He dropped his hands and shook his head. “Around that time, the first of our people vanished. At first, no one thought anything of it. The ISA is a big organization, people come and go all the time.”
“Then someone came back with a strange story about being whisked away in a strange flash of light, and waking up with no memory of where she’d been. When a second person returned and had an almost identical story, we started to take them seriously. Both were gone almost two days on the dot.” He exhaled. “But it wasn’t until the blood work came back and we realized they truly were . . . altered . . . that the higher-ups took notice.”
“They were Returned,” I said, filling in the blank.
He nodded, less comfortable now. “I was working late one night, when we received a broadcast over a frequency we didn’t even use anymore. At first, the guys on duty almost wrote it off as nothing more than a bunch of white noise. But they asked me to take a listen. When I heard it, I realized what I was hearing—it was that same static-y sound I’d heard coming from Adam. Of course, I followed protocol and reported it, and the person who responded was Dr. Clarke.”
My eyes leaped to his. “So that’s how you knew her? The two of you worked together?”
He glanced over to where the others were clearly eavesdropping. “We weren’t friends or anything, but she listened to the message.”
I held my breath. “And your code, was it able to translate the message?”
My dad shook his head. “No, but I think they were using my own code against us. I think they were picking up our transmissions to track our location and that’s how they’d been able to figure out it was us holding their M’alue.”
I frowned, letting all this sink in. “And even then, you never thought you should just set him free?”
“It wasn’t up to me. And then it was kids who started to vanish. The first was the son of a man named Alexander Luddy. Luddy was the ISA’s head of operations. His boy’s disappearance caused a huge uproar, and Luddy demanded we surrender the M’alue. But by then it was too late. Experiments had begun. Ugly experiments, and they’d done way more damage than good. The ISA was afraid that sending him back would only make things worse. The kid was eventually returned, forty-eight hours later and halfway across the country.”
The notion that the ISA had done experiments on Adam—ugly experiments, my dad had said—made me ill.
“After that, Dr. Clarke’s own son was taken. That was when the M’alue was moved. I never heard where they took him, I only cared he was gone. I didn’t want anything to do with him . . . or with the project. I thought that was the end of it.” He scratched his jaw.
“Then, another girl went missing, a thirteen-year-old honor student from Arlington, not too far from us. I worked with her dad—he was an IT guy, and I realized: we’d been tapped. This thing, it was never gonna be over, not as long as the ISA had that monster in custody. All I knew was, I couldn’t let anything happen to you, so I decided I’d never let you leave my sight.
“I started following you . . . everywhere you went. I started calling in sick so I could sit outside your school; I watched your practices from the parking lot; I stayed up all night just to make sure there was no way you’d be taken.
“The night you were taken, the whole reason I didn’t let you ride with your team after the game was because I couldn’t take the chance . . .” His voice broke. “I couldn’t risk taking my eyes off you, not for a second.”
His entire face crumpled. “And then it happened anyway. Despite all my planning and watching. Despite the sleepless nights and the stakeouts . . . they took you anyway. But I told myself it was okay because you’d come back . . . you were supposed to come back. Two days, that’s what it was for everyone else . . . less than two days.”
His face went slack, like all the life had been drained from him. “Not you though. You didn’t return. I lost my job after that, but I would have quit anyway. I hated the ISA. I hated everything they stood for. This was their fault—my baby being stolen. No one believed me, not your mom, not our friends, and definitely not the police. I had no recourse.”
He fell to his knees, sobbing. “I wished it had been me. They should have taken me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I WANTED TO ABSOLVE MY DAD. SAY SOMETHING comforting. Be one of those good daughters who said nice things and could forgive easily. Forget.
Maybe that was Old Kyra.
New Kyra needed time. Maybe Tyler and I had more in common than either of us realized.
I had no idea how I was supposed to feel. I was numb. Shell-shocked maybe, if that was a real thing.
All this time . . . all those years lost . . . could they really be his fault? Maybe not directly, but he’d known me being taken was a possibility. He’d worked for those responsible.
I thought I’d learned everything when the M’alue had downloaded all that information into me, but apparently even that was one-sided. They either didn’t know that my dad had worked for the ISA, or they didn’t consider it relevant.