The Replaced

He probably knew I was the one who’d broken that glass tube in the central lab.

As much as I hated it, I couldn’t help thinking Simon might’ve been right when he’d said the message from my dad had been a fake. I mean, if Agent Truman really did want to get his hands on me, why stop at Tyler when he could use my dad against me too?

From the front seat, Jett went back to work on his laptop as I watched the lights outside blur past.

“Get anything yet?” Simon asked Jett. It was clumsy, his attempt to switch the subject, and Jett paused before answering, “So far, all their files are encrypted, but nothing I didn’t expect.” I guessed that must’ve been what Willow had in her backpack when Simon and I had escaped the ducts below the central lab—hard drives or disks, password-protected files she’d stolen—but I was only half listening, unable to quit thinking about the other stuff—the aliens and the hybrids and genetic mutations Simon insisted we’d undergone. I pressed my finger to the spot on my shin where there was a bruise hidden beneath my jeans. It was the same bruise that had been there since I’d returned, and it had been there when I’d been taken too—five whole years ago. It hadn’t changed at all during that entire time.

And it never would, thanks to whatever had been done to us. Thanks to what Simon tried to tell me was this alien DNA I was supposed to have in me now.

“Their security is Grade A,” Jett told Simon, unaware I was freaking the hell out back here. “I can crack it, but I’ll need heavier equipment to do it.”

The SUV lurched to a hard stop, and I sat up, looking toward Natty. “What happened? Is something wrong?”

Natty leaned forward and shook her head from the ghostly shadows of the car’s interior. “I don’t know. Nothing, maybe. Looks like some kind of backup.”

From the passenger seat, Jett strained to see around the traffic. “Whatever it is, it must be bad. I can’t see where it ends.”

I scanned the highway, too, on either side of us. All lanes were moving at a snail’s pace. “Where are we?”

“Just north of Chehalis,” Jett answered, closing out of the locked files for the moment and plugging something into one of the USB ports. “If it doesn’t clear up soon, we won’t cross into Oregon for another two, maybe three, hours.” I watched as he pulled up a web browser.

Simon raised an eyebrow toward the computer. “Don’t stay online too long. We don’t want to give the Daylighters any way to track us.”

Jett patted his laptop like it was a dog. “This baby’s clean as a whistle. And I paid cash for the hotspot burner. If they track us, it won’t be because of my Wi-Fi.”

“Still . . . ,” Simon said as I watched Jett search through news links and Department of Transportation websites.

I leaned back, avoiding Simon’s gaze. I still felt weird about the way things had gone back at the Tacoma facility. I didn’t fully understand Simon’s reasons for agreeing to go in the first place. I mean, I knew why I’d gone—for Tyler—and I knew he said we’d gone because he wanted to know what the No-Suchers, this Daylight Division, was hiding in there, but was that really all there was to it? Or was it possible he felt guilty, too, that Tyler might have been there in the first place?

And what about the way he’d dragged me away after Willow was captured? Why me and not her? He’d told me I was special, but what did that even mean? Special to who . . . him?

Was that why I’d woken up with my head in his lap?

The whole thing was just too . . . weird. I pretended to be fascinated by the traffic so he wouldn’t know how uncomfortable I felt around him.

Where were the fireflies when you needed them?

“Get off at the next exit!” Jett announced frantically from the front seat. He snapped the laptop shut and was waving wildly toward the right side of the jam-packed highway. “Get over! Start signaling now. We need to get off the freeway as soon as possible!”

This couldn’t be good. “Why? What is it?”

“It’s us,” Jett answered, twisting in his seat so he could face us all. “They’ve got roadblocks up ahead and they’re looking for us.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“SO, WHAT NOW?” NATTY ASKED, HER EYES SHIFTING between the two leaders—Thom, who seemed to mean more to her than I’d realized, and Simon, who was lodged between us. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was: Which one of these guys was in charge now?

We pulled off in front of a driveway to a ranch of some kind. It was dusty and deserted and gave us exactly what we needed: privacy.

“The good news is that none of the reports mention us by name,” Jett said as his eyes—that unusual mosaic of colors that looked like cut glass pieced together—fell on me. “Not even you, Kyra.”

“Then how do you know the roadblocks are meant for us?” I wished he hadn’t singled me out. I already felt responsible for this mess.

Something about the look Jett and Simon exchanged gave me a chill. “Because they are showing this picture.” He spun his laptop so we could all see what he had. The shot was grainy, but there we were—me, Simon, Natty, and Thom. We were running across the blacktop toward the entrance of a top secret NSA facility. The image had to have been taken from one of the neighboring buildings’ security cameras, right before we’d gone in to break Willow out.

Still, it didn’t make sense. “So why not release our names? He might not know all of you, but Agent Truman definitely knows my name. And if that place, the Daylight Division, is such a secret, why are they so willing to admit we were even there?”