Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time Read Online Free

catch up with you after she’s been debriefed and examined.”
    “But…” Bex started.
    “Go to class,” Mom said. But they didn’t really trust me to leave their sight again, I could tell; and Mom must have known it, because she moved inside the car without me.
    “Cammie, I’ll see you downstairs in a minute,” she said, and the doors slid closed.
    For the first time in months, my three best friends and I were alone. How many hours had we spent walking those halls together in the early morning or middle of the night? Sneaking. Planning. Testing our limits and ourselves. But standing there, we were all a little too straight—our posture a little too perfect. It was as if we were strangers trying to make a good impression.
    “Stop looking at me like that,” I told them when it finally became too much.
    “Like how?” Liz asked.
    “Like you didn’t think you’d ever see me again,” I said.
    “Cam, we—” Liz started, but Bex cut her off.
    “You don’t get it, do you?” Her voice was more hiss than whisper. “Until forty-eight hours ago, we didn’t.”

 
    T he first time I’d ever seen the elevator to Sublevel One, I’d been starting my sophomore year. Real-life fieldwork had seemed ages away. Covert Operations was a totally new subject. And Bex was my best friend. As the car began to sink into the top secret depths of my school, I had to wonder if all of those things had changed. I didn’t want to think about the way Bex had looked at me. I didn’t want to cry. So I just stood there wondering if anything was ever going to be the same again, when the doors slid open and my mother said, “Follow me.”
    There’s a tone of voice that adults get that lets you know that you’re in trouble. I heard it then, and suddenly I wanted back on the chopper. Sadly, running away a second time seemed like a terrible idea, so I had no choice but to turn and follow my mother inside the room where I’d learned my first lessons in Covert Operations. But with one glance I knew it wasn’t a classroom anymore. Right then, it was a war room.
    A long table sat in the middle of the space, chairs all around it. There were phones and computers, a massive screen that showed an aerial image of the convent and the mountain. I smelled burned coffee and stale doughnuts. For a second, I was tempted to close my eyes and imagine that I was just another part of the team.
    But then a chair squeaked, and Madame Dabney asked, “How are you, Cameron?” and I had to remember that when you go to spy school, some questions are way more complicated than they appear.
    Say “I’m okay,” and you might sound like an idiot who doesn’t care she has amnesia.
    Say “I’m terrified,” and risk looking like a wimp or a coward.
    “My head hurts” sounds like a whiner.
    “I just want to go to bed” sounds like someone too foolish or lazy to care about the truth.
    But saying nothing to the faculty of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women wasn’t exactly an option either, so I took the seat at the opposite end of the table, looked my teachers squarely in the eyes, and told them, “I’m feeling better, thank you.”
    It must have been the right answer, because Madame Dabney smiled in my direction. “Do you feel like answering some questions for us?”
    “Yes,” I said, even though what I needed was to have questions answered for me. Collectively, they’d probably been on a thousand different missions in their lifetimes, and I knew they’d combed the corners of the earth to find out what had happened over the summer. I wanted to know everything they’d discovered, and so much more.
    Madame Dabney smiled. “Why don’t you begin by telling us why you ran away?”
    “I didn’t run away,” I said, louder than I’d intended. “I left.” My mind drifted back to the night when the Circle cornered me in the middle of a mountain, and the look on Joe Solomon’s face as he triggered the explosion that, in so many ways,