Chapter 1: An Unexpected Surprise

"What the hell are they doing here? I thought we saw the last of them yesterday!" Cammie proclaimed in our tower room. It was dark outside, and it had been a matter of 3 hours 27 minutes and 15 seconds since boys came to Gallagher. Boys. Can you imagine? In an all-girl school, there were finally boys. The expressions on the faces of the other girls were priceless. Shock, mixed with a somewhat cute fluttering as they all suddenly and self-consciously fixed their hair, and stopped eating. Not for us though, not for me, Cammie, Liz and Macey. We'd figured it out last night, when we saw the bedrooms in the East Wing. I mean, it had been a massive stroke of luck that Cam and Macey had heard the conversation between Cam's mom and Mr Solomon, and that Cam had found the photo with her dad and Mr Solomon on it.

I'm worried about her. Cammie, that is. I mean, finding a photo of her dad she never knew existed, and the whole Josh thing last semester. And the way that Zach, the boy she'd spent all yesterday trying to avoid, coming into our school and winking at her. I wish he'd winked at me. Boy, she's had one more serious boyfriend than anyone else at our school, bar perhaps Macey. But, then again, I liked the look of the one on the end, the one trying to hide. He resembled your average Greek god. But WAY hotter. Spiked golden-blonde hair, carefully gelled across his forehead. Tall, and he had a body that you could see, even under a shirt, was not a stranger to a good gym. I don't even know his name.

"Lizzie, can you see if they've found any information about them from the CCTV at the mall yesterday?" I said, as I knew that the rest of the sophomores were downstairs in the computer suite in sublevel 1, searching for every male aged between 14 and 20 who'd been in the mall yesterday.

"Sure, I'm right on it" she said with that gleam in her eye she got whenever she was asked to do anything technical. She opened her laptop, the latest MacBook, on the desk we'd put in the room just for her. She opened a suite of hacking tools, and located the computers she wanted to see.

Macey and Cammie were jabbering away about something, and I think I heard the words "Tracking devices", "Bugs" and, perhaps most disturbingly, "Camera's fit well in light fittings". Although, if that hottie from yesterday was taking his shirt off, by god would I want a camera in that room!

Lizzie suddenly jumped out of her seat. Well, she fell off her beanbag, which is sort of the same thing. "We've found them! We've found them!" She shouted excitedly. "Okay, just let me take over the computer downstairs…" She mumbled, and then pressed a few keys. A green light flicked on in the corner of the screen. She then started to control the computer downstairs, piecing together a 3D view of the entire mall from yesterday: CCTV footage, satellite imaging and facial recognition. She called this 'Project OverWatch' : a system which could find a single wanted person in a city filled with millions of people, or, in this instance, 20 extremely cute boys in the mall. She was developing it for the CIA and MI6, in return for money and a definite job in the future.

She'd found the boys, sure, and was now running them through the most advanced facial recognition software known to man. It took a couple of minutes, well, 2 minute and 12 seconds, but eventually, the results came back. Nothing. Nothing at all, for any of them. 20 boys, and none of them were on the system. And if they weren't on the system, why not? I mean, us Gallagher Girls aren't on most systems either, only the most high security CIA database, but these boys weren't even on that.

"Nothing at all… What does that mean?" Asked Liz.

"They don't exist. They're like ghosts. If they weren't here, and we hadn't met them yesterday, I wouldn't believe that they even existed." Cammie said, with a worried glint in her eyes. "And that means, that means that" she hesitated, gripping her hands nervously. "That means that they're secret. Top secret. More secret than us. Why? Why do they get absolute disguise and we still technically exist? It doesn't make sense" She wondered, descending into murmurs.

Then I saw Macey. She was silent, apart from the slightly panicked breathing. Her hands were clenching the desk tightly, her skin turned white. Her face had a sickly pallor, and had lost all it's colour. "What's wrong?" I asked tentatively.

"Nothing" She replied, "Nothings wrong okay! I'm fine, I've just been up late, you know? Erm, studying for that pop quiz Mr Moscowitz set last week. I'm really tired, it's 11 o'clock and I just need to go to sleep." And with that, she walked out the room and down the stairs.