The Replaced(11)

At least that’s the way he’d always told the story. All I remembered were those teeth.

That was maybe the last time I’d felt like something deserved the word daunting until this very instant. And even though this wasn’t at all like the “polar bear incident,” my feelings were precisely the same. I wanted to scream and run away.

The building didn’t look all that special, just a regular building that was huddled among a bunch of other regular-looking buildings—the kind of place where something as ordinary as zippers or lip balm might be manufactured. Not so much the kind of place you’d expect the NSA to be concealing an undercover operation. A place where they kept teens who were newly returned from alien experimentation.

Yet here we were.

And in there . . . who knew. Would we find Tyler? Agent Truman . . . ?

I shuddered as that nemesis feeling gripped me again.

From the moment Agent Truman had landed on my mom’s doorstep, he’d given me the creeps. There’d been something off in the way he’d pretended to be all friendly and concerned about me, asking where I’d been during those five years, like he was a regular cop but never telling me who he really was. Yet all along he’d suspected I was one of the Returned.

I might never have discovered in time how shady he was, except my mom had already taken me to the dentist. We’d already learned I hadn’t aged—that the comparison of the X-rays I’d had done before I’d been taken and the ones done after I’d come back had proven I hadn’t gone from sixteen to twenty-one the way I should have during my absence. Agent Truman had known it too, even though he hadn’t said so at first. But when he realized I wasn’t going to cooperate, he’d come back, along with a team of NSA agents, all suited up in hazmat gear and brandishing the kind of medical equipment designed for dissecting people like me.

If Simon hadn’t come along and saved my ass . . . well, let’s just say my head would probably be mounted and stuffed on Agent Truman’s office wall as we speak.

So maybe it wasn’t the building after all. Maybe it was the idea of facing my nemesis again, if he was in there at all, that made me think of the polar bear incident after all these years.

I was sure I was overreacting. I mean, I’d already proven I was physically stronger than the NSA agent. Heck, his hand was probably still broken from when I’d shattered it with a baseball.

Plus, there was that other thing I could do—that weird thing no one in either camp, other than Simon, knew about . . .

Except I hadn’t been able to do it again, not since that night at Devil’s Hole, and I was starting to think that whatever it was, it controlled me rather than the other way around. So far, I’d only managed to make it happen twice, and neither time had been entirely on purpose.

The first time had been right after I’d infected Tyler. I’d left him in the motel room where we’d been hiding from Agent Truman and the rest of his hazmat team, while Tyler had been delirious from fever. I’d been desperate to find a way to make him better. So desperate that, without meaning to, I’d moved an entire display of pain relievers across a cashier booth at a gas station, using only my mind . . . all to get my hands on some Tylenol.

If anyone had been there to see it, they wouldn’t have been more shocked than me.

The second time it happened, Simon had witnessed it. We’d been up at Devil’s Hole, where Agent Truman had tracked us down and was holding my dad hostage. I’d seen the look in the agent’s eyes—he was going to kill my father.

But I hadn’t let him, and again, there’d been the familiar throbbing in the back of my head, and before I’d realized what was happening, the gun he’d been holding just a moment—a second—earlier, flew, rocketed, from his hand. Disappearing into the depths of Devil’s Hole.

It had been me. My mind that had done that.

Since then, I’d tried to roll pencils or to make water slosh or to flip on a light switch—just by concentrating. Anything to prove I had control over it, rather than the other way around.

So far, I’d gotten nothing but a headache for my efforts.

Simon hadn’t mentioned it again, not after that night. Maybe he would have if I’d given him a chance, but I didn’t think so. Without saying so, it had become a secret—our secret. And I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want the Silent Creekers to know. I didn’t want anyone to know because it made me feel like a freak. A freak among freaks.

But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t use it again if I needed to. Like now. I’d do anything to save Tyler, even if it meant revealing my secret in front of everyone.

“You guys ready for this?” Simon asked from the passenger seat, his eyes moving around the inside of the vehicle, where we’d parked it across the road from the warehouse-looking building. He stopped at each one of us, including Thom.

“Ready,” Thom announced, sitting straighter, and looking like he was prepared to take any order Simon threw at him.

I nodded, trying to convince myself I was ready too. My heart jackhammered in my chest, the way it used to right before the start of a crucial pitch—the kind of pitch that wins or loses games. Except this time the stakes were so, so much higher than just a championship trophy.

I remembered what my dad always said about those clutch plays. It’s not the best athlete who wins the game; it’s the one who stays cool under pressure.