The Replaced (17 page)

It would take a while to break Tyler of whatever hero worship thing he had for Griffin, but I had every intention of dethroning her and reclaiming my place in his heart.

I knew it sounded like I wanted to control Tyler, like this was some sort of catfight where Griffin and I were fighting over a boy. But it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t about to fight Griffin, and I certainly wasn’t fighting
for Tyler
. I knew you couldn’t control a person and you couldn’t force someone to love you—you should never have to. What I was fighting for was a chance.
Our
chance.

I just wanted him to remember who I was. Who
we
were . . . together.

And if, in the end, he remembered all that, and he still
chose Griffin, then so be it.

The thing was, I didn’t think that would happen. I believed, to the very core of me, that if his memories returned, he’d still want me.

And if they didn’t . . . well, if he didn’t, then he’d fall in love with me all over again, because it wasn’t circumstance that had made us the couple we’d been, it was us. It was ingrained in us. It was who we were.

In the same way Griffin had immediately disliked Willow—the way some magnets repelled each other. Tyler and I were the ones that attracted. The ones that, no matter how far apart, would forever be drawn together.

Meant to be.

I didn’t always believe in such things, but now, finding Tyler in this Utah compound with Griffin and her fanatical militia . . . now I couldn’t believe otherwise.

“It was perfect,” I told her.

“So he remembered you?” she asked nervously.

It didn’t matter that she’d asked it nervously or that she hadn’t guessed right. “No. But he will.” I sat on my bunk. “What about you? Have you been here the whole night?”

Natty perked up. “Thom was here. They’re letting us see each other. He just left.” It was the most animated I’d ever seen her.

I wasn’t sure what to say, what I
should
say. If it were Cat, I’d ask what they did . . . like exactly
what they did
. But that definitely felt like prying. “Did you . . . have fun?”

So. Awkward.

Natty didn’t notice. She beamed as she nodded, her eyes gleaming. “We talked all night.” She lowered her voice, letting me know she was sharing a secret. “He told me more about Blackwater, and he said they call this part of it—where they’re keeping us—
Paradise
.”

I leaned closer. “Did he say why?”

“It’s like what Willow said about not trusting the government names that sound the most innocent. That if you hear something called Operation Rainbow, it’s gonna be majorly bad. Paradise is where they keep the people they don’t trust.” She shrugged with her face, her eyebrows rising and her mouth drooping. “Like us.”

I wondered if letting Thom spend the night with Natty might be a step in the right direction toward letting us off house arrest, if we might be earning our way out of Paradise.

But then I remembered the look on Griffin’s face when she’d busted Nyla for sneaking me away to meet Simon, and I sincerely doubted it. Thom and Natty might earn their freedom back, but Simon and I would likely be trapped in Paradise forever.

Just then there was a knock, or as much of a knock as there could be on a tent door, kind of a flapping sound against the canvas. I jumped up and pushed the opening aside.

I felt a surge of triumph when I saw Tyler standing there, back so soon. “Couldn’t stay away?” I beamed, unable to contain myself.

He held his hands behind his back. “I brought you something.” He said it like it was no big deal, but he was
self-conscious, and he bit his lip. It was completely adorable. “It can get kinda boring here.” And even though I understood what he was saying, I couldn’t disagree more. At this moment there was no place in the world I’d rather be than right here. This camp was the most exhilarating place I’d ever been.

He clumsily withdrew his hands and presented me with a book, his hands shaking. “It’s my favorite,” he told me, holding it gingerly, and my face nearly crumpled as I reached for it, pressing my hand over its paperback cover. The edges were worn, tattered.

I lifted my eyes to his and swallowed hard. I didn’t tell him that I’d already read this book—
his favorite
. That he’d given a copy to me before and that I’d memorized line after line and that he was the one who’d taught me the beauty of reading. “Thank you,” I managed while he let me take it from him.

Our fingers brushed, more than brushed, as the book exchanged hands and my cheeks ignited all over again.

“I can’t stay,” he whispered. “I just wanted to give you this. I gotta go.” He glanced back at me once more after he ducked his head, leaving Natty and me in our tent as he left to meet Griffin, or do whatever it is her trainees were supposed to be doing all day.

I clutched the book to my heart.

“I see what you mean,” Natty joked when I finally spun around and saw her watching me. “A book. That’s pretty serious.”

“It’s
Fahrenheit 451,
” I breathed, ignoring her mocking tone as I held the book even tighter. “It was the first gift he ever gave me.”

The bantering look melted from her face. “He doesn’t remember?”

“It doesn’t matter. He gave it to me again. It means something.”

Natty didn’t argue, and I went to my cot and sat down with my treasure, looking at a cover I’d looked at a hundred times before, and ran my fingers over it. This wasn’t just about the book.

But as I peeled the cover back and began thumbing through the pages, my heart throbbed savagely, achingly.

Tyler might not readily recall the other things from our old life together the way I did, but they were still there, buried somewhere in his subconscious. I knew for sure because I was looking right at them with my very own eyes.

The best things in life are worth the risk
.

The phrase was scribbled in Tyler’s familiar handwriting across the top of one of the pages, and had been traced over again and again, as if he’d considered them. Chewed on them. Come back to them time and time again.

I wondered if he even knew who he’d written them for . . . if he knew he’d meant them for me. Or if that was what haunted him. If the memory was right there, elusive and insubstantial and just out of his reach.

I could picture them clearly, though, even if he couldn’t. Vibrant and crisp and artfully chalk-drawn on the road
between our houses:
The best things in life are worth the risk
.

That’s what he’d written. About me. About us.

The birdcage was there on the page too, with the small bird escaping from it.

And as I flipped through the book, there were others. Tyler had copied the chalk pathway he’d drawn for me—the one that had extended from his side of the road to mine, joining my house to his. Him to me. And the words he’d drawn over the top of it:

I’ll remember you always
.

It was still true, I told myself.

Those memories might not be right at the surface, but they were absolutely-totally-
undeniably
there, waiting to be called back. The book, and what he’d scribbled inside of it, was proof of that.

I thumbed through the pages, and for the first time in forever I hardly wondered what time it was, as instead I let myself get lost in the drawings and words, and in the passages I’d read before. I let all of it dredge up the past and tried to hold on to the feelings they elicited . . . the emotions, the sensations, the memories.

I got lost in Tyler.

I barely noticed when Simon sat down beside me.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, even though we both knew he hadn’t.

I shoved the book beneath my pillow, right next to my
stolen copy of
Slaughterhouse-Five,
not wanting to share it with him—the book itself or the meaning behind it. When I glanced at my watch, I was stunned to realize that hours had passed. Glancing around, I was even more surprised that Natty was gone. How had I lost track for so long? “What’s happening?” Simon wore a serious expression, and my stomach dropped. “Did something happen to Tyler?”

Hurt flashed behind Simon’s copper eyes, and immediately I regretted letting Tyler’s name slip past my lips. I might not understand what had happened between Simon and me, which pretty much amounted to a whole lot of nothing, at least from my vantage point, but that didn’t mean I needed to rub this whole Tyler-coming-back thing in his face. Simon had never seen things the way I had. That I wasn’t available the way he’d wanted me to be, no matter how much I’d protested. He’d made it pretty clear he wanted something between us.

“No. He’s fine.” His voice was flat. “I came to check on you.”

“Sorry,” I said. And then again, my whole body relaxing: “Really. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I just . . .” I sighed because it wasn’t really a mystery what had gotten into me. It was everything. Being here at Blackwater, finding Tyler the way we had, which should have been the best thing ever except that he didn’t remember anything about us, and then learning about Simon’s history with Griffin and Thom and Willow. It was . . .
a lot
to take in.

Simon’s shoulders fell. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry.” His expression was pensive. “I shouldn’t have put so much pressure on you.”

We were silent for a long time after that, not in a weird way, but in a comfortable way. The way I wished things could have been between us all along. This was the Simon I felt like I could confide in. Count on.

Outside, the constant shout of someone calling drills filtered into the tent.

“So, what’s with that, anyway? All the training?” I finally asked.

Simon didn’t miss a beat. “Preparation,” he said, like the answer was obvious.

But it wasn’t obvious to me. “Preparation for what?”

“For a war.”

There was no way I’d just heard him right. “Are you kidding? Griffin’s preparing for
war
? Who could she possibly be going to war with?”

Simon shrugged like this was no big deal, but it so completely
was
a big deal. “The NSA?” he said. “Maybe the world. Pretty much anyone who messes with her.”

I wasn’t even sure what to say to that. “I mean, I get the idea of
preparation
.” I didn’t actually use air quotes on the last word, but there was no missing my skepticism. “I’d like to stay in one piece as much as the next girl, but really? From what you’ve said, the other camps lay low, like Thom and the Silent Creek camp. Why can’t she just do that? Seems like she’s got a pretty good thing going here . . . you know, in
the desert. Does she really think a bunch of buffed-up teens stand a snowball’s chance in hell against
the government
?”

Simon leaned closer when he asked, “You wanna know why Griffin has such a grudge against the government?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I guess it helps to know where she’s coming from . . . what she thinks of us. It’s pretty messed up, what happened to her.”

“Of us?” I asked hesitantly, because wasn’t that a strange way to phrase it? Griffin was
like
us.

Swallowing hard, Simon pushed on. “Remember when you asked me if I ever felt like a monster, knowing I had alien DNA?”

I winced. “I didn’t mean it. I was just . . . having a hard time accepting . . .” I shrugged. “You know . . . it’s weird.”

“I hear ya,” Simon said. “Weird doesn’t even begin to explain it. But the thing is, Griff never got to that point: acceptance. She doesn’t even call us hybrids, the way we do. She uses a different word: chimera. It
literally
means monster.”

“Monster,” I repeated numbly, feeling sick that I’d ever said that word myself.

The truth was, I felt exactly-wholly-
completely
identical to the same person I’d always been. If it weren’t for the fact that I knew, logically, that my body had been changed at a genetic level, I probably wouldn’t even believe it.

“But she’s one of us. Why would she say that?”

“Griffin’s case is different from ours,” Simon explained. “Not different in the sense that she’s not a hybrid, because
she is. But different in the
reason
she’s a hybrid.”

I raised my eyebrow, prompting him to go on.

“Her dad worked at this place called the Los Alamos National Laboratory, back in the ’50s. It was the same place they did the first atomic bomb tests back in ’45.” Simon chewed his lower lip before continuing. “Her dad was kind of a big deal—some super scientist who knew a whole helluva lot about biochemistry. This was right after Watson and Crick had discovered the double helical structure of DNA, so there was still a lot to learn in the field.”

“Apparently, there still is,” I interjected. “Otherwise, why would the Daylighters be so desperate to get their hands on us?”

“I think even without the alien intervention there’s still a lot to learn. But yeah, I think we’re somewhat
exceptional,
” Simon added. “There was also a lot of fringe activity in the government around these covert alien meetings, supposedly involving President Eisenhower.”

I remembered this. “Jett told me about those. I think he called them the First Contact meetings. He said there were all kinds of scientists and high-up officials and even that President Eisenhower had these meetings with aliens. It sounds crazy.”

“Crazy, maybe, but hard to dispute when you know the truth,” Simon said. “Griffin’s father was one of the scientists invited to the meetings. Only he didn’t just get invited . . .” Simon stopped and inhaled, because apparently what he had to say next required a deep-breath kind of delivery. “He
offered Griffin as some sort of . . .
goodwill contribution
to the efforts.”

“Shut up,” I scoffed, but I seriously doubted Simon was making this stuff up, so what I was really thinking was: How messed up is that? “And they took her?” I asked, but the answer was obvious: of course they’d taken her, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

Cat had always referred to scenarios like these as train-wreck moments.

Of course, Cat had always meant something along the lines of the kind of nasty breakup where one person cheats on the other, or juicy scandals, like when Mr. Jasper got caught breaking into the girls’ locker room and trying on our stinky gym uniforms. That sort of thing.