As far as she could tell, she was in a unique and unenviable position, and the only upside was that the press hadn’t released the names of the survivors.
Rebecca had lost so much. Two sisters. One brother. Two parents. And now Grandpa Frank. Grandma Betty had died nearly a year before, of both emphysema and a broken heart; according to the ladies in her garden club, she’d gone to visit her son in prison every week until he’d asked her to stop coming.
Rebecca took the stack of letters from her desk and flipped through them. She knew she should open them. But they were always the same questions about her life, followed by short updates on her mother’s existence in prison, where she’d taken up origami and several of her best friends were fellow parental victims of the reaping.
At least she had friends.
Instead of reading the letters, Rebecca bound them in a stack with a rubber band and pulled a pink cardboard keepsake box from beneath her bed. Inside were bound stacks of at least a hundred other letters from her parents, all read, though she’d only responded to a handful of them. Beneath those lay a single three-by-six minialbum of family photos—what few she’d claimed for herself as her grandmothers had negotiated over her parents’ keepsakes, when it had become clear they would remain in prison.
Rebecca flipped through the album. Nearly five years had passed since the reaping, and she’d grown up, but Laura and John remained forever frozen as ten-and twelve-year-olds. And Erica...
She stopped on a picture of all six of the Essigs, taken by a waiter at her father’s birthday dinner, two weeks before the reaping. Double prints had arrived in the mail nearly a week after he’d been arrested. That family photo was the only picture she’d kept of Erica.
Rebecca ran her finger over her youngest sister’s face, and for the thousandth time, she wondered whose face it really was. Then she wondered what her real sister—the one who’d likely never made it home from the hospital—would look like now. If she were even still alive.
Were she and the surrogate who’d replaced her identical? Newborns grow and change so much that they are virtually unrecognizable from one week to the next. Which meant that if the initial glamour on the surrogate had worn off when she was still a baby, would anyone have even realized? Could Rebecca’s real sister look like a totally different child by now?
Was she still alive somewhere, unrecognizable at eleven years old? If so, other than Grandma Janice, she was Rebecca’s last living, unincarcerated relative. And she might be out there alone. In foster care, or...?
What had happened to the three hundred thousand babies replaced by surrogates in 1980?
After her parents lost their appeal, that question had obsessed Rebecca. She’d spent most of her senior year of high school tracking down books through the library’s interbranch loan program, trying to find answers. But without knowing the species of whoever had taken the babies, her search had only led to more unanswered questions.
Some species offaeraised lost and stolen children as their own. Others raised human changelings as servants. And still others actuallyatethe young they’d kidnapped.
Rebecca shuddered at the thought. She’d come across that tidbit more than a year ago, and that horrific possibility was what had led her to give up her search for answers. But now...
Now, Grandpa Frank was gone, and she needed something else to think about.
Rebecca replaced the letters and pictures and pushed the keepsake box back under the bed. Then she lay flat on her stomach and reached even farther into the dusty space her grandmother had given up cleaning when her back had gone out a couple of years before, and pulled out the small stack of books she’d removed from the public library without actually checking them out, during the summer after her senior year of high school.
Rebecca preferred to think of the act as liberating resources, rather than stealing. After all, no one had checked any of them out for a full four years before she’d freed them from their library prison.
The grubby stack of hardbound books still had torn-out strips of notebook paper sticking out of the tops, to mark pages she’d found potentially helpful during her initial search. Rebecca flipped through the first book, glancing at the passages she’d highlighted, which purported to tell the reader how to secure the return of a stolen human child by forcing the one left in its place to admit the ruse.
Pretend to be willing to put the changeling in the oven.
Let the changeling see something he or she has never seen before, to prompt it to speak and reveal its true nature.
Beat the changeling until it reveals its true form.
Even if she were willing to beat a child or pretend to cook it, none of those ridiculous and homicidal options were viable, since the government had taken custody of all of the surrogates, including Erica, years before.
Her curiosity renewed, Rebecca settled onto her unmade bed with the top book from the stack. She brushed dust from the cover, then flipped to the last page she’d marked and began reading.
Most of the information read more like folklore than like research into cryptid biology or sociology—a fact that seventeen-year-old Rebecca hadn’t picked up on. Nineteen-year-old Rebecca read until long after she’d heard her grandmother retire for the night to a bedroom she now had all to herself.
By midnight, Rebecca had begun to yawn. She started to close the heavy hardbound book propped up on a pillow on her lap when a swath of neon yellow near the bottom of the page caught her eye. She hadn’t read this far in her earlier attempts, which meant that some previous reader had highlighted that line before she’d stolen the book from the library.
To make contact with the party who exchanged your human infant for a changeling, simply prick the changeling’s finger and smear its blood on a mirror in a dark room.
Rebecca closed the book, dismissing the new bit of instruction because—though it sounded much less violent than the other methods she’d come across—the fact that she didn’t have access to Erica’s finger in order to prick it was still a problem.
She headed into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and as she stared into the mirror with a mouthful of mint-flavored suds, her gaze caught on the hand towel hanging to the right of the sink.
On it was a single drop of blood, left behind from her grandmother’s cut finger when she’d washed and dried her hands hours before.
And just like that, Rebecca had an idea.
