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.

He’d be a freak, like me.

“Think about it,” Jett went on. “What if we can figure it out? What if we can pinpoint a location and take him there?”

“How?” Simon interrupted. “Where?”

Encouraged by Simon’s questions, Jett sprang into action. He went to one of the walls where he’d already hung the mostly decimated map I’d taken from my dad’s place. He tapped it, looking at me. “I enhanced the map we got from you. . . .” He went to the nearest workstation and pulled up an exact replica of the map, only this one was easier to read, the smudged lines clearer and more legible. “I also tried the USB, but it’s too damaged. I couldn’t get anything off it.”

Impatient, Willow chimed in. “Will you please just get to the point?”

“The CD was another matter,” Jett continued, oblivious to Willow’s short temper. He grinned like a kid on Christmas morning. “It held a lot of your dad’s backup files for the past five years, and your dad is one righteous record keeper. Most of what he had on that disc we already knew: names, dates, locations—that kind of thing.”

“So?” Simon interrupted. “What’s your point?”

“The point is, there’s one place that comes up in his files numerous times as a taking site. One place that’s shown up again and again and again and again in the past five years that we’ve never been able to pinpoint.”

Jett jumped up from his chair and tapped a spot on the map with the tip of a pen. “And it’s not that far from us.”

I stared at the distorted map of Washington State. “Where is it?” I asked, because even if I wasn’t willing to entertain the idea of letting Tyler become like me—like us—I needed to hear Jett out.

“It’s called Devil’s Hole.” Jett breathed the name, filling it with as much wonder as he could manage.

“Devil’s? Hole?” The skepticism in Willow’s voice was obvious.

Again Jett didn’t seem at all discouraged by her cynicism. “It’s here, not too far north of the Oregon border,” he explained as he traced a path from where we presumably were—in an abandoned nuclear bunker below the ground—all the way to the place where Jett believed Tyler had a chance of being taken.

“There’s been a lot of talk about it being just an Indian legend. In fact, there was this Native American shaman named Red Elk who once told reporters that his father had first taken him to see the hole back in 1961. He claimed that not only was the hole ‘endless’ but also that strange things happened whenever he went near it. He never really said what those strange things were, but there were others who swore that animals refused to go anywhere near the giant crater. Some have said it’s the gateway to hell.” He flashed a crooked smile.

“Of course, none of these things was ever confirmed. At least not for the general public. But here’s the interesting thing. . . .” He raised his eyebrows. “No one’s ever really known the true location of Devil’s Hole. But there are those who believe the government knows exactly where it is and that it’s always been a source of alien activity, and they’ve been trying to conceal the location for years. According to your dad”—he was looking at me again—“those people are right, because he seems to know exactly where it is too.”

He took off the pen’s cap and circled a pinprick of a spot on the map, making it clear that this was the location in question. I studied the distance between here and there. He was right; it wasn’t far. A couple of hours at most.

“And what? You think we can just show up there, and they’ll take Tyler and heal him?” I couldn’t help it. The idea was preposterous.

“Not just heal. Restore,” Simon corrected.