for tunarh, who wanted me to make a depressing story. (happy belated birthday!)
& major thanks to my beta, DiVaGiRl13, for letting me PM her at like 6 AM to ramble about her being my beta and then forgetting to send the document over. but it's all good now! so yeah, she gets like, all the chocolate in the world.
m y m i s t a k e s w e r e m a d e f o r y o u
The last thing Cammie remembers is a crash.
::
(She was in her limo, in fact, on her way to her final semester at the Gallagher Academy. She had been staring out the window, wishing she wasn't a spy and wishing she hadn't been born into this world of fire so cold it burned. She had been wishing that maybe this would all turn out to be some wacked out drawn-out dream and she would wake up in a suburban home with a mother and a father and maybe a sister, a real one, not a peer, but before she can even regret that thought, take it back, shove it to the back of her mind, there's this bright light that's too bright and she's flying, flying through the air and there's pieces of glass stuck to her arms and her shoulders and it smells terrible, like gasoline and smoke and metal and blood. But it was only uncomfortable, at the most. Mostly, she just enjoyed the feeling, that feeling of soaring.)
::
Her head hurts like hell and she wants to looks around—her spy instincts are basically all she is now—but when she opens her eyes all she can see is black. She feels the fibers rubbing into her sore neck and realizes a burlap sack has been thrown over her head and tied loosely with a rope.
She raises her hands to remove it, but her hands are locked together in her lap with something cold and heavy.
"Awake?" A familiar voice says, sounding bored, monotone, sounding like the person asking the question couldn't care less whether she was actually awake or okay or even alive. Normally this wouldn't affect her at all, even if the voice was yelling at her and screaming at her it normally wouldn't affect her at all, but this voice—this voice sends ice running down her back.
She licks her lips.
A million things—ideas, connections, realizations—hit her at once.
::
(She was supposed to be invisible.)
::
"Do you want water or something?" The voice continues, and there's sound of shuffling.
"I dunno. Would you expect me to drink through the burlap sack or would you stick a straw up here for me?" She snaps back coldly, curling her fingers even though she knows she won't be able to swing a punch.
Almost carelessly, the sack is slipped off her head and the first thing she wants to do is look around but a warm hand grabs hold of her chin and tilts her face upwards. She's looking into those emotionless gray eyes and she can't look away. She doesn't know if she really wants to, and when the warm hands slides away and goes back into a dark denim pocket and a back turns towards her, she forces herself to look around the room.
Barren, is the first word that comes to mind. There are gray cement walls and a gray cement floor. There's nearly nothing in the room except for a naked bulb and a steel door and the chair she's sitting on. No windows, no weapons.
Except for two people. Him and her. Would people even be the right word? Spies were hardly people, and she had always thought if they were to be considered people, they'd be the lowest form of people, below the murderers and kidnappers and rapists and maybe even below the beetle that those people step on.
"So, where am I?"
"Where do you think?"
He's doing that thing. That annoying thing. That thing where he made her think for herself, made her have her own opinions and theories and the year before last she thought he had been doing it to irritate her and get under her skin because they were fifteen and they were immature. Last year, she had thought he had been doing it to make her a better spy—that he was trying to help her.
She was dead wrong, obviously.
Cammie surveys the room again. They're underground, a basement, maybe. She looks behind her at the wall she had missed before, and it strains her because the only that girl in The Exorcist can turn her head in a 360 degree angle, but she can see the symbol spray painted on the wall like common graffiti.
She could imagine him, laughing and having a good time, maybe with a couple friends, just thinking they're being cool, being funny, being cute, being adolescent, as the hissing sound of the spray cans indicated they were emptying out and sneakered feet silent against the hard floor as they ran off. She doesn't know why, but she can just feel that he did that, made that, imprinted that insignia onto the wall.
"Blackthorne?"
He turns back around, but only halfway, so she can see his profile, enough to gather that he was rather unimpressed by her answer. "Was that a question or a statement?"
"Blackthorne," she says, her voice firmer.
His dismissive expression almost cracks for a minute, and he's turned around to face her fully now, and she's sitting and staring and he's standing and staring and they're just staring, until, finally, he gives her a half-smile. "You got it faster than I thought you would."
::
(She hated how he said this like it was a privilege that she should even be in his thoughts, hated how he said this like it should be a compliment when it was so obviously demeaning, so obviously a shit thing to say. But it wasn't like she could do anything as he turned back around and walked away, walked out of the room, except send some bad thoughts and she was above that, she was way above that, she wasn't going to let one boy control her emotions like that, that's all he was, one boy...)
::
She sits there in the silence and thinks. Just thinks.
(Because she was stupid and careless and sloppy and she had had her head in the clouds when she truly thought that maybe even in a world like hers fairytale endings could exist. She was wrong. Again.)
(She fantasized that that little voice who had told her something was off with Zach, Zach who was cold and distant now but used to be so warm and close, she had fantasized that that little voice was wrong even if that little voice had never been wrong before. But no, it was her that was wrong. Again.)
She doesn't know how much time passes but it seems like hours, days on ends, as she just sits alone with her thoughts and her mouth becomes dry and her throat becomes scratchy, her lips chapped, her muscles feeling like rubber and her eyelids feeling heavy.
Then the heavy metal door bangs open, and a woman walks in.
"Cammie, darling, how're you feeling?" She says in a motherly voice, and Cammie reminds herself that she is a mother, in the most basic sense of the word. "Hungry?"
Cammie stares at her.
"I know what you're wondering, I saw your face when I walked in," Juliana Goode tells her. "But Zach has school. And I want him to have the best education, as all mothers do."
Cammie swallows and it hurts but she doesn't let it show, instead looking off to the side.
"Trust me, darling, he wanted to stay," Juliana continues, walking over and tsking at, Cammie assumed, the state of her hair. "If I didn't know any better I'd say he actually liked you." Her facial expression changed, jaw setting and eyes darkening.
"Why am I here?" Cammie demands, her voice stronger than she expected it to be. She's ignoring the 'I'd say he actually liked you' statement.
"Right now there's a price tag on your head for over a hundred thousand dollars, dead or alive, from all the big organizations in the world," Juliana says, her eyes clouding over. "And it's rising every day."
"Criminal organizations."
"Details," Juliana dismisses, even though her voice hardens. "But my boss, he's offering me at least five times that amount. Add in the bidding war I could get started with a little nudge to the CIA, you're probably worth... a lot of money."
"So this is about money?"
"It's about a lot of things, little girl, but that's not what I came in here to talk to you about," she snaps, her lips curling into a small smirk that resembled Zach's too much. "Although, I admit, you're good. Letting me talk, getting caught up in my own ideas, making me feel good about myself. You remind me of your mother."
Pause.
"I hated your mother."
Cammie shifts uncomfortably in her chair because she knows that if she sent the woman over the edge she could be killed in an instant.
"I was actually wondering if maybe you'd like to have a little sit-down with Zach. I'm sure you have a lot of catching up to do. Blackthorne has its own interrogation room, you know? I thought you'd appreciate a bit of privacy." Her eyes flash. "But not for anything like that."
Cammie pressed her lips together.
Juliana raised an eyebrow. "I'd take the opportunity, if I were you," she said, and Cammie felt actual, true fear as she said the next words: "Especially if I knew tomorrow, I'd be dead."
Cammie spits out, "Are you unhinged?"
"That's a very open-ended question, Chameleon."
::
(Two guards force Cammie up and out and down a long hall into a room with frosted glass windows and too much air conditioning. Zach was sitting at the table looking just as emotionless as ever but he was still in his Blackthorne uniform and he looked a lot like that boy who she had met two years ago, the boy who had made sure her head was okay when she bashed it against a fireplace and a boy who had always purposely forgotten Josh's name, just a little game they played, because back then, they could still play games—)
::
"You lied."
"I lie about a lot of things."
::
(—and not get hurt.)
::
"Can you at least tell me what's going on?"
"You haven't figured it out already?"
::
(He's used that tone again, and she stared at him, trying to think, trying to set things straight. She thought about what she knew. Zach was a lying jerk who was part of the organization that killed Solomon, probably killed her father, and would soon kill her. Blackthorne had a Circle branch in its basement, which meant Zach had lied again—he had claimed that only some students got picked off to join the Circle but no, no, they trained students for the Circle, just like Gallagher trained students for the CIA.)
(And for some reason she still hadn't figured out why they wanted her. They've always wanted her. Never Macey. Always her. Her dad. They arranged for the exchange, the semester long exchange, they cleaned up their history a bit, made it seem like only a few students occasionally strayed to the dark, so it seemed safe, they would only send three students from each grade, make it seem even safer.)
(Juliana Goode seemed pretty high up in the Circle, and so Zach was chosen, of course, to go along in the exchange, and Cammie was probably only an assignment to him, really, and she ignored the twist in her insides when that thought crossed her mind.)
::
"Done?"
She licks her lips and suddenly feels tired. "You're good. Two years."
"Some covers last for lifetimes, Cam." (Her name still slid easily off his tongue.) "People get lost in them. They go in deep, they never come back out. Until they die. And sometimes, not even then. Gravestones bearing the wrong name, epitaphs claiming they were loving husbands, wives, mothers and fathers, when they never had any kids, never got married."
"Who was it?"
His facial expression changes, just a bit, and he stands, preparing to go. "My dad." And then he pushes out of the door, telling the guards at the door, "We're done. Take her back." With a voice so blasé she actually feels angry at him.
::
(He told her more in those five minutes than he had ever told her in the past two years.)
::
Back in the room made of cement, Cammie waits. She doesn't know what for. Maybe for Zach to burst through the door wearing shining armor. Maybe for her roommates or Solomon or hell, even her dad, to drop down on the roof of the building. Maybe for some ingenious plan to flash in her mind.
(Well, she never wanted to be in this world anyway, so what's the worst that could happen if she died?)
She knows she's being selfish and petty but she's losing all resolve, just staring at the blank, gray wall.
"You know, darling, I just had the greatest idea," a blithe voice says, and Juliana Goode walks in again. "We're going to have to take you with a bit of flair, a bit of pizzazz, you know?"
"What are you going to do? Pour glitter on me or something?"
"Be nice to the person deciding how you're going to die, darling," Juliana says. She pokes her head out the door and talks to someone standing in the hall. "Come on in. Don't be shy, it's only Cammie. She won't bite."
Macey McHenry walks in, her blue eyes wide, her mouth gagged, her skin pale and bruised and her hair not as shiny as it usually is.
"No!" Cammie cries out, trying to stand up. "They don't want Macey, do they? You don't need to kill her too! Just—just—" Macey starts shaking her head.
"Of course I'm not going to kill her; I don't need the Secret Service on me too," Juliana says bluntly. She pulls a gun out of her the pocket of her blazer and puts it in Macey's trembling hands.
Cammie holds her breath.
"Your life or hers."
Macey spits out the gag. "You're a bitch, whoever you are," she snaps, still sounding exactly how Macey should sound like. Cammie feels slightly relieved. "How do you know I'm not going to shoot you?"
"Because I'm leaving," Juliana replies, disappearing through the door. "Five minutes, girls."
"Ohmigod, Cammie," Macey breathes. "Ohmigod. We have to get out of here. Blackthorne it's—it's like—"
"A Circle breeding ground?" Cammie finishes, sighing.
"Yeah. And Zach—"
"I know."
Macey stares at her. "I'm sorry, Cam."
"Whatever. How are we getting out of here?"
Macey runs a bony hand through her black hair. "When they... got me, they didn't take my phone away until they brought me inside. I texted Bex, told her they were taking me to Blackthorne, it was just a lucky guess, but crap..." She trails off. "Help is coming but I don't know how soon."
"How long have you been here?"
"I came straight from the van to here. I haven't been here for long, but long enough to know what's going on," Macey says. She smiles humorlessly. "Daddy didn't say boarding school would be so fun."
::
(Macey shouldn't have been there. She was a rich kid; she should've been going to parties in New York and making it onto the cover of Vogue magazines, dating celebrities and only caring about broken nails. But nope, the spy world had to screw up her life too.)
::
"Time's up, girls," that annoying voice announces. "Predictably, you did nothing. Thank God I think ahead." As she walks into the room, her son walks in behind her, still looking empty. "Zach, the gun."
Cammie tries not to watch as Zach wrestles the gun away from Macey. There's a small shuffle, a muttering of "Fuck off, Goode." and then Macey ends up on the floor.
A guard comes in and drags Macey out.
"You better not hurt her," Cammie warns. "The CIA are coming any minute, and if there's even a scratch on her—"
"I've forgotten how close of a bond Gallagher sisters have," Juliana muses, cutting her off midsentence. "But there's no time for that. I have to get you to the auction by tomorrow evening, and you need to be" —she made a slicing motion across her throat— "so I'm going to have to get somebody who can do it, and do it right."
Her gaze flickered to her son.
"Someone who's been training half his life to kill people."
Zach isn't looking at Cammie, even though she wants him to turn around, just a bit, not even all the way, just a little, so she can see what's going on, what he's feeling, see if maybe he cares, and not because she was her but because his mother had just asked him to put a bullet through the head of a 17 year old girl.
"Anyone want to volunteer?" Juliana asks.
"Subtle," Zach remarks dryly.
"I'll be waiting."
She leaves.
::
(For a while, it was basically a staring contest and anyone who had walked in would've been able to cut the tension with a knife, it was that thick. But then, Zach slowly approached her and cupped her face and said quietly, I liked you a lot more than I should have, tracing her cheek with a calloused thumb. But she didn't pay attention to that, she paid attention to how he said 'liked' instead of 'like', as if he was actually going to do it, he was actually going to kill her because she was a past tense now, she was a 'liked', a 'like' with a 'd', a 'd' for dead, dying, death, dead. She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, glad she'd never have to open them again.)
(But it didn't really work out the way she planned. It never did.)
::
He's about to kiss her, is what the feeling is like, because she can feel his breath warm on her forehead, and she holds her breath and hardens her muscles and something brushed her forehead, but it doesn't feel like lips, it feels like fingers. They travel down, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Cam."
His voice is stressed, almost strangled, the voice of someone about to make a very hard decision. She lets out a breath.
(Why wouldn't he do it already?)
"Cam, you don't have to answer this question, you just have to listen, okay? You have to follow my instructions precisely because if you don't she's going to be angry, pissed, and she's going to take it out on the world, and she's powerful enough to cause serious damage, okay?"
He sighs. He's probably never talked this much, ever.
"Cam, how long can you hold your breath?"
That's his question. She's about to die and he wants to know how long she can hold her breath? She frowns, thinking, a long time, the number seven minutes and forty-six seconds flashing in her mind. But why does he want to know? Why does he want this number in her head?
"Cam, the CIA is going to be here in exactly eight minutes eleven seconds, and you need to stay inside this room until they get you. Don't move, don't make a sound, and don't breathe."
"Zach, what's-"
"Listen to me. A very powerful gas is going to go off at the Code Black—"
"Code Black? You're going to set off a Code Black?" She wrenches open her eyes.
"Listen, Cammie, okay? Don't make a sound. Don't even move. They know where they are. Just hold your breath for as long as you can once the alarms sound."
"But what about you—"
"I'll be fine, Cam," he says wearily. "I have to go deal with... people, and I'll be fine, at worst, the gas only knocks people out."
"Is the whole school going to get this gas?" She cries out.
"It's only in the basement."
"And it only knocks people out?" She asks, wanting to make sure. Zach looks away but he nods. She shakes her head. "Zach, don't do it. Please don't do it." But it's too late because he's already gone.
::
(She wanted to stop him because this was suicide and she couldn't let him just throw himself out there and go against his family for her because she told herself he was just a boy. To him she was just a girl because that's how it is, how it always is in this line of business.)
(She was weak because she couldn't find it in her to throw open the door and stop him.)
(She guessed she'd always been weak.)
(There was a scuffle outside, screaming, furious yelling, and something thudded against the floor. [Not Zach. Not Zach. Not Zach.] More yelling. Then, she heard a something, a big BANG. Then, hissing, as the gas was released.)
(Alarms sounded.)
(Cammie pressed her lips together, trying not to cry, because crying needed breathing and breathing, she couldn't do.)
::
She waits and waits and waits and can only hear everything going on outside, wanting to help, really wanting to help, but not being able to do anything because she's tied to a chair. She counts the seconds, until she passes the eight minute mark, and her head starts to get light and she wants to take a breath but she can see the gray clouds in the gray room and knows she can't risk it.
At nearly nine minutes, she's almost collapsed, but the door breaks down and people in gas masks kneel by her and cut off the rope and unlock the handcuffs and take her out, and her eyes are starting to close...
"Get her in a van," a voice orders, and she recognizes the British accent of Bex's father. "She needs a mask, now!"
A van door opens and she collapses inside, and a face swims above her. "Cammie!" Bex screams. "Ohmigod, Cammie. What's going on?" And an oxygen mask is strapped to her face. She takes in one deep, clean breath, and then snaps it off.
"Zach," she begins.
"Yeah, we know, he's like this evil piss-off," Bex exclaims.
She shakes her head. "No, no, Zach, you need to get him. He's dying. Get him and Macey." Something pokes into her arm. An IV drip. She stares at it curiously. "What's that for?"
"Cam, you've been gone for almost a week. Have they fed you or anything during that time?" Bex asks, her brown eyes wide.
"That doesn't matter," she insists. "Macey—"
"It's okay, Cam, Macey's here," Bex reassures, pointing to the gurney in the van, where Macey lies, a mask covering to her face, breathing slowly and evenly. Normally, she would feel happy, but not now, not when—
"What about Zach?" She asks desperately. Bex opens her mouth. "No, Bex, listen, he's the one who got me out. Set the alarms, everything." Bex stared. "He could've gotten seriously hurt! Bex, listen to me. Why aren't you listening to me?"
"I'm listening, hon, I'm listening," Bex says.
"He—he set off the alarm, he did, but before that he got into..." What she wants to say next sounded so weird, so off, but she says it anyway. "A fight with his mom. And she's not... that lovely."
"Yeah, I heard he has, like, a seriously dysfunctional family," Bex mutters. "Cam, I believe you, but I don't know what to do, I mean, I can't do anything, I'm still a student, just like you, I can't order everyone to go and find someone they think tried to kill you."
"I can," another English accent says. Cammie whips around to see the chiseled face and dark hair of Edward Townsend. "Well, maybe not everyone, but enough people. Did he really try to save you?"
Bex and Cammie look at each other. "He did save me, Townsend," Cammie says pointedly. "Unless I look like I have a bullet in my brain right now?"
Townsend looks at Bex. "This is a serious matter. Zach's a criminal in the CIA's book, a big criminal," Townsend says. He puts his hands up and shakes his head. "I don't even know why I suggested the idea."
"No, he's good, he's good," Cammie protests. "Why else would he have let me go?"
"This could all be one big, elaborate set up, I've heard of things like this before—"
Cammie stands up. Townsend was taller, bigger, and older, but he almost looked dwarfed by Cammie in all her rage. "Do you want to help me or not?" She screams at him.
"Yes, I do, but besides the fact that your boyfriend is probably not the saint you make him out to be, it might already be too late," Townsend yells back.
"Then what are you waiting for?"
Townsend looks down at the radio in his hand, then raises it to his lips. "Find the Goode boy," he says into the radio, before shutting it off and tossing it on the bed, like he doesn't want to look at it anymore. "If I get in a shade of trouble for this..."
::
(He was limp.)
::
Fire so cold it burns, Cammie muses to herself, staring out of the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. Happy endings that don't exist. Games that are never fun. Epitaphs that don't make sense. Mistakes made for people who aren't worth it. And lies. So many lies. Lies about things, inane things, big things, major things, things like how you feel and what you want and whether a gas only knocks people out or kills them.
That's just the spy world, though, isn't it?
::
:
.
Zachary Stephen Goode
Jan 7 1993 ~ Aug 30 2010
Loving son and peer
.
:
::
fin.