The Replaced

by Kimberly Derting

  There was a hushed kind of silence. The heavy kind that comes when no one wants to talk and you know it’s bad. The worst kind of bad.

  It didn’t surprise me that Simon spoke up first. “Look, Kyra, I planned to tell you this eventually . . .” The deliberate way he said it caused a sour taste to flood the back of my mouth.

  “You’re kidding, right? There are more secrets? So what now? What is it you thought we couldn’t handle?” I turned to the others, thinking we were in this together. But as soon as I saw their faces, I knew: I was the only one out of the loop. “Awesome.” How could I possibly have thought it was nice when Simon was stroking my hair, unconscious or not? There wasn’t anything nice about him. “What was it that you all decided I was too delicate to know?”

  I braced myself for what was coming.

  “The experiments,” Simon finally said.

  “Experiments?” I let my lack of enthusiasm hang there in that one word.

  “That’s right,” Simon acknowledged when I just crossed my arms and waited for him to elaborate. “The experiments I told you about, the ones that were done on you when you were taken.”

  I hugged myself tighter. “The ones the aliens did,” I said, emphasizing aliens because even though I’d let go of my disbelief, saying it out loud hadn’t gotten any easier. “The experiments they did on all of us? What about them?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t tell you everything.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Um, yeah. I kinda got that. So, go ahead. Tell me now.”

  He gave me an are-you-sure? look, and all of a sudden we were in some kind of weird argument. But I was so sick of Simon holding back information for my own good. I was a big girl; I was perfectly capable of deciding what was good for me and what wasn’t.

  “They weren’t random, these experiments. There’s a reason we can heal and that we don’t need much food or sleep.” He still hadn’t told the others about how I could move things—or shatter glass—with my mind, and all at once this seemed like as good a time as any. Maybe we’d had enough with the secret keeping.

  Nevertheless, I wasn’t exactly spilling either.

  He looked me over. “How come you never asked why we can do those things—what it is they did to us that makes us different?”

  “You told me. You said it was because of the experiments. That they messed with us and we didn’t come back the same.” I remembered when he’d explained that I’d been gone longer than the other Returned, and that he thought that meant they were perfecting whatever it was they were doing to us.

  He’d used the word “special” when he’d told me I could heal faster than the rest of them.

  Me, I didn’t feel special. I felt weird.

  And now what? Was he saying it wasn’t tests they’d been doing on us? “So, what is it, then? What’s worse than experimenting on us?” I’d already lost five years of my life. I’d already had to give up my family because of what happened. “Did they expose us to radiation? Kryptonite? Am I gonna lose my teeth? Grow an eye in my back?” I tried to laugh, but I was way past amused, and the sound lodged somewhere deep in my throat.

  Simon swallowed my name, and I knew he was stalling. “Kyra.”

  “Simon,” I shot back acidly. “Say it already.”

  “It’s not like radiation or anything. And they didn’t just mess with us and our DNA, they introduced their DNA to ours.”

  I faltered. “They . . . introduced . . . ?”

  He glanced uncertainly at Thom, who gave him a you-do-it-or-I-will look. Simon exhaled noisily. He definitely didn’t want to do it. “We don’t know everything,” he went on. “Just that whatever it is, it’s some form of genetic splicing. They replace some of our DNA with theirs.”

  “Replace?” I repeated, finding it almost impossible to form even that single word.

  Simon nodded, having the decency to look chagrined. “Yes, replace.” He hesitated, and for the first time in forever the leader in him vanished. He was just a kid when he met my gaze. Like me. “That’s what this whole abduction thing seems to be about. Genetic manipulation.” He swallowed, his brows lifting.

  I shrank back. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I put my hands up to warn everyone to just . . . stay back! even though not one of them had moved so much as an inch. I needed a minute, or maybe a lifetime, to process what he’d just said because it was so are-you-kidding-me? When I finally tried to talk, I’d reached that hysterical edge where my voice had shot up about ten octaves. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that I’m . . . that you think I’ve got some kind of alien DNA in me?” My last few words were laced with so much disbelief there was no doubt what I believed. “This isn’t for real. You can’t be serious.”

  “The proper term for it is hybrid,” Jett offered, like he was being helpful or something.

  My face crumpled, and my stomach plummeted. “Dude, no. Not you too.”

  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.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “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 squeeze
d 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?”