The Naturals

Briggs and Locke left shortly after Judd showed me to my room. They promised to return the next day for training, but for now, all that was expected of me was to settle in. My roommate—whoever she was—had yet to make an appearance, so for the moment, I had the room to myself.

Twin beds sat at opposite ends of the room. A bay window overlooked the backyard. Tentatively, I opened what I assumed to be the closet door. The closet was exactly half full: half of each rack, half of the floor space, half of the shelves. My roommate favored patterns to solids, bright colors to pastels, and had a healthy amount of black and white in her wardrobe, but no gray.

All of her shoes were flats.

“Dial it back a notch, Cassie,” I told myself. I’d have months to analyze my roommate’s personality—without creepily stalking her half of the closet. Quickly and efficiently, I emptied my own bag. I’d lived in Colorado for five years, but before that, the longest I’d ever lived in one place was four months. My mother was always off to the next show, the next town, the next mark, and I was an expert unpacker.

There was still space on my side of the closet when I was done.

“Knock-knock.” Lia’s voice was high and clear. She didn’t wait for permission before coming into the room, and I realized with a start that she’d changed clothes.

The boots had been replaced with ballet flats, and she’d traded the tight black pants for a lacy, flowing skirt. Her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck, and even her eyes looked softer.

It was like she’d given herself a makeover—or switched personalities altogether.

First Michael, now Lia. I wondered if he’d picked up the trick of changing clothing styles from her, or if she’d gotten it from him. Given that Lia was the one who specialized in deception, my money was on the former.

“Are you finished unpacking yet?” she asked.

“I’m still working on some stuff,” I said, busying myself with the dresser.

“No. You’re not.”

I’d never considered myself a liar until that moment, when Lia’s ability took the option away.

“Look, those serial killer pictures give new meaning to the word creepy.” Lia leaned back against the doorjamb. “I was here for six weeks before someone told me that Grandma and Gramps were actually Faye and Ray Copeland, who were convicted of killing five people and made a cozy little quilt out of their clothes. Trust me, it’s better that you know now.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“Anyway,” Lia said, dragging out the word, “Judd gives crappy tours. He’s a surprisingly decent cook, and he’s got eyes in the back of his head, but he’s not exactly what one would call chatty, and unless we’re about to burn the place down, he’s pretty hands-off. I thought you might want a real tour. Or that you might have some questions.”

I wasn’t sure that a person renowned for her skill at lying was the ideal information source or tour guide, but I wasn’t about to turn down a peace offering, and I did have one question.

“Where’s my roommate?”

“Where she always is,” Lia replied innocently. “The basement.”

— — —

The basement ran the length of the house and stretched out underneath the front and back yards. From the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was two enormous white walls that ran the width of the space, but didn’t quite reach the fourteen-foot ceilings. There was a small space between where one wall ended and the next began.

An entrance.

I walked toward it. Something exploded, and I jumped backward, my hands flying up in front of my face.

Glass, I thought belatedly. Shattering glass.

A second later, I realized that I couldn’t see the source of the sound. I lowered my hands and looked back at Lia, who hadn’t so much as flinched.

“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.”