The Replaced (20 page)

“Mine . . . ? Mine, what?”

Jett grimaced. “Yours is missing that.”

I wanted to say something along the lines of, it seemed like they were making a big deal out of nothing, I mean, wasn’t that a good thing, me not having any of that alien DNA mixed in?

Simon jumped in then. “He doesn’t mean yours is missing the alien kind. He means yours is missing the human kind.”

And like Cat used to say:
Boom goes the dynamite!

Just like that, the world slanted beneath my feet. I thought I’d heard everything. Or maybe I’d finally just cracked and this was me slipping deliciously-deliriously-
painlessly
into sweet insanity, because holy hell, who can even handle hearing something like that?

Not I, said the Fly,
another of my dad’s stupid expressions that popped into my head, and for the first time in forever I wished I
couldn’t
hear his voice.

Not human? Not at all?

So, what, then . . . ?

“Nope. No way.” I shook my head, unwilling to even engage their level of crazy. “It’s not even possible.”

Griffin spoke up, playing the voice of reason. “Possible? Kyra, look around you. Think about who we are. Are any of us really in any position to question what is, and isn’t, possible anymore? And clearly you already knew there was something different about you.” She said it kinder, and even used my name, and almost made me believe she was trying to be nice.

“Different?” I shot back. “Different is having a weird eye color or needing to wear braces for an extra year. What you’re talking about doesn’t make me
different,
it makes me . . .” I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t even know what it makes me.” I wanted to pull my hair out because what they were saying was just . . . too much.

But.

Griffin wasn’t so far off with the whole who-are-we-to-question-what’s-possible thing.

And then there was that one thing, with the NSA guy at the Tacoma facility, that one down in the ducts, where he’d shone his flashlight on me and said, “
It’s you,
” all serious-like. And again, with Agent Truman, when he’d told those guys in the alley, “
She’s the one we want
.”

I’d figured it meant something, even while I’d tried to convince myself it was nothing.

“So, what does this all mean?” I finally said. “I mean, how and why and . . .
how
?” I felt broken as I held out my hands, palms up as if to say, how was I even standing there if
I wasn’t me? “If I’m not human, then what the heck am I? It doesn’t make sense.” I just kept shaking my head, like some damaged bobble-head doll.

Simon reached for my hand, and even though my heart fully and completely belonged to Tyler, just like it had all along, I let Simon give me this—his comfort, and his strength—because I needed it. I needed it so damn much. “You’re more human than anyone I’ve ever known,” he whispered, and I almost smiled, because usually when people called each other human, they were explaining away making mistakes, so it should have been an insult, him calling me human like that. Except I knew he meant it in the best possible way, so I gave him a quick squeeze in return.

“My father used to tell me about how he first met them,” Griffin said, turning her gaze toward the ceiling, the sky. “Some called them the First Contact meetings, but my father, he just called it ‘the Meeting’ and we all knew what he meant. People think the president was there.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was at some point, but not for the first one.”

The room went silent while she talked; even the computers seemed to hum less noisily, as if her words had suddenly become a physical presence demanding to be noticed, something you could feel and see and taste.

“He said they struck a deal at
the Meeting
—those scientists, the ones like my dad, and whatever those things were, from wherever they came from. A deal?” She gaped, leveling her gaze on us. “Can you believe that? To trade people
for technology.” She gave a peevish shake of her head. “It’s not like we had a choice in the matter, about whether to agree or not. People had already been taken and experimented on, even before then. The agreement only ensured that the government would be
compensated
—paid in the form of cutting-edge technology—for turning a blind eye to these abductions. They would benefit from this
obviously
advanced culture.” She stressed the word
obviously,
making her less-than-generous feelings known.

I felt like I was gonna be sick as I tried to process where I fit in all this. Whether I was supposed to consider myself part of this “advanced culture” now, or if I was still just plain old me.

I thought about how thickheaded I’d been when we’d gone through my dad’s things and I’d seen all those stories about government cover-ups, all the accounts of secret files and covert government agencies, and how I’d scoffed at the very idea. I almost felt stupid for being so close-minded.

“Sounds like your dad got exactly what he deserved.” I didn’t pretend not to know what Griffin had done to him. As far as I was concerned, anyone who was willing to let his own daughter be used as an alien-lab-rat in exchange for some cool gadgets had punched his own one-way ticket to hell.

Griffin didn’t comment one way or the other about her father. “In the end, the deal never worked out the way my dad, or the other scientists and politicians, wanted it to. The ‘technology’ our side was promised wasn’t delivered in the
form of ray guns or X-ray glasses or anything like that. The scientists were promised alien DNA that they could experiment on, that they’d planned to learn from. Potentially even harness.” She grinned a wicked grin. “There was only one problem with their plan: we were harder to catch than they thought we’d be.”

I gasped, finally clueing in. “
We
are the alien technology?” No wonder we were constantly being sought after. Hunted.

She shrugged. “Think about it. Our metabolisms are slower. We need less food and sleep than normal humans, we age ridiculously slowly, and we heal spontaneously. Why wouldn’t we be valuable? What pharmaceutical company wouldn’t pay millions, even billions, to get their hands on a few strands of our DNA? Or even better, what government wouldn’t kill for an army of soldiers with lethal blood?”

The way she said it, like we could be used as a weapon, made my skin crawl.

“And what do they get out of it, this trade? The aliens?”

Simon jumped in. “We’ve asked ourselves the same thing a million different ways. Thing is, we’re not even sure who they are exactly. Maybe our DNA has something they need. Or maybe, the way we use lab animals,
we’re
just guinea pigs to them. Maybe they’re doing all this weird shit to us, and then releasing us back into the wild.”

“And me?” I asked. “What does that make me? If I’m not . . . still me?” I looked at my hands again, my fingers, the lines running across my palms, because they looked so . . . so
ordinary. Same as they always had.

Griffin sighed. “My dad liked to talk. He was one of those guys who liked the sound of his own voice, and when I was”—she exhaled again—“when I was one of his
subjects,
a captive audience, he told me one of the things both sides wanted all along was to create a replicate—an exact human copy. Not a hybrid, but more like an alien clone that looked entirely human. It was what they referred to as a
Replacement
. Made from the genetic material of the aliens but still containing all the memories and life experiences of the human they were replicating.

“My dad called it the ultimate scientific achievement. He said it would decide what truly defines life: heredity or history.”

I recoiled from her words. Her explanation. Especially since I was “the human” in question. “Life?” I had to ask. “What does that even mean? My heart is beating, my blood—even though it’s not the same human blood it was before—is still pumping. I’m breathing. Aren’t those the things that make me alive?”

“Are they?” Simon cut in. “Is it your genetics that make you the person you are? Or is it about
who
you are? The other things—the stuff your parents taught you about being a good person or that you throw a killer rise ball and win championships—all the things that have nothing to do with DNA or blood . . .” He reached out and tugged at my new fake brunette hair. “. . . or hair color?”

I thought about something Tyler had said to me, back
when I’d first explained to him about the whole healing and aging thing, and he’d tried to convince me that neither of these things changed who
I
was: “It’s your memories and life experiences, your hopes and fears and dreams and passions that make you who you are, and none of those things have changed, have they?” and I wondered if that applied here too. If he’d still feel the same way now.

I wasn’t so sure.

“Who else knows?” I asked, suddenly wishing no one knew, not even me. I wanted to go away. To start over and never think about this, about how different I was again.

“Natty was here when we opened the file,” Thom explained, and he’d been so quiet I’d almost forgotten he was here at all. “She didn’t see the DNA report, but she already saw how fast you heal when we were rescuing Willow.”

I heard Griffin suck in a sharp breath. “Heal?” she repeated dazedly. “No one mentioned that.”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “She heals like”—he snapped his fingers—“
that
. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

Except, I remembered what Tyler said: that Griffin had told him he could heal faster than anyone else at camp. I wondered, then, was it a leap to read more into that? If we shared more than just being Returned?

I opened my mouth to ask Griffin what she thought, when she caught my eye and shook her head at me. The action was discreet and curt, but the message was loud and clear: I needed to keep my mouth shut.

Hadn’t she said the same thing to Tyler? Told him not to tell anyone?

I glanced around—at Jett and Simon and Thom—and tried to imagine who, in here, she didn’t trust. But I did as she instructed, swallowing back my questions.

Inwardly, however, they buzzed through my brain.

Did Tyler have any new and unique abilities too? Was there anything he could do the other Returned couldn’t?

And what about that other part—that thing where I’d been gone for five whole years? Was that because I was a Replaced and not just a regular Returned?

If that was the case, then where did that leave Tyler? I didn’t know how long he’d been gone, but it couldn’t have been too long. It certainly hadn’t been five years. Days at most. Yet when I’d come back, my memory had been whole, complete. His was a mess. Sure, he remembered things from before, but there was a definite gap, a missing chunk from right before he’d been taken . . .

. . . the entire part where we’d fallen in love.

It was the best part, if you asked me.

“Let me ask you a question.” Griffin’s eyes narrowed as her brief flash of concern over Tyler was safely tucked away. “How much control do you have over this
telekinetic thing
you have? Can you . . .” Her brows fell in a silent ultimatum. “. . . can you show it to me, so I can see how it works?”

I shook my head. “I wish. I have to be
focused
.”

Focused
was putting it nicely. Angry, panicked, completely
freaked out, all those probably made more sense.

Griffin nodded then, and I thought the gesture was for me, a kind of
Okay, I get it
.

But then the door opened and six of her soldiers stormed in all at once. They were armed to the teeth, their black rifles held at the ready, and suddenly the room that had been empty seconds earlier was busting at the seams.

I’d been wrong. Everything wasn’t okay, and Griffin didn’t
get it
. The nod had been a signal, all right, but not for me.

Simon was bulldozed out of the way by two of Griffin’s giants, who moved to stand on either side of me, while two others flanked Griffin. The two remaining soldiers stayed on their toes, eyeballing Thom and Simon vigilantly.

Jett, apparently, was not a threat.

Simon didn’t seem concerned that he was outmanned or outclassed. He jumped to his feet, his face red. “What the hell is this?” He shot daggers at Griffin, and then to Thom, who stared at him blankly.

“I’m sorry to have to do this,” Griffin said as one of the guys—a hulk of a dude—snatched me by the arm. I saw Simon lunge for him, but one of the other giants turned and pointed his gun, the nose of it aimed directly at Simon’s chest, causing him to crash against it.

It wasn’t aimed at his shoulder or his leg, places that could heal, but at his heart, and I doubted the gun would be firing beanbags.

“Simon, don’t!” I cried, just as Jett got to his feet too. Thom stayed where he was, his hands in the air.

I had no idea what was happening, but whatever Griffin was up to, it wasn’t worth letting any of them get hurt, or worse, killed. I turned back to Griffin. “Leave them out of this.”

Her brows pulled together. “They were
never
in it. No one was. This is about you, and only you.” She turned her back on me as she told the guys who were on each side of me now, squeezing my arms and dragging me toward the door, “Take her to the holding cell. And don’t take your eyes off her.”

Simon was still yelling, screaming, at Griffin when his voice finally faded to oblivion.

REPLACED
.

The word made me feel
not real
. Like a thing—a mannequin or one of those wax statues you can barely tell apart from the real celebrities they’re fashioned after. Like Wax Elvis or Wax Marilyn Monroe or Wax Lady Gaga.

Maybe I was Wax Kyra.

Except that I could eat and breathe and think. And feel. I knew because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t buy into this crazy theory about my memories being transplanted—the memories that kept running through my head, the ones I couldn’t let go of even now. The ones of
my dad and Tyler and my mom and Cat, and even Austin. I couldn’t make myself believe they didn’t belong to this body, a body that wasn’t really my own.

They felt real. They felt real all the way to my bones. Like they were ingrained in every molecule, every cell, every breath I took.

They were as much a part of me, of this body and who I was, as the skin that surrounded me.

I even tried pinching myself, because maybe this whole thing, being told I was no longer human, had all been a dream—one long, whacked-out, surreal dream. But the pain receptors,
my
pain receptors, convinced me otherwise. This was happening, all right.

Replaced,
I silently repeated the word again. Replicated. Copied. Made from an amalgamation of alien DNA and human memories. It didn’t matter how I tried to reframe it—I had a hard time making it fit. But only because it was so damn freaky.

Yet I couldn’t deny it either. There were too many things that pointed to the fact that it might be true. Things that separated me from the other Returned.

So the question was: Could I live with that, if it turned out Griffin was right? If I really was a Replaced?

I guess the answer was simple: What choice did I have? I wasn’t exactly a woe-is-me, I-can’t-go-on-another-day kind of person.

Person
. Another word that no longer seemed to fit.

But what if Simon was right? What if I could allow
myself to believe what he’d said about what made me human? What if all these memories and thoughts and feelings really were enough?

I had to cling to that, because deep down, I knew who I was. I was still Kyra Agnew, regardless of what my blood tests showed. No one could take my past,
my
history, the narration of
my life
away from me. Although, evidently, they could take away my freedom. Exhibit A, the claustrophobic cell I was now confined within.

I forced myself not to think too long about how dark and narrow this space really was. It made the first place we’d been contained in seem glamorous and roomy by comparison. If I stared for too long at the walls, or considered how far one of them was from another, I got that tight-chested feeling that was almost claustrophobia. Yet another reminder that I was more than just a bunch of chromosomes strung together, because that squeezing in my chest was part of what made me the same as I’d always been.

Instead I looked out, past the narrow bars—because yes, there were bars just like in a real jail—to where two of those thugs were guarding me like there was some chance I might somehow rip off the bars in a fit of rage and try to escape. I wondered what they’d been told about me. I wondered, too, what they thought I was actually capable of, because there was no way these bars were budging. Trust me, I’d tried.

If only I could bend iron with my cool telekinesis thing—that was what kept looping through my mind.

And, of course, Tyler. I thought about Tyler a lot.

But also the bending-bars thing, because how cool would that be, if I could just King Kong my way out of here with my mind?

And then maybe I could find something to knock those two goons out with . . . again with my mind since, hello, they were giants.

But as far as I could see, there was nothing I could use against them. Nothing I could levitate with my new “alien ability.”

So I paced—not far, and mostly in tight circles in front of the bunk that was bolted to the wall, doing my best to steer clear of the stainless steel toilet, not because it was dirty or anything—in fact it sparkled so much it was practically mirror-like—but because it was a toilet, and well, gross. I paced and I checked the time. Mostly I checked the time, giving myself permission to just . . . stare. To watch the second hand. To track it as it moved around and around and around.

Hours had passed, and I’d spent most of those doing nothing and thinking everything.

I was surprised, then, when Griffin stepped beneath the dull lights of the hallway. I hadn’t even realized there’d been a change of shift until she nodded to the two new guards, indicating for them to give us some privacy.

Like good little minions, they did as they were told.

“What do you want?” I didn’t bother getting up, just stayed where I was with my hands lying on my stomach.

“We need to talk,” she said, her voice even. “We have a problem.”

“Oh we do, do we?” I asked, lacing my voice with as much sarcasm as I could round up. “Seems to me you got everything under control.”

She waited a second before adding, “It’s Tyler.”

She had me. I couldn’t pretend not to care, and I sat up.

“That’s what I thought.” I wanted to wipe the smug look off her face, but this was about Tyler, and I bit back the
Bitch
hovering on the tip of my tongue. “I think we both know why I’m here,” she continued, her voice way, way lower now, like she didn’t want even her own guards to hear what she’d come here to say. “I think he’s . . .
like you
.”

I went to the bars, to where she was clutching them, and I leaned close so we were nose to nose. “How long was he gone?” I asked, trying to piece it together.

Her dark eyes searched mine. “When we found him, he wasn’t sure, so we had to figure it out for him. Daylight Division chatter put his disappearance somewhere around twenty-five days ago.” I did the math in my head. That was right. That was when he and my dad and Agent Truman had vanished from Devil’s Hole. “We picked him up some five days later—the day he said he was returned.”

Five days, not five years.

Still, that was three days past the forty-eight-hour mark.

She must’ve read my thoughts, because she said, “I knew it was too long, and at first I assumed he was confused. It
happens. People—those of us who’ve gone through it—tend to lose track of time. It’s disorienting. But even when I figured out he was right, I didn’t tell him how
unusual
that was.” She didn’t say
unheard of,
because we both knew that wasn’t true; I was proof of that. “And then . . . when he could heal the way he could, I assumed they’d done something more to him. More than they’d done to the rest of us. It just never occurred to me . . .”

I nodded because I knew what she meant—even with everything her father had told her it would be a stretch to assume Tyler had been successfully Replaced.

I could hardly believe it myself.

“His memory,” I whispered. “Do you think that’s a side effect? Maybe they sent him back too soon . . . ?”

“Maybe.” She looked over her shoulder. Ever since we’d been here at Blackwater, I hadn’t known her to be anything but confident and in command. It was strange to see her so spooked.

“Do you think he’ll get it back? The part he’s missing.”

Griffin gave me a look. “That’s the least of my concerns.” Then she smoothed her hand over her hair. It was a nervous gesture. “Who knows. Look, I get that you want this to be like some kind of happily-ever-after fairy-tale sort of thing, but that’s not the way the world works. I’m just trying to keep him alive. I can’t worry about your little crush.”

My heart crashed. “Alive? Why? What happened?”

“Kyra,” she said, saying not just my name, but saying it
so sincerely and looking me in the eye that I couldn’t help the jolt of alarm that boomeranged in my chest. “I need you to get Tyler out of here.”

I didn’t understand why Griffin was being so secretive, or why she was all of a sudden confiding in me, especially considering she’d been the one to order my detainment in the first place.

“Where are Simon and the others?” I demanded, wondering if they were being held the same way I was.

“Simon’s safe. He’s making plans as we speak.”

“Plans? He was there when you had me arrested. I seriously doubt he’s helping you make any plans.”

“I explained everything to him; he gets why I had to do that now.”

“Mind explaining it to me?” I gave her my best this-better-be-good look while I waited.

Griffin pinched the bridge of her nose, releasing her breath on a hiss. “I know you don’t trust me, but you need to believe me when I tell you we have a traitor in our midst.”

Traitor
. The word hit me like a thousand tons of lead.

I thought of Simon’s
complicated
history with Griffin.

“It’s not Simon,” I defended, my voice raising and echoing off the concrete walls. “And it’s not Willow either.”

“Shh!” she shushed, flapping her hands and warning me to keep it down. And then she met my gaze directly, her expression weary. “I know that, Kyra. It never was.”

I lost some steam with her admission. “So who, then?”

Pulling out a key, she unlocked the door and opened it. I
didn’t know if she was coming in or if I was coming out, so we both just stayed where we were. “I wasn’t sure until I had you locked up. I had to make it look believable, so everyone would think I was keeping you prisoner.”

“Well, bravo. You were convincing.” I cocked my head to the side, crossing my arms. “But for what purpose?”

“I needed whoever the traitor was to think I was willing to trade you myself. That I planned to turn you in to the Daylighters. And then I waited.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For someone to try to get a message out.”

“I take it they did.” It wasn’t a question. Of course they had or Griffin wouldn’t be here now, telling me what her plan had been, and asking me to get Tyler away from this camp. “So . . .” I was almost afraid to ask. “Who was the traitor?”

Griffin came inside and dropped to the bunk. She put her face in her hands. It was a strange reaction, not at all what I’d expected.

I ran through the list of possibilities. I’d already ruled out Simon and Willow, and I mentally ticked off Jett, and Natty since she’d been with me almost every minute of every day since Simon and I had landed in Silent Creek.

“Thom,” I breathed, almost at the same time Griffin said it. But even hearing her voice echoing mine, I shook my head. “No . . .”

“It had to have been him back then too.” The accusation was pitiful, as if it was painful for her to say. “He
must’ve been working with them, colluding all these years. I’ve always wondered how they could know so much.” Her face lifted so we were eye to eye. “Has Simon ever wondered how the Hanford camp was found out?”

“Thom?” I asked with almost as much disbelief as her. “But . . . why? And if they knew where the camps were, why didn’t the Daylighters just round you all up years ago?”

“Because we’re not the ones they really wanted. They’ve been looking for a Replaced. The Returned are child’s play.” Even her shrug was unenthusiastic. A whisper. “I mean, sure, they’re willing to do their experiments on us if we’re all they can get. They extract our DNA and dissect us and . . . who knows what else they do in that lab of theirs.” I hugged myself tighter, her words making my skin tighten. “But it’s always been about finding a Replaced. Thom’s no good to them, none of us are, not if they can’t get their hands on one of you.”

“One of us. You mean, me and Tyler?”

She nodded wearily. Tiredly.

But we couldn’t afford to be tired. “What about that Alex kid? What if he was a Replaced? What if
they
. . .
the aliens
are honing their skills and there are more of us out there? What if they no longer need five years, or even five days? What if we’re coming back in forty-eight hours?”

“That’s not our concern. At least not yet. For now, I need to get you two out of here.”

“And go where?” Just yesterday, the idea of leaving here
with Tyler was exactly what I’d wanted. Now it just made me feel sick.

“Simon’s working on that. He’s setting up a rendezvous for you, a way to get you safely away from here.”

“What about the rest of you? What happens to you now? Is the Daylight Division on their way?”

“We’re doing what we always planned to do: fight.”

“I’ll help you,” I told her, “if you tell me the truth. Why Tyler? Why do you care so much what happens to him?”

She didn’t hesitate. “I think you already know the answer. He’s special.”

“So you care about him?” I asked, not sure why I was putting myself through this. I’d seen the way he looked at her. Hadn’t I already wondered if his feelings were more than just innocent when it came to her?

“Don’t we both?” she said, getting up and reaching for my arm. “Now, come on, we don’t have time to waste. We need to get you out of here, before it’s too late.”