Free Gallagher Girls 5 - Out of Sight, Out of Time by Ally Carter Page A

here,” I said, and I instantly knew it was true. “I came here last spring.” I felt myself pointing to the tapestry and the passageway that lay behind it. “That was where I left.”
    “Impossible.” Buckingham pulled her robe tighter. “That corridor was closed last December. I oversaw the work myself.”
    “There’s a branch no one knew about. You missed it,” I said, but my gaze never left my mother. “I remember coming here.…I came here and then…”
    “What happened next, Cammie?” Liz asked, inching forward.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Yes you do,” Liz said. “You know. You just have to—”
    “Liz,” Aunt Abby warned. “It’s okay. She doesn’t have to remember.”
    “Yes I do!” I yelled, but my voice faded, frustration replaced by fear as I faced my mother. “I know you don’t want me to remember. I know you think I can’t take knowing what happened to me. But don’t you see? There’s nothing worse than not knowing .”
    “Cammie,” my mom started. “You’re home now. It doesn’t matter,” she said, but I pulled away.
    “It matters to me!” The hallway was too quiet for so many people. “You say I don’t want to remember—that it’s best not to know. Well, this”—I held up the raw, bloody fingers that, moments before, I’d been using to try to claw through the walls—“this is what not knowing is doing to me.” My hand began to shake, and I couldn’t stop myself. I yelled, “Why didn’t you find me?”
    There are so many things the Gallagher Academy trains us to do, but the most important, I think, is to watch. To listen. And when my mother looked at my aunt, I saw the faintest hint of something pass between them, a thread I had to follow and pull, even if it meant unraveling everything I’d ever known.
    “What?” I asked, but Abby was shaking her head.
    “It’s nothing, Squirt.”
    “What?” I demanded, turning to my mother. “What aren’t you telling me?”
    “We did find you, Cammie.” Mom looked down at the ground. She seemed worried and afraid and ashamed. “We were just a little too late.”

 
    O kay, to tell you the truth, I totally didn’t know what was weirder—that someone knew something about my summer, or that, come Monday morning, I was crammed into a school van with my mother, my aunt, my new therapist, my roommates…and Zach.
    I could hear him talking with Bex in the third row of the van, where the two of them sat next to Dr. Steve. I didn’t look at them or speak. I kept my eyes glued to the road ahead. The only thing that broke my trance was when my mother would turn from the front passenger seat and glance back at me, almost involuntarily, as if to make sure that I was still there.
    “Now, Zachary, how is that study schedule I designed for you?” Dr. Steve asked about an hour into the journey.
    “Good,” was Zach’s reply.
    “And your new courses…anything there I should know about?” Dr. Steve went on.
    “Everything’s fine,” Zach said, but he didn’t sound fine at all.
    We drove through the countryside, along unfamiliar winding roads, and I didn’t let myself think about the classes I was missing (six) or the number of tests that were being added to the ones I already had to make up (two). I wasn’t at all concerned about the facts that my favorite jeans were now really big and my best friends were still pretty hostile. No, I didn’t let myself think about that.
    Instead, I watched the road and the landmarks, looked at every gas station and café as if that would be the sight that would spring the trap that was my memory and put everything back the way it was supposed to be.
    And yet we kept driving in circles. Hours passed and we kept backtracking and stopping for no reason—all the standard vehicular antisurveillance techniques—until, after what seemed like forever, the van finally slowed and turned onto a narrow lane that was all but invisible in the dense forest, a path hidden beneath a thick layer of