The Replaced

But it never came to that. Simon stepped aside, and all at once everything inside of me loosened as I realized there’d be no fight. “We can always use an extra set of hands,” Simon said, like it was no big deal that Thom was leaving his camp behind to join us.

Thom ignored Simon’s olive branch, if that’s even what it was, and shoved past him, making his own statement with his actions: he wasn’t doing this for Simon. He climbed all the way in the back, to the third row, where no one else was sitting. He didn’t acknowledge anyone, not even Natty, like she wasn’t the reason he was there in the first place.

“Can he do that?” I whispered to Jett before we got in too.

Jett just shrugged. “He can do whatever he wants. It’s his camp. Besides,” Jett said, looking back to where a few members of Thom’s camp council had gathered to see us off. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this place is like a well-oiled machine. I think they can spare him for a day or two.”

True, I thought, sliding in beside Natty and ignoring the tension already mounting inside the vehicle. If it kept up like this, I’d have a raging headache before we made it fifteen miles.

It felt strange leaving Silent Creek. It might not be my home, exactly, but I’d gotten sort of used to the orderliness of it here.

Silent Creek’s remote mountain location made it ideal for what Thom needed: hiding an entire camp of eternal teens from civilization. What had once been a thriving logging community had turned into a virtual ghost town when timber laws had changed decades earlier. Most of the locals fled, leaving only a handful of holdouts who’d refused to vacate the outlying areas. The decaying old church in the center of the small settlement had turned out to be the perfect operation center for the Returned.

During my time there, I’d only seen a single car pass through Silent Creek, which Natty said almost never happened, mostly because the place was so far off the beaten path. And since there were no stores or cafés or gas stations, not even a single latte stand, there were zero reasons to stop, even on those rare occasions when someone did stray their way.

And it hadn’t escaped my notice that up here, cocooned in the mountains the way we were, it felt somehow safer. I mean sure, Jett had to “jack” his internet connection, which I assume meant he’d illegally hacked into someone’s satellite service or something, and the closest groceries were some forty miles away at a convenience store where truckers and RVers stopped to stock up on energy drinks and chips while they filled their tanks, but at least we didn’t have the No-Suchers breathing down our necks.

Plus, the stars here were so bright they were practically fake, and yet every night they appeared, they sort-of-totally-absolutely took my breath away.

According to my calculations, and trust me, I’d done the calculations, the drive from the central Oregon camp to Tacoma should have taken somewhere along the lines of six hours. If I was being completely honest, I knew precisely how long it should’ve taken—you know, because of the calculations and all—six hours and seventeen minutes. And I’d planned to count down every last second on Jett’s watch.

But things didn’t go exactly as planned, and instead of taking just over six hours, we were closing in on eight and a half, none of which was because Willow had decided to take the scenic route. A mere fifteen minutes had been eaten up at a run-down little nothing of a gas station we’d stopped at to refuel. Simon had picked the stop because he doubted they had surveillance cameras the NSA could tap into. He was so certain, in fact, he even let us get out and stretch our legs while we waited. But fifteen minutes was nothing, no big deal.

The other hour-plus was taken up by the tire we’d blown in the middle of the winding two-lane mountain highway. I shouldn’t complain—we were lucky. One, Willow had mad driving skills and had somehow managed to keep us from crashing into the guardrail, or worse, from plummeting over the side and ending up in a fiery heap of scrap metal at the bottom of the mountain. And two, and significantly less dramatic, we’d had a spare. So we’d been able to change the flat.

And when I say we, I mean Willow and Simon. I was useless, mostly because there was no way Willow would ever have let me help, so I stood there watching, along with Jett, Natty, and Thom—who was still doing everything in his power to avoid everyone. Even Simon wasn’t a huge help, mostly just serving as Willow’s one-man pit crew, while she was the one who got her hands dirty.

But apparently our “spare” was just that, a temporary fix until we could get a replacement. When we finally made it to the next crappy little station—also presumably without cameras—Simon managed to procure us a not-necessarily-new but definitely-not-flat tire to get us back on the road again.

Every time Simon mentioned security cameras, my shoulders tensed up all over again. I didn’t want to admit it, but the closer we got to Tacoma, the more worried I became. But none of these things changed the countdown in my head.

The hours, the minutes, the seconds . . .

All potentially leading me to Tyler.

I might not be able to get back any of the time I’d lost during the five years I’d missed, but at least with Willow, who didn’t worry about such insignificant matters as speed limits or laws or anything like that, behind the wheel we might make up some of the time we’d lost on the road.

When we crossed the bridge over the Columbia River, I found my eyes glued to the sign indicating we were entering Washington—the state where I’d been born . . . the state Tyler had vanished from, and where I hoped to find him again.