The Naturals (6 page)

“Is that normal?” I asked her.

She gave a graceful little shrug. “Define
normal.”

A girl poked her head out from behind one of the partitions. “Conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern.”

The first thing I noticed about the girl—other than the chipper tone in her voice and the fact that she had literally just defined
normal
—was her hair. It was blond, glow-in-the-dark pale, and stick straight. The ends were uneven and her blunt-cut bangs were too short, like she’d chopped them off herself.

“Aren’t you supposed to be wearing safety goggles?” Lia asked.

“It is possible that my goggles have been compromised.” With that, the girl disappeared back behind the partition.

Based on the self-satisfied curve of Lia’s lips, I was going to go out on a limb and guess that I had just met my roommate.

“Sloane, Cassie,” Lia said with a grand gesture. “Cassie, Sloane.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. I took a few steps forward, until I was standing in the space between the partitions and could see what they had hidden before. A narrow hallway stretched out in front of me. It was lined with rooms on either side. Each room had only three walls.

Immediately to my left, I found Sloane standing in the middle of what appeared to be a bathroom. There was a door on the far side, and I realized that the space looked exactly the way a bathroom would if someone had removed the back wall.

“Like a movie set,” I murmured. There was glass all over the floor, and at least a hundred Post-it notes stuck to the edge of the sink and scattered in a spiral pattern on the tiles. I glanced back down the hallway at the other rooms. The other sets.

“Potential crime scene,” Lia corrected. “For simulations. On this side”—Lia posed like a game show assistant—“we have interior locations: bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, foyers. A couple of miniature—and I do mean
miniature
—restaurant sets, and, just because we really are that cliché, a mock post office, for all your
going postal
needs.”

Lia pivoted and gestured toward the other side of the hall. “And over here,” she said, “we have a few outdoor scenes: park, parking lot, make-out point.”

I turned back to the bathroom set and Sloane. She knelt gingerly next to the shards of glass on the floor and stared at them. Her face was calm. Her fingers hovered just over the carnage.

After a long moment, she blinked and stood up. “Your hair is red.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“People with red hair require roughly twenty percent more anesthesia to undergo surgery, and they’re significantly more likely to wake up on the table.”

I got the distinct feeling that this was Sloane’s version of “hello,” and suddenly, everything clicked into place: the prevalence of patterns in her wardrobe, the precision with which she’d divided our closet in two. “Agent Briggs said that someone here was a Natural with numbers and probabilities.”

“Sloane’s absolutely dangerous with anything numerical,” Lia said. She gestured lazily toward the glass shards. “Sometimes literally.”

“It was just a test,” Sloane said defensively. “The algorithm that predicts the scatter pattern of the shards is really quite—”

“Fascinating?” a voice behind us suggested. Lia dragged one long, manicured nail over her bottom lip. I turned around.

Michael smiled. “You should see her when she’s had caffeine,” he told me, nodding at Sloane.

“Michael,” Sloane said darkly, “hides the coffee.”

“Trust me,” Michael drawled, “it’s a kindness to us all.” He paused and then gave me a long, slow smile. “These two have you nice and traumatized yet, Colorado?”

I processed the fact that he’d just given me a nickname, and Lia stepped in between us. “Traumatized?” she repeated. “It’s almost like you don’t trust me, Michael.” Her eyes widened and her lower lip poked out.

Michael snorted. “Wonder why.”

An emotion reader, a deception specialist, a statistician who could not be allowed to ingest coffee, and me.

“Is this it?” I asked. “Just the four of us?”

Hadn’t Lia mentioned someone else?

Michael’s eyes darkened. Lia’s mouth curved slowly into a smile.

“Well,” Sloane said brightly, completely unaware of the changing undercurrent in the room. “There’s also Dean.”

W
e found Dean in the garage. He was lying on a black bench, facing away from the door. Dark blond hair was plastered to his face with sweat, his jaw clenched as he executed a series of slow and methodical bench presses. Each time his elbows locked, I wondered if he’d stop. Each time, he kept going.

He was muscular but lean, and my first impression was that this wasn’t a workout. This was punishment.

Michael rolled his eyes and then strolled up behind Dean. “Ninety-eight,” he said, his tone full of mock pain. “Ninety-nine. One hundred!”

Dean closed his eyes for a brief moment, then pushed the barbell up again. His arms shook slightly as he went to set the weight down. Michael clearly had no intention of spotting him. To my surprise, Sloane pushed past Michael,
wrapped dainty little hands around the barbell, and rocked back on her heels, angling it into place.

Dean wiped his hands on his jeans, grabbed a nearby towel, and sat up. “Thanks,” he told Sloane.

“Torque,” she said, instead of
you’re welcome
. “The role of the lever was played by my arms.”

Dean stood up, his lips angling slightly upward, but the moment he saw me, the fledgling smile froze on his face.

“Dean Redding,” Michael said, enjoying Dean’s sudden obvious discomfort a little too much, “meet Cassie Hobbes.”

“Nice to meet you,” Dean said, pulling dark eyes from mine and directing those words at the floor.

Lia, who’d been remarkably quiet up to this point, raised an eyebrow at Dean. “Well,” she said, “that’s not strictly—”

“Lia.” Dean’s voice wasn’t loud or hard, but the second he said her name, Lia stopped.

“That’s not strictly what?” I asked, even though I knew that the next word out of her mouth would have been
true
.

“Never mind,” Lia said in a singsong tone.

I looked back at Dean:
Light hair. Dark eyes. Open posture. Clenched fists
.

I cataloged the way he was standing, the lines of his face, the dingy white T-shirt and ratty blue jeans. His hair needed to be cut, and he stood with his back to the wall, his face
cast in shadows, like that was where he belonged.

Why wasn’t it nice to meet me?

“Dean,” Michael said, with the air of someone imparting a fascinating bit of useless trivia, “is a Natural profiler. Just like you.”

Those last three words seemed more aimed at Dean than me, and as they hit their target, Dean lifted his eyes to meet Michael’s. There was no emotion on Dean’s face, but there was
something
in his eyes, and I found myself expecting Michael to look away first.

“Dean,” Michael continued, staring at Dean and talking to me, “knows more about the way that killers think than just about anyone.”

Dean threw down the towel in his hand. Muscles taut, he brushed by Michael and Sloane, by Lia, by me. A few seconds later, he was gone.

“Dean has a temper,” Michael told me, leaning back against the workout bench.

Lia snorted. “Michael, if Dean had a temper, you’d be dead.”

“Dean’s not going to kill anyone,” Sloane said, her voice almost comically serious.

Michael dug a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. “Wanna bet?”

— — —

That night, I didn’t dream. I also didn’t sleep much, courtesy of the fact that Sloane, who had a dainty little build, also apparently had the nasal passages of an overweight trucker. Instead, as I tried to block out the sound of her snoring, I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house.
Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane
. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s.

Lia’s.

I started with the physical things. She was taller than I was, and lithe. Her hair was longer, and instead of sleeping with it tucked under her head, she would spread it out on the pillow. Her fingernails were painted, and when she had energy to burn, she rubbed the thumbnail on her left hand with the thumb on her right. In my mind, I turned my head—Lia’s head—to the side, peering into her closet.

If Michael had leveraged a car out of Briggs, Lia would have gone for clothes. I could almost
see
the closet, full to overflowing. As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.

I let go of my bed and my closet, my physical sensations.
I let myself
be
Lia, and a rush of information came at me from all sides. Like a writer getting lost in a book, I let the simulation run its course. Where Sloane and I were neat, the Lia in my head was messy, her room a multisensory archive of the past few months. There was no rhyme or reason to the organization of the closet. Dresses hung half on and half off the hangers. There were clothes—dirty, clean, new, and everything in between—on the floor.

I pictured getting out of bed. In my own body, I had a tendency to sit up first, but Lia wouldn’t take the time. She’d roll out of bed, ready for action. Ready to attack. Long hair fell on my shoulders, and I twirled a strand of it around my index finger: another of Lia’s nervous habits, designed to look like it wasn’t nervous at all.

I glanced over at the door to the room. Closed, of course. Probably also locked. Who was I keeping out? What was I afraid of?

Afraid?
I scoffed silently, my mind-voice sounding more and more like Lia’s.
I’m not
afraid
of anything
.

I walked over to the closet—light on my toes, hips swaying gently—and pulled out the first shirt I touched. The selection was completely random, but what came next wasn’t. I built the outfit up around me. I dressed myself up like a doll, and with each passing moment, I put that much more space between the surface and everything underneath.

I did my hair, my eyes, my nails.

But there was still that little voice in my head. The same one that had insisted I wasn’t scared. Only this time, the one thing it kept saying, over and over again, was that I was here—behind this locked door with who knows what waiting outside—because I had nowhere else to go.

You’re home now. You’re alone. Everything is in its place. Everything but
this.

You know that there are other people like you. Other monsters. Other gods. You know you’re not the only one who takes keepsakes, things to remember the girls by, once their screams and their bodies and their begging-pleading-lying lips are gone.

You walk slowly to the cabinet. You open it. Carefully, gingerly, you place this whore’s lipstick next to all the rest. The authorities won’t notice it’s missing when they search her purse.

They never do
.

A lazy smile on your face, you run your fingertips across each one. Remembering. Savoring. Planning
.

Because it’s never enough. It’s never over
.

Especially now
.

T
he next day, I could barely look at Lia. The game I’d played the night before was one my younger self had played with strangers: children I’d met in diners, people who had come to my mother’s shows. They were never real to me—and neither were the things I’d imagined once I’d mentally tried on their shoes. But now I had to wonder how much of it was really imagination and how much of it was my subconscious working its way through Lia’s BPE.

Had I imagined that Lia was messy—or had I profiled it?

“There’s cereal in the cabinet and eggs in the fridge,” Judd greeted me from behind a newspaper as I wandered into the kitchen, still debating that question. “I’m making a grocery run at oh-nine-hundred. If you’ve got requests, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

“No requests,” I said.

“Low maintenance,” Judd commented.

I shrugged. “I try.”

Judd folded his paper, carried an empty mug to the sink, and rinsed it out. A minute later—at nine o’clock on the dot—I was alone in the kitchen. As I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I went back to trying to work my way through the logic of my Lia simulation, to figure out how I knew what I knew—and if I knew it at all.

“I have no idea what those Cheerios did to you, but I’m sure they’re very, very sorry,” Michael said as he slid into the seat next to me at the kitchen table.

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve been stirring them into submission for a good five minutes,” Michael told me. “It’s spoon violence, is what it is.”

I picked up a Cheerio and flicked it at him. Michael caught it and popped it into his mouth.

“So which one of us was it this time?” Michael asked.

Suddenly, I became very interested in my Cheerios.

“Come on, Colorado. When your brain starts profiling, your face starts broadcasting a mix of concentration, curiosity, and calm.” Michael paused. I took a big bite of cereal. “The muscles in your neck relax,” he continued. “Your lips turn ever so subtly down. Your head tilts slightly to one side, and you get crow’s-feet at the corners of your eyes.”

I set my spoon calmly in my bowl. “I do not get crow’s-feet.”

Michael helped himself to my spoon—and a bite of cereal. “Anyone ever tell you you’re cute when you’re annoyed?”

“I hope I’m not interrupting.” Lia came in, stole the cereal box, and started eating right out of the carton. “Actually, that’s not true. Whatever’s going on here, I am absolutely delighted to interrupt it.”

I tried to keep myself from studying Lia—and I definitely tried to keep from wrinkling the corners of my eyes—but it was hard to ignore the fact that she was wearing barely-there silk pajamas. And pearls.