The Replaced

by Kimberly Derting

  “Who . . . the Daylighters?” But yes, that was exactly who she meant. “Why me?” I went on, not needing her to answer my first question. “What’s so special about my blood work?” And what I meant was, what made mine different from theirs, because I already knew mine was different from any normal person’s.

  “It’s the DNA,” Jett finally said, pointing at the place on the monitor that had some sort of sophisticated, science-y looking chart on it. “The Daylighters ran an analysis of your DNA, your genetic makeup. I’ve seen some similar blood tests, from some of the other Returned, and the rest of us . . . well, we still have most of our human DNA, mingled with some foreign—or what we suspect is the alien—DNA we told you about. Yours . . . ,” Jett started, but then he hesitated.

  “Mine . . . ? Mine, what?”

  Jett grimaced. “Yours is missing that.”

  I wanted to say something along the lines of, it seemed like they were making a big deal out of nothing, I mean, wasn’t that a good thing, me not having any of that alien DNA mixed in?

  Simon jumped in then. “He doesn’t mean yours is missing the alien kind. He means yours is missing the human kind.”

  And like Cat used to say: Boom goes the dynamite!

  Just like that, the world slanted beneath my feet. I thought I’d heard everything. Or maybe I’d finally just cracked and this was me slipping deliciously-deliriously-painlessly into sweet insanity, because holy hell, who can even handle hearing something like that?

  Not I, said the Fly, another of my dad’s stupid expressions that popped into my head, and for the first time in forever I wished I couldn’t hear his voice.

  Not human? Not at all?

  So, what, then . . . ?

  “Nope. No way.” I shook my head, unwilling to even engage their level of crazy. “It’s not even possible.”

  Griffin spoke up, playing the voice of reason. “Possible? Kyra, look around you. Think about who we are. Are any of us really in any position to question what is, and isn’t, possible anymore? And clearly you already knew there was something different about you.” She said it kinder, and even used my name, and almost made me believe she was trying to be nice.

  “Different?” I shot back. “Different is having a weird eye color or needing to wear braces for an extra year. What you’re talking about doesn’t make me different, it makes me . . .” I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t even know what it makes me.” I wanted to pull my hair out because what they were saying was just . . . too much.

  But.

  Griffin wasn’t so far off with the whole who-are-we-to-question-what’s-possible thing.

  And then there was that one thing, with the NSA guy at the Tacoma facility, that one down in the ducts, where he’d shone his flashlight on me and said, “It’s you,” all serious-like. And again, with Agent Truman, when he’d told those guys in the alley, “She’s the one we want.”

  I’d figured it meant something, even while I’d tried to convince myself it was nothing.

  “So, what does this all mean?” I finally said. “I mean, how and why and . . . how?” I felt broken as I held out my hands, palms up as if to say, how was I even standing there if I wasn’t me? “If I’m not human, then what the heck am I? It doesn’t make sense.” I just kept shaking my head, like some damaged bobble-head doll.

  Simon reached for my hand, and even though my heart fully and completely belonged to Tyler, just like it had all along, I let Simon give me this—his comfort, and his strength—because I needed it. I needed it so damn much. “You’re more human than anyone I’ve ever known,” he whispered, and I almost smiled, because usually when people called each other human, they were explaining away making mistakes, so it should have been an insult, him calling me human like that. Except I knew he meant it in the best possible way, so I gave him a quick squeeze in return.

  “My father used to tell me about how he first met them,” Griffin said, turning her gaze toward the ceiling, the sky. “Some called them the First Contact meetings, but my father, he just called it ‘the Meeting’ and we all knew what he meant. People think the president was there.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was at some point, but not for the first one.”

  The room went silent while she talked; even the computers seemed to hum less noisily, as if her words had suddenly become a physical presence demanding to be noticed, something you could feel and see and taste.

  “He said they struck a deal at the Meeting—those scientists, the ones like my dad, and whatever those things were, from wherever they came from. A deal?” She gaped, leveling her gaze on us. “Can you believe that? To trade people for technology.” She gave a peevish shake of her head. “It’s not like we had a choice in the matter, about whether to agree or not. People had already been taken and experimented on, even before then. The agreement only ensured that the government would be compensated—paid in the form of cutting-edge technology—for turning a blind eye to these abductions. They would benefit from this obviously advanced culture.” She stressed the word obviously, making her less-than-generous feelings known.

  I felt like I was gonna be sick as I tried to process where I fit in all this. Whether I was supposed to consider myself part of this “advanced culture” now, or if I was still just plain old me.

  I thought about how thickheaded I’d been when we’d gone through my dad’s things and I’d seen all those stories about government cover-ups, all the accounts of secret files and covert government agencies, and how I’d scoffed at the very idea. I almost felt stupid for being so close-minded.

  “Sounds like your dad got exactly what he deserved.” I didn’t pretend not to know what Griffin had done to him. As far as I was concerned, anyone who was willing to let his own daughter be used as an alien-lab-rat in exchange for some cool gadgets had punched his own one-way ticket to hell.

  Griffin didn’t comment one way or the other about her father. “In the end, the deal never worked out the way my dad, or the other scientists and politicians, wanted it to. The ‘technology’ our side was promised wasn’t delivered in the form of ray guns or X-ray glasses or anything like that. The scientists were promised alien DNA that they could experiment on, that they’d planned to learn from. Potentially even harness.” She grinned a wicked grin. “There was only one problem with their plan: we were harder to catch than they thought we’d be.”

  I gasped, finally clueing in. “We are the alien technology?” No wonder we were constantly being sought after. Hunted.

  She shrugged. “Think about it. Our metabolisms are slower. We need less food and sleep than normal humans, we age ridiculously slowly, and we heal spontaneously. Why wouldn’t we be valuable? What pharmaceutical company wouldn’t pay millions, even billions, to get their hands on a few strands of our DNA? Or even better, what government wouldn’t kill for an army of soldiers with lethal blood?”

  The way she said it, like we could be used as a weapon, made my skin crawl.

  “And what do they get out of it, this trade? The aliens?”

  Simon jumped in. “We’ve asked ourselves the same thing a million different ways. Thing is, we’re not even sure who they are exactly. Maybe our DNA has something they need. Or maybe, the way we use lab animals, we’re just guinea pigs to them. Maybe they’re doing all this weird shit to us, and then releasing us back into the wild.”

  “And me?” I asked. “What does that make me? If I’m not . . . still me?” I looked at my hands again, my fingers, the lines running across my palms, because they looked so . . . so ordinary. Same as they always had.

  Griffin sighed. “My dad liked to talk. He was one of those guys who liked the sound of his own voice, and when I was”—she exhaled again—“when I was one of his subjects, a captive audience, he told me one of the things both sides wanted all along was to create a replicate—an exact human copy. Not a hybrid, but more like an alien clone that looked entirely human. It was what they referred to as a Replacement. Made from the genetic material of the aliens but still con
taining all the memories and life experiences of the human they were replicating.

  “My dad called it the ultimate scientific achievement. He said it would decide what truly defines life: heredity or history.”

  I recoiled from her words. Her explanation. Especially since I was “the human” in question. “Life?” I had to ask. “What does that even mean? My heart is beating, my blood—even though it’s not the same human blood it was before—is still pumping. I’m breathing. Aren’t those the things that make me alive?”

  “Are they?” Simon cut in. “Is it your genetics that make you the person you are? Or is it about who you are? The other things—the stuff your parents taught you about being a good person or that you throw a killer rise ball and win championships—all the things that have nothing to do with DNA or blood . . .” He reached out and tugged at my new fake brunette hair. “. . . or hair color?”

  I thought about something Tyler had said to me, back when I’d first explained to him about the whole healing and aging thing, and he’d tried to convince me that neither of these things changed who I was: “It’s your memories and life experiences, your hopes and fears and dreams and passions that make you who you are, and none of those things have changed, have they?” and I wondered if that applied here too. If he’d still feel the same way now.

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Who else knows?” I asked, suddenly wishing no one knew, not even me. I wanted to go away. To start over and never think about this, about how different I was again.

  “Natty was here when we opened the file,” Thom explained, and he’d been so quiet I’d almost forgotten he was here at all. “She didn’t see the DNA report, but she already saw how fast you heal when we were rescuing Willow.”

  I heard Griffin suck in a sharp breath. “Heal?” she repeated dazedly. “No one mentioned that.”

  “Yeah,” Simon said. “She heals like”—he snapped his fingers—“that. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Except, I remembered what Tyler said: that Griffin had told him he could heal faster than anyone else at camp. I wondered, then, was it a leap to read more into that? If we shared more than just being Returned?

  I opened my mouth to ask Griffin what she thought, when she caught my eye and shook her head at me. The action was discreet and curt, but the message was loud and clear: I needed to keep my mouth shut.

  Hadn’t she said the same thing to Tyler? Told him not to tell anyone?

  I glanced around—at Jett and Simon and Thom—and tried to imagine who, in here, she didn’t trust. But I did as she instructed, swallowing back my questions.

  Inwardly, however, they buzzed through my brain.

  Did Tyler have any new and unique abilities too? Was there anything he could do the other Returned couldn’t?

  And what about that other part—that thing where I’d been gone for five whole years? Was that because I was a Replaced and not just a regular Returned?

  If that was the case, then where did that leave Tyler? I didn’t know how long he’d been gone, but it couldn’t have been too long. It certainly hadn’t been five years. Days at most. Yet when I’d come back, my memory had been whole, complete. His was a mess. Sure, he remembered things from before, but there was a definite gap, a missing chunk from right before he’d been taken . . .

  . . . the entire part where we’d fallen in love.

  It was the best part, if you asked me.

  “Let me ask you a question.” Griffin’s eyes narrowed as her brief flash of concern over Tyler was safely tucked away. “How much control do you have over this telekinetic thing you have? Can you . . .” Her brows fell in a silent ultimatum. “. . . can you show it to me, so I can see how it works?”

  I shook my head. “I wish. I have to be focused.”

  Focused was putting it nicely. Angry, panicked, completely freaked out, all those probably made more sense.

  Griffin nodded then, and I thought the gesture was for me, a kind of Okay, I get it.

  But then the door opened and six of her soldiers stormed in all at once. They were armed to the teeth, their black rifles held at the ready, and suddenly the room that had been empty seconds earlier was busting at the seams.

  I’d been wrong. Everything wasn’t okay, and Griffin didn’t get it. The nod had been a signal, all right, but not for me.

  Simon was bulldozed out of the way by two of Griffin’s giants, who moved to stand on either side of me, while two others flanked Griffin. The two remaining soldiers stayed on their toes, eyeballing Thom and Simon vigilantly.

  Jett, apparently, was not a threat.

  Simon didn’t seem concerned that he was outmanned or outclassed. He jumped to his feet, his face red. “What the hell is this?” He shot daggers at Griffin, and then to Thom, who stared at him blankly.

  “I’m sorry to have to do this,” Griffin said as one of the guys—a hulk of a dude—snatched me by the arm. I saw Simon lunge for him, but one of the other giants turned and pointed his gun, the nose of it aimed directly at Simon’s chest, causing him to crash against it.

  It wasn’t aimed at his shoulder or his leg, places that could heal, but at his heart, and I doubted the gun would be firing beanbags.

  “Simon, don’t!” I cried, just as Jett got to his feet too. Thom stayed where he was, his hands in the air.

  I had no idea what was happening, but whatever Griffin was up to, it wasn’t worth letting any of them get hurt, or worse, killed. I turned back to Griffin. “Leave them out of this.”

  Her brows pulled together. “They were never in it. No one was. This is about you, and only you.” She turned her back on me as she told the guys who were on each side of me now, squeezing my arms and dragging me toward the door, “Take her to the holding cell. And don’t take your eyes off her.”

  Simon was still yelling, screaming, at Griffin when his voice finally faded to oblivion.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  REPLACED.

  The word made me feel not real. Like a thing—a mannequin or one of those wax statues you can barely tell apart from the real celebrities they’re fashioned after. Like Wax Elvis or Wax Marilyn Monroe or Wax Lady Gaga.

  Maybe I was Wax Kyra.

  Except that I could eat and breathe and think. And feel. I knew because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t buy into this crazy theory about my memories being transplanted—the memories that kept running through my head, the ones I couldn’t let go of even now. The ones of my dad and Tyler and my mom and Cat, and even Austin. I couldn’t make myself believe they didn’t belong to this body, a body that wasn’t really my own.

  They felt real. They felt real all the way to my bones. Like they were ingrained in every molecule, every cell, every breath I took.

  They were as much a part of me, of this body and who I was, as the skin that surrounded me.

  I even tried pinching myself, because maybe this whole thing, being told I was no longer human, had all been a dream—one long, whacked-out, surreal dream. But the pain receptors, my pain receptors, convinced me otherwise. This was happening, all right.

  Replaced, I silently repeated the word again. Replicated. Copied. Made from an amalgamation of alien DNA and human memories. It didn’t matter how I tried to reframe it—I had a hard time making it fit. But only because it was so damn freaky.

  Yet I couldn’t deny it either. There were too many things that pointed to the fact that it might be true. Things that separated me from the other Returned.

  So the question was: Could I live with that, if it turned out Griffin was right? If I really was a Replaced?

  I guess the answer was simple: What choice did I have? I wasn’t exactly a woe-is-me, I-can’t-go-on-another-day kind of person.

  Person. Another word that no longer seemed to fit.

  But what if Simon was right? What if I could allow myself to believe what he’d said about what made me human? What if all these memories and thoughts and feelings really were enough?

  I had
to cling to that, because deep down, I knew who I was. I was still Kyra Agnew, regardless of what my blood tests showed. No one could take my past, my history, the narration of my life away from me. Although, evidently, they could take away my freedom. Exhibit A, the claustrophobic cell I was now confined within.

  I forced myself not to think too long about how dark and narrow this space really was. It made the first place we’d been contained in seem glamorous and roomy by comparison. If I stared for too long at the walls, or considered how far one of them was from another, I got that tight-chested feeling that was almost claustrophobia. Yet another reminder that I was more than just a bunch of chromosomes strung together, because that squeezing in my chest was part of what made me the same as I’d always been.

  Instead I looked out, past the narrow bars—because yes, there were bars just like in a real jail—to where two of those thugs were guarding me like there was some chance I might somehow rip off the bars in a fit of rage and try to escape. I wondered what they’d been told about me. I wondered, too, what they thought I was actually capable of, because there was no way these bars were budging. Trust me, I’d tried.

  If only I could bend iron with my cool telekinesis thing—that was what kept looping through my mind.

  And, of course, Tyler. I thought about Tyler a lot.

  But also the bending-bars thing, because how cool would that be, if I could just King Kong my way out of here with my mind?

  And then maybe I could find something to knock those two goons out with . . . again with my mind since, hello, they were giants.

  But as far as I could see, there was nothing I could use against them. Nothing I could levitate with my new “alien ability.”