The Countdown (The Taking #3)(3)

“I found something,” he told me with that earnest expression I couldn’t get enough of, his green eyes overly intense—one of the side effects of being a Returned or a Replaced, the change to our eye color. He kept his voice low; we both did, not wanting to wake my dad, who was stuffed inside his miniature-sized tent with his not-so-miniature-sized dog, Nancy.

He didn’t have to invite me twice. I forgot all about my hair and followed him as he disappeared into the thick forest. I reminded myself for the hundred-millionth time that it didn’t matter what he’d said the other night. It didn’t mean anything because he’d been sleepwalking, and sleepwalking didn’t count, right?

If only he’d said something else.

The Returned must die.

Had that really only been three nights ago? It seemed like another lifetime. Three nights since I’d found him, standing in front of a sheer rock wall in the Utah desert, drawing strange symbols and chanting in that strange mumbo-jumbo language I’d never heard before.

To be fair, no one had probably ever heard it before because it was nonsense.

And when he’d finally looked at me, his expression had kinda-sorta cleared, and he’d said: “Ochmeel abayal dai.”

Then, plain as day: “The Returned must die.”

At first, I thought he’d have some logical explanation for what I’d just heard. That he’d just blink and be magically awake, losing that blanked-out expression he’d been wearing and he’d ask me what we were doing there because it was weird to be out there in the middle of the night like that.

But that wasn’t how it happened. And when he didn’t explain, it became this thing . . . this strange unspoken weirdness between us.

I’d been stuck like that ever since. Wishing I could find the right words and the right time to just . . . ask him, because that’s what people did, they asked each other things. But I never quite got around to it because the timing was always . . . off.

So three days had gone by. And every time I tried to ask, the words just died on my lips. Where would I even start, other than What the hell, Tyler? and that wasn’t much of an icebreaker when what I really-really wanted to ask was, Do you remember anything . . .

. . . about me?

About us?

About what I did to you?

That last one was the one that made my stomach twist. Somehow, I had to find a way to tell him, to explain before the memory came back to him on its own. Because what if he only got back pieces and they were jumbled, and he didn’t understand it had all been a giant-terrible-horrific mistake? That I hadn’t realized my blood had been toxic to him . . . to all humans? What if he didn’t understand that sending him with them—the aliens—that night up at Devil’s Hole was the only way I knew to save him from dying?

I never would have risked letting him be changed if I’d had another choice.

Again, I totally would have talked to my dad about it, if my dad had been acting like my dad. I would have told him about the strange words Tyler had said in the desert, and confessed about the guilt I felt over my decision to let Tyler be taken in the first place.

I might even have mentioned the thing where Simon had kissed me when he’d dropped Tyler and me off to meet my dad. The day he’d decided being “friends” wasn’t enough for him.

I could’ve used a dad for that one.

I wished he could help me out with other things too, questions I still had. Like what exactly had happened to him that night up at Devil’s Hole when Tyler had been taken? Agent Truman had held my dad hostage, using him as leverage to make me turn myself in. And I would have, if the fireflies hadn’t come and made them both disappear—my dad and Agent Truman—at the same time they’d taken Tyler.

So if he’d been taken like the rest of us, why had my dad come back without having been changed at all?

The whole thing was all so strange . . .

And then there was this thing with the mornings. Every dawn came with an unbearable gut-wrenching pain that wasn’t getting any easier to deal with. Most mornings it doubled me in half, to the point I had to bite my own tongue to keep myself from crying out.

My dad hadn’t noticed it, but Tyler most definitely had.

Even stranger, each morning a number ticked off in my head. I couldn’t explain it, but whatever the number was, it became my obsession of the day. And suddenly I’d see that number everywhere we went.

Today’s number was seventeen, and so far I’d seen it in the newspaper my dad had found at one of the campsites, on a mile marker we’d passed, and I’d lost count of how many times I’d happened to check my watch at the exact moment the minute hand landed on the seventeen mark.

It was eerie.

The crippling pain I felt each morning combined with my increasing obsession with numbers and time was making me start to think I might be dying. That my body—this new alien body—was rejecting me . . . rejecting this world, and I would eventually just . . . vanish again.

Only this time I wouldn’t come back.

Maybe that was what kept me from going to my dad. My fear that my time here was limited. If that was the case, I didn’t want to waste a single second by worrying him, especially if Tyler’s nonsense mutterings turned out to be nothing. Just the mumbo-jumbo ramblings of a sleepwalker awakened too soon.

Die . . .

The Returned must die.