Chapter Nine
Evie's Notes: Happy Sunday, y'all! Hope you enjoy the new chapter! Let me know your favorite part in the comments!✨
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in bold, only my OCs 💕
"I'll read next!" offered Trina, accepting the book and beginning to read.
"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.
"No duh" snarked Jackie. "What did you think was going to happen in a potentially possessed elevator" only to be hushed by her roommates.
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.
"Good choice, you don't want to know what happens if you don't" chuckled Dr. Fibbs darkly.
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.
Those who had traveled to Sublevel Two, smiled fondly at the memories those rooms held.
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."
"JOE!" rebuked the headmistress.
"Come on Rachael, It's helping them learn navigational skills" teased the man.
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.
"As you should," agreed Tanya, a senior student.
"Covert operations." Mr. Solomon walked through a set of large double doors into a room twice as large as the library in the mansion above us. As in the library, a second-story walkway circled the room, and old-fashioned wooden tables were arranged in a U-like shape across the floor. "The clandestine service…" our teacher talked on as the entire junior CoveOps class rushed to claim seats. "It's a life of being where you're not supposed to be—of doing what you're not supposed to do."
There was a wooden chair at the front of the room, but instead of sitting, he gripped the back of it with both hands. It was the first thing about Covert Operations that felt familiar. "It means getting in, ladies." He searched the room. "And most important, it means getting out." I thought about hotels and laundry chutes, and for a second my head hurt. I felt a little dizzy
This ladies and gentleman is what we call a panic attack and why she should be in therapy not just treated like everything is normal" griped the school psychiatrist Madame White.
I felt a little dizzy… as our teacher said, "Exfiltrations are defined by two factors, Ms. Baxter. Name them." "They take place in hostile territory," Bex said. "Correct," Mr. Solomon replied, taking a step. He wrote Bex's response on an ancient rolling chalkboard at the front of the room. "That's one qualifier of an exfiltration. Ms. Fetterman, what's two?" As we waited for Anna's response, I heard the chalk against the board. Everything was louder here, especially the clear bright voice that said, "No one ever knows about it." Every head turned. I've never seen anyone command a room more effortlessly than Aunt Abby did when she said, "You rang, Joe?"
Oh. My. Gosh. Maybe it was the spy in me… or the girl in me… or the niece in me… but when Aunt Abby placed her hand on her hip, I could have sworn she was doing something that I hadn't thought any Gallagher Girl would ever dare to do: flirt with Joe Solomon!
The man in question simply groaned in despair and tried to block out the uncomfortable knowledge he had gained about his students throughout the book.
"Agent Cameron," Mr. Solomon said. "So glad you could join us. The junior class…" He gestured toward us. Aunt Abby waved two fingers. "Hi, girls." "… and I were just getting ready to discuss exfiltration operations." He dropped the chalk into the tray and slapped his hands together twice. "Thought you might lend a unique perspective to that topic."
"Oh, Mr. Solomon," Abby said with a smile, "you do know how to show a girl a good time." She walked around the U of desks, scanning the walls, the cases of books, everything about Sublevel Two; and I realized that while I was seeing it for the first time, my aunt was seeing it again after a long time. I wondered if it might look different in the light of everything she'd learned since leaving.
"It certainly is" agreed each of the ex-gallagher girls on the school staff.
"As I was saying," Mr. Solomon went on, "exfiltrations are critical. And they're hard—" "Especially in Istanbul," Aunt Abby added softly, and our teacher laughed. It sounded like an inside joke, except spies don't make inside jokes! There's too much information "inside," and so that's where we keep it. But the craziest thing wasn't that Aunt Abby had made a joke…. It wasn't even that she was flirting. The craziest thing was that I was pretty sure that smiling and laughing were Mr. Solomon's way of flirting back! There we were, in a cavern of stone and secrets, and yet it felt like my aunt had brought the sun in with her, illuminating a side of my teacher that I had never seen. For the first time in weeks, my head didn't hurt. Boston was just a city in Massachusetts. I might have been content to sit like that all day—all week. All year. But then the lights went out. At the back of the room an old-fashioned projector came to life, and an image was slicing through the dark.
"Well that's never good" muttered Cammie, having long made her peace with the fact that this book was going to bring her plenty of suffering in the near future.
"I'm sure you've all seen this before," Mr. Solomon said. But I hadn't seen it. A chill ran through me as I realized… I'd lived it. The entire class seemed to hold its breath while the film cut between different angles, different cameras, different news crews. Parts of the footage had been shown in an almost continual loop on every TV in the country for days, but as with most things we Gallagher Girls do, there was a lot more to the story, and that day we were seeing the uncensored version.
"What I'm about to show you is a nearly textbook example of a daylight exfiltration operation in an occupied area." I thought Mr. Solomon would look at me. I expected my aunt to ask if I was okay. I wanted someone to acknowledge that it wasn't a lesson—it was the hardest day of my life. But the only change in our teacher's voice was a sudden pause before he added,
Madame White shot a furious glare in Mr. Solomon's direction, but the man ignored her in favor of listening to the story.
"Lucky for us, it didn't work." And then I knew that we weren't there to study what Macey and I had done right. We weren't the seasoned professional operatives on the roof that day. We were just two girls who got lucky, and luck's not a skill that anyone can learn. Dust kept dancing in the projector's light. At no point did anyone say, "If this is too much for you, Cammie, you can leave" or "Ms. Morgan, what were you thinking there?" I was just another girl in the room, not the girl on the roof. The sounds were different there—just the buzz of my instructor's voice. The answering of questions. The muffled shouts of the camera operators as they jockeyed for position. But in my head I saw the whirl of circling blades. I heard the grunts and kicks, the distant roar of the wind coming in off the harbor. In my mind, the film was clearer and slower as Preston fell to safety. And then I watched a masked figure ignore the son of a potential president, point to my best friend, and say the two words I hadn't truly heard before. The room was dark. The walls around us were thick. And I'm pretty sure my aunt was the only person who heard me whisper, "Get her."
Madame White's fury had continued to grow throughout the last part of the chapter. So when Trina finished reading, she grabbed Mr. Solomon by the arm and dragged him out of the room. The headmistress then decided that now was the perfect time to take a break as Madame white most likely took her fury out on the Cove Ops teacher in the P & E Barn.
Evie's Notes 2: I hope you enjoyed this update, let me know what you want to see more of in the comments 💜!
I love hearing from y'all! Let me know what you think of the chapter and the story so far in the comments or my Tumblr Find-y0ur-j0y! - Xo Evie ✨