“Yeah,” Simon said. “She heals like”—he snapped his fingers—“that. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
Except, I remembered what Tyler said: that Griffin had told him he could heal faster than anyone else at camp. I wondered, then, was it a leap to read more into that? If we shared more than just being Returned?
I opened my mouth to ask Griffin what she thought, when she caught my eye and shook her head at me. The action was discreet and curt, but the message was loud and clear: I needed to keep my mouth shut.
Hadn’t she said the same thing to Tyler? Told him not to tell anyone?
I glanced around—at Jett and Simon and Thom—and tried to imagine who, in here, she didn’t trust. But I did as she instructed, swallowing back my questions.
Inwardly, however, they buzzed through my brain.
Did Tyler have any new and unique abilities too? Was there anything he could do the other Returned couldn’t?
And what about that other part—that thing where I’d been gone for five whole years? Was that because I was a Replaced and not just a regular Returned?
If that was the case, then where did that leave Tyler? I didn’t know how long he’d been gone, but it couldn’t have been too long. It certainly hadn’t been five years. Days at most. Yet when I’d come back, my memory had been whole, complete. His was a mess. Sure, he remembered things from before, but there was a definite gap, a missing chunk from right before he’d been taken . . .
. . . the entire part where we’d fallen in love.
It was the best part, if you asked me.
“Let me ask you a question.” Griffin’s eyes narrowed as her brief flash of concern over Tyler was safely tucked away. “How much control do you have over this telekinetic thing you have? Can you . . .” Her brows fell in a silent ultimatum. “. . . can you show it to me, so I can see how it works?”
I shook my head. “I wish. I have to be focused.”
Focused was putting it nicely. Angry, panicked, completely freaked out, all those probably made more sense.
Griffin nodded then, and I thought the gesture was for me, a kind of Okay, I get it.
But then the door opened and six of her soldiers stormed in all at once. They were armed to the teeth, their black rifles held at the ready, and suddenly the room that had been empty seconds earlier was busting at the seams.
I’d been wrong. Everything wasn’t okay, and Griffin didn’t get it. The nod had been a signal, all right, but not for me.
Simon was bulldozed out of the way by two of Griffin’s giants, who moved to stand on either side of me, while two others flanked Griffin. The two remaining soldiers stayed on their toes, eyeballing Thom and Simon vigilantly.
Jett, apparently, was not a threat.
Simon didn’t seem concerned that he was outmanned or outclassed. He jumped to his feet, his face red. “What the hell is this?” He shot daggers at Griffin, and then to Thom, who stared at him blankly.
“I’m sorry to have to do this,” Griffin said as one of the guys—a hulk of a dude—snatched me by the arm. I saw Simon lunge for him, but one of the other giants turned and pointed his gun, the nose of it aimed directly at Simon’s chest, causing him to crash against it.
It wasn’t aimed at his shoulder or his leg, places that could heal, but at his heart, and I doubted the gun would be firing beanbags.
“Simon, don’t!” I cried, just as Jett got to his feet too. Thom stayed where he was, his hands in the air.
I had no idea what was happening, but whatever Griffin was up to, it wasn’t worth letting any of them get hurt, or worse, killed. I turned back to Griffin. “Leave them out of this.”
Her brows pulled together. “They were never in it. No one was. This is about you, and only you.” She turned her back on me as she told the guys who were on each side of me now, squeezing my arms and dragging me toward the door, “Take her to the holding cell. And don’t take your eyes off her.”
Simon was still yelling, screaming, at Griffin when his voice finally faded to oblivion.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REPLACED.
The word made me feel not real. Like a thing—a mannequin or one of those wax statues you can barely tell apart from the real celebrities they’re fashioned after. Like Wax Elvis or Wax Marilyn Monroe or Wax Lady Gaga.
Maybe I was Wax Kyra.
Except that I could eat and breathe and think. And feel. I knew because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t buy into this crazy theory about my memories being transplanted—the memories that kept running through my head, the ones I couldn’t let go of even now. The ones of my dad and Tyler and my mom and Cat, and even Austin. I couldn’t make myself believe they didn’t belong to this body, a body that wasn’t really my own.
They felt real. They felt real all the way to my bones. Like they were ingrained in every molecule, every cell, every breath I took.
They were as much a part of me, of this body and who I was, as the skin that surrounded me.
I even tried pinching myself, because maybe this whole thing, being told I was no longer human, had all been a dream—one long, whacked-out, surreal dream. But the pain receptors, my pain receptors, convinced me otherwise. This was happening, all right.
Replaced, I silently repeated the word again. Replicated. Copied. Made from an amalgamation of alien DNA and human memories. It didn’t matter how I tried to reframe it—I had a hard time making it fit. But only because it was so damn freaky.
Yet I couldn’t deny it either. There were too many things that pointed to the fact that it might be true. Things that separated me from the other Returned.
So the question was: Could I live with that, if it turned out Griffin was right? If I really was a Replaced?
I guess the answer was simple: What choice did I have? I wasn’t exactly a woe-is-me, I-can’t-go-on-another-day kind of person.
Person. Another word that no longer seemed to fit.