Over and Run With - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Nineteen

"Goode. We need your input."

"Yeah, be right there." There was a lot that went unsaid within the walls of that namelessly abandoned hospital. Most of it existed on the surface level—silences shared in the static of a scanning radio receiver, or dissatisfied huffs given during a fighting match. There was no time for excuse me, no need for thank you, and occasionally a sneeze would go unblessed. When it came to the Gathering, it seemed as though the best thing a person could do was keep quiet, and keep their head down.

As time went on, we gained more and more recruits. Lily had been right. Once word got around that a Goode had joined the Gathering, more and more agents began to crawl out of the woodwork. Circle members long defected returned without a second thought. Children of the Circle—some wronged by my parents, and others simply reignited in their heritage—found purpose anew in my presence. With my help, it would be the largest resurgence that the Gathering had ever seen.

Curiously, the unspoken thoughts also extended to the new people, although their silences ran deeper. Every now and again, I would catch a dubious glance after an uncertain order. There was confusion in a strategy revealed to some and clearly hidden from others. No one in the Gathering ever divulged their past, they never warned of their future, and their unease regarding the present was best represented in the dustless circles left behind as a result of Lily's late-night pacing.

The Gathering's looming doubt in their leader went unexpressed. Their leader's apprehension went unacknowledged. We were shaping up to be a real army, but no one was quite sure who to trust.

The only words that they all seemed to agree on were, to my immense discomfort, mine. When I spoke, people listened. Everything I said was scrutinized, everything I did was watched. I was no stranger to the world of surveillance, but even for a Gallagher Girl, this was a lot. I had spent my entire life surrounded by people who were smarter than me in almost all the ways a person could count, and now I was the most knowledgeable person in the room.

"Goode," Lily called again. "On the double."

"Just one more second."

As a result, the vast majority of my time spent with the Gathering was uneventful. The bulk of my hours were devoted to the one part of spyhood that was inevitable, no matter what side you fell upon: paperwork. Report, after report, after report, about my father's favorite color, my mother's preferred dog breed, my grandmother's history with firearms, and where my aunts liked to get their sushi. Everyone wanted to know everything, and there was too much information to say verbally, so Lily had sat me down at a table in the lobby, given me a pen and paper, and told me to write.

And I did. I wrote more than I ever thought I would write about my family. I wrote more than I would ever care to tell a stranger. And as I wrote my final note that evening, my pen weighed heavy in my hand.

"Goode."

"Alright, okay, I'm coming." I tucked all of my words into their own folder—a wrinkled grey thing that had been used time and time again for any number of different purposes. It now traveled almost exclusively with me, stuffed to the brim with all of the information that the Goode family would rather keep secret.

When I reached Lily's station, she didn't look up from the table, seemingly engrossed by a large, marked-up map of Eastern and Central Europe. She only said, "Are you done with the locations report?"

I tapped twice on my folder. "Just about."

Lily sipped at her drink—a tea made of mint from the garden and boiled rainwater. "The sooner the better," she said. "I need to come up with our next move, and I feel like everyone's just watching me."