It was a trap.
At the top of the hill I could hear the sounds of the park floating across the lake. All I had to do was keep running, keep fighting, but then I saw them - the agents who had been in the crowd all day - watching my every move. They were descending through the woods -
emerging form behind the tall trees and the roller coaster's massive pillars, rushing past me.
Past me?
Not a soul tried to usher me to safety. And in that moment I knew that they weren't protectors. They were hunters. And me? I was the bait.
It was a trap.
I heard footsteps behind me, hard and fast.
"Zach," I called to the boy who was running toward me.
"Where is he?" Zach yelled, out of breath. I lunged forward and grabbed him. "Let me go, Gallagher Girl. I have to -"
"Do you want them to take you too?" I shouted, shaking him. When he stopped fighting I held him tighter. "They have him, Zach." I heard my mother's words coming back to me.
"He's gone."
Mr. Solomon lay on the ground in the clearing below, bloody and bound, while agents still swarmed from all directions. I remember how, once on a helicopter en route to Ohio, Mr. Solomon had told us that often the hardest thing an operative can do is nothing.
Standing there that day, I knew that it was true - that Joe Solomon was always right.
"Stupid!" Zach yelled. He banged him hand hard against the truck of a tree, and I couldn't tell whether the hand of the tree for the worst of it. He turned to me. "What happened?"
"CoveOps exercise. I tailed a man here. And then Mr. Solomon was there, talking about the Circle, saying I was in danger. And then there was a woman. I thought she was the woman form Boston."
"That wasn't her, Cammie."
"I know that know."
He grasped my shoulders. I could see a kind of fear settle into his eyes as he whispered,
"There's no way Joe Solomon would ever be with her."
The roller coaster roared overhead, and I felt the ground vibrate beneath my feet.
"Why would he come here?" I asked. "It was a trap. Joe Solomon walked into a trap."
Believe it or not, of all things I'd seen and heard since London, that was what surprised me most of all.
"You." Zach sounded almost amazed that I did know. "If he thought you were going to be here - virtually unprotected . . . There's nowhere he wouldn't go to save you."
"Why would he do that?" I snapped, trying to pull away, but he just held me tighter.
"That doesn't make any -"
"It's in the journal, Cammie." Zach's gaze bore into mine. "It's all in the journal."
"Cammie!" someone said.
"I think I see her!" someone else called.
I could hear my classmates' voices in my ear. I knew they had crossed the fence and were running closer, but Zach's gaze never left mine.
"Look at me." Zach's hands felt like a vise. "Read the journal, Gallagher Girls. Read it all."
And then he pulled me closer, squeezed me so tightly that I could barely breathe. He pressed his lips hard against my forehead for a split second - nothing more - and when he finally let me go and disappeared back into the trees, I thought that I might fall.
"Oh my gosh, Cam, are you okay?" Eva Alvarez was screaming. "Are you -"
I heard Eva stop, Breathless. I watched her pull up short and turn to stare with the rest of my classmates at the scene that lay behind me. The agents. The chaos. The blood. And the way our former teacher lay on his stomach in the middle of it all, hands bound, legs shackled. Unconscious.
"Is that Mr. Solomon?" Anna asked.
"Yes." Bex's voice was low.
"What . . ." Tina's voice caught. "What is that?"
"It was a trap."
Chapter Twenty-Eight
You may think it would be impossible for a van full of teenage girls to be completely quiet for the duration of a two-hour drive, but that night I didn't hear a single voice. A soft rain fell, and only the sloshing of the windshield wipers - the sound of water splashing against the undercarriage of the car - could break the stifling silence on the long ride back to school.
I recognized the sound. I'd heard it once on our Arlington town house as neighbors brought casseroles and condolences. I'd felt it at the ranch as relatives I barely knew spilled onto my grandparents' porch, the four walls of the house too thin to hold us and the news that my father was never coming home. The junior CoverOps class was mourning, and one by one, every girl in the van came to realize what my roommates and I had known for weeks - that Mr. Solomon hadn't been on a mission. Mr. Solomon was a whole different kind of gone.
When we pulled through the gates that night, it seemed like every light in the mansion was on. I could imagine girls inside, laughing and heading downstairs for supper, talking about papers and tests. But as we crawled from the van and watched Agent Townsend stride through the front doors, we all stayed perfectly still, a heavy drizzle and the memory of all we'd seen settling down around us, no one wanted to carry in all inside.
"I never knew," Anna Fetterman said. "I never even guessed. I'm making a mistake, aren't I?" She looked right at me as if I should know. "I shouldn't be on the CoveOps track. I shouldn't . . . I never knew."
"No one knew." Eva Alvarez placed an arm around Anna's shoulders. "No one knew what he was."
"Is."
No one heard me whisper, but that was just as well. After all, no one else had stood in the amusement park graveyard and heard him say the Circle was coming. No one else had felt his warm hands on the bridge. I might have been the only Gallagher Girl in the world at that moment who knew that Mr. Solomon wasn't in the past tense.