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.”
PART TWO
“Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
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.”