“Let me tell you what I remember,” Simon began again, not at all rushing his explanation just because I’d decided to put him on the clock. “I remember walking to my girlfriend’s house; I’d just had a fight with my parents.” He looked at me as if this was somehow significant, but he kept talking. “We lived in Boise, and it was August, so even though it was getting late, I remember it was still hot as hell. Man, the mosquitoes were eatin’ me alive that night.” He chuckled slightly, and I wondered if he thought this was funny, because I so totally didn’t. I didn’t appreciate his stroll down memory lane. I just wanted his five minutes to be up already so I could tell him, “Thanks for saving me from the Men in Black, but I gotta be on my way now.”
Oblivious to my surliness, Simon continued, his gaze going deep and faraway, “And then there was this light . . . and it was so . . . I couldn’t see anything but that light.” He closed his eyes as if he’d gone someplace else. Distant. Another place in time.
When he opened his eyes again, he shook his head. “I was ten miles south of home when I woke up, at a place called Lucky Peak. Almost two days had passed, and I had no idea where I’d been or what had happened to me.”
I stopped sulking as I broke out in goose bumps. His story was different from mine but so very much the same all at once.
Except I’d been gone way, way longer.
I sat up straighter, not convinced by any stretch but a little more curious. “So how’d you figure it out? And how are you still . . .” I didn’t know how old I thought he was. “Shouldn’t you be like fifty or something?”
“Forty-nine,” he stated, as if the answer was simple. “We just don’t age at the same rate as everyone else.” And then his eyes narrowed. “At the same rate as normal people.”
I laughed then. A small, breathy sound, and I was frowning and grinning at the same time. “Okay, what?” I stopped smiling then, because it really wasn’t funny. “This is . . . You’re just . . .” I narrowed my eyes back at him. “Did my dad put you up to this?” I wasn’t sure if I was amused or pissed, or freaked out that someone—even my own father—would go to this length to prove a point. But I was definitely alarmed.
Because Simon didn’t look like he was joking. Or like anyone had put him up to anything.
He looked completely, stone-cold sober and drop-dead serious.
“What do you mean ‘normal people’?” I didn’t use the air quotes this time, and my voice was way, way quieter.
“I’m not saying we’re not normal, Kyra. I’m just saying we’re different. We can do things other people can’t after we’ve been returned.”
I spoke slowly, like he was dim-witted. “Like not aging?”
He shook his head, a patient smile replacing his serious expression. “Not at all. We age. I aged. I was only fifteen when I was taken, the same way you were taken.”
I shook my head because what he was saying was utter-complete-absurd nonsense. He was nothing like me.
He only nodded in response. “I was. And you’ll age too.” He was speaking slowly now, as if I was the one who didn’t get it. As if I was the one who was crazy. “Just way, way, way slower than everyone else.”
I studied him and tried to see him as fifteen. He could be fifteen, I supposed, if I squinted just so. But more likely he was lying, and honestly, I was getting tired of being toyed with. “Prove it,” I said at last, knowing there was no way he could convince me.
“Are you sure, Kyra? You want me to prove it to you?”
“Yeah. Sure. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Prove it.”
And then he did the absolute last thing I anticipated: he cut himself.
The knife came out of nowhere. It was one of those pocketknives, like the Swiss Army kind that has all the gadgets. Before I could do anything—stop him or escape—it cut across the soft, unblemished skin of his forearm.
I opened my mouth to say “Oh my god!” but no words came out. All I could do was pant in jagged breaths. I twisted around in my seat then, as I searched for something to stop the blood that was already spilling from the inch-long gash he’d inflicted on himself.
“No! Kyra, don’t. Just watch.” His other arm was on my wrist, demanding I stop rummaging for a makeshift bandage and pay attention to what was happening on his arm.
Recoiling, I reluctantly turned back and did as he said. I looked at the cut. It was wide and deep, and I could see far too far inside it, and I was sure it would need stitches and probably a tetanus shot, because who knew where that blade had been before he’d shoved it into his own arm!
I felt queasy, and the possibility of me throwing up right there in the front seat of his car skyrocketed.
And then the weirdest thing happened, and the world beneath me spun out of control. The thing started to close. The wound—it started to heal, right before my eyes.
It was still bleeding, but the flow began to subside as the blood itself became thicker, darker, and then the edges at the ends of the slash began to . . . I had to blink to make sure I was seeing it right, but they did, they began to seal back together.
I sat there, mesmerized, for at least five minutes, the total time it took for the process to complete. In the grand scheme of things, it had to be some kind of miracle.
But when all was said and done, his injury had spontaneously healed in mere minutes.