Waking up the next morning was hard. It was how I imagine a hangover to feel—slow and sharp. It lasted through breakfast and through my goodbyes. Through airport security and across the Atlantic Ocean. The only relief I felt was when I took a nap, but as soon as I woke up, Scout’s head on my shoulder, it was like starting the morning all over again.
But it was the car ride back to school that really started to get to me, inviting in a new dread with each and every passing mile. When Scout drove up to those familiar gates, I felt my stomach sink. “Can I help you?” asked a gruff man through Scout’s window.
Scout started to explain, but he didn’t need to. I just leaned forward against my seatbelt and waved. “Hey Martin,” I said.
The man in the window grinned, which highlighted the scar that crossed his cheek. Martin is the head of security at the Gallagher Academy. He and I are good friends, mostly because he’s been getting dragged into the aftermath of my impulsivity for years. Martin’s the man who cleans up my messes, but I knew that he couldn’t clean up this one. “Oh, Miss Maggie,” he said, his southern drawl muddling up his words. “You’re in some real trouble this time.”
He leaned into his booth and buzzed us in, the wrought iron gates inching open with the grace that was usually associated with royalty. The dread only grew stronger as we followed that twisting drive. Scout checked to make sure I had everything, but really I think he was just stalling—holding on to those last few moments during which Morgan Goode wasn’t just another headstone in the family plot. But we both know we could only put it off for so long, so we said our goodbyes and before I knew it, I was alone, looking up at that grand mansion and wondering how it had never felt so big before.
Those first few steps were the hardest, but once I got momentum going, it wasn’t so bad. I made it through the doors and up the stairs. I made it past Gilly’s sword. Past my mother. I only hesitated when I reached the Headmistress’ office.
My hand felt like it was stuck on the knob, but eventually I was able to turn it and push. I was shocked to see who was on the other side. I probably shouldn’t have been. I probably should’ve expected to see my father waiting for me.
He was sitting just in front of Grandma’s desk, both of them looking far more worried than I had been expecting. He was hunched over, elbows on knees and hands in his hair. At the sound of my entrance, he shot up in his seat, snapping his gaze in my direction. He had deep, dark circles under his eyes and with one look, I felt the guilt punch me in the gut.
You did this to him, my mother hissed.
“Mags.” The word was a sigh—as if he’d been holding his breath for an entire day and now he could finally breathe again. He stood and darted towards me. Before I even knew what was happening, his arms were around me and I was finally allowed to relax. Finally, the heaviness that I had woken up with was gone.
It had been the absence. I hadn’t known it, but the cloud looming over me all morning had been the absence, but with Dad, it started to fade. With Dad, the absence didn’t seem to hurt as much and suddenly, I felt the need to hug my father back. To wrap my arms around him and keep him there forever. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am.”
He held me at arm’s length, tucking a stray curl behind my ear and swiping a tear from my cheek—both habits which come from fatherhood and not from being a spy. “I am so unbelievably angry with you,” he said.
“I know.”
“What were you thinking?” he asked, looking over every inch of me, checking to see that my brother had returned me in the same state he had taken me. “Are you safe? Are you feeling okay—do you even know how stupid that was?”
“I know,” I said, trying to lace as much significance into the words as I possibly could. “I know. Dad, I’m sorry. I should have left a note or—”
“You shouldn’t have gone in the first place!” he snapped, the worry gone. It’s so much easier to be angry with someone you love once you know they’re safe. “You have no idea what sort of risk you opened yourself up to because if you did—”
“Zach.” It was Grandma, her voice as cool and calm as ever. All it took was that single word from here—just that one call of his name—for Dad to stop himself entirely. “I thought we agreed to approach this calmly.”
“Oh,” he replied dangerously, not taking his eyes off me. As if I may run away again if he dared lose sight. “This is calm. Compared to what she should be getting, I’m goddamn Gandhi.”
“Zachary,” she said, not quite as calm as before, but not nearly on the same level as Dad. “Take a seat. Morgan, you too. Let’s have a chat about what this field trip means for you.”
I could feel the urge to run bubbling up under my skin. To sprint right out of that office and go find some place quiet. Maybe I could go back to my secret room that I’d found last semester. I could stay there for hours, letting the heat of the fire soak into my clothes. Let the shadow roll over my shoulders and steal the hurt—rob me of my embarrassment and my consequences.
But as I looked to my father, and then to my grandmother, I knew that I wouldn’t make it a foot out of the door before someone caught up with me. And so I sat, more than a little uncomfortable with being on the wrong side of Grandma’s desk.
“In case it wasn’t made clear already,” Dad said, plopping down next to me. “You’re grounded until further notice.”
Grandma nodded, agreeing to the terms, but it was clear that my being grounded would be the least of my problems. I hung my head as the rest of the punishments came rolling in. “Morgan, as you know I will always be your grandmother before I am your headmistress,” she reminded me, which only made me dread what was coming next. The only time she said something like that was when my good pal Martin was standing right behind us and I was about to face some serious detention. “But I’m afraid you’ve given me no choice. As headmistress, I’m stripping you of all of your extracurricular activities until further notice.”
My head snapped up, trying to see if she was serious. She was. She totally, totally was. “Until further…” I started, unable to even finish the sentence. I spun to my father who looked both unsurprised and unsympathetic. “But that’s—that’s not fair.”
“No,” my father grumbled, slumped in his chair with his arms crossed, looking exactly like Matt—or rather, Matt had looked like him. “What isn’t fair, is waking up to find out your daughter is missing and that she didn’t even leave a note letting you know she’s alive.”
And that was the real argument here. The point that beat them all. I was in the wrong and there was nothing I could say to combat that fact.
Grandma went on. “Your CoveOps training will be limited to your classroom time and you are forbidden from leaving the grounds. Your training with Professor Woods and Mr. Hughes will come to an immediate end.”
“The Gathering?” I protested. “But I’m Junior Captain!”
“And as Junior Captain, you should have thought about your responsibilities to your team before you ran off to the other side of the world,” Dad argued and I could feel that we weren’t as in step as we should have been. I wanted to ask him what kind of responsibilities were on his mind when he had been running off to the other side of the world, but I didn’t, because I was already in enough trouble at the moment. I didn’t need my big mouth adding to the whole mess.
So instead of yelling at my father, I yelled at my grandmother. “You can’t do this! You can’t—”
“Morgan,” she snapped, instantly reminding me exactly why no one ever even raised their voice in her general direction. “You are grounded and you will not leave this mansion. Is that understood? If I hear that you’ve even thought about leaving this mansion, you will face severe consequences. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes ma’am,” I mumbled.
“Good.” She collected a stack of papers, thick enough and colorful enough to be my entire disciplinary file, and struck them against the desk until they were straight. She needed a binder clip to hold them together, since paper clips had stopped doing the trick since their eighth grade. “Now,” she said, looking to my father. “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”
Dad made an effort not to look at me. He sounded almost resentful as he asked, “Did you have fun?”
The question seemed so out of place in the conversation that I had to look at Grandma just to make sure I’d heard right. She didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about it and so I said, “What?” because there was no way that Dad had just asked what I thought he had just asked.
Dad looked significantly less patient this time around. The words were supposed to hurt, I could tell, but he just couldn’t make them. “I am so completely angry with you, but I am still your father and you still ran an op so I am asking if you had fun in Romania.”
Even just the name took me back to the land. To the sweet air and the local lore. To the spicy tango and the carved buildings. To that star-filled night and more adventure than I ever could have imagined. I caught myself smiling, and so I had to say, “Yeah.”
But then I remembered the woman. Remembered drowning in a closet. Remembered the fear. “I mean, aside from the part when I almost died. That would have been a pretty big downer, I think.”
Neither of them found this very funny, but I don’t think I expected them too. Really, I think a part of me knew. Knew that it would cause some sort of reaction. Knew that it would make them exchange a glance. It was a look that was meant to be covert. The conversation held within its silence was probably far above my clearance level and yet, I recognized it. Not for the first time, I found my brother in my father’s features, and I saw him giving my grandmother the exact same look Matt had given Aunt Bex. Another one, he had said when Dad had delivered the mystery news. Another what?
“What is it?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The two of them found me, looking as if I’d just appeared out of nowhere. Like I wasn’t supposed to be able to hear the conversation they were having. Don’t they know by now? I hear everything.
I’ve rarely seen hesitation cross my father’s face. It’s just not something that he’s programmed with. Dad’s a doer. He does things. Right then, right there. But in that single moment, I saw it. I saw the hesitation. I saw the look in his eye as he tried to read me. Tried to see my reaction before it even came.
“She’ll find out one way or another,” Grandma continued. There was a sort of repetitiveness to her tone. This was a conversation they’d had multiple times already. I could hear it in the way she spoke.
But still, Dad waited and I realized what he was doing. He was giving me my seconds—those last few seconds of ignorance that a person has before they find out something terrible has happened. Dad was giving me the opportunity to hold on to those seconds and to remember a world which was not affected by the information he was about to give me. Whatever he was going to say, it was big. And it was bad.
“What is it?” I asked, handing him his cue. Letting him know that I was ready for anything. At the time, I couldn’t have possibly known how wrong I was.
He took a big breath in and then a slow breath out before he was finally able to say, “Yesterday morning, William Kasey was reported missing.”
My heart plummeted into my stomach and almost instantly, I felt like I was starting to drown again. The air left my lungs, leaving the word, “Bill,” hanging in the air.
Dad leaned forward now, any anger about Romania temporarily stored away. He looked right at me, almost begging for me to stay with him as he explained further. “We thought that maybe he was with you,” he said. “But when Bex called…”
Bill wasn’t there. That was the end of his sentence, but not even the great Zachary Goode could get it out.
It was growing again—the darkness. The empty space inside of me. All this time that I had spent in the shadows, it never once occurred to me that maybe the shadows were spending time in me. “Who, um…?” My mouth was dry, my breaths shallow. I felt like I was flailing, barely staying afloat, but in reality, I couldn’t make myself move. Couldn’t even form words. “Who has him?”
Dad shook his head, a leftover fear in his expression, and I realized why he had been so angry. Why he hadn’t slept. I had gone missing at the same time as Bill. For a brief period of time, I had been as missing as my mother.
The thought made me want to apologize all over again—to assure them that I was here. I was here. But there was no time for apologies because Bill wasn’t.
Bill was gone.
He was gone.
“We don’t know,” Dad said after what felt like an eternity, but only lasted a second.
I started to stand up, desperate for air. Desperate to reach the surface. “Where is he now?”
Dad sat there, looking up at me with his hands hovering at my front. As he spoke, I could hear that same tone in his voice that Aunt Bex had used with Mom. That same caution that came when someone was close to jumping. “Maggie, please. Sit down.”
I looked at the chair, but I couldn’t move my body. “I—I—” I stuttered. “I can’t—Dad, who has him?”
You’ll never find him, my mother whispered to me and I wanted to scream. I wanted to yell from the rooftops, but even if I did, no one would hear me. Not while I was twenty feet under water.
I threw my hands over my ears, hoping to block her out, but I could still hear my father say, “Mags, sweetie, we don’t know. Sit.”
“No, no, no!” I yelled, banging on my head. If she wasn’t going to shut up then maybe my mother would make herself useful for once and give me the answers I was desperate to hear.
“Maggie, stop!” Dad said, pulling my hands down and pinning them to my sides.
This couldn’t be happening. Not after everything. Not after Mom. The universe wouldn’t possibly tear another person away from me. It had to be an impossibility. Bill had people who loved him—Bill had a soulmate for god’s sake. The universe can’t specially craft one person for another and then take them away.
Oh god.
“Will,” I spat. I looked to my father and then my grandmother, both of them unsurprised by the conclusion that I had reached. “Dad, I know I’m grounded, but you have to let me go talk to Will. You just have to.”
Again, Grandma and Dad shared a look and again, I saw the hesitation on my father’s face. He leaned into his words as he said, “Will was brought to the Gallagher Academy for questioning earlier this morning,” he informed me. “He’s got the strongest relationship with the subject—”
“Don’t call him that,” I yelled. I probably sounded angry, but I wasn’t. I was desperate. It’s so strange how often the two get confused. “Use his name. Once you stop using his name, he’s dead.”
Dad was still for a moment before nodding. “Will knows everything about Bill. CIA wanted to interview him, so he’s down in Sublevel One, but Maggie—”
It was too late. By the time Dad started to forbid it, I was already running.