The Collide

by Kimberly McCreight

  “Lucky for them,” Elise says. “It might be easier not to see through everything.”

  “Easier in the short term,” Marly says. “In the end, you’re always left with the truth.”

  “Anyway,” Ramona goes on, desperate to get back to the part of the story where she is awesome. “They brought a bunch of us into this one room in a big crowd, and your grandfather—”

  “Just call him Russo, for Christ’s sake,” Riel says. “He’s nothing to me. He never was.”

  “Russo was making his way around the room,” Ramona goes on. “He had his phone out because he was taking selfies with volunteers. Or trying to. It was mostly just for show. Trying to be funny or whatever.”

  “And he was making all these bad dad jokes about how hip he was.” Elise shudders.

  “Except most of the other volunteers did kind of eat it up.” Ramona rolls her eyes. “Anyway, Russo got distracted by some dude telling him he was awesome and put his phone down for a second and . . .” Ramona looks at Elise, who has an eyebrow raised. “Okay, technically, Elise grabbed it. But I distracted his security people so she could jet out the door with it. They were still crawling around on the floor looking for his stupid phone when I ducked out myself—no one even asked where I was going.”

  There’s a loud knock at Marly’s door then, startling all of them.

  “Did you take his SIM card out?” Riel asks.

  “Yes, of course,” Marly says, and she puts a hand on Riel’s shoulder. “It’s Level99. I asked them to come get the phone. Seemed safer than bringing it to them.”

  MARLY OPENS THE door and Brian steps inside, bristling already. He didn’t like being Riel’s errand boy to begin with. He likes it even less now that he has been reduced to following the instructions of her friends. But maybe that’s not even what his bad, wound-up energy is about. Honestly, Brian has so many mixed-up, bad feelings Riel isn’t sure. And she doesn’t like not being sure. But the phone is worth nothing without Brian’s help.

  Marly hands Brian the phone and the SIM card. “We need anything incriminating or potentially incriminating off here.”

  Brian looks down at the phone in his hand, then tucks the SIM card in his pocket. “Incriminating? You got anything more specific?”

  When he looks over at Riel, she feels only smug condescension. Brian can’t even keep it in check temporarily. He must know Riel will read it. Maybe Brian wants her to. Riel is on her feet before she realizes it.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she growls at Brian. “‘If you don’t know what incriminating looks like after all this time, then I can find someone else who does.”

  Brian’s eyes drop and his cheeks flush. Behind him, Riel can feel Marly, Ramona, and Elise silently cheering. But he’s actually more pissed than embarrassed. Also, he still feels pretty smug.

  “Nope, it’s fine,” Brian says through gritted teeth, turning the phone in his hand. “I’m on it.”

  For a split second, Riel considers taking her grandfather’s phone back from Brian. But again she thinks: without Level99’s help, the phone is worth nothing.

  “Oh, yeah, we found Kendall, too,” Brian adds, turning back on his way to the door. “Or the guy who was pretending to be him.”

  Riel’s heart speeds up. “Really?” She was sure they never would. “Where?”

  Brian’s eyes flick down. “Well, I mean, I guess technically Kendall found me,” he says. “Dude was waiting at my house when I got home. My mom let him in. It was freaky.”

  “You still live with your mom?” Ramona chirps. “Aren’t you, like, twenty-five?”

  Riel shoots Ramona a look, and she holds up her hands, mouths “sorry.”

  “Twenty-three,” Brian snaps back. “And not all of us were born to privilege.”

  “What did Kendall say?” Riel asks.

  “He asked me to give this to you.” Brian hands her a small folded note. “That was it. I tried to ask him who he was, but he wouldn’t answer me. I didn’t read it.”

  A lie definitely. She eyeballs Brian.

  “Okay, fine,” Brian says. “I did look at it. But just to be sure it wasn’t something totally messed up.”

  When Riel opens the note, there is a time—eight thirty p.m.—and directions for driving, followed by walking, to a location. Then a warning: Come alone.

  RIEL DRIVES MARLY’S car away from Boston, south toward Connecticut, already knowing she’ll be late. It isn’t long before the directions take her off the brightly lit highway and onto a more local route, then for a while longer on a seriously narrow two-lane, twisty road plunging deep into the woods. It’s already coming up fast on eight, almost dark.

  As the miles click by Riel feels less and less sure that she is going to get any of the answers she is hoping for. Still, she has no doubt about going to meet Kendall, even alone. Riel thought Wylie was a stupid asshole for trusting Kendall. But from the second he put his hands on Riel in that crowd, Riel has known what Wylie did: Kendall’s intentions are good.

  It’s another ten minutes of winding through trees and more trees before Riel finally spots the turnoff the note describes: the third on her left, a dead end, no street sign. She pulls slowly down the street and parks on the side of the cul-de-sac. From there, she is supposed to find a path cut in the trees and follow it into the woods. Then, in a quarter of a mile, the path will open up to a clearing. Hopefully, at least.

  Riel stays in the car until she spots the opening in the trees. The path. Hard to believe she is actually going to follow it alone and in the dark. But she is. Definitely. So much dread has crept into her chest, though, she could choke on it. But curled up right next to that dread? Certainty.

  ONCE SHE’S OUT of the car, Riel moves quickly down the narrow path, flashlight in hand, branches clawing at her arms and legs. She tries not to think about what lies ahead, or who might be following behind. It isn’t long before she finally sees something up ahead. Two long buildings set in a small clearing. Riel stops and stares. Just ordinary warehouses, but there seems nothing good about seeing them out there in the middle of nowhere. And Kendall didn’t pick this spot to meet by accident.

  Riel takes one last deep breath before stepping toward the warehouses and—

  A hand has clamped down over her mouth. Riel screams loud and raw and animal. But the sound is muffled under the set of strong fingers. She tries to wriggle away, too, but the hand is too tight. She can’t even move her head.

  “Shhh!” A whispered growl in her ear. Something hard pointed into her back. A gun? Is that possible? “Stop screaming!”

  And so Riel does as she is told. The hand is still on her, that something that could be a gun still jammed against her spine. As she is shoved forward toward the back warehouse, she tries reading the person behind her. Kendall, it must be. She hopes. Whoever it is, he’s not feeling anything she can read, though, except focus on the task at hand.

  “Open it,” he says when they reach the warehouse door. “Go in.”

  INSIDE, RIEL IS pushed forward so hard she stumbles. When she finally regains her footing and turns, there is Kendall behind her, near the door, scanning the darkness outside the windows. The strong lines of his set face are outlined in the moonlight, his taut arms defined beneath his snug shirt. He certainly looks like someone who could have killed all those people up at that camp without giving it a second thought. He could easily kill Riel now, and probably still wouldn’t feel a thing. But this is bullshit. Riel has done what he wanted.

  “What the fuck?” she shouts.

  “I needed to make sure you weren’t followed.” Kendall’s eyes are still locked on the trees outside.

  “I’m not stupid. I was careful,” Riel says as she looks around the warehouse, trying to get her bearings. There is an empty room at the front, with a dusty concrete floor. A wall of windows at either end, none on the side. A long hall in between with lots of doors. “What the hell is this place?”

  “There is no such thing as careful enough,”
Kendall says, without making eye contact. He heads on, checking the interior of the building. Like a machine—quick, methodical. This is not an act and does not take effort. It’s reflex.

  “What is this place?” Riel asks again.

  Kendall doesn’t answer. Instead, he heads down the hall, clearing the other end. He opens each of the doors on the long hall on his way back, checking inside.

  “Who the hell are you?” Riel asks when Kendall still does not say a word. She tries again to read him. But Kendall’s only real emotion still is concentration—he doesn’t seem to feel anything else. “I mean, who are you for real?”

  Finally, Kendall stops his checking and stands feet square, arms at his side, staring at Riel. Sure enough, there is an actual gun in his hand, the one he must have had pointed into Riel’s back.

  “I’m no one,” Kendall says, and he means this. Simply and completely. “They’ve spent years making me that way.”

  “You work for my grandfather?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “Then who?”

  “Military intelligence. That’s who I report back to. But they’d deny my existence.” He isn’t torn up about confessing this. It’s like he already knows it doesn’t matter. That he doesn’t matter. “They function as a go-between. I go where they tell me. I’m not usually privy to the why. Only the what. But this, this I looked into. And yeah, it goes back to your grandfather. All of it.”

  Finally, a flicker like a trapdoor has flashed open for a second. Regret. Way deep down, Kendall is drowning in it. Somewhere in there is an actual person.

  “You shot all those people at the camp,” Riel says quietly.

  Kendall shakes his head. “I was supposed to, but the first target I ran into was some old lady. Said something about being a nurse, asked if I was wounded and needed help. I think she thought we were in Vietnam or something,” he says, haunted by the memory. “After all these years, after all I’ve done—she was my line in the sand. She had no idea what the hell was going on. I tried to take out the other agent there with me so he couldn’t finish the job. Klute was his name. Biggest regret of my life is never getting a clear shot at him.”

  “So, let’s assume for a second that I believe you—what do you want now?” Riel asks. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “There were girls up at that facility. Young girls. I saw them there.”

  “You mean Boston Hospital?”

  He makes a confused, annoyed face. “No, before the hospital. The WSRF,” he says. “I was there long before I got sent up to the camp in Maine.”

  “The WSRF,” Riel repeats. Her whole body is tensed, bracing for a truth she’ll never be ready to know. Morphine. Morphine. Morphine.

  “Yeah, it’s a testing facility,” he says. “Where the doctors talked way more in front of us than they should have. I guess they thought we were too stupid to understand. At first they were trying to see if they could use some kind of hallucinogenic state to mimic this whole Outliers thing. That’s not what they called it, but that’s what it was. Then they were using stressors—pain, sleep deprivation—to see if it could somehow be learned. When none of that worked, it was all about blocking.”

  “Where did they get the girls to test?” Riel asks, thinking of Kelsey, of course.

  He shrugs. “Paid them. They needed a lot of girls to come up with a single Outlier. Most of them weren’t. These were girls without a lot of options. Ones who wouldn’t be missed if the tests turned south. Which they did all the time. They had some of them high out of their minds. They lost a lot of girls.”

  Riel takes a deep breath, tries to swallow. She doesn’t have it all connected yet, but this is how Kelsey died. It had something to do with the WSRF. The last thing Riel wants is to cry in front of Kendall, but it’s too late.

  “How long was this going on?” Riel asks, trying to ignore her ragged voice. “When did it start?”

  Kendall shrugs. “Few years ago. Three. Four.”

  Riel feels a nauseous sense of vertigo. Like she’s been on a train she thought was moving. But it’s been the train next to her this whole time.

  “Years?” Riel repeats. “But Ben Lang only found—”

  “Ben Lang wasn’t the beginning of this,” Kendall says, waving a finger in the air. “He was the end. The end of Russo being able to keep it a secret. He was the first person to call them Outliers, but that’s it. I hoped Lang’s wife, the reporter, would do something with those pictures I sent her. But she didn’t even know what she had before they tried to kill her, too.”

  Riel has gotten so many details wrong. Her grandfather started this, not Dr. Lang. They were Kendall’s pictures, not Hope’s. That explains why Hope didn’t know where the WSRF was.

  “They did kill her,” Riel says.

  “No, no,” Kendall says. Like Riel is the one who’s lost it now. “She’s still alive. But only alive because the Architect wants her that way.”

  “The Architect?”

  Kendall shrugs. “Whoever the Architect is, he’s behind most of what Russo does. The strategy.” He motions to the warehouse. “This included. He sees to it that the dirty work gets done so Russo can keep his hands clean. You got to give it to them—it’s working. Russo was a nobody senator, and now he’s running for president. Looks like he could even win.”

  “Are you sure the Architect is still alive?” she asks, thinking of Quentin. But she’s already got her doubts.

  “I think so. But since the camp, I’m not sure of anything,” he says. “I’ve been mostly off the grid. They don’t like it when we don’t follow orders.”

  “But you put the note under Leo’s door, didn’t you?” Riel says. “You went into the hospital to see Wylie.”

  Kendall shrugs. “I was trying to warn both of you. Seemed like the least I could do.”

  “And so what is this place?” Riel asks.

  Kendall takes a breath and looks around as he backs up to lean against the windows. “They’ll have dozens of these built before anyone realizes it. They rely on that, being a couple steps ahead. Hard to kill a weed once it’s got its roots established. Easier to defend something that’s already done. But they do cleanup first—the camp, Wylie, her dad. You. They won’t leave a single loose end.”

  This is the truth as Kendall knows it. And Riel has a terrible feeling he is very close to exactly right.

  “I still don’t understand what this place is.”

  “The next phase,” Kendall says. “It’ll be—”

  There’s been a small pop. Kendall is frozen. Riel glances down, worried she’s somehow stepped on a piece of glass. Crushed it beneath her shoe. There’s a dull, heavy thud.

  Kendall has collapsed facedown on the ground.

  “Oh, shit.” She rushes over. “Kendall, are you—”

  Another pop. And then another. Riel hits the ground. Shit. Holy shit. Bullets. There are bullets cracking holes in the glass.

  And the first one hit Kendall square in the base of the head.

  WYLIE

  I’M STILL TREMBLING BY THE TIME WE FINALLY MAKE IT TO THE WATUCK PUBLIC Library. Inside, it’s almost completely empty. Not surprising for 8:40 p.m. Even so, it’s a pretty cheerful and charming place—brand-new, but made to look old so that it fits in with the rest of the picture-perfect downtown. There’s only one other customer, an old man reading a newspaper, and three young, attractive librarians—two women, one man—behind the desk, talking. They were all in here first, I remind myself. They had no way of knowing we were coming here. They did not follow us.

  I don’t think the Wolf is coming after us, either. He would have by now. Still, I can’t shake the feeling of being blindsided by seeing him, standing right there in Mrs. Porter’s kitchen. Terror. That’s what I felt. So much I was choking on it.

  As soon as I said the word “hot,” Gideon bolted for Mrs. Porter’s door. He was so jacked up and nervous to begin with that he was ready the second I said the word. I wasn’t far behind. And I di
dn’t look back until we were safely locked in the car.

  The Wolf followed only as far as the front steps of the house. Then he loomed there in the doorway, blinking at me. He looked so much weaker out of his security officer’s uniform, under the light of that bare bulb. It made the fact that anyone had put him in charge of the girls at the hospital all the more frightening.

  Even if the Wolf isn’t behind us, I still feel hunted. Being in the town where Sophie-Ann died isn’t helping. But the Watuck Public Library was the best choice to dig up whatever we could find on Sophie-Ann’s accident. Especially in case we had to resort to asking the librarians; they might have firsthand knowledge. And while being online isn’t the safest thing right now, we need answers about Sophie-Ann. But we don’t have much time. The library closes at nine p.m.

  As Gideon and I head toward the computers, I try to get a better read on the room. Nothing stands out, except the two female librarians definitely flirting with each other. And the old guy, it turns out, is asleep. Whoever shot Oshiro could be waiting outside to shoot us, too. Definitely. But at least they aren’t inside the library. At least, not yet. We’ll just have to hope that whatever terrible reason they had for letting us leave that parking lot where they shot Oshiro still stands.

  They. The Wolf being connected has only complicated my assumptions about who “they” might be. I’ve been so focused on Quentin as the link between the camp, and The Collective, and Sophie-Ann, and where my dad is. But the hospital, too? Unlikely. That was an official operation with genuine support. Something someone like Senator Russo could make happen. Russo is the kind of somebody who could also make a DC missing-person case disappear.

  “Let’s check in with Elizabeth first,” I say. “I want to make sure Oshiro is okay.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Gideon asks. “What if he’s not?”

  He’s right that I haven’t really let myself absorb that possibility. I’m hoping that’s because I know it’s not true, but I can’t be sure.