The Collide Read online

  Klute grabbed her arm then and jerked her close, the pain so sharp and unexpected it almost made Riel cry out.

  “Stay away. From all of it. Especially Wylie Lang,” Agent Klute repeated through clenched teeth. He pointed at Leo then. “If you don’t, he’ll be the one who pays. I’ll personally make sure of it.”

  “WHERE ARE THEY following you?” Leo asks. “What do you mean?”

  Riel didn’t mean to freak Leo out. She feels bad now for telling him. “I mean, not all over. There’s not like an army of them or something. But every once in a while when I’m out, I’ll spot someone watching me. Maybe. I haven’t seen that asshole Klute again, luckily. But I think I have seen that white van they were in at my grandfather’s house.”

  “But Wylie’s in jail, and you haven’t spoken to her,” Leo says. “How much farther do they want you to stay away?”

  Riel shrugs. “Wylie isn’t the whole thing, you know?”

  “But you have been staying away from the rest, too, right?” Leo asks.

  “I haven’t even been to Level99 since my grandfather’s house. You know that,” Riel says. “I barely leave your room.”

  “Good.” Leo lies back down. Exhales like he’s relieved. He isn’t. “They’ll lose interest eventually, right?”

  “I hope so,” Riel says. “Because it kind of feels like I’m running out of places to hide.”

  WHEN RIEL WAKES again, it’s nine a.m. The shades are up and Leo’s small dorm room is filled with light, the small slice of bed next to her empty. Riel runs a hand over the cool, crumpled sheets. Leo has Harvard summer program classes and an internship. That’s the only reason he even has a dorm room right now. A tiny single—desk, bed, that’s it. Long-term visitors, much less roommates, are against the rules. But Leo insisted that Riel stay. Hard to argue when she had no place else to go.

  Before, Riel had been sleeping at the Level99 house, ever since Kelsey died in March. But it’s not safe for Level99 if she’s there now. She doesn’t want Agent Klute coming after her and finding them. And also, maybe she just wants a break. From everything. Leo’s felt like such a safe place to hide.

  Riel picks up her new burner off the nightstand. She’s been changing them out weekly. The only people who have the number are Leo and Level99. The phone has one text. Maybe even one that just woke her. A ?, and nothing more. It’s from Brian. It means, You coming in? Brian checks in every day. He doesn’t actually want Riel to come in, of course. He likes being in charge of Level99. He just likes to confirm that he still is.

  Riel reminds Brian all the time that she is coming back when things cool down. That him being in charge is temporary, and only to protect Level99—even if it is more complicated than that for Riel right now. Maybe Brian even knows she’s conflicted. Someone has been jumping in and out of Riel’s online life. She’s noticed. Brian, checking up on her for sure. And fair enough. That’s his job now. To protect Level99.

  But then what’s Riel’s job? To protect herself? Wylie? The Outliers? She’s not sure anymore, and it makes her feel more lost than she wants to admit.

  “My dad is with your grandfather.” That was what Wylie said that night right before she dove into the water. And then there was that guilty twitch from Agent Klute when Riel had pursued the lead. Her grandfather. He’s an asshole, no doubt. But connected to the Outliers and Dr. Ben Lang? How and why? It doesn’t make any sense.

  And, if so, how the fuck hadn’t she seen him coming? What kind of an Outlier was she?

  That’s the problem, isn’t it? Reading’s not ESP. It’s not a crystal ball. Feelings and instincts are fuzzy things. They change. Shift. Blur. And people will want Outliers to prove they can read minds. Or they won’t believe they can do anything. It will be all or nothing. Neither here nor there is the place you get crushed in between.

  Senator David Russo was Kelsey and Riel’s maternal grandfather, and he’d always hated their dad. According to their grandfather, their dad and his Communist, a.k.a. liberal, ideals had ruined their mother. Making Riel and Kelsey the fruit of his poisonous tree. Their dad was also black, which Riel has always suspected was their grandfather’s bigger issue with him, and them.

  When their parents died, it was decided that the girls were old enough to take care of themselves. This was true in theory, if not in fact. Riel was three months in at Harvard, studying computer science. The plan was that she would move home and commute to school until Kelsey graduated high school. No problem. They had plenty of money through their mother’s trust, too. No problem. Their mother’s sister—childless Aunt Susan, a banker from Manhattan—would check in on them occasionally. No problem. They were good kids anyway, responsible.

  Of course, just because they could take care of themselves didn’t mean that they should.

  They hadn’t seen their grandfather in years when he came to their parents’ funeral—the cameras were watching, after all. And he didn’t speak to either one of them at the funeral. He spoke at them: a few polite words tossed in their direction like stale candy from a parade float.

  It was only after the funeral that Riel had tracked down her grandfather’s Cape house and started breaking in on occasion, to mess with him. It wasn’t something she was proud of, but it was satisfying.

  Riel is about to answer Brian’s text—nope, not coming in—when she sees an envelope slide under Leo’s door. Nope. That’s what Riel thinks about that, too. Don’t want that. But these days ignoring a note under a door is not an option.

  Riel pushes herself up out of bed and heads over to pick it up. She lifts it carefully. Inside the envelope is a single sheet of paper, on it a single handwritten sentence: They know you have them.

  Goddamn it. Fucking enough. Riel jerks open Leo’s door and looks up and down the hallway, trembling with rage. She’s ready to scream at Klute or whoever left it. But there’s no one in sight.

  Riel closes the door, heart beating hard as she studies the paper again. The words are still there, unfortunately. Riel was right, there was somebody following her—her grandfather, his people, Klute. They’ve known all along exactly where she is. Leo’s room, that small square of safety: gone. Like so much else.

  They know you have them? Have what? It takes Riel a beat. Wylie’s pictures? The eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope she shoved at Riel before racing out of her grandfather’s house.

  Riel has only ever taken a quick look just so she knew what she had: pictures of buildings—shitty, blurry pictures. Obviously, they were important to Wylie, but just looking at them it wasn’t obvious why. Once, Riel had seen Leo late at night flipping through them in the darkness. He’d told her the next day she should get rid of them. Not because of what was in them. But because they were Wylie’s. And he’d been right. Of course he had been.

  BREW IS THREE blocks from Leo’s dorm. It has long, knotty tables, perpetually packed with nerdy types hunched over laptops. These are Riel’s people, even if she doesn’t exactly look the part with her fashionable tank top, low-slung jeans, gameboard tattoo, and piercings. But Riel will always be a complete nerd at heart.

  As usual in the morning, there is nowhere to sit at Brew. Riel has to hover for ten minutes before a table finally opens up. As she waits, she realizes she can’t be sure that it’s safer to be in Brew than Leo’s room. But at least in Brew, there will be witnesses to any abduction.

  After Riel sits down, she pulls out the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope of Wylie’s pictures from her bag, sees the name on the envelope: David Rosenfeld. She’d forgotten about that.

  Riel looks around the café again before she opens the envelope, feels like she’s being watched. But she doesn’t see anyone looking at her. Then again, these people’s whole job is to blend in. Finally, Riel flips through the pictures quickly: a blurry office building, a shelf or rack with what look like big white buckets on it. The buckets have writing on them, but it’s impossible to make out. Like she remembered, nothing to go on in the pictures, except how badly shot they a
re. That and the fact that her grandfather apparently really wants them. Probably her grandfather. Riel’s real evidence for this is super thin, but the feeling that she is right? Outlier, instinct, whatever you want to call it, it’s overwhelming.

  David Rosenfeld. He’s the next logical step. Riel pulls her laptop out and jumps on the wide-open-to-tracking public Wi-Fi. It’s a risk, but there aren’t other options. A second later, she has a couple dozen possible Rosenfelds: a lawyer, a dentist, a high school baseball star. And then, there it is, the fourth entry down, a link to an author’s website: David Rosenfeld.

  Riel clicks through to the site, which drops her onto a glossy home page with a bunch of New York Times bestselling books stacked up artfully. The headshot of the author—current reporter, former soldier—on the right-hand side. Rosenfeld. Curly hair, thick black-framed glasses. Cute, even if the picture is a little too much about his biceps. His books are all about Iraq and Afghanistan, except for the most recent, which is called A Private War: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Face of the Military. And there is a related article: “Want Funding, but No Oversight? How the Federal Government Gets Away with Looking at Everyone but Themselves.”

  This is the right Rosenfeld, no doubt about that. Military financing smells like her grandfather. But what does he have to do with the pictures? It would be a hell of a lot easier just to swing by the detention facility and ask Wylie. But Klute warned Riel specifically to stay away from her. It’s bad enough that she’s ignoring the other part of what Klute said: stay away from all of it. Riel is pretty sure the pictures fall into the “all of it” category.

  Riel startles when her phone vibrates in her pocket. She pulls it out to read the text. Be back in fifteen. Forgot something. L. Shit, Leo will be back way earlier than she expected. And she left out that note: They know you have them. She needs to beat Leo back home and get rid of it before he sees it. He will freak out otherwise.

  Riel’s still looking down at her phone when there’s a voice right next to her. “Excuse me?”

  She jumps to her feet, clutching the pictures against her body. “What the fuck?” she shouts.

  But there’s just a skinny, acne-spotted guy who looks about twelve years old, blinking at her. He holds up his nervous hands and moves them around in the air.

  “Oh, sorry, no, I’m—” He touches the back of the open chair across from Riel. “I just wanted to borrow this chair.”

  “Yeah, yes,” Riel manages. “Take it.”

  But as she sits back down, she notices somebody else on the opposite side of the room. Baseball hat and glasses. A take-out coffee in one hand, a braided leather bracelet on his wrist. Sitting at a table. Alone. He was watching her a second ago. She can feel the echo of his stare. Worse yet, Riel has seen him somewhere before. The baseball hat is doing the trick, though—she can’t place him.

  But she doesn’t need to. Between that and Leo about to beat her back to the room, it’s time to go. Riel snaps shut her computer and shoves it and the pictures in her bag before heading quickly for the door.

  The fresh air is a relief, but Riel still feels jittery out on the sidewalk. She crosses the street quickly and picks up speed, checking over her shoulder a few times. But there’s no one behind her. She’s at a jog by the time she enters the gates to campus.

  On campus, she feels alone, singled out. Scared. Despite all the people—professors, graduate students, summer program students, tourists.

  As Riel dives into the flow, someone blows past her, knocking hard into her elbow. Running in the direction of Leo’s dorm at the far end of the square. Riel is about to yell at the guy when she notices that he isn’t the only one who’s hustling that way. Lots of people are. They are all rushing in the direction of Leo’s dorm.

  No is what Riel thinks as she starts to run, too. No. No. No.

  She sees the fire trucks first, right there by Leo’s building. She blinks hard. But they remain. Lights flashing. And then, only a second later, she sees the flames. Actual freakin’ flames. Coming out the windows.

  The windows to Leo’s dorm room.

  TOP SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL

  To: Senator David Russo

  From: The Architect

  Re: Outlier Identification Modeling

  April 3

  To summarize today’s meeting, they will proceed to run predictive modeling for two potential programs to identify and track subjects demonstrating specified skill set. One model will examine the use of identification cards. The second model will study the possible use of observable bracelets.

  Aspects evaluated will include:

  —Likelihood of subgroup compliance with protocol

  —Cost of protocol

  —Ease of enforcement

  —Time from initiation to launch

  —Likelihood of legal opposition

  —Efficacy of protocol in properly alerting nontarget subgroup

  Results to follow.

  WYLIE

  THE MENU AT HOLY COW IS WRITTEN ON A MIRROR BEHIND THE OLD-FASHIONED soda counter in curly white script. It’s barely eleven a.m., so we’re the only customers, seated at a booth along the wall. We ended up there after we left Cassie’s and after we stopped at the drugstore and after we went for breakfast and after we drove around and around. I told Gideon I wanted to go to all those places because I could. Because I wanted to feel free. That’s true. It’s also true that I’m stalling. Like if we don’t go home, I don’t have to tell him about our mom. So now, ice cream at Holy Cow.

  Nicholas is behind the counter; a gray-haired man with an impressive potbelly, a huge square face, and an intimidating scowl. Cassie always said he was much sweeter than he looked. He would have to be.

  Telling Gideon about our mom would be so much easier if Jasper were here. Not for Gideon, maybe. Gideon still isn’t exactly a Jasper fan. But definitely for me. I still haven’t been able to reach Jasper, though. Using Gideon’s cell, I’ve tried his phone twice, and both times I’ve gotten a new recording: this number is no longer in service. A definite downgrade from the customer you are trying to reach is not available, which I got before. Calling Jasper’s mom is my best option now, I know that. But I need to work up my courage first.

  “Hello?” When I look down, Gideon is holding out a menu to me.

  “Oh, thanks.”

  The bell on the door chimes as the girl Cassie used to work with and couldn’t stand comes in. She used to have bright pink acrylic nails and bows in her long blond hair, but she’s cut it pixie-short and dyed it bright white. She has a nose ring, too, and trimmed bare fingernails. I wonder if those things would have made Cassie like her more. Or less. I’m not sure I know anymore. After the funeral and before the hospital, Jasper had once joked about Cassie being a terrible judge of character. And somehow it felt not like an insult, but like an act of love. To remember her fondly, but exactly as she was.

  “Are you okay?” Gideon asks.

  To say anything now other than the whole truth would feel like an actual betrayal. Still, my mouth feels stuck. I lean forward and imagine punching the words from the base of my gut.

  “Mom is . . . ,” I begin, but nothing more will come.

  Gideon’s eyes snap up from his menu. “Mom is what?”

  Afraid, that’s how he feels. Afraid of something exactly like what I am about to tell him. Something that will make everything even worse. And what I wish most at this moment is that I could have no idea how he feels.

  “She’s alive,” I say, looking down at the table, bracing myself for the blowback: betrayal, anger, rage, hurt. “She’s been alive this whole time. It wasn’t her in the car.”

  But nothing. I feel nothing from him. And when I look up, Gideon is just staring stone-faced at the wall. Totally numb. And it is awful. I’d much rather he’d feel something, anything—anger, rage, sadness. This quiet emptiness? It’s like peering into a sucking black hole.

  “Gideon?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says finally. But still,
he feels nothing. And he looks so pale and stunned.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” he says, raising his hands helplessly. Am I? they ask.

  And then suddenly, the floodgates open and Gideon’s heartbreak plows into me with such force that without thinking I reach forward and clutch his hands.

  “I know, I’m sorry,” I say, looking away as tears fill his eyes. I haven’t seen Gideon cry since we were little kids. And I do not want to, especially not now. “Rachel says that Mom did it to protect us. Not the accident, that was . . . Someone really did try to run her off the road. It just wasn’t her in the car. But the staying away after, I mean. It’s been to keep us safe.”

  “I should have known.” Gideon shakes his head.

  “How could you have?” I say. “Who would ever have thought that—”

  “There’s an envelope in your room.” He cuts me off sharply. “And if you want to know why I was in your room, looking through your stuff—I don’t have a good excuse. I went through everybody’s room in the past two weeks—Mom and Dad’s, yours. I was lonely.”

  And this is so heartbreakingly true it makes my breath catch.

  “What letter?” I ask.

  “On your nightstand,” he says. “I didn’t open it, I swear. But I saw it there. And I thought, wow, that kind of looks like Mom’s handwriting. Of course, because I’m me and not you, I didn’t have a ‘feeling’ about anything. I was like, logic says Mom is dead. So it’s old or something . . .”

  “I didn’t have a feeling either until she was standing right in front of me. I had no idea she was alive.” But that’s true only technically—I was obsessed about the accident not being an accident. Probably because some part of me knew she wasn’t dead.

  “Wait.” Gideon’s eyes are wide. “You saw her? Where?”

  Crap.

  “Only for a second,” I say, wishing I could snatch the words back and stuff them down my throat. “She came to the detention facility just so I would know Rachel was telling me the truth.”