The Taking (21 page)

I stayed in the car with my fists pressed tightly on top of my knees. My teeth were clenched, and my shoulders ached. Simon scraped a lone metal chair across the concrete floor to the passenger side of the car and opened my door, propping the chair in front of me.

He straddled it and leaned forward on his knees. “I guess I have some explaining to do.”

I don’t know why, but when his coppery eyes drilled into me, I felt some of my tension easing. It made no sense, considering the circumstances. Still, I was here now, and after a quick perusal of the space, I realized that I probably wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted me to, so I figured I might as well listen to what he had to say.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” I told him at last. “So, who the hell are you, and why have you been following me?”

He smiled, revealing a set of straight teeth that flashed against his skin. “You noticed, huh?”

My eyebrows lifted. “You weren’t exactly stealthy. You practically knocked me over at the bookstore.” I paused, chewing the inside of my cheek. “And what about that message . . .” I breathed in. “How the hell did you get that on my receipt?”

His smile faded. “Let me start at the beginning. My name is Simon Davis, and I’m like you, Kyra. I was taken too.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

FIRST OF ALL, THERE WAS NO WAY I BELIEVED A
word he’d said.

Sure, he’d saved me and all. Or at least that’s what he expected me to believe. But now that I’d heard him out, I was starting to suspect I’d traded whatever Agent Truman and his band of Merry Men had in store for me for a straight-up nut job.

Besides, how did I know Simon hadn’t been wrong about them? Maybe they were trying to help.

It was certainly an easier pill to swallow than the one Simon was trying to shove down my throat. If only he hadn’t started his explanation with the words: “I was abducted in 1981.”

Uh, yeah . . .

I mean, even if I ignored the part where he’d used the word
abducted
, I could still do simple calculations in my head. I didn’t have to be a math whiz to know that, if what he’d said was true, that would put old Simon here somewhere around balding and middle-aged. And there was no way in hell that Simon—
this Simon
who was sitting right in front of me—was a day older than eighteen. Nineteen at the most.

“
Sooo
. . . ,” I drawled, stretching out my skepticism to epic proportions. “You were ‘abducted’”—I used air quotes in case he hadn’t grasped the doubt oozing from my tone— “back in 1981 and didn’t return until, what, three days ago?”

But my cynicism didn’t rattle him. “No,” he clarified matter-of-factly, without skipping a beat. “I was only gone a day and a half. Most of us are returned within forty-eight hours.”

I wilted; my hero was looking more and more like a fruitcake. “‘Most of us’?”

“Kyra,” Simon offered sympathetically. “I know this is difficult to believe, but you need to hear it. People—teens, mostly—have been abducted for years. Decades. I can’t say why, for sure, but we believe we’re part of some kind of experiment. There is a purpose—we’re sure of it; we just don’t know what the end goal is yet.” He reached out and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Your father isn’t crazy.”

I flinched. From his explanation. From his touch and from his mention of my dad. My back dug into the gearshift behind me, and I winced. “My dad? What does he have to do with any of this? How do you even know about him?”

He dropped his hand but stayed where he was, conviction written all over his face. “Your dad—his online activity—that’s how we found you. That’s how we knew you’d been returned. You’re the first of our kind to come back after all this time. No one’s ever been returned past the forty-eight-hour mark. It’s unheard of. Anyone who’s ever been gone that long . . . well, they’re never heard from again. We’ve always assumed the experiments have failed after that point. That the body . . . that it didn’t survive.”

I heard so many things wrong with what he’d just said that I couldn’t process any of them:
our kind . . . never heard from again . . . the body . . . didn’t survive
. . .

I waved my hands to ward him off even though he was no longer touching me. Hysteria was creeping in on me, threatening to consume me. My throat was swelling shut, and in a matter of seconds I was pretty sure I was going to suffocate. He was literally killing me with his words. “What the . . . ? What do you mean, ‘our kind’?”

My panic was obviously visible, and Simon inhaled deeply. Watching him, the way his chest was rising and falling rhythmically, hypnotically, I swore he was prompting me to do the same. “Kyra.” He inhaled. “Please.” He took another slow and steady breath. “Just let me talk. I’ll do my best to make sense of it, and then you can ask anything you want.” He exhaled calmly, easily.

I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to breathe the way he was. Slowly. In and out. So very, very slowly . . .

After a few seconds I felt . . . well, okay. Who was I kidding? I still felt like I was trapped in a storage locker with a maniac, but at least I could breathe again. “Fine,” I muttered. “You have five minutes. And then I’m leaving.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to continue. I was angry and frustrated, but most of all confused and scared.

“Let me tell you what I remember,” Simon began again, not at all rushing his explanation just because I’d decided to put him on the clock. “I remember walking to my girlfriend’s house; I’d just had a fight with my parents.” He looked at me as if this was somehow significant, but he kept talking. “We lived in Boise, and it was August, so even though it was getting late, I remember it was still hot as hell. Man, the mosquitoes were eatin’ me alive that night.” He chuckled slightly, and I wondered if he thought this was funny, because I so totally didn’t. I didn’t appreciate his stroll down memory lane. I just wanted his five minutes to be up already so I could tell him, “Thanks for saving me from the Men in Black, but I gotta be on my way now.”

Oblivious to my surliness, Simon continued, his gaze going deep and faraway, “And then there was this light . . . and it was
so
. . . I couldn’t see anything but that light.” He closed his eyes as if he’d gone someplace else. Faraway. Another place in time.

When he opened his eyes again, he shook his head. “I was ten miles south of home when I woke up, at place called Lucky Peak. Almost two days had passed, and I had no idea where I’d been or what had happened to me.”

I stopped sulking as I broke out in goose bumps. His story was different from mine but so very much the same all at once.

Except I’d been gone way,
way
longer.

I sat up straighter, not convinced by any stretch but a little more curious. “So how’d you figure it out? And how are you still . . .” I didn’t know how old I thought he was. “Shouldn’t you be like fifty or something?”

“Forty-nine,” he stated, as if the answer was simple. “We just don’t age at the same rate as everyone else.” And then his eyes narrowed. “At the same rate as normal people.”

I laughed then. A small, breathy sound, and I was frowning and grinning at the same time. “Okay,
what
?” I stopped smiling then, because it really wasn’t funny. “This is . . . You’re just . . .” I narrowed my eyes back at him. “Did my dad put you up to this?” I wasn’t sure if I was amused or pissed, or freaked out that someone would go to this length—even my own father—to prove a point. But I was definitely alarmed.

Because Simon didn’t look like he was joking. Or like anyone had put him up to anything.

He looked completely, stone-cold sober and drop-dead serious.

“What do you mean ‘normal people’?” I didn’t use the air quotes this time, and my voice was way, way quieter.

“I’m not saying we’re not normal, Kyra. I’m just saying we’re different. We can do things other people can’t after we’ve been returned.”

I spoke slowly, like he was dimwitted. “Like not aging?”

He shook his head, a patient smile replacing his serious expression. “Not at all. We age.
I
aged. I was only fifteen when I was taken, the same way you were taken.”

I shook my head because what he was saying was utter-complete-
absurd
nonsense. He was nothing like me.

He only nodded in response. “I was. And you’ll age too.” He was speaking slowly, too, now, as if I was the one who didn’t get it. As if I was the one who was crazy. “Just way, way,
way
slower than everyone else.”

I studied him and tried to see him as fifteen. He
could be
fifteen, I supposed, if I squinted just so. But more likely he was lying, and honestly, I was getting tired of being toyed with. “Prove it,” I said at last, knowing there was no way he could convince me.

“Are you sure, Kyra? You want me to prove it to you?”

“Yeah. Sure. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Prove it.”

And then he did the absolute last thing I anticipated: he cut himself.

The knife came out of nowhere. It was one of those pocketknives, like the Swiss Army kind that has all the gadgets. It cut across the soft, unblemished skin of his forearm.

I opened my mouth to say “Oh my god!” but no words came out. All I could do was pant in jagged breaths. I twisted around in my seat then, as I searched for something to stop the blood that was already spilling from the inch-long gash he’d inflicted on himself.

“No! Kyra, don’t. Just watch.” His other arm was on my wrist, demanding I stop rummaging for a makeshift bandage and pay attention to what was happening on his arm.

Recoiling, I reluctantly turned back and did as he said. I looked at the cut. It was wide and deep, and I could see
far too far
inside of it, and I was sure it would need stitches and probably a tetanus shot, because who knew where that blade had been before he’d
shoved it into his own arm
!

I felt queasy, and the possibility of me throwing up right there in the front seat of his car skyrocketed.

And then the weirdest thing happened, and the world beneath me spun out of control. The thing started to close. The wound—it started to heal, right before my eyes.

It was still bleeding, but the flow began to subside as the blood itself became thicker, darker, and then the edges at the ends of the slash began to . . . I had to blink to make sure I was seeing it right, but they did, they began to
seal
back together.

I sat there, mesmerized, for at least five minutes, the total time it took for the process to complete. In the grand scheme of things, it had to be some kind of miracle.

But when all was said and done, his injury had spontaneously healed in mere minutes.

There was only one question left as I sat there, staring at his perfect, completely uninjured and unscarred skin. “
What . . .
are you?”

I could’ve used one of Cat’s tequila shots right about then. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt so disoriented, not even when I’d first come back and realized I’d lost five entire years. Or when I’d gone to the dentist and learned I hadn’t aged a single day during that time.

Because what Simon was telling me now went beyond farfetched and ventured straight into
no-freaking-way
territory.

Except that I’d just watched him heal a gash that surely needed serious medical attention in less time than it took to make Top Ramen in the microwave.

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying that when we’re ‘returned’”—I pulled out the air quotes again because it was too weird not to use them—“we’re not the same as before? And you think you were taken by . . . ?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I knew how—I just couldn’t say the word.

“Aliens,” he filled in for me, completely nonplussed by the whole deal.

“Seriously?” I asked, my voice chock-full of disbelief.

Simon nodded, the same way he had the other three times I’d asked the very same question, trying to phrase my doubts in different ways and hoping for a different response. “I am, Kyra. I’m saying we both were. That’s what happens when we’re taken. We’re not the same when we come back. Not the same at all.”

“And when you say ‘not the same,’ you’re talking . . . ?” I’d never had such a hard time completing sentences in my entire life.

Simon looked at me like I was being intentionally dense. “Well,
this
for one.” He held his arm wrist up for my inspection. “Have you ever seen anyone else do that? And what about sleep? I’m guessing you haven’t slept much since you’ve been back.” He studied me, waiting for me to answer, and I wanted to deny the truth.

Really.
I wanted to flat-out lie to avoid feeding his delusions, but he was right; I’d barely slept, and not in the way people say that so they have something to complain about, like it’s a competition.

I shook my head and shrugged. “So, I have some insomnia issues. It’s been a big adjustment. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“That’s not it, and you know it. You’re not even tired.”

He didn’t bother asking if he was wrong, and he wasn’t. I hadn’t even considered that before this minute. That it had been five long nights without more than an hour in any given night, and I wasn’t the slightest bit drowsy. I hadn’t yawned once.

“What about that?” I pointed at the dried blood on his arm.
“I
can’t do that.”

He shot me a challenging look. “You so sure about that?”

I jolted in my seat. “Are you freaking kidding me? You don’t seriously want to test it out! You’re even crazier than I thought, you know that?”

Suddenly I needed to get out of there. Simon wasn’t just a fruitcake, he was a
dangerous
fruitcake.

But before I could open my mouth to tell him I was out of there, either with or without a ride, he’d reached out and snatched my arm, and the edge of his blade was sliding into my wrist.