The Replaced (14 page)

Even though he was several inches shorter, he somehow managed to look down his nose at us. “Since you ladies can’t seem to keep up, why don’t you hit the showers?”

“What? No, we’re fine. Really.” I knew I was only speaking for me, but I wasn’t ready to go back to our tent for the night.

But Natty was more than willing to take the out, and her plodding stopped and she bent at the waist, gasping for breath. We didn’t need a secret language to know she’d had enough “fresh air” for one day.

I guessed my buddy and I were hitting the showers.

I was frustrated with Natty for getting us kicked out of drills, and with the drill instructor, who gave me a cheerful wave as he took off with the rest of his squad, only too happy to be rid of us, and then with Buzz Cut, who swooped in the second we’d been eighty-sixed so she could escort us to the showers. It wasn’t that I couldn’t use a shower—I totally could, I stunk as bad as Natty, maybe worse after that sweat fest out there. It was just that I wasn’t looking forward to
another all-night tic-tac-toe marathon.

We took our time, just like we did with everything now that time was all we had, and when I was finished, I wiped the steam from the face of my watch. It had to be dark out by now, I realized, as I tossed my sweaty clothes in the hamper, following Natty on our way out the door.

It was cooler now, too, as I trailed after her, letting her lead the way along the path to the cafeteria, which was our next stop.

Buzz Cut stiff-armed me across my chest. “Not you,” she said, her voice low. And then she nodded toward another girl who’d been waiting in the shadows. “Take her.” The
her
in question was Natty, and Natty shot me a questioning look, but I didn’t have the answers she was looking for.

“Why? What’s happening now?” Suddenly tic-tac-toe with
my buddy
didn’t sound half-bad.

Buzz Cut just thrust her chin at the other girl once more, and Natty was towed away through the gloom, toward the cafeteria.

I told myself it was fine and tried to channel my inner Billy Pilgrim—the whole
And so it goes
attitude. But telling myself it was fine and convincing myself were two different things, and the acids in my stomach surged with anticipation.

Although I could see fine in the dark, it would be easy to get turned around in a camp like this, where the tents were so packed together, each looking like the next. I stayed close to Buzz Cut as she slipped in and out among them.

The night air was crisp with the smell of scorched clay, and my feet crunched lightly in the sand beneath me. Above us, the night was perforated by thousands of white lights that were somehow brighter out here in the middle of the desert, probably
because
it was so dark.

When Buzz Cut finally stopped, somewhere near the edge of the tents, I examined the stars. From where I stood, I could almost imagine they were far-off fireflies, swarming, and emerging from the sky to warn of a taking.

The last time I’d seen the fireflies, I’d been holding Tyler’s hand and assuring him everything would be okay, while wishing with all my heart that was true. I’d give anything—
anything
—to undo what I’d done to him—taking him to Devil’s Hole, exposing him to my blood . . . falling in love with him in the first place. If I hadn’t done that, then he never would have been hurt at all.

And then, I wouldn’t be here right now.

“I thought maybe we were gonna have to send a search party after you.” Simon’s voice was barely a rustle, stirring the cooling night air around me.

When I spun around, he was there, watching me intently with those copper eyes of his. His arms were crossed casually over his chest as he leaned against the canvas wall behind him. “Simon,” I exhaled on a shaky laugh, breathing easier now that I knew he was alive. “You’re okay.” I still had about a million and one questions for him, but I started with “What about Willow and Jett and Thom? Have you seen
them? Are they okay too?”

“I haven’t seen them, but they’re fine,” he assured me before I could ask anything else. He looked to Buzz Cut, who nodded, almost like she was confirming what he’d just told me.

But that couldn’t be right, could it?

My gaze shifted, alternating between him and Buzz Cut. “I . . . I don’t understand . . .” I faltered.

Simon’s eyes crinkled as he pushed away from the wall and sauntered toward me, his eyes appraising me as if he could see as clearly in the dark as I could.

“I told you . . . we have allies here.”

No. Uh-uh. No freakin’ way.

I’d seen the way Buzz Cut had smacked him with her gun. I mean, she’d shattered his nose. And, honestly, if looks could kill . . . Simon would’ve been lying in a ditch somewhere, not standing here grinning like he’d pulled one over on me. On everyone.

“Shut. Up.” But I was already starting to believe it, because she was just standing there, wearing that same stupid grin on her face. “But I thought . . . ,” I stammered. “Don’t you
hate
him?”

Simon shrugged. “An act,” he said.

“You
broke
his
nose
.” Even I had a hard time thinking an ally could do something so brutal.

The corner of her mouth slid up. “Had to make it believable.”

Simon frowned at her and rubbed his nose. “Yeah, well, it was believable, all right. Maybe next time you could take it down a notch.”

She lifted one shoulder. “We’ll see.”

And then Simon did that same chin-lift thing at her that she’d done at the girl who’d taken Natty away. “Can we have a minute, Nyla?”

Nyla.

It was weird not to think of her as Buzz Cut. To give her a name—a
real
name.

But it was another thing altogether to see her as an ally.

I guess you never knew about people, and where you’d find someone you could count on.

“Sure. But only a minute. I gotta get her back,” Nyla answered, glancing around vigilantly.

“I knew you had a name,” I couldn’t help mentioning under my breath before she’d sidestepped us.

She just curled her lip at me—a very
Willow-like
response.

Out here, beneath the stars, was about as private as you could get. We were on the edge of their desert camp, where it was dark and isolated and quiet. I breathed deeply, taking stock of the distant landscape of withered trees and rocks and an endless black sky.

“What now?” I asked when Simon came to stand beside me. His relaxed stance wasn’t at all what I expected. “Do we make a run for it?”

His voice, when he answered, was gentle. “I could stand here and look at this forever. It’s easy to think here.”

“And that’s a good thing?” I paused to examine him and he wore a bemused expression.

“Depends.”

Shrugging, I flashed him a wistful smile. “Sometimes it’s
worse
to think. Sometimes I feel like . . .” I stopped myself because I wasn’t sure how to finish my own thought. That even though I had nothing but time, I still couldn’t sort things out? That being here made me realize how lonely I really was?

Or that even though I missed Cat and Austin, and the way things used to be before I was returned, I’d started to miss
Simon
even more?

No, I definitely couldn’t say that last part. I wasn’t even sure it was true.

Besides, I still ached for Tyler.

Simon didn’t say anything, and he didn’t move, so we just stood there, staring into the darkness.

When I finally broke the silence again, my voice came out resigned rather than critical. “She’s crazy, Simon. Griffin. I talked to her, and she’s out of her mind. What were you thinking bringing us here?”

He sighed, a breathy sound that only added to the calm of the night. “She’s not crazy, she’s just . . . unhappy.”

“Unhappy my ass,” I said, glancing sideways at him. “I get the sense she’d like to play target practice with your skull. Besides, I’m unhappy too. You know we’ve been in lockdown ever since we got here, don’t you? How long’s this gonna last?” I doubted anyone, not even Nyla, could hear
us, but I kept my voice hushed all the same. “And what’s all this about Willow and Thom knowing each other? Griffin says Willow’s the reason none of you are friends anymore.”

I half expected a denial, but he just nodded. “It’s true. But probably not for the reasons Griffin said. She has a way of twisting things around.”

I guessed that much already. Griffin seemed like the type who enjoyed manipulating words and facts until they suited her. “She didn’t say why, just that it was Willow’s fault. That everything would’ve been fine if Willow hadn’t come along.”

Simon smiled sadly. “Of course that’s the way she’d see it. Revisionists have a way of changing history to suit themselves.”

The sound of footsteps interrupted us, and Nyla appeared, wearing a
Time’s up
expression.

“Please,” I begged. “Just a few more minutes?”

She looked from me to Simon and then rolled her eyes. It was her reluctant way of giving in. “Make it fast. You have five minutes.”

When she was gone again, I said to Simon, “Okay, so what does Griffin have against Willow?”

Simon caught hold of my hand as he dragged me deeper into the desert. His fingers were strong and warm, and as much as I wanted to uncoil my fingers so I could lace them through his, I stubbornly refused, keeping my fist tightly curled.

He spoke more urgently now that Nyla had put us on a
clock, and at first his story mirrored Griffin’s exactly as he explained how he and Thom and Griffin had once worked together. “But it wasn’t Willow’s fault,” he insisted at the point where their versions deviated. “Willow didn’t do anything wrong, other than the fact that she was different from the other girls Thom and I were sent after. She wasn’t like anyone we’d ever come across before. She didn’t have that lost-puppy sense about her that most of the new Returned had. She wasn’t freaking out the way most of us do.”

I might have taken offense, if he hadn’t included himself in that description as well.

“Here she’d been taken and experimented on and then returned, and she just . . . what?” He shrugged more to himself than to me. “She just
accepted
it, the way you would that the sky is blue and a bear shits in the woods.” He looked me right in the eye and nodded. “Yeah, that was it. It was that no-nonsense thing about her. Willow’s biggest fault, at least in Griffin’s eyes, was that Thom and I admired her. That and the fact that Thom and I thought maybe she could work with us, the same way Griff did.”

My stomach lurched at the casual way he said
Griff
. I wasn’t born yesterday—girls like “Griff,” with their push-up bras and badass attitudes, had a way of wiggling their way inside guys’ heads, and I couldn’t stop from wondering if she was there now—in Simon’s head.

But Simon was oblivious to what was going on inside
my
head. “No matter what we said,” he continued, “Griffin hated Willow from the get-go. And she went out of her way
to undermine her every chance she got.

“At first I thought she’d get over it. I mean, just because we were taking an interest in Willow, that didn’t mean we’d replaced Griffin. But Griffin was never like that. She had to be the best at everything. The center of the universe. She didn’t like Thom and me having our interests
divided
by the new girl.” He was quiet for several long seconds, and then he said, “I just never realized how far Griffin would go to get Willow out of the way.” Simon spat in the sand, as if the memory were too sour to swallow.

“What did she do?”

“At the time, Blackwater was having serious problems with the Daylighters. That Agent Truman guy wasn’t around back then, at least not that I know of, but there was this other guy, and he was just as relentless. He always seemed to know about our recruiting missions even before we got there. Franco warned us all to be careful every time we left the camp. But no matter how many precautions we took, that agent was always one step ahead of us, and he would snag the new Returned before we could get to them.” He shook his head. “We started to suspect someone inside the camp was feeding him information.”

“And Griffin thought it was Willow?” I asked, piecing the puzzle together myself.

He shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t think she ever really
believed
it was Willow, but that’s what she told Franco. She convinced him that all our trouble started about
the time Willow showed up, which was pretty much the truth. She said Willow shouldn’t be trusted.”

“And he believed Griffin?”

Simon shrugged. “Whether he did or not, I never got the chance to find out. I told Thom we needed to convince Franco that Griffin was wrong, that there was no way Willow was passing information to the No-Suchers’ Daylight Division.”

“How could you be so sure? What if it really was Willow who was working on the inside?”

“It wasn’t. Thom and I already suspected this recruiter named Eddie Ray, who’d been coming up through the ranks. He was power-hungry like Griffin, only he had Franco’s ear.” He grimaced. “I went to Thom about Willow, but he refused to back me up. He didn’t want to go against Griffin. I think that’s when I realized she’d gotten to him. That she was willing to do whatever it took to convince Thom, and anyone else who could help her cause, that she was right: that Willow was the traitor.”

I wasn’t quite sure I understood. “Are you saying they had a thing, Griffin and Thom?”

“I’m saying Thom had a thing for Griff . . . enough so that he’d stopped thinking with his head. I mean, I guess I knew she could do that to a guy; it was what made her such a good recruiter in the first place. I just didn’t think Thom would be so . . .
susceptible
.”

“And what about you?” I asked, hating the note of
jealousy I heard in my own voice. “Were you susceptible too?”

“Me? Nah. I mean, I didn’t blame the guys who fell for her. She had this way of looking at you with those brown eyes of hers like she’d known you forever, even though she’d barely just met you. It was like the two of you had these private secrets that no one else in the world were in on. And, holy shit, when she smiled”—Simon squeezed his eyes closed—“kinda sideways, like it accidentally slipped out, you couldn’t help but smile back at her.”