Because Simon didn’t look like he was joking. Or like anyone had put him up to anything.
He looked completely, stone-cold sober and drop-dead serious.
“What do you mean ‘normal people’?” I didn’t use the air quotes this time, and my voice was way, way quieter.
“I’m not saying we’re not normal, Kyra. I’m just saying we’re different. We can do things other people can’t after we’ve been returned.”
I spoke slowly, like he was dimwitted. “Like not aging?”
He shook his head, a patient smile replacing his serious expression. “Not at all. We age. I aged. I was only fifteen when I was taken, the same way you were taken.”
I shook my head because what he was saying was utter-complete-absurd nonsense. He was nothing like me.
He only nodded in response. “I was. And you’ll age too.” He was speaking slowly, too, now, as if I was the one who didn’t get it. As if I was the one who was crazy. “Just way, way, way slower than everyone else.”
I studied him and tried to see him as fifteen. He could be fifteen, I supposed, if I squinted just so. But more likely he was lying, and honestly, I was getting tired of being toyed with. “Prove it,” I said at last, knowing there was no way he could convince me.
“Are you sure, Kyra? You want me to prove it to you?”
“Yeah. Sure. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Prove it.”
And then he did the absolute last thing I anticipated: he cut himself.
The knife came out of nowhere. It was one of those pocketknives, like the Swiss Army kind that has all the gadgets. It cut across the soft, unblemished skin of his forearm.
I opened my mouth to say “Oh my god!” but no words came out. All I could do was pant in jagged breaths. I twisted around in my seat then, as I searched for something to stop the blood that was already spilling from the inch-long gash he’d inflicted on himself.
“No! Kyra, don’t. Just watch.” His other arm was on my wrist, demanding I stop rummaging for a makeshift bandage and pay attention to what was happening on his arm.
Recoiling, I reluctantly turned back and did as he said. I looked at the cut. It was wide and deep, and I could see far too far inside of it, and I was sure it would need stitches and probably a tetanus shot, because who knew where that blade had been before he’d shoved it into his own arm!
I felt queasy, and the possibility of me throwing up right there in the front seat of his car skyrocketed.
And then the weirdest thing happened, and the world beneath me spun out of control. The thing started to close. The wound—it started to heal, right before my eyes.
It was still bleeding, but the flow began to subside as the blood itself became thicker, darker, and then the edges at the ends of the slash began to . . . I had to blink to make sure I was seeing it right, but they did, they began to seal back together.
I sat there, mesmerized, for at least five minutes, the total time it took for the process to complete. In the grand scheme of things, it had to be some kind of miracle.
But when all was said and done, his injury had spontaneously healed in mere minutes.
There was only one question left as I sat there, staring at his perfect, completely uninjured and unscarred skin. “What . . . are you?”
I could’ve used one of Cat’s tequila shots right about then. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt so disoriented, not even when I’d first come back and realized I’d lost five entire years. Or when I’d gone to the dentist and learned I hadn’t aged a single day during that time.
Because what Simon was telling me now went beyond farfetched and ventured straight into no-freaking-way territory.
Except that I’d just watched him heal a gash that surely needed serious medical attention in less time than it took to make Top Ramen in the microwave.
“Let me get this straight. You’re saying that when we’re ‘returned’”—I pulled out the air quotes again because it was too weird not to use them—“we’re not the same as before? And you think you were taken by . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I knew how—I just couldn’t say the word.
“Aliens,” he filled in for me, completely nonplussed by the whole deal.
“Seriously?” I asked, my voice chock-full of disbelief.
Simon nodded, the same way he had the other three times I’d asked the very same question, trying to phrase my doubts in different ways and hoping for a different response. “I am, Kyra. I’m saying we both were. That’s what happens when we’re taken. We’re not the same when we come back. Not the same at all.”
“And when you say ‘not the same,’ you’re talking . . . ?” I’d never had such a hard time completing sentences in my entire life.
Simon looked at me like I was being intentionally dense. “Well, this for one.” He held his arm wrist up for my inspection. “Have you ever seen anyone else do that? And what about sleep? I’m guessing you haven’t slept much since you’ve been back.” He studied me, waiting for me to answer, and I wanted to deny the truth.
Really. I wanted to flat-out lie to avoid feeding his delusions, but he was right; I’d barely slept, and not in the way people say that so they have something to complain about, like it’s a competition.
I shook my head and shrugged. “So, I have some insomnia issues. It’s been a big adjustment. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“That’s not it, and you know it. You’re not even tired.”
He didn’t bother asking if he was wrong, and he wasn’t. I hadn’t even considered that before this minute. That it had been five long nights without more than an hour in any given night, and I wasn’t the slightest bit drowsy. I hadn’t yawned once.
“What about that?” I pointed at the dried blood on his arm. “I can’t do that.”
He shot me a challenging look. “You so sure about that?”
I jolted in my seat. “Are you freaking kidding me? You don’t seriously want to test it out! You’re even crazier than I thought, you know that?”
Suddenly I needed to get out of there. Simon wasn’t just a fruitcake, he was a dangerous fruitcake.
But before I could open my mouth to tell him I was out of there, either with or without a ride, he’d reached out and snatched my arm, and the edge of his blade was sliding into my wrist.
This cut was longer than his, though, probably because I’d flinched and the blade had slipped. Blood spurted out, spilling onto my lap and seeping from between my fingers as my hand instinctively shot around it, trying to staunch the seemingly endless flow.
“Why did you . . . ?” I cried. But I knew why.
I opened my mouth but only gulped in air. My chest burned.
Beneath my fingers, even while Simon was trying to pry them away from my injury, I could feel something happening. There was the sensation of hundreds of needles all around the injury—not painful but prickling.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered this feeling.
“It’s okay,” he promised, his voice so soothing that my pulse slowed and my breathing evened out. And even without releasing my grip to look beneath my fingers, I knew he was telling me the truth, because the surge of blood began to slow. Then it stopped altogether.
I waited only a few seconds before venturing a glance. I removed first one finger and then another, peering beneath, only to find my suspicions confirmed. The wound was completely healed. Or rather, absent. If it hadn’t been for all the blood still covering my hands and my legs and the seat of the car, I would never have believed it had been there at all.
That was when I remembered where I’d felt that before, that sensation of tingling—of skin closing and healing. It was the day I’d been in the hospital and had my blood drawn, when the guy couldn’t get the needle out.
Had I healed around it? So quickly that was why he’d had to yank it back out again?
“Less than a minute.” Simon breathed the words as if it was some accomplishment I should be proud of.
“What ar
e you talking about?” I shot back at him, furious that he’d cut me at all. What if he’d been wrong? What if I hadn’t healed and I’d bled out, right there in his car?
“This is a new record. No one’s ever healed this fast. I had a feeling. I’m sure it has something to do with how long you were gone. They’ve done something different to you—to make you special.”
At that moment, all I really wanted to do was kick his teeth in. I’d show him how “special” I was. But for now I had to know more. For every answer he provided, I had five questions of my own.
I continued to rub the still-tingling spot where his blade had sliced me. My fingers were covered in sticky blood that settled into my cuticles and beneath my fingernails, making dark-red crescents. “You said we were ‘taken’ as part of some experiment; what did you mean by that? And how can you possibly believe it was . . .” I swallowed. I had to say it. “Aliens?”
I had the feeling this wasn’t the first time Simon had had to convince someone, and a look of patience settled over his face. He sat back and nodded. “I think you already know why, Kyra. We’ve been tracking your father’s online comings and goings for years. You don’t have to pretend he didn’t try to tell you this already.”
I closed my eyes and wished that were enough to block him out. How could any of this—anything my dad had said—really be true?
Yet how could I argue when I’d just witnessed my own body healing itself? Simon was right; no normal person could do that.
“When they take us, they don’t just take our temperatures, or poke and prod us, Kyra. They’re advanced—way more so than we are. They do things to us.” His eyes met mine. “We’re no longer like our old selves. Our bodies heal faster, and age slower. We need less sleep and sustenance. I assume you haven’t eaten much either. That nothing tastes the same.”
He was right about the sleep, and the food, even if I didn’t tell him so.
I swallowed, trying to make sense of what he was saying.
I looked down at my hands. They were the same hands as they’d always been. I was exactly the same as I’d always been. I looked the same, sounded the same, had the same tan and bruise I’d had right before I’d vanished.
Which was weird. “If I can heal, why do I still have this?” I showed him my bruise, the one on my shin.
“You had it when you vanished, right?”
I nodded because I finally had him.
“Right,” he said. “And you always will. I can’t explain everything; I wish I could. Occasionally someone will come back with a bruise or a scar, and if they do, they’ll always have it.” He lifted his sleeve to show me a circular scar on the upper part of his left arm. “I still have this—from my small pox vaccination.”
I examined his scar, and then leaned over and looked at my bruise, trying to decide if it had changed, even a little bit, since I’d been back. It had been almost a week, and as much as I didn’t want it to be different, I was pretty sure it was exactly the same as the day I’d disappeared. “So, you’re saying it’ll be there the rest of my life?”
Simon nodded.
“Which is going to be, like, forever?” He didn’t say anything; he just lifted his eyebrows, which I took as Yes. “So are you invincible?” I couldn’t bring myself to say “we” because the whole idea was so . . . out there.
“Invincible? No. We can be killed, just not that easily. I mean, cut off our heads, and I’m sure we wouldn’t just”—he made air quotes to emphasize his next word—“‘heal.’” He grinned at me, letting me know he had a sense of humor about all this before continuing. “Certain poisons have been known to be lethal as well.”
“And diseases?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Don’t really know. So far, I’ve never seen any of the Returned get sick.”
“The Returned?” I echoed distractedly.
“That’s what we call ourselves. Those of us who’ve been taken and sent back.”
I thought about the way I’d woken up behind the Gas ’n’ Sip and tried to imagine there were others like me, who had been through the same thing I had. “But you said no one comes back after forty-eight hours. What about me? I was gone five years.”
Simon’s head dipped forward thoughtfully. “That’s why we thought you were gone for good. We’d all but written you off. Mostly, we were still tracking your dad’s activity because he keeps intel on the others who’ve been taken. He tracks when they go missing and from where, how long they’re gone, if and when they’re returned. He knows ages, dates, locations, genders, religions, family backgrounds . . . he even knows what their last meal was. He documents everything about them. He never gave up on you, you know?” My heart squeezed, knowing how easily I’d given up on him. “When we saw his post on one of his message boards that you’d come back, I left camp and drove all day to get here.”
“Camp?”
Simon leaned closer. I watched his hand, the one that had, just moments earlier, yielded the pocketknife, warily. But he stretched right over the top of me and grabbed something on the floor on the other side. “There are camps where there are others. Like us.” He held out a pack of Wet Ones wipes to me.
I took the container and popped the plastic top, pulling out one of the premoistened towelettes while I reflected on his words. “Is that where you live?” When he nodded, I inhaled and asked, “And what about them? Can they do this, too?” I glanced down at my arm. I still wasn’t sure I believed him, but I couldn’t deny it completely as I wiped away the blood and there was nothing but unscathed skin beneath.
“Not quite as efficiently as you.” I was glad he didn’t say fast, because for once in my life this wasn’t a race I wanted to be in.
“So . . . how many more are there?”
“Of the Returned?” Simon shrugged. “Who knows. Hundreds for sure. But there could be thousands. A lot of us prefer to stay together. It’s safer. And that way we can network with others like us.” He raised his eyebrows as he kept explaining. “Some who come back prefer to remain in isolation. They move from place to place, never getting close to anyone, not even to other Returned.”
I was still confused. It was too much information at once. “Safer, how? Who exactly are you hiding from?”
His mouth formed a hard line. “More people than you can imagine. Scientists, crackpot conspiracy theorists, government agencies. You’d be surprised how many people would like to get their hands on . . .” He stopped midsentence, and I wondered what he’d been about to say. “ . . . well, on people like us. I’m sure that Agent Truman was able to find you the same way we did: through your dad’s online chatter. That’s why I couldn’t approach you sooner, Kyra. I had to make sure you hadn’t been compromised.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked pointedly.
“It means exactly how it sounds. I wanted to make sure Agent Truman hadn’t gotten to you first. That you weren’t being used as bait to lure me out.”
“Bait? Are you kidding me?” I crossed my arms. “You really think they’d use me as bait to catch you?”
Simon leaned close, his expression so grave it nearly took my breath away. “Not just me. All of us.”
I stared into his eyes, noting how much more amber they were up close than I’d first guessed, flecked with chips of gold. “So how did you know I wasn’t? Compromised, I mean?”
His nostrils flared as he reached out and caught my wrist. “Because I saw them coming for you. And I knew exactly what they planned to do to you when they got you.”
My throat felt tight, and my chest ached, but somehow I found my voice. “You’re scaring me,” I managed.
Simon didn’t blink when he answered me, “Good, Kyra. You should be scared. This is serious. I know it’s hard to believe, all of it, but you’d better start believing it, and fast. Your dad, as well-meaning as I’m sure he is, puts you—puts all of us—at risk. Agent Truman and those NSA guys, they’d love nothing more than to get their hands on us. You saw them—all that equipment.
What did you think they wanted to do, interview you?” He gave a slow shake of his head. “No, Kyra. They do their own kinds of experiments, and they’re not pretty. No one ever returns from those.”
“Things like . . .” I turned a pointed glance in the direction of my arm, letting Simon know what I thought of his tactics. “Cutting someone open?”
“Worse,” he informed me, his nostrils flaring and the muscle in his jaw leaping. “Way, way worse.”
My mind reeled with the implications. “You mentioned that some people are taken and never come back. What happens to them?”
He paused, reaching for a wet wipe and absently scrubbing at the blood on his own hands. “We think those people don’t survive, like failed experiments. For all we know, we’re just lab rats to them. Expendable. And I’ve never heard of anyone who wasn’t a teen being returned. Maybe we’re the only ones who are ever truly taken in the first place. Maybe the rest who say they are . . .” He shrugged. “Really are just crazy.”
“Teens? Why’s that?”
He turned his palms over and got lost in examining them. “Beats me. Maybe because our bodies are stronger and can survive all that shit they do to us.” Sitting straighter, he rubbed his hands over his knees, his eyes searching me out. “Or maybe it’s just that teens are more disposable. You can yank them out of their lives for a few days and then drop them right back in, and it’s just a blip on the radar. Younger kids get AMBER Alerts and milk cartons. Families send out search parties because they were likely abducted by some psycho sex offender. People are quick to give up on teens, to call them troubled or runaways . . . especially those who’ve been fighting with their parents.” He raised his eyebrows at me.
My dad and I had been arguing.