Now his words filled my head, reminding me I could never forget Tyler, not as long as I lived . . . even if I never laid eyes on him again.
Natty watched curiously. I’d never told her what it meant, the saying, or why I’d spent hour upon hour drawing the fireflies, although that part was no great mystery. I’m sure she knew their link to the abductions, the same as any of the Returned. The way they seemed to swarm right before the aliens came.
She ducked her head, her dark blond hair falling around her flushed cheeks. She glanced up through the wispy curtain and I saw her eyes—sharp the way they were—studying me.
Natty had explained about the eyes, something I hadn’t realized at first, and still didn’t always recognize.
On Simon, it was obvious: the shocking copper with the gold flecks. I thought they were just unusual at first, but Natty told me his eyes weren’t just strange, they were unnatural.
Natty had them too, maybe the only thing on her that was striking at all, her eyes. They were hazel, which sounded ordinary enough to say: hazel. A color that could never decide whether it was green or brown or gold or even blue. On some people, it was almost muddy-looking.
On Natty, that mixed-up blend somehow managed to be arresting.
It happened sometimes, she’d told me, to the Returned. Our eye colors were . . . enhanced. The same, but brighter. Bolder.
Unnatural.
Like Jett’s, which almost looked like stained glass pieced together, or a kaleidoscope.
I didn’t see it on Willow or Thom. Their eyes just seemed ordinary, but maybe that was only me. Maybe if I’d known them before, I’d notice it now. Maybe their eyes were more vibrant now than before either of them had been taken. When they’d both been . . . normal.
It took a while, but I could see it in the mirror once I knew what I was looking for. I almost couldn’t believe my parents hadn’t noticed it too. Or if they had, that they hadn’t said anything.
Five years, I had to remind myself. It was a long time. Maybe they’d just wanted me to be the same so badly that they’d been willing to overlook anything that made me different from the way I’d been before.
“Thom says you got a message,” Natty said hopefully. I’d forgotten how quickly news traveled in a camp of fewer than a hundred people.
But because there was still this strange divide between Simon’s people, which I was considered part of, and their camp, the Silent Creekers, which Natty belonged to, I wondered how much she’d actually heard through this strange grapevine of gossip. Sometimes I wondered if it was like that game Telephone we played as kids, where someone started a rumor, but by the time it reached the last person, it had been repeated so many times the meaning had been jumbled and it was something else entirely.
I thought of the way Simon had asked me not to say anything about our plans just yet. “I—uh . . . yeah.” Way to be subtle, I thought. I glanced at the clock and my heartbeat settled. It always calmed me to know the time.
At first, back when I’d realized I had a problem, I’d tried to convince myself that my preoccupation with the time was just idle curiosity, a way of grounding myself in the present. But I couldn’t lie, at least not to myself, anymore. This thing, whatever it was, had gone way past idle curiosity. It consumed huge chunks of my day. I went out of my way to find clocks and cell phones and microwaves—anything that had the time—so I could set my mind at ease.
My fixation was teetering on the brink of neurosis.
It was as if each second that passed meant one more second of my life lost . . . one more second without Tyler or my dad.
Or maybe . . . maybe I was just delusional.
When I felt like I could look at Natty with a decent poker face, I cleared my throat and nodded, trying my best to look earnest. Simon never said I couldn’t mention the message. “We did.”
“So? You think the message was from him. That he’s alive?” Natty’s poker face sucked, and instead of trying to hide her eagerness the way I had, she plopped down next to me, searching my face.
She didn’t mean my dad, she meant Tyler, because even though I hadn’t told her everything, I’d told her that much at least, that I was waiting for word he’d survived. That he’d been returned the way the rest of us had.
“Maybe,” I answered hesitantly, evasively.
But this was Natty. It was ridiculous to pretend I didn’t care, or that there wasn’t anything to be hopeful about.
I reached for her hands. “God, I hope so, Nat. I want it to be him so badly. Simon says it could be a trap, and that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. But how can I not? What if it is him? What if he’s back and we can rescue him?” I squeezed, probably too hard. Definitely too hard.
“Are you? Gonna try?”
Simon’s words echoed in my head: Don’t tell anyone.
I held back my automatic yes, and instead bit my lip. “I don’t know yet.”
But Natty wasn’t so easily dissuaded, and her eyes shone, reminding me that she, no matter which camp I belonged to, was on my side. “I’ll do anything I can to help.”
“I know you will.” And even knowing she was telling the truth, I still didn’t mention the other message—the one that maybe, hopefully, was from my dad. I just couldn’t bring myself to share everything.
After Natty had gone, Thom was waiting for me when I finally came down the front steps of the tiny house we’d been set up in. I thought about ditching him again, if only to avoid talking about the message or any possible plans Simon might be working on to try to breach the Tacoma facility, but it seemed pointless since he was blocking my way, and there was no one else around.