The Replaced (8 page)

But Jett just nodded. Clearly, I was the only one who wasn’t onboard with this insane theory of theirs. “That’s what the offspring of two species are called: hybrids.”

“But that’s not what we are. We’re not”—I used air quotes to show what I thought of it—“‘offspring.’ It’s not like we were up there doin’ it or anything.” I knew I sounded like a twelve-year-old, but I was way past caring about my maturity level.

“No,” Jett agreed, and the way his voice lowered, getting all serious, it struck me all over again that he wasn’t nearly as young as he looked. “There was no”—he made air quotes too—“‘doing it’ involved. At least as far as we know. This was done good-old-fashioned test tube–style.”

I shook my head, but Simon nodded his in unison. And so did Thom, Natty, Jett, and even Willow when I looked back at her. I was pretty sure I must’ve banged my head on
something or been rufied or maybe I’d passed out again and this was all one big crazy dream.

Hybrids
.

I let the word rattle around in my brain.

Up ’til now I’d been pretty open-minded, or so I thought. I’d accepted a lot: that I hadn’t aged a single day the entire time I’d been gone, that I’d been “experimented” on and now would age ridiculously slowly, that my blood was now toxic to everyone who wasn’t like us. But this . . . this felt like a whole different level of crazy. “Okay, yeah,” I said, my voice rising another notch. “I saw that movie once. Isn’t that the one where Jeff Goldblum accidentally turns himself into a giant bug by mixing his DNA with a fly?” I sounded unhinged; I knew that. But who wouldn’t in my place? My mom and I had watched that movie too—
The Fly
. The scientist whose teleportation experiments had gone horribly wrong, and in the end, he’d morphed into something half man and half insect, and begged the woman he loved to put him out of his misery.

Was that what we were? Some genetic mutation that belonged nowhere? Is that why Agent Truman and his Daylight Division were so desperate to get their hands on us?

“This isn’t a movie,” Thom added, ending his silent streak. I tried to remember why I ever thought he was the voice of reason. “You knew we were different, you just didn’t realize
how
different.”

“So you’re saying we’re not even
human
?”

Simon tried to reach for me, but I batted his hand away. I couldn’t stand the idea of being touched, not by him. Not by anyone. “We’re still human,” he said softly. “We’re alien-
human
hybrids. We’re . . .
both
.” He tried again, and this time I let his hand stay on my knee. “It’s what makes us—
you
—special. You need to believe that.”

I crushed my palms against my eyes until I saw white spots. This was insane. I couldn’t take any more of this talk about being some sort of . . . hybrid-whatever-we-were-supposed-to-be.

There was no way it was true.

Except, how was the idea that any of us was
less than human
any weirder than the fact that we’d been abducted by aliens and then returned? Besides, didn’t that explain the strange things we could do—that we’d somehow been altered?

I squeezed my eyes even tighter as guilt choked me. If that was the case, what had I done to Tyler? What had I subjected him to?

Turning away from everyone, I pressed my head against the window.

I traced my finger around the ragged and bloody tear in my jeans. I thought about Agent Truman and what he’d said when we were surrounded: “She’s the one we want.”

She, meaning
me
. That, coupled with the guy down in the air ducts, the way he’d looked at me with those cold blue eyes of his. “It’s you,” he’d said, like he recognized
me, even though we’d never met.

It’s me
. . .

What if that was it all along? What if this whole thing had never been about the rest of them—the other Returned—the way Simon suggested. What if Agent Truman had his sights set on me and me alone, and Willow had only gotten caught in the crossfire?

Agent Truman was still wearing that cast, after all;
he’d
been there that night at Devil’s Hole and had seen what I could do.

Me
. What
I
could do, not the others.

He probably knew I was the one who’d broken that glass tube in the central lab.

As much as I hated it, I couldn’t help thinking Simon might’ve been right when he’d said the message from my dad had been a fake. I mean, if Agent Truman really did want to get his hands on me, why stop at Tyler when he could use my dad against me too?

From the front seat, Jett went back to work on his laptop as I watched the lights outside blur past.

“Get anything yet?” Simon asked Jett. It was clumsy, his attempt to switch the subject, and Jett paused before answering, “So far, all their files are encrypted, but nothing I didn’t expect.” I guessed that must’ve been what Willow had in her backpack when Simon and I had escaped the ducts below the central lab—hard drives or disks, password-protected files she’d stolen—but I was only half listening, unable to quit
thinking about the other stuff—the aliens and the hybrids and genetic mutations Simon insisted we’d undergone. I pressed my finger to the spot on my shin where there was a bruise hidden beneath my jeans. It was the same bruise that had been there since I’d returned, and it had been there when I’d been taken too—five whole years ago. It hadn’t changed at all during that entire time.

And it never would, thanks to whatever had been done to us. Thanks to what Simon tried to tell me was this alien DNA I was supposed to have in me now.

“Their security is Grade A,” Jett told Simon, unaware I was freaking the hell out back here. “I can crack it, but I’ll need heavier equipment to do it.”

The SUV lurched to a hard stop, and I sat up, looking toward Natty. “What happened? Is something wrong?”

Natty leaned forward and shook her head from the ghostly shadows of the car’s interior. “I don’t know. Nothing, maybe. Looks like some kind of backup.”

From the passenger seat, Jett strained to see around the traffic. “Whatever it is, it must be bad. I can’t see where it ends.”

I scanned the highway, too, on either side of us. All lanes were moving at a snail’s pace. “Where are we?”

“Just north of Chehalis,” Jett answered, closing out of the locked files for the moment and plugging something into one of the USB ports. “If it doesn’t clear up soon, we won’t cross into Oregon for another two, maybe three, hours.” I
watched as he pulled up a web browser.

Simon raised an eyebrow toward the computer. “Don’t stay online too long. We don’t want to give the Daylighters any way to track us.”

Jett patted his laptop like it was a dog. “This baby’s clean as a whistle. And I paid cash for the hotspot burner. If they track us, it won’t be because of my Wi-Fi.”

“Still . . . ,” Simon said as I watched Jett search through news links and Department of Transportation websites.

I leaned back, avoiding Simon’s gaze. I still felt weird about the way things had gone back at the Tacoma facility. I didn’t fully understand Simon’s reasons for agreeing to go in the first place. I mean, I knew why I’d gone—for Tyler—and I knew he said we’d gone because he wanted to know what the No-Suchers, this Daylight Division, was hiding in there, but was that really all there was to it? Or was it possible he felt guilty, too, that Tyler might have been there in the first place?

And what about the way he’d dragged me away after Willow was captured? Why me and not her? He’d told me I was special, but what did that even mean? Special to who . . . him?

Was that why I’d woken up with my head in his lap?

The whole thing was just too . . . weird. I pretended to be fascinated by the traffic so he wouldn’t know how uncomfortable I felt around him.

Where were the fireflies when you needed them?

“Get off at the next exit!” Jett announced frantically
from the front seat. He snapped the laptop shut and was waving wildly toward the right side of the jam-packed highway. “Get over! Start signaling now. We need to get off the freeway as soon as possible!”

This couldn’t be good. “Why? What is it?”

“It’s us,” Jett answered, twisting in his seat so he could face us all. “They’ve got roadblocks up ahead and they’re looking for us.”

“SO, WHAT NOW?” NATTY ASKED, HER EYES SHIFTING
between the two leaders—Thom, who seemed to mean more to her than I’d realized, and Simon, who was lodged between us. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was: Which one of these guys was in charge now?

We pulled off in front of a driveway to a ranch of some kind. It was dusty and deserted and gave us exactly what we needed: privacy.

“The good news is that none of the reports mention us by name,” Jett said as his eyes—that unusual mosaic of colors
that looked like cut glass pieced together—fell on me. “Not even you, Kyra.”

“Then how do you know the roadblocks are meant for us?” I wished he hadn’t singled me out. I already felt responsible for this mess.

Something about the look Jett and Simon exchanged gave me a chill. “Because they
are
showing this picture.” He spun his laptop so we could all see what he had. The shot was grainy, but there we were—me, Simon, Natty, and Thom. We were running across the blacktop toward the entrance of a top secret NSA facility. The image had to have been taken from one of the neighboring buildings’ security cameras, right before we’d gone in to break Willow out.

Still, it didn’t make sense. “So why not release our names? He might not know all of you, but Agent Truman definitely knows my name. And if that place, the Daylight Division, is such a secret, why are they so willing to admit we were even there?”

Jett shook his head. “They’re not. Probably why they didn’t put out a better image. As far as the authorities are concerned, at least the ones who’ve been alerted to look for us, we’re just a bunch of animal activists who broke into a medical testing facility.” He’d turned the computer back around and was reading right from the website. “It says here: they’re holding us responsible for about a half-million dollars’ worth of damage to some major pharmaceutical company.” He shrugged, a sideways smile slipping over his lips. “It also
says we did it in the name of animal rights. Kinda makes
us
sound like the good guys, if you ask me.”

“We
are
the good guys,” I pointed out. “
We
weren’t the ones who started this.”

Natty chewed on the side of her thumb. “So does this mean every police force in the state is looking for us?”

Jett closed his laptop and gave us a discouraged look. “Worse. Not just every agency in Washington, but Oregon, Idaho, and even the Canadian border patrol.” He pressed his lips together. “They’ve got roadblocks on every major road and highway out of the state.” He looked to Simon.

“Isn’t that a little extreme for a bunch of animal lovers?” Natty asked.

“They have to come up with some cover story, and a half mill is nothing to sneeze at—” Simon started.

But Jett cut in. “That’s not all. It says here we killed a security guard during our raid.”

Killed?

I squeezed my eyes shut as I thought about just how far I’d been willing to go to save Tyler . . . and then Willow.

I’d caused a full-blown Code Red.

Just because I’d given them warning didn’t stop the bile from surging up my throat.

“Do you think it’s true?” I solicited, hoping for a denial. “That someone died?”

Natty’s eyes were wide when she answered. “Maybe that Agent Truman guy.” Her voice fell to less than a whisper. “He wasn’t wearing a suit . . .”

Behind me, Willow’s hand landed on my shoulder, reminding me he’d left me no other choice. I nodded, but my chest still burned, my stomach acids trying to eat their way out.

“So, why not put our faces out there?” I finally uttered. “Get the public involved? It seems like that would make things a lot easier for them, if everyone was on the lookout for us.”

This time when Simon answered, I found I couldn’t avoid looking at him. “They can’t risk it. We all belonged somewhere once. We had families, friends, lives . . .” He shrugged, giving me a meaningful look. “
You
still do. They can’t risk putting our real pictures on the news. What if someone recognizes us, even all these years and all these miles later? There would be questions. Some long-lost relative who looks
exactly
like their suspects . . . it would raise eyebrows at the least. They can’t take the chance that some reporter might make the connection between all of us who were taken and then returned. It puts their little agency under the microscope. This way is easier, cleaner.”

“So you think we’re fine, then,” I concluded. “No one’ll even know it’s us.”

Simon shook his head. “Just because they haven’t given decent pictures of us to the news outlets doesn’t mean they haven’t sent some to the authorities . . . along with some BS story about those pictures being classified information. Need-to-know, that kind of thing. But no matter how they’re going about it, there’s no way we’re
fine
. Our faces
are out there in some capacity, whether we like it or not. We gotta get someplace safe. Otherwise, if we do get picked up, we’ll end up being handed over to the No-Suchers. Then we’ll all be strapped to one of those stretchers, being lobotomized.” He leaned his head all the way back and raised an eyebrow at Willow. “Too soon?”

Willow just snorted and punched the back of his seat.

Thom chimed in from the front. “He’s right, though. They don’t do anything in the public eye, not if they can help it. Those guys in the Daylight Division are about as shady as they come. And if there are already roadblocks, it means they’re desperate to get their hands on us.”

“So, what now?” I asked, wondering which was freaking me out more: the roadblocks or Simon’s blasé mention of lobotomies.

“Well, we can’t go back to Silent Creek. We can’t risk that the Daylighters either know about the camp already, or that we’d be leading them right to it,” Simon explained.

“Where, then? We have nowhere else to go.” But as soon as I said it, there was this weird invisible wire that seemed to stretch between Thom and Simon, a look that passed between them that said I might be wrong. “Do we?”

Thom gave Simon a quick nod, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Simon give one right back. A decision had just been made without a single word being exchanged.

“There may be a place . . . another camp . . .” But something about the way Thom was stalling made me think this
might not be an ideal solution.

Willow gripped the back of our seat as she shoved her face between ours. “It’s a bad idea. They won’t take us in.” There was a sharp edge to her voice.

“Sure they will,” Thom assured her, still leaving the rest of us in the dark. “They might not like it, but they would never turn us away.”

Jett, who apparently was as clueless as I was, squinted suspiciously. “Who we even talkin’ about?
What camp?
”

Simon shrugged, like it was no biggie. It was the same kind of shrug Cat used when she was trying to convince me to do something she knew we shouldn’t be doing. Like somehow that gesture would convince me that sneaking off campus in the middle of the day wouldn’t land us in seriously deep shit with our parents, the principal, and coach.

Fool me once,
my dad used to say.

So, seeing Simon try to pull that move made this whole thing seem like an even bigger deal. Especially since just yesterday he and Thom could hardly look each other in the eye. Yet now they were sharing private looks and making silent pacts.

They were one step away from secret handshakes.

“A place called Blackwater Ranch,” Simon answered, finally filling in the blank. He nodded toward Thom. “It’s where
we
met. A lot of the Returned end up there at some point.”

A spark of recognition flashed in Jett’s eyes, and he gave
a slow nod. “Yeah. I heard’a that place.” His face contorted as though straining to recall more specifics. “Run by a Griffin something-or-other. One of those guys who thinks the Returned should rise up against the man. Give the No-Suchers a dose of their own medicine or something.” He laughed at the notion.

“What, like some kind of army?” I asked. Sure, it sounded crazy, but who was I to question their ways? As the last of us to be returned, I’d barely scratched the surface of all there was to learn about the camps and alliances, and the scientists and agencies who were after us. I still had about a million unanswered questions about why, why,
why
this had even happened to us in the first place.

“Sorta like that,” Jett answered. “From what I hear, they’re like Returned activists. They have a reputation for being a tad on the zealot-y side, but stories tend to get exaggerated as they move from camp to camp.” He glanced from Simon to Thom, still trying to get a beat on their whole look-at-us-being-friends bit. “Does all that sound about right?”

Simon gave that shrug of his, the one that made everything as clear as dishwater. “I think they just want to be prepared if anything goes sideways, is all.”

In typical Thom fashion, he remained tight-lipped on the matter.

“So, where is this place? This activist camp?” I asked.

“About fifty miles outside Zion National Park. Basically, it’s smack in the middle of the Utah desert.”

Utah
. . .

Awesome.

Geography wasn’t my strong suit, but I knew Utah was nowhere near where we were. It was ten hours away. At least. And that was if we stuck to the main highways, which had already been ruled off-limits.

And we were supposed to get there with the NSA hounding us the entire way. Double awesome.

On top of everything else, it meant leaving my old life in Burlington even farther behind.

You’d think after everything I’d been through, and the way my world had been upended while I’d been away, the last thing on my mind would be missing my mom and her new husband and their new son, especially since they’d made it more than clear they didn’t want anything to do with me. But the idea of being so far from them only made me so much more aware of how sick and tired I was of losing people.

I had to ask, “How are we supposed to do this? Get there . . . without being caught?”

Simon sighed, no longer looking bored or vague. “The only way we can. One mile at a time.”

We drove twenty-four minutes to a gas station that was way,
way
off the highway. It was also super,
super
sketchy.

But just like when we were on the road to the Daylight Division’s Tacoma facility from Silent Creek, we had to assume the sketchier the station, the less likely it was
to have security cameras. It also didn’t seem completely implausible that this throwback to the ’70s was getting its mail by Pony Express, which we hoped meant the cashier hadn’t been alerted to be on the lookout for a carload of kids matching our descriptions.

That was the other thing: our descriptions. There was no way we were getting all the way to Utah looking the way we did.

To avoid drawing attention, Jett went into the tiny store alone, and when he came back, he held out three boxes of hair color to Natty and Willow and me, like he’d just done us some huge favor.

“That’s it?” I asked, turning up my nose at the selection. Our choices were jet-black, brown, and dark brown.

“You’re lucky they had these. It’s not exactly a Walmart in there.” He passed Simon an old-school-style paper map, and Simon unfolded it as he began plotting our course from here all the way to Utah. GPS was out of the question, Simon had declared. It would be far too easy for the NSA to get a lock on us that way.

Simon glanced at the boxes in our hands. “Better get moving, you only have about half an hour.”

Willow grabbed a box without even looking. Brown it was.

I was relieved because the girl on Willow’s box had reminded me vaguely of Mandy Maxwell.

In the sixth grade Mandy Maxwell had sprouted a good
seven inches, and three bra sizes, past the rest of us girls, all within a matter of six months. There was something about the combination of high-water jeans and her brand-new C-cups that had left Mandy foul-tempered. So when I’d beaten her one too many times at tetherball during recess, she’d decided I deserved to have gum squished in my hair.

My mom had spent hours trying to pick the sticky wad out, but in the end she’d had to resort to scissors, leaving me with an unsightly bald patch. I’d hated Mandy long after the hair had grown back.

The idea that she and I might be walking around with the same hair color, natural or not, even this many years later . . . well, thanks but no thanks.

I turned to Natty, who was contemplating the other two options way too seriously, but at least she was putting some thought into it. I put my fate in her hands. “Go ahead, you pick first,” I told her.

She bit her lip and shot me a questioning look. I shrugged because as far as I was concerned, it was hair. My natural color would grow back eventually.

But when her fingers clamped around one of the boxes, I was impressed by her bold choice. She’d chosen the one with the cover model who had sleek, cropped, intensely black hair.

I never would’ve called that one.

That left me with the darker of the two browns.

Willow had already gone into the gas station’s restroom
with her package, so Natty and I followed, taking the new hairbrush Jett had bought us, along with the unopened pack of oil rags we’d be using as towels. Let the transformation begin!

Willow’s blue eyes sparkled mischievously as she gave us a nod from where she was standing in front of the mirror, already hard at work on her own hair. Apparently she didn’t need anyone’s help.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection from behind her and was mildly surprised that I hadn’t changed since the last time I’d looked. I still had freckles and eyes I thought were too big for my face—but not alien big, just regular-girl big.

I didn’t want to be some half-breed alien anomaly. I just wanted to be regular old me again.

Averting my gaze, I fumbled with the instructions for the hair color. My eyes stung, making it hard to concentrate, but Natty just took the sheet of paper from my hand.

“Here, let me.” She uncapped one bottle of astringent-smelling solution. Dumping it into the larger one, she shook them together like she’d done this a thousand times before. “I used to help my mom,” she explained when she caught me eyeballing her. She pointed to the single toilet in the restroom, and I sat down on the closed lid.