“But she’s one of us. Why would she say that?”

“Griffin’s case is different from ours,” Simon explained. “Not different in the sense that she’s not a hybrid, because she is. But different in the reason she’s a hybrid.”

I raised my eyebrow, prompting him to go on.

“Her dad worked at this place called the Los Alamos National Laboratory, back in the ’50s. It was the same place they did the first atomic bomb tests back in ’45.” Simon chewed his lower lip before continuing. “Her dad was kind of a big deal—some super scientist who knew a whole helluva lot about biochemistry. This was right after Watson and Crick had discovered the double helical structure of DNA, so there was still a lot to learn in the field.”

“Apparently, there still is,” I interjected. “Otherwise, why would the Daylighters be so desperate to get their hands on us?”

“I think even without the alien intervention there’s still a lot to learn. But yeah, I think we’re somewhat exceptional,” Simon added. “There was also a lot of fringe activity in the government around these covert alien meetings, supposedly involving President Eisenhower.”

I remembered this. “Jett told me about those. I think he called them the First Contact meetings. He said there were all kinds of scientists and high-up officials and even that President Eisenhower had these meetings with aliens. It sounds crazy.”

“Crazy, maybe, but hard to dispute when you know the truth,” Simon said. “Griffin’s father was one of the scientists invited to the meetings. Only he didn’t just get invited . . .” Simon stopped and inhaled, because apparently what he had to say next required a deep-breath kind of delivery. “He offered Griffin as some sort of . . . goodwill contribution to the efforts.”

“Shut up,” I scoffed, but I seriously doubted Simon was making this stuff up, so what I was really thinking was: How messed up is that? “And they took her?” I asked, but the answer was obvious: of course they’d taken her, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

Cat had always referred to scenarios like these as train-wreck moments.

Of course, Cat had always meant something along the lines of the kind of nasty breakup where one person cheats on the other, or juicy scandals, like when Mr. Jasper got caught breaking into the girls’ locker room and trying on our stinky gym uniforms. That sort of thing.

In this case, we were talking about a girl’s life forever altered by someone she should’ve been able to count on. All things considered, no wonder she had trust issues.

“They did. And when she came back—the way so many of us do—she was never the same.” He shuddered. “But you have to remember, it’s not like she was the first to be taken. Thom was taken before she was,” he told me, and I thought about that. Natty had mentioned that Thom had barely been a teen when he’d been taken, sometime before the 1950s. But that made him, what, at least in his seventies, didn’t it?

I pictured him the way he was now, aged so much slower, the way all of us would age. He looked older than the rest of us, sure, but not by much . . . twenty, maybe twenty-one years old, but definitely not an old man.

I’d vaguely considered the way I’d had to leave my friends and my parents so I couldn’t hurt them, but I’d never really thought about what they would mean down the road. Like what my life would be like in twenty . . . thirty . . . fifty years.

As far as I could tell, from the way the other Returned were living, it would be exactly the same as it was now. I’d be living the same way, with the same people . . . trying not to be caught by those who hunted us.

The idea was depressing.

No wonder Griffin was angry.

But Simon was still talking. “To hear her tell it, when she tells it at all, she might as well have been the first.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Dear Old Dad wasn’t quite done with her after she was returned. He wasn’t satisfied with making her a sacrifice. He was a scientist, and he wanted to know just what they’d done to her, and how—if at all—she’d changed. She became like his very own home science kit.”

“That’s sick.”

“You’re telling me,” Simon agreed.

“No wonder she hates the government so much. Her dad must’a done a number on her head.”

“Her dad and everyone else at the lab. She became property of the US military after that.”

“For how long?” I asked, feeling a stab of guilt for judging her so quickly and so harshly.

Simon’s voice bled into the shadows. “Until she killed him.”

“Her own dad?” I asked, rubbing my arms absently. “What happened?”

“He never realized how much she hated him for what he’d done. One day, he came to take a blood sample from her, and when he wasn’t looking, she cut his safety suit with a scalpel she’d stolen. She’d been waiting for an opportunity like that . . . for her chance to get even.

“She could’ve used the knife to cut through her straps and escape—she’d had the time. But instead she’d hidden it and plotted her revenge. The thing was, he didn’t even realize what she’d done right away; it wasn’t until the symptoms started setting in that they even thought to check his suit for damage. He never suspected she was planning a thing, and he didn’t take enough precautions against her. His own fault, really. He was a goner the second the exposed air reached his lungs. Poor guy never had a chance,” Simon finished.