By late morning the temperature was already approaching the eighty-degree mark. It was hard to imagine what it was like out here in July or August.
I wiped the sweat from my upper lip as I climbed down from the truck, kicking up a cloud of dust as my feet hit the gritty earth.
Tyler was asleep inside the cab.
He hadn’t thrown up again, but he’d bled. Not from his nose this time but from his right ear. I’d dabbed at it while he slept. I didn’t say anything but caught Willow watching me as I swiped at the trickle.
He was getting worse.
“We’ve got a place for you two already set up in the bunkhouse. We can get him in there, and then we should talk,” Simon told me, coming around behind me while I watched Tyler sleep. “I know this is hard, Kyra, but there’s nothing you can do for him. He’s only got a day or so left.” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I shrugged it off, not wanting to hear what he had to say. “We’ll make him as comfortable as we can. We have drugs we can give him—they won’t cure him or anything, but they’ll . . .” He faltered, just like he should falter, I thought. Because this was bullshit. It shouldn’t be happening. “ . . . they’ll make it easier on him.”
I clenched my jaw, biting back every terrible thing I wanted to say to him because I knew he was right; it wouldn’t do any good.
The bunkhouse we were taken to was rustic to say the least: four walls and a few cots, which looked barely used and smelled like deep-rooted dust. With the windows closed it was even hotter in there, and I had to prop them all open just to get the scant breeze moving through the ramshackle building so Tyler wouldn’t suffocate when I laid him down. I sent Simon to get us some water and a washcloth so I could sponge Tyler’s burning skin.
When a boy came back with what I’d asked for, he offered me a grimy-looking water jug and a worn-looking rag. “I’m Jett,” he explained, pushing a mop of sandy-brown hair out of his eyes. “Simon had to take care of some things and asked me to look after you.” His eyes drifted to Tyler, to his limp form on the cot, and then skittered away from him again as if looking at him for too long was difficult. It was, really. I was the only one unwilling to admit it. “Can I get you anything else?”
I shook my head, turning back to Tyler and ignoring the boy.
After a minute I heard footsteps and knew the boy had left us alone. Good, I thought. I didn’t want him here anyway. I didn’t want anyone here unless they knew how to fix Tyler.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out another packet—Advil this time. I tore it open with my teeth and forced Tyler awake again. It was getting harder and harder to keep him conscious. “Tyler . . .” I tried not to sob when I said his name, but that was harder too. Guilt shredded me from the inside out. “Take these,” I ordered.
He opened his mouth listlessly but not his eyes, and I let the pills fall on his tongue, which didn’t really look like a tongue should—not pink and soft and moist. Instead it was desiccated, like leather. Pretending not to notice, I lifted the jug to his lips and trickled the water into his mouth.
After he finally swallowed, I thought he’d go back to sleep. Instead, he moved his lips to talk. At first all that came out were these garbled, whispering sounds, like muffled breaths, and then I heard him.
“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” he croaked. “Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world, . . .” He paused, taking a breath. I tried to figure out what he was saying and wondered if he was hallucinating. But he wasn’t finished. “It’s more . . . more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” I recognized it then. It was from Fahrenheit 451, the book he’d shared with me. His favorite one.
My eyes burned, and then that burning gave way to the tears, because I understood what he was saying. I bent over him, weeping as I clutched his hands, desperate to make him know how sorry I was. “You . . . you . . . know?” I managed to say between choked gasps.
Tyler’s face remained still, his eyes closed. When he breathed, it sounded like it was coming from too far down inside his chest and each breath had to be dredged up. Labored for. Speaking was an effort. “I heard you . . . when you were talking. I know . . .” He paused to take a long, determined pull of the dusty air around us. “I know I don’t have long.” He strained to open his eyes, and again it was a struggle, that task that should have been so incredibly simple.
Yet when he did, I nearly lost it.
His eyes . . . oh my god, his eyes . . .
What had once been beautiful and green, and had sparkled when he smiled, were now completely and totally devoid of all color. As if black ink had been spilled within them, blooming from the pupil and diffusing outward.
“I wish I could see you,” Tyler said, lifting his hand feebly and reaching for my face.
Trembling, and unable to stop myself from crying openly, I moved so he could find me, letting the tips of his fingers graze my cheeks until even that effort was too much for him and his hand fell back down. I captured his hand then and crushed my lips to it.
“I don’t want you to blame yourself, Kyra. Not ever.” He wheezed, and before I could stop him, he spoke again. “It was worth it, you know. I would trade a million lifetimes for the one I’ve had with you.”
“You’re wrong,” I insisted. “I would trade anything to give you your life back. Anything.”
I felt him then. Going quiet, completely motionless, once more. Exhaustion overtaking him.
I hovered above him, listening to the sounds of his breathing and hating how much I feared that this might be it. The way my stomach clenched at the rasping sound he made as he fought for each and every breath like it might be his last. I had a hard time swallowing as I willed his lungs to find a rhythm, for him to hang on.
When he found that calm at last, I relaxed, easing back and letting go of his hands.
“Simon wants you to come with me.”
The voice startled me, but I recognized it. It was Jett, standing in the doorway behind me.
“What? I can’t leave him,” I said, getting to my feet.
“He’ll be okay for now,” Jett explained, nodding toward Tyler, who was out cold. “He won’t even know you’re gone. Simon wants me to show you around.” When I looked like I might argue, which I considered, unable to bring myself to leave Tyler alone, Jett added, his voice quiet and persuasive, “You’ll want to see this. I promise.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS HARD TO LEAVE TYLER IN THE FILTHY, rundown cabin while I followed Jett into what I could only describe as a maze of tunnels that extended far below the hot and dusty surface of the camp.
“What is this place?” I ran my hand along the cool concrete that made up the underground walls. I’d let Jett lead me down into what I thought was a sewer opening in the middle of the soil, one that had been concealed by a heavy iron cover that he had to drag off it, and once we’d dropped all the way to the bottom, I found myself surrounded by darkness. The tunnel we walked through seemed endless, and, unlike me, Jett needed a flashlight to find his way.
“Used to be part of the Hanford operation—the nuclear facility. They haven’t used this place in years, though. I’m not sure this bunker is even on the map.” He stopped in front of a closed metal door that blended into the cement wall around it.
“Nuclear facility? Is it safe to be here?”
Jett flashed me a boyish grin, and I wondered just how old he was. He looked younger than both Simon and Willow. Younger than me and Tyler, at least in human years. I had no idea how that translated in replaced time. At the delayed aging rate of the Returned, he could’ve been back for mere weeks or as long as decades. “It is for us,” he bragged.
Goose bumps broke out over my skin at his answer. He worked to unlatch the door, which involved rotating a handle the way you did with submarine hatches. “
Okay,” I asked, rubbing the chill from my arms. “But what about Tyler? He’s not . . . like us?” The seal popped with a hiss, and the door burst outward.
Jett shot me a look that told me I was being unreasonable. “He’s also been exposed,” he said. “He can’t survive.”
I hated him for being so matter-of-fact about it, even if it was the truth.
Jett frowned at me. “I’m sorry,” he explained. “We’ve all lost people we cared about.”
I kept rubbing my arms, my skin no longer chilled but wanting to ward away the feelings that overwhelmed me. I turned my attention to the room in front of us.
Jett lifted his chin toward the opening, his eyes sparkling. “Welcome to my lair.”
From the other side of the open door came the hum of electricity, the buzz filling the air with its static charge. Jett stepped over the threshold, which was several inches high, and I leaned in closer to see what it was he was hiding in there.
Computers. There was a hodgepodge collection of computer workstations—monitors and keyboards and routers and modems of various sizes and designs—like they’d been salvaged from junkyards and thrift stores and yard sales—anyplace he’d been able to gets his hands on a piece of equipment. There were printers and cords and discs too.
And then there were the maps. Walls and walls of maps.
It was like the military version of my dad’s place. More organized and state-of-the-art, but it had that same feel to it. A similar command-center vibe.
“What do you do down here?” I questioned, taking a step inside and feeling slightly claustrophobic once I was on this side of the metal door.
“This,” Jett declared, interlacing his fingers and flipping his hands over, and then he cracked all his knuckles in front of him at the same time, “is where the magic happens.” He hit a power button on one of the computers, and at once they all crackled to life, monitors blinking furiously through a series of synchronized commands.
When they finished flashing the sporadic lines of script on their screens and came fully ablaze, there was a single glowing logo in the center of each and every one of them—a logo I recognized all too well—and the dusting of goose bumps that had prickled my skin when Jett had mentioned this was a nuclear facility came back with a vengeance.
It was an electronic image of a firefly.
“What the holy mother of . . . The fireflies . . .” I shook my head. “What are those . . . what does that mean?”
Jett flashed me a curious look. “Have you seen that before?”
“Yes. I mean, maybe not this one exactly, but ones like it. My dad had all these picture of fireflies at his place.”
He nodded. “That makes sense. Your dad would probably know.”
“Know what?”
“About the fireflies, and what they represent.”
“And that is what exactly?” I asked, blowing a strand of hair out of my eyes irritably.
Jett laughed at my reaction. “Oh yeah, I keep forgetting you’re new to all this.” He sat down at one of the computer workstations and twisted his chair back and forth, like a restless schoolkid. “There have been stories of UFO sightings that date back hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, but it wasn’t until the 1950s, when there was this Brazilian farmer—a guy named Antonio Vilas-Boas—who claimed he’d been taken on board one of those alien spaceships and ordered to impregnate”—he wiggled his eyebrows when he said the word impregnate, making me think he was as young as he looked—“this hot ‘humanoid.’ When he was returned, he was in pretty bad shape, like they’d beaten the crap out of him. And even though authorities claimed they didn’t buy his story, it caused a flood of other people to start reporting that they’d been abducted too. The thing is, some of these claims had certain things in common. Things that didn’t get reported to the general public.” He leaned back while he continued to twirl in his chair. “Wanna guess what those things might be?”
I raised my eyebrows; pretty sure the answer wasn’t rocket science or anything. “I’m gonna say fireflies?”
Jett gave an exaggerated nod. “Bingo! And not just a firefly here or there. According to those ‘abducted,’ for lack of a better word, or witnesses, there were always lots of them—swarms of them.”
“And you think the fireflies have something to do with the taken?”
“Oh, they have something to do with it, all right. We’re sure of it. And so were the government agencies and the scientists who were tracking the activity at the time. It wasn’t the No-Suchers . . .” He paused to clarify, unaware that I’d already heard the term. “I mean the NSA, who tracked that kind of thing back then. Rumor has it that after working with Winston Churchill during World War Two to cover up a UFO sighting in England, President Eisenhower had these covert meetings that were called the First Contact meetings with the aliens to forge a treaty with them. He also formed his own agency to look into these so-called ‘abductions’ as well.”
“This sounds like the kind of crazy conspiracy stuff my dad would spew.” I sighed, crossing my arms and feeling somewhat defensive.
He sat up straighter. “Anyone can Google it, but from what I know about your dad, he’s not all that crazy. There’s some truth to this. At least part of it. I don’t know much about the First Contact meetings or about who was really behind this new agency that was formed, but I do know that they got wind of people claiming to be returned, and of witnesses stating that they’d seen huge gatherings of fireflies around the time those people had been taken. Once it was proved that the Returned had the ability to heal, a plan was devised.” He winced. “A really terrible plan, somewhere along the lines of torture. But it got the job done.”
Cocking my head, I took a step closer, almost afraid to ask. “What did they do?”
Jett pulled up his sleeve and showed me his arm. “They used the whole firefly thing against us. They tracked us down and captured us. They questioned us, and if we didn’t admit to being one of these so-called ‘Returned,’ then they would use this thing that looked kind of like a car cigarette lighter, but it was more like a brand, really. It had a symbol in the center of it: a firefly.” He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a completely barbaric thing he was describing. “Since they couldn’t risk exposing themselves to our blood by cutting us, they used it to sear our skin instead. To test us.”
I frowned as I leaned closer, trying to figure out what I was missing. “But . . . there’s nothing there,” I stated solemnly, hating that someone could do something so vile to another person—human or not.
His voice lowered. He was quiet, so quiet, when he answered, “That’s how they knew. If you healed, you’d been returned.”
I closed my eyes. I felt sick. I didn’t say anything for a very, very long time. Finally, when I trusted myself not to throw up when I opened my mouth, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Jett looked up at me with eyes that couldn’t decide if they were blue or green or shades of gold. It was like staring into cut glass.
Or into the iridescent wings of a firefly.
“It was a long time ago,” he recalled with a faraway look in those mosaic eyes of his.
“This is what it looked like,” he said, pointing to the golden-beetle image on his screen.
“They were a different agency back in WW Two—I’m not even sure what jurisdiction they fell under. But the guys who are after you now are a part of the NSA, at least indirectly. They’re an offshoot agency that operates under the radar of the rest of the organization. The government doesn’t sanction what they do, and if the public ever discovered their true purpose, it would be denied. They’re kinda the Area 51 of agencies. Officially, they don’t exist . . . except that they totally do.”
I turned away from the screen, unable to stomach the idea of anyone, especially people in authority, doing the things Jett was talking about. It was murder.
I inhaled, still trying to steady my stomach. “How old are you, Jett?”
He came back to the present then, dropp
ing his sleeve and offering me a small smile. “Twelve when I vanished.” He counted on his fingers then, his smile growing. “But now . . . sixty-four years young.”
“So how did you escape?”
Jett lifted his chin. “My pops wasn’t the kind of guy you messed with, not even if you were a GI.” He closed out the image with a sharp click, and even though I wanted to ask more about it, I got the feeling the discussion was over.
“What did I miss?” Simon asked, ducking through the doorway as he joined us. Willow was right behind him, and I wished she didn’t make me so uneasy. She just had that energy about her, like she was hoping a fight would break out at any second just so she could let off some steam.
Like punching was her hobby.
“I was just about to show her the Sats,” Jett said, turning to face one of the monitors.
“Sats?” I asked.
“Satellite images.” His fingers danced over the keyboard, and a series of images flashed up on the screen. At first it was like looking at Google Earth: generic images I’d seen searching the Web. But then they became more specific as he refined the shots, honing in, until I recognized the city . . . the street . . . the house he was converging on. The image was crystal clear; there was no mistaking it.
It was my mom’s house. The very house I’d grown up in.
Except that it looked so strangely different now, covered almost completely in plastic. Enclosed the same way my mom had wrapped the leftovers she’d set out for me. Surrounding the property, all the way around the yard, there was a tall chain-link fence that hadn’t been there before.
“Quarantined?”
It was Simon who answered me. “They’re probably searching for evidence as well as contaminants. I wasn’t lying when I said they’d do anything to get their hands on you.”
“Assholes,” Willow growled, reminding me that we had an enemy in common.
“What about my dad? Has anyone heard from him? Did they get to him too?”
Jett went to work on the keyboard. “We’ve been following the online chatter—his message boards and chat rooms, all the places he usually frequents. So far he hasn’t made an appearance. But we also haven’t heard anything on the police or No-Suchers’ frequencies to make us think he’s been taken in for questioning either. He seems to have gone off the grid for now.” A satellite picture of my dad’s trailer popped up, and it was like looking at my mom’s house. It, too, had been quarantined, tented in plastic sheeting and enclosed by a chain-link barricade.