"Harder."
Smack.
"Harder!"
Thwap.
"You've got three more hits to impress me, Virgo. Otherwise it's going to be a long night."
The rest of the group had already started to clean up, all of them having made their marks for the day. Each of them bragging about their latest stats to whoever would listen. I was still at the punching bag, a long way from reaching my strength goals for the day. What kind of Junior Captain was the last one on the mats? Pathetic.
A pair of boys pulled their duffels over their shoulders, laughing as they sprayed water in their mouth and through their hair. Charles and Eddie were their names. I knew that it wasn't the sweat making me feel slimy as their eyes ran over me, sizing me up. Checking me out. Both. It was always both.
Bill came up behind them and knocked Eddie in the back of the head. Hard. Eddie didn't look my way again.
Hughes dropped his voice and craned his neck around the punching bag. "Too tired?" he asked, his voice low and quiet. It wasn't the same tone that the rest of my teachers used. It was softer. Genuine. "Do you need a break?"
My arms burned. My chest was too tight. Several of my knuckles had long ago cracked oppen, offering up a new addition to the collection of scarlet splotches staining that canvas bag. A break sounded like the best possible thing in the world.
But just moments ago, Charles and Eddie had been snickering to themselves in the corner. They were good guys and all, but one thing was for sure: Charles and Eddie were always going to like the look of my butt in workout pants more than they were going to like the look of my punches. I didn't need to give them and excuse to justify that sort of behavior—they'd have to come up with one of those without my help.
A break was the last thing I needed and so I did what we Gallagher Girls always have to do. I kept going. Kept Working. Kept hitting.
"Good," Hughes said, taking his stance behind the bag again. He raised his voice back to a level that everyone could hear. "Then make you marks."
Right. Make my marks. Don’t think about the boys in the corner or the fact that Finn O’Reilly now held the record for hardest hit. Just focus on the drills.
One hit.
“Unimpressive,” my teacher spat at me. He was right, of course. It had been bad. Whenever I was around him, they were all bad.
Two hit.
“C’mon, Virgo,” he said, warning in his voice. Only one more hit left. “Surprise me.”
We had been told to hit the bag. Hit it. Now, of course, the automatic assumption is that one would use their hands to hit, but technically a hit can be completed with any part of the body. Even a foot—which, yeah, alright, is really a kick, bit it’s also kind of not.
That’s probably why it caught Hughes off guard when I kicked the punching bag in that third hit. That’s probably why Hughes stumbled backwards and why Charles and Eddie stopped staring at my ass.
Hughes stood in shock and, for a second, I wondered if I had gone too far this time. If I had finally stepped over the line and now my rebellious personality was going to get me kicked out of the Gathering once and for all. Except then he smiled at me, wiped his brow, and said, “Not bad, Virgo.”
I let out a satisfied huff, looking over to Will and Bill who were each giving me a discrete thumbs-up. I winked at them, cocking a grin in their direction as I tried to crack the knuckles that felt like they needed to be popped, but didn’t.
I didn’t notice that Hughes had gotten closer until his lips were just by my ear. “Find Mr. Kidd and meet me in my office.”
I wiped the sweat from my lip, covering the words from curious on-lookers as I muttered, “Yes sir.”
Hughes smiled, patted me twice on the shoulder, and took off towards his tiny office in the corner. I locked eyes with my Captain. When he saw me this time, the smile dropped off of his face and I knew that he meant business. He turned to his best friend, exchanged some sort of freaky handshake, and then he came straight towards me. “What’s up, Cap?”
I threw my head towards the cracked door at the rear of the room. “Hughes wants us.”
Will nodded and, for a moment, the boy from the summer returned. The nervous boy who gulped with newfound responsibility. Who kept waiting for a coin to land on heads or tails. I rolled my eyes at him and did what Junior Captains did best. I stood by my Captain, confidently pulling him along towards the little office.
There was no sign of summer left in that cramped little space. The papers had been tidied. The computer was alive and buzzing. Not even the fan in the corner was blowing anymore. It was like the room was being inhabited by an entirely different man and then I remembered that it sort of was. Gone was the soldier from the summer, replaced by the piano-playing, nickname-giving teacher that I had come to know.
He whistled as he thumbed through a pile of paperwork, the tune familiar and soothing. The smile was like butter on his face as he turned and dropped a file onto his desk. It was a standard manila folder, its contents no thicker than last semester’s Advanced Encryption essay, but somehow it felt so much bigger than that. “D.C.”
Two letters. So many possible meanings.
Except Will didn’t seem to have any trouble deciphering. “Yes sir,” he said confidently as he picked up Hughes file and started to read. It was automatic for him, I noticed. See. Read. Execute. He knew what came next, even though I wasn’t even entirely sure of what had come first.
“Sorry sir,” I said, eyeing the folder. “But I feel like I’m missing something.”
“That’s because you are,” she said, sitting at his desk. He officered for me to take a seat as well, but Will was still standing, therefore I stood too. Hughes saw this and nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. “Mr. Kidd,” he said. Will snapped the folder shut and handed it to me. “You’ve been on these trips before.”
“Yes sir,” Will said. “Chicago and Morocco.”
“And you ran those ops under Luke Collins, correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“You see, Virgo,” Hughes said, leaning forward. “As a teacher, my job is to prepare you for a world outside of my training room—a job which I cannot do by teaching you drills in my training room. Do you see where this is going?”
Of course I saw where this was going. Dad had preached about assimilation since Matt and I were babies. Woods had dragged us out to Roseville a hundred times to prove the point. We needed to be ready for reality—for other people watching us and landscapes that we were unfamiliar with.
Hughes smiled. It was that same smooth smile he gave everyone, but somehow it felt like it was meant just for me. “For the past few years, I’ve been practicing the concept of sending you kids out on pre-prepared missions. They’re safe and controlled, but still teach you what you need to know.”
“We call them MockOps,” Will informed me. “It’s kind of like those Mock Supreme Courts that everyone does in elementary school.”
I smiled at the memory of trash-bag robes and fighting over who got to bang the gavel. There had been a judge. A jury and a defendant. There had been a real case fought out by fake lawyers and a real decision had been made. Only difference was that in these trails, no one went to jail when they were found guilty.
“Exactly. This is no different,” Hughes told me. “I send you off on an op and you complete the task at hand. Real scenarios, but no real consequences.”
I tried to remember the last time my life had been free of consequences. All my life people had been telling me not to say anything about the safe house or not to use any of the moves Grandpa Joe taught me on my unsuspecting classmates. All my life there had been reasons why Mom and Dad couldn’t come and speak on career day. I was in desperate need of a break from my consequence-filled life. “So…” I said, turning open the cover of the file. “D.C.”
“An op,” Hughes confirmed. “A friend of mine is running a MockOp for us. He doesn’t know who I’m sending or when I’ll be sending them.”
“Sorry sir,” I began, running over the last sentence in my head again. “But what does he know?”
Hughes smiled at me once more, but this time was different. This time, he wasn’t smiling with me, but rather at me. Like he was in on his own private joke that I didn’t stand a chance of understanding. “He’ll know not to kill you if he catches you.”
Which was only slightly reassuring.
"What's the mission?" Will asked, not even slightly thrown by the words. I flipped through the folder, maybe expecting the answer to be within the pages. District of Columbia, it read at the top. Just below that, a picture of a strong looking man with—If we're being honest—the face of an angel. Subject X.
Hughes waited until I was done skimming the file to answer. “Find out what he’s up to,” he said simply.
It wasn’t much of an answer. Usually we had so much more to go off of. Usually we would be tailing a suspect in a murder or would be following radiation until we found the massive plant full of nuclear bombs. Usually we had more, but we must’ve had enough information for Will’s standards, because he seemed satisfied, ready to take on D.C. without hesitation.
His confidence was contagious. Soon enough, I couldn’t deny it, filling me up from toe to head until I was smiling. Will had a way about making people smile.
But then I read over something in the file and I felt my confidence wither. “This file says he’s CIA,” I pointed out. “Is he good?”
“You should assume that all of your enemies are good, Virgo,” Hughes replied.
I channeled Alice and gave him a massive eye roll. “Okay,” I went on. “But how good is this guy, really?”
I watched as Hughes squinted at me, perhaps trying to get a read. I suddenly wondered if my question was stupid. Did Hughes think I was stupid? He spoke slowly and definitely, choosing his words carefully as he said, “Blackthorne good.”
And despite William Kidd’s many good qualities, his ability to keep a poker face is, well, lacking. His jaw slackened as the words hit him. Blackthorne good. We were dealing with alumni.
Hughes smiled, standing up once more. He was taller than both of us, though Will only missed him by a few inches. “You’ll be spending the weekend in D.C.”
The weekend? But I had homework. And friends. And a life. “Sir, sorry, but is that even allowed?”
“Are you questioning my legality, Goode?” he asked me. That smooth smile was still on his face, but his eyebrows were closer together than usual. Anger. He was angry.
But I stood my ground, because if there’s one way to put me on the defense, it’s getting angry with me. “It’s just that, I was under the impression that we aren’t supposed to leave the grounds.”
Hughes shared a laugh with Will who chuckled along. “It’s official school business,” my teacher assured me, a promise floating through his voice. “It’s all taken care of.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and I saw that same old Mr. Hughes again, playing his favorite melody on the piano. “No offense, sir, but are you allowed to do that?”
He smiled at me again—always smiling. “If Charlotte can take you to London, then I can send you to D.C.”
It was a fair point. I’d gone farther on official school business. D.C. was only an hour away on a bad day. But still, something was jumping out at me. Call it a gut instinct or whatever, but I wasn’t feeling so great about this.
But Will. Will had done this before. It had worked out well for him, apparently, because he looked giddy about having another go at it. I trusted Will. I trusted Hughes. Sometimes, in a spy’s life, all you can do is trust the people around you. “We’ll need a team,” I said.
“I won’t do it without Bill,” Will added with a vigorous nod.
“Okay, okay. Yes, of course you get a team. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He took a pen out of the mug on his desk and tore a sheet of paper from a stack. “I’ll need their names. For my records. Let’s say we keep it to four this time.”
Will didn’t hesitate. “William Kasey.”
Hughes nodded as he scribbled the name down. “And you, Goode?”
“Alice Anderson,” I said automatically, but at this Hughes scrunched his face up. “What?” I asked.
“I need it to be someone from the Gathering,” he said.
I shook my head, not really understanding. “But Alice is just as trained—”
“Those are the rules, Virgo,” he said. “It’s out of my hands.”
“It’s Alice or I don’t go.”
Hughes stood up straight, setting his feet in the standard defensive position. He wasn’t going to play these games with me. That much was clear. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’m sure Luke Collins is dying for some extra practice. I’ll just call him up and see if he’s got the time to run the MockOp with some old friends and—”
“Wait.”
Ah, Luke Collins. How do I explain my relationship with Collins? Probably as a perpetual rage. Yeah. That’s it. A never-ending competition. An ever-burning flame with little hope at ever being extiguished. So, naturally, for him to find out that I was too stubborn—too pathetic to run an op. Well, I don’t need to tell you that it’s my worst nightmare. Literally. I’ve had a nightmare like that before.
“Fine.” I spat. I looked to Will. “It’s recon. We can do it with three, right?”
Will nodded like that sounded about right. “You and Billy? Only team I need.”
“You’re sure?” Hughes asked us both.
“Yes,” he and I both responded.
“Great,” he said, tossing the pen back into the mug with superspy precision. “You’re both dismissed. Pack your bags and be ready by morning.”
“Yes sir,” said Will as he ran out the door, off to catch up with Bill who was waiting with an extra water bottle in hand.
I started to leave too, but I saw Hughes reach for the phone on the corner of his desk and I felt something in my chest splinter. “You’re not calling Collins, are you?”
Hughes looked at me, hand hovering mid-grab. “If you must know, Virgo, I’m calling Professor Woods. She was dropping off a friend at the airport and I want to know when she’ll be available”—his eyes cut to me, probably suddenly aware of who he was talking to—“for dinner. When she’ll be available for dinner.”
I heard him clear his throat and I got the distinct impression that dinner hadn’t been the original ending to that sentence. “Right,” I said awkwardly. “Well, is her friend Ellie Sutton?”
“As a matter of fact, she is.”
I nodded, figuring that I owed him what little information I had. He had helped me so much over the summer. The least I could do was help him get his “dinner”. “Well,” I said. “Ellie left a few days ago. In fact, Woods is here. She drove me here.”
He seemed genuinely surprised by this information, which is not a look I get to see on anyone’s face very often. Especially not his face. “Is that so?”
“Yeah, Ellie took off three days ago,” I said. “No way Woods is still busy with her. Last I heard she was going to see Grandpa Joe while she waited for you.”
The idea of Woods waiting for him brought a whole new light to his face. “Thank you, Vigro.”
I gave him a sloppy salute—they all saluted here—as I left the room. It was his turn to roll his eyes this time. “Wait, Goode,” he said, tacking on one last thing to our conversation. I poked my head back onto the other side of the doorframe. “I never got a chance to give you my condolences,” he said. “For your mother.”
Right. Because my mom was dead. Too bad. For a moment there I had almost forgotten. “Thanks.”
“Are you feeling okay, where that is concerned?” he asked, because that was who he was. Always ready to listen.
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly.
He nodded. Whenever he nodded, I knew he understood—I mean really, truly understood. “Yes. Well, no worries. In this business, there is always hope.”
Now, I let my whole body slide back into the room. “Sorry, sir?”
He looked up, meeting my eyes, as if what he was saying was as normal as the weather. “I just meant that you never know, in our business. Who’s dead or alive, I mean.”
“My mother is dead, sir,” I said coldly. The words themselves felt numb as they fell from my mouth, but they had to be true. They had to be. I had spent an entire summer convincing myself of that. “They found her body at the crash site.”
He shrugged, appearing so nonchalant that I kind of wanted to punch him. And then I wanted to hug him. Because when it came to Mom, no one had been able to be nonchalant. As if she were some monstrous spirit that would take over is anyone misspoke about her. Like one of those chain-letters I used to get in the sixth grade. “Bodies are surprisingly inconclusive,” he told me. “But emotions—well. Those can be surprisingly accurate. What do you think, Virgo?”
I’d formed a lot of thoughts that summer—up into the wee hours of the night formulating some sort of explanation. Some sort of way around all of this hurt. So far, no one had asked to hear about them. I guess Hughes had really only ever been the one to listen. “I think that if my mother were dead, then I would know it.”
“And do you think your mother is dead?”
“I don’t know.”
He sat back in his chair, sticking his tongue into his cheek as he looked at me with a new sort of thought in his eye. “Sir?” I said, dying to break the silence.
He seemed to snap out of whatever thought he was stuck in. “My offer still stands, Goode. Come talk to me if you need to.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Dismissed.” I left, something stinging at my eyes, but I was glad to finally say it. Glad to finally admit that despite the evidence, I had a fleeting hope that I’d see my mother again. I was even more glad to know that I wasn’t crazy for thinking it.
I could hear Hughes whistling as I left, the musical man striking me once more. The man who listened.
I was surprised to see Will and Bill waiting for me. They were going to be late for dinner and they were never late for dinner. “Where’re ya headed, Cap?” Bill asked me, the pair of them grinning from ear to ear.
Maybe it was the way the two of them were smiling at me or maybe it was where I was headed, but I found myself smiling, too. “Dinner with my dad,” I told them both. “I’ve got to tell him all about D.C.”
The boys stopped in their casual tracks, both of them looking at the other as if to say, Are you going to tell her?
It was Will, finally, who spoke up. “Cap, this is a MockOp.”
“Yeah?” I said, not meaning for it to sound like a question, but not entirely sure why Will was looking at me like I was an idiot, either.
“Emphasis on the op,” Bill said.
“Classified,” Will explained.
“Just like any other op,” Bill finished.
Right. Of course. Classified. I should’ve known. But Dad and I had this new thing going on. This new tell-each-other-everything thing that were meant to decrease the potential breakdowns that may come in the near future. Dad and I… we told each other everything nowadays. “It’s my dad,” I told them.
Both of the shrugged at the exact same time in the exact same way. They looked like two sides of a funhouse mirror. “When you get older, some things are going to have to be classified,” Will reminded me.
“Even from your pops,” Bill added.
Yeah. I knew that, but I guess I’d never thought of it actually having to happen until now.
Will knew that, too. His parents were spies. He knew what it meant to live a classified life, which is probably why it was so easy for him to say, “It’s just another thing to practice.”
I thought back to one of the first times I’d been in that training room. My roommates had broken in and started blowing off steam. When Hughes came in, he told us what this room was really supposed to be used for—practice. This was a place of practice. Despite its smooth chrome walls and its newly refurbished Judo mats, this was a place to practice that ancient art. I guess I never knew how much practice I’d really end up getting.