The Secret Runners
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Matthew Reilly
Interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by IRONGAV
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Sammy Yuen
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in 2019 by HOT KEY BOOKS, London.
Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reilly, Matthew, author.
Title: The secret runners / Matthew Reilly.
Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Books for Young Readers, [2020] | Audience: Ages 14 and up. | Audience: Grades 10-12. | Summary: “Rumors of a coming global apocalypse are building as Skye Rogers gets let into the most exclusive group in upper class New York”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033394 | ISBN 978-0-593-12580-9 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-593-12578-6 (library binding) | ISBN 978-0-593-12579-3 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Cliques—Fiction. | End of the world—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Time travel—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Twins—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. | Science Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R45533 Sec 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780593125793
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
Penguin Random House LLC supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to publish books for every reader.
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Central Park, NYC
Prologue
Becky’s Last Run
Part I: The School Where New Girls Go Missing
New School, New Life
Assembly
The Coming End
New York, Bitches vs. New York Bitches
Misty
Boys and Beemers
The Season
Red
Part II: The Secret Runners of New York
The Tunnel Under the Park
Red’s Run
The Tunnel Run
The Real World
The Well
The New Year in New York
Boys
An Unexpected Favor
The Plaza, the Dakota, and the Carlyle
The Party
Into the Park
Virgin Run
After
The Last Days of February
Private Run
Second Run
Part III: New York Reborn
Skye and Bo’s Run
The “New” New York
Reading About the Coming End of the World
Debrief and Decision
Runners Assemble
A Run in Broad Daylight
School
Part IV: The Last Days of New York
A Fold in Time
The Cotillion
A Late-Night Run
Misty and Me, on the Inside
Attackers
The Fate of My Family
Part V: The Missing Girls of Monmouth
New York City and Surrounding Area
Manhattan Island and Surrounding Area
The Days Before the Event
Another Missing Girl
Getting Inside
The Investigation Run
Trapped
Bound
Bait
Him
Flee
The Uncertain Future
Part VI: The Dead World
The Bitter Future
The Man in the Mask
Away
To the Ends of the Earth
The Retreat
Red’s Trail
Old Red
Back into the Dark World
Home
Part VII: The End of Civilization
Mayhem
About the Author
This book is for everyone
who went to high school…
and survived.
If you have enough money and a good name, you can do anything.
—Cornelia Guest, The Debutante’s Guide to Life
Why do we remember the past but not the future?
—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
PROLOGUE
BECKY’S LAST RUN
NEW YORK CITY
2:35 A.M. DATE: UNKNOWN
The girl in the torn bridal gown ran for her life through Central Park.
Thorny branches slashed her cheeks as she charged headlong through the undergrowth. It was late, well after midnight. The park and the city around it were dark and silent.
Becky Taylor’s normally pretty seventeen-year-old face was smeared with blood and dirt. Across her forehead, written in red lipstick, were the words:
HEAD GIRL
The crimson letters were streaked with desperate sweat.
Becky ducked her head as she rushed frantically through the brush, leading with her forearm. Amid all the bloody scratches on that arm were some marks near the wrist.
Four vertical lines: ||||
Rising above the trees behind Becky, black shadows against the nighttime sky, were the iconic buildings of Central Park West: the colossal American Museum of Natural History and some of the most famous and expensive apartment buildings in the world: the San Remo, the Majestic, and the Dakota. Not a single light glowed within them.
Her heart pounding, her lungs burning, Becky kept running as fast as she could.
She could hear them behind her—running, grunting, hunting.
And then she pushed through a final thicket, and suddenly the ground dropped away in front of her. Becky pulled up with a lurch, narrowly avoiding falling down a seven-foot drop.
In her ripped bridal gown, Becky Taylor risked a smile.
She’d reached the 79th Street Transverse.
She was almost there.
She quickly lowered herself down the wall that flanked the sunken roadway and dashed across it.
Of course the road that had once allowed vehicular traffic to cross Central Park was n
ow empty. Like the darkened city around it, it was eerily deserted.
Weeds, grass, and ivy had grown up through the pavement, cracking it, warping it. Abandoned cars lay at all angles: the weeds had simply engulfed them.
Not a soul could be seen.
It was just Becky in this dead, empty city…and her pursuers.
Around her left wrist was a ring of torn, bloody skin. Becky had awoken here bound to a streetlight, her hands tied behind her back with rope. After some very painful struggling, she had managed to wrench her left hand free of her bonds and begun this frantic run home.
Becky sprinted across the roadway and clambered up the stone wall on its opposite side.
A minute later, she rounded a corner and saw it: the Swedish Cottage.
The Swedish Cottage is a strange, brown, wood-walled, gingerbread-style house that was actually built in Sweden in the 1870s and shipped to the United States soon after as a gift from the government of Sweden. It sits in Central Park beside the Shakespeare Garden, out of time, out of fashion, and out of place.
It wasn’t the cottage that Becky was after, but what lay behind it.
She dashed around the brown building and came to a dirt clearing on the other side.
There she saw the low stone well.
Becky hurried over to the well and leapt straight into it, pressing her hands and feet against its close walls and lowering herself down the tight vertical shaft.
Twenty feet later, she emerged inside the mysterious tunnel at the bottom of the well. She dropped the last few feet and hurried down the tunnel until she saw the ancient stone doorway…
…and stopped dead.
The exit wasn’t open.
She couldn’t get out.
“Misty, Chastity, you bitches,” Becky said to no one.
A bloodcurdling male scream from outside made her spin. And there, in that cold underground tunnel in that wretched version of New York City, Becky Taylor realized that she was going to die.
This day wasn’t supposed to end like this.
Only hours earlier, she had literally been the belle of the ball, stunning in her Vera Wang gown, with a handsome date and the world at her feet.
And now she was here.
In this horrible place.
Trapped and alone.
Soon its cruel inhabitants would find her, and when they did, they would kill her in the slowest and ugliest of ways.
And with those grim thoughts, Becky Taylor—in her torn bridal gown and lipstick-branded face—dropped to the floor, closed her eyes, and quietly began to sob.
* * *
—
At that exact same moment, in Becky’s room in her family’s apartment in the Majestic building—a regular seventeen-year-old girl’s room in the regular New York City of today—her parents found her phone and, on it, a final text message, written but unsent.
It read:
DEAR MOM AND DAD,
I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE: THE PRESSURE, THE EXPECTATIONS, THE BURDEN OF THOSE EXPECTATIONS.
PLEASE DON’T COME LOOKING FOR ME, BECAUSE YOU WON’T FIND ME. I WILL BE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER, AT PEACE.
I LOVE YOU.
BECKY
THE SCHOOL WHERE NEW GIRLS GO MISSING
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money….
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
NEW SCHOOL, NEW LIFE
It was my first day at school in a new city, but I don’t think you’d find many people feeling sorry for me.
On paper, my life was the ultimate fantasy of the average American sixteen-year-old girl.
I was living in New York City on the Upper West Side, in the historic San Remo building, in an enormous apartment that overlooked Central Park. The San Remo is one of those imperious twin-towered art deco co-ops that were built in the 1930s and are now occupied by movie stars, Wall Street masters of the universe, Saudi princes, and anybody else who can afford to pay $20 million in cash for an apartment.
But as far as I saw it, my life sucked.
Wrenched from my childhood home in Memphis, I had been transplanted at the age of sixteen into the most fearsome milieu of teenage bitchiness imaginable: that of ultra-wealthy New York.
Enrolled at a new school in a new city, away from the father I loved, living with a mother I despised and a stepfather who tolerated me, I hated it. The only plus was that my twin brother, Red—ever calm and easygoing—was in it with me.
The first day of school didn’t start well.
I dressed in my uniform: an utterly sexless white button-down blouse under a navy-and-green tartan dress. The white shirt was long-sleeved with stiff buttoned cuffs. A racing-green ribbon was the only hair accessory allowed. In a school as well-to-do as Monmouth, jewelry can be a serious issue—girls get competitive about this sort of thing, and it was entirely possible for a female student to wear earrings worth a few hundred thousand dollars. So all jewelry was forbidden. The only other accessory permitted was a watch.
I didn’t mind the plainness of it all, or the sexlessness, for that matter. At my old school in Memphis—an all-girls school—there had been no dress code, so the student body had worn whatever they liked, and as the girls got older, every day became a fashion contest. And as hips became curvier and breasts became larger, the waistlines of jeans got lower and the necklines of tops plunged farther. In the stifling heat of the Tennessee summer, the amount of skin on display was outrageous.
One hot summer’s day, as I saw two male gym teachers ogling the asses of three seventeen-year-old girls in short shorts, I overheard a female teacher say, “Are you kidding me?”
But this was not the case at The Monmouth School (never forget to include the “The”; they will correct you). It was a learning institution, and uniforms—for both boys and girls—were one of the ways it kept its students’ eyes on their books and not on the opposite sex.
As I said, I didn’t mind this. For my own reasons, I especially liked the long-sleeved shirt. And I always wore a watch on my left wrist: a chunky yet very practical white Casio G-Shock.
My mother, on the other hand, had all sorts of issues with the school’s uniform policy.
She positioned me in front of the mirror in our entry hall and began redoing my hair from behind me. She twirled a couple of mousy brown strands down around my temples.
“Don’t yank your hair back off your face like that, Skye, darling,” she said. “You could be pretty, you know, if you tried a little.”
I bristled inwardly, but I didn’t let it show. I’d heard a thousand comments like this before.
Why don’t you wear something a little more flattering?
Stop slouching, pull your shoulders back, push your little titties forward.
Eyes up, child. Honestly, how will you ever get a boy to notice you if you never look up?
And most cutting of all: You know, Skye, I really think you could stand to lose a little bit of weight.
Of course, my mom was fully made up even though it was 7:30 in the morning.
She had already been up for two hours by then, and in that time she had run six miles on her treadmill and done a hundred sit-ups and a twenty-minute mindfulness meditation. My mother was forty-five with the body of a twenty-five-year-old, and today her sleek form had been poured into a perfectly fitted Prada dress. Her long auburn hair, as always, had been professionally done, every curl and wave carefully arranged. (Our live-in maid, Rosa, in addition to being my mother’s personal servant, confidante, and informer, had once been a TV makeup artist, which no doubt had secured her the job.)
Oh, and my mother wore heels, even in our apartment at that hour.
“Skye,” she said, “this is a hard truth that nobody wants t
o admit, but you have to learn how the world judges women: it’s not what is in our heads that matters. It’s the package. How else do you think I won your stepfather?”
A quick little disappearing act under the table at the restaurant on your first date? I thought uncharitably. I’d overheard Mom revealing that to her best friend, Estelle, one night on the phone after she’d had a few too many cosmopolitans.
My mother, Deidre Allen (née Rogers, née Billingsley)—one-time belle of the Memphis Ladies’ Auxiliary’s debutante ball and second runner-up in the Miss Tennessee beauty pageant—had only a high school education to her name, but that hadn’t stopped her from rising to the peak of New York society and adopting a daily ritual of shopping, lunching, yoga, and cocktails.
Thankfully, at that moment, Red came down the stairs, dressed in his Monmouth blazer, tie, and trousers, and said, “You ready, Blue?”
I loved my twin brother. His real name was Alfred, but since time immemorial everyone had called him Red. With his carelessly tousled copperish hair and his elfin face—which matched mine—he somehow managed to make his private school uniform look cool.
I don’t know how he did it.