The Replaced

I chewed the inside of my lip, turning to Griffin once more. “And we’ll have more freedom?” I just wanted her confirmation one more time. When she nodded, I took a deep breath. “Fine, then. I’m in too.”

“How much farther?” I had to yell to be heard from the backseat. The bandanna Nyla had given me to tie my hair back barely contained it, and the wind whipped stray pieces around my cheeks as we flew along the road in the open-air Jeep.

With her smooth head, Nyla didn’t have to worry about pesky hair flying around, stinging her face. She hollered over her shoulder while she drove, “Little town called Delta, about two hours from here.”

I checked my watch; that would put us there sometime around 2:30 in the morning, plenty of time to get back to camp before sunup, just as Simon had predicted.

“What makes Griffin think this kid we’re going after is one of us? How exactly does she get her intel?” I was fascinated by the process. By the way they did things in this Returned world I lived in now.

I assumed there was some kind of shared superhighway of information, like all those crazy files my dad had kept on everyone who’d disappeared, including where they’d lived, where they’d last been seen, their favorite music, and if they’d ever returned at all.

Pretty much everything there was to know about them.

I sat forward to hear better, but also hoping the seat might block some of the wind assaulting me.

Simon faced me from the passenger seat. “Depends. This time she got a call from an inside source saying they had the boy in town,” he called back to me, “under medical observation. I guess when they found him, he told the sheriff the last thing he remembered was being with a friend back home . . . which apparently was nowhere near Utah.”

My palms got sweaty and I rubbed them on my jeans. I remembered that not-knowing sensation, of being one place and then waking up in another. It was . . . disturbing, to say the least.

Like a really, really bad case of déjà vu.

“So, where was he from, then?”

I watched the scenery zip past. The only lights out here were from our headlights and the stars overhead. It might have been beautiful, if only I hadn’t known that we were on our way to change someone’s life forever.

Simon interrupted my thoughts when he handed me a piece of paper.

Unfolding it, I assumed Griffin’s “inside source” had gotten her this police report as well. It listed all the pertinent details about the boy and his disappearance:

Alex Walker, fifteen years old. From Florida.

According to this, his grandmother had reported him missing from their home in Tallahassee just two days earlier. Since he had a history of running away, she’d told local police he’d probably run off again.

Yet late this evening, Alex Walker had walked into a truck stop near the edge of Delta, Utah, and asked the waitress, and I quote: “What circle of hell is this place supposed to be?” When questioned further, he claimed to have absolutely zero memory of how he’d gotten all the way from Tallahassee to Delta, or where he’d been for the past forty-eight hours.

Forty-eight hours . . . the exact amount of time most Returned were missing.

The report said he was being held for observation at the Delta Medical Clinic, and his grandmother had been contacted.

He was at the hospital.

My stomach knotted painfully.

I’d been taken to the hospital, too, back when I’d first been returned, and it hadn’t ended so well for the lab tech who’d drawn my blood. My body had tried to heal around the needle, and because I hadn’t known better, he’d been exposed to what I realized now was my poisonous blood.

I seriously hoped history didn’t repeat itself in this case.

“Griffin mentioned that the Daylighters already know about him. How can she be so sure? Did her inside source tell her that too?”

Simon looked to Nyla for the answer.

“Griffin said the message came from a camp in Texas, who heard it from another one in southern New Mexico,” she called back to me. “That’s the way it works—we get these bulletins that bounce from camp to camp. It’s not a bad system, and most of the time the information’s pretty accurate.”

I wanted to be cool, and make it seem like my stomach hadn’t just clenched painfully, but I had to ask, “Most of the time? And what if they’re wrong this time? About our head start?”

“Kyra . . .” The way Simon said it was supposed to mean I shouldn’t worry, but I couldn’t help it. I worried plenty.

Nyla didn’t seem half as concerned. She leaned back and shouted, “Relax! If Griffin really thought there’d be trouble, she wouldn’t have risked sending a team at all.”

Or, I thought as my stomach clenched tighter and tighter, until it was just a shriveled little knot, she’d send a crew she considered expendable.

My eyes wandered to my watch to count down the minutes. But for once, time couldn’t ease the crush of anxiety that built inside me, reaching a crescendo as each second passed, growing leaden and filling all my insides. I had to tug at my shirt so the air could reach down in front.

Damn, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sweated so much.

Eighty-six minutes . . .

Sixty-three . . .

Forty-four . . .

When we finally saw Delta, the city’s lights were like distant stars. Something about knowing we were so close to reaching our destination made me restless, and even though I’d considered the unrelenting wind that battered me cold just a few miles back, I leaned into it now to dry the perspiration that prickled my skin.