The Secret Runners of New York Read online

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it together when they get back on Friday night.’

  On Monday, all the talk at school was about the recently held Cotillion.

  Misty—despite all the horrors we had seen on our run after the Cote—was in her element, basking in the attention.

  But her mood visibly darkened the moment she saw Jenny the following day.

  Their heated exchange at the Cotillion was clearly still on her mind. I got the impression that it wasn’t often that someone got the better of Misty Collins in a verbal spat, but Jenny had and Misty didn’t like it.

  ‘How’s your dad doing, Jenny?’ she asked airily in the corridor on Tuesday. ‘After the divorce, do you think you’ll live with him or with your mom and the tennis pro? I hope you’re okay, though. I wouldn’t want you to run out of Xanax and slash your wrists in despair.’

  Jenny visibly stiffened, but she didn’t take the bait. She just rolled her eyes at Misty.

  But then she turned to me.

  It wasn’t a fleeting glance this time.

  The withering look Jenny gave me was far worse than the one she’d given Misty. It was the look you gave someone who had breached your trust. Shit. I was going to have to talk to her.

  But for some reason, Jenny didn’t show up for school on Wednesday or Thursday, so I didn’t get the chance.

  And then on Thursday I experienced a different kind of conundrum.

  At lunchtime, in the space of five minutes, I received two invitations: Bo asked me to meet him after school at the Met to study and Misty asked me to join her and Griff once again after school at The Plaza for high tea.

  I didn’t know what to do. I really wanted to see Bo, alone, in our private place, but I didn’t want to upset Misty. I especially didn’t want to decline her invitation and have her ask, ‘Well, what are you doing instead?’

  I decided to go to The Plaza and hurry over to the Met afterward.

  When I arrived at The Plaza’s private tea room, Misty and Griff were already there, in their usual seats by the fireplace. They were, however, engaged in intense conversation. Not wanting to interrupt, I waited behind a lattice screen nearby.

  Griff was saying, ‘Only fifteen families got invited to the Retreat and mine wasn’t one of them, so I’m screwed unless my brain is in the 0.5% that survives the cloud. You gotta give me your gem when you go. Then I can hide inside the tunnel when we pass through the gamma cloud and come out after.’

  ‘I thought your dad had money?’ Misty said.

  She said it with serious judgement. She might as well have said, ‘I thought you were one of us.’ (With his renovated-townhouse-garage, I thought Griff’s father had money, too.)

  ‘Not in fucking cash,’ Griff said. ‘He’s a theatre producer. He spent all his cash on our apartment and the garage to keep up appearances. Most of it he borrows against his intellectual property rights. You know how it is: asset rich, cash poor.’

  ‘Oh,’ Misty said. She clearly didn’t know how it was at all. You were either rich or you weren’t.

  ‘So can you leave me the gem?’ Griff asked.

  Misty paused. ‘Okay. Everyone going to the Retreat is supposed to leave by helicopter on March 15, but knowing what I know, I’m going to make sure my parents leave before then. Be here on Sunday the 11th at noon. I’ll bring the gem or I’ll send someone with it.’

  Griff fell back into his chair. ‘You’re a lifesaver. Thanks.’

  ‘Anytime,’ Misty said.

  I took that as my opportunity to join them and I stepped around the screen and said my hellos.

  Ninety minutes later, I hurried to the Met where I found Bo in our café. Only he wasn’t studying, he was staring up at a television on the wall, transfixed.

  Everyone in the café was.

  ‘Check it out . . .’ Bo said.

  I looked up at the TV.

  It was tuned to CNN and showing footage of a siege of some kind.

  The ticker tape at the bottom of the screen read: breaking news: attack at university club, nyc.

  A female reporter was standing on the street, speaking urgently into a microphone: ‘—six kitchen employees armed with AR-15 assault rifles took control of the exclusive University Club an hour ago. After barricading all the exits, they vandalised the outside of the building. Then the shooting started and they began tossing dead bodies of members out the upper-floor windows. The police have now surrounded the building but they don’t have many options: the assailants are entrenched, well armed and not likely to come out anytime soon—’

  A sudden burst of gunfire made the reporter duck. The camera filming her skewed wildly, tilting up in time to show a bloodied body come sailing out of a window.

  Screams of horror. Shouts from the cops.

  The camera remained on the building and I saw the graffiti on its limestone face, written in bright red paint:

  Similar incidents were occurring around the world, an inordinate number of them in Europe.

  Why the collapse of social order began in Europe, no-one really knew.

  Perhaps it was because the scientists there had been more in agreement about the catastrophic effects of the gamma cloud (almost all of them had declared with grim certainty that the world was going to end, whereas American scientists continued to offer mixed views depending on which cable news channel they appeared on). Then again, maybe it was because of the centuries-old and highly visible class distinctions in Europe that had long divided the Old World rich from the desperately poor.

  Whatever the case, acts of violence by the low and middle classes against the wealthy began to spread like a contagion around the world.

  A three-thousand-strong mob of unemployed young Muslims from the projects in Paris had stormed some mansions in the 7th arrondissement.

  An even larger crowd of migrants living in a squalid tent city near Calais overwhelmed the gate guards, knocked down the fences and flooded into the Channel Tunnel, walking en masse down the car lanes and train tunnels toward England.

  Gangs of masked British hooligans—whipped into a frenzy by social media—invaded homes in the posh London neighbourhoods of Belgravia and Mayfair. There were far too many of them for the police to stop.

  Similar events occurred in Germany, Italy and Spain, and in wealthy tax havens like Monaco.

  Countries that had in the past been oppressed by colonial powers—like India, Brazil and South Africa—saw even more shocking incidents of violence against the homes and symbols of the old elites.

  Whether the attackers believed this was their final chance to upend the socio-economic order, or whether they just saw an opportunity to unleash their baser instincts even if the world didn’t end, it didn’t matter.

  In the face of the end of all things, the boundaries of civilisation were no longer being recognised. The pent-up rage of the poor and middle class was being explosively released.

  And with the bloody siege at the University Club in New York—where the minimum-wage staff had risen up against the elite membership—the contagion began to spread in America.

  That was when the chaos began, in the days before the event.

  One more thing would occur that week and it would shake my world even more.

  On Friday morning Ms Blackman called a school assembly and informed us all that Jenny Johnson had disappeared.

  ANOTHER MISSING GIRL

  All the adults in my world immediately jumped to the same conclusion about Jenny: kidnapping.

  After the siege at the University Club, the wealthy of New York City were on their guard for assault, attacks and abduction. Many feared their own staff and servants.

  Women carried pocket-sized tasers and stun guns in their purses. Men now carried pistols in holsters under their jackets.

  Misty’s mother, Starley, bought a gun. (Of course, in true
Collins style, it was the height of fashion: it had a white pearl grip, gold screws and a gleaming silver barrel.)

  But the kidnapping theory had one major hole in it. No-one had demanded any kind of ransom from Jenny’s father. No-one had contacted Ken Johnson at all, let alone sent Jenny’s fingers back to him one at a time.

  And there were no signs that Jenny had run away: she had not packed anything from her room. She had simply left for school on Wednesday and vanished.

  Jenny Johnson had disappeared into thin air.

  For those keeping count, that made her the fourth girl connected to The Monmouth School to disappear without a trace in the last two years.

  Immediately after the school assembly, as one of Jenny’s friends, I was called into the headmistress’s office.

  I sat in a lone chair before five adults: Ms Blackman, Ken Johnson and three other school functionaries including the counsellor, Ms Vandermeer.

  My heart went out to Ken. His eyes were red from crying, bloodshot with worry. The bags under them were testimony to the sleepless nights he’d had in his grand yet empty apartment. His cheating wife had moved out only days before.

  I stared at Ms Blackman behind her big mahogany desk. Rapid-fire images of her in the future flashed across my mind: of her rotting corpse, in this very room, in that very chair with a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head.

  ‘Skye,’ the corpse said before I blinked back to reality and saw Ms Blackman addressing me. ‘Did Jenny say anything to you about running away, anything at all?’

  ‘No. She never said anything like that.’

  ‘Jenny suffered from clinical depression,’ Ms Blackman said. ‘Did she show any signs of despair lately? Perhaps regarding all this gamma cloud nonsense.’

  ‘No, ma’am. She seemed fine.’

  As I said this, I was thinking about Jenny’s altercation with Misty: Jenny’s verbal wit had been perfectly fine lately. Likewise, her inner strength. I recalled her flat declaration to Misty at the Cotillion: ‘You cannot hurt me.’

  Then Ken said, ‘Skye, Jenny told me that you’d hurt her feelings recently. That you’d betrayed her confidence. Is that true?’

  I froze. Oh, no.

  She really had thought it had been me who’d blabbed to Misty about her suicide attempt and she’d told Ken about it.

  But what could I say? That Misty had gone to the future, rifled through Ms Vandermeer’s filing cabinet and gleefully read Jenny’s confidential medical file?

  Damn.

  I stammered woefully. ‘That . . . that was a . . . misunderstanding.’

  The look Ken gave me broke my heart.

  I could only bow my head.

  As I left Ms Blackman’s office, my reputation as a good friend irreparably shattered, my mind raced.

  As every adult in that office knew, in the modern world it was very hard to vanish completely without a trace. Cell phone towers, security cameras at train stations and airports, ATM records: something always gave away where you were.

  Yet at The Monmouth School, four girls had done just that. What was it about the school that could make such a thing happen? What secret did it hold?

  I knew the secret.

  If you carried someone through a portal to another time and left them there, that would do it.

  And suddenly I found myself thinking about the missing girls of Monmouth and the connections they’d had to the secret runners.

  The first girl to disappear, Trina Miller: smart, pretty, a sophomore. She’d been friends with Misty . . . only for Misty to freeze her out socially when she’d started tutoring Bo Bradford. She’d vanished soon after.

  I knew nothing about the second girl, the special-needs student, Delores Barnes, the one with Down Syndrome.

  And then there was the third girl, Becky Taylor.

  She had been a year older. Popular, beautiful and clever, she’d beat out Chastity Collins for the title of Belle of the Ball at the Cotillion last year . . . and had then disappeared that very night.

  Becky had also been the leading contender to be Head Girl at Monmouth this year, but after her disappearance, Chastity took that title.

  So both Trina and Becky had clashed with the Collins girls—girls who had more than a little ruthlessness in them and who had access to their own private time portal.

  I recalled Jenny’s words at the Cote about the Collins clan: ‘Just be careful. That family is weird.’

  And now, after a particularly venomous confrontation with Misty—following months of smaller skirmishes dating back to the first school assembly—Jenny was suddenly gone.

  Could Misty and her friends really be that spiteful, that malicious? That evil?

  I liked Jenny. I liked her dad, too, and I hated seeing him in such pain. In this world of unreal wealth, superficial friends and casual entitlement, Jenny and Ken Johnson were grounded, real, decent.

  My runs with Misty’s crew were adrenaline hits, not friendship.

  But Jenny, with her similar wrist scar and our shared job, was the closest thing I had to a true friend. And wherever she was, she hated me right now.

  I had to do something about this.

  But to take action was to cross a line—like it had been back in Memphis—except that the danger in defying Misty was far greater than it had been in defying Savannah. Here it could be deadly.

  Screw it, I thought.

  I knew what I had to do.

  GETTING INSIDE

  I found Bo at lunchtime on the rooftop basketball court.

  I’d sought him out to see if I could convince him to venture into the portal with me later that day, but as it turned out, I didn’t have to.

  ‘I want to find out what happens to my family,’ he said firmly. ‘I have to know. But I don’t want to do it with the whole group. Will you come with me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I want to check out a couple of things myself. How about we go today after school?’

  Bo nodded. ‘I’ll ask Misty for the gem. Meet me at the Met at five.’

  At 4:59 p.m. I was standing on the front steps of the Met dressed in hiking boots, a North Face jacket and jeans, when my phone buzzed.

  It was a text from, of all people, my dad down in Memphis.

  hey blue!

  great news. they’re letting me out on monday (i think the coming end of the world has made the powers that be at the hospital a little more lenient).

  i’m booked on a train to nyc on tuesday. i’ll be arriving at penn stn around 3:00 p.m. on the 14th. can’t wait to see you.

  (p.s. i hope you’ve been eating your vitamin supplements and sardines!)

  love, dad

  I was both pleased and horrified. I wanted to see my dad more than anything, but I also had foreknowledge that on March 14 total societal breakdown would begin in New York. My dad would be riding that train directly into the chaos.

  I was lifting my phone to call him when Bo ascended the steps of the Met, dressed in sneakers and his lacrosse tracksuit.

  With a smile, he held up the gem. He’d got it from Misty without any fuss.

  ‘I was honest with her,’ he said. ‘I told her I wanted to see what’s going to happen to my family without the larger group.’

  ‘Did you mention that I was going with you?’ I asked. ‘I think Misty has more than a little crush on you.’

  Bo grimaced uncomfortably. ‘Yeah, I’ve kinda noticed that. And, no, I didn’t mention you were coming.’

  ‘Okay, then. Let’s do this.’

  THE INVESTIGATION RUN

  It was about 5:30 p.m. when Bo and I climbed out of the well inside the other New York.

  Bo lived at 960 Fifth Avenue, another very prestigious address in New York. Unlike the San Remo or the Dakota, celebrities did not bother to apply at ‘960’, as it was known: it existed solely for t
he ultra-wealthy elite who delighted in their wealth not being seen. The last apartment to be sold there went for $70 million, in cash.

  It was also a block away from Monmouth, which suited me fine, because that was my destination.

  We came to the entrance to 960.

  I gave Bo a solemn nod. ‘I hope it’s all okay in there. I’ll go to Monmouth while you check it out.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Bo said. ‘Oh, wait.’ He pulled something from his pocket and quickly looped it over my head: Misty’s necklace, with the gem attached to it.

  ‘Here, take this. If something happens to me, you’ll be able to get back home.’

  ‘But what if something happens to me?’ I asked. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll find you,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  With a final nod, he went into his building.

  When he was out of sight, I hurried up Fifth Avenue and dashed into the ruins of The Monmouth School.

  I went straight to Ms Vandermeer’s office, the one in which Misty and Hattie had read through the confidential files of Jenny and who-knew-how-many other students.

  In fact, the files they had been reading were still spread out messily on the floor where they had left them.

  I went straight to the filing cabinet, slid it open and flicked through the files till I found the one I was looking for:

  collins, melissa (misty)

  I’m not sure what exactly I was looking for in Misty’s file or what I expected to find. Perhaps some mention of the missing girls, some link to them.

  And there it was, right near the front of her file, a report from January of last year:

  PSYCHIATRIST’S REPORT

  Psychological appraisal following incident with

  Ms Trina Miller at The Monmouth School

  Misty is a troubled young woman. She displays both sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies. In her social interactions, she is controlling and manipulative. Or in less formal terms, she likes to get her way.