“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.
“So, Cassie, are you ready for your first day of How to Crawl into the Skulls of Bad Guys 101?” Lia set the cereal box down and headed for the fridge. Her head disappeared into the refrigerator as she started digging around. Her pajama bottoms left very little to the imagination.
“I’m ready,” I said, averting my eyes.
“Cassie was born ready,” Michael declared. Over in the refrigerator, Lia stopped rummaging for a moment. “Besides,” Michael continued, “whatever Agent Locke has her doing, it has to be better than watching foreign-language films. Without the subtitles.”
I bit back a smile at the aggrieved tone in Michael’s voice. “Is that what they had you do on your first day?”
“That,” Michael said, “is what they had me do for my first month. ‘Emotions aren’t about what people say,’” he mimicked, “‘they’re about posture, facial expressions, and culture-specific instantiations of universal phenomenological experiences.’”
Lia exited the refrigerator with empty hands, shut the door, and opened the freezer. “Poor baby,” she told Michael. “I’ve been here for almost three years, and the only thing they’ve taught me is that psychopaths are really good liars, and FBI agents are really bad ones.”
“Have you met many?” I asked.
“FBI agents?” Lia feigned ignorance as she retrieved a carton of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from the freezer.
I gave her a look. “Psychopaths.”
She grabbed a spoon out of the drawer and brandished it like a magic wand. “The FBI hides us away in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood in a nice little town. Do you really think Briggs is going to let me tag along on prison interviews? Or go into the field, where I might actually get to do something?”
Michael put Lia’s words in slightly more diplomatic terms. “The Bureau has tapes,” he said. “And reels and transcripts. Cold cases, mostly. Things that other people haven’t ever been able to solve. And for every cold case they bring us, there are dozens of cases that they’ve already solved. Tests to see if we really are as good as Agent Briggs says we are.”
“Even when you give them the answer they’re looking for,” Lia continued, picking up right where Michael left off, “even when the Powers That Be know that you’re right, they want to know why.”
Why what? This time, I didn’t ask the question out loud—but Michael answered it anyway.
“Why we can do it and they can’t.” He reached over and snagged another bite of my Cheerios. “They don’t just want to train us. They don’t just want to use us. They want to be us.”
“Absolutely,” a new voice concurred. “Deep down, in my heart of hearts, all I really want is to be Michael Townsend.”
Agent Locke strolled into the kitchen and went straight for the fridge. Clearly she was at home here, even if she lived somewhere else.
“Briggs left files for you two”—Agent Locke gestured to Michael and Lia—“in his study. He’s going to run a new simulation with Sloane today, and I’m going to start catching Cassie up to speed.” She heaved a larger-than-life sigh. “It’s not as glamorous as being a jaded seventeen-year-old boy with parental issues and a hair-gel dependency, but c’est la vie.”
Michael reached up to scratch the side of his face—and oh-so-subtly flipped Agent Locke off in the process.
Lia twirled her spoon around her finger, a tiny, ice-cream-laden baton. “Lacey Locke, everybody,” she said, like the FBI agent was a comedian and Lia the announcer.
Locke grinned. “Doesn’t Judd have a rule about you wearing lingerie in the kitchen?” she asked, eyeing Lia’s pajamas. Lia shrugged, but something about Agent Locke’s presence seemed to subdue her. Within minutes, my fellow Naturals had scattered. Neither Lia nor Michael seemed anxious to spend time in the company of an FBI profiler.
“I hope they’re not making life too difficult on you,” Locke said.
“No.” In fact, for a moment there, eating with the two of them, talking to them, had felt natural.
No pun intended.
“Neither Michael nor Lia was given much of a choice about joining the program.” Locke waited for that to sink in. “That tends to put a chip on a person’s shoulder.”
“They’re not the type to respond well to being strong-armed,” I said slowly.
“No,” Agent Locke replied. “They aren’t. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but that wasn’t one of mine. Briggs lacks a certain amount of … finesse. Guy never met a square peg he didn’t want to pound into a round hole.”
That description fit with my impression of Agent Briggs exactly. Agent Locke was speaking my language, but I didn’t have time to relish that fact.