The Countdown (The Taking #3)(73)

I felt blindsided. How was I supposed to respond? All this time my dad had been working with the ISA and he hadn’t said a single word. I felt like I was talking to a stranger. Suddenly I had to wonder where he fell on my scale of who I could trust.

But he just kept talking. “I was there,” he said, his voice like a growl. “The night the ship crashed—the EVE, they called it. It happened right outside Devil’s Hole. They tell you that part?”

I shook my head, too dazed to manage anything else.

Simon had told me once that Devil’s Hole was a hotbed of alien activity. I thought when he’d said that, he meant abductions and sightings. I hadn’t realized that included UFO crashes too.

“I wasn’t actually at the crash site, mind you. That was reserved for top-level clearance personnel only. I wasn’t even part of the recovery team. But the body—that M’alue—was transported across the mountains, to where we were in Woodinville, and I happened to be in the facility when it arrived.” His voice drifted as he closed his eyes, remembering. “I saw it, all gray and broken.” When he looked at me again, his eyes were red. “I had no way of knowing how much trouble that thing would cause, but looking back, we probably shoulda let it die. We damn sure shouldn’t have kept it . . . not locked inside that capsule.” He covered his mouth to stop from choking on his sob. “Jesus, Kyr, I’m so sorry.”

“So why did you then?” I asked.

He let out a long, slow, shaky breath before trying again. “When they realized it was healing . . . that it was going to live, someone—I don’t know who, but some *—decided we should try to communicate with it. To break barriers.” He ran his hand through his hair. “No clue who thought that was a good idea. But that’s where I came in.” He started pacing, his voice no longer low, and I knew the others could hear him too. Everyone was watching us. Listening. “They put me in charge of writing a code—a translating program.” He shrugged. “Turns out it wasn’t all that complicated, at least to transcribe some of the stuff we recovered from the crash site. It was rudimentary, and like I said, definitely not perfect, but we made progress. That’s how we knew what it . . . what he was . . . that they called themselves the M’alue.” He scrubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “But we never quite got the verbal part right. I tried. Worked on it for months. Sat outside his tube and tried to communicate with him, and I thought I was making progress—a couple of times I swear he tried to respond to the messages I was transmitting. He would open his mouth and make this”—his gaze drifted as he remembered it—“this sound at me.” His eyes met mine. “Like static.” Like the hikers, I could practically hear his thoughts. “But I never understood. The program never deciphered it.”

I still wasn’t sure what all this had to do with me.

“I realized then just how much he was suffering,” my dad went on. “I tried to tell my boss, but he refused to listen. So I went to his boss. No matter who I told, no one wanted to hear it.” He just kept rubbing his chin, his jaw, his cheek. “But it was preying on my mind.”

He dropped his hands and shook his head. “Around that time, the first of our people vanished. At first, no one thought anything of it. The ISA is a big organization, people come and go all the time.”

“Then someone came back with a strange story about being whisked away in a strange flash of light, and waking up with no memory of where she’d been. When a second person returned and had an almost identical story, we started to take them seriously. Both were gone almost two days on the dot.” He exhaled. “But it wasn’t until the blood work came back and we realized they truly were . . . altered . . . that the higher-ups took notice.”

“They were Returned,” I said, filling in the blank.

He nodded, less comfortable now. “I was working late one night, when we received a broadcast over a frequency we didn’t even use anymore. At first, the guys on duty almost wrote it off as nothing more than a bunch of white noise. But they asked me to take a listen. When I heard it, I realized what I was hearing—it was that same static-y sound I’d heard coming from Adam. Of course, I followed protocol and reported it, and the person who responded was Dr. Clarke.”

My eyes leaped to his. “So that’s how you knew her? The two of you worked together?”

He glanced over to where the others were clearly eavesdropping. “We weren’t friends or anything, but she listened to the message.”

I held my breath. “And your code, was it able to translate the message?”

My dad shook his head. “No, but I think they were using my own code against us. I think they were picking up our transmissions to track our location and that’s how they’d been able to figure out it was us holding their M’alue.”

I frowned, letting all this sink in. “And even then, you never thought you should just set him free?”

“It wasn’t up to me. And then it was kids who started to vanish. The first was the son of a man named Alexander Luddy. Luddy was the ISA’s head of operations. His boy’s disappearance caused a huge uproar, and Luddy demanded we surrender the M’alue. But by then it was too late. Experiments had begun. Ugly experiments, and they’d done way more damage than good. The ISA was afraid that sending him back would only make things worse. The kid was eventually returned, forty-eight hours later and halfway across the country.”