The Countdown (The Taking) (24 page)

I knew Jett well enough to guess he’d already done a security sweep, checking for bugs—cameras and listening devices. Anything they could use to spy on us.

“Secure enough,” he answered uncertainly. “From what I can tell there are cameras in most corridors, but only one on this level—out by the elevator.”

Jett’s assurance was good enough for me.

Jett looked from me to my dad. “Um, does someone wanna clue me in?”

“Yeah, I think I might’a missed something,” Willow added, glancing around at Simon and then Griffin.

My dad shook his head. “You didn’t miss anything. In fact, you were front and center. Meryl Streep here just put on the performance of a lifetime.” He slow clapped theatrically as if they were all part of my audience. “If I wasn’t so afraid you might use your skills against me one day, I’d be impressed. Now spill. And don’t leave anything out.”

“Fine,” I said, wiping my crocodile tears and sniffing in a less dramatic way. “It wasn’t like I didn’t plan on telling you anyway. I just couldn’t risk letting Molly”—I nodded toward the closed door—“in on what we’re up to.”

Griffin got up from her table and joined us, keeping as far from her dad as possible. “So we
are
up to something?” she asked, more interested now than she had been before.

My temporary bout of amnesia magically forgotten, I nodded. “We are . . . or at least we will be. And we don’t have a lot of time.” I winked at my dad. “So here’s the deal. I wasn’t totally faking it; I honestly
don’t
remember everything about where I was that whole time. There’s a serious blank spot for me. But what I do know, is this place is definitely not on the up-and-up. What do you know about them?” I glanced at Agent Truman, who ignored Griffin’s cold shoulder routine. “If you thought there might be a war coming, why’d you decide to bring us here? Why not try to mobilize
your own people? Call up the Daylighters instead?”

“Because I know my guys. War isn’t exactly something our government shies away from, even if it’s unwinnable. And they’d never consider you and me allies. First thing they would’ve done is round up everyone with a hint of alien DNA and held us hostage, or used us as leverage. If you’ve read your history books, you saw what happened during World War Two . . . the internment camps. The Japs didn’t fare so well on US soil.” He scowled, looking more human than I’d seen since I met him. “From what I knew of the ISA, these guys’re hippie scientists mostly. Do-gooders who want to hug it out with ET. At least that’s how we’ve always pegged them.”

“We, meaning the NSA?”

“We, meaning everyone, far as I know. I’ve never heard otherwise. In government circles they’re considered well funded but harmless. I met Dr. Clarke years ago at a conference, when she was giving a talk on Jerry Ehman.” When I just stared at him blankly he clarified, “The guy from SETI who intercepted what was thought to be the very first deep space radio signal.” He chuckled. “’Course we all knew it was bullshit. We’d been communicating with the little green bastards for years, but at the time Ehman’s little message went public it was big news. Ask your dad. He can tell you.” He glanced at my dad. “Ben? Wanna share how you know Clarke?”

I stared at my dad. “What’s he saying? You knew her. Like before we got here?”

My dad shifted on his feet, suddenly uncomfortable. “I . . .” He cleared his throat and ran his hand through his hair, something he’d already done several times. “Aw, hell.” He sighed irritably.

“Maybe you two’d like a minute alone?” Agent Truman goaded my dad.

Pulling a tight smile at the agent, my dad reached for my arm.

When we were as alone as we could get inside the cramped four walls, he cleared his throat. “He’s right. Much as I hate to admit it, I need to talk to you, and what I need to say is better left between us.”

I hated the way my dad was stretching this out, avoiding eye contact. The way he kept rubbing the thick bristles on his jaw, because I knew it was a nervous habit, and him doing that was making me nervous too.

“Dad. Just say it.”

“Kyra,” he started. “I should’ve told you this a long time ago.”

I nodded, but the sour taste in the back of my mouth warned me I wouldn’t like this, and I considered faking another crying jag just to make him stop . . . before he said something he couldn’t take back.

But he was already in it; the words were already out there: “It was my fault you were taken in the first place.”

And once you said something like that, there was definitely no going back.

“You . . .
what
?” I fumbled. “Your fault? What does that
even mean? That’s ridiculous. It was
no one’s
fault. I was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It was dumb luck. That’s all.”

But he was shaking his head, and telling me, “No. No, Kyr, you got it all wrong.” He reached up and scratched his beard again. “It should have been me. You should never have been taken at all.”

I raised my hand, and my voice, to shut him up. “Stop it. Stop right now. I get that you feel guilty, and it must suck to have your daughter carried away by aliens, but all this bad heart crap and trying to take the blame is just . . . We’re wasting time.” I whirled to go, but my dad grabbed me.

He was stern in a way he’d never been before. “Goddammit, Kyra, I’m not messing around here. Now stop being such a baby, and listen to me, will ya?”

This time I didn’t have to force thoughts of stolen memories to make myself cry. I blinked hard, and now I was the one avoiding eye contact. He gave me a curt nod and let go of me. “Good. Okay then.” He started talking, and I kept my eyes glued to his feet. But I listened hard. “Remember when you were little and you used to ask if you could go to the office with me? When they’d have Take Our Daughters to Work Day, and your friends would tag along with their folks? You always asked, and I always made excuses—meetings, appointments. Hell, three years in a row I pretended to have the flu just to get out of it.” Something heavy settled in my gut.

“The thing was, I couldn’t. Bring you, that is. You knew
I worked with computers, but what you didn’t know was that I worked for the ISA.”

My eyes shot up to his.

“It’s true,” he admitted. “I gave them almost twenty years. Most’a my adult life. They recruited me right out of college, and I worked out of their Woodinville facilities. Nothing near as intense as this . . .” He spread his arms to indicate this place, and then he dropped them, shrugging halfheartedly. “But definitely not small potatoes either. My security clearance was pretty limited, but I knew they had other operations all over the country.” He chuckled ruefully. “Hell, all over the globe.”

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 asshole—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.”

The notion that the ISA had done experiments on Adam—ugly experiments, my dad had said—made me ill.

“After that, Dr. Clarke’s own son was taken. That was when the M’alue was moved. I never heard where they took him, I only cared he was gone. I didn’t want anything to do with him . . . or with the project. I thought that was the end of it.” He scratched his jaw.

“Then, another girl went missing, a thirteen-year-old honor student from Arlington, not too far from us. I worked with her dad—he was an IT guy, and I realized: we’d been tapped. This thing, it was never gonna be over, not as long as the ISA had that monster in custody. All I knew was, I couldn’t let anything happen to you, so I decided I’d never let you leave my sight.

“I started following you . . . everywhere you went. I started calling in sick so I could sit outside your school; I watched your practices from the parking lot; I stayed up all night just to make sure there was no way you’d be taken.

“The night you were taken, the whole reason I didn’t let you ride with your team after the game was because I couldn’t take the chance . . .” His voice broke. “I couldn’t risk taking my eyes off you, not for a second.”

His entire face crumpled. “And then it happened anyway. Despite all my planning and watching. Despite the sleepless nights and the stakeouts . . . they took you anyway.
But I told myself it was okay because you’d come back . . . you were supposed to come back. Two days, that’s what it was for everyone else . . . less than two days.”

His face went slack, like all the life had been drained from him. “Not you though.
You
didn’t return. I lost my job after that, but I would have quit anyway. I hated the ISA. I hated everything they stood for. This was their fault—my baby being stolen. No one believed me, not your mom, not our friends, and definitely not the police. I had no recourse.”

He fell to his knees, sobbing. “I wished it had been me. They should have taken me.”

I WANTED TO ABSOLVE MY DAD. SAY SOMETHING comforting. Be one of those good daughters who said nice things and could forgive easily. Forget.

Maybe that was Old Kyra.

New Kyra needed time. Maybe Tyler and I had more in common than either of us realized.

I had no idea how I was supposed to feel. I was numb. Shell-shocked maybe, if that was a real thing.

All this time . . . all those years lost . . . could they really be his fault? Maybe not directly, but he’d known me being taken was a possibility. He’d worked for those responsible.

I thought I’d learned everything when the M’alue had downloaded all that information into me, but apparently even that was one-sided. They either didn’t know that my dad had worked for the ISA, or they didn’t consider it relevant.

But I did.

That was the other thing, the M’alue weren’t really the M’alue at all. They called themselves the Maanjaulfgaa.

The name was more a sensation than even a word. A shiver that started with a hum and ended with a vibration. In my head that made perfect sense, but my mouth couldn’t wrap itself around it. So, until there was a better option, Dr. Clarke and my dad were right, M’alue was close enough.

The information the M’alue had given me was enough to fill my brain, my dad’s brain, and everyone’s in this entire room. It was probably enough to fill every computer in the ISA.

Tyler had been right though. It was no accident we’d come here. The M’alue had been using us, leading us, homing in on us and sending messages meant only for us. They wanted us to be here. But not to hurt us. They weren’t the ones who couldn’t be trusted.

I now knew the full history of the First Contact Meetings, including who was really there, where they met, and the transcripts of each and every conversation they’d had.

I even knew the exact coordinates of the M’alue’s home planet, which was so far from Earth, and so outside the realm
of human comprehension, that even if I tried to disclose it, I’d have to hand draw star chart after star chart just to get close.

I had the names, dates, and locations of every abductee who had ever been taken, and the information of everyone who was ever returned, which was a far smaller number.

I knew who’d died and who they sent back.

I would’ve been angry if I hadn’t also been given a glimpse at the M’alue and their dying population . . . not hundreds or thousands, but millions of them. As far as they were concerned, we’d been their last hope. Not because they’d believed we held the cure, but because by the time they’d located us, they’d run out of resources to keep searching for other options.

Fortunately for them, it had been us. We
had
been the answer they were seeking. It had taken them decades, and several failed attempts, but ultimately, through their experiments on humans, they’d managed to perfect and extract the one microscopic chromosome they’d needed to save almost an entire population.

Was it worth it? The M’alue believed it was, and who was I to decide whether their entire planet . . . their entire species should have gone extinct without what we—the human race—had to offer.

If only they would have gone about it a different way.

If only the ISA hadn’t captured and held Adam.

“Right now we have bigger problems,” I told my dad. “I know the real meaning of the message.” Suddenly no one was pretending not to listen, and it wasn’t just my dad and
me having a private conversation. “We got it wrong,” I told the others. “It was a warning, but not in the way we thought it was. The meaning . . . the interpretation . . .” I shook my head, and looked at everyone but my dad. I couldn’t do it, make things right with him yet. “It wasn’t right. And we didn’t have the entire message. It wasn’t ‘The Returned must die,’ it was ‘The Returned must end.’ They were offering us a bargain. An exchange.” I hoped I was making sense because I was talking so fast, wanting to make them understand. We didn’t have a ton of time. “They were offering to end all this. To stop taking and returning humans if Adam is released.”

Tyler came toward me. “So let’s do it. Let’s tell Dr. Clarke what we know.”

I lifted my chin to meet his eyes. “The ISA already knows. They got the full message and rejected them. They’re never letting Adam go.”

“How can you be so sure?” Jett asked.

“Because something happened when I boarded that spaceship up there.”

Jett looked confused. “So . . . wait. Are you saying you weren’t taken by force? Because that’s what it looked like . . . on the radar screen. That that ship of theirs, or whatever it was, just
engulfed
you.”

I shook my head. “They’re not hostile. At least, that’s not their intention. I can’t explain it, but somehow I sensed they were
inviting
me on board. Maybe not in so many words . . . at least not in a way you or I would understand . . .” I chewed
my lip trying to think of a way to make it clear. “And they never actually
spoke
to me, but I . . .
knew
what they wanted.” I shook my head. “Seriously, I get how crazy this sounds, and I wish I could make it more clear, but the truth is, I don’t remember
how
it happened. I honestly thought I was up there for less than an hour.” I tried to laugh it off, because that was starting to feel like the story of my life—gaping memory lapses—but the laugh caught on a lump in my throat. I swallowed, trying again. “All I know is we’re running out of time.”

Simon drew me back to the issue at hand. “When you say ‘running out of time’ . . . time for what, Kyra?”

I pushed my shoulders back, determined to find a way to make this clear. “We’re in trouble. And not just us,” I explained, looking around at all of them, even my dad. His eyes were bloodshot, but he was paying attention. “
Everyone
. . . like the entire planet.”

Willow eyed me. “You sure you didn’t bang your head on something? You said you don’t remember all of what happened up there, maybe you got a concussion and you hallucinated the whole thing.”

I glanced at Jett. “You saw the radar. Did that look like a hallucination?”

Hanging back ’til this point, Thom spoke up. “If they’re not hostile, then what makes you think we’re in danger? Did
they
tell you that?”

I started to shake my head and then stopped myself. “Like I said, not in so many words. My memory was blank,
but when I snapped out of . . . whatever happened to me . . . I just
understood
things. Like they transferred information straight into my brain.”

Griffin wrinkled her nose skeptically. “Like what?”

“Like this.” I lifted my hand and drew their attention to the table Griffin had been sitting at a minute ago. I felt the familiar tingle tugging the skin at the back of my neck, only this time I didn’t have to concentrate, I just took a breath and . . .

The pen she’d been using was suddenly hovering six inches above the tabletop.

Willow’s mouth fell open as she gaped at me. I flashed her a knowing grin and then flicked my fingers at the pen and it shot toward me. I caught it in my fist, and inhaled deeply.

There’d been a part of me that had worried Willow might be right—that I’d suffered some sort of space fever.

When I turned and caught Simon staring at me, I raised my eyebrows. “And I’m barely concentrating. Like I said, I can’t explain it. I just knew stuff. And not just how to move objects; other things too. They taught me how to tap into electrical currents.” I was more nervous now. At least the thing with the pen was something I’d tried before, something I’d only been perfecting. The electrical thing was all new to me, and if I blew it . . .

I squeezed both hands into fists, closing my eyes as I concentrated on what I wanted to have happen.

Lights out
, I thought. And then, desperate to prove I
wasn’t delusional, I added,
Please, for the love of God, get this right . . .

Even though my eyes were shut, I knew the moment the room went dark because I heard the collective gasp. When I opened them again, eight heads shot my way, and I knew they were all seeing my eyes, and only my eyes.

“Whoa,” Jett admired.

“That was . . .
wow
. . .” Tyler added.

“I know,” I admitted, with almost audible relief. And just to test things out, I popped my fingers wide, feeling like a tacky, second-rate magician when I did.

Still, the lights came back on at once.

There were several light-adjusting blinks before I announced, “See? Not a head injury.”

But there was one thing I needed to make very clear, something we all needed to take seriously. I spoke mainly to Tyler, Simon, and Jett since they’d been there. “You know how Dr. Clarke told us the ISA replicated the EVE? What she didn’t mention was that they didn’t build just one ship. They have an entire fleet of them. I don’t even think the M’alue I met were aware of what the ISA was up to.” My eyes fell on Tyler. “At least not until you and I arrived.”

“You?” my dad interrupted. “How does your being here make a difference?”

“All I know for sure is that we were what the ISA has been missing. Now that they have us, they’re one step closer to getting their fleet airborne.”

Griffin glanced from Tyler to me, and then snatched her
pen out of my hand. “That . . .
trick
you just did there might be impressive, but there’s no way they can expect the two of you to pilot an entire fleet.”

“Not pilot,” I explained. “
Power up
. Tyler and I . . . we’re some sort of power source for these things. Dr. Clarke told us that when we got here, the EVE sent out a signal, but she was wrong. The entire fleet sent out signals. All of the ships. That’s how the M’alue knew the ships were here. But the thing is, they need
us
.” I looked at Tyler. “The ship I piloted . . . the ISA made . . .” I frowned, trying to pinpoint the right word. “
Modifications
to its original design. They put in manual controls designed to be used by humans. If they can get us . . . or some other Replaced . . .” I thought of Alex Walker and the way I thought he might be like us before the NSA had snatched him away and experimented on him. “All they need is to power up their ships, and then someone else can step in and fly them.”

“Why not use Adam? If all they need is a power source?” Jett asked.

I shook my head. “He’s too sick. They’ve done”—bile flooded my throat—“too much to him. He’s barely hanging in there.”

“So if the ISA rejected their offer, why haven’t the M’alue already blown this place sky-high?” It was Agent Truman asking, and I wasn’t surprised that his first response was to resort to violence. I also wondered why he wasn’t more concerned that this agency that claimed to be peaceful had secretly been amassing an army of spaceships.

“The M’alue don’t want war. They want this to end peacefully. But if we can’t make that happen . . .” I thought of the other part . . . the other images they’d shown me, of what they could do to us if we couldn’t find the ISA’s fleet in time. Images of the Earth, scorched and in ruin. Of a world decimated.

It was grim. Brutal.

Hopeless.

“Tyler and I weren’t sent here by accident,” I went on. “Those maps Tyler was drawing and the messages we heard—the M’alue were trying to contact us. To remind us of our mission, something we’d both apparently forgotten once we were returned.”

“What mission?” Tyler asked.

“To find Adam and send him home.” I was overwhelmed by how powerful my sense of allegiance was.

Except it wasn’t to the M’alue as a whole. It was to Adam.

Even if it hadn’t been coded into me to save him, knowing what he’d been through all these years—trapped in that tube and experimented on—I would have wanted to free him from this place . . . from these people who’d spent years torturing him.

I added, “And now that they’ve discovered the truth about the ships, we need to stop the ISA from getting them into space. If we can do that
and
free Adam, they’ve promised to retreat. There will be no war. And they will leave us alone.” I searched the room, the eyes of the Returned—different from everyone else’s because of what had been done to them—and
thought of the things we could stop. “For good.”

“As in, no more abductions?” Jett asked, scratching his arm.

I nodded, tears filling my eyes. “As in, never again. No more abductions.”

I’m not sure Griffin was even aware she was standing by her dad now, her shoulders thrust back defiantly. “How do you know you can trust them? These ships might be the only line of defense we have against them. What if the M’alue are tricking us into destroying the only thing we can use to defend ourselves against an attack?”

“I can’t,” I answered truthfully, but I couldn’t erase the images of what the M’alue had promised to do to us if we didn’t destroy the ships. And I couldn’t erase the way I felt about Dr. Clarke and the others here. “But we can’t trust the ISA either. No good can come from what they’ve done—holding Adam hostage, stealing the M’alue technology, building spaceships. How could that
not
be seen as hostile? The M’alue believe we want war, and for all we know, that’s where this is headed.” I swallowed, my throat suddenly raw with the idea of going up against a race that was so much more advanced than we were. “We need to stop this from happening,” I said resolutely.

“So, judging by the way you keep looking at the clock, you know we’re on a countdown,” Simon said. “How much time did they give us?”

I frowned. “Not enough. That’s what I was trying to say. Time isn’t the same for them. When I was out there, it really
felt like only half an hour. I had no idea an entire day had passed, which means we have even less time than I thought we did.” I glanced again at the clock on the wall. “As far as I can tell, we have until nine tonight,” I said as calmly as I could.

Jett jerked. “Nine? But that’s only four hours.”

“Not much time,” Willow chimed in.

I nodded. “When they attack, they plan to start with this facility.”

There were several long seconds while I let everyone absorb what I’d just told them. I gave them that. It was a lot to take in, possible extinction.