Over and Run With - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Seventeen

Here's the thing about cracked doors: no one ever thinks to check for them. They check for open doors. They check for locked doors. But no one ever notices a door that's cracked just enough to hear what's happening on the other side. So when the footsteps started walking up the hall, I could hear them. And when someone started talking, Woods heard them too.

Transcription of Intercepted Intelligence

Transcribed by Operative Morgan Goode

LILY: Easy, baby brother. You're already on thin ice as it is.

LUKE: And why is that, exactly? I trained with the Gathering. Grew up getting passed from house to house. I'm in this fight, same as you.

LILY: Yes, but I wasn't dating the enemy when I did all that.

LUKE: An enemy wouldn't have left alone in the middle of the night. An enemy wouldn't have cut off all communication with her family, and she wouldn't have gone along with it when you told her to feed false information to them. If Morgan Goode was your enemy, then this whole building would already be leveled.

LILY: And I'm just supposed to believe—?

LUKE: Not even three days ago, you put snipers on her closest family and burned their house to the ground, and you think it's weird that she has questions for you?

LILY: I think it's weird that she's not angrier.

LUKE: Just because you've spent your whole life being angry, doesn't mean everyone else has to.

LILY: Easy.

//: The silence is stagnant, waiting for something to break it up. Luke, true to character, is not the one to break it :\\

LILY: Even if she's not the enemy, she's not an ally. And I don't have the time or the resources to dedicate to someone stuck in the middle.

LUKE: Then tell her that. Maybe that's all she needs to hear. But this isn't going to be over until the two of you sit down and have a conversation—even the biggest wars are ended by treaties, peace negotiations, understandings.

LILY: This isn't a war. And I'm not a fucking general.

//: Her words are paired with laughter, but it's not founded in humor. It sounds like spite and melancholy all tied up together :\\

LILY: Don't you get it? This was never supposed to be us. This was never supposed to be our life. We spent our whole childhood on the run, not knowing if we were going to have food to eat or a place to stay. Do you remember the number of beds we shared? The times Mom and Dad would throw us on a train, and we'd ride different lines for days, never knowing if they'd make it back?

LUKE: Of course I do.

LILY: And then one day, they met Catherine Goode. And she had safehouses. And food. And she had a plan to take down the Inner Circle once and for all—we were finally going to be safe, Luke.

LUKE: You can't honestly think—

LILY: I remember the first time we stayed in a single place for a week. And I didn't feel like I was going to throw up all the time. And I thought that maybe I could sleep for an entire night, and nothing bad would happen. Our parents were trying to get out of the Circle, Luke, and Catherine Goode was their one-way ticket.

LUKE: Catherine Goode wasn't any better than the rest of them.

LILY: She wasn't trying to kill our parents. She wasn't threatening to kidnap the two of us. She stopped World War III.