She slipped stealthily through the dark hallways, alone but for her shadow, silent and unnoticed. Thought it was long past midnight, her eyes were dark and alert, despite the fact that she knew no one would be looking for her. And even if they were, they would never find her. She had been trained, after all, to not just blend into her surroundings, but to disappear completely.

Within the hallowed halls of Gallagher Academy, Esmeralda Medina was referred to-by the few who realized she existed-as the Ghost. Oh, she was most certainly alive, with a beating heart and warm skin. But here, amidst a school full of future spies and agents, she had chosen the path of the ghost operative.

Ghost operative were never seen, never heard, never sensed, unless they wanted to be. They flitted in and out of existence, taking on different names, different lives, at the drop of a hat. It wasn't a popular path, or an easy one. A Ghost operative could make no permanent ties, could have no qualms when it came to lying. Relationships were to be avoided at all costs, attachments strictly banned. For these reasons, and so many more, Gallagher Academy only produced around two or three Ghost operatives a decade. At the moment, Esmeralda was the only one. And that was just fine with her.

She knew, quite well, that the Headmistress' daughter Cameron was known as the Chameleon, for her skills at blending in with the crowd, for just becoming another face amidst a sea of faces. And that was an enviable skill as well. But it wasn't the life for Esmeralda. The Chameleon worked with partners, with fellow students in a unit. And the Chameleon, as it had become so obvious over the past few months, was capable of being seen.

None of this was the case for Esmeralda. She worked alone, completely so, with the assignment in her head and a communication device in her ear that connected her to Mr. Solomon. It had been he, after all, who had seen to her training since she'd entered the Academy. Balancing the Chameleon and the Ghost, she mused, couldn't have been easy, but he'd done quite well, really.

With a quiet hum in her throat, Esmeralda stopped at a window, three to the right of the suit of armor in the West Wing. Perhaps the Chameleon thought she knew where all the secret tunnels were inside the Academy. But she'd be wrong. Her face completely blank, her movements unhurried, she ran a finger over the edge of the glass pane in the window, her nail slipping between glass and plastic. No one who didn't know exactly where it was would have ever noticed the tiny catch three quarters of the way down the window.

But Esmeralda knew where it was, and her nail caught it, pushing it down with an inaudible click. Silently, the wall of stone beside the window slid aside, revealing a hidden entrance that she slipped through without hesitation, seeming not to notice the thick cobwebs or the heavy chill of the hidden corridor. The wall slid silently back into place as she passed through, and Esmeralda found herself incased in a world of absolute black.

Still, she walked confidently through the inky blackness, going deeper and deeper underground. She had traveled this path many times before, after all, and was no stranger to the dark. It was a long walk, but she was fit, her thin, subtly muscled body used to climbing rock walls or crawling through vents for hours. Had anyone ever bothered to ask Mr. Solomon about the resident Ghost, he might have told them she had the looks of the gypsy she was named after, with olive toned skin and smoky gray eyes. Her mass of curling black hair was most often pulled back, as it got in the way. But even she, who downplayed her looks as much as possible day after day, had some vanity, and refrained from cutting it to a shorter length.

She used no disguises when on the job, relying on lifelong training to make her unseen, even if someone happened to be staring right at her. She had been to countless countries, had carried countless names and manufactured backgrounds. She could, if necessary, stand in a room with only one other person and have them thinking they were completely alone. After graduation, she was guaranteed a position with the United States government, such was her skill.

The passageway got even colder, and using that as a signal, she turned to the left, using a fingertip grazing along the wall to guide her. She began walking down another hallway, content knowing her short journey was almost over. She really had Cammie to thank, she mused to herself. With so many people focused on the Headmistress's daughter, no one gave a passing thought to the Ghost. Not that they had in the first place, but still.

She stopped abruptly, her hand reaching out and wrapping around a familiar knob. Twisting it hard, she rolled her eyes at the squeak it emitted, and then wrenched open the door attached to it, a burst of humid air escaping out into the cold hallway. As she walked inside this secret room, her own little hideaway, she reached out, flicked on the single bare bulb that hung from the low ceiling. Letting the door swing shut behind her, she breathed in the scent of dust and moisture, and felt more at home here than any cozy dorm room.

For here, amidst the rock walls and lonely light bulb were all her secrets that no one, not even Mr. Solomon, knew about. The girl who was forbidden to form attachments of any sort, who had chosen the life of having no life at all, had hoarded her memories in this one room, keeping them safe from the rest of the world.

Photos covered the walls, pictures of popular monuments, like the Washington Tower, the Eiffel Tower, and the Spanish Steps. But there were other pictures, pictures that held no meaning to anyone but her, of crowds of people, of market plazas and crowded sidewalks. She knew, without looking, that the picture on the south wall, three to the left and four from the bottom, was a picture of a fountain in Italy. She'd been Thomasina Rinaldi then, and had earned extra credit for retrieving four coins from the middle of the fountain in the middle of the afternoon with absolutely no one noticing. Those coins were currently in a glass box on a shelf on the west wall.

And there, dangling from the ceiling by a wire was a small replica of a fishing boat, retrieved from a Grecian boat half a mile out to sea. No one had seen her get on or off, and extra credit had been achieved once more. She had all these and many other souvenirs from her assignments, secreted away in this chamber that held all the memories she wasn't allowed to have. Only when she came here, to this room, did she allow herself to remember the places she'd been, the things she'd done.

And only in this room did she ever admit, if only to herself, that once, just once, someone had spotted the Ghost when she hadn't wanted to be seen.