Tyler’s face remained still, his eyes closed. When he breathed, it sounded like it was coming from too far down inside his chest and each breath had to be dredged up. Labored for. Speaking was an effort. “I heard you . . . when you were talking. I know . . .” He paused to take a long, determined pull of the dusty air around us. “I know I don’t have long.” He strained to open his eyes, and again it was a struggle, that task that should have been so incredibly simple.
Yet when he did, I nearly lost it.
His eyes . . . oh my god, his eyes . . .
What had once been beautiful and green, and had sparkled when he smiled, were now completely and totally devoid of all color. As if black ink had been spilled within them, blooming from the pupil and diffusing outward.
“I wish I could see you,” Tyler said, lifting his hand feebly and reaching for my face.
Trembling, and unable to stop myself from crying openly, I moved so he could find me, letting the tips of his fingers graze my cheeks until even that effort was too much for him and his hand fell back down. I captured his hand then and crushed my lips to it.
“I don’t want you to blame yourself, Kyra. Not ever.” He wheezed, and before I could stop him, he spoke again. “It was worth it, you know. I would trade a million lifetimes for the one I’ve had with you.”
“You’re wrong,” I insisted. “I would trade anything to give you your life back. Anything.”
I felt him then. Going quiet, completely motionless, once more. Exhaustion overtaking him.
I hovered above him, listening to the sounds of his breathing and hating how much I feared that this might be it. The way my stomach clenched at the rasping sound he made as he fought for each and every breath like it might be his last. I had a hard time swallowing as I willed his lungs to find a rhythm, for him to hang on.
When he found that calm at last, I relaxed, easing back and letting go of his hands.
“Simon wants you to come with me.”
The voice startled me, but I recognized it. It was Jett, standing in the doorway behind me.
“What? I can’t leave him,” I said, getting to my feet.
“He’ll be okay for now,” Jett explained, nodding toward Tyler, who was out cold. “He won’t even know you’re gone. Simon wants me to show you around.” When I looked like I might argue, which I considered, unable to bring myself to leave Tyler alone, Jett added, his voice quiet and persuasive, “You’ll want to see this. I promise.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS HARD TO LEAVE TYLER IN THE FILTHY, rundown cabin while I followed Jett into what I could only describe as a maze of tunnels that extended far below the hot and dusty surface of the camp.
“What is this place?” I ran my hand along the cool concrete that made up the underground walls. I’d let Jett lead me down into what I thought was a sewer opening in the middle of the soil, one that had been concealed by a heavy iron cover that he had to drag off it, and once we’d dropped all the way to the bottom, I found myself surrounded by darkness. The tunnel we walked through seemed endless, and, unlike me, Jett needed a flashlight to find his way.
“Used to be part of the Hanford operation—the nuclear facility. They haven’t used this place in years, though. I’m not sure this bunker is even on the map.” He stopped in front of a closed metal door that blended into the cement wall around it.
“Nuclear facility? Is it safe to be here?”
Jett flashed me a boyish grin, and I wondered just how old he was. He looked younger than both Simon and Willow. Younger than me and Tyler, at least in human years. I had no idea how that translated in replaced time. At the delayed aging rate of the Returned, he could’ve been back for mere weeks or as long as decades. “It is for us,” he bragged.
Goose bumps broke out over my skin at his answer. He worked to unlatch the door, which involved rotating a handle the way you did with submarine hatches. “Okay,” I asked, rubbing the chill from my arms. “But what about Tyler? He’s not . . . like us?” The seal popped with a hiss, and the door burst outward.
Jett shot me a look that told me I was being unreasonable. “He’s also been exposed,” he said. “He can’t survive.”
I hated him for being so matter-of-fact about it, even if it was the truth.
Jett frowned at me. “I’m sorry,” he explained. “We’ve all lost people we cared about.”
I kept rubbing my arms, my skin no longer chilled but wanting to ward away the feelings that overwhelmed me. I turned my attention to the room in front of us.
Jett lifted his chin toward the opening, his eyes sparkling. “Welcome to my lair.”
From the other side of the open door came the hum of electricity, the buzz filling the air with its static charge. Jett stepped over the threshold, which was several inches high, and I leaned in closer to see what it was he was hiding in there.
Computers. There was a hodgepodge collection of computer workstations—monitors and keyboards and routers and modems of various sizes and designs—like they’d been salvaged from junkyards and thrift stores and yard sales—anyplace he’d been able to gets his hands on a piece of equipment. There were printers and cords and discs too.
And then there were the maps. Walls and walls of maps.
It was like the military version of my dad’s place. More organized and state-of-the-art, but it had that same feel to it. A similar command-center vibe.
“What do you do down here?” I questioned, taking a step inside and feeling slightly claustrophobic once I was on this side of the metal door.
“This,” Jett declared, interlacing his fingers and flipping his hands over, and then he cracked all his knuckles in front of him at the same time, “is where the magic happens.” He hit a power button on one of the computers, and at once they all crackled to life, monitors blinking furiously through a series of synchronized commands.
When they finished flashing the sporadic lines of script on their screens and came fully ablaze, there was a single glowing logo in the center of each and every one of them—a logo I recognized all too well—and the dusting of goose bumps that had prickled my skin when Jett had mentioned this was a nuclear facility came back with a vengeance.
It was an electronic image of a firefly.
“What the holy mother of . . . The fireflies . . .” I shook my head. “What are those . . . what does that mean?”
Jett flashed me a curious look. “Have you seen that before?”
“Yes. I mean, maybe not this one exactly, but ones like it. My dad had all these picture of fireflies at his place.”
He nodded. “That makes sense. Your dad would probably know.”
“Know what?”
“About the fireflies, and what they represent.”
“And that is what exactly?” I asked, blowing a strand of hair out of my eyes irritably.
Jett laughed at my reaction. “Oh yeah, I keep forgetting you’re new to all this.” He sat down at one of the computer workstations and twisted his chair back and forth, like a restless schoolkid. “There have been stories of UFO sightings that date back hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, but it wasn’t until the 1950s, when there was this Brazilian farmer—a guy named Antonio Vilas-Boas—who claimed he’d been taken on board one of those alien spaceships and ordered to impregnate”—he wiggled his eyebrows when he said the word impregnate, making me think he was as young as he looked—“this hot ‘humanoid.’ When he was returned, he was in pretty bad shape, like they’d beaten the crap out of him. And even though authorities claimed they didn’t buy his story, it caused a flood of other people to start reporting that they’d been abducted too. The thing is, some of these claims had certain things in common. Things that didn’t get reported to the general public.” He leaned back while he continued to twirl in his chair. “Wanna guess what those things might be?”