Page 1 (1/1)

PART ONE

"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,

"’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy"

--Mary Howitt, The Spider and the Fly

CHAPTER ONE

Day Twenty-Five

Silent Creek Ca

That’s the way I felt, watching the screen go all black like that Like s that were pink and plump and filled with life, to shriveled-up hunks of useless meat that could no s from my back and fly

It had been seventeen days since I’d watched the guy I love be plucked froht The saht I’d lost my dad in that very desert And now the first actual hints of the two of theht before the computer shut down

That was the worst part of all this, that I still had no idea whereme utterly-madly-insanely crazy

For the past seventeen days I’d been consuht never see either of them alive, all while I’ve been trapped here, in the on, in a camp for the Returned--others like ular lives, but who’d had the rug pulled out from under them the same way I had when I’d been taken Abducted and experimented on by aliens All because I’d had the du tied

And now people around er to others

I’d spent the past seventeen days living with the proof of just how deadly I’d becoirls had poisoned their own boyfriends si theet how crazy it sounds, the whole idea of alien experiments, and I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t seen the proof withthe part where Tyler had alht in front of irls when I’d sliced my hand with that box cutter, then I’d never have needed to take Tyler to Devil’s Hole that night, hoping those same aliens who’d made my blood toxic to him in the first place would whisk hie I’d done to him

Maybe then Tyler would still be alive and safe, andthe way he had, before I’d even had the chance--a real chance--to tell hi him and his "crazy" abduction theories, and to tell him how much I’d missed him Him, the dad he’d always beenalways, even when I’d beenfor five years and he’d never, ever, not for a second, given up onmy boyfriend, Austin, my best friend, Cat, and my mom--whose betrayal hurttheir children are out there, soave up on both of us, me and my dad She left us behind and started a new life, with a new husband and a new son--her new faive her, to understand her motivations, but I wasn’t sure I could, not entirely

But none of that meant I didn’t love her, or that I didn’t miss her or evenht not spend every e the way I felt about each and every one of thee that had popped up on Jett’s screenseventeen days after Tyler and Agent Trumanand my dad had just

Poof!

"Does someone want to explain what the hell just happened?" I was surprised I’d even been able to force the words fros ofoverfrantically at the keyboard in front of me He tried his best to boot the computer back up, but I could already tell there was no point Everything we’d been looking at a one, and noere left staring at a big e

He shook his head "So to me now--his comment was directed at Simon He lifted the computer from my lap and dropped it onto his own as he hunched over it, his fingers gliding in a way that ot lost in a series of commands and functions I’d never understand Jett handled a keyboard the way I handled a softball, like it was second nature "They kneere in their system and they locked us out" He unconsciously rubbed his aresture It was Jett’s tic whenever he h they hadn’t directly been responsible for branding hiun covertly hunting for the Returned, and even though he’d healed froe they’d scalded into his skin--the e all healed from our injuries--his hand instinctively stroked the spot

"They," I repeated Of course it was theht before that cryptic ht on to us

That dying sensation was back, rendering h I wanted to talk, the words were stuck so far down in h theht there," I sputtered, and even that ca like someone had just punched me in the throat I pointed at the deceased co to revive