The Taking

EPILOGUE

SEVENTEEN DAYS. THAT’S HOW MUCH TIME HAD passed since I woke up beneath the scorching sun near the mouth of Devil’s Hole.

Just me and Simon.

We’d stayed there for nearly an hour—maybe less, maybe more. It was hard to know for sure. Time felt irrelevant after everything we’d been through. We’d searched for the others—Tyler, my dad, even Agent Truman—but they were nowhere. I tried long after Simon had given up on them, convinced they were gone. Convinced they weren’t coming back anytime soon.

I’d shouted for them until I was hoarse and scrambled up the rocky hills to get a better view of the deserty landscape. I skinned my knees and cut my palms, but there was no one there who could be infected by my recklessness.

I even crawled to the edge of Devil’s Hole and screamed their names into the void.

The only evidence that they’d ever been there at all was Agent Truman’s sedan, still parked behind our car, and his badge, which had been lying on the ground right where he’d once stood.

Even the fireflies had vanished.

“It’s not healthy, you know? Drawing bugs all day long.” I jerked my head up to find Natty grinning at me. She sat down, sliding a small plate of fruit in front of me. “Here, eat. It won’t do you any good to starve.”

Natty was sweet like that, the only kind-of friend I’d made since we’d arrived here at the Silent Creek camp, where Simon and his band of Returned had taken up refuge after the NSA had discovered their location.

Simon had tried to talk to me over and over again after that morning when we’d driven all the way from Devil’s Hole. I knew he thought I was avoiding him, and maybe I was, but it wasn’t about Simon, not really.

I just couldn’t bear to face him, to be reminded of what I’d done to Tyler, and to my dad as well. If I hadn’t been so selfish, if I had just been able to let Tyler go peacefully—the way he should have—my dad would still be here.

Not . . . vanished. Maybe forever.

And Simon was just another reminder of what an idiot I’d been.

It hadn’t been all that hard to avoid him, though. Simon’s group—Jett and Willow included—kept to themselves for the most part. It was like the two camps were rival high schools, coming together only for important meetings but staying segregated whenever possible. When they did sleep, they slept in different quarters; and when they ate, they made sure it was in different shifts.

But I wasn’t tethered by whatever pecking orders had already been established. I was like the new girl at school, able to choose for myself. And once we’d arrived at Silent Creek and I’d met a few of the Returned here, I’d immediately gravitated toward their way of life. They lived peacefully in this place, no guns or satellite trackers. They tended to their vegetable gardens and raised chickens and washed their clothes in the stream near the edge of camp.

Like the Returned from Simon’s camp, these Returned were young, so it was strange to see the way they worked so efficiently, delegating chores and responsibilities, and voting whenever an issue arose. There was a leader of the Silver Creek camp, but not the way Simon was. Thom was more of a chairman than he was a strategist or final decision maker.

But being in a new place, with new people, didn’t make it any easier to forget those I’d left behind.

If, or rather when, from what I’d gathered, Simon and his Returned moved on, I wasn’t sure what I’d do—stay here in the mountains of central Oregon with Natty and Thom and the other Silver Creekers or move on with Simon and Jett and Willow, and the rest of their Returned.

Natty would be hardest to leave if I did go. Mostly she stayed quiet and didn’t ask a lot of questions, just made sure I ate every day or so and kept me company. Even when I didn’t feel like talking.

I glanced down at the doodles on the edge of the page—the fireflies—and flipped my journal closed. I smiled weakly at her while she slid in silently beside me, not asking more than I could give.

The fireflies. They still took up too much space in my thoughts, still made me shudder, even seventeen days later.

I’d never get rid of the sensation of a million legs climbing over every square inch of me.

It shouldn’t have happened that way. Simon told me so. None of it. The way the fireflies had engulfed us. Or the fact that they—whoever they were—had taken my father and Agent Truman along with Tyler.

Simon didn’t have to tell me the rest, I had Jett’s statistics to rely on for that. The Returned were usually young, in their teens.

It didn’t bode well for my dad.

But honestly, at the seventeen-day mark, it didn’t bode well for any of them.

Still, I refused to give up hope. Not yet. I was desperate to know if any of them—if Tyler or my dad, at least—had survived.

Both camps had their own information networks in place, yet so far neither one of them had heard so much as a peep about anyone, anywhere, being newly returned. And that lack of news was . . . well, it was killing me.

“I wasn’t drawing. I was . . .” It didn’t matter. Natty didn’t need to hear that I was trying to write it all down so I could find a way to make some sense of it, because it would never make sense, even if it was on paper.

“You’re crying again,” Natty said quietly, and I blinked, wiping my eyes on my sleeve.

I was past being embarrassed over my outbursts, which were happening more and more frequently as I tried to cling to hope. “Sorry,” I offered halfheartedly.

She shrugged and picked up a slice of apple from my plate.

“Kyra!” It was Jett who’d come bursting into the dining room of the old mountain church house the Silent Creekers had taken over. “Kyra, come quick!” His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were overly bright. “There’s something you should see.”

I jumped up and reached for the hand Jett held out to me. We ran across the small courtyard to the temporary communications room Jett had set up using some of the equipment he’d brought with him.

Like everything else, the communications equipment for both camps was kept separate, and Jett had a no-share policy about his stuff. I was clearly an exception to that rule.

“Someone reported a Returned?” I asked, knowing I sounded desperate and not caring in the least. I wanted it to be true so bad.

Jett’s eyebrows lowered. “We’re not sure exactly,” he hedged, and my stomach dropped. “We intercepted a report of a teenage boy the No-Suchers picked up. They suspect he’s one of us.”

I frowned at him, refusing to let myself be crushed again. “So? That could be anyone. What makes you think it was him?”

“Here. See for yourself.” He handed me a laptop that was so bulky it felt like it could withstand an atomic blast.

I took it, my stomach doing crazy flips as I glanced tentatively down at the screen. I wanted to give myself just a few more moments of believing it could be Tyler before finding out it for sure wasn’t. Sometimes those few seconds of hope were worth the crash back to reality, and I didn’t want to lose that feeling—not just yet.

When I finally dared to peek, there was an email already cued up, and from the looks of it, it was definitely need-to-know information only. It had the word CLASSIFIED written all over it.

I skimmed the body of the email, my heart soaring with each passage I read:

On June 10 at 18:47 . . . Washington State Patrol reported an unidentified male between the ages of 16 and 20 years old at a rest stop just south of Olympia, Washington . . . subject was carrying no identification and refused to reveal his name to officials. Subject is currently being held at the Tacoma facility for my inspection.

“I don’t get it. This could be anyone.” I started to close the laptop, but Jett stopped me.

“Read who sent the memo.”

When I did, my stomach tightened, and I had to re-read the signature line several times.

It was right there, in black-and-white. Agent Truman was back, and he’d sent the email about a boy he wanted to “inspect.”

“Jett? What was he talking about? What’s the ‘Tacoma facility’?”

It was Simon who answered my question as he came into the room. “It’s exactly the kind of place we’ve been avoiding. And if that’s him, if it really is Tyler and he’s been returned, we need to get him the hell outta there.”

I turned to Simon then, wishing I could take back every second I’d avoided him over the past seventeen days, because now when I needed him most, he was right here for me. I was almost afraid to ask: “Can we do that?”

Simon pushed away from the wall, grinning daringly at me. “We can sure as hell try.”

“Kyra,” Jett half whispered from his spot beside me, and I whipped back around to face him.

He was pointing at the screen again, only this time it wasn’t the email he meant. “Look,” he breathed, his mouth hanging wide open.

It took me a second to process what had gotten him so worked up, but on the screen a message had popped open and in it there was only a single word, blinking at us.

Supernova16?

I stared at the message for several long seconds, my heart sliding into my throat.

Beside me, Jett’s voice rose excitedly. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

My hands shook as my fingers touched the keyboard.

What if it was a trap?

On the other hand, what if it wasn’t?

I had to know, so I tapped in the single word message and hit ENTER: Dad?