All I could think was that I didn’t want to vanish again.
Not again . . . not again . . . not again . . .
“Stop it!” a voice hissed against my ear. It was hushed and came from someone far younger than I’d imagined.
But it didn’t stop me from struggling, even though I wavered for just a moment.
Then he spoke again. “If you scream, they’ll know you’re in trouble and come busting in after you. We only have a few minutes.”
Yes, I thought. They’ll come in here and help me. I had no idea who “they” were, but they had to be better than the guy who’d just assaulted me in my own home.
“You need to trust me, Kyra,” he whispered against my ear. “I swear I’m here to help you.”
This time I went still. Fainting-goat still.
We were in the kitchen now, and the moment I went limp in his arms, I questioned my own judgment. After I stopped struggling, he tentatively let go of my mouth, and when I didn’t scream—not that I wasn’t considering it still—he leaned over the top of me and revealed himself at last.
It was the coffee-shop boy with the strange-colored eyes.
Seeing him almost sent me over the edge again. How the hell did he, of all people, end up here in my house? And now, of all times?
His smirk was not at all reassuring. “I can see you have questions, but trust me, now isn’t the time. There are a bunch of people out there coming to get you—” And as if he’d coordinated the timing to confirm his ominous prediction perfectly, there was a thunderous crashing from the front room. It sounded like someone had just set off a bomb at my front door.
And before I could ask him what the hell was happening, and who “they” were and what they wanted from me, he was hauling me to my feet. “If we don’t get you out of here right now, they will take you.”
We heard footsteps and voices, and then we disappeared through the already-open back door.
He kept giving me hand signals, like we were part of some covert ops mission, but I didn’t understand any of them. Mostly we just snuck through the neighbors’ backyards, keeping low and moving fast. When we were finally far enough from my house, hiding between the overgrown shrubs of the O’Flannerys’ house, I stopped panting long enough to glare at him.
I was still shaking all over, barely able to contain myself. “I have no idea who you are or what the hell’s going on back there, but this better be the best explanation ever or I’m calling the cops myself.”
He told me, “I’m Simon.” And then he held his hand out to me like we were introducing ourselves at some sales convention.
I stood there looking at it like it was something strange and foreign. Was he kidding with this? He wanted to shake hands right now?
I shoved his hand away from me. “Is this some kind of joke or something? You’re the guy who left the note on my receipt, and now you come into my house and kidnap me?” I knew I was being too loud, but I could barely restrain myself. This was too much.
But Simon didn’t give me the chance to fall apart. “I get it. This is a shock. But let me show you something.”
He drew me out from the cover of the bushes . . . not far, but far enough so I could see all the way down the street. He kept his hand on my shoulder, ready to reel me back at any moment.
The scene unfolding on my front lawn looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. Car doors slammed as more and more people arrived. Many were covered from head to toe in what I could only assume were hazmat or some sort of biohazard suits. Whatever they were wearing, they were intended to protect their occupants from something harmful—something dangerous.
They seemed to be everywhere, with more arriving by the second. The street, for as far as I could see, was lined with polished black vehicles: cars, vans, SUVs, and something that resembled a small bus or an ambulance with doors in the back that were opened wide. Inside I could make out a stretcher and what appeared to be medical equipment.
Someone was unrolling a giant tarp, and someone else was assembling a metal frame that was surrounded on all sides by similar plastic sheeting. There was a table set up at the far end of the yard, near the road. And even from inside my house, I could make out the faint crackling of radio static and saw several people talking into black handhelds.
Seriously, the only thing missing was a squadron of armed soldiers and a helicopter flying overhead.
Whatever they were collecting must be extremely hazardous.
That was when I saw him coming down the front steps of my house. Agent Truman.
He paused long enough to talk to someone in one of the hazmat suits, and then he pointed at my house and shook his head.
“Jesus,” I whispered, pulling back again. I hadn’t even realizing I’d said it out loud. “What’s he doing here?”
Simon caught my expression, or maybe he’d heard the fear in my voice. “So you two’ve met already?”
Dazedly, I shook my head in disbelief and then nodded in answer to his question. “I . . . yeah . . .”
Shouting drew our attention again, and we both inched out of the shrubs in time to see Tyler running toward my house, calling my name. When he reached the sidewalk on my side of the street, he was stopped by two men who weren’t in hazmat suits. I could hear him arguing with a third man who had come to stand in front of him: Agent Truman.
Instinctively, I lurched toward him, but Simon stopped me. “You can’t. We have to get out of here. He’ll be okay. It’s not him they want.” He nodded at me solemnly, and my stomach dropped. And as much as I wanted to deny what he was telling me with that silent nod, all those people in biohazard gear said otherwise.
According to Simon, it was me they were after.
“Stay close, Kyra, and when I give you the signal . . . run.”
He raised his eyebrows as if to ask Got it?
I glared back at him: I have no idea what you mean.
Turns out Simon’s “signal” involved waving three fingers in front of his face and then pointing toward a car—a red one with tinted windows that stood out like a sore thumb on a street that was now teeming with black government vehicles. It was parked directly across the street from us.
Then he took off running without me. What about the whole no-man-left-behind thing?
Fortunately, years on the field had trained me to think fast.
Thankfully the red car’s doors were unlocked, and when we reached it we climbed inside the vehicle before I could question whether we were making a huge mistake or not.
“They’ll hear us,” I insisted in a shaky breath. “They’ll see us leaving and come after us.”
But Simon gave a brisk shake of his head and then nodded toward my house, which was down from where we were now. Several neighbors who were home during the day had made their way out to the sidewalk, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, and Tyler was still arguing with Agent Truman. “They’re way too occupied to notice us. But we have to go. Now.” And somehow, before I had the chance to second-guess him, the engine rumbled to life.
I stayed low, crouched in the passenger seat, and didn’t dare to peek above the dash to see if anyone had spotted us . . . or was running our way. My head was pounding and my chest ached and my breathing was coming in uneven gasps.
I don’t know how we made it out of there without anyone noticing us, but the next thing I knew we were driving. Above me, through the windows, I saw houses and trees, and eventually signs from businesses zipping past us. When I was sure I wasn’t going to pass out, I sat up and started checking behind us to see if anyone was coming after us.
But there was no one. Somehow, someway, Simon had pulled it off. He’d gotten me out of there.
I didn’t know how Agent Truman and his biohazard team expected to explain what they’d done when my mom and Grant got home to find their front door broken to smithereens, but that wasn’t really my problem.
To calm my beating heart, I dug my phone from my front pocket and checked the time
. It was barely three in the afternoon, which meant that the schools were just letting out and most grown-ups were counting down the last hours of their workweek before the weekend.
Me, I was on the run from the NSA.
Simon’s eyes widened as he saw what I was doing. “You brought your phone? Jesus, Kyra? Have you used it? Did you call or text anyone since we left?”
Frowning, I shook my head. “No. I was just seeing what time it was.” But even as I said it, I realized what the problem was. Of course the NSA would be able to track my cell phone, the same way Agent Truman had been able to track down my phone number. Obviously, privacy wasn’t an issue for them. “Can they find us if I didn’t use it?”
Simon ran his hand over the top of his close-cropped hair. “They can do a lot of things.” He jerked the steering wheel hard to the right and slammed on the brakes, and then he held his hand out for it. “We can’t take the chance. We need to ditch it,” he demanded, but I was already ahead of him.
I’d taken a marker from his center console and was copying down on my hand the only two numbers—of the three in my contacts list—I didn’t have memorized. My mom’s number, which was new since I’d returned, and Tyler’s. My dad’s was the same as it had always been.
When I was finished, I handed him the phone. He opened his door and set it on the concrete, and then smashed it beneath the heel of his boot.
Simon pulled back onto the road and concentrated on driving, while I kept glancing behind us.
“Here,” Simon said, pulling down a side road that looked a little like the alley Tyler had taken me down the night we’d gone to the used books store. It was wider and seemed more warehousey, though, which turned out to be the point when Simon hopped out and unlocked a tall metal door like the ones you see on storage lockers, the kind that are hinged and rolled up.
When he got back in, he parked the car inside the garage-like space, flipped a switch that illuminated a single bare bulb overhead, and dragged the metal door closed again. It was all very cloak-and-dagger.
Now I was locked inside a storage facility with the stranger who’d just kidnapped me from the authorities and smashed my cell phone. Awesome.
I stayed in the car with my fists pressed tightly on top of my knees. My teeth were clenched, and my shoulders ached. Simon scraped a lone metal chair across the concrete floor to the passenger side of the car and opened my door, propping the chair in front of me.
He straddled it and leaned forward on his knees. “I guess I have some explaining to do.”
I don’t know why, but when his coppery eyes drilled into me, I felt some of my tension easing. It made no sense, considering the circumstances. Still, I was here now, and after a quick perusal of the space, I realized that I probably wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted me to, so I figured I might as well listen to what he had to say.
“That’s the understatement of the century,” I told him at last. “So, who the hell are you, and why have you been following me?”
He smiled, revealing a set of straight teeth that flashed against his skin. “You noticed, huh?”
My eyebrows lifted. “You weren’t exactly stealthy. You practically knocked me over at the bookstore.” I paused, chewing the inside of my cheek. “And what about that message . . .” I breathed in. “How the hell did you get that on my receipt?”
His smile faded. “Let me start at the beginning. My name is Simon Davis, and I’m like you, Kyra. I was taken too.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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PART TWO
“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER TWELVE
FIRST OF ALL, THERE WAS NO WAY I BELIEVED A word he’d said.
Sure, he’d saved me and all. Or at least that’s what he expected me to believe. But now that I’d heard him out, I was starting to suspect I’d traded whatever Agent Truman and his band of Merry Men had in store for me for a straight-up nut job.
Besides, how did I know Simon hadn’t been wrong about them? Maybe they were trying to help.
It was certainly an easier pill to swallow than the one Simon was trying to shove down my throat. If only he hadn’t started his explanation with the words: “I was abducted in 1981.”
Uh, yeah . . .
I mean, even if I ignored the part where he’d used the word abducted, I could still do simple calculations in my head. I didn’t have to be a math whiz to know that, if what he’d said was true, that would put old Simon here somewhere around balding and middle-aged. And there was no way in hell that Simon—this Simon who was sitting right in front of me—was a day older than eighteen. Nineteen at the most.
“Sooo . . . ,” I drawled, stretching out my skepticism to epic proportions. “You were ‘abducted’”—I used air quotes in case he hadn’t grasped the doubt oozing from my tone— “back in 1981 and didn’t return until, what, three days ago?”
But my cynicism didn’t rattle him. “No,” he clarified matter-of-factly, without skipping a beat. “I was only gone a day and a half. Most of us are returned within forty-eight hours.”
I wilted; my hero was looking more and more like a fruitcake. “‘Most of us’?”
“Kyra,” Simon offered sympathetically. “I know this is difficult to believe, but you need to hear it. People—teens, mostly—have been abducted for years. Decades. I can’t say why, for sure, but we believe we’re part of some kind of experiment. There is a purpose—we’re sure of it; we just don’t know what the end goal is yet.” He reached out and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Your father isn’t crazy.”
I flinched. From his explanation. From his touch and from his mention of my dad. My back dug into the gearshift behind me, and I winced. “My dad? What does he have to do with any of this? How do you even know about him?”
He dropped his hand but stayed where he was, conviction written all over his face. “Your dad—his online activity—that’s how we found you. That’s how we knew you’d been returned. You’re the first of our kind to come back after all this time. No one’s ever been returned past the forty-eight-hour mark. It’s unheard of. Anyone who’s ever been gone that long . . . well, they’re never heard from again. We’ve always assumed the experiments have failed after that point. That the body . . . that it didn’t survive.”
I heard so many things wrong with what he’d just said that I couldn’t process any of them: our kind . . . never heard from again . . . the body . . . didn’t survive . . .
I waved my hands to ward him off even though he was no longer touching me. Hysteria was creeping in on me, threatening to consume me. My throat was swelling shut, and in a matter of seconds I was pretty sure I was going to suffocate. He was literally killing me with his words. “What the . . . ? What do you mean, ‘our kind’?”
My panic was obviously visible, and Simon inhaled deeply. Watching him, the way his chest was rising and falling rhythmically, hypnotically, I swore he was prompting me to do the same. “Kyra.” He inhaled. “Please.” He took another slow and steady breath. “Just let me talk. I’ll do my best to make sense of it, and then you can ask anything you want.” He exhaled calmly, easily.
I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to breathe the way he was. Slowly. In and out. So very, very slowly . . .
After a few seconds I felt . . . well, okay. Who was I kidding? I still felt like I was trapped in a storage locker with a maniac, but at least I could breathe again. “Fine,” I muttered. “You have five minutes. And then I’m leaving.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to continue. I was angry and frustrated, but most of all confused and scared.
“Let me tell you what I remember,” Simon began again, not at
all rushing his explanation just because I’d decided to put him on the clock. “I remember walking to my girlfriend’s house; I’d just had a fight with my parents.” He looked at me as if this was somehow significant, but he kept talking. “We lived in Boise, and it was August, so even though it was getting late, I remember it was still hot as hell. Man, the mosquitoes were eatin’ me alive that night.” He chuckled slightly, and I wondered if he thought this was funny, because I so totally didn’t. I didn’t appreciate his stroll down memory lane. I just wanted his five minutes to be up already so I could tell him, “Thanks for saving me from the Men in Black, but I gotta be on my way now.”
Oblivious to my surliness, Simon continued, his gaze going deep and faraway, “And then there was this light . . . and it was so . . . I couldn’t see anything but that light.” He closed his eyes as if he’d gone someplace else. Faraway. Another place in time.
When he opened his eyes again, he shook his head. “I was ten miles south of home when I woke up, at place called Lucky Peak. Almost two days had passed, and I had no idea where I’d been or what had happened to me.”
I stopped sulking as I broke out in goose bumps. His story was different from mine but so very much the same all at once.
Except I’d been gone way, way longer.
I sat up straighter, not convinced by any stretch but a little more curious. “So how’d you figure it out? And how are you still . . .” I didn’t know how old I thought he was. “Shouldn’t you be like fifty or something?”
“Forty-nine,” he stated, as if the answer was simple. “We just don’t age at the same rate as everyone else.” And then his eyes narrowed. “At the same rate as normal people.”
I laughed then. A small, breathy sound, and I was frowning and grinning at the same time. “Okay, what?” I stopped smiling then, because it really wasn’t funny. “This is . . . You’re just . . .” I narrowed my eyes back at him. “Did my dad put you up to this?” I wasn’t sure if I was amused or pissed, or freaked out that someone would go to this length—even my own father—to prove a point. But I was definitely alarmed.