The Countdown (The Taking #3)(53)

If it truly was an alien, like Dr. Clarke hadn’t denied, it didn’t feel that way to me.

Something inside me tripped at the sight of it, like a switch or a trigger, and I was drawn closer.

It was human-ish but so obviously not human. It had a head and four limbs—two arms and two legs—hands, feet, a torso, fingers and toes, although nothing was in exactly the same shape as mine or Thom’s or Agent Truman’s or Dr. Clarke’s. Its skin was thicker, its head larger, its jaw wider, and as I circled around the canister, I noticed its spinal column was raised and thorny.

“What . . . ,” I tried. “What do you call it?”

“He’s part of a larger group we call the M’alue. Their actual name is unpronounceable, so M’alue is the closest our language can get to it. The meaning itself is totally lost.”

Thom moved to stand next to me. “But it’s a him?”

“Yes,” Dr. Clarke acknowledged. “We call him Adam.”

“What’s wrong with him? Is he . . . alive?”

Dr. Clarke’s voice was somewhere behind me. “We keep him in stasis. For his health.”

I stepped closer to the tube, as close as I could possibly get. There was something about him, about Adam . . . “How did you get him?” I asked. “How did he end up here?”

I leaned in, my breath clouding the glass as I pressed my forehead against it. I raised my hand and let my fingers roam along the cool surface of the cylindrical canister. I felt sorry for him, thinking how easily the roles could have been reversed—me and him. I let myself wonder if that’s how they’d kept me, during the time they’d taken and held me for all those years. Had I been up there in a similar tube, breathing jelly-like blue liquid?

When his eyes opened, I jumped. Behind me, there was a gasp, although who it came from, I wasn’t sure.

Adam was looking directly at me. Into me.

The eyes that looked out at me were wide and golden and, like my newly transformed ones, they glowed.

Glowed.

But more than that, there was something happening between us. Something I was sure no one else in the room was aware of. I wasn’t sure if I heard or felt it. Or maybe it was just a singular awareness coming from inside my veins. But it was him . . . it was definitely him. He was communicating with me. Adam, he was trying to tell me something.

“Do you see that?” It was Thom, right at my back. “Kyra, are you seeing this?”

I nodded, thinking, How could I miss it?

“Step back,” Dr. Clarke said, but she said it uncertainly. “We need to go.” And when I didn’t move, I felt her hand on my shoulder, more confident than her voice. She pulled me away as she insisted, “Now.”

“Okay, so that was something, right?” I whispered to Thom, when the tour abruptly ended and Dr. Clarke ushered us as far away from Adam as she could manage. Her welcoming attitude had vanished and now she was silently leading us down endless corridor after endless corridor.

Agent Truman stayed by her side, but every now and then he’d throw me a frosty look to let me know I’d messed up, even though I couldn’t quite figure what I’d done wrong.

We went into another of those glass elevators and Dr. Clarke punched a button. I barely noticed as the elevator sank and darkness closed in from all sides as chiseled cavern walls surrounded us. I was stuck on what had just happened back there. About that thing—Adam—trapped inside that tube. The way he’d looked at me.

Dr. Clarke had refused to answer any of my questions about him . . . about why they had him in there, and what was wrong with him. He was hurt I tried to tell her, mostly because it seemed so obvious. He was . . . damaged.

I knew because I’d felt it from him. I’d sensed an intense, unbearable, excruciating pain coming from him.

Her only response was that her team was doing its best for him. That he had the best minds in the world working on him and he was in good hands.

But I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t so easily brush Adam from my thoughts. . . .

When we emerged from the elevator, Dr. Clarke said, “I thought it was a coincidence, you showing up the way you did.” She eyed me, and then looked to Agent Truman. “But after what I just witnessed . . . up there just now, I believe I’ve been mistaken . . .” Her voice trailed off as we stopped in front of a large metal door. I heard muffled voices coming from the other side of it. “I think your arrival might be connected in some way,” she explained, and then stepped aside as she opened the door.





SIMON


WE’D BEEN KEPT WAITING FOR HOURS, TOLD SOMEONE would come for us when, so far, no one had. My restlessness was sharp.

When the door began to open, and I saw who was standing on the other side, that restlessness mutated, becoming sticky and hot as it burned the back of my tongue.

Of all the people it had to be, they’d brought us Thom. A snake might’ve been better. Or a rabid junkyard pit bull. Anyone but Thom.

After everything he’d done—sending the NSA the coordinates to Blackwater Ranch, putting a tracking device in the watch he’d given Kyra . . . he was seriously the last person I’d expected to find standing there. Facing us.

“What the fu—” I started. But then I narrowed my eyes and bit down hard, clenching my jaw. “You piece of crap!” I bit out, right before I landed the first punch, hard in the face. And then the second. Somewhere along the line there was a third and probably a fourth.