The Replaced

Simon shrugged, like it was no biggie. It was the same kind of shrug Cat used when she was trying to convince me to do something she knew we shouldn’t be doing. Like somehow that gesture would convince me that sneaking off campus in the middle of the day wouldn’t land us in seriously deep shit with our parents, the principal, and coach.

Fool me once, my dad used to say.

So, seeing Simon try to pull that move made this whole thing seem like an even bigger deal. Especially since just yesterday he and Thom could hardly look each other in the eye. Yet now they were sharing private looks and making silent pacts.

They were one step away from secret handshakes.

“A place called Blackwater Ranch,” Simon answered, finally filling in the blank. He nodded toward Thom. “It’s where we met. A lot of the Returned end up there at some point.”

A spark of recognition flashed in Jett’s eyes, and he gave a slow nod. “Yeah. I heard’a that place.” His face contorted as though straining to recall more specifics. “Run by a Griffin something-or-other. One of those guys who thinks the Returned should rise up against the man. Give the No-Suchers a dose of their own medicine or something.” He laughed at the notion.

“What, like some kind of army?” I asked. Sure, it sounded crazy, but who was I to question their ways? As the last of us to be returned, I’d barely scratched the surface of all there was to learn about the camps and alliances, and the scientists and agencies who were after us. I still had about a million unanswered questions about why, why, why this had even happened to us in the first place.

“Sorta like that,” Jett answered. “From what I hear, they’re like Returned activists. They have a reputation for being a tad on the zealot-y side, but stories tend to get exaggerated as they move from camp to camp.” He glanced from Simon to Thom, still trying to get a beat on their whole look-at-us-being-friends bit. “Does all that sound about right?”

Simon gave that shrug of his, the one that made everything as clear as dishwater. “I think they just want to be prepared if anything goes sideways, is all.”

In typical Thom fashion, he remained tight-lipped on the matter.

“So, where is this place? This activist camp?” I asked.

“About fifty miles outside Zion National Park. Basically, it’s smack in the middle of the Utah desert.”

Utah . . .

Awesome.

Geography wasn’t my strong suit, but I knew Utah was nowhere near where we were. It was ten hours away. At least. And that was if we stuck to the main highways, which had already been ruled off-limits.

And we were supposed to get there with the NSA hounding us the entire way. Double awesome.

On top of everything else, it meant leaving my old life in Burlington even farther behind.

You’d think after everything I’d been through, and the way my world had been upended while I’d been away, the last thing on my mind would be missing my mom and her new husband and their new son, especially since they’d made it more than clear they didn’t want anything to do with me. But the idea of being so far from them only made me so much more aware of how sick and tired I was of losing people.

I had to ask, “How are we supposed to do this? Get there . . . without being caught?”

Simon sighed, no longer looking bored or vague. “The only way we can. One mile at a time.”

We drove twenty-four minutes to a gas station that was way, way off the highway. It was also super, super sketchy.

But just like when we were on the road to the Daylight Division’s Tacoma facility from Silent Creek, we had to assume the sketchier the station, the less likely it was to have security cameras. It also didn’t seem completely implausible that this throwback to the ’70s was getting its mail by Pony Express, which we hoped meant the cashier hadn’t been alerted to be on the lookout for a carload of kids matching our descriptions.

That was the other thing: our descriptions. There was no way we were getting all the way to Utah looking the way we did.

To avoid drawing attention, Jett went into the tiny store alone, and when he came back, he held out three boxes of hair color to Natty and Willow and me, like he’d just done us some huge favor.

“That’s it?” I asked, turning up my nose at the selection. Our choices were jet-black, brown, and dark brown.

“You’re lucky they had these. It’s not exactly a Walmart in there.” He passed Simon an old-school-style paper map, and Simon unfolded it as he began plotting our course from here all the way to Utah. GPS was out of the question, Simon had declared. It would be far too easy for the NSA to get a lock on us that way.

Simon glanced at the boxes in our hands. “Better get moving, you only have about half an hour.”

Willow grabbed a box without even looking. Brown it was.

I was relieved because the girl on Willow’s box had reminded me vaguely of Mandy Maxwell.

In the sixth grade Mandy Maxwell had sprouted a good seven inches, and three bra sizes, past the rest of us girls, all within a matter of six months. There was something about the combination of high-water jeans and her brand-new C-cups that had left Mandy foul-tempered. So when I’d beaten her one too many times at tetherball during recess, she’d decided I deserved to have gum squished in my hair.

My mom had spent hours trying to pick the sticky wad out, but in the end she’d had to resort to scissors, leaving me with an unsightly bald patch. I’d hated Mandy long after the hair had grown back.