I hear a heaving sound, and a sour, sickly smell fills the air. I turn back to my grandfather. He has thrown up all over himself, and he’s rocking back and forth in the vomit. Where is Wes? Does he even know I was taken?
I kneel next to my grandfather again. But every time I touch him, he recoils. Finally I just sit next to him and hum a tuneless song under my breath. It seems to calm him.
I fight tears as I stare at the heavy metal door that separates me from freedom. I’m not sure how long I sit there with my grandfather, reliving the past few days, wondering where I went wrong, but I’m jolted back to the present by a scraping noise at the door. I freeze as it opens slowly.
It’s Wes, wearing his black recruit uniform. He slips quietly into the room.
“Oh my god,” I breathe. I stumble to my feet, almost tripping in my effort to reach him. “You’re here.”
My arms close around his. He is stiff, though he relaxes for a second, his hands coming up to lightly touch my back. But then he steps away from me.
We have to maintain cover. “What’s going on?” I whisper the words, trying not to move my mouth. “Do you know why they took me? How they found out about me?”
He doesn’t answer, but his gaze falls on my grandfather.
“We need to get him out,” I say. I rush back across the room until I’m standing near the bed and Grandpa. “We can take him with us to nineteen twenty. It’s the only way now.” I look up at Wes.
He still hasn’t moved.
“I can’t lift him alone. Help me?”
But Wes is silent.
I cannot place the look on his face—it is a combination of horror, regret, and fear. “What’s going on?” This time I don’t bother to whisper.
I hear a noise from the hallway. It sounds like thunder or a racetrack when the horses start sprinting toward the finish line. I stare up at Wes and watch as his previous expression is slowly wiped away until there is nothing left. He is a hollow shell.
The door bursts open and guards swarm into the room. I scramble to my feet. One of the guards grabs my shoulder. I fight back, lashing out with my arms and legs. I hit him in the knee and he falls, but there’s another one and then another, all coming for me. Together, two of the guards take hold of my arms, twisting them painfully behind my back.
“Wes!” I cry out.
I turn to the door, expecting to see him fighting, a pile of guards already at his feet. But he is just standing there; the soldiers rush past like he’s a rock in a stream, calmly parting the water in front of him.
“Wes?” My voice falls away as our eyes meet.
“Take the girl into an empty cell,” he says. “General Walker needs to question her.”
His face is no longer blank, but I almost wish it were. Because his expression is colder than anything I’ve ever seen, and it’s directed right at me.
That’s when I start to suspect I’ve been betrayed.
CHAPTER 20
This can’t be happening. Wes wouldn’t work against me. Not him. Anyone but him. I hold his gaze as the guards pull me from the room. He never loses his severe expression, and never softens, not even for a moment.
As I am forced out into the hallway, I glance back over my shoulder. My grandfather is still lying on the floor, slowly rocking. Sick, weak, and oblivious to what has just happened.
“Grandpa!” I scream. But he doesn’t look up.
The guards pull me across the hallway and throw me into a new cell. I land on my hands and knees on the hard tile. Wes is nowhere in sight.
The door shuts with a bang. I stay on my knees, my head down, my eyes unfocused as I stare at the blinding white of the floor. Soon I am completely numb.
I crawl forward and see that this room is identical to the one I was in before. I slowly heave myself up onto the bare mattress. How could Wes just stand there, letting the guards take me? It doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t he give me some kind of sign? Could he have been working with them this whole time, plotting to bring me in?
No. I pull myself up into a sitting position and push my bangs off my forehead with so much force they flutter up over my head. I trust Wes. There has to be a reason for his silence, for why he couldn’t help me just now. He would never deliberately hurt me. He’d never hand me over to the Montauk Project, not when he has spent so much time trying to protect me from them.
Any minute now that door will burst open and Wes will be there, and he’ll explain everything. I have to be ready to escape with him.
I hear the muffled sound of voices speaking, and the squeak of a boot on the tiled floor outside. See? I say to myself. Wes is already here. I stand up and face the door.
The door swings open and I jerk forward automatically, expecting Wes. But it isn’t him.
A middle-aged man enters. A younger guard follows him, carrying a metal folding chair, which he places in the center of the room. The young guard then leaves, closing the door firmly behind him.
The older man sits down and gives me a measured look. His hair is brown, with only touches of gray at his temples, and he’s wearing a black uniform, though his is slightly different from the guards’. I see a gold, triangular metal gleaming at his shoulder.
“Lydia Bentley,” he says gravely. “We meet at last.”
At the sound of his voice, I sink back down onto the white mattress. This is General Walker, the man who debriefed Wes and me when we arrived in 1989. The man who looked at me as if he knew exactly who I was. Now I’m starting to wonder if he did.
“I think we’ve already met.” My voice sounds surprisingly strong. Much stronger than I feel right now.
He leans forward in his chair and rests his elbows on his knees. “But you were pretending to be Seventeen then. So I’m not sure it counts.”
When I first saw General Walker, I thought he had a kind face, with crinkly hazel eyes. But I can’t find any of that kindness in him now. He just looks calculating and slightly pleased, as though he has won some game I didn’t even know we were playing.
“You knew who I was, didn’t you?” I ask softly.
“Not then. We did think you were Seventeen, until our recruits in twenty-twelve found her body stashed in the woods yesterday. From there, we were quickly able to ascertain who had taken over her identity.” He smiles. “We’ve known about you for a very long time, Miss Bentley.”
I twist my fingers together on my lap. “How?”
“For several reasons.” He sits back in his chair, his eyes never leaving my face. “Eleven informed me that you found your name on a list of our recruits. So, you know that we’ve been tracking you ever since you were born. Or should I say, as soon as you will be born.”
My breath is short. “Wes wouldn’t tell you that.”
He smiles. Walker is distinguished-looking, with a long, patrician nose and a high forehead. None of this can quite hide how cruel his eyes are, though. “Are you sure you know Wes as well as you think you do?”
“What does that mean?”
But he doesn’t answer my question. “Eleven also said that you discovered what the scar on your shoulder means. I have to say, I’m impressed that you put it all together.”
I close my hand around my upper arm, and I feel the round bump under my fingers. “It is from the serum, then? You injected me with something when I was a baby, didn’t you?”
“Polypenamaether was invented by a Doctor Faust in nineteen forty-five. It’s a type of vaccine, and when injected into the bloodstream it better equips people to handle the TM. Of course children are still able to travel more easily than adults. And even with the drug, the TM is so physically demanding that it will break down the body of any traveler, eventually.”
Like Wes, who told me he was dying, who wanted to run away with me.
Then the significance of what the general is saying hits me. Doctor Faust invented the serum that allows me to travel through time safely, and I’ve had it in my system for my entire life.
“Why are you tel
ling me this?” I demand.
“This is information we share with all of our recruits, eventually.”
“But I’m not . . .”
“You are now.” He says it as though I should be excited. “You’re a recruit, Lydia. It is your destiny.”
“I’m not.” I jump up from the bed. “I refuse.”
“Sit down,” he growls.
“No. I’m not yours to control and I never will be. I’m not some scared little kid you picked up off the streets.”
“We have your grandfather. According to Eleven, you’ll do whatever I say to keep him safe.”
I slowly sink back down onto the mattress. According to Eleven? How could Wes tell him that?
I glare at the general. “Why me? I’m seventeen. I’m too old already. And I’m not trained.”
Walker steeples his fingers together and considers me over the top of them. “Let me tell you why this election was so important for us. In this time line, because John McGregor loses, Alan Sardosky wins the election. In a few more years, he goes on to become mayor. Then, eventually, a U.S. senator. In the year twenty forty-four, at the age of seventy-three, he will run for the presidency and win. He’s an older candidate, but by then, people are living a lot longer. In twenty fifty, during his second term, he signs a nuclear arms act. Two months later, war breaks out between North Korea and the United States. Nuclear bombs are sent to Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC. Millions die. Our Center in New York is destroyed and we lose hundreds of recruits. On a larger scale, the world is never quite the same again.”
“No,” I whisper. I’m clenching my hands together so hard it feels like my skin is about to split open. “That’s impossible.”
Walker’s expression is solemn. “I’m afraid it’s not.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Wes is telling me that recruits never traveled before 1950 or after 2050. Now I guess I know why.
“I can’t . . . that doesn’t make sense. The time line changed. Just change it back.”
“It’s not always that simple.”
“But there has to be a way,” I say.
“That’s where you come in.”
I glare at him. “Are you saying this is somehow connected to me becoming a recruit?”
“I’m realizing now that it’s more complicated than even I knew. You made the link between John McGregor and Peter Bentley. That was a crucial connection that we did not have. As we speak, we have recruits traveling through time, figuring out where the original rift took place, the one that eventually effected McGregor’s defeat. It’s like a stack of dominoes. Your grandfather may have changed McGregor, but what happened to change your grandfather?” He raises an eyebrow. “I suspect we can attribute it to your unauthorized trip to nineteen forty-four with Eleven.”
“You knew we were in nineteen forty-four,” I breathe.
He continues as though I never spoke. “After Eleven brought us the information on McGregor, we were able to piece together your connection to the shift in the time line. Something you did in the nineteen forties changed the future. And now, the Montauk Project is in jeopardy. Now, the world is a different place.”
I feel my mouth fall open. “You’re saying it’s my fault there’s a nuclear war.”
“I’m saying you’re connected in some way.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He shrugs. “The origin of the time line shift and your involvement is new information to us. But you were on our radar long before this, Lydia.” He leans closer. “In exactly six months, we send a team of recruits into the future to stop the nuclear holocaust. They are able to infiltrate Sardosky’s inner circle and discover his motivations behind his decision. They don’t stop him, not yet, but they come close. You are part of that team, Lydia.”
I slowly shake my head. “It doesn’t matter. The world ends anyway.”
“So far, yes. But we’ve been experimenting with possible futures. Having you on the team is the closest we’ve come to preventing Sardosky from signing that act.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” I scowl at the general. “Why wouldn’t you just kill him when he was a child? Wouldn’t that solve all of your problems?”
“The time line is a little trickier than that. Killing Sardosky accomplishes nothing. The ripple effects through the time line are insurmountable.”
I swallow. “You say it as though you’ve already tried that option.”
He smiles. “Of course we have. We’ve also tried rigging the election. We’ve tried killing Sardosky’s parents, before they even met. But none of those things worked, and in some cases the nuclear attacks came sooner rather than later. The closest we’ve ever come has been through you and a few other carefully selected recruits.”
“But now you know where the shift in the time line came from. Can’t you just go back and fix it?”
“No.” He studies me with narrowed eyes. “You know where the shift came from. And now we have you and we can do what we want with you. Perhaps we’ll send you to nineteen forty-four first, to see if you can’t fix your mistake. Or maybe we’ll have you go kill your younger self.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He chuckles lightly. “Probably not. It would create an entirely new time line, and we can’t take that chance.”
“Is that why you didn’t take me when I was younger?” I ask. “I’ve always had this scar, even before I traveled to nineteen forty-four. That means you gave me the serum the day I was born. My name must have always been on that list.”
“I cannot comment on the other time line, but I can tell you that every capture of a recruit is precisely timed. Even if it is an orphan we find on the streets. We track them. We learn their history. We know who their great-great grandparents are. We often know more about our recruits than they ever know about themselves. Most importantly, we wait for the exact right moment to take them. You were not ready until your seventeenth year. We had been planning to acquire you in your own time, but then you conveniently landed on our doorstep.”
“I didn’t land on your doorstep,” I say bitterly. “You kidnapped me.”
He smirks a little, and his heavy, gray-brown eyebrows draw closer together. “Ah yes. Eleven helped with that, you know. He has been tracking you for a very long time.”
I remain still.
“Did he tell you what he does for us?”
“He said . . .” I bite my lip. “He said he gathers information and makes small changes in the time line.”
“Sometimes. But he’s also one of the main recruits in charge of extraction.” I must look confused, because he adds, “Bringing in recruits.”
“You mean kidnapping.” I think of all those times Wes shut down while he was talking about the Project snatching children off the streets. I assumed he didn’t want to relive the memory of when it happened to him, but maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of what they forced him to do to others.
General Walker shrugs. “He was assigned to you, Lydia. He’s been following you for months. Long before you stumbled into the TM in twenty twelve.”
I shake my head. “I don’t believe that.”
“Once we realized that you had assumed Seventeen’s identity and that you were in nineteen eighty-nine, we knew we needed to bring you in before you could do anything else to disrupt the time line. Eleven had a mission planned for yesterday afternoon, but all of our people were on high alert and instructed to bring you in if they saw you. That’s why Twenty-nine apprehended you when she was on her mission to secure your grandfather. She thought she could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”
Was Wes really heading a mission to turn me in—after we had planned to run away together, after we spent the night wrapped in each other’s arms? “Wes wouldn’t do that to me. He loves me.” But even I am starting to hear the doubt in my voice.
The general stands up and walks over to the door. He raps on the metal once and it immediately opens. “Bring in Ele
ven,” he says to the guard standing outside.
“Yes, sir.”
I stare at the door. In less than a minute Wes appears, and my breath catches in my throat. He doesn’t look at me as he enters the room.
“Wes.” I stand up. “Tell me it’s not true. This is a mistake. It has to be.”
“Eleven, please explain your objective to Lydia,” General Walker says, his voice less familiar and more commanding.
Wes stares blankly at the wall. “I was assigned to follow Lydia Bentley and to do whatever was necessary to bring her into the Project on July thirtieth, two thousand twelve at exactly 10:57 P.M. This objective was made more difficult when I had to follow her to nineteen forty-four. I made sure the target returned safely, but she had grown attached to me and I was forced to change my strategy for her detainment. I brought her to nineteen eighty-nine because I knew it would be easier to turn her in here, when she was willingly disconnected from her friends and family.”
I close my eyes so I won’t have to look at his face.
I hear Wes say, “It became imperative to persuade the subject I had romantic feelings for her in order to convince her to trust me. It was an unavoidable part of the mission.”
I make a small, jagged sound in the back of my throat and squeeze both hands tightly against my chest. “I don’t believe it. I don’t! You’re just saying this because he’s here.”
Walker’s chair scrapes on the tile and I open my eyes to see him walking toward the door. “I’ll give you two a minute.” He sounds amused. “And Lydia? There are no cameras in this room.”
Then Wes and I are alone.
I spare two seconds to look at the corners of the ceiling. The general is right; I can’t see any cameras. Moving quickly, I launch myself across the room and take Wes’s arm. “What is going on? Please tell me you have a plan.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice is still cold.
“Wes, he’s gone,” I say desperately. “We’re alone.”
He stares into my face and I jerk back at the vacant look in his eyes. This is not the Wes I know. I’ve never seen this person before.
This Strange and Familiar Place Page 18
