The Replaced(65)

Outside, the constant shout of someone calling drills filtered into the tent.

“So, what’s with that, anyway? All the training?” I finally asked.

Simon didn’t miss a beat. “Preparation,” he said, like the answer was obvious.

But it wasn’t obvious to me. “Preparation for what?”

“For a war.”

There was no way I’d just heard him right. “Are you kidding? Griffin’s preparing for war? Who could she possibly be going to war with?”

Simon shrugged like this was no big deal, but it so completely was a big deal. “The NSA?” he said. “Maybe the world. Pretty much anyone who messes with her.”

I wasn’t even sure what to say to that. “I mean, I get the idea of preparation.” I didn’t actually use air quotes on the last word, but there was no missing my skepticism. “I’d like to stay in one piece as much as the next girl, but really? From what you’ve said, the other camps lay low, like Thom and the Silent Creek camp. Why can’t she just do that? Seems like she’s got a pretty good thing going here . . . you know, in the desert. Does she really think a bunch of buffed-up teens stand a snowball’s chance in hell against the government?”

Simon leaned closer when he asked, “You wanna know why Griffin has such a grudge against the government?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I guess it helps to know where she’s coming from . . . what she thinks of us. It’s pretty messed up, what happened to her.”

“Of us?” I asked hesitantly, because wasn’t that a strange way to phrase it? Griffin was like us.

Swallowing hard, Simon pushed on. “Remember when you asked me if I ever felt like a monster, knowing I had alien DNA?”

I winced. “I didn’t mean it. I was just . . . having a hard time accepting . . .” I shrugged. “You know . . . it’s weird.”

“I hear ya,” Simon said. “Weird doesn’t even begin to explain it. But the thing is, Griff never got to that point: acceptance. She doesn’t even call us hybrids, the way we do. She uses a different word: chimera. It literally means monster.”

“Monster,” I repeated numbly, feeling sick that I’d ever said that word myself.

The truth was, I felt exactly-wholly-completely identical to the same person I’d always been. If it weren’t for the fact that I knew, logically, that my body had been changed at a genetic level, I probably wouldn’t even believe it.

“But she’s one of us. Why would she say that?”

“Griffin’s case is different from ours,” Simon explained. “Not different in the sense that she’s not a hybrid, because she is. But different in the reason she’s a hybrid.”

I raised my eyebrow, prompting him to go on.

“Her dad worked at this place called the Los Alamos National Laboratory, back in the ’50s. It was the same place they did the first atomic bomb tests back in ’45.” Simon chewed his lower lip before continuing. “Her dad was kind of a big deal—some super scientist who knew a whole helluva lot about biochemistry. This was right after Watson and Crick had discovered the double helical structure of DNA, so there was still a lot to learn in the field.”

“Apparently, there still is,” I interjected. “Otherwise, why would the Daylighters be so desperate to get their hands on us?”


“I think even without the alien intervention there’s still a lot to learn. But yeah, I think we’re somewhat exceptional,” Simon added. “There was also a lot of fringe activity in the government around these covert alien meetings, supposedly involving President Eisenhower.”

I remembered this. “Jett told me about those. I think he called them the First Contact meetings. He said there were all kinds of scientists and high-up officials and even that President Eisenhower had these meetings with aliens. It sounds crazy.”

“Crazy, maybe, but hard to dispute when you know the truth,” Simon said. “Griffin’s father was one of the scientists invited to the meetings. Only he didn’t just get invited . . .” Simon stopped and inhaled, because apparently what he had to say next required a deep-breath kind of delivery. “He offered Griffin as some sort of . . . goodwill contribution to the efforts.”

“Shut up,” I scoffed, but I seriously doubted Simon was making this stuff up, so what I was really thinking was: How messed up is that? “And they took her?” I asked, but the answer was obvious: of course they’d taken her, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

Cat had always referred to scenarios like these as train-wreck moments.

Of course, Cat had always meant something along the lines of the kind of nasty breakup where one person cheats on the other, or juicy scandals, like when Mr. Jasper got caught breaking into the girls’ locker room and trying on our stinky gym uniforms. That sort of thing.

In this case, we were talking about a girl’s life forever altered by someone she should’ve been able to count on. All things considered, no wonder she had trust issues.

“They did. And when she came back—the way so many of us do—she was never the same.” He shuddered. “But you have to remember, it’s not like she was the first to be taken. Thom was taken before she was,” he told me, and I thought about that. Natty had mentioned that Thom had barely been a teen when he’d been taken, sometime before the 1950s. But that made him, what, at least in his seventies, didn’t it?