The Replaced

As I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that Thom was still staring resentfully out the window, pretending there was some invisible barricade between him and us.

Super. Mature.

I turned back around to Natty, deciding enough was enough. “I don’t care what anyone thinks.” I made sure I was loud enough to be heard in both the front and the back seats. “I’m glad you decided to join us.”

Natty’s surprising hazel eyes got all huge and her cheeks flushed pink. “Um, thanks . . . ?” She hedged over her words, like even acknowledging my approval might keep her in the doghouse with Thom.

I twisted around again, this time to Thom. “You too,” I added, and now I was probably the one in trouble. I could practically feel Simon’s disapproval drilling into the back of my head. “Everyone’s acting so calm, like this is no big deal, but I’m freaking out. It makes me feel better you guys are here.”

Thom stopped staring out the window and faced me, and even though he didn’t actually answer me, his expression softened just the slightest bit and his nod said what he couldn’t. We were cool.

Jett was the first one to use real words. “I’m glad you’re here too,” he said, from the other side of Natty.

From the driver’s seat, Willow followed Thom’s lead and jerked her head in an almost nod while her eyes strayed briefly from the road to the rearview mirror. It was the closest to an acknowledgment that she didn’t at least hate me that I’d gotten from Willow.

Simon kept his mouth shut, but the second I caught him glancing my way, I made a face at him, letting him know what I thought of his ridiculous pigheadedness.

“Fine.” He let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Me too.” And then he gave me an are-you-happy? look, to which I smiled, because I so was happy.

If we were really doing this—going into an NSA stronghold, a place no Returned had ever gone into on purpose—I’d rather we not do it wearing our angry eyebrows. If I could have convinced everyone to hold hands and sing a chorus of “We Are the World” or “Kumbaya” or some other can’t-we-all-just-get-along song, I probably would have. But for now, I was satisfied we weren’t at one another’s throats.

I’d take my victories where I could get them.

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE TIME, WHEN I WAS MAYBE THREE YEARS old, my dad took me to this mall where they had this giant stuffed polar bear—a real one that was posed so it was standing upright on its hind legs. Its front paws were outstretched with its claws fully extended so it was in a perpetual state of attack mode. People stood in line to get their picture taken with it, smiling and posing and petting its patchy fur.

What I remembered most were its teeth, which were long and yellowed from age, but still pointy and sharp.

I don’t think I knew at the time why we were standing in line, at least not until it was our turn and my dad pushed me out in front of the bear, all twelve feet of it—I know it was twelve feet because, years later, I looked it up on ask.com, and that’s the answer I got: twelve feet. But at that moment, when my dad made the decision to shove his innocent three-year-old daughter with her scraggly little blond ponytail toward that twelve-foot bear with all those razor-sharp teeth, she totally lost her shit. That was when the screaming started.

I don’t really remember screaming, but my dad used to tell me about it. He said they were gut-wrenching, bloodcurdling screams—the kind of screams that aren’t supposed to come from little girls. The kind you hear in horror movies. He said people in the mall shot him dirty looks, trying to decide exactly what he’d done wrong to make me scream like that, while he did his best to ignore them, and their judge-y stares, as he carried me—still screaming, mind you—all the way through the mall, and then the parking lot, to our car.

He said the screaming didn’t end until way, way later, when I’d finally fallen asleep during the drive home. I hadn’t even stopped screaming when he’d offered me ice cream in an attempt to bribe me into silence.

At least that’s the way he’d always told the story. All I remembered were those teeth.

That was maybe the last time I’d felt like something deserved the word daunting until this very instant. And even though this wasn’t at all like the “polar bear incident,” my feelings were precisely the same. I wanted to scream and run away.

The building didn’t look all that special, just a regular building that was huddled among a bunch of other regular-looking buildings—the kind of place where something as ordinary as zippers or lip balm might be manufactured. Not so much the kind of place you’d expect the NSA to be concealing an undercover operation. A place where they kept teens who were newly returned from alien experimentation.

Yet here we were.

And in there . . . who knew. Would we find Tyler? Agent Truman . . . ?

I shuddered as that nemesis feeling gripped me again.

From the moment Agent Truman had landed on my mom’s doorstep, he’d given me the creeps. There’d been something off in the way he’d pretended to be all friendly and concerned about me, asking where I’d been during those five years, like he was a regular cop but never telling me who he really was. Yet all along he’d suspected I was one of the Returned.

I might never have discovered in time how shady he was, except my mom had already taken me to the dentist. We’d already learned I hadn’t aged—that the comparison of the X-rays I’d had done before I’d been taken and the ones done after I’d come back had proven I hadn’t gone from sixteen to twenty-one the way I should have during my absence. Agent Truman had known it too, even though he hadn’t said so at first. But when he realized I wasn’t going to cooperate, he’d come back, along with a team of NSA agents, all suited up in hazmat gear and brandishing the kind of medical equipment designed for dissecting people like me.