The Taking (The Taking 1)

I reached out and pushed the door open. I went into the tiny bedroom that my dad had been using for five long years to track others like me . . . those who’d been taken.

Once inside, I turned all the way around so I could see into every corner and every crevice of the tiny space.

The small bedroom-turned-office had been destroyed. Pictures had been ripped from the walls and were strewn across the desk and floors, some intact and some ripped to shreds. Same thing with the maps and charts. It was in a state of shambles.

But I didn’t give a crap about any of that. All I cared about was that my dad wasn’t there.

He was gone.

“Where do you think he is?” Tyler asked, and I jolted, nearly forgetting I wasn’t alone.

I knew, too, that I could no longer put Tyler at risk simply because I wanted his help. I’d already put him in too much danger.

I shrugged and shook my head at the same time, hoping more than anything that my dad had managed to get someplace safe.

Tyler held his hand out to me, and I took it, our hands fitting together seamlessly. The idea of leaving him was nearly unbearable, like losing part of myself—something I understood all too well.

As I let him pull me along, something in the wreckage caught my attention, and I hesitated.

“Hold on a sec.” I pulled my hand from his, reaching for the picture that was jumbled in with all the rest. A photograph.

I bent down, brushing aside broken glass to pluck it free. Beneath the first photograph was another. And beneath those, another and another.

I recognized all the images despite never having seen anything like them in real life. Fireflies. Picture after picture of fireflies.

There were faraway images of swarms and incredibly detailed close-ups. Others were artistic—shots taken in the night sky, making the fireflies look like stars against the black canvas of night—and others still that were clinical feeling and stark, in which you could make out each and every detail of the insects, right down to their delicate antennae and bulging round eyes. It was as if my dad had been studying the insects.

At the bottom of the haphazard pile was an image I’d seen before. I hadn’t made the connection between it and the nocturnal luminaries, with their delicate, vein-laced and swirl-tipped wings.

My fingers traced the image as I tried to recall the first time I’d seen it: the beetle-like version that depicted what a firefly looked like at rest . . . and burnished in gold.

Just like it had been in the center of Agent Truman’s badge. It hadn’t been a golden beetle at all. It had been a firefly.

My thoughts were interrupted when a single drop of blood fell onto the photo from above me. It landed right in the center of the picture and splattered outward, blooming like a flower. A feeling of icy alarm settled over me as I turned to glance over my shoulder.

I’d half expected to find my father there, with his bloodied hands outstretched to me.

But it wasn’t my father. It was Tyler, standing above me and studying the same images I was.

“Your nose.” I let the picture flutter to the floor. “Tyler, you’re bleeding.”

He frowned at me before using the back of his hand to check for himself. “You’ve got to be—” He shook his head, perplexed. “I haven’t had a bloody nose since I was a kid.”

But I was already on my feet and running toward the bathroom, kicking litter out of my way. When I came back, I handed him a wad of toilet paper. “I think you’re supposed to lean your head back. And pinch your nose. I think you’re supposed to pinch it.”

He did as I said, and without taking the paper away, he dropped his gaze and grinned at me. “So you’re saying I’m not gonna miraculously heal the way you did? I thought maybe some of your superpowers might rub off on me.”

I rolled my eyes, wondering how he could possibly make jokes during a situation like this. It would be hard to leave him when the time came. “They’re not superpowers.” I smirked back at him. He sounded ridiculous with all that toilet paper bunched up and plugging his nose. I grinned. “And I’m pretty sure they don’t work that way.” I nudged him with my shoulder as I shoved past him back into my dad’s room. “I just want to grab a few things and then we need to get out of here before anyone catches us. I was hoping my dad would be here. I have so many questions, and I think he might have some of the answers I need.” It felt so strange to admit that out loud, that my dad had been right after all. I looked around at the room. At the ripped papers and broken glass. Even the computer monitor had been smashed. I couldn’t bear to think that he might’ve been harmed because of me. “I just hope he’s okay.”

“Me too.” Tyler’s voice came out muffled by the toilet paper.

I began collecting what I could find, anything that looked even remotely useful, although most of it looked like junk. I gathered the firefly images and a map with a bunch of colorful dots and lines my dad had drawn, along with the one missing-person flier I couldn’t ignore: the one of me.

While I was searching, I found the ball from the first baseball team I’d ever been on, back when I was in the first grade—when the boys and girls still played together. Our parents had signed Austin and me up for the same team, and my dad had volunteered to be our coach.

This was the very same ball Austin had hurled through my bedroom window after I’d accused him of throwing like a girl. His parents had grounded him for a whole week for breaking my window—one day for every year he’d been alive on this earth.