Now I was locked inside a storage facility with the stranger who’d just kidnapped me from the authorities and smashed my cell phone. Awesome.

I stayed in the car with my fists pressed tightly on top of my knees. My teeth were clenched, and my shoulders ached. Simon scraped a lone metal chair across the concrete floor to the passenger side of the car and opened my door, propping the chair in front of me.

He straddled it and leaned forward. “I guess I have some explaining to do.”

I don’t know why, but when his coppery eyes drilled into me, I felt some of my tension easing. It made no sense, considering the circumstances. Still, I was here now, and after a quick perusal of the space, I realized that I probably wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted me to, so I figured I might as well listen to what he had to say.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” I told him at last. “So, who the hell are you, and why have you been following me?”

He smiled, revealing a set of straight teeth that flashed against his skin. “You noticed, huh?”

My eyebrows lifted. “You weren’t exactly stealthy. You practically knocked me over at the bookstore.” I paused, chewing the inside of my cheek. “And what about that message . . . ?” I breathed in. “How the hell did you get that on my receipt?”

His smile faded. “Let me start at the beginning. My name is Simon Davis, and I’m like you, Kyra. I was taken too.”

PART TWO

Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

CHAPTER TWELVE

FIRST OF ALL, THERE WAS NO WAY I BELIEVED A word he’d said.

Sure, he’d saved me and all. Or at least that’s what he expected me to believe. But now that I’d heard him out, I was starting to suspect I’d traded whatever Agent Truman and his band of Merry Men had in store for me for a straight-up nut job.

Besides, how did I know Simon hadn’t been wrong about them? Maybe they were trying to help.

It was certainly an easier pill to swallow than the one Simon was trying to shove down my throat. If only he hadn’t started his explanation with the words: “I was abducted in 1981.”

Uh, yeah . . .

I mean, even if I ignored the part where he’d used the word abducted, I could still do simple calculations in my head. I didn’t have to be a math whiz to know that, if what he’d said was true, that would put old Simon here somewhere around balding and middle-aged. And there was no way in hell that Simon—this Simon who was sitting right in front of me—was a day older than eighteen. Nineteen at the most.

“Sooo . . . ,” I drawled, stretching out my skepticism to epic proportions. “You were ‘abducted’”—I used air quotes in case he hadn’t grasped the doubt oozing from my tone—“back in 1981 and didn’t return until, what, three days ago?”

But my cynicism didn’t rattle him. “No,” he clarified matter-of-factly, without skipping a beat. “I was only gone a day and a half. Most of us are returned within forty-eight hours.”

I wilted; my hero was looking more and more like a fruitcake. “‘Most of us’?”

“Kyra,” Simon offered sympathetically. “I know this is difficult to believe, but you need to hear it. People—teens, mostly—have been abducted for years. Decades. I can’t say why, for sure, but we believe we’re part of some kind of experiment. There is a purpose—we’re sure of it; we just don’t know what the end goal is yet.” He reached out and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Your father isn’t crazy.”

I flinched. From his explanation. From his touch and from his mention of my dad. My back dug into the gearshift behind me, and I winced. “My dad? What does he have to do with any of this? How do you even know about him?”

He dropped his hand but stayed where he was, conviction written all over his face. “Your dad—his online activity—that’s how we found you. That’s how we knew you’d been returned. You’re the first of our kind to come back after all this time. No one’s ever been returned past the forty-eight-hour mark. It’s unheard of. Anyone who’s ever been gone that long . . . well, they’re never heard from again. We’ve always assumed the experiments have failed after that point. That the body . . . that it didn’t survive.”

I heard so many things wrong with what he’d just said that I couldn’t process any of them: our kind . . . never heard from again . . . the body . . . didn’t survive . . .

I waved my hands to ward him off even though he was no longer touching me. Hysteria was creeping in on me, threatening to consume me. My throat was swelling shut, and in a matter of seconds I was pretty sure I was going to suffocate. He was literally killing me with his words. “What the . . . ? What do you mean, ‘our kind’?”

My panic was obviously visible, and Simon inhaled deeply. Watching him, the way his chest was rising and falling rhythmically, hypnotically, I swore he was prompting me to do the same. “Kyra.” He inhaled. “Please.” He took another slow and steady breath. “Just let me talk. I’ll do my best to make sense of it, and then you can ask anything you want.” He exhaled calmly, easily.

I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to breathe the way he was. Slowly. In and out. So very, very slowly . . .

After a few seconds I felt . . . well, okay. Who was I kidding? I still felt like I was trapped in a storage locker with a maniac, but at least I could breathe again. “Fine,” I muttered. “You have five minutes. And then I’m leaving.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to continue. I was angry and frustrated, but most of all confused and scared.