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

falling leaves.
    Mom shifted in her seat and looked at me. “You know where we are?” she asked, and I nodded.
    “It’s coming back?” Liz said, her eyes bright. “See, I knew it would come back if we just had patience and faith, and now it’s—”
    “It’s not back, Liz,” Macey told her just as the van pulled out of the forest and into a large clearing. It was almost noon, and the sun glistened off a lake—its water as smooth as glass under the clear blue sky. Only the sounds of the birds that filled the woods broke the stillness. It was as if that place, too, were sleeping, waiting for its owner to wake up.
    “It’s Mr. Solomon’s cabin,” I said.
    “Well, it’s certainly…” Dr. Steve struggled for words. “Rustic.”
    Crawling out of the van, Liz held one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, and I stepped out beside her. It felt good to stretch. Everything was cooler, fresher there. I waited for some memory to come rushing back and slap me across my senses—send the whole summer back in a blur—but nothing came.
    All I felt was chilly air and warm sun and the sense that Summer Me was still hiding, lurking, like the shadows out there in those woods.
    “I was here?” I said, turning to my mother and my aunt.
    Dark sunglasses covered their eyes, and they didn’t look like my family—they looked like agents who needed answers if they were ever going to see the other side of this particular mission.
    Abby pushed her glasses onto the top of her head and studied me. “When we discovered you were gone, we notified all the key people, but we couldn’t look for you like we normally would without alerting the Circle that you were missing. From an operational standpoint, that was the hardest part.”
    I didn’t want to consider what the mother and aunt standpoints might have looked like.
    “We had to keep it quiet,” Mom went on. “We couldn’t let them know you were in the wind. Alone.”
    I blinked, told myself it was the glare and not the words that were causing my eyes to water.
    “But we knew how you were trained,” Abby went on. “And we had an idea of what resources you had with you, and…”
    “We knew you,” Liz finished, smiling.
    Bex sounded significantly less chipper when she pushed past me. “Or we thought we did.”
    Macey shrugged. “We didn’t know where you were, Cammie,” she said, stepping away from the van. “But this seemed as good a place as any to run.”
    It was, after all, where she had run. I smiled, knowing that at least I was in good company.
     
    Walking toward the porch, I tried to search out something that was familiar, but I’d been to that cabin at least twice before. Once, after the Circle had made its first move—back when we’d thought the Circle was after Macey. And once again when Macey had run there on the eve of her father’s big election. Those memories swirled together, and I didn’t know where the old stopped and the new might have begun.
    And there was something else, a worry or a fear tugging at the back of my mind.
    “I don’t think I would have come here.” I stopped in the cabin’s doorway and shook my head, as if even then it felt wrong to intrude. “I mean, how can you be sure I came here?”
    Abby laughed. “Oh, you were good, Squirt.” She walked to a cabinet and turned on a small TV. “But Joe was better.”
    A split second later, a blurry black-and-white picture filled the screen. It was divided into four quadrants, the images flashing, rotating from one camera to another, showing at least a dozen different angles of the cabin and the grounds.
    “He had cameras,” I said, unable to hide the awe in my voice.
    Abby worked the remote control, and a moment later I was looking at a mirror into the past. My hair was long again, and even in black-and-white, I knew it was the brownish-blond color that had always seemed so boring to me, back before I realized that boring is seriously underrated.
    Abby pushed a button, sending