It was Tyler I’d spent hours single-mindedly focused on. Picturing in my head. Daydreaming of.
I’d driven Simon and the others crazy for weeks on end, talking incessantly about Tyler after he was taken and wondering why he hadn’t been sent back yet.
I should have been satisfied to have them both—Tyler and my dad. Even though we had to lay low, we were together, the three of us.
Yet I couldn’t help thinking there was something wrong. With me . . . and with Tyler.
With this whole screwed-up situation we were in.
Like I said, my life was a mess.
“You look beautiful.” Tyler stood above me as I sat on a log covered in coarse moss, combing my fingers through the knots in my tangled hair.
My hair. It was the last thing I should be thinking about, considering all the other, way more important things we had to deal with.
“Shut up,” I insisted, but already blood was rushing to my cheeks.
It had been like that for days. Three, to be exact. Three awkward days with Tyler giving me these long, deliberate looks, like he was searching for something he couldn’t quite put his finger on and me wishing he’d hurry up and figure it out already—the memories of who we’d once been together—so I could stop thinking about that other thing.
Because for three days it had been eating me up inside, and even though I’d been unwilling to face it head-on, I couldn’t drop it either: What had Tyler meant that night in the desert when he’d said those chilling words: The Returned must die?
Now I stared up at him, blushing like a schoolgirl just because he’d said I was beautiful.
“I found something,” he told me with that earnest expression I couldn’t get enough of, his green eyes overly intense—one of the side effects of being a Returned or a Replaced, the change to our eye color. He kept his voice low; we both did, not wanting to wake my dad, who was stuffed inside his miniature-sized tent with his not-so-miniature-sized dog, Nancy.
He didn’t have to invite me twice. I forgot all about my hair and followed him as he disappeared into the thick forest. I reminded myself for the hundred-millionth time that it didn’t matter what he’d said the other night. It didn’t mean anything because he’d been sleepwalking, and sleepwalking didn’t count, right?
If only he’d said something else.
The Returned must die.
Had that really only been three nights ago? It seemed like another lifetime. Three nights since I’d found him, standing in front of a sheer rock wall in the Utah desert, drawing strange symbols and chanting in that strange mumbo-jumbo language I’d never heard before.
To be fair, no one had probably ever heard it before because it was nonsense.
And when he’d finally looked at me, his expression had kinda-sorta cleared, and he’d said: “Ochmeel abayal dai.”
Then, plain as day: “The Returned must die.”
At first, I thought he’d have some logical explanation for what I’d just heard. That he’d just blink and be magically awake, losing that blanked-out expression he’d been wearing and he’d ask me what we were doing there because it was weird to be out there in the middle of the night like that.
But that wasn’t how it happened. And when he didn’t explain, it became this thing . . . this strange unspoken weirdness between us.
I’d been stuck like that ever since. Wishing I could find the right words and the right time to just . . . ask him, because that’s what people did, they asked each other things. But I never quite got around to it because the timing was always . . . off.
So three days had gone by. And every time I tried to ask, the words just died on my lips. Where would I even start, other than What the hell, Tyler? and that wasn’t much of an icebreaker when what I really-really wanted to ask was, Do you remember anything . . .
. . . about me?
About us?
About what I did to you?
That last one was the one that made my stomach twist. Somehow, I had to find a way to tell him, to explain before the memory came back to him on its own. Because what if he only got back pieces and they were jumbled, and he didn’t understand it had all been a giant-terrible-horrific mistake? That I hadn’t realized my blood had been toxic to him . . . to all humans? What if he didn’t understand that sending him with them—the aliens—that night up at Devil’s Hole was the only way I knew to save him from dying?
I never would have risked letting him be changed if I’d had another choice.
Again, I totally would have talked to my dad about it, if my dad had been acting like my dad. I would have told him about the strange words Tyler had said in the desert, and confessed about the guilt I felt over my decision to let Tyler be taken in the first place.
I might even have mentioned the thing where Simon had kissed me when he’d dropped Tyler and me off to meet my dad. The day he’d decided being “friends” wasn’t enough for him.