The Replaced

by Kimberly Derting

Suddenly I felt like I needed to wipe my palms, too, as I bit my bottom lip and grinned back at him. It was silly, knowing all this about who we’d been and having to start from scratch. Silly and awesome all at the same time, because maybe it wasn’t so bad, having all these firsts all over again.

  “Hey,” Natty said, and Tyler blinked, all surprised-like, as if she’d just . . . poof! . . . materialized from out of nowhere.

  But Natty didn’t wait for a hint, she did this roll-her-eyes-and-shake-her-head-sighing thing that made it clear she knew she wasn’t invited to this little party. “I’ll just . . .” She pointed to our tent. “I’ll be in here. See you later.” She slipped inside and left the two of us alone outside.

  Tyler’s grin grew as he rocked back on his heels. “She seems nice,” he said, and I wondered when he’d possibly come to that conclusion. During the two seconds he’d glimpsed her waiting for me inside our tent when he’d first dropped me off, after we’d first been reunited? Or just now, during their awkward, barely-two-seconds-longer run-in?

  Still grinning, he shoved his hands in his pockets and lifted his shoulders. I swear, his smile could literally melt the sun, which was the lamest compliment ever, but was so totally true it didn’t even matter. He was that hot. “I . . .” He nodded his head in the direction we’d just come from. “I was supposed to . . .” What I initially thought was nervous, and somewhat cute, stammering was getting uncomfortable.

  I frowned. “What? You were supposed to what?”

  “Griffin,” he finally blurted out. “She wanted me to come get you.”

  If I could have buried my head, like an ostrich, I would have. I was part embarrassed that I thought he’d been looking all awkward because of me, which I still sort of hoped was the case, and part mad because Griffin was the real reason he was here.

  “Griffin?” I parroted numbly.

  He nodded, stuffing his hands deeper into his pockets. “Yeah. She’s waiting for us. For you.”

  Not exactly the way I imagined my evening unfolding after finding Tyler on my front step, but . . .

  I tried not to sound too disappointed when I exhaled. “Fine. Lead the way.”

  Tyler bumped my shoulder as he fell into step beside me, seemingly relieved that I understood. I kept telling myself this was what I’d been waiting for—to spend time, even just a few seconds at a time, with him . . . regardless of the reason.

  He took me to Griffin, who was waiting for us in a place where there were none of the giant spotlights and it was dark all around. Simon was there too, as was Nyla.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Simon.

  But it was Griffin who answered. “I have a job for you. All of you.”

  I looked to Simon, and then Tyler, before asking, “Job? What kind of job? And why us?”

  “Not Tyler,” Griffin answered. “He stays here. With me. But I need the three of you to go on a recruiting mission.”

  “Seriously? You want us to recruit for you?” I shot Simon a skeptical look, then shrugged at Griffin. “Why would we do that? You’ve held us hostage for days and now you want us to run errands for you?”

  Then she exhaled. “I’m giving you a chance to prove you can be useful. Earn yourself some freedoms around camp.” When I started to argue, to tell her I didn’t need to prove anything, she just lifted her hand to stop me. “I’ve already explained this to Simon and Nyla, but we believe the No-Suchers know about this kid too. I don’t want to send one of my teams, but I will if I have to. The last thing we want is for the Daylight Division to get to this kid before we do. You have no idea what they do to those like us.”

  But she was wrong; I knew exactly what they’d do. And the very mention of the No-Suchers, and their Daylight Division, made my blood run cold. The thought of saving this kid from their clutches made me feel like some sort of hero.

  And if I could get Griffin to loosen the leash she had me on in the process, then all the better.

  “You don’t have to do it,” Tyler said, easing up alongside me as he gripped my arm. “She’s right, there are other teams who can do this. It’s dangerous.” His breath tickled my cheek, and even though it was dark, I had no trouble seeing the earnestness in his green eyes as they searched mine.

  Griffin cleared her throat. “But I’d be grateful if you did. And I’d go out of my way to make things easier on you here at camp if you did.”

  “Natty too?” I asked, thinking of the way she’d been followed just hours earlier.

  Griffin held my gaze. After several long seconds, she nodded. “All of you.”

  I looked to Simon, and then to Nyla. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’d rather have you stay here, at camp.” Simon answered me but glared at Griffin. “But it’s been made clear that’s not an option. From what we’ve heard, we have a big enough head start that I think we can get there and back by dawn, no problem.” I wondered what I’d missed, and whether Tyler knew what had transpired between Griffin and Simon before we got here.

  I chewed the inside of my lip, turning to Griffin once more. “And we’ll have more freedom?” I just wanted her confirmation one more time. When she nodded, I took a deep breath. “Fine, then. I’m in too.”

  “How much farther?” I had to yell to be heard from the backseat. The bandanna Nyla had given me to tie my hair back barely contained it, and the wind whipped stray pieces around my cheeks as we flew along the road in the open-air Jeep.

  With her smooth head, Nyla didn’t have to worry about pesky hair flying around, stinging her face. She hollered over her shoulder while she drove, “Little town called Delta, about two hours from here.”

  I checked my watch; that would put us there sometime around 2:30 in the morning, plenty of time to get back to camp before sunup, just as Simon had predicted.

  “What makes Griffin think this kid we’re going after is one of us? How exactly does she get her intel?” I was fascinated by the process. By the way they did things in this Returned world I lived in now.

  I assumed there was some kind of shared superhighway of information, like all those crazy files my dad had kept on everyone who’d disappeared, including where they’d lived, where they’d last been seen, their favorite music, and if they’d ever returned at all.

  Pretty much everything there was to know about them.

  I sat forward to hear better, but also hoping the seat might block some of the wind assaulting me.

  Simon faced me from the passenger seat. “Depends. This time she got a call from an inside source saying they had the boy in town,” he called back to me, “under medical observation. I guess when they found him, he told the sheriff the last thing he remembered was being with a friend back home . . . which apparently was nowhere near Utah.”

  My palms got sweaty and I rubbed them on my jeans. I remembered that not-knowing sensation, of being one place and then waking up in another. It was . . . disturbing, to say the least.

  Like a really, really bad case of déjà vu.

  “So, where was he from, then?”

  I watched the scenery zip past. The only lights out here were from our headlights and the stars overhead. It might have been beautiful, if only I hadn’t known that we were on our way to change someone’s life forever.

  Simon interrupted my thoughts when he handed me a piece of paper.

  Unfolding it, I assumed Griffin’s “inside source” had gotten her this police report as well. It listed all the pertinent details about the boy and his disappearance:

  Alex Walker, fifteen years old. From Florida.

  According to this, his grandmother had reported him missing from their home in Tallahassee just two days earlier. Since he had a history of running away, she’d told local police he’d probably run off again.

  Yet late this evening, Alex Walker had walked into a truck stop near the edge of Delta, Utah, and asked the waitress, and I quote: “What circle of hell is this place supposed to be?” When questioned further, he claimed to have absolutely zero
memory of how he’d gotten all the way from Tallahassee to Delta, or where he’d been for the past forty-eight hours.

  Forty-eight hours . . . the exact amount of time most Returned were missing.

  The report said he was being held for observation at the Delta Medical Clinic, and his grandmother had been contacted.

  He was at the hospital.

  My stomach knotted painfully.

  I’d been taken to the hospital, too, back when I’d first been returned, and it hadn’t ended so well for the lab tech who’d drawn my blood. My body had tried to heal around the needle, and because I hadn’t known better, he’d been exposed to what I realized now was my poisonous blood.

  I seriously hoped history didn’t repeat itself in this case.

  “Griffin mentioned that the Daylighters already know about him. How can she be so sure? Did her inside source tell her that too?”

  Simon looked to Nyla for the answer.

  “Griffin said the message came from a camp in Texas, who heard it from another one in southern New Mexico,” she called back to me. “That’s the way it works—we get these bulletins that bounce from camp to camp. It’s not a bad system, and most of the time the information’s pretty accurate.”

  I wanted to be cool, and make it seem like my stomach hadn’t just clenched painfully, but I had to ask, “Most of the time? And what if they’re wrong this time? About our head start?”

  “Kyra . . .” The way Simon said it was supposed to mean I shouldn’t worry, but I couldn’t help it. I worried plenty.

  Nyla didn’t seem half as concerned. She leaned back and shouted, “Relax! If Griffin really thought there’d be trouble, she wouldn’t have risked sending a team at all.”

  Or, I thought as my stomach clenched tighter and tighter, until it was just a shriveled little knot, she’d send a crew she considered expendable.

  My eyes wandered to my watch to count down the minutes. But for once, time couldn’t ease the crush of anxiety that built inside me, reaching a crescendo as each second passed, growing leaden and filling all my insides. I had to tug at my shirt so the air could reach down in front.

  Damn, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sweated so much.

  Eighty-six minutes . . .

  Sixty-three . . .

  Forty-four . . .

  When we finally saw Delta, the city’s lights were like distant stars. Something about knowing we were so close to reaching our destination made me restless, and even though I’d considered the unrelenting wind that battered me cold just a few miles back, I leaned into it now to dry the perspiration that prickled my skin.

  I was nervous. What if we were too late, and the Daylighters had beaten us and had already whisked the kid back to the Tacoma facility?

  What if this was another trap?

  We passed a sign that read: You Are Now Entering Delta, Utah. Population 3,457.

  I never once saw Nyla consult a map or a GPS, or ask directions. She didn’t say if she’d been here before, but if she hadn’t, then she was just one of those people who had an innate sense of direction. Their own built-in compass.

  I was super jealous of people like that. I’d always been fast on the mound, and now I could add super strong to my list of talents, but even as a kid I’d always been directionally challenged. To the point that Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey had been less like a game and more like a hand-eye coordination test.

  One I almost never passed.

  When we got there, the Emergency entrance was brightly illuminated against the dark backdrop of the rest of what I assumed was supposed to pass for a hospital. Even if it hadn’t been dark, the place we pulled up in front of was really more clinic-sized than hospital-sized, but Delta was a small town, so clearly they made do with what they had.

  Out front of the blazing ER doors there were two parked cars, which would have made my heart race and set my suspicions into overdrive, except that one was a beat-up station wagon, circa 1960-something. And the other was a bright yellow convertible Volkswagen Beetle.

  Neither screamed Daylight Division.

  Off to the side, and closer to the sidewalk, was a man smoking a cigarette and murmuring into his cell phone. Again, since he was pushing seventy and wearing a hospital gown, I deemed him at least relatively harmless.

  Rather than parking, Nyla decided to wait for us, which was probably a good idea, since no matter how I tried to spin it, I couldn’t come up with a reasonable story for the three of us to be skulking around the hospital at three in the morning.

  Also, with her shaved head, I didn’t imagine Nyla went unnoticed all that often.

  There was only a small check-in counter inside, and the girl working it looked barely older than we did. When Simon and I stopped to ask where we could find Alex Walker, she chomped obnoxiously on her wad of gum and pulled out a spiral notebook, which didn’t seem very hospital-y at all. She had us sign one of the lined pieces of paper after asking us to confirm that we didn’t have any cough or flu symptoms, and then she just blurted out his room number.

  Not, “Are either of you family members?” or concerns for privacy laws or anything. Just a raised eyebrow that asked, Are we done here? and we were on our way, wandering the halls of the hospital in the middle of the night, without so much as a glance at our (fake) IDs.

  Apparently security wasn’t much of an issue in Delta, Utah.

  We only had to go up one floor, which shouldn’t have been a big deal, except that, because the building was so old, the place was put together like a ransom note. The building looked small from the outside, but it seemed bigger inside, and it was as if every hallway had been added on as a second, and then third, thought.

  I was beginning to feel like a rat in one of those science mazes, and that we should get some sort of reward for figuring our way through.

  After several turns and dead ends and some backtracking, Simon and I finally found an elevator. When we got off on the second floor, I breathed a sigh of relief that there was an actual sign pointing toward room numbers 2024–2050, since Gum-Chewing Girl told us Alex was in room 2046.

  I pulled Simon to a stop outside the closed door. “What did you mean when you said Griffin didn’t give you a choice about bringing me here?” I stalled, suddenly nervous. I mean, how do you even start to explain that everything this kid knew, his entire life, was a lie? That his whole world had just changed, all because he’d gone missing for less than forty-eight hours.

  Simon leaned his head out of the small alcove and glanced down the hallway, making sure we were still all alone. It was end-of-the-world quiet out there. The flickering overhead fluorescents were dimmed, and it was super weird that we hadn’t even passed a nurse’s station on this floor, considering it was a hospital and all. “She didn’t say it in so many words, but I think she wants to keep you away from Tyler,” he explained. “If I didn’t know better, I think she feels threatened by you.”

  I pursed my lips. “And that doesn’t worry you? Look at what she was willing to do to Willow when she was threatened by her.” Now it was my turn to look down the hallway, my heart picking up speed.

  Simon put his hands over mine. “Relax, Kyr. Her beef with Willow had to do with power. I don’t think that’s her issue with you. I think she’s worried Tyler might be a little too interested in you.” He took a step closer, too close, and suddenly my heart beat like a sledgehammer. “Frankly, I’m worried about that too.”

  He leaned toward me, closing the gap that had already grown too small. There was a shift in the air, something tangible and sharp that I felt all the way to my toes. I could smell him—his skin, clean and crisp, but with the hint of the dust-blown air clinging to him. His eyes, so rich and coppery, landed on mine, begging me to tell him this was okay, what he was about to do.

  I yanked back at the last possible second, just as his lips were about to brush mine, and my head thumped against the wall behind me.

  His eyes sparkled then, like he’d been about to get away with someth
ing he’d known he shouldn’t have.

  “You never give up, do you?” I accused, shoving him, and giving myself the space I needed to breathe again. And then, because it was easier to change the subject than to deal with the lingering tension, I eyeballed the door to room 2046. “Should we knock or just go in?”

  Simon was still chuckling beneath his breath, and had his hand on the door, when we heard the elevator down the hallway sliding open once more. I couldn’t explain why exactly, since this was a hospital and people came and went at all hours in places like this, but something made me stop him from opening it.

  I had the strangest feeling we should wait, for just a split second . . . for just the barest-tiniest-briefest of moments.

  I craned my neck from the recess we were standing in to watch as two men stepped out of the elevator, and I flinched, dragging Simon back until we were out of sight.

  The men were wearing suits—starched suits with crisply starched shirts. Even their ties looked stiff and starched. In any other place, at any other time, I’d say there was nothing special about them, these two men. Their suits weren’t matching, they weren’t dressed all in black, and they weren’t wearing sunglasses indoors or anything.

  Except we already knew we were only a step or two ahead of the Daylighters, and these two were just . . . off somehow. In the same way Agent Truman had seemed off when I’d met him that first day, when he’d come to my front door.

  The hairs on my arms went on high alert, and Simon dragged me back as we took one step, and then another and another, until we’d disappeared through the open door beside room 2046 and were hidden in the darkness of room 2048. Behind us, over my shoulder, I heard a machine pulse, beeping on even intervals that felt like it was keeping time with my heart.

  My eyes were wide as we stood there, listening for the men’s footsteps in the hallway outside, and as they neared, their heavy soles falling against the tiles, my heart rate overtook the beating of the machine.

  I squeezed Simon’s arm when I heard one of the men mumble, “Two-oh-four-six. This is it.”

  2046. It was them. They were here for Alex too.