, absorbing what he’d said, what it meant, knowing that he was right. Our memories are the only weapons we take with us no matter where we go, but then I thought about the second part of his statement—Don’t make things harder than they have to be. I thought about what I’d overheard the night before. The look in my mother’s eyes on the long, quiet ride home. And finally…Josh. And then I realized that my life would be a whole lot easier if there were some things I could forget.

Summary of Surveillance

By utilizing the “least-intrusive means possible” model of covert operations, The Operatives were able to ascertain the following:

According to some very popular Internet search engines, “black thorn” is a common type of rose fungus, but does not appear to be a code name for any rogue government conspiracy theories.

There are approximately 1,947 people in the United States named Blackthorne, but, according to the IRS, none of them have listed their profession as Spy, Spook, Ghoul, Assassin, Hitter, Pro, Freelancer, Black Bag Man (or woman), Operative, Agent, or Pavement Artist.

Seeing through the door to the East Wing wasn’t possible, because, despite rumors to the contrary, Dr. Fibs’s X-ray vision goggles had not passed beyond the prototype phase. (Which also explained why he was wearing that eye patch.)

A good thing about going to spy school is that you have genius friends with incredible abilities who are able to help you with any “special projects” that may come up. The bad part is that they really get into those “projects.” Way into them.

“It’s got to be in here somewhere!” Liz cried over the sound of heavy books crashing onto hard wood as she dropped volumes nine through fourteen of Surveillance Through the Centuries onto the library table.

I looked around the quiet room, waiting for someone to shush her, but all I heard was the crackling of wood in the fireplace and the sigh of a girl who, after spending every spare moment for a week barricaded in the library, was starting to lose faith in books. (And Liz is the girl who actually slept with a copy of Advanced Encryption and You during finals week of our eighth grade year!)

Macey tossed aside The Chronicles of Chemical Warfare that lay on her lap. “Maybe it’s not in the library,” Macey said, and I seriously thought Liz was going to hyperventilate or something. She might have if Macey hadn’t crossed her legs and asked, “So what does that mean?”

Oh my gosh! I can’t believe we hadn’t asked that question before—that somehow we’d forgotten one of the basic rules of covert operations: everything means something! Not finding something significant was maybe the most significant thing of all.

“Do you know how current something has to be not to be in these books?” Liz asked, backing away, sounding slightly terrified and a little bit giddy. She looked at the volumes on the table as if they were so dangerous they might explode (which is silly, since everyone knows the so-top-secret-they’ll-explode-if-you-read-them-without-clearance books are stored in Sublevel Three).

“So black thorn must be—” Macey started, looking at me.

“Classified,” I finished. “Really classified.”

Spies keep secrets—it’s what we do. So we sat in silence while the fire crackled and the truth washed over us: If Blackthorne was that Top Secret, then I was sure we’d never find it.

“You know, Cam,” Bex said, smiling a smile that might be alarming on an ordinary girl, but on a girl with Bex’s special talents it’s downright terrifying, “there is one place we haven’t looked.” She tapped a finger against her chin in a gesture that, even for Bex, was especially dramatic. “Now, who do we know who has access to the headmistress’s office?”

“No, Bex.” I sat up straight and began stacking and restacking books. “No. No. No. I cannot spy on my mom!”

“Why not?” Bex asked as if I’d just told her I couldn’t pull off wearing red lipstick (which, by the way, I can’t).

“Because…she’s my mom,” I said, not even trying to hide the duh in my voice. “And she’s one of the CIA’s very best operatives. And…she’s my mom!”

“Exactly! She would never suspect”—Bex paused for effect—“her own daughter.” And then Bex, Liz, and Macey looked at me as if this were the best plan ever. Which it wasn’t. At all. I mean, I know a little something about plans, having helped my father design a Trojan horse–type scenario to infiltrate a former Soviet nuclear missile silo that had been taken over by terrorists when I was seven. And this was not a good plan!

“Bex!” I cried. “I don’t want to do this. It—”

But before I could finish, the library door swung open and I heard Macey say, “Hello, Ms. Morgan.”

Even though I’d been sitting relatively still for forty-five minutes, my heart felt like I’d just run a mile. Mom looked down at the Portuguese translation of 101 Classic Covers and the Spies Who’ve Used Them and said, “What are you girls doing in the library on a sunny day like this?”

“COW extra credit,” we all said, citing the cover story we’d agreed on before we left the room.

But still, my pulse didn’t slow down. I just sat there, reminding myself that we weren’t breaking any rules. I hadn’t really told any lies. (Mr. Smith had assigned extra credit, after all.) Technically, I hadn’t broken my promise. Yet.

“Okay,” Mom said, smiling. “I’ll see you tonight, Cam.”

I felt Bex’s eyes on me and knew what she was thinking—that I was going to be spending the evening with my mother. In her office. What kind of operative would I be if I didn’t take advantage of the situation?

But then I thought about my mother and wondered what kind of daughter I would be if I did.



THINGS I’VE DONE THAT I’M NOT NECESSARILY PROUD OF:A list by Cameron Morgan

• One time I accidentally spilled all of Bex’s detangling conditioner and refilled the bottle with volumizing conditioner, and her hair got really big for a few weeks, but I never told her why.

• I once wore Liz’s favorite yoga pants without permission and totally stretched them out. Also, her favorite sweater.

• Whenever I’m in Nebraska I always pretend I’m too weak to open pickle jars, because Grandpa Morgan likes to do it for me.

• As I have thoroughly documented elsewhere, I once had a clandestine relationship with a really cute, really sweet boy and then lied about it. A lot.

• On the first Sunday after winter break in my sophomore year, I helped Liz implant a camera in the watch Grandma gave me for my birthday. And then I wore it to Sunday-night supper in my mother’s office so that I could do the worst thing I’ve ever done. Ever.



When you’re the daughter of two secret agents, you learn pretty early that spies walk a moral tightrope. We do bad things for good reasons, and for the most part we can live with that. But that Sunday night, when I sat in my mother’s office eating microwavable crab puffs and fingering my new custom-made spy watch, I thought about my cover: hungry daughter bonding with her mother-slash-mentor. Then I thought about my mission: do a basic recon of the headmistress’s office and hope there will be a report titled Operation Black Thorn or Contents of the East Wing just lying around.

Sunday-night supper in my mother’s office is something I’ve been doing ever since Mom and I came to the Gallagher Academy. Usually, however, I don’t feel nauseous until after I’ve eaten (because even though Mom once manufactured an antidote for a rare poison by using the contents of a hotel minibar, she has yet to master microwaves and hot plates).

“So,” Mom said, gesturing to the small silver tray of puffs, “how are they?”

(Note to self: research bioweapon potential of microwavable crab puffs.)

“They’re great!” I lied, and my mother smiled. No, scratch that—she glowed. And at that moment I seriously wanted to back out, to put the watch in my pocket and forget how I’d already memorized the exact position of everything on her desk in case I got a chance to snoop and then had to put things back. I wanted to stop being a spy and start being a daughter. Especially when Mom glanced at my wrist and said, “You’re wearing Grandma’s watch.”

I rubbed my thumb over the smooth glass that now doubled as a telephoto lens. “Yeah.”

“That’s nice,” she said, and smiled happily. Even though she seemed to be fine now, I thought about the worried woman I’d shared a limo with from D.C., and the conversation I’d overheard. I wasn’t the only operative in that room clinging to her legend.

And then, before I could stop to think, I blurted, “Do you have any fingernail clippers?” Mom looked at me for a second, and I knew I couldn’t back out now, so I held out my right hand, which thankfully, wasn’t shaking. “I’ve got a hangnail that’s driving me crazy.”

“Sure, sweetie,” Mom said. “In my desk. Top drawer.”

So see, I didn’t even have to pick the lock or fake the fingerprint-activated drawers. I was perfectly within my daughterly rights as I moved to my mother’s desk and rummaged around for the clippers.

A brief search of the headmistress’s desk revealed the following:

Headmistress Morgan had ten different lipsticks in her desk (only three of which were for purely cosmetic uses).

Mom carried a small pan into her private bathroom and turned on the water, and that’s when I took pictures of every single thing in her trash can.

Headmistress Morgan had, evidently, been fighting off a cold, because her trash contained fourteen used tissues and an empty bottle of Vitamin C.

I knocked a paper clip dispenser off her desk and channeled Liz with a loud “Oopsy daisy.” Then I huddled on the floor as I picked up paper clips with one hand and rifled through her bottom desk drawers with the other.

Of all the items the Gallagher Academy receives royalty revenues from, Band-Aids are surprisingly the most profitable.

I could hear my mother on the far side of the room, stirring things, pouring things. “Did you find them?” she called out.

I held up the nail clippers with one hand while I closed her bottom drawer with the other.

I smiled and waved my manicured fingers and thought, I am a terrible daughter.

But my mother only smiled in return, because maybe I’m also a pretty good spy.

Ironically, the one person who could explain the difference was the one person I totally couldn’t ask.

I placed the nail clippers back where I’d found them and looked down at a desk that even an expert would swear had never been touched. I placed my palms against the middle drawer and felt my fingertips brush against the smooth wood of the underside, the cool metal track on which it ran. But something else, too. Something thin and worn.

“I know this semester is going to be a big adjustment for you, kiddo,” Mom said. She stirred a bubbling concoction in a Crock-Pot while I pressed a finger against the paper—felt it move.

“And last semester. Well, I can only imagine what it must have been like—the reports, the debriefings.”

I probably hadn’t found anything important; after all, the underside of a drawer isn’t a preferred hiding place for a spy—nothing about it is secure or protected. But it is a good hiding place for a woman—a place to keep something you want nearby but out of sight.

“And I want you to know,” Mom went on, “that I am so proud of you.”

Yes, that’s right, not only was I invading my mother’s personal space right under her nose, but that’s the moment she chose to tell me how proud she was of my new-and-improved behavior! It was official:

I was a terrible person.

Then I felt the paper give. It fluttered through the air and landed right on my lap. And from that point on I barely heard a word my mother said.

Dad. It was a picture of Dad—but like no picture I’d ever seen, because for starters, he looked older than he did in the pictures Grandma had given me, and younger than he did in the pictures of him and my mom. And in this picture, my father wasn’t alone.

Mr. Solomon’s arm was around my father’s shoulders. They stood on a baseball field. They were young. They were strong. And if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn they were both immortal.

But I did know better. And that, I guess, was the problem.

“Did you find what you needed, sweetheart?” Mom asked, and I thought it was a really good question. I aimed my watch at the photo, imagined the faint click as I took a picture. “Cam,” Mom said again, moving toward me.

“I’m not feeling too well,” I said, and slipped the picture back to where my mother kept it hidden. From me. From herself. From whoever. I moved away from the desk, toward the door. “Can I maybe have a rain check on supper?”

“Cam,” Mom said, stopping me. She put her hand against my forehead like Grandma Morgan always does. “It could be a cold—you know something has been going around.” I did know. I’d already seen the proof in her trash can.

“I think I just need to go to bed,” I said. “It’s pretty late.”

But then I opened the door, and there, in the Hall of History, I saw Bex.

And Liz was sitting on her shoulders.

Time’s a strange thing at the Gallagher Academy. Usually it flies. But sometimes it gets really, really slow. Needless to say, this was one of those times.

The Operatives modified a Mobile Observation Device (aka Macey’s new digital camera) and attached it to the bookcase across from the entrance to the headmistress’s office with a Retractable Adhesion Unit (aka duct tape) and programmed it to take pictures at ninety-second intervals.

Down the corridor, I saw Macey kneeling in front of the mysteriously locked door to the East Wing.

The Operatives secured an Entry/Exit Detection Device (aka a piece of string) to the doorknob in question, knowing it would fall off if the door was opened in The Operatives’ absence.

For a split second, everything seemed to freeze, but then I heard my mom say, “What is it, Cam?” She walked toward me.

“Nothing.” I closed the door and leaned against it. “It’s just…” It’s just that my friends are completely insane and on the other side of this door right now, doing things that they really aren’t supposed to be doing, and if you catch them you’ll be really mad—or proud—but probably mad.

“It’s just…I wanted to tell you that I think I’m really in a good place this semester.” (Because technically, at that moment, the best possible place was between the headmistress and my roommates.) “And I was thinking about what you said,” I went on. “I’m committed to—”

But then a bang on the door cut me off, and I had a bad feeling that Liz had fallen from Bex’s shoulders and knocked herself unconscious on the doorknob.

“Cam,” Mom said, inching closer. “You gonna get that?”

But I didn’t dare turn around. “Get what?” Another knock. “Ooooh. Thaaaat.”

I opened the door. Please let it be Bex, I prayed. Or Liz…Or Macey…Or…

Anyone but Joe Solomon!

Oh my gosh! Could the night get any worse? Yes, it turns out—it could. Because not only was one of the CIA’s best secret agents standing in front of me, but my best friends in the world were twenty feet behind him, being secretive and agenty! (I know because I could see Macey’s hand holding a compact around the corner to see whether or not the coast was clear. Which, obviously, it wasn’t!)

I had to buy some time—a minute, thirty seconds at least—so Bex, Liz, and Macey could pull themselves from their hiding places and get out of there.

So I said, “Oh, hello, Mr. Solomon,” because Madame Dabney has trained me to be socially gracious, and Mr. Solomon himself has trained me to act normal under the most abnormal circumstances.

“Ms. Morgan, I hate to bother you, but…” Mr. Solomon looked past me toward my mother. “Those records you asked for, Rachel.” He handed Mom a plain brown envelope.

An envelope bearing the word Blackthorne in Mr. Solomon’s careful writing.

And then time got really slow again.

“Cam?” Mom said behind me. “You really aren’t feeling well, are you sweetie?”

“No,” I muttered. I was staring at the first piece of concrete evidence that Blackthorne wasn’t some weird dream I’d had, and yet I just stood there, looking at my Covert Operations instructor but seeing the man in the picture—my father’s friend.

“Okay, I’m going to go,” I said with a glance at my mother. “And you guys have probably got…stuff…to do. And…”

I could have said a dozen things in a dozen languages, but before I could blurt a single one I heard a voice at the end of the Hall of History call, “There you are!”

And then the thing that I’d been fearing happened: Mr. Solomon turned around.

But there’s a difference between getting caught and allowing yourself to be found, and right then, Macey, Bex, and Liz were walking through the Hall of History, hiding in plain sight.

“We can’t hold movie night forever, Cam,” Bex said.

So I turned my back on my mom and Mr. Solomon, and then, envelope or not, I walked away.

Do you know how many things I was feeling as we got to the room? A lot. A lot. For starters, there was the crab-puff thing. And then there was the envelope thing. But as soon as our door was closed and our stereo was on, I turned to my best friends and cried, “You planted surveillance equipment in the Hall of History while my mother was in her office!” because I guess that was the thing I felt the loudest.

“Oh, Cam,” Bex said, shrugging slightly. “It was just a little recon.”

Deep down, all I really wanted to do was put on my comfy pajamas and go to sleep and brush the crab-puff taste out of my mouth (but not necessarily in that order.) But instead I snapped, “Yeah, well you almost got caught—you almost got me caught. And getting debriefed by the security department isn’t as much fun as it sounds, guys.” I forced a laugh. “Trust me.”

I said it kind of snotty, but Bex didn’t answer. She didn’t even get mad. Instead, she looked at me as only a best friend-slash-spy-slash-person-who-has-been-trained-on-reading-body-language can do. She climbed onto her bed and crossed her long legs. “You found something.”

I could have denied it. I could have lied. But right then I was in the one room in the mansion where I could never disappear.

“Actually, I did.” I told them what I’d found in my mother’s desk. I listed the contents of her trash—even the shades of her lipstick. And finally, I told them about the envelope.

“We’ve got to get it!” Bex exclaimed, sounding as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. “We can wait until everyone goes to bed and then break into the office.”

“That’s not a good idea, Bex,” I said as I slipped on my pajamas, took off my watch, and pulled my hair into an old stretched-out hairband.

“Come on, Cam,” Bex pleaded, while Macey and Liz looked on. “If anyone can get into the headmistress’s office, it’s you!”

“No!” I snapped, maybe because I knew better than to let Bex work up any momentum; maybe because I was still completely on edge. But maybe because sometimes a girl just really needs to snap at someone who she knows will forgive her later.

I started for the bathroom, but Bex was right behind me. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not a game,” I said, talking louder than I wanted, but somehow unable to lower my voice. “Because sometimes spies get caught. Because sometimes spies get hurt. Because sometimes—”

“We’ve got pictures!” Liz cried triumphantly. Thin wires ran from my new watch to her computer. Images flashed across the screen. Crab puffs. File folders. And finally…

Dad.

Because sometimes spies don’t come home.

The picture I had taken filled the screen. My jeans were like a denim border—a frame behind the snapshot that had landed on my lap. Liz zoomed in. She magnified.

“Ooh,” Macey said. “Who’s the hottie?”

“That’s Mr. Solomon, Macey,” I said, starting for the bathroom because, well, I didn’t want to cry in front of my friends. And one of the advantages of the face-washing process is that you have an excuse for squinting your eyes and looking away.

“Not Mr. Solomon,” Macey said. “The other guy. Is he Blackthorne?”

“No, Macey,” Bex said, saving me the trouble. I glanced in the bathroom mirror and saw Bex turn from the screen and catch my eye in the glass. “That’s Cam’s dad.”

We study a lot of dangerous stuff at the Gallagher Academy, but there are some things so feared that they’re never, ever mentioned. Everyone knows my dad was in the CIA. That he went on a mission and never came home. Now there’s an empty grave in the family plot in Nebraska. Everyone knows, but no one ever asks to hear the story. And that night, Macey was no different.

I splashed cold water on my face and flossed my teeth, clinging to my routine—to normal. I might have stayed in there, flossing forever, if I hadn’t heard Liz say, “Oh. My. Gosh.”

In the mirror I saw her staring at the picture on the screen with the eyes of a scientist, taking in every detail of the faces of the two boys.

“Cam,” Liz called, without taking her eyes from the screen. “You’ve got to look at this!”

I moved from teeth-flossing to face-moisturizing—anything to stay busy. “I’ve seen it already,” I told her.

“No, Cam,” Liz said, pointing at the bright screen in the dim room. “Look! Look at his shirt! Mr. Solomon’s T-shirt!”

But she didn’t have to finish, because there…magnified—enhanced—I saw what I hadn’t noticed in my mother’s office. I read the words BLACKTHORNE INSTITUTE FOR BOYS.

“It’s a school,” Macey said slowly.

“A boys’ school!” Liz cried.

I looked at the picture and said what everyone else was thinking. “For spies?”

I’ve always heard that the hardest thing for a spy isn’t knowing things—it’s acting like you don’t know things you’re not supposed to know. But I’d never really appreciated the difference until then. Looking at Mr. Solomon was hard, talking to my mom was impossible, and the whole next day felt like a dream. A very weird there’s-a-boys’-school-for-spies-that-nobody-ever-told-me-about nightmare.

Blackthorne was a school! That Mr. Solomon had gone to! A school where they make more Mr. Solomons! It was officially the strangest day of my entire covert life. (And that includes the time Dr. Fibs’s lab was temporarily gravity-free.)

I told myself that maybe it was just coincidence that Tina Walters had been swearing for years that there was a boys’ school in Maine. After all, Tina also swore that Gillian Gallagher was a direct descendant of Joan of Arc. Tina swears a lot of things. Tina is frequently wrong.

But by the time Professor Buckingham took the podium and announced, “Today we will be reviewing the origins of the clandestine services, beginning with the Montevellian Theory of Operative Development,” I knew I wasn’t going to be waking up anytime soon.

I love Professor Buckingham. She’s cool and strong and the most amazing role model, but her teaching style could probably best be described as…well…boring.

“Since its publication more than two thousand years ago, The Art of War has been the definitive thesis in warfare and deception…” she read from her notes as warm sunlight drifted through the windows and lunch grew heavy in my stomach. Her voice was soothing, like white noise, and my eyelids felt like they weighed about a ton, since, for obvious reasons, there hadn’t been a whole lot of sleeping in our room the night before.

(Have I mentioned that we had evidence that strongly suggested there is a boys’ school? For spies!)

But was Professor Buckingham filling us in about our long-lost band of potential brothers? No. She was talking about the 1947 Council of Covert Operatives, which, let me tell you, isn’t nearly as interesting as it sounds.

Then Buckingham stopped talking. The sudden silence jolted me awake as my teacher looked over the top of her reading glasses. “Yes, Ms. McHenry?”

And then, maybe for the first time that semester, Patricia Buckingham had our full attention.

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Macey said. “I was only wondering—and I’m sorry if everyone else already knows this—I’m still a little new, you know.”

“That is fine, Ms. McHenry,” Buckingham said. “What is your question?”

“Well, I was just wondering if there are other schools.” Macey paused. She seemed to study our teacher a moment before adding, “Like the Gallagher Academy.”

Liz almost fell out of her chair. Tina’s eyes got really, really big, and I’m pretty sure the entire sophomore class stopped breathing.

“I mean,” Macey went on, “is this the only school of its kind, or are there—”

“There is only one Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, Ms. McHenry,” Buckingham said, throwing her shoulders back. “It is the finest institution of its kind in the world.”

Buckingham smiled and returned to her notes, totally not expecting Macey to continue.

“So there are other institutions?”

Buckingham sighed, and an almost pained expression crossed her face as she carefully chose her words. “During the Cold War, the concept of recruiting and training operatives at a young age was not an uncommon practice. And there may have been institutions formed for that purpose.” Then she straightened her glasses and looked around the room as if to see exactly how far off course we’d forced her to stray. “For obvious reasons it is impossible to determine if any such schools are in existence now. If they ever existed at all, of course.”

“So there could be other schools?” Tina exclaimed.

“Could and are, Ms. Walters,” Buckingham said, her voice as strong as steel, “are two very different things.” She gave us a cold smile that signaled that the Q&A portion of the program was officially over.

Buckingham went back to her notes. “This theory was the fashion until 1953, when a group of retired agents…” Eva and Tina’s attention drifted back out the window. But my roommates and I remained on high alert.

There have been other schools.

It doesn’t mean there are any now.

I thought of the way Mr. Solomon and my dad had been smiling in the picture. There was no date on it, no place. It was almost like it was a fake—part of some legend the CIA had manufactured in a lab, an alias of my father’s that I had never known.

And then there was a knock at the door.

“Yes?” Buckingham said as she removed her glasses and the door eased open.

Every head in the room turned, and Mr. Solomon said, “Pop quiz.”

I hadn’t exactly slept. I hadn’t really eaten. It was maybe the worst possible time for a CoveOps assignment, and yet, three minutes later, as I buttoned my winter coat and ran down the Grand Staircase with the entire sophomore CoveOps class, I stopped thinking about the picture and the file. I stopped thinking. And sometimes, even at the Gallagher Academy, that can be a very good thing.

The cold wind blew in our faces as we dashed through the front doors. A familiar van sat idling in the driveway, so we headed toward it until Mr. Solomon called, “That’s not our ride, ladies,” and eight highly trained operatives skidded to a stop.

I looked to my right, expecting another van to appear from around the corner of the mansion, but all I saw were eighth graders on their way to Protection & Enforcement class (P&E), their ponytails swaying back and forth as they ran. I turned to my left and saw nothing but snow in the vast open field that lay between the mansion and the woods.

“Then how are we…” I started, but then I trailed off. Bright sunlight bounced off slushy piles of half-melted snow. I squinted and blinked, making sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, because I could have sworn the ground’s shape began to shift.

I glanced at my teacher, saw the faintest hint of a smile grow on his lips while, behind him, a great hollow opening appeared in the middle of the field. Twin blades of a helicopter rose steadily from the huge hole, and wet snow whirled over the frozen ground as the blades started to spin. Mr. Solomon pointed over his shoulder and said, “That’s our ride.”

When I was five, Mom brought me to the Gallagher Academy for the first time. I’d thought it was the biggest building in the world; but today I looked through the helicopter’s windows and watched the mansion grow smaller and smaller until it looked like it was in a snow globe that someone had given a good shake.

We flew so low over the woods that I could almost touch the trees. I thought about how my school had taught me chemistry and biology and even a very real appreciation for calligraphy. But helicopters were completely new territory! Was there going to be jumping? Or rappelling? (Hello—our uniforms have skirts.)

I don’t know if it was turbulence, nerves, or the sight of the blindfolds in Mr. Solomon’s hands, but my stomach did a little flip.

“I’m afraid this isn’t a sightseeing tour, ladies,” Mr. Solomon said as he cinched the bands over our eyes. “If I were you, I’d get comfortable. We’re gonna be up here a while.”

Well, it turns out “a while” is exactly forty-seven minutes and forty-two seconds, because that’s how long it was until I felt the helicopter’s quick descent. During that time, Mr. Solomon had warned “No peeking, Ms. Walters” twice, but other than that and Bex’s snoring (she can sleep anywhere!), there wasn’t a single sound on our mysterious ride.

I had no idea how fast we’d been going, or in what direction. All I knew was that we’d been in the air for almost forty-eight minutes and I really had to go to the bathroom.

We touched down. I heard the helicopter doors open, then someone guided me out onto concrete and into a waiting van. Soon we were off again. Destination unknown.

I smelled Bex’s perfume beside me and drew some small comfort in the familiar scent.

“Blindfolds off,” Mr. Solomon said.

I tugged at the black band that circled my head, and soon I was squinting, trying to adjust to the light, the situation, and most of all, the sight of seven Gallagher Girls with very questionable hair. Static electricity filled the van. Eva’s long black mane was practically standing on end. But I was riveted by the state-of-the-art equipment that lined the windowless walls. Gadgets two generations better than anything we’d ever had were at our fingertips. I didn’t need Joe Solomon to say, “Today we’re playing with the pros, ladies” to know that it was true.

Mr. Solomon turned to Courtney. “Countersurveillance has three functions, Ms. Bauer, name them.”

“Detect and evade surveillance procedures?” Courtney said, her answer sounding more like a question than a direct quote from page twenty-nine of A Covert Operative’s Guide to Surveillance Countermeasures.

“That’s right,” Mr. Solomon said. He didn’t smile. He didn’t say good job. Instead, he looked at the screens that filled the walls of the van, the wires and keyboards that were locked carefully into place. “It’s a big world, ladies, but that doesn’t make it easy to hide. If you stay on this course of study, you’d better be ready to look over your shoulders for the rest of your lives.

“Countersurveillance isn’t something you learn from a book—it’s not about theory,” Solomon continued. “It’s about the prickly feeling on the back of your neck, the little voice in your head that tells you when something isn’t quite right.” The van came to stop.

“Last semester, some of you”—he looked directly at me—“proved that you’re pretty good at not being seen when you don’t want to be. Well, today you go from being tailers to tailees. And, ladies…” Mr. Solomon paused. My classmates were so still, so quiet, I could almost hear our pounding hearts. “…this is harder.”

I thought about our first mission last semester, how Mr. Smith had used every countersurveillance measure known to man simply to enjoy a night in the Roseville town square. It had been exhausting just watching him, and I knew Mr. Solomon was right. The bad guys could be anyone, they could be anywhere, and the odds would always be in their favor.

“Split up into four teams of two—and remember—I don’t know exactly how many operatives are out there waiting today, ladies, but if they’re good—and you should assume they’re very, very good—then it will take every trick you know and every ounce of luck you can muster to identify them and lose them and make it to this location before five o’clock.” He pulled an envelope from his coat pocket and placed it in Tina’s hands.

He eased toward the back doors of the van. “Oh, and ladies, surveillance might help you do your job, but countersurveillance keeps you alive. If this Op is hard”—Mr. Solomon’s voice trailed off, and for a second he wasn’t just a teacher, he was my father’s friend—“it’s supposed to be.”

The doors swung open, bright sunlight streamed inside, and by the time we heard the heavy metal clank of the doors again, Joe Solomon was already gone.

We could have flown two hundred miles, or we could have gone in circles and were now back in our school’s driveway, twenty feet from where it had all began. Anything was possible, but one thing was sure: this quiz wasn’t about grades—nothing at the Gallagher Academy ever really is.

“Do it, Cammie,” Bex said. I eased toward the doors and opened one a crack.

A sliver of bright light sliced through the dim van as I peered outside and let my eyes adjust to what I saw. “It’s the Mall.”

“Cool,” Bex said, sliding toward me.

I threw the door open wider. “Not that kind of mall.”

We crawled, one by one, out of the back of the van and stood for a long time, staring down the grassy promenade that ran between the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol, the heart of Washington, D.C. A lot of people think the Smithsonian is a museum, but it’s actually a lot of different museums, and right then we were in the center of them all. We could have gone to see everything from the U.S. Constitution to Fonzie’s leather jacket, but somehow I knew that, of all the school groups that take field trips to the National Mall every year, ours was very different.

A man in black stretched his hamstrings on a bench before taking off in a jog. A long line of women wearing matching sweatshirts that said “Louisville Ladies do D.C.” milled in front of a Metro stop. And I couldn’t help thinking, Oh, Mr. Solomon is good.

After all, he’d been telling us for weeks that surveillance is all about home-court advantage, and that the more limited a location’s access is to the public, the easier it will be to see someone who doesn’t belong; but that day, Joe Solomon had brought us to a place where tourists converge from all over the world, a place that’s home to everyone from panhandlers to politicians (Macey, by the way, swears there isn’t much difference). And before I knew it, Kim was saying exactly what I was already thinking.

“We’re being watched….”

“By friends of Mr. Solomon’s,” Mick Morrison added with a crack of her knuckles.

“And they could be…” Anna started, but her voice broke and she swallowed hard.

“Anyone,” Bex finished, her voice as excited as Anna’s was terrified.

Beside me, Tina was opening the envelope Mr. Solomon had given her.

“What?” Bex asked. “What does it say?”

Tina held up a folded brochure from the National Museum of American History and pointed to a picture of a tiny pair of bright red shoes. There was a message scrawled across it:

There’s no place like home

5:00

Well, the girl in me has seen The Wizard of Oz approximately one billion times, so I knew that Dorothy’s ruby slippers must be on the other side of the grassy lawn with the rest of our national treasures.

But the spy in me knew that getting there, tail-free, by five o’clock would be a whole lot harder than clicking our heels together and wishing for home.

“And…flip,” Bex said an hour later.

We stopped midstride in front of the museum, then pivoted and started back in the opposite direction. The guy in the red baseball cap who had been following us since we passed the National Gallery of Art kept walking as if he didn’t care that the two girls in front of him had just done a total about-face. And maybe he didn’t. Care, I mean. But then again, maybe another member of his team had rotated into position and taken his place. There was no way to know. So we kept walking.

“We could be clear,” Bex said, sounding wishful. “There might not be anyone on us.”

“Or maybe there’s a team of twenty CIA all-stars out here, and we’re just not good enough to see them.”

“Yeah,” Bex said. “There’s that, too.”

I love being a pavement artist; seriously, I do. It’s like when guys who would normally hate being freakishly tall discover basketball, or when girls with abnormally long fingers sit down at a piano. Blending in, going unseen, being a shadow in the sun is what I’m good at. Seeing the shadows, it turns out, is not my natural gift.

“I can’t believe I haven’t seen anyone!” I said in frustration.

“Look at the bright side, Cam.” Bex flung her arms out wide like a girl who’d cut class or run away from a school group. To the people around us, she no doubt looked beautiful and exotic—but not at all like a highly trained operative who was memorizing the faces of every person who lingered within a hundred feet.

“We could be in Ancient Languages right now,” she said, which was a very good point. “We could be locked in the basement with Dr. Fibs.” Which was an excellent point. (Since the X-ray goggles incident, our chemistry professor’s lack of depth perception had made him even more accident-prone.) “And here the view is infinitely better.”

I wish I could say she was talking about the Washington Monument or the Capitol or any of the sights that drive tourists to D.C. But I know Bex well enough to know she was really talking about a pair of boys who were sitting on a park bench thirty feet away, staring at her.

“Oooh,” Bex said, throwing an arm around my shoulders. “I want one.”

“They’re not puppies.”

“Come on.” She grabbed my hand. “Let’s go talk to them. They’re really cute!”

And…okay…I admit it: they were really cute. But this wasn’t the time to encourage her. “Bex, we have a mission.”

“Yeah, but we can multitask.”

“No, Bex. Talking to civilian boys during a CoveOps exercise is a bad idea. Trust me.” I forced a smile and added a singsong lilt to my voice as I said, “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets their memory erased.”

“Wow,” Bex said. She blinked against the sun. “You’re really…”

“What?” At that moment I knew there were at least nineteen security cameras trained on our path. I knew the Japanese man behind us was asking his wife if she still wanted a T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe. I knew a lot of things, but I didn’t have a clue what my best friend was trying to say.

“I’m really what?” I asked again.

Bex glanced away, then back, and for one of the bravest people I know, she seemed almost afraid to say, “Not over Josh.”

Josh. We’d been back at school for more than a week, but so far no one had said his name. And hearing it, to be honest, sounded strange.

“Of course I’m over him.” I shrugged and started walking, scanning the crowd. “I broke up with him. Remember? It wasn’t a big deal.”

Bex fell into step beside me. Her voice was almost timid as she said, “You don’t have to pretend, Cam.”

But that’s what spies do—we pretend. We have aliases and disguises and go to great lengths to not be ourselves. So I said, “Of course I’m over him,” and walked on, clinging to my cover till the end.

Bex probably would have argued with me; I’m sure she would have pointed out that Josh had been my first boy-friend, my first kiss; that he had seen me when to the rest of the world I was invisible, and that’s not the kind of thing a girl—much less a spy—forgets so quickly. Knowing Bex, she probably would have pointed out a lot of things; but at that very moment…twenty feet ahead of us…we saw a woman in a beige business suit sitting on a bench, talking on a cell phone. There was nothing unusual about her—not her hair, not her face. Nothing except for the fact that fifty minutes before, she’d been wearing a jogging suit and pushing a baby stroller.

“Bex,” I said as calmly as possible.

“I see her,” Bex replied.

Here’s the thing you need to know about detecting and losing a tail: to do it right—I mean really right—you’d need to cover half a city. You’d climb in and out of cabs and train cars and walk against the grain on at least a dozen busy sidewalks. You’d take all day.

But Mr. Solomon hadn’t given us all day, and that was kind of the point. So Bex and I spent the next hour going in one museum entrance and out another. Going up escalators only to come down the elevator two minutes later. We made sudden stops and looked in mirrors and tied our shoe-laces when they didn’t need it. It was a virtual blur of corner-clearing and litter-dropping—everything I’ve ever seen, everything I’ve ever even heard of! (At one point Bex had almost talked me into crawling out the bathroom window in the Air and Space Museum, but a U.S. Marshal walked by and we decided not to press our luck.)

The seconds ticked by and the sun went lower, and soon the shadow of the Washington Monument was stretched almost the full length of the Mall. Time was running out.

“Tina,” I said through my comms unit, “how are you and Anna?” But I was met with empty silence. “Mick,” I said. “Are you there?”

Bex and I shared a worried glance, because there are reasons operatives go radio-silent, and most of them are not good.

We were cutting across the Mall, walking north, hoping anyone who wasn’t intentionally following us would stick to the path.

“Forty-seven minutes,” I announced, as if Bex weren’t fully aware of that fact.

She turned around to glance at a man walking too fast behind us, and I didn’t know whether to take it as an insult or a compliment that a team of CIA pros didn’t care if they stood out anymore. They just wanted to stay with us.

When a crowd of girls filled the sidewalk in front of us and started down the long, steep escalator to the Metro station below, I looked at Bex. “Do it!” she said, and we merged into the crowd. The girls were wearing white blouses almost exactly like ours. Their name badges bore a logo from something called Mock Supreme Court. They were almost identical to us from the waist up, so Bex and I slipped off our coats as we descended into the cavernous, echoing station.

“I love your bracelet!” I said to the brunette next to me, because, while most girls are on to the whole strangers-with-candy thing, the strangers-with-compliments strategy is still remarkably effective.

“Thanks!” said the girl, who, according to her badge, was Whitney from Dallas. “Hey, are y’all with the group?”

“Yeah,” Bex said. Then she looked down at her chest. “Oh my gosh! I left my name tag in my senator’s office—we took them off to have our picture taken,” she explained.

“Really?” another girl said. “That’s cool. Who’s your senator?”

And then Bex and I each said the first name that popped into our heads: “McHenry.”

We looked at each other and shared a very subtle laugh as the escalator carried us deeper and deeper beneath the city.

One of the girls, Kaitlin with a K, whispered to another girl, Caitlin with a C, “Are they back there?”

C peered back up the escalator, then grinned. “They are so following us!”

Bex and I might have exuded a panicked vibe about then, because K leaned in to explain, “These two hot guys have totally been checking us out.”

“Oh,” Bex said, as she and I used this as an excuse to check behind us. Sure enough, red-baseball-cap guy was back there (by now he was dressed like a navy lieutenant). And ten feet in front of him we saw the boys from the bench.

The C(K)aitlins started to laugh. It was hilarious. It was fun. Cute boys were on their tail, and maybe they thought they were being covert or cool, but all that really mattered was that once they got home they’d have a story they could tell. And it wouldn’t be classified.

As the escalator entered the cavernous room, a train was already at the station. “Let’s run and get it!” Bex screamed.

And everyone was off, racing to the bottom of the escalator, then dashing to the end of the train. The girls piled inside as the doors closed, and red-baseball-cap-slash-navy-officer guy jumped forward, barely making it into the next to last car as the train pulled out of the station, and away from where Bex and I stood underneath the escalator, waiting for our new friends and old shadow to disappear.

Bex and I watched the man in the train press himself against the glass as the train sped into the tunnel.

We were free.

We were clear.

We thought.

Overconfidence is a spy’s worst enemy, so to be on the safe side, Bex and I decided to split up when we left the Metro station. We had exactly twenty minutes to make it to the Museum of American History and our rendezvous with Mr. Solomon. Twenty more minutes to make sure we really were clear.

I slipped into the shadows of the Metro station and watched Bex ascend the escalator, then waited long enough to be certain no one followed her. Then I headed to the elevator, but as I reached for the button, another hand beat me to it.

“Hey,” one of the boys from the park bench said. He did that half head nod thing that all boys seem to do…or at least the boys I know. Which mainly means Josh.

“Hi,” I replied, pushing the button again, hoping to make the elevator come faster, because the last time a random boy had said hi to me, things had ended badly—like Mr.-Solomon-practically-being-run-over-by-a-forklift badly. And needless to say, that’s not the kind of thing that looks good on a girl’s permanent record.

When the elevator doors slid open, I was kind of, sort of hoping he wouldn’t step inside, but of course he did; and since the Metro station was forever and a day underground, the elevator ride was forever and a day long. The boy rested against the railing. He was slightly shorter and broader through the shoulders, but in the blurry reflection of the elevator doors, he almost looked like Josh.

“So,” the boy said, pointing to the crest on my coat. “The Guggenheim Academy—”

“Gallagher Academy,” I corrected.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Which was kind of the point, but I didn’t say so. “Well, it’s my school.”

The elevator seemed to move slower and slower as the clock in my head ticked louder and louder, and I thought about how Mr. Solomon might make us walk back to Roseville if no one achieved our mission objectives.

“You in a hurry or something?” the boy asked.

“Actually, I’m supposed to meet my teacher at the ruby slipper exhibit. I’ve only got twenty minutes, and if I’m late, he’ll kill me.” (Not a lie, but maybe an exaggeration—I hoped.)

“How do you know?”

“Because he said, ‘Meet me at the ruby slipper exhibit.’”

“No.” The boy was smiling, shaking his head. “How do you know you only have twenty minutes? You’re not wearing a watch.”

“My friend just told me.” The lie was smooth and easy, and I was a little bit proud of it, happy that I didn’t have to think about how, in forty-five seconds, this boy had noticed something Josh hadn’t seen in four months.

“You fidget a lot,” he said.

Make that two things Josh hadn’t seen.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t. “I have low blood sugar.” Lie number three. “I need to eat something.” Which wasn’t really a lie, since…well…I was hungry.

And then stranger-boy totally knocked me for a loop, because he handed me a bag of M&M’S. “Here. I ate most of them already.”

“Oh…um…” What was that I’d said about strangers with candy? “That’s okay. Thanks, though.”

He shoved the candy back in his pocket. “Oh,” the boy said. “Okay.”

We finally reached the surface, and the doors slid open onto the Mall, where dusk had somehow fallen in the last ten minutes.

“Thanks again for the candy.” I darted outside, knowing that to be safe I couldn’t take the most direct way to the museum—not yet. I had to—

Wait.

I was being followed!

But not in any kind of covert sense!

“Where are you going?” I said, spinning on the boy behind me.

“I thought we were going to meet your teacher in the wonderful world of Oz.”

“We?”

“Sure. I’m going with you.”

“No you’re not,” I snapped, because A) The aforementioned forklift thing, and B) I’m pretty sure bringing a boy to a clandestine rendezvous isn’t in the CIA handbook.

“Look,” the boy said confidently. “It’s dark. You’re by yourself. And this is D.C.” Oh my gosh. It’s like he had Grandma Morgan on speed-dial or something. “And you’ve only got”—he pondered it—“fifteen minutes to meet your teacher.”

He was wrong by ninety seconds, but I didn’t say so. All I knew was that I couldn’t shake him—not without creating a lot more drama than letting him tag along was going to cause, so I just quickened my pace and said, “Fine.”

As we walked against the cold wind, I told myself that this was good; this was fine. Nobody looking for a Gallagher Girl would expect me to be with a boy. He was cover. He was useful.

“You can really walk fast,” he said, but I didn’t say anything back. “So, do you have a name?” he asked, as if that were just the most innocent question ever. As if that isn’t how broken hearts and broken covers always start.

“Sure. Lots of them.”

That was probably the most truthful thing I’d told him yet, but the boy just smiled at me as if I were funny and flirty and cute. Let me tell you, I was none of those things, especially after not sleeping or eating, wearing a blindfold for an hour, then walking up and down the frozen Mall all day!

My nose was running. My feet were killing me. All I really wanted to do was get to Dorothy’s slippers, click my heels together, and go home. But instead I had to put up with a boy who assumed I needed protecting. A boy with whom I could never “be myself.” A boy who was staring at me as if he knew a secret—and worse—as if the secret was about me.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

At this point I should point out that I was pretty sure the boy was flirting with me! Or at least I thought he was flirting with me, but without running it by Macey (and maybe plugging a sample into the voice-stress analyzer that Liz had developed for this very purpose), there was no way I could be sure. Last semester I’d thought I was learning how to interpret boy-related things, but all I’d really learned was that Gallagher Girls shouldn’t flirt with normal boys—not because we won’t like them. But because we might like them too much. And that would be the worst thing of all.

“Look, thanks for the chivalry and all, but it really isn’t necessary,” I muttered what may have been the understatement of the century, since I’m pretty sure I could have killed him with my backpack. “It’s just up here.” I pointed to the Museum of American History, which stood gleaming twenty yards away. “And there’s a cop over there.”

“What?” the boy said, glancing at the D.C. police officer that stood at the corner of the street, “you think that guy can do a better job protecting you than I can?”

Actually, I thought Liz could have done a better job “protecting” me than he could, but instead I said, “No, I think if you don’t leave me alone, I can scream and that cop will arrest you.”

Somehow the boy seemed to know it was a joke…mostly. He stepped away and smiled. And for a moment I felt myself smile, too.

“Hey,” I called to him, because, despite how annoying he was right then, a pang of guilt shot through my stomach. After all, he had been all knight-in-shining-armory. It wasn’t his fault I’m not the kind of girl who needs saving. “Thanks anyway.”

He nodded. If it had been another day or I’d been another girl, a hundred other things might have happened. But I had begun the semester with a promise to be myself, and the real me was still a girl on a mission.

I darted for the doors and pushed my way inside, then slipped into a narrow hallway behind the help desk. I watched the entrance, waiting ninety seconds to be sure that I was clear.

“Bex.” I tried my comms unit. “Courtney…Mick…Kim…” I told myself there was no way they’d all been made. They were probably downstairs in the ice-cream parlor; or maybe waiting in the van.

I grabbed a visitors’ brochure from a stack on the help desk, slipped into a narrow stairwell, and began the three-story climb to the slippers, not really caring that I wouldn’t get to see the sights. (After all, the “Julia Child’s Kitchen” exhibit didn’t even illustrate how she used to send coded messages in her recipes.)

I could feel the ticking clock, almost see the look on Mr. Solomon’s face and hear him say well done. I was so close; I scanned the map and took the stairs two at a time until I emerged at the far end of the floor, where the ruby slippers were displayed.

There were no signs of Mr. Solomon or my classmates; not another soul in the great oval room. I felt the clock in my head chime five o’clock. I stepped toward a case, which looked almost exactly like the one that stood in the center of the Hall of History. But instead of the sword that Gillian Gallagher had used to kill the first guy who’d tried to assassinate President Lincoln, this case held a different kind of national treasure.

The ruby slippers were so small, so delicate, that a part of me wanted to marvel in the coolness of being that close to something so rare. The rest of me just wanted to know why seven Gallagher Girls had gone radio silent and my teacher was nowhere to be seen! Then I heard Mr. Solomon’s voice behind me.

“You’re four seconds late.”

The shoes glistened as I spun around. “But I’m alone.”

“No, Ms. Morgan. You’re not.”

And then the boy from the elevator, the boy from the bench, stepped out of the shadows.

And looked at me.

And smiled.

And said, “Hi again, Gallagher Girl.”

There are changes that come slowly—like evolution. And letting your hair grow out. And then there are changes that happen in a second—with a ringing phone, a well-timed glance. And in that moment I knew the Gallagher Academy wasn’t alone. I knew there was a school for boys. And, most of all, I knew one of them had just gotten the best of me.

This can’t be happening, I chanted in my head. This can’t be—

“Nice work, Zach,” Mr. Solomon said. “Zach” winked at me, and I thought, This is totally happening!

I’d been sloppy. I’d been distracted. And worst of all, I’d let a boy stand between me and my mission objectives…again.

The whole thing might have been too awful—too humiliating—to endure if I hadn’t summoned the courage to say, “Hi, Blackthorne Boy.” Since I wasn’t supposed to know the Blackthorne Institute for Boys even existed, there was a split second when I had the upper hand.

Mr. Solomon blinked. Zach’s mouth gaped open, and I was the person smiling when my teacher said, “Very good, Ms. Morgan.” But then he looked at the boy who had beaten me at my own game, and my face went as red as Dorothy’s shoes. “But not good enough.”

I saw the day like a movie in my mind: Zach and his friend watching Bex twirl in the breeze; the boys standing on the long escalator ride into the Metro station. They’d been there—we’d seen them! But we’d thought they were just…boys. And they were. Kind of like we’re just girls.

“Your mission was…what?” I started, amazed by how even my voice sounded, how steady my pulse felt. “To keep us from achieving our mission?”

The boy cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. “Something like that.” Then he smirked and exhaled a half laugh. “I thought I could just make you late for your meeting. I didn’t think you’d actually tell me where it was and walk me halfway there.”

I thought I was going to be sick—seriously—right there in front of eight security cameras, my favorite teacher, and…Zach.

I’d thought he was chivalrous (but he wasn’t). I’d thought he was cute (but tall, dark, and handsome is highly overrated when you think about it). And worst of all, I’d thought he’d been flirting…with me.

A group of tourists wandered into the shoe exhibit and pressed closer to the case. I was jostled by the crowd, then blinded by a flashing camera. Mr. Solomon put his arm around my shoulders and guided me to the doors.

I looked back toward the slippers.

But Zach was already gone.

How weird was the helicopter ride home? Let me count the ways:

In an effort to make themselves less tailable, Mick and Eva had traded their school uniforms for jumpsuits from the National Park Service maintenance staff.

Kim Lee had fallen down the stairs at the National Gallery, so she had to sit with her ice-packed ankle propped on Tina’s lap.

Courtney Bauer was still wet, following a very unfortunate Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool incident.

And Anna Fetterman kept staring into the dark with her mouth open because, of all the Gallagher Girls on the Mall that day, she was the only one to achieve our mission objective (yeah, you read that right, Anna Fetterman!), and she was the most shocked person of all.

Even Bex had picked up a tail on her way out of the Metro station and didn’t make it to the museum on time.

So that’s why the entire sophomore CoveOps class from the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women sat in silence, watching the Washington Monument fade into the dark night while the helicopter rose, carrying us home.

I thought there would be questions. And theories. But even Tina Walters—the girl who had once hacked into a National Security Agency satellite in order to look for the alleged boys’ school—didn’t have a thing to say.

After all, it’s one thing to learn there’s a top-secret school for boy spies.

It’s another to find out they might be better than you.

The countryside shimmered beneath us, and the mansion finally came into view, lights shining through the windows and reflecting off the snow.

I felt the helicopter touch down, saw the snow swirl around us as Mr. Solomon reached for the helicopter door, then paused.

“Today I asked you to do something that maybe fifty people in the entire world can do,” he said, and I thought, This is it—a pep talk, a debrief. Or at least an explanation of who those boys were and why we were meeting them now. But instead, Mr. Solomon said, “By the end of this semester, there had better be fifty-eight.”

“You really saw some?” Liz said an hour later. Sure, we had the stereo blaring and the shower running, but Liz still whispered, “They really…exist?”

“Liz,” I whispered back. “They’re not unicorns.”

“No,” Bex said flatly, “they’re boys. And they’re…good.”

Dampness weighed my hair, steam fogged the bathroom mirror, but the four of us kept the door closed, because A) Steam is excellent for your pores. And B) The biggest news in the history of our sisterhood was sweeping through the halls of a place where eavesdropping is both an art and a science. So needless to say, my roommates and I weren’t taking any chances.

“Maybe it’s not what you think,” Liz said. “Maybe they weren’t from Blackthorne at all. Maybe they just looked young. Maybe—”

“Oh,” Bex said simply, “it was them.”

As I dropped to the edge of the bathtub and rested my head in my hands, I knew nothing hurt as much my pride.

“I can’t believe I actually talked to him,” I finally admitted. “I can’t believe I actually told him where I was going!”

“It couldn’t have been that bad, Cam,” Liz said, dropping to sit beside me.

“Oh, it was worse! He was…and I was…and then…” But I gave up because, in all of my fourteen languages, there wasn’t a single word that could express the anger-slash-humiliation that was coursing through my veins.

“So,” Macey said, hopping onto the counter and crossing her long legs, “just how hot was this guy?”

Oh. My. Gosh.

“Macey!” I moaned. “Does it matter?”

Bex nodded. “He was pretty hot.”

“Guys,” I pleaded, “the hotness is really beside the point.”

“But exactly what kind of hot was he?” Liz asked as she pulled open her notebook and grabbed a pen. “I mean, would you say he was pretty-boy hot, like Leonardo DiCaprio the early years, or ruggedly-handsome hot, like George Clooney the later years?”

I was about to remind her that neither kind of hot could justify my revealing the location of a clandestine rendezvous, when Bex answered for me. “Rugged. Definitely rugged.” Macey nodded her approval.

Down the hall, the rest of the sophomore class was hacking into the Smithsonian surveillance system and running the pictures of every male between the ages of twelve and twenty-two who had been on the Mall that day through the FBI’s facial recognition program. At least a dozen girls were in the library scouring the very books we had abandoned days bef. . .