What if it had been about making sure I was never alone?
My stomach churned at the idea. She’d been my friend, my confidante. Natty’s lips parted and suddenly I wondered how I’d ever mistaken her for sweet. Quiet. Unassuming. She looked predatory, sharklike.
“Because you exist,” she answered.
I was glad no one was watching the monitor, because my heart rate had reached an all-time high. I had no idea who she was, this Natty. She was a stranger. A virtual-absolute-unmitigated stranger. I realized I’d never known her at all, and alone with her was the straight-up last place I wanted to be.
Nervously, I glanced her way.
She closed the remaining gap between us. “If you know anything, now’s the time to say it.”
“About what . . . ? Natty, I don’t know what you mean.”
She curled her lip. “The others. Like you.”
“The Returned?”
She circled me, sizing me up . . . and I could tell by the way she narrowed her eyes I’d guessed wrong. “You have no idea how special you are, do you?”
Natty wasn’t there when I’d discovered just how different I was from the others—a Replaced rather than one of the Returned. But since Thom had been there I assumed he’d told her. Surely he’d told her.
“No,” I answered. I’m not sure I’d ever chosen my words more carefully. “I know.” I winced, watching her reaction closely. “I’m a Replaced. My body is made from one hundred percent alien DNA. My memories . . . my thoughts are all that’s left of the old me.”
“Not that, you idiot,” she shot back venomously. “Of course you’re a Replaced. Everyone knows that. But do you even know what that means? Why they made you?”
I’d asked myself that same question so many times, but figured there was no answer. I was just some experiment—an alien lab rat who’d landed in the wrong petri dish at the wrong time.
Even as I shook my head, a noose tightened around my throat. I hated how badly I wanted the answer . . . how desperate I was to know. “Tell me,” I gasped.
“Do you feel them?” she asked.
Fifteen, my brain suddenly screamed.
She opened her mouth, and I held my breath, waiting. Eager.
“Leave!” Ed’s voice boomed, echoing obnoxiously against the hollowed-out bricks that crumbled overhead.
Natty closed her mouth, but it wasn’t like with Blondie, who jumped to obey Ed the second he gave an order. Natty was less responsive, not as comfortable in the submissive role. Strange, since that was the only role I’d ever known her in. The Natty I’d known had always been a dutiful follower.
She eased away from me, her lips tightening. She might not be happy taking orders, but she also wouldn’t blatantly disobey him either. She had no intention of telling me anything. At least not with Eddie-what’s-his-name hovering over her shoulder.
He’d ruined my chance of discovering anything Natty knew about me.
TYLER
FLINCHING HARD, I SAT UP STRAIGHT. IT ONLY TOOK A second to realize what was happening and where I was.
The dream by itself didn’t make any sense, mostly because I shouldn’t be dreaming at all. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t just blow it off. Ignore it.
Ben had taken us from location to location, campsite to campsite, choosing stopping points with no apparent rhyme or reason. But no matter where we’d gone—first driving west to Nevada, then backtracking to Arizona before heading north again—I always knew where we were. Not because he’d told us, he never did. But because in those rare instances when I slept, I somehow dreamed our locations.
And I was never wrong. That last campsite, where I’d overheard those creepy hikers by the hot spring, was somewhere in northern Colorado.
Now though . . . now I dreamed of Kyra.
Even with the fog lifting, I was left with an overwhelming awareness of her. Of the drive to find her, and the coordinates that were now ringing . . . echoing inside my head.
As much of a dick as Simon was, he was right about one thing: I should never have left Kyra alone. I should’ve acted like a man and stayed to face what she’d told me, even though it felt like she’d caught me unaware with her admissions about our history. If I had, Kyra might be here right now.
It was my fault she’d been kidnapped.
But it was her fault I was a Replaced. She’d told me as much. It was her fault I’d lost everything—my friends, my family, and not just my parents but my brother too. My entire life, all of it, gone.
So what that she’d done it by accident. So what if she hadn’t realized her blood was poisonous, like she said. Did that really make everything okay? Make it all right that she offered me up to aliens to mess with my DNA and snatch away my humanness?
And what about that other part, where we . . . she and I . . . had been . . . what? A couple? What did that even mean?
She loved me, she’d said. She’d actually said that.