I could’ve used a dad for that one.
I wished he could help me out with other things too, questions I still had. Like what exactly had happened to him that night up at Devil’s Hole when Tyler had been taken? Agent Truman had held my dad hostage, using him as leverage to make me turn myself in. And I would have, if the fireflies hadn’t come and made them both disappear—my dad and Agent Truman—at the same time they’d taken Tyler.
So if he’d been taken like the rest of us, why had my dad come back without having been changed at all?
The whole thing was all so strange . . .
And then there was this thing with the mornings. Every dawn came with an unbearable gut-wrenching pain that wasn’t getting any easier to deal with. Most mornings it doubled me in half, to the point I had to bite my own tongue to keep myself from crying out.
My dad hadn’t noticed it, but Tyler most definitely had.
Even stranger, each morning a number ticked off in my head. I couldn’t explain it, but whatever the number was, it became my obsession of the day. And suddenly I’d see that number everywhere we went.
Today’s number was seventeen, and so far I’d seen it in the newspaper my dad had found at one of the campsites, on a mile marker we’d passed, and I’d lost count of how many times I’d happened to check my watch at the exact moment the minute hand landed on the seventeen mark.
It was eerie.
The crippling pain I felt each morning combined with my increasing obsession with numbers and time was making me start to think I might be dying. That my body—this new alien body—was rejecting me . . . rejecting this world, and I would eventually just . . . vanish again.
Only this time I wouldn’t come back.
Maybe that was what kept me from going to my dad. My fear that my time here was limited. If that was the case, I didn’t want to waste a single second by worrying him, especially if Tyler’s nonsense mutterings turned out to be nothing. Just the mumbo-jumbo ramblings of a sleepwalker awakened too soon.
Die . . .
The Returned must die.
Still, I couldn’t shake the guilt over what I’d done to Tyler. I needed to come clean to him about how . . . why . . . he was taken.
“Up ahead. Through here . . . ,” Tyler said, but I’d been following so close that when he finally stopped, I ran into him from behind. Not that it was a bad place to be—I’d always appreciated that side of him.
Flustered, I jumped back. “Oh, crap . . . sorry.”
Laughing, he at least pretended not to notice that my hands had just been all over him. “There,” he said, sweeping a large cluster of branches out of our way.
Ahead of us was a pond. And flowing away from the pond was a stream. For three days we’d been climbing toward higher elevation, leaving the desert far behind. My dad never said exactly where he was taking us, only that we had to put distance between us and Blackwater Ranch, which really meant getting far away from Agent Truman and the rest of the No-Suchers, the agency’s nickname because of its extreme secrecy.
To me, it meant leaving behind Simon, Jett, Willow, Natty, and all the other Returned, including Griffin, who’d risked their lives so Tyler and I could escape the secret camp when Agent Truman and his goons had attacked it. The idea that we were putting more miles between us each and every day made me more desperate for word from them—news that they’d survived. Information about where they were now. Anything.
“It’s warm . . . the water . . . ,” Tyler breathed, leading me closer. “Hot, even. Some kind of natural spring.”
“Nuh-uh. Are you for real right now?” He didn’t have to tell me what that meant, I was already peeling off my shoes and socks.
The last time we’d seen water clear enough to wash in was two days ago and it had been bitterly cold—mountain runoff, my dad had called it. I’d only been able to stay in long enough to rinse off the thinnest layer of grime before my skin had been rigid with gooseflesh. I’d shivered the rest of the day, despite the campfire my dad had reluctantly let us build.
Our new life on the run had come with strict rules, and fires could only be lit when they were absolutely crucial. Fires made us conspicuous, my dad had warned, and conspicuous was the last thing we wanted to be. Our plan was to set camp at dusk, and break it again by dawn, never staying in one place long enough to be noticed. Never giving anyone the chance to recognize us.
Tyler had made the case that preventing hypothermia was cause enough to break my dad’s no-fire rule, and for that, I was sure I owed him some sort of life debt.
But now . . .
Now he was presenting me with an even better gift than fire: a heated pool.