Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Sixteen

I usually took the long way back.  After Dad and I said our goodbyes and gave our hugs, I usually took the long way back to my room.  Don't bother asking why, because I don't know.  All I know is that sometimes, taking the long way back was easier.  There was something about losing myself in the shadows—about handing over my humanity to the company of nothingness.  Something that made me feel like I wasn't falling apart.  As if the presence of outside absences could somehow make the inside ones feel less demanding.

And so I took the long way back to my room, sparing myself hours of tossing and turning and cutting right to the part when I get up and start to wander.  It never mattered if I was at Blackthorne or the Gallagher Academy.  I knew them both as well as I knew the other and besides.  Everything looks the same in the shadows.  I just had to get up.  Move.  Do something that reminded me I was alive.  

I could spend hours in the shadows.  Sometimes the sun came up before I even had a chance to go down and I would start the day from the beginning, waiting for night to fall so that I could do it all over again.  I think my record for continuous days is at three.  Or maybe eight.  Sometimes I lose track.

I used to like letting my fingers run along the wall as I walked, especially when I was at Blackthorne.  I used to like the texture of the stone as it slid past my fingertips.  I used to like a lot of things, come to think of it, but like the crisp, clean walls at Blackthorne, those things had gotten scratchier over the past few months and were no longer anything more than an annoyance.  

Nowadays, I just kept my fingers in my pockets.  It was easier that way.

It was a while before I turned down the hallway where all of the guest quarters were, thinking maybe it was going to be one of those nights when I actaully get a few hours of sleep.  My bed was made.  Alice's wasn't.  I couldn't help but laugh.  Of course her bed wasn't made.  "I'm just going to mess it up again," she would have said if she were beside me.  "Why would I make it?"

But Alice wasn't right beside me.  She was back at the Gallagher Academy, doing who-knows-what.  Maybe she had finally finished her designs for a solar power car or maybe she and the seniors had finally contacted NASA.  There was, of course, the slight chance that she was sleeping this late at night, but I doubted that was the case.  Alice hadn't been sleeping much.  She was still stuck on Ellie.

Two weeks.  It had been two weeks since Alice's aunt had gone missing.  On top of that, Dad had a friend found dead only one week ago.  Only a few months since Mom's crash landing and a year since Natasha Azarov had dropped off the map—since her murder.  A year since her murder.

Something was shaving away at my mind.  Scraping.  Grating.  Like an itch that can't be scratched no matter how badly you rip at your skin.  I wanted to see these people standing next to each other—wanted to line them up for mug shots, each of them up against that striped wall with their names and descriptions written out in front of them with those crooked plastic letters.  I had to examine them.  He to see what they all had in common.  There had to be a link somewhere.  There had to be.

I stepped out of the room and started on my endless jouney once more, not wanting to remember my best friend or the loss she might know.  I let myself leave, unaware of myself and unwilling to change that.  It's amazing how relieving it is to not be yourself.

"She's dead."

At the sound of the voice, I immediately slunk back farther into the shadows.  Those are two words that no person ever wants to hear, perhaps especially from the mouth of Charlotte Woods.

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Transcription of Intercepted Intelligence