I raised my eyebrows; pretty sure the answer wasn’t rocket science or anything. “I’m gonna say fireflies?”
Jett gave an exaggerated nod. “Bingo! And not just a firefly here or there. According to those ‘abducted,’ for lack of a better word, or witnesses, there were always lots of them—swarms of them.”
“And you think the fireflies have something to do with the taken?”
“Oh, they have something to do with it, all right. We’re sure of it. And so were the government agencies and the scientists who were tracking the activity at the time. It wasn’t the No-Suchers . . .” He paused to clarify, unaware that I’d already heard the term. “I mean the NSA, who tracked that kind of thing back then. Rumor has it that after working with Winston Churchill during World War Two to cover up a UFO sighting in England, President Eisenhower had these covert meetings that were called the First Contact meetings with the aliens to forge a treaty with them. He also formed his own agency to look into these so-called ‘abductions’ as well.”
“This sounds like the kind of crazy conspiracy stuff my dad would spew.” I sighed, crossing my arms and feeling somewhat defensive.
He sat up straighter. “Anyone can Google it, but from what I know about your dad, he’s not all that crazy. There’s some truth to this. At least part of it. I don’t know much about the First Contact meetings or about who was really behind this new agency that was formed, but I do know that they got wind of people claiming to be returned, and of witnesses stating that they’d seen huge gatherings of fireflies around the time those people had been taken. Once it was proved that the Returned had the ability to heal, a plan was devised.” He winced. “A really terrible plan, somewhere along the lines of torture. But it got the job done.”
Cocking my head, I took a step closer, almost afraid to ask. “What did they do?”
Jett pulled up his sleeve and showed me his arm. “They used the whole firefly thing against us. They tracked us down and captured us. They questioned us, and if we didn’t admit to being one of these so-called ‘Returned,’ then they would use this thing that looked kind of like a car cigarette lighter, but it was more like a brand, really. It had a symbol in the center of it: a firefly.” He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a completely barbaric thing he was describing. “Since they couldn’t risk exposing themselves to our blood by cutting us, they used it to sear our skin instead. To test us.”
I frowned as I leaned closer, trying to figure out what I was missing. “But . . . there’s nothing there,” I stated solemnly, hating that someone could do something so vile to another person—human or not.
His voice lowered. He was quiet, so quiet, when he answered, “That’s how they knew. If you healed, you’d been returned.”
I closed my eyes. I felt sick. I didn’t say anything for a very, very long time. Finally, when I trusted myself not to throw up when I opened my mouth, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Jett looked up at me with eyes that couldn’t decide if they were blue or green or shades of gold. It was like staring into cut glass.
Or into the iridescent wings of a firefly.
“It was a long time ago,” he recalled with a faraway look in those mosaic eyes of his.
“This is what it looked like,” he said, pointing to the golden-beetle image on his screen.
“They were a different agency back in WW Two—I’m not even sure what jurisdiction they fell under. But the guys who are after you now are a part of the NSA, at least indirectly. They’re an offshoot agency that operates under the radar of the rest of the organization. The government doesn’t sanction what they do, and if the public ever discovered their true purpose, it would be denied. They’re kinda the Area 51 of agencies. Officially, they don’t exist . . . except that they totally do.”
I turned away from the screen, unable to stomach the idea of anyone, especially people in authority, doing the things Jett was talking about. It was murder.
I inhaled, still trying to steady my stomach. “How old are you, Jett?”
He came back to the present then, dropping his sleeve and offering me a small smile. “Twelve when I vanished.” He counted on his fingers then, his smile growing. “But now . . . sixty-four years young.”
“So how did you escape?”
Jett lifted his chin. “My pops wasn’t the kind of guy you messed with, not even if you were a GI.” He closed out the image with a sharp click, and even though I wanted to ask more about it, I got the feeling the discussion was over.
“What did I miss?” Simon asked, ducking through the doorway as he joined us. Willow was right behind him, and I wished she didn’t make me so uneasy. She just had that energy about her, like she was hoping a fight would break out at any second just so she could let off some steam.
Like punching was her hobby.
“I was just about to show her the Sats,” Jett said, turning to face one of the monitors.
“Sats?” I asked.
“Satellite images.” His fingers danced over the keyboard, and a series of images flashed up on the screen. At first it was like looking at Google Earth: generic images I’d seen searching the Web. But then they became more specific as he refined the shots, honing in, until I recognized the city . . . the street . . . the house he was converging on. The image was crystal clear; there was no mistaking it.
It was my mom’s house. The very house I’d grown up in.
Except that it looked so strangely different now, covered almost completely in plastic. Enclosed the same way my mom had wrapped the leftovers she’d set out for me. Surrounding the property, all the way around the yard, there was a tall chain-link fence that hadn’t been there before.
“Quarantined?”
It was Simon who answered me. “They’re probably searching for evidence as well as contaminants. I wasn’t lying when I said they’d do anything to get their hands on you.”
“Assholes,” Willow growled, reminding me that we had an enemy in common.
“What about my dad? Has anyone heard from him? Did they get to him too?”
Jett went to work on the keyboard. “We’ve been following the online chatter—his message boards and chat rooms, all the places he usually frequents. So far he hasn’t made an appearance. But we also haven’t heard anything on the police or No-Suchers’ frequencies to make us think he’s been taken in for questioning either. He seems to have gone off the grid for now.” A satellite picture of my dad’s trailer popped up, and it was like looking at my mom’s house. It, too, had been quarantined, tented in plastic sheeting and enclosed by a chain-link barricade.
This time I could read the signs that were hung on the fencing: WARNING: RESTRICTED AREA
And at the bottom of the sign, in bold red letters: USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.
The whole thing—the signs, the fencing, the quarantine—it was all insane.
“So, I never asked this, but when we were at the bookstore, Tyler and me, there was an agent who . . .” I stopped because it was hard to find a way to put the words together just right.
But I didn’t have to finish my thought, because Jett turned around to look at Simon—another silent exchange. They already understood what I wanted to know.
“He killed himself,” Willow answered before either of the two boys had a chance. “Shot himself. That’s how we knew you were in trouble; their frequencies blew up with word of an agent being exposed to a Code Red and offing himself.”