The Replaced(69)

Simon interrupted my thoughts when he handed me a piece of paper.

Unfolding it, I assumed Griffin’s “inside source” had gotten her this police report as well. It listed all the pertinent details about the boy and his disappearance:

Alex Walker, fifteen years old. From Florida.

According to this, his grandmother had reported him missing from their home in Tallahassee just two days earlier. Since he had a history of running away, she’d told local police he’d probably run off again.

Yet late this evening, Alex Walker had walked into a truck stop near the edge of Delta, Utah, and asked the waitress, and I quote: “What circle of hell is this place supposed to be?” When questioned further, he claimed to have absolutely zero memory of how he’d gotten all the way from Tallahassee to Delta, or where he’d been for the past forty-eight hours.

Forty-eight hours . . . the exact amount of time most Returned were missing.

The report said he was being held for observation at the Delta Medical Clinic, and his grandmother had been contacted.

He was at the hospital.

My stomach knotted painfully.

I’d been taken to the hospital, too, back when I’d first been returned, and it hadn’t ended so well for the lab tech who’d drawn my blood. My body had tried to heal around the needle, and because I hadn’t known better, he’d been exposed to what I realized now was my poisonous blood.

I seriously hoped history didn’t repeat itself in this case.

“Griffin mentioned that the Daylighters already know about him. How can she be so sure? Did her inside source tell her that too?”

Simon looked to Nyla for the answer.

“Griffin said the message came from a camp in Texas, who heard it from another one in southern New Mexico,” she called back to me. “That’s the way it works—we get these bulletins that bounce from camp to camp. It’s not a bad system, and most of the time the information’s pretty accurate.”

I wanted to be cool, and make it seem like my stomach hadn’t just clenched painfully, but I had to ask, “Most of the time? And what if they’re wrong this time? About our head start?”

“Kyra . . .” The way Simon said it was supposed to mean I shouldn’t worry, but I couldn’t help it. I worried plenty.

Nyla didn’t seem half as concerned. She leaned back and shouted, “Relax! If Griffin really thought there’d be trouble, she wouldn’t have risked sending a team at all.”

Or, I thought as my stomach clenched tighter and tighter, until it was just a shriveled little knot, she’d send a crew she considered expendable.

My eyes wandered to my watch to count down the minutes. But for once, time couldn’t ease the crush of anxiety that built inside me, reaching a crescendo as each second passed, growing leaden and filling all my insides. I had to tug at my shirt so the air could reach down in front.

Damn, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sweated so much.

Eighty-six minutes . . .

Sixty-three . . .

Forty-four . . .

When we finally saw Delta, the city’s lights were like distant stars. Something about knowing we were so close to reaching our destination made me restless, and even though I’d considered the unrelenting wind that battered me cold just a few miles back, I leaned into it now to dry the perspiration that prickled my skin.

I was nervous. What if we were too late, and the Daylighters had beaten us and had already whisked the kid back to the Tacoma facility?

What if this was another trap?

We passed a sign that read: You Are Now Entering Delta, Utah. Population 3,457.

I never once saw Nyla consult a map or a GPS, or ask directions. She didn’t say if she’d been here before, but if she hadn’t, then she was just one of those people who had an innate sense of direction. Their own built-in compass.

I was super jealous of people like that. I’d always been fast on the mound, and now I could add super strong to my list of talents, but even as a kid I’d always been directionally challenged. To the point that Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey had been less like a game and more like a hand-eye coordination test.

One I almost never passed.

When we got there, the Emergency entrance was brightly illuminated against the dark backdrop of the rest of what I assumed was supposed to pass for a hospital. Even if it hadn’t been dark, the place we pulled up in front of was really more clinic-sized than hospital-sized, but Delta was a small town, so clearly they made do with what they had.

Out front of the blazing ER doors there were two parked cars, which would have made my heart race and set my suspicions into overdrive, except that one was a beat-up station wagon, circa 1960-something. And the other was a bright yellow convertible Volkswagen Beetle.

Neither screamed Daylight Division.

Off to the side, and closer to the sidewalk, was a man smoking a cigarette and murmuring into his cell phone. Again, since he was pushing seventy and wearing a hospital gown, I deemed him at least relatively harmless.

Rather than parking, Nyla decided to wait for us, which was probably a good idea, since no matter how I tried to spin it, I couldn’t come up with a reasonable story for the three of us to be skulking around the hospital at three in the morning.

Also, with her shaved head, I didn’t imagine Nyla went unnoticed all that often.

There was only a small check-in counter inside, and the girl working it looked barely older than we did. When Simon and I stopped to ask where we could find Alex Walker, she chomped obnoxiously on her wad of gum and pulled out a spiral notebook, which didn’t seem very hospitaly at all. She had us sign one of the lined pieces of paper after asking us to confirm that we didn’t have any cough or flu symptoms, and then she just blurted out his room number.