Jennifer Barnes - The Naturals

It hadn’t.

“You want me to be nervous about this,” I told him, because that much was clear from his words. “And you told me not to come.”

He smiled, but there was a hard glint to it, an edge. “I guess you could say I’m contrary.”

I snorted. That was one word for it.

“Are you going to give me even a hint of what’s going on here?” I asked as we neared the end of the hall.

He shrugged. “That depends. Are you going to stop playing Who’s Got the Best Poker Face with me?”

That surprised a laugh out of me, and I realized that it had been a long time since I’d laughed because I couldn’t help it and not because someone else was laughing, too.

Michael’s smile lost its edge, and for a second, the expression utterly changed his face. If he’d been handsome before, he was beautiful now—but it didn’t last. As quickly as the lightness had come, it faded.

“I meant what I wrote on that card,” he said softly. He nodded to a closed office door to our right. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go in there.”

I knew then—the way I always knew things—that Michael had been in my shoes once and that he had opened the door. His warning was genuine, but I opened it, too.

“Ms. Hobbes. Please, come in.”

With one last glance at Michael, I stepped into the room.

“ Au revoir ,” the boy with the excellent poker face said, punctuating the words with an exaggerated flick of his fingers.

Special Agent Tanner Briggs cleared his throat. The door closed behind me. For better or worse, I was here to meet with an FBI agent. Alone.

“I’m glad you came, Cassie. Take a seat.”

Agent Briggs was younger than I’d expected based on his phone voice. The gears in my brain turned slowly, incorporating his age into what I knew. An older man who took pains to appear businesslike was guarded. A twenty-nine-year-old who did the same wanted to be taken seriously.

There was a difference.

Obediently, I took a seat. Agent Briggs stayed in his chair, but leaned forward. The desk between us was clean, but for a stack of papers and two pens, one of which was missing its cap.

He wasn’t naturally neat, then. For some reason, I found that comforting. He was ambitious, but not inflexible.

“Are you finished?” he asked me. His voice wasn’t curt. If anything, he sounded genuinely curious.

“Finished with what?” I asked him.

“Analyzing me,” he said. “I’ve only been in this office for two hours. I couldn’t even guess what it is that has caught your attention, but I figured something would. With Naturals, something almost always does.”

Naturals . He said the word like he was expecting me to repeat it with a question mark in my tone. I didn’t say anything. The less I gave him, the more he’d show me.

“You’re good at reading people, at taking little details and figuring out the big picture: who they are, what they want, how they operate.” He smiled. “What kind of eggs they like.”

“You invited me here because I’m good at guessing what kind of eggs people like?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulousness out of my voice.

He drummed his fingers over the desktop. “I asked you here because you have a natural aptitude for something that most people could spend a lifetime trying to learn.”

I wondered if when he said most people he was referring at least in part to himself.

He took my continued silence as some kind of argument. “Are you telling me that you don’t read people? That you can’t tell me right now whether I’d rather play basketball or golf?”

Basketball. But he’d want people to think the answer was golf.

“You could try to explain to me how you figure things out, how you figure people out, Cassie, but the difference between you and the rest of the world is that to explain how you just figured out that I’d rather get a bloody nose on the basketball court than tee off with the boss, you’d have to backtrack. You’d have to sort out what the clues were and how you’d made sense of them, because you just do it. You don’t even have to think about it, not the way that I would, not the way that my team would. You probably couldn’t stop yourself if you tried.”

I hadn’t ever talked about this, not even with Mom, who’d taught me the parts of it that could be taught. People were people, but for better or worse, most days, they were just puzzles to me. Easy puzzles, hard puzzles, crosswords, mind-benders, sudoku. There was always an answer, and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing until I found it.

“How do you know any of this?” I asked the man in front of me. “And even if it’s true, even if I do have really good instincts about people, what’s it to you?”

He leaned forward. “I know because I make it my business to know. Because I’m the one who convinced the FBI that they need to be looking for people like you.”

“What do you want with me?”

He eased back in his chair. “What do you think I want with you, Cassie?”

My mouth went dry. “I’m seventeen.”

“Natural aptitudes, like yours, peak in the teen years. Formal education, college, the wrong influences, could all interfere with the incredible raw potential you have now.” He folded his hands neatly in front of him. “I want to see to it that you have the right influences, that your gift is molded into something extraordinary, something that you can use to do an incredible amount of good in this world.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at him, to walk out of the room, to forget that any of this had ever happened, but the other part just kept thinking that for five years, I’d been living in limbo, like I was waiting for something without knowing what that something was.

“You can take as much time as you need to think about it, Cassie, but what I’m offering you is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Our program is one of a kind, and it has the potential to turn Naturals—people like you—into something truly extraordinary.”

“People like me,” I repeated, my mind going ninety miles an hour. “And Michael.”

The second part was a guess, but not much of one. In the two minutes we’d spent walking to this office, Michael had come closer to figuring out what was going on inside my head than anyone I’d ever met.

“And Michael.” As he spoke, Agent Briggs’s face became more animated. Gone was the hardened professional. This was personal. This program was something he believed in.

And he had something to prove.

“What would becoming a part of this program entail?” I asked, measuring his response. The enthusiasm on his face morphed into something far more intense. His eyes bored into mine.

“How would you feel about moving to Washington, DC?”

How would I feel about moving to DC?

“I’m seventeen,” I reiterated. “A better question might be how my legal guardians would feel about it.”

“You wouldn’t be the first minor I’ve recruited, Cassie. There are work-arounds.”

Clearly, he had not met my Nonna.

“Five years ago, custody of Cassandra Hobbes was remitted to her biological father, one Vincent Battaglia, United States Air Force.” Agent Briggs paused. “Fourteen months after your appearance in his life, your father was transferred overseas. You chose to remain here, with your paternal grandmother.”

I didn’t ask how Agent Briggs had come by that information. He was FBI. He probably knew what color toothbrush I used.

“My point, Cassie, is that legally, your father still has custody, and I have every confidence that if you want this to happen, I can make it happen.” Briggs paused again. “As far as the outside world is concerned, we’re a gifted program. Very selective, with endorsements from some very important people. Your father is career military. He worries about the way you isolate yourself. That will make him easier to persuade than most.”