“How many are there? Outliers, I mean,” I ask after a few minutes. She pauses and looks up. She is not blocking me anymore. And what I feel from her is a mix of nerves and a tiny flicker of hope—hope that she might find something in me that she’s been looking for since she lost Kelsey. “I met someone at the gym and she made it sound like people came around looking for Leo all the time, which I’m guessing means they were looking for you. You’ve found other Outliers, right?”

Riel turns back to the computer.

“After I realized that Quentin was full of shit, but before we bailed from the camp, I grabbed as much of your dad’s stuff as I could—background research, copies of sample tests, that kind of thing. Enough so that with the help of a few psych geniuses on campus here that Leo knows, we were able to assemble a basic Outlier self-test. Not like official scientific or whatever—there’s a disclaimer. But so far it seems decently accurate.”

“And what did you do with it?”

“Posted it online.” She is proud of this fact, but also a little uneasy. “Now you can Google ‘Feel Test’ and find it.”

“What’s the point?”

“People have a right to know who they are,” she says, seeming appalled that I don’t realize that. But also I can feel her hesitation (despite her attempts to block me). Like she isn’t entirely sure about these things she’s already done. “Besides, if there’s going to be a war, I’m sure as hell going to be ready with an army.”

“A war,” I say. Not a question. More an idea I am trying on for size. And it fits in a way that I wish it did not. “Can I ask you something else?”

“I guess,” Riel says.

“Do you think being an Outlier is more than being able to read how people feel?”

“Definitely,” she says without hesitating. “A lot more.”

“Do you sometimes know that things are going to happen before they do?”

Riel turns and looks dead at me. “All the time.” And I feel it then: that thing I had so envied when I read the notes in 1984. What Riel and the real Kelsey had shared. An actual connection. “That’s the worst part of what happened to Kelsey. I think I kind of knew it was going to happen. And I should have stopped her.”

Outlier Rule #5: With enough practice we won’t just be able to know people’s feelings. We will know what’s going to happen.

“But knowing that something bad is going to happen isn’t the same thing as being able to stop it,” I say.

“But it should be,” Riel says. “It could be.”