“Like . . . how?” I asked, giving a cockeyed shrug and trying to laugh it off like it was nothing. A mistake.
But inside, where my heart was going a million miles a minute, I understood it wasn’t nothing. I understood it was a huge-giant-enormous something. I could tell by the way they were all looking at me, watching to see if I was ready to hear what they had to say.
Like they were about to unload a pile of Can she handle this? on me.
Unconsciously, I reached up to rub the back of my neck, suddenly thinking it had gotten at least ten degrees hotter in here in the last five minutes.
Griffin didn’t seem to notice. She was impervious to the heat and the constant hum of the computers that was starting to make my head ache, and to the fact that her bra must be at least a size too small to be pushing her boobs halfway up to her neck the way it was, something I’d only just noticed, but now couldn’t stop thinking about. I told myself to look away because it was weird that I was staring at her chest, but it was easier to look there than at the interest I saw spark in her eyes. “Oh my god,” she breathed. “You’re the one they’ve been searching for. Your blood work proves it. And until they find you, they’ll never stop searching.”
“Who . . . the Daylighters?” But yes, that was exactly who she meant. “Why me?” I went on, not needing her to answer my first question. “What’s so special about my blood work?” And what I meant was, what made mine different from theirs, because I already knew mine was different from any normal person’s.
“It’s the DNA,” Jett finally said, pointing at the place on the monitor that had some sort of sophisticated, science-y looking chart on it. “The Daylighters ran an analysis of your DNA, your genetic makeup. I’ve seen some similar blood tests, from some of the other Returned, and the rest of us . . . well, we still have most of our human DNA, mingled with some foreign—or what we suspect is the alien—DNA we told you about. Yours . . . ,” Jett started, but then he hesitated.
“Mine . . . ? Mine, what?”
Jett grimaced. “Yours is missing that.”
I wanted to say something along the lines of, it seemed like they were making a big deal out of nothing, I mean, wasn’t that a good thing, me not having any of that alien DNA mixed in?
Simon jumped in then. “He doesn’t mean yours is missing the alien kind. He means yours is missing the human kind.”
And like Cat used to say: Boom goes the dynamite!
Just like that, the world slanted beneath my feet. I thought I’d heard everything. Or maybe I’d finally just cracked and this was me slipping deliciously-deliriously-painlessly into sweet insanity, because holy hell, who can even handle hearing something like that?
Not I, said the Fly, another of my dad’s stupid expressions that popped into my head, and for the first time in forever I wished I couldn’t hear his voice.
Not human? Not at all?
So, what, then . . . ?
“Nope. No way.” I shook my head, unwilling to even engage their level of crazy. “It’s not even possible.”
Griffin spoke up, playing the voice of reason. “Possible? Kyra, look around you. Think about who we are. Are any of us really in any position to question what is, and isn’t, possible anymore? And clearly you already knew there was something different about you.” She said it kinder, and even used my name, and almost made me believe she was trying to be nice.
“Different?” I shot back. “Different is having a weird eye color or needing to wear braces for an extra year. What you’re talking about doesn’t make me different, it makes me . . .” I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t even know what it makes me.” I wanted to pull my hair out because what they were saying was just . . . too much.
But.
Griffin wasn’t so far off with the whole who-are-we-to-question-what’s-possible thing.
And then there was that one thing, with the NSA guy at the Tacoma facility, that one down in the ducts, where he’d shone his flashlight on me and said, “It’s you,” all serious-like. And again, with Agent Truman, when he’d told those guys in the alley, “She’s the one we want.”
I’d figured it meant something, even while I’d tried to convince myself it was nothing.
“So, what does this all mean?” I finally said. “I mean, how and why and . . . how?” I felt broken as I held out my hands, palms up as if to say, how was I even standing there if I wasn’t me? “If I’m not human, then what the heck am I? It doesn’t make sense.” I just kept shaking my head, like some damaged bobble-head doll.
Simon reached for my hand, and even though my heart fully and completely belonged to Tyler, just like it had all along, I let Simon give me this—his comfort, and his strength—because I needed it. I needed it so damn much. “You’re more human than anyone I’ve ever known,” he whispered, and I almost smiled, because usually when people called each other human, they were explaining away making mistakes, so it should have been an insult, him calling me human like that. Except I knew he meant it in the best possible way, so I gave him a quick squeeze in return.
“My father used to tell me about how he first met them,” Griffin said, turning her gaze toward the ceiling, the sky. “Some called them the First Contact meetings, but my father, he just called it ‘the Meeting’ and we all knew what he meant. People think the president was there.” She shrugged. “Maybe he was at some point, but not for the first one.”