The Taking (31 page)

Jett frowned at me. “I’m sorry,” he explained. “We’ve all lost people we cared about.”

I kept rubbing my arms, my skin no longer chilled but wanting to ward away the feelings that overwhelmed me. I turned my attention to the room in front of us.

Jett lifted his chin toward the opening, his eyes sparkling. “Welcome to my lair.”

From the other side of the open door came the hum of electricity, the buzz filling the air with its static charge. Jett stepped over the threshold, which was several inches high, and I leaned in closer to see what it was he was hiding in there.

Computers. There was a hodgepodge collection of computer workstations—monitors and keyboards and routers and modems of various sizes and designs—like they’d been salvaged from junkyards and thrift stores and yard sales—anyplace he’d been able to gets his hands on a piece of equipment. There were printers and cords and discs too.

And then there were the maps. Walls and walls of maps.

It was like the military version of my dad’s place. More organized and state-of-the-art, but it had that same feel to it. A similar command-center vibe.

“What do you do down here?” I questioned, taking a step inside and feeling slightly claustrophobic once I was on this side of the metal door.

“This,” Jett declared, interlacing his fingers and flipping his hands over, and then he cracked all his knuckles in front of him at the same time, “is where the magic happens.” He hit a power button on one of the computers, and at once they all crackled to life, monitors blinking furiously through a series of synchronized commands.

When they finished flashing the sporadic lines of script on their screens and came fully ablaze, there was a single glowing logo in the center of each and every one of them—a logo I recognized all too well—and the dusting of goose bumps that had prickled my skin when Jett had mentioned this was a nuclear facility came back with a vengeance.

It was an electronic image of a firefly.

“What the holy mother of . . . The fireflies . . .” I shook my head. “What are those . . . what does that mean?”

Jett flashed me a curious look. “Have you seen that before?”

“Yes. I mean, maybe not this one exactly, but ones like it. My dad had all these picture of fireflies at his place.”

He nodded. “That makes sense. Your dad would probably know.”

“Know what?”

“About the fireflies, and what they represent.”

“And that is
what
exactly?” I asked, blowing a strand of hair out of my eyes irritably.

Jett laughed at my reaction. “Oh yeah, I keep forgetting you’re new to all this.” He sat down at one of the computer workstations and twisted his chair back and forth, like a restless schoolkid. “There have been stories of UFO sightings that date back hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, but it wasn’t until the 1950s, when there was this Brazilian farmer—a guy named Antonio Vilas-Boas—who claimed he’d been taken on board one of those alien spaceships and ordered to impregnate”—he wiggled his eyebrows when he said the word
impregnate,
making me think he was as young as he looked—“this hot ‘humanoid.’ When he was returned, he was in pretty bad shape, like they’d beaten the crap out of him. And even though authorities
claimed
they didn’t buy his story, it caused a flood of other people to start reporting that they’d been abducted too. The thing is, some of these claims had certain things in common. Things that didn’t get reported to the general public.” He leaned back while he continued to twirl in his chair. “Wanna guess what those things might be?”

I raised my eyebrows; pretty sure the answer wasn’t rocket science or anything. “I’m gonna say
fireflies
?”

Jett gave an exaggerated nod. “Bingo! And not just a firefly here or there. According to those ‘abducted,’ for lack of a better word, or witnesses, there were always lots of them—swarms of them.”

“And you think the fireflies have something to do with the taken?”

“Oh, they have something to do with it, all right. We’re sure of it. And so were the government agencies and the scientists who were tracking the activity at the time. It wasn’t the No-Suchers . . .” He paused to clarify, unaware that I’d already heard the term. “I mean the NSA, who tracked that kind of thing back then. Rumor has it that after working with Winston Churchill during World War Two to cover up a UFO sighting in England, President Eisenhower had these covert meetings that were called the First Contact meetings with the aliens to forge a treaty with them. He also formed his own agency to look into these so-called ‘abductions’ as well.”

“This sounds like the kind of crazy conspiracy stuff my dad would spew.” I sighed, crossing my arms and feeling somewhat defensive.

He sat up straighter. “Anyone can Google it, but from what I know about your dad, he’s not all that crazy. There’s some truth to this. At least part of it. I don’t know much about the First Contact meetings or about who was really behind this new agency that was formed, but I do know that they got wind of people claiming to be returned, and of witnesses stating that they’d seen huge gatherings of fireflies around the time those people had been taken. Once it was proved that the Returned had the ability to heal, a plan was devised.” He winced. “A really terrible plan, somewhere along the lines of torture. But it got the job done.”

Cocking my head, I took a step closer, almost afraid to ask. “What did they do?”

Jett pulled up his sleeve and showed me his arm. “They used the whole firefly thing against us. They tracked us down and captured us. They questioned us, and if we didn’t admit to being one of these so-called ‘Returned,’ then they would use this thing that looked kind of like a car cigarette lighter, but it was more like a brand, really. It had a symbol in the center of it: a firefly.” He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a completely barbaric thing he was describing. “Since they couldn’t risk exposing themselves to our blood by cutting us, they used it to sear our skin instead. To test us.”

I frowned as I leaned closer, trying to figure out what I was missing. “But . . . there’s nothing there,” I stated solemnly, hating that someone could do something so vile to another person—human or not.

His voice lowered. He was quiet, so quiet, when he answered, “That’s how they knew. If you healed, you’d been returned.”

I closed my eyes. I felt sick. I didn’t say anything for a very, very long time. Finally, when I trusted myself not to throw up when I opened my mouth, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Jett looked up at me with eyes that couldn’t decide if they were blue or green or shades of gold. It was like staring into cut glass.

Or into the iridescent wings of a firefly.

“It was a long time ago,” he recalled with a faraway look in those mosaic eyes of his.

“This is what it looked like,” he said, pointing to the golden-beetle image on his screen.

“They were a different agency back in WW Two—I’m not even sure what jurisdiction they fell under. But the guys who are after you now are a part of the NSA, at least indirectly. They’re an offshoot agency that operates under the radar of the rest of the organization. The government doesn’t sanction what they do, and if the public ever discovered their true purpose, it would be denied. They’re kinda the Area 51 of agencies. Officially, they don’t exist . . . except that they totally do.”

I turned away from the screen, unable to stomach the idea of anyone, especially people in authority, doing the things Jett was talking about. It was murder.

I inhaled, still trying to steady my stomach. “How old are you, Jett?”

He came back to the present then, dropping his sleeve and offering me a small smile. “Twelve when I vanished.” He counted on his fingers then, his smile growing. “But now . . . sixty-four years young.”

“So how did you escape?”

Jett lifted his chin. “My pops wasn’t the kind of guy you messed with, not even if you were a GI.” He closed out the image with a sharp click, and even though I wanted to ask more about it, I got the feeling the discussion was over.

“What did I miss?” Simon asked, ducking through the doorway as he joined us. Willow was right behind him, and I wished she didn’t make me so uneasy. She just had that energy about her, like she was hoping a fight would break out at any second just so she could let off some steam.

Like punching was her hobby.

“I was just about to show her the Sats,” Jett said, turning to face one of the monitors.

“Sats?” I asked.

“Satellite images.” His fingers danced over the keyboard, and a series of images flashed up on the screen. At first it was like looking at Google Earth: generic images I’d seen searching the Web. But then they became more specific as he refined the shots, honing in, until I recognized the city . . . the street . . . the house he was converging on. The image was crystal clear; there was no mistaking it.

It was my mom’s house. The very house I’d grown up in.

Except that it looked so strangely different now, covered almost completely in plastic. Enclosed the same way my mom had wrapped the leftovers she’d set out for me. Surrounding the property, all the way around the yard, there was a tall chain-link fence that hadn’t been there before.

“Quarantined?”

It was Simon who answered me. “They’re probably searching for evidence as well as contaminants. I wasn’t lying when I said they’d do anything to get their hands on you.”

“Assholes,” Willow growled, reminding me that we had an enemy in common.

“What about my dad? Has anyone heard from him? Did they get to him too?”

Jett went to work on the keyboard. “We’ve been following the online chatter—his message boards and chat rooms, all the places he usually frequents. So far he hasn’t made an appearance. But we also haven’t heard anything on the police or No-Suchers’ frequencies to make us think he’s been taken in for questioning either. He seems to have gone off the grid for now.” A satellite picture of my dad’s trailer popped up, and it was like looking at my mom’s house. It, too, had been quarantined, tented in plastic sheeting and enclosed by a chain-link barricade.

This time I could read the signs that were hung on the fencing: WARNING:
RESTRICTED AREA

And at the bottom of the sign, in bold red letters:
USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.

The whole thing—the signs, the fencing, the quarantine—it was all insane.

“So, I never asked this, but when we were at the bookstore, Tyler and me, there was an agent who . . .” I stopped because it was hard to find a way to put the words together just right.

But I didn’t have to finish my thought, because Jett turned around to look at Simon—another silent exchange. They already understood what I wanted to know.

“He killed himself,” Willow answered before either of the two boys had a chance. “Shot himself. That’s how we knew you were in trouble; their frequencies blew up with word of an agent being exposed to a Code Red and offing himself.”

Code Red.
So that’s what he’d meant.

I turned to Willow, who didn’t seem to have any qualms about answering my questions. “And Jackson?”

“Was that the other guy’s name?” She shrugged, and again I was struck by how easily they accepted all this. “They got him. He was exposed, too, I guess. Must’ve been fresh blood still on the floor when he came in to see what happened.”

I shifted on my feet. “How do you know he was exposed?”

Simon and Jett exchanged a look again, and again it was Willow who didn’t mince words. “We already got confirmation that he died.”

“Died? How?” I asked, ignoring both boys and turning all my attention to her now.

“How do you think?” she answered as if I were dense.

My voice cracked. “Already?”

Simon pushed past Willow to stand in front of me. “He probably touched it—the blood. If it made contact with his skin, it would have reacted more quickly.”

But that didn’t make sense. “It was on my clothes,” I explained. “Tyler . . . he touched me after I saw you. He should’ve—”

Simon interrupted. “It wasn’t fresh then. There’s only about a sixty-second window when contact makes a difference. Airborne’s bad, but skin contact’s worse.”

I don’t know if that was supposed to make me feel better, that Tyler would outlive Jackson because he hadn’t touched my blood within that sixty-second window, but it didn’t. Dead is dead.

I shook my head, not wanting to be like them. Not wanting to be okay with all this, to accept death so willingly. Already, though, I could feel the hollowness consuming me, and I wondered if this was how it started. The carving out of your emotions. If I would soon be empty, a shell. “There has to be a way,” I murmured, collapsing bonelessly into one of the chairs.

And then it was Jett—Jett who’d only been twelve when he’d been taken but was now sixty-four years old. Jett who looked at me with those confusing, kaleidoscope eyes when he said the words that gave me back some of myself. “Maybe there is a way.”

I shot to my feet. “Wh—what are you talking about? What are you saying?”

Simon looked as confused as I felt, and behind me, Willow was silent.

Jett blinked rapidly and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “What if . . .” He rubbed his hands on his pants. “What if he could be one of the returned?”

It was as if Jett had poured gasoline on an open flame.

“What you’re suggesting is crazy!” Simon shouted, waving his hands as he spoke. “No one’s ever done that. Not on purpose. Even if we wanted to, there’s no way of even knowing where or when one of these ‘takings’ might occur.”

“Besides,” Willow added, a million times more subdued than Simon was but just as convinced. “There’s no guarantee he’d even come back. Most don’t.”

I didn’t know that. I knew
some
didn’t, but not
most
. It didn’t matter, though. What Jett was suggesting, it was crazy. Beyond crazy.

It was as good as murder as far as I was concerned.

It was taking a normal, living, breathing human and turning him into something . . .
less than human
.

I’d be sentencing Tyler to a life where he would no longer be normal. Where he’d be a walking time bomb because his blood was toxic to everyone around him. And where he’d never age like other people, so he’d be forced to give up all his friends and family in order to keep his secret.