The Naturals

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 cliche, 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.”

CHAPTER 9

We 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