Over and Run With - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Eighteen

It was actually a hospital, not a warehouse.

Long abandoned, of course, with peeling walls and broken stone. What windows remained were drafty and barred. The tile was long cracked. Every step was one of caution, for fear that you may fall through the floor or step beneath a crumbling archway. Some walls were covered in graffiti. Others looked like they hadn't seen daylight in years. If ghosts and spirits were real, they almost certainly lived here.

I tried not to think too hard about the implications. That I had allied myself with a group of people living out of an abandoned mental institution was not, per se, the most comforting thought given my own back-and-forth experience with mental health. To reside, however temporarily (or, perhaps, permanently), within the halls of a building that had once caused such pain to people like me was, in a word, upsetting. If I was crazy—and I was, crazy—then this was the last place I wanted to be.

The only solace was knowing that the Gathering hadn't chosen this building on purpose, but rather, that it had been one of the few safehouses that couldn't be traced back to Catherine. She had acquired it, but she had never visited, which some attribute to her own sordid history with mental hospitals. As such, not even my father knew of its existence. The Collins family had claimed it as their headquarters not out of any great desire, but because they'd had no other options if they'd wished to remain hidden.

In the weeks we spent training with them, we learned that this was a fairly common occurrence for the Gathering. The vast, vast majority of their decisions were made not as an attempt at efficiency, but rather, they were made in an effort to stay alive. All this time I had thought that the Gathering had risen from the ashes of the Circle when, in fact, they were merely the lingering embers of a long gone flame, looking for a reason to spark.

Their resources were wildly low. Their strategy, unorganized. Whenever someone proposed a new idea against my family, my only thought was how the Goodes were always prepared, and the Gathering simply was not. The Gathering was utterly outmatched. Maybe it was my years as a member of the world's foremost family of spies, but I found myself wondering how anyone could function in such chaos.

Maybe they did need leadership. Maybe I was the one to provide it.

But I was in no such position to do it at this exact moment. Nor, I suspect, would I have been given the opportunity to do so. "No matter what I do, she's still doubting me."

Woods and I had fallen into something of a routine, meeting up weekly in the room that used to serve as a cafeteria. It was here that the two of us did what the two of us do best—we fought. It was largely out of necessity. Without an outlet, the restless buzzing would settle in my firsts, waiting for something to hit, and while my options were plentiful, Woods always knew how to hit back in a way that was new and interesting and worth the challenge. "She needs time, Goode."

"How does she think I'm going to lead these people if she doesn't trust me to do it?" We circled each other, perhaps a little more hesitant than we might usually be. There were, after all, no mats in the hospital for us to land on. No spring-loaded floors to help us back up if we were knocked down. Everything was just a little bit harder with the Gathering. "I've given her so much information—information that she never would have gotten without an inside source."

"Lily Collins was raised on completely different ideals than you were." Woods' feet shuffled with the threat of a hit, but she backed down quicker than she started. "She's spent years hating your family, and it's rooted in an even longer history that extends long before either of you were born. That's not going to go away in a couple of months."

I could feel the sweat rolling down my neck. The stiffness of hits already landed was starting to creep up through my skin. "I'm going to have to do something bold to win her over." A sinking fear settled into my stomach—the kind of fear that came with the night and kept a girl from sleeping. "I'm going to have to do something terrible."