The Secret Runners - Hardcover

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Matthew Reilly is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of adult thrillers, including The Great Zoo of China and the Scarecrow and Jack West series. His books have been published in over twenty languages and have sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide. This is his first novel for young adults. Matthew lives in Los Angeles.
matthewreilly.com

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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 to 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. 

Hell, sometimes I didn’t know how he and I had shared the same womb. 

A bare two minutes older than me, Red was everything I was not: chill and all-but-unflappable. Nothing could rattle him. “It’s that extra level of maturity I possess,” he’d tease me. “Since I am a little bit older than you.” 

He made friends easily, effortlessly. You could throw Red into a room full of strangers, and within twenty minutes, he’d be chatting and laughing with a bunch of them. 

I wished I could do that. 

I liked to think I was pretty good at small talk and could get along with most people. The problem was the intro. 

I was painfully shy when I met people for the first time. I just had to get to the conversation. Once there, I was actually okay; reaching it was my problem. 

Blue had been my dad’s nickname for me--my real dad’s--as in sky blue. (I actually couldn’t remember him ever using my real name.) Get it? Red and Blue. And since my dad’s name was Dwight, he had loved to say, “Look at us three: Red, Dwight, and Blue!” 

Dad jokes. You hate them when you hear them every day, but trust me, you sure do miss ’em when he’s gone. 

I said, “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.” 

I yanked myself from my mother’s grip and got out of there as fast as I could. 

Our new school was directly on the other side of Central Park, maybe half a mile away, so Red and I walked there. 

I have to admit, despite all the other things I hated about my life, I liked that walk. 

Our building was on Central Park West, not far from the American Museum of Natural History, and Monmouth was on the...