Guilt sucked.

“I wouldn’t count him out just yet,” I said with a sigh. “I doubt getting sick is enough to stop him from coming after us. We shouldn’t stop worrying about him . . . at least not yet.”

“Can I just say I wasn’t sure you’d have the balls to go through with it?” This was from Willow now, resurrected from the dead and gripping my shoulder from behind.

I had to smile at that. I couldn’t say I blamed her for doubting me; there was a point there where I wasn’t sure I could do it either. “Is that your way of saying thank you?”

Another squeeze, just a slight tightening, and then she collapsed backward against her seat. “If that’s how you want to take it.”

I was relieved. To have Willow back, to be away from that place, and even a small part of me, a secretly terrible part of me I didn’t want to admit to, was glad knowing that Agent Truman might not be a problem for much longer. Still, there was something bugging me.

After everything we’d just been through, I should probably banish any lingering concerns to the darkest corner of my brain, but I’d never been the kind of girl who could ignore something once the question was niggling at me. Even when I was little, I’d always wanted to know why the sky was blue or birds flew south for the winter . . . to the point that I’d driven my parents crazy because “I don’t know” or “because that’s just the way things are” were never good enough answers for me.

“So that lab . . . and all that equipment . . . ,” I started on a shaky voice, because maybe, for the first time, these were the kinds of answers I really didn’t want. “What exactly are they hoping to gain? From us, I mean. What is it they expect to find . . . from whatever it is they plan to do to us?”

There was a hushed kind of silence. The heavy kind that comes when no one wants to talk and you know it’s bad. The worst kind of bad.

It didn’t surprise me that Simon spoke up first. “Look, Kyra, I planned to tell you this eventually . . .” The deliberate way he said it caused a sour taste to flood the back of my mouth.

“You’re kidding, right? There are more secrets? So what now? What is it you thought we couldn’t handle?” I turned to the others, thinking we were in this together. But as soon as I saw their faces, I knew: I was the only one out of the loop. “Awesome.” How could I possibly have thought it was nice when Simon was stroking my hair, unconscious or not? There wasn’t anything nice about him. “What was it that you all decided I was too delicate to know?”

I braced myself for what was coming.

“The experiments,” Simon finally said.

“Experiments?” I let my lack of enthusiasm hang there in that one word.

“That’s right,” Simon acknowledged when I just crossed my arms and waited for him to elaborate. “The experiments I told you about, the ones that were done on you when you were taken.”

I hugged myself tighter. “The ones the aliens did,” I said, emphasizing aliens because even though I’d let go of my disbelief, saying it out loud hadn’t gotten any easier. “The experiments they did on all of us? What about them?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t tell you everything.”

I rolled my eyes. “Um, yeah. I kinda got that. So, go ahead. Tell me now.”

He gave me an are-you-sure? look, and all of a sudden we were in some kind of weird argument. But I was so sick of Simon holding back information for my own good. I was a big girl; I was perfectly capable of deciding what was good for me and what wasn’t.

“They weren’t random, these experiments. There’s a reason we can heal and that we don’t need much food or sleep.” He still hadn’t told the others about how I could move things—or shatter glass—with my mind, and all at once this seemed like as good a time as any. Maybe we’d had enough with the secret keeping.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t exactly spilling either.

He looked me over. “How come you never asked why we can do those things—what it is they did to us that makes us different?”

“You told me. You said it was because of the experiments. That they messed with us and we didn’t come back the same.” I remembered when he’d explained that I’d been gone longer than the other Returned, and that he thought that meant they were perfecting whatever it was they were doing to us.

He’d used the word “special” when he’d told me I could heal faster than the rest of them.

Me, I didn’t feel special. I felt weird.

And now what? Was he saying it wasn’t tests they’d been doing on us? “So, what is it, then? What’s worse than experimenting on us?” I’d already lost five years of my life. I’d already had to give up my family because of what happened. “Did they expose us to radiation? Kryptonite? Am I gonna lose my teeth? Grow an eye in my back?” I tried to laugh, but I was way past amused, and the sound lodged somewhere deep in my throat.

Simon swallowed my name, and I knew he was stalling. “Kyra.”

“Simon,” I shot back acidly. “Say it already.”

“It’s not like radiation or anything. And they didn’t just mess with us and our DNA, they introduced their DNA to ours.”

I faltered. “They . . . introduced . . . ?”

He glanced uncertainly at Thom, who gave him a you-do-it-or-I-will look. Simon exhaled noisily. He definitely didn’t want to do it. “We don’t know everything,” he went on. “Just that whatever it is, it’s some form of genetic splicing. They replace some of our DNA with theirs.”