The Countdown (The Taking #3)(2)

And I couldn’t entirely blame him, because I was thinking the same things, wondering whether being made entirely from alien DNA somehow canceled out my human memories and personality. I was curious about the things I could do—my abilities, my strengths, the dangers I posed, even though I 100 percent felt the same. Even though I looked and acted exactly like my old self.

I wanted to tell him to cut it out with the weird looks, because . . . not cool, but every time I started to say something, my throat closed tighter than Fort Knox and I ended up pretending I hadn’t noticed.

Inside, though . . . inside, the idea that my dad—my own dad—couldn’t figure out what to make of me, made me want to vanish again. One more chink in my already tarnished armor.

Nice.

I wondered what he’d do if my stomach ripped apart and some alien baby popped out, grinding and gnashing its acid-dripping teeth while it screeched its alien battle cry.

Maybe that’s what he expected. That any second I’d be torn apart by whatever was inside me, waiting to break free the way it happened in the movies.

Aliens versus humans.

Us versus them.

In real life, though, Alien Kyra was super boring. Plainer even than Old Kyra, with far fewer friends and a lot more empty time on her hands.

Just thinking about it made me miss the other Returned Tyler and I had left behind at Blackwater because at least they had a clue what we were going through—Simon, Jett, Willow, Natty.

They’d taken me in when I’d had no place else to go, back when Agent Truman had first discovered I existed and set his sights on me. When my mom had decided I was too dangerous to be around, which turned out wasn’t so far from the truth.

Like me, the Returned had also been abducted by aliens and sent back after being altered. Only they’d been less changed than I was.

Half alien and half human, they considered themselves hybrids. Like me, they could heal faster and needed less food and sleep than our human counterparts. We also aged slower; making them . . . making all of us look like teenagers indefinitely.

But I’d give anything to have the one thing they had—the half-human part they still could lay claim to.

Like I said, I’d been taken too, but I’d come back different from the Returned. Different from almost everyone, except Tyler.

Tyler, who was exactly like me.

Well . . . almost. He was as close to me as anyone in the world.

We weren’t Returned, we were the Replaced. The difference being that when we’d been abducted, it wasn’t only segments of our genetic coding the aliens had messed with, it was everything. All of it. Our entire bodies had been replicated.

Replaced. So that Tyler and I now shared full-on alien DNA, leaving only our faces and our memories to remind us who we used to be. Although even in that I was alone, since Tyler had a gap in his memories—he was missing the time we’d spent together before he was taken. Which was the one memory I wanted him to have most: the part where the two of us had fallen in love.

That was a biggie.

Without it, we were just friends, like Old Kyra and Old Tyler, which maybe could’ve been enough, once upon a time.

There should have been a song in there somewhere . . . an angsty, twangy country song filled with lyrics about love lost and found again. But I couldn’t wrangle enough of my former smart-alecky self to think up a single line.

Maybe spunky had been part of Old Kyra’s DNA. Maybe Alien Kyra had no game. She was straitlaced and boring. She was into bubblegum pop. Or worse, church hymnals. She was the kind of girl who colored inside the lines and wore pink. Crazy amounts of pink.

Alien Kyra was already on my nerves.

Of course it was good to have New Tyler back. He was the one person I’d been fixated on from the moment we’d been separated. I mean, my dad too. But Tyler . . .

It was Tyler I’d spent hours single-mindedly focused on. Picturing in my head. Daydreaming of.

I’d driven Simon and the others crazy for weeks on end, talking incessantly about Tyler after he was taken and wondering why he hadn’t been sent back yet.

I should have been satisfied to have them both—Tyler and my dad. Even though we had to lay low, we were together, the three of us.

Yet I couldn’t help thinking there was something wrong. With me . . . and with Tyler.

With this whole screwed-up situation we were in.

Like I said, my life was a mess.

“You look beautiful.” Tyler stood above me as I sat on a log covered in coarse moss, combing my fingers through the knots in my tangled hair.

My hair. It was the last thing I should be thinking about, considering all the other, way more important things we had to deal with.

“Shut up,” I insisted, but already blood was rushing to my cheeks.

It had been like that for days. Three, to be exact. Three awkward days with Tyler giving me these long, deliberate looks, like he was searching for something he couldn’t quite put his finger on and me wishing he’d hurry up and figure it out already—the memories of who we’d once been together—so I could stop thinking about that other thing.

Because for three days it had been eating me up inside, and even though I’d been unwilling to face it head-on, I couldn’t drop it either: What had Tyler meant that night in the desert when he’d said those chilling words: The Returned must die?

Now I stared up at him, blushing like a schoolgirl just because he’d said I was beautiful.