The Replaced

I’d been wrong. Everything wasn’t okay, and Griffin didn’t get it. The nod had been a signal, all right, but not for me.

Simon was bulldozed out of the way by two of Griffin’s giants, who moved to stand on either side of me, while two others flanked Griffin. The two remaining soldiers stayed on their toes, eyeballing Thom and Simon vigilantly.

Jett, apparently, was not a threat.

Simon didn’t seem concerned that he was outmanned or outclassed. He jumped to his feet, his face red. “What the hell is this?” He shot daggers at Griffin, and then to Thom, who stared at him blankly.

“I’m sorry to have to do this,” Griffin said as one of the guys—a hulk of a dude—snatched me by the arm. I saw Simon lunge for him, but one of the other giants turned and pointed his gun, the nose of it aimed directly at Simon’s chest, causing him to crash against it.

It wasn’t aimed at his shoulder or his leg, places that could heal, but at his heart, and I doubted the gun would be firing beanbags.

“Simon, don’t!” I cried, just as Jett got to his feet too. Thom stayed where he was, his hands in the air.

I had no idea what was happening, but whatever Griffin was up to, it wasn’t worth letting any of them get hurt, or worse, killed. I turned back to Griffin. “Leave them out of this.”

Her brows pulled together. “They were never in it. No one was. This is about you, and only you.” She turned her back on me as she told the guys who were on each side of me now, squeezing my arms and dragging me toward the door, “Take her to the holding cell. And don’t take your eyes off her.”

Simon was still yelling, screaming, at Griffin when his voice finally faded to oblivion.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

REPLACED.

The word made me feel not real. Like a thing—a mannequin or one of those wax statues you can barely tell apart from the real celebrities they’re fashioned after. Like Wax Elvis or Wax Marilyn Monroe or Wax Lady Gaga.

Maybe I was Wax Kyra.

Except that I could eat and breathe and think. And feel. I knew because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t buy into this crazy theory about my memories being transplanted—the memories that kept running through my head, the ones I couldn’t let go of even now. The ones of my dad and Tyler and my mom and Cat, and even Austin. I couldn’t make myself believe they didn’t belong to this body, a body that wasn’t really my own.

They felt real. They felt real all the way to my bones. Like they were ingrained in every molecule, every cell, every breath I took.

They were as much a part of me, of this body and who I was, as the skin that surrounded me.

I even tried pinching myself, because maybe this whole thing, being told I was no longer human, had all been a dream—one long, whacked-out, surreal dream. But the pain receptors, my pain receptors, convinced me otherwise. This was happening, all right.

Replaced, I silently repeated the word again. Replicated. Copied. Made from an amalgamation of alien DNA and human memories. It didn’t matter how I tried to reframe it—I had a hard time making it fit. But only because it was so damn freaky.

Yet I couldn’t deny it either. There were too many things that pointed to the fact that it might be true. Things that separated me from the other Returned.

So the question was: Could I live with that, if it turned out Griffin was right? If I really was a Replaced?

I guess the answer was simple: What choice did I have? I wasn’t exactly a woe-is-me, I-can’t-go-on-another-day kind of person.

Person. Another word that no longer seemed to fit.

But what if Simon was right? What if I could allow myself to believe what he’d said about what made me human? What if all these memories and thoughts and feelings really were enough?

I had to cling to that, because deep down, I knew who I was. I was still Kyra Agnew, regardless of what my blood tests showed. No one could take my past, my history, the narration of my life away from me. Although, evidently, they could take away my freedom. Exhibit A, the claustrophobic cell I was now confined within.

I forced myself not to think too long about how dark and narrow this space really was. It made the first place we’d been contained in seem glamorous and roomy by comparison. If I stared for too long at the walls, or considered how far one of them was from another, I got that tight-chested feeling that was almost claustrophobia. Yet another reminder that I was more than just a bunch of chromosomes strung together, because that squeezing in my chest was part of what made me the same as I’d always been.

Instead I looked out, past the narrow bars—because yes, there were bars just like in a real jail—to where two of those thugs were guarding me like there was some chance I might somehow rip off the bars in a fit of rage and try to escape. I wondered what they’d been told about me. I wondered, too, what they thought I was actually capable of, because there was no way these bars were budging. Trust me, I’d tried.

If only I could bend iron with my cool telekinesis thing—that was what kept looping through my mind.

And, of course, Tyler. I thought about Tyler a lot.

But also the bending-bars thing, because how cool would that be, if I could just King Kong my way out of here with my mind?

And then maybe I could find something to knock those two goons out with . . . again with my mind since, hello, they were giants.

But as far as I could see, there was nothing I could use against them. Nothing I could levitate with my new “alien ability.”

So I paced—not far, and mostly in tight circles in front of the bunk that was bolted to the wall, doing my best to steer clear of the stainless steel toilet, not because it was dirty or anything—in fact it sparkled so much it was practically mirror-like—but because it was a toilet, and well, gross. I paced and I checked the time. Mostly I checked the time, giving myself permission to just . . . stare. To watch the second hand. To track it as it moved around and around and around.