Tether Read Online Free Page A

please,
please,
let it be from him.
    One of the last things I saw before I went flying through the tandem was Thomas being shot. A month had passed since that night. Grant kept telling me, in a tone of voice that was supposed to be somber but came out sounding hopeful, that Thomas was probably dead. I guess he thought if I kept hoping Thomas was alive, I’d never move on or find a way to be happy with the life I was born into. But I didn’t have any intention of doing either.
    I peeled the star open slowly and took a deep breath. The note read:
    HE’S ALIVE
    And that was all.

“Where’d you get this?” Grant asked, handing the note back to me. I could tell he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours and he’d been wearing the same clothes for days. There were dark half-moons under his eyes, and he was fidgeting with his watch, compulsively opening and closing the clasp. I covered his hand with mine to make him stop, then pulled away. Most of the time, I tried not to touch him. It just made things too unbearably weird.
    “It was in my mailbox when I got home.” I squinted into the distance, over the tops of the trees and buildings across the narrow strip of grass. When I’d finally returned his call, Grant had asked me to meet him in the park down the street from his house. We were sitting on the swing set in the playground. The late-evening sun glinted off car hoods; the streetlamps were starting to flicker on. If we were in Aurora, ribbons of swirling green light would already be visible in the sky, but this was just another normal night on Earth, and all I could see were clouds.
    “Who’s it from?” Grant looked at me, and I held my breath for a beat, forgetting again, for a moment, that he wasn’t Thomas. I swallowed hard and shifted away from him.
    “I don’t know. But whoever it is must have a way of communicating with the other side.” I stared at him.
    “You think it was me? Yeah, right, Sasha.” Grant ran his fingers through his hair; he was letting it grow long, which was decidedly un-Thomaslike. I’d been building a mental list of differences between the two of them, but every time I looked at Grant, my heart lurched. I kept hoping it would stop, but it never did. Maybe it never would. Thomas was a piece of glass buried deep beneath my skin—painful but impossible to remove.
    “If I can see through my analog’s eyes, it stands to reason that you can, too.”
    “Just because you want that to be true doesn’t mean it is,” Grant said. I sighed, because I knew he was right. For whatever reason, my ability to see through Juliana’s eyes was unique. Dr. Moss, a physicist I met in Aurora, said I owed the strength of my bond with Juliana to the fact that my father was born in Aurora. That revelation had turned my whole life upside down—it was as if I had lost my parents all over again, and with them, the person I’d always believed myself to be. Thomas wasn’t the only reason I felt out of place on Earth; I was half Auroran, and his world was my world, too, in a way. I wasn’t done with it yet, and after getting that note, I knew it wasn’t done with me.
    “I have to find out who sent this,” I told Grant. “I have to know if it’s true.”
    “And then what?” He narrowed his eyes at me.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “I’m not stupid, you know.” Grant shoved his hands into his pockets and hung his head, deliberately not meeting my gaze. It reminded me of how he’d been in the Farnham prison cell: defeated, the high school god brought to his knees. The experience was written on his face in scars only I could see.When he spoke, his voice shook, and it was obvious he felt that I’d betrayed him somehow. “You’ve been looking for a way back since the day we came home.”
    “So?”
    “So?”
He shook his head. “You’re unbelievable. Don’t you remember what happened over there? What they did to us? We were kidnapped. We were
held hostage.
Are you seriously going