The Replaced(46)

The blue-eyed girl with the shaved head—Simon’s new BFF—stood in the doorway, glaring at us . . . at Simon most of all. I moved my face away, so he was no longer touching me, and pulled my hand from his.

But I was too late—she’d noticed. Her condemning glare moved from my hands to Simon. “Come on,” she dictated to him.

“Wait!” I said in a rush. “What about the rest of us? You’re not leaving us here, are you?”

Jett jumped up, doing his best to block the gaping hole he’d made in the wall. “Where are you taking him?”

“None’a your business,” she shot back.

“Don’t worry. I got this.” Simon gave me an overconfident nod, and then turned his less-than-convincing charms back on the girl. “So, that’s it? No ‘Nice to see you’ or ‘I’ve missed you’ or ‘Where have you been all my life?’ Just ‘Come on’?” he taunted her, and I wanted to tell him to just, for once, shut his mouth and do as he was told. But it was useless. He was Simon—it wasn’t in him to leave well enough alone.

“And you,” Buzz Cut told Jett before closing the door behind them. “Stop messing with the wiring. If you start a fire, no one’s comin’ in here to save your asses.”

When the lock snapped into place, Jett’s gaze shot around the room, moving from one place to the next as he searched for something. “Dammit,” he cursed when he finally found what he’d been looking for.

He approached the metal paper towel dispenser mounted to the wall right beside the dingy porcelain sink. I didn’t get it; it looked like an ordinary dispenser to me, the same kind you saw in crappy restaurants and schools and rest stops all around the country.

Jett hooked both hands inside the lower lip, where the next paper towel was poking through waiting to be pulled free. He yanked the painted metal as hard as he could and the top burst open with a screech, sending a stack of brown paper towels tumbling free.

Inside, Jett retrieved a small, round lens that was obviously some sort of surveillance device.

“Should’a seen this,” he grumbled, pocketing the gadget. “They were watching us this whole time.” He ran his fingers around the metal cover one more time before letting it slam shut once more. “Too bad it’s wireless, I might’ve been able to use the hardware.”

Thom scanned the room, and then his fingers laced through Natty’s.

Natty shot me a timid glance, her cheeks flushing.

“We should assume they’re listening too,” Thom said as he dragged Natty against him, and that was that—the mystery of Thom and Natty was solved. “Don’t say anything you don’t want them hearing.”





CHAPTER TWELVE


BY THE TIME IT WAS MY TURN, BUZZ CUT HAD already come back for everyone else, and I was the last one left. Five hours and thirteen minutes had passed since she’d first come to take Simon away.

Now it was well past eleven in the morning, which meant it was already hot in the Utah desert, and even hotter inside the sweltering closed-up space where we’d been confined. The sun beat down against the one-and-only bolted-closed window, and no matter how much dirt was caked over the outside of it, there wasn’t enough to filter out the escalating heat.

Sometime after nine, when Natty was still with me, we’d tried to block the window using one of the thin blankets in the cell. But there’d been nothing to secure it with, and eventually we’d given up.

It was a relief when it was finally my turn, and suddenly the unknown was better than sweating it out—literally—in what had turned from jail cell to sweat lodge. So I was surprised when, instead of being led to some other stuffy room, like some sort of interrogation cell with two-way mirrors, I was led to an enormous shower area.

“Clean up,” Buzz Cut ordered, shoving a towel and stack of borrowed clothes at me.

Despite the layers of grime and the rust-colored sand that clung to me, I bristled at the command, and thought about telling her where she could shove it. I do not want that shower, I lied to myself.

But she cleared up any misgivings about whether it was an option or not when she said, “Do it or I’ll throw you back in the holding cell and you can sweat it out there the rest of the week.”

Problem solved. I was definitely showering.

And it was totally worth it. After the morning I’d had, the campground-style, communal showers were like stepping into a luxury spa—a serious indulgence.

I stayed beneath the stream of hot water for a lifetime, which was more than enough time to scrub away not only the dirt, but the residual blood that was dried along my hairline. I rolled my neck and stretched my shoulders, and when my fingers started to prune, I finally turned off the nozzle and toweled off.

Using my fingers, I combed out the tangles from my hair and slipped into the clean clothes she’d loaned me: a loose-fitting pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that was so threadbare it felt like air against my newly clean skin. I knotted the end of the shirt to keep from being swallowed up by it.

I spent way too long in front of the mirror, looking at the stranger with the russet-colored hair who could no longer pass as Bridget Hollingsworth—the girl on the fake ID Simon had given me. Bridget had looked too much like the old me.

I wondered what kind of name this stranger might have. She could be a different Bridget, I supposed, but she could just as easily be a Maddy or a Mikayla, or maybe even a Kaci with an i.