But I did mention that different was the new normal, right? And just because things were somehow off between me and my dad didn’t mean I wasn’t happy to be back with him. Or that he didn’t feel the exact same way. I knew because of his hug.
It was that simple—the way he hugged me when we were finally reunited. Simon had driven Tyler and me out to meet him from Blackwater Ranch, the secret camp where we’d been staying, after it had been attacked by Agent Truman and his Daylight Division—the NSA’s not-so-nice branch that hunted down us abductees. The second my dad had laid eyes on me, he’d nearly smothered me in his flannel embrace. And he hadn’t stopped ever since. Even though he looked at me strangely sometimes, he was always touching me—my hand, my shoulder, sometimes my cheek—asking me if I was okay or if I needed anything. Like he was silently reassuring himself I was still there.
He never asked questions about the things that made me different, even though we both knew those questions were there, right beneath the surface. He had to be curious; it was in his nature . . . his conspiracy-theory, we’re-not-alone, tinfoil-hat-wearing nature.
And I couldn’t entirely blame him, because I was thinking the same things, wondering whether being made entirely from alien DNA somehow canceled out my human memories and personality. I was curious about the things I could do—my abilities, my strengths, the dangers I posed, even though I 100 percent felt the same. Even though I looked and acted exactly like my old self.
I wanted to tell him to cut it out with the weird looks, because . . . not cool, but every time I started to say something, my throat closed tighter than Fort Knox and I ended up pretending I hadn’t noticed.
Inside, though . . . inside, the idea that my dad—my own dad—couldn’t figure out what to make of me, made me want to vanish again. One more chink in my already tarnished armor.
Nice.
I wondered what he’d do if my stomach ripped apart and some alien baby popped out, grinding and gnashing its acid-dripping teeth while it screeched its alien battle cry.
Maybe that’s what he expected. That any second I’d be torn apart by whatever was inside me, waiting to break free the way it happened in the movies.
Aliens versus humans.
Us versus them.
In real life, though, Alien Kyra was super boring. Plainer even than Old Kyra, with far fewer friends and a lot more empty time on her hands.
Just thinking about it made me miss the other Returned Tyler and I had left behind at Blackwater because at least they had a clue what we were going through—Simon, Jett, Willow, Natty.
They’d taken me in when I’d had no place else to go, back when Agent Truman had first discovered I existed and set his sights on me. When my mom had decided I was too dangerous to be around, which turned out wasn’t so far from the truth.
Like me, the Returned had also been abducted by aliens and sent back after being altered. Only they’d been less changed than I was.
Half alien and half human, they considered themselves hybrids. Like me, they could heal faster and needed less food and sleep than our human counterparts. We also aged slower; making them . . . making all of us look like teenagers indefinitely.
But I’d give anything to have the one thing they had—the half-human part they still could lay claim to.
Like I said, I’d been taken too, but I’d come back different from the Returned. Different from almost everyone, except Tyler.
Tyler, who was exactly like me.
Well . . . almost. He was as close to me as anyone in the world.
We weren’t Returned, we were the Replaced. The difference being that when we’d been abducted, it wasn’t only segments of our genetic coding the aliens had messed with, it was everything. All of it. Our entire bodies had been replicated.
Replaced. So that Tyler and I now shared full-on alien DNA, leaving only our faces and our memories to remind us who we used to be. Although even in that I was alone, since Tyler had a gap in his memories—he was missing the time we’d spent together before he was taken. Which was the one memory I wanted him to have most: the part where the two of us had fallen in love.
That was a biggie.
Without it, we were just friends, like Old Kyra and Old Tyler, which maybe could’ve been enough, once upon a time.
There should have been a song in there somewhere . . . an angsty, twangy country song filled with lyrics about love lost and found again. But I couldn’t wrangle enough of my former smart-alecky self to think up a single line.
Maybe spunky had been part of Old Kyra’s DNA. Maybe Alien Kyra had no game. She was straitlaced and boring. She was into bubblegum pop. Or worse, church hymnals. She was the kind of girl who colored inside the lines and wore pink. Crazy amounts of pink.
Alien Kyra was already on my nerves.
Of course it was good to have New Tyler back. He was the one person I’d been fixated on from the moment we’d been separated. I mean, my dad too. But Tyler . . .