The Replaced

He might as well have set off a nuclear blast. I winced, taking several seconds to adjust to the sudden flare, and then I watched as behind that light, he cocked his head to the side, studying me with those frigid eyes of his. “It’s you . . . ,” he exhaled, forcing me to taste the sour combination of coffee and tobacco on his breath.

“Simon, run!” I kicked at the guy, but the hand clamped around my wrist was strong, and the arm behind it was thick and muscular. The guy jerked me back before I could figure out a way to stop him. I pitched backward, my head slamming against the metal wall as I tried to find something to grip on to. Everywhere around me—the walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the ducts—was sheer and smooth. There was nothing I could grasp.

“Kyra!” Simon called out to me, his voice filtering through my hysteria. He should be trying to run, I thought, but instead he said calmly, “The word,” and somehow, even above all that fan noise, I heard him.

I knew he was saying something vitally-critically-majorly important, but for a split second I couldn’t quite grasp it. He’d just explained this, hadn’t he? “If I say the word . . . ,” he’d told me, then . . . what?

I was supposed to do something . . . but no . . . I was supposed to not do something.

Yes! That was it.

I clamped my mouth closed and stopped breathing altogether, and at the exact same moment, that key card—the very same one Jett had given Simon earlier, the one Simon had made Jett assure him would work—landed with a clank on the metal duct floor right at my feet. It was plain and plastic, and it just sat there, doing what looked like a whole lot of nothing.

I glanced up at the guy, the one with the death grip on my wrist. He looked blankly back at me and then down at the useless-looking key card. Only he didn’t have the instructions for “the word” and he was still breathing.

I didn’t even know if anything was happening at first, or what was going to happen, but after a few seconds of looking back and forth between the card and the guy, I started to notice something: the guy—this giant behemoth of a man—was getting woozy.

Even if I hadn’t been able to hold my breath for as long as I could—which was way longer than everyone else—what happened next happened crazy fast. Within seconds, milliseconds even. First there was just a whole lotta blinking, something the poor guy probably wasn’t even aware he was doing. And then I felt his hold on my wrist slipping, his fingers sliding.

I didn’t react, mostly because I didn’t think I needed to. Like I said, it all happened so fast. And it wasn’t like in the movies, where you could see the steam or smoke or toxic fumes coming out of the key card—there was nothing to indicate anything had happened at all. Except the blinking and the loosened grip, and then the nodding.

And then, when I thought maybe the guy was just going to fall asleep standing there like that, I reached over and prodded him, with only my index finger.

That was all it took . . . he tumbled over, falling flat onto his back.

The crash echoed up and down the walls of the ductwork like thunder. Simon bent over and took the flashlight, then grabbed my hand. “Let’s get outta here. And don’t breathe too much just yet.” Instead of Simon hauling me backward, away from the guy, we climbed over him, like he was a giant, slumbering mountain.

The back of my head throbbed where I’d smacked it against the metal wall. I reached up to feel it. “What did he mean?” I asked Simon, who was dragging me along now that he had the flashlight and could see where he was going.

“What did who mean?”

“That guy? Back there, when he said ‘It’s you,’ what do you think he meant by that?”

Simon’s delay wasn’t necessarily long, but it wasn’t short either. “Nothing, probably. Just that he found us, I guess.”

He waved the light toward a ladder, its rungs welded to one of the sheer walls. “There, up ahead. See that? We made it.”

“Wait. How do you know this is the place?” Simon stopped and pointed at a metal sign that was riveted to the sheer wall. Research Chamber, it read. The exact place Willow had told us to meet her, and I was impressed again. Simon had a serious grasp of the inner workings of this place, since he’d gotten us here through a bunch of tunnels in the near dark.

I tugged at the back of his shirt. “What if they’re up there, waiting for us?” I’d only seen Jett give Simon one of those toxic key-card thingies.

He didn’t seem all that concerned, and he pocketed the flashlight as he started up the ladder. “Only one way to find out.” Then he paused. “But if anything does happen, you need to save yourself. Find someplace safe and stay hidden. Someone—Jett or Willow . . . or someone will come back for you.” He shot me a pointed look over his shoulder. “I mean it, Kyra. Stay hidden.” He paused, waiting for me to agree.

My mom and I spent a girls’ night one time watching Titanic, the version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. And the way Simon was looking at me was like the scene where the two of them are floating in the icy waters of the Atlantic, after the ship has sunk, and Leo’s character, Jack, tells Kate’s character, Rose, to “never let go” . . . minus the freezing waters and blue lips.

“I will. I’ll stay hidden,” I finally caved, even if it was just to make him stop giving me that look.

Satisfied with my answer, Simon turned and scaled the rungs two at a time, and I followed right behind, not wanting to be trapped down in this place a second longer. When we reached the top, there was a heavy grille blocking our way. He glanced back at me, grinning over his shoulder as he reached out and scratched his fingertips along its surface, creating an almost imperceptible rasping sound.