Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

Bex would have thought it was cool. Liz would have calculated the exact amount of force it would have taken to do that kind of damage. Bruises like that usually earn you a week's worth of extra credit in P&E. But Macey didn't want to hear those things.



And it was just as well, because I didn't want to say them.



So I helped her into her school sweater wondering:



7. Did I think Macey was okay? (Because I was the only one who seemed to be asking it.)



Sometime in the night our school had reversed itself. The Code Red was over. The Senator and his entourage were gone. Bookshelves and paintings had spun around again, and in the Hall of History, Gilly's sword was gleaming in its protective case.



Everything seemed right. Everything seemed normal. Then I heard a voice I hadn't heard in a very long time say, "Hey, squirt."



My mom calls me kiddo. My friends call me Cam. Zach called me Gallagher Girl. But no nickname in history has ever had the same effect on me as "Squirt." I suddenly had the urge to spin around really, really fast and eat cotton candy until I was sick. But instead I just said, "Hi."



"Someone grew up."



"I'm sixteen," I said, which was about the dumbest thing ever, but I couldn't help it. Even geniuses have the right to be dumb sometimes. I felt Bex and Liz come from the Grand Hall to stand beside me. "Everyone, this is"—I gazed up at her, wondering how she could look almost exactly the same when almost everything in my life was different—"Aunt Abby?" It came out like a question, but it wasn't.



"Don't tell me," my aunt said as she turned to Bex, "you must be a Baxter."



Bex beamed. It didn't matter that the two of them had never met before. My aunt didn't wait on introductions. Which was just as well—Bex never waited on anything. "So how's your dad?"



"He's great," Bex said with a grin.



Abby winked. "Do me a favor and tell him Dubai at Christmas is no fun without him,"



Beside me, I could practically feel Bex's mind spinning out of control, wondering about Dubai in December. But Abby didn't offer details; instead she just turned to Liz.



"Oooh," Abby said as she examined the fresh cut on her chin. "Paper clip?" she asked.



Liz's eyes got even wider. "How did you know that?"



Abby shrugged. "I've seen things."



I thought back to Mr. Solomon's cabin. Whenever he and my mother spoke about the things they'd seen and done, I wanted to hide from the details of their lives. But as Abby spoke, we hung on every word.



"Does Fibs still have that stash of the SkinAgain prototype in the lab?" my aunt asked.



"Isn't that a little"—Liz started—"strong?" (Which might have been a bit of an understatement, since I know for a fact the Gallagher Academy developed SkinAgain after an eighth grader fell into a vat of liquid nitrogen.)



Abby shrugged. "Not if you mix it with a little aloe. Rub some of that on, and no way that leaves a scar."



"Seriously?" Bex and Liz asked at the exact same time.



Abby leaned into the light. "Does this look like the face of a woman who survived a knife fight in Buenos Aires?"



Every girl in the foyer (by then there were quite a few) craned to look at her flawless, porcelain skin.



"That's not a good idea, Ms. McHenry," my aunt said, startling her admirers. I turned and saw Macey reaching for the front doors, and realized Abby had sensed her without even turning around. And just that quickly her skin stopped being the most amazing thing about her.



"I don't do breakfast," Macey said. (Which was a lie, but I didn't say so.) "I'm going for a walk."



At the sound of the word "breakfast," the girls in the foyer seemed to remember that they'd spent an entire summer without access to our chef's Belgian waffles. They filtered out, one by one, until it was just me, my three best friends in the world, and the woman who had taught me how to use a jump rope to temporarily paralyze a man when I was seven.



She stepped closer to Macey. "The security division noted two helicopters in the vicinity this morning— probably paparazzi looking for pictures of you—but until we're sure…" She eased between her protectee and the door. "You can't go outside. I'm sorry." She added that last part later, like an afterthought.



"Isn't that why you're here?" Macey reminded her and stepped toward the door again, but Abby casually cut her off.



"Actually, that's why I'm here." Abby pointed to her feet and leaned against the door. It might have been a casual gesture from another person, in another place. But as I looked from my aunt to Macey, I realized they were both strong. Both smart. Both used to being the prettiest girl in the room. The last time I'd had a feeling like that, it had involved Dr. Fibs's lab and two chemicals that are both potent, and volatile, and don't really like being put together under pressure.



"Rule number one, ladies," my aunt said. "Get careless…get caught."



As she walked away, Bex grabbed my arm and mouthed, "She's bloody awesome!"



Then, without turning around, Abby called, "I bloody know."



The rest of the morning was something of a blur.



Macey was in the junior level Countries of the World class, so she sat right beside me as Mr. Smith talked for forty-five minutes about the pros and cons of getting your cosmetic surgery at CIA-approved facilities. (Evidently, the work is very high quality, but since they don't technically "exist," the insurance paperwork is a nightmare!)



Madame Dabney gave a nice, relaxing refresher course on the basics: i.e. identifying every piece in a twenty-piece place setting (and the corresponding best methods in which each utensil could be used as a weapon).



Things seemed perfectly normal as we started down the



Grand Staircase and Liz headed toward Dr. Fibs's lab in the basement.



"See ya!" she called, which was okay. I'd gotten used to the idea that Liz was destined for the research-and- operations track while Bex and I were training for a life in the field.



It wasn't until I heard Macey say, "See you at lunch," that I remembered she was still behind the rest of us, academically.



As she set off for the freshman-level encryption course taught by Mr. Mosckowitz, Bex and I moved into the small passage beneath the Grand Staircase and stepped before a gilt-framed mirror. A thin laser beam scanned our faces, reading our retinal images. The eyes of the painting behind us flashed green, and a mirror slid aside, revealing the elevator to the most secret classrooms of the most secret school in the country.



But I didn't feel a rush. I wasn't thinking about pop quizzes or how Mr. Solomon looked that one time when we were doing wilderness reconnaissance exercises and he rolled up his sleeves.



Instead I just said, "Bex," and waited for my best friend's "Yeah."



"I'm worried about Macey."



"Why?" Bex asked, pressing her palm against the glass on the inside of the elevator. "She seems fine to me."



I placed my palm beside my best friend's. "That's what worries me."



Bex is black and I'm white. She's beautiful and I'm plain. She grew up in London and I spend my summers on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. She was born for fight and I was born for flight. But the way she looked at me reminded me that Bex and I are alike in all the ways that matter.



"I know something that'll make you feel better," she



said.



"What?" I asked as the elevator around us rumbled to a start. My palm burned hot and I jerked my hand from the glass. An odd light unlike anything I'd ever seen before filled the car around us, and through an eerie purple glow, my best friend smiled.



"We're about to see Sublevel Two."



Chapter Nine



When you're the first Gallagher Girl since Gilly herself to find and use the passageway behind the third-floor corridor that contained a million dollars worth of confederate coins, you might start thinking that the Gallagher mansion can't possibly surprise you anymore.



But you'd be wrong.



The car stopped. I knew the doors were about to slide open and reveal the most covert place we had ever seen. I held my breath, waiting. Then suddenly the car jerked backward, throwing us against the doors.



"Cam," Bex said as we hurtled at least a hundred feet further underground. "Is this supposed to be—" she started, but suddenly we were plunging downward again.



We halted. "PRESENT DNA, PLEASE," a mechanical voice rang through the car. A narrow slot appeared in the stainless-steel shell. It was exactly finger-size, so I reached out to touch it.



"Ouch!" I cried. A small pin had pricked me. Then it disappeared, and a fresh needle replaced it. A small drop of blood bubbled at the top of my finger.



"No way," Bex said, shaking her head emphatically. (And that's how I learned that the girl who once bragged she'd taken on an arms dealer in a sword fight in Cairo one spring break was actually afraid of needles.)



"PRESENT DNA, PLEASE," the voice demanded again, this time sounding slightly less patient, so Bex put her finger in just as the car stopped.



The doors slid open…and I knew that nothing about Sublevel One had prepared me for Sublevel Two.



It had been almost exactly a year since Bex and I had first laid eyes on Sublevel One. There the walls were made of stainless steel and frosted glass. Our footsteps had echoed. I'd always brought a sweater. Everything about it was cool and modern, like stepping inside the future—our future. But stepping inside Sublevel Two was…not.



Around me, other elevator doors were sliding open; other girls with bleeding fingers were stepping onto creaking, wide-planked oak floors.



The ceiling was a jigsaw puzzle of thick stone and heavy beams, and as I reached out to touch the rock walls, I realized there were no seams. No mortar. Just an indeterminable amount of limestone and earth separating us from the outside world.



My classmates stirred and turned, too busy taking in the dimly lit space to notice the man who stepped out of the shadows and said, "Welcome to Sublevel Two." He turned and started down the gently sloping floors, leading us in a steady spiral. "I'd highly recommend paying attention, ladies," Mr. Solomon instructed. "First day is the last day you get a guide."



Corridors branched away from the spiraling walkway in a maze of stone. We passed arching doorways, and the incline grew steeper. One wide corridor was labeled, simply, storage, but the doors that lined the hall were marked with everything from f, false flag operations; h, hitler, attempted assassinations of. I'd always heard about secrets being locked in stone, but I'd never seen it with my own eyes until then.



We walked for what felt like five minutes. The air around us was damp and cool, and yet something told me that even in the dead of winter or heat of summer the temperature would never vary more than three degrees.



And then finally Joe Solomon came to a stop. As we stepped onto a floor of solid stone, I looked back up the spiraling walkway—at the corridors that branched like a maze—and suddenly I pitied the enemy agent who was ever foolish enough to try to penetrate this store of covert knowledge. And finally I smiled, wondering what on earth (or beneath it) could possibly lay in store on Sublevel Three.