The Replaced

by Kimberly Derting

  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 r
equired 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.

  In this case, we were talking about a girl’s life forever altered by someone she should’ve been able to count on. All things considered, no wonder she had trust issues.

  “They did. And when she came back—the way so many of us do—she was never the same.” He shuddered. “But you have to remember, it’s not like she was the first to be taken. Thom was taken before she was,” he told me, and I thought about that. Natty had mentioned that Thom had barely been a teen when he’d been taken, sometime before the 1950s. But that made him, what, at least in his seventies, didn’t it?

  I pictured him the way he was now, aged so much slower, the way all of us would age. He looked older than the rest of us, sure, but not by much . . . twenty, maybe twenty-one years old, but definitely not an old man.

  I’d vaguely considered the way I’d had to leave my friends and my parents so I couldn’t hurt them, but I’d never really thought about what they would mean down the road. Like what my life would be like in twenty . . . thirty . . . fifty years.

  As far as I could tell, from the way the other Returned were living, it would be exactly the same as it was now. I’d be living the same way, with the same people . . . trying not to be caught by those who hunted us.

  The idea was depressing.

  No wonder Griffin was angry.

  But Simon was still talking. “To hear her tell it, when she tells it at all, she might as well have been the first.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Dear Old Dad wasn’t quite done with her after she was returned. He wasn’t satisfied with making her a sacrifice. He was a scientist, and he wanted to know just what they’d done to her, and how—if at all—she’d changed. She became like his very own home science kit.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “You’re telling me,” Simon agreed.

  “No wonder she hates the government so much. Her dad must’a done a number on her head.”

  “Her dad and everyone else at the lab. She became property of the US military after that.”

  “For how long?” I asked, feeling a stab of guilt for judging her so quickly and so harshly.

  Simon’s voice bled into the shadows. “Until she killed him.”

  “Her own dad?” I asked, rubbing my arms absently. “What happened?”

  “He never realized how much she hated him for what he’d done. One day, he came to take a blood sample from her, and when he wasn’t looking, she cut his safety suit with a scalpel she’d stolen. She’d been waiting for an opportunity like that . . . for her chance to get even.

  “She could’ve used the knife to cut through her straps and escape—she’d had the time. But instead she’d hidden it and plotted her revenge. The thing was, he didn’t even realize what she’d done right away; it wasn’t until the symptoms started setting in that they even thought to check his suit for damage. He never suspected she was planning a thing, and he didn’t take enough precautions against her. His own fault, really. He was a goner the second the exposed air reached his lungs. Poor guy never had a chance,” Simon finished.

  But I didn’t share Simon’s sympathy for Griffin’s dad. It was hard to feel bad for a man who’d sentenced his very own daughter to a lifetime of being less than human. He’d taken away her chance at an ordinary-everyday-normal life. Of growing up and growing old. Of going to school and graduating and having a family. “That poor guy was responsible for changing her in the first place. She never asked for what he did. For the rest of us, it happened by chance. What he did was on purpose,” I argued.

  Then something struck me.

  “Kind of like what I did to Tyler?” I asked, but I asked it flatly, and Simon just shook his head, wearing an expression that said he saw right through me: I didn’t mean it. Which was true, because I didn’t.

  “That’s not even kinda the same.”

  I’d known Tyler would never be able to see his friends or his family again when I’d decided to let him be taken, but I hadn’t known a thing about the not-human part. Besides, even if I had, he would have died if I hadn’t done anything at all.

  Not much of a decision, if you asked me.

  But understanding more about Griffin, suddenly I wasn’t so sure I didn’t want to stay with her at Blackwater. To train with her army.

  Except I knew that wasn’t true either, not really. I was angry—for her and for myself and for all of us—but I’d never be that angry. I’d never been a rage-against-the-machine kind of girl.

  Cat had been the one who had causes. She’d been the one to boycott big businesses and start petitions and join groups to raise social awareness. I’d always been along for the ride. Even if I did stay at Blackwater Ranch, that’s what I’d be doing, going along for the ride.

  I didn’t have that kind of fire in my heart, no matter how much I hated the way the Daylight Division was relentless in their pursuit to capture us. I would still rather steer clear of them than try to take them down, because to me, you might as well be Jack trying to slay the giant. Even if we managed to take one down, they always had more giants.

  They had more resources than we ever would.

  Besides, I still couldn’t wrap my brain around this whole us-versus-them thing.

  In my mind, I was still one of them. Maybe not Agent Truman and his Daylight Division, but regular people, like my parents and my little brother, Logan. Like Cat and Austin and all the kids I’d gone to school with, who even though they were older than I was now, were still the same ones I’d grown up with my whole life. It didn’t matter that I could see in the dark or needed less sleep. None of those things changed the fact that when it came down to it, I was the same dorky girl I’d always been. I still liked to watch The Little Mermaid over and over again and to sing at the top of my lungs in the shower, and I wanted to play softball and be kissed like I was the only girl in the world.

  I mean, weren’t those the things that made me who I was, not the fact that if I concentrated super hard, I could levitate a book with my mind, which when you really thought about it, so could a lot of guys in Vegas who wore sparkly suits and did magic tricks.

  It seemed to me, those of us who’d been returned should be on the same side as everyone else, even if we were different now.

  “You don’t have to agree with Griffin,” Simon said, getting up and standing in front of me. “But it helps to understand where she’s coming from,” which was probably true of everyone if you stopped to think about it.

  His hand moved then, and his thumb skimmed the underneath of my chin, slipping beneath my jaw. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said. “And no matter what happens, now that Tyler’s back, I’ll still be here for you, Kyra. Always.”

  Then he bent forward and his lips pressed a soft kiss on my forehead. And before I could tell him no, or stop, or this so wasn’t a good idea, he’d already turned around and left me all alone.

  PART THREE

  Nothing happens until something moves.

  —Albert Einstein

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Day Thirty-One

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR NATTY AND I TO FIGURE we were stuck in this weird kind of limbo—not really being detained, but still . . . kind of being watched. Nyla was no longer stationed outside our tent, and she hadn’t been replaced by anot
her guard or anything. But we also weren’t completely free to roam the camp.

  Natty was the one who figured that part out, when she’d gone out exploring. It was at the same time Simon had stopped by to check on me.

  She told me about her strange experience as we hunched over a plate of fresh berries and sliced cheeses that evening in the cafeteria, pretending not to be aware of the sharp-eyed glances directed our way.

  Natty thought she was only being paranoid at first. But when the same blond girl kept popping up wherever she went, no matter how hard she tried to ditch her, she realized she was being tailed.

  Eventually the girl approached her, suggesting Natty should go back to our tent, using some lame excuse about Natty having had enough sun for the day. Seriously? I’m sure that was what she was worried about—Natty being overheated or burning or whatever.

  But according to Natty, it wasn’t an order or anything. It was more like a vigorously reinforced recommendation. A recommendation that came with a new blond shadow. Natty thought she could have objected, but rather than try to dodge her new stalker for the rest of the day, she’d just given in.

  The girl had escorted Natty the entire way back to Paradise . . . you know, to ensure Natty didn’t “get lost” along the way.

  But at least we knew where we stood now. We weren’t prisoners, but we weren’t not prisoners either.

  Clear as mud.

  Natty tried to find the blond girl again so she could point her out to me—on our way to the cafeteria, while we ate, and during our walk back—but whoever she was, she was clearly off-duty.

  Too bad. I wanted to know who our non-guards were.

  Tyler was waiting at our tent when we got back, and the anxious look he gave me, along with the way he rubbed his hands over the sides of his khakis, made it clear he wasn’t the spy assigned to keep an eye on us.

  “Hey,” he offered, his deep dimple gouging a path through his cheek.