I didn't know where Mom had flown in from. I didn't know where she was going to fly out to. All I knew was that right now, she was here, and I absolutely hated being in the same room as her.
Don't get me wrong, I was happy to have her there. Sort of. I think. I don't know. It was easier to be angry with her than it was to be sad about her. It was easier to have her here than it was to have her away. Having her here was certainly preferential to having her dead, but only slightly, and only if I told myself that everything was okay.
The part I really hated was the voice. That damn voice that had never left, even when she had. My mother, snarling away in my head. It was the voice that made my skin crawl—made my heart race. It was the voice that had made me spend the majority of my summer up in my room, reading or punching a bag or just trying to get away.
This was the situation: when Mom wasn't in the room, I knew with absolute certainty that I was making up her voice. When Mom was in the room, I had to watch her lips or monitor her movements, just to determine whether or not she was really speaking. Guesswork. It was guesswork.
I spend my days perfecting punches, just so I know exactly where they land. I spend hours upon hours memorizing the names of foreign dignitaries, just so I have them available during a mission. I am not in the business of guesswork.
I hated being in the same room as my mother, but more than that, I hated that it wasn't her fault. It was mine.
"You should have seen the two of them, Cam," Dad said, cheek full of Chinese takeout. "I'm telling you—this brush pass was flawless. I didn't even see it."
Mom just laughed in the same way she always did whenever Dad got this excited. "I'm sure it was quite a show," she said.
For as long as I could remember and probably even longer, Mom and Dad had always clicked. They had, on some level, understood one another, even before Dad knew the story of Matthew Morgan. Even before Mom knew the story of Catherine Goode. They got one another, and if there were any two people who had found The One, it had to be them.
I could see it in how they moved and noticed it in their smiles. I could tell that they were always on the same page—always understanding, even if not always agreeing.
"And Maggie was right there with the block," he went on. "Clinged to her cover right until the very end, and neutralized the threat."
"It sounds like she did a great job."
The scene was so unbearably normal. Mother and father, home after a long day at work as their teenager sulked on the sofa across from them. Maybe the three of us really did belong back in Roseville, trapped behind a picket fence and working the day job.
God knows it would be easier.
I'd never been a huge advocator for the idea of normal. Matt—Matt was the one who wanted to settle down and have two point five kids. Matt was the one who had always wanted to play House back when we were kids. It was one of the greatest differences between my brother and I—one that had sparked many an argument over the years—but right then, looking my dead mother in the eye, I couldn't help but think that maybe my big brother was on to something.
If we were normal, we'd be safe. If we were normal, we'd be sane. The more I thought about it, the more normalcy started to sound like a pleasantry rather than an eighty-year death sentence.
I would spend my day going to a normal school with normal friends whose only idea of betrayal included swapped out boyfriends, not terrorism. I'd come home to a normal dinner and eventually retire to a normal room that might even show up on Google Maps if I took the time to look—which I could, because I would have time. I would have normal homework and a normal sleep pattern and I would hate my mother for all the normal reasons that teenagers are supposed to hate their mothers, not for running away and faking her death.
Forever, I heard a voice say, but Mom's mouth was stuffed with pasta, so I knew that the voice I was hearing had to be fake. Probably. I wanted to leave forever.
I would not allow my brain to trick me. Not this time. Instead, I occupied my thoughts with conversation—I made my mother speak, so that I could remember what the real version of the voice sounded like. "Are you headed out again soon?" I asked.
You should've seen the way they looked at me. Maggie? She exists? And she's sitting right in front of us? Golly gee, who could have known?
When the question hit Mom's ears, her smile weakened and, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't until my father looked at me from the tops of his eyes that I realized my question sounded more like an accusation. "Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean that you should leave. I just..." wanted to know the plan. Wanted to know what you were doing. Wanted to know how much time I was going to have with you before you left me again.
"No, I get it," she said, and she did, because in the end, Cameron Goode had never been a terrible mother. "I'm flying out with the Collins kid tomorrow. Charlotte says she has a lead."
The way she said his name—the Collins kid. It was so nonchalant. It was so cold. As far as I knew, there was no way to say the name Collins without feeling flame, but maybe that was just me, so I didn't say so. "Who's the lead?" I asked instead. "What information are you tracking down?"
At this, she cut a glance at my father, asking how much I was allowed to know and how much I wasn't. I suddenly felt like I was intruding and stuck my nose into my carryout bin, poking at something that was probably supposed to be chicken. It was a far too familiar scene—the adults at the head of the table, exchanging looks and making silent conversation in front of the little girl who, in all likelihood, had already heard too much.
That was really when I started to realize that she didn't know. That she hadn't been there when I'd been forced to do the majority of my growing up. The last time she had seen me, I had been a day over fifteen.
Child, she said. Little girl.
"I'm not a little girl," I bit back.
"What?"
The voice seemed more immediate this time, and instantly I knew that I had answered the wrong version of my mother. I snapped my gaze upward, hoping that maybe—just maybe—I was wrong, and that Mom had been talking this whole time, but the way she looked at me told me that she definitely hadn't been.
There are moments, whether you are a daughter of two spies or not, when you know you're busted. Parents spot every little misstep, be it through the front door after a long night out or a stutter across the lips after a long night in. Right then, the pair of them were looking at me like I had been caught, or at the very least, like I should be caught, even if they weren't entirely sure what for.
In these moments, you can either fess up or keep lying. This is true of any scenario in which you are undeniably busted, and it's generally known that fessing up bodes better in the long run, but there was no way—no way—that I was going to tell my parents about the voices. Or rather, voice, as the case may be.
"Nothing," I said instead. "It's nothing I just thought..." that you were speaking. That you were talking to me. That the voice in my head was real. So many words left unsaid. "I'm not a little girl. I'm a part of this. If your lead has info on the Gathering, I want to know about it."
"Maggie, sweetie, I really don't think—"
She was cut off by a nudge, ever so light and ever so subtle. If I hadn't been Joe Solomon's granddaughter, I never would have noticed it, but I did, and I was more than a little relieved to see that Dad was rooting for both of his girls, not just Mom.
It was with a sigh and a little bit of reluctance that she said, "We think he has connections with people higher up in the Gathering. Charlotte says he was a friend of Blake's, and if we can find him then..."
She didn't finish.
She didn't have to.
The words each landed with their own individual smacks. Hurt him. Torture him. Kill him if need be. We'll do whatever we have to do to get information out of him.
At this point, the Goode family had one goal and one goal only—neutralize the Gathering. We were, officially or not, at war, and as is the case in most war, people were going to get very, very hurt. People were going to die. More likely than not, they were going to be people who I cared about.
Then I realized that I'd already faced that nightmare, dead on, in a golden sunrise across the Potomac.
I shot William Kidd.
"Yeah, I know you did," I barked back, because if there was anything I didn't need when it came to Will, it was a reminder. If there was anything I knew too well, it was the fact that he had died by my mother's hand. "And I know—"
Except when I looked up, Mom was giving me that look again, and Dad was watching me like I was in the middle of an attack.
I don't know why I hear my mother's voice. It could just as easily have been my father's or my grandmother's, or maybe even some twisted version of my own. But it's not. It's my mother's, and I know that means something, even if I don't know what.
"It's me, isn't it," said the real version of my mother. "It's my voice."
She was too calm—to scientific. She wasn't seeing me as a daughter, but rather as a case study. Another problem she had to solve before she could hear her degree. Just then, she was applying everything she knew about to human brain to the girl in front of her. Patient X: a nameless child who needed help.
I hated it.
And still, she said it again, as if not making things clear the first time. "You're hearing my voice—"
"Cam—"
"No," she said, and she didn't look away—wouldn't look away. I wanted to break the stare, but I didn't dare look away. Not again. I didn't dare risk hearing another fake and leaving myself unable to differentiate reality. "No, the Collins kid said that you hear my—"
"He has a name," I snapped. "You can call him Luke or you can call him Collins, but he's a person, Mom. Everyone around you—they're people. You know, with thoughts and feelings?" And then I laughed. "But I guess I should know better than to expect you to care about feelings."
"Morgan Ann," Dad tried to scold, but it was useless. He was lost among the glares, his voice drowned out by the sound of tangible tension between the two women he loved most in the world.
"No, she's right," Mom said, which, let me tell you, did not feel as satisfying as it was supposed to. "Is that what you want to hear, Maggie? That's you're right? Well congratulations. You're right. I didn't consider the feelings of the people I left behind and do you know why? It's because I was too busy considering the state of their lives."
This, I knew, was her core argument. I had been hearing it all summer, like a broken record, over and over while the adults did all their yelling. When little Morgan was up in her room, supposedly sleeping. This had been for us, she had insisted. She had done all of this for us. It was supposed to have kept us safe.
Yeah. Safe. A lot of good that had done.
"When I was your age, people started coming after me," she said, and I knew it was true. She had been a year younger than me when she was first attacked. "They haven't stopped coming after me since, and now there are more of them, Maggie. Do you understand that? Do you understand that they've been breeding and growing and recruiting?"
"I understand that part just fine," I grumbled at her.
Traitor, traitor, traitor.
It was the fake voice, which I knew because Mom's lips weren't moving. Nope. They were in a nice hard line until she said, "I have had people attacking me and attacking my family to get to me since I was sixteen years old, and even then, the only way to make sure the people I loved were safe, was to run. To get as far away from them as possible. I know you don't understand that, but, to be honest sweetheart, I'm so glad you don't understand that. I'm so happy to see you mad at me, because it means that you don't know what it's like."
But I did. I did know what it was like. I knew what it felt like to have one of my dearest friends killed. I knew what it felt like to have links of people—dominoes of love—all just trying to manipulate me. I knew what it felt like to lose that fight, and I hated that my mother thought that I was ignorant to it.
So I stood. And I closed the gap between us. And my shadow fell over my mother as I told her, "When people you love are being shot at, you don't run from the bullet. You stand in front of them and hope for the best."
Some people in this world are harder to surprise than others. Cameron and Zachary Goode may just be the hardest, but I had always been the exception to that rule, and that night was no different. They watched me as I turned to leave, like maybe they couldn't quite believe that such big words could come from someone so small, and I listened to the stunned silence that followed as my mother tried to figure out exactly when her little Morgan Ann had gotten so big.
I bet normal families never had to deal with this.
As far as I knew, my roommates were out for the night. Faith was with Mr. Klein, working on her newest development for coding in C++ and I couldn't really bring myself to care where Blair was. Alice was supposed to be in the library, but Alice is very good at not being where she's supposed to be.
In fact, she's very good at being in our room, under the covers, with a redheaded boy from Ireland.
That's right, folks. As I opened the door to my suite, still fuming from dinner with the parents, I walked in on—for the second time, mind you—Alice Anderson and Finn O'Reilly, giggling beneath the sheets.
"Alice!" I threw my hands up, shielding my young and innocent eyes. "Oh, god, what the hell dude?"
"Ugh. Maggie."
Finn, who was very much on top of Alice and looking plenty happy to be there, hung his head. "We really need to stop meeting like this, Morgan."
"You're telling me—how did you even get in here?" I asked, because this building had more security than the White House.
"I caught a ride in the van."
I thought back to Roseville. To capture the flag. To my father, sitting just beside me as he rode back with us. "And Dad didn't catch you?"
Finn rolled off of Alice, an act which he did not seem to much appreciate (and neither did Alice, for that matter) and gave me a grin. "I think you'll find that the people who have the privilege to see are the ones who most often forget to look."
I huffed. "You're feeling especially pretentious tonight."
Alice giggled, looking to Finn. He must have felt her breath on his neck, because he turned to her and the two of them nuzzled noses. Blech. Disgusting. "He gets that way when he's..." she started. "Nevermind—I thought you were having dinner with your parents."
I shut the door behind me and crossed the room, relieved to finally crash onto my bed. The ceiling was tall and my voice seemed to echo when I said, "We had some disagreements—is this what you've been trying to tell me all night? That we were going to have company?"
If she noticed my voluntary change of subject, it was completely blocked out by the look of pure panic on her face. She flung Finn aside and before he could even protest, she was on my bed now and saying, "Actually," in a voice that was far too high for comfort.
"Alice," I said. "What did you do."
It was more of a statement than it was a question—a fact of the universe. Alice had already done something, and now I just needed her to point me in the right direction of the mess so that I could help her clean it up. "Funny story," she said, and almost every time Alice lead with those words, the story was anything but funny. "Do you remember that time Collins asked you out on a date?"
"Alice..."
"Well, you see, as your very best friend in the entire world—the entire world, Mags—it's kind of my job to make sure that you've got options in the romance department, you know?"
"No, no, no," I said, standing up. Alice was quick to join me. "Whatever you're about to say next, don't."
"I miiiiight have told Matt to tell Collins that you said you'd go out with him."
And there it was. My final punch to the gut—the hit that finally killed me. "You did not," I said. "Alice tell me you didn't—I never said I'd go on a date. In fact, I very specifically remember a very careful avoidance on my part when it comes to Luke."
Alice nodded, like this was probably a fair point, but she didn't really have the time to hear it out. "See, I know that and you know that, but Matt and Collins? They don't know that."
"Alice!" I felt my cheeks turning red and I did my best to convince myself that it was the anger, not the embarrassment, making them that way. "I'm going to kill you."
"That's fair," she said. "But maybe wait until tomorrow to kill me."
"And why would I do that?"
She bit her lip and looked to Finn, as if hoping for backup. When she looked back to me, there was a mix of excitement and apology in her voice. "Because the date is in about twenty minutes."