“What now?” I asked when Simon came to stand beside me. His relaxed stance wasn’t at all what I expected. “Do we make a run for it?”
His voice, when he answered, was gentle. “I could stand here and look at this forever. It’s easy to think here.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I paused to examine him and he wore a bemused expression.
“Depends.”
Shrugging, I flashed him a wistful smile. “Sometimes it’s worse to think. Sometimes I feel like . . .” I stopped myself because I wasn’t sure how to finish my own thought. That even though I had nothing but time, I still couldn’t sort things out? That being here made me realize how lonely I really was?
Or that even though I missed Cat and Austin, and the way things used to be before I was returned, I’d started to miss Simon even more?
No, I definitely couldn’t say that last part. I wasn’t even sure it was true.
Besides, I still ached for Tyler.
Simon didn’t say anything, and he didn’t move, so we just stood there, staring into the darkness.
When I finally broke the silence again, my voice came out resigned rather than critical. “She’s crazy, Simon. Griffin. I talked to her, and she’s out of her mind. What were you thinking bringing us here?”
He sighed, a breathy sound that only added to the calm of the night. “She’s not crazy, she’s just . . . unhappy.”
“Unhappy my ass,” I said, glancing sideways at him. “I get the sense she’d like to play target practice with your skull. Besides, I’m unhappy too. You know we’ve been in lockdown ever since we got here, don’t you? How long’s this gonna last?” I doubted anyone, not even Nyla, could hear us, but I kept my voice hushed all the same. “And what’s all this about Willow and Thom knowing each other? Griffin says Willow’s the reason none of you are friends anymore.”
I half expected a denial, but he just nodded. “It’s true. But probably not for the reasons Griffin said. She has a way of twisting things around.”
I guessed that much already. Griffin seemed like the type who enjoyed manipulating words and facts until they suited her. “She didn’t say why, just that it was Willow’s fault. That everything would’ve been fine if Willow hadn’t come along.”
Simon smiled sadly. “Of course that’s the way she’d see it. Revisionists have a way of changing history to suit themselves.”
The sound of footsteps interrupted us, and Nyla appeared, wearing a Time’s up expression.
“Please,” I begged. “Just a few more minutes?”
She looked from me to Simon and then rolled her eyes. It was her reluctant way of giving in. “Make it fast. You have five minutes.”
When she was gone again, I said to Simon, “Okay, so what does Griffin have against Willow?”
Simon caught hold of my hand as he dragged me deeper into the desert. His fingers were strong and warm, and as much as I wanted to uncoil my fingers so I could lace them through his, I stubbornly refused, keeping my fist tightly curled.
He spoke more urgently now that Nyla had put us on a clock, and at first his story mirrored Griffin’s exactly as he explained how he and Thom and Griffin had once worked together. “But it wasn’t Willow’s fault,” he insisted at the point where their versions deviated. “Willow didn’t do anything wrong, other than the fact that she was different from the other girls Thom and I were sent after. She wasn’t like anyone we’d ever come across before. She didn’t have that lost-puppy sense about her that most of the new Returned had. She wasn’t freaking out the way most of us do.”
I might have taken offense, if he hadn’t included himself in that description as well.
“Here she’d been taken and experimented on and then returned, and she just . . . what?” He shrugged more to himself than to me. “She just accepted it, the way you would that the sky is blue and a bear shits in the woods.” He looked me right in the eye and nodded. “Yeah, that was it. It was that no-nonsense thing about her. Willow’s biggest fault, at least in Griffin’s eyes, was that Thom and I admired her. That and the fact that Thom and I thought maybe she could work with us, the same way Griff did.”
My stomach lurched at the casual way he said Griff. I wasn’t born yesterday—girls like “Griff,” with their push-up bras and badass attitudes, had a way of wiggling their way inside guys’ heads, and I couldn’t stop from wondering if she was there now—in Simon’s head.
But Simon was oblivious to what was going on inside my head. “No matter what we said,” he continued, “Griffin hated Willow from the get-go. And she went out of her way to undermine her every chance she got.
“At first I thought she’d get over it. I mean, just because we were taking an interest in Willow, that didn’t mean we’d replaced Griffin. But Griffin was never like that. She had to be the best at everything. The center of the universe. She didn’t like Thom and me having our interests divided by the new girl.” He was quiet for several long seconds, and then he said, “I just never realized how far Griffin would go to get Willow out of the way.” Simon spat in the sand, as if the memory were too sour to swallow.
“What did she do?”
“At the time, Blackwater was having serious problems with the Daylighters. That Agent Truman guy wasn’t around back then, at least not that I know of, but there was this other guy, and he was just as relentless. He always seemed to know about our recruiting missions even before we got there. Franco warned us all to be careful every time we left the camp. But no matter how many precautions we took, that agent was always one step ahead of us, and he would snag the new Returned before we could get to them.” He shook his head. “We started to suspect someone inside the camp was feeding him information.”
“And Griffin thought it was Willow?” I asked, piecing the puzzle together myself.
He shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t think she ever really believed it was Willow, but that’s what she told Franco. She convinced him that all our trouble started about the time Willow showed up, which was pretty much the truth. She said Willow shouldn’t be trusted.”
“And he believed Griffin?”
Simon shrugged. “Whether he did or not, I never got the chance to find out. I told Thom we needed to convince Franco that Griffin was wrong, that there was no way Willow was passing information to the No-Suchers’ Daylight Division.”
“How could you be so sure? What if it really was Willow who was working on the inside?”
“It wasn’t. Thom and I already suspected this recruiter named Eddie Ray, who’d been coming up through the ranks. He was power-hungry like Griffin, only he had Franco’s ear.” He grimaced. “I went to Thom about Willow, but he refused to back me up. He didn’t want to go against Griffin. I think that’s when I realized she’d gotten to him. That she was willing to do whatever it took to convince Thom, and anyone else who could help her cause, that she was right: that Willow was the traitor.”
I wasn’t quite sure I understood. “Are you saying they had a thing, Griffin and Thom?”
“I’m saying Thom had a thing for Griff . . . enough so that he’d stopped thinking with his head. I mean, I guess I knew she could do that to a guy; it was what made her such a good recruiter in the first place. I just didn’t think Thom would be so . . . susceptible.”
“And what about you?” I asked, hating the note of jealousy I heard in my own voice. “Were you susceptible too?”
“Me? Nah. I mean, I didn’t blame the guys who fell for her. She had this way of looking at you with those brown eyes of hers like she’d known you forever, even though she’d barely just met you. It was like the two of you had these private secrets that no one else in the world were in on. And, holy shit, when she smiled”—Simon squeezed his eyes closed—“kinda sideways, like it accidentally slipped out, you couldn’t help but smile back at her.”
I had to wonder if he had been a little susceptible, even if he wasn’t willing to admit it.
“My grandma had a word for girls like her
. She called them wanton.” He grinned then. “It was pretty much the worst insult she could give, and that’s what she would’ve said about Griff. She was one of those fast girls you were supposed to watch out for. The kind we were warned about in church on Sundays. Also, why I kinda hated church. I liked girls who weren’t buttoned-up and afraid to speak their minds.” He looked down at our hands, and his fingers pushed their way between mine, until our fingers wove together. He smiled.
“But I thought Thom and I were . . .” I expected him to say “brothers,” just like Griffin had, but instead he finished with “partners,” which carried way less punch. “I thought he’d have my back when push came to shove. But he didn’t. He backed Griffin, even though we both knew she was lying.”
“So what happened?”
“I figured Griffin didn’t tell you everything.” He shrugged. “Back then I was the council’s favorite to take over as leader if anything happened to Franco. So when Franco called a meeting to deliberate over Willow’s fate, I was there. When the decision was handed down that Willow was set to be excommunicated, mine was the sole vote against it.” In the dark, Simon’s eyes met mine and he let out a slow breath. “It doesn’t sound so bad, except it was practically a death sentence for Willow. We still had a very real information leak in our camp and the Daylighters were sure to find out where Willow was being sent. I couldn’t let Willow be captured by those bastards just because Griffin didn’t like her.” His fingers tightened around mine and my stomach flipped. “So that night, we left. Willow and I snuck out of camp. I didn’t tell anyone what I planned to do, not even Thom.”
I thought Simon’s grandmother was wrong about girls like Griffin—wanton was the wrong word after all. Simon might have been off the mark when he said she wasn’t crazy.
Griffin’s brain was scrambled like those eggs in that don’t-do-drugs commercial:
This is your brain.
This is your brain after being transported 200 million light-years and having your DNA messed with by aliens.
I would probably use the words stone-cold crazy for someone like her.
“Where’s Franco now?”
His eyebrows bunched together. “That’s the thing. A few months later, Franco was ambushed during a recruiting mission, same way the other recruiting teams had been. He was never heard from again. About that same time, Eddie Ray just . . . disappeared. I mean, if he wasn’t guilty, then where’d he go?” His lips tightened as he shook his head. “Griffin had managed to worm her way into the camp’s council, and it wasn’t long before she was voted in as leader of the camp.”
“And Thom? How come he left?”
His gaze clouded over. “I don’t know the whole story. We never talked again after Willow and I took off, at least not until that morning when we showed up at Silent Creek. But most of the camps stay in contact through a convoluted communication system. Gossip manages to get around. Indirectly, I heard he couldn’t stomach the new leadership, and if I had to guess, I’d say he finally figured out Griff had been using him all along.”
“Time’s up.” When Nyla interrupted us again, I peeled my hand away from Simon’s. It was the second time Nyla had caught us like that, and I was sure she was starting to get the wrong impression.
I meant to ask Simon if he’d ever regretted leaving with Willow, or questioned her loyalty. But I already knew his answer, because Willow was as trustworthy as they came.
It was Griffin whose loyalty I suspected now.
Was it possible she’d been the one responsible for betraying the Blackwater recruiters all those years ago as a means to get to the top of the pecking order? Was anyone really that narcissistic and power-hungry?
Cold dread settled heavily in my stomach at the very thought.
I prayed I was wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IN A PLACE LIKE BLACKWATER, WHERE NO ONE really slept, there was always activity. So by the time we’d reached the heart of the camp, the darkness that stretched far into the desert had been replaced by strategically placed floodlights that made it almost as bright as daytime.
It was as if night never even existed.
When we reached the cafeteria, Nyla dragged me to a halt. “When Dakota brings your friend out, you’ll join them and she’ll take you back to your tent.” I assumed Dakota was the girl who’d shuttled Natty away after our showers.
“Don’t worry, I’ll work this out.” Simon was quiet when he spoke. “You won’t have to stay under guard much longer. I promise.”
I was just about to tell him I wasn’t ready for him to go, not quite yet, when Griffin’s voice pierced my newfound calm seeing Simon again had given me. “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“Are you kidding me?” I exhaled dramatically before facing Griffin. I felt like a kid caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I hoped this didn’t mean I’d lose the small freedoms I’d been allowed so far.
Griffin emerged from the tent maze, her attention not directed on me or Simon, but on Nyla. She looked thoroughly hacked. “I knew when I couldn’t find her”—she indicated me when she said that—“that he’d be involved.” This time she gave just the slightest nod of her head toward Simon. “But I never suspected you,” she reprimanded Nyla, her eyes narrowing, and she looked dangerous when she said it. The kind of dangerous that made my skin pebble all over with stiff goose bumps.
“Griffin, don’t blame her. This was all my idea.” Simon stepped in front of Nyla to explain, and I was thinking it wouldn’t matter what he said because Nyla had betrayed Griffin—a real betrayal, not the made-up kind she’d accused Willow of, either. There was no way she was letting Nyla off the hook for this.
But then something happened, and suddenly none of those things mattered.
Suddenly everything changed, at least for me they did.
It was the laugh that did it.
I had to reach for Simon in order to stay on my feet, because all at once my legs were unreliable, like I was standing on stilts I had yet to master. The sensation of guilt over getting caught with Nyla and Simon turned to something else entirely as it spread, prickling my skin everywhere and making every tiny hair on my body stand at full alert.
My heart stopped—like stop-stopped—and I waited for it to start again, the same way I waited to hear that sound, the laugh, for what seemed like forever and a day. And when I finally did, when I heard it, my heart not only started to beat once more, it pounded.
Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud . . . beating so freaking hard I almost gasped.
Simon looked down at me, and I wasn’t sure if I saw sadness in his copper eyes, or if he was asking for an explanation I couldn’t offer, while inside hope was struggling to the surface.
All around us, people like us, other Returned, were doing the things they did—training for whatever Griffin told them they were training for, running in their symmetrical clusters, talking to one another, eating, and some of them, somewhere, were probably even managing to sleep.
Yet I was here, living in my own world. Trapped in a bubble. Caught between states of disbelief and hope so overpowering they threatened to smother me.
So far, all I had was that laugh, but it wasn’t enough to prove anything.
I took a step forward because I needed to know if it was him or if I’d only imagined it.
I turned toward the sound, but one of the floodlights was shining right in my face, and it was blinding me. All I could make out were several hazy outlines. It was enough to know that there was more than one person, and that they were almost to us now.
But I no longer cared about anyone else, because when the shadowy figures became clear, my grip on Simon’s arm tightened.
I saw him then. Undeniably.
I saw the way his green eyes squinted and his dimple creased his cheek as his eyes fell on Griffin.
“Tyler.” I croaked the word, and it barely made it past my lips, but it was the sweetest, most magnificent word I’d ever uttered, and suddenl
y the past twenty-three days melted away.
The last time I’d seen him, he’d been covered head-to-toe in pustules that had made it too painful to even touch him. He’d been blind and taking his very last breath.
This Tyler, though, the one standing before me now, was so incredibly-breathtakingly-irrefutably beautiful all I could do was stare. I took him in, and I felt myself come alive. It was as if I had just been returned all over again, seeing him standing there, alive. Whole.
Safe.
He stopped where he was, his feet planted on a patch of dry grass. There were so many expressions that passed over his face in those split seconds that there was no way I could catch them all. I totally understood how he felt. It was exactly what I was feeling too, finding him here of all places—confusion, shock, doubt, curiosity, relief.
“Tyler,” I said again, only this time it was louder as I let go of Simon, and I knew I was for sure going to cry in front of everyone.
“Kyra?” The hairs that had already been standing on end vibrated as his voice, a voice I’d been waiting to hear for three and a half weeks, a voice I’d willed myself to dream about, brushed over them.
I was running then, closing those last steps that separated us. I didn’t stop to ask why he was here, or to worry about whether Griffin or anyone else was watching, or what they thought about me or Tyler or the fact that we knew each other. I launched myself at him, and he caught me, wrapping his arms around me, and it was amazing to feel him.
To smell him. To know his heart was beating just inches beneath my own . . . that it was beating at all after everything he’d been through, after everything I’d put him through.
It had been a risk to take him to Devil’s Hole, and it had paid off. Tyler had been Returned.
“Tyler. Oh my god, Tyler . . .” I couldn’t bear to let go. I might never let go, I thought as I got lost in his embrace. He felt leaner than I remembered, which wasn’t at all impossible, and possibly more muscular, like maybe he’d been following the same workout regimen as the rest of Griffin’s camp.
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