The Collide. Kimberly McCreight
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 are. 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