He moves toward the bed and slumps down onto the mattress. I stare at the relaxed, easy way he moves his body. Most recruits are like coiled springs, their muscles tight, their eyes watchful. But not Thirty-one.
He raises his brows and I realize he’s waiting for me to answer. “No.” I think of the time machine—Tesla’s Machine, or the TM as the Project refers to it—the way it rips your body apart, shooting you through space and time in broken pieces. “It never gets easier.”
We are silent for a minute. I stare at the heavy wooden door, wondering what Twenty-two and Wes are doing in the next room.
Thirty-one is watching me closely. “I’m surprised you remember me.”
“We sparred together under Lieutenant Andrews,” I say. “There were only ten of us on our team. Why wouldn’t I remember you?”
He shrugs. “You seemed pretty out of it. And it wasn’t just the sparring. I would watch you, sometimes, in the Center. Eating in the cafeteria, or walking down the halls.”
I try to think back to that time, but it is a blur of empty hallways, endless lessons, white lights, and cold, blank recruits. “You did?”
“You didn’t even notice.” He spreads his legs wide and rests his forearms on his knees. It is too comfortable of a position. Everything about this boy is too comfortable, too casual. “You had your head down, looked kind of blank. But there was one day, a few months ago, when I saw you crying and I knew you weren’t like the rest of them.”
I remember that day. It was after my commanding officers had forced me to write a letter to my parents, saying that I was running away. They would put it in my bedroom the same night I disappeared, and a few days later a body matching my description would be found in a nearby ditch. My parents would never know the truth of what happened to me.
I had written it carefully and silently, my fingers not even shaking. It wasn’t until I was out in the hallway that the impact hit me. I fell back against the wall, one hand pressed to my stomach, the other to my chest, trying to hold in the sobs I could feel ripping through me. Only a few tears escaped, sliding down my face to fall onto the white tiles below. I had thought I was alone, that no one had seen me, but obviously I was wrong.
“I am like the rest of them,” I protest, but Thirty-one shakes his head.
“No. They’re zombies. You’re different, I think.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
At my icy tone, he shifts his weight, pulling in his arms slightly. “I’m going too fast, aren’t I? My mom always said I speed through shit. Sorry.”
“You remember your mom?”
He nods, his hazel eyes locked on my green ones.
“How is that possible?”
He shrugs again, the movement deliberately casual. “I don’t know. I just do.”
“Were you . . . were you brainwashed?”
He nods, keeping his body forward, his hands swinging in the space between his knees. I don’t even know why I bothered to ask. Brainwashing is the first stage of training. It means the recruits won’t run away when they’re out on missions, because they have nothing left to care about. No family, no friends, just the constant fear that the Project is all knowing, that they will find you no matter what. It was why Wes wouldn’t run away with me, in the end.
“Were you?” he asks, and my muscles go tight, my back stiff above the silk of my gown. He is digging too deep, and I cannot trust this person. I can’t trust anyone anymore.
“I’m the same as any other recruit.” I keep my voice even.
“I haven’t met another recruit who would cry in a hallway.”
“And I haven’t met one who remembers their family.”
“That’s why I think we might be able to help each other,” he says softly.
There is a silence. I keep my arms wrapped around my middle. I’ve been trying so hard to be numb, to forget those endless days of training. When they first took me I was in the Center, hidden below Central Park. That is where I learned how to be a recruit—how to fight, how to survive in the wilderness with no supplies, how to load a gun in seconds. Then there was the intelligence training: languages, codes, minute historical facts. It is the recruit’s job to change small moments, to gather information, to act as a liaison between different time periods. If we are not careful, we could change the entire course of history.
All that information, crammed into six months, crammed into my head, crammed in a room with hundreds of other recruits, all children, all vacant eyed. In the beginning, I had so many questions. Who was the mysterious Resistor, who visited me at my father’s hardware store in my time, who helped me realize I was destined to become a recruit? How did my grandfather have a disk with a list of future recruits that included my name? But no matter how much I churned through possible answers, I could never find clarity, and after a while, remembering was harder than forgetting. By the time I got to the facility in Montauk to practice on the TM, I had built a shell around myself, had learned to block out everything but the information they kept pumping into me. For months I’ve lived like this. Trying to let go of Wes, my family, my old life. General Walker didn’t make me go through the brainwashing, but he might as well have.
“Do you remember your family?” Thirty-one asks.
I open my mouth but I do not answer. An image of my grandfather flashes through my head, standing next to the stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti and asking me about my latest article for the school paper. But then the memory shifts and he’s curled in a tight ball on the floor of a cell, rocking back and forth, moaning in pain and fear.
My grandfather was the one who told me about the Montauk Project in the first place—and now they’re using him as leverage so I’ll work for them, knowing that the threat to his life is enough to keep me in line.
“I don’t know why I remember mine,” Thirty-one says when I don’t respond. “I just do. I can . . . There are flashes of my mom. I had a sister. She was ten. We were close.”
I stare down at the floor, at the way the black tiles meet the white ones in never-ending diamonds. “When were you taken?”
“A year ago, I think. Time gets muddled down there. You know.”
I do know, only guessing at the nine months that have passed since I was taken. “Still,” I say. “That’s not long. Most recruits are kidnapped earlier, put through training for longer.”
“General Walker said they couldn’t have brought me in any earlier or time would have been messed up. I’m needed for this mission, I guess.”
I look down at him. “Me too. He said it was my destiny.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
“They said they needed to speed up my training,” Thirty-one says. “Maybe that’s why the brainwashing didn’t totally stick.”
His words are light but his eyes are drawn at the corners and white lines appear around his mouth. It is a mask, his casual behavior, in the same way Wes’s coldness is a mask, hiding the part of himself that the Project tried to strip away.
“This is why we can help each other. Even if it’s just to have someone we trust.”
Help each other? I think of what the Resistor told me, about how he was starting a movement against the Project. Since I’ve become a recruit, I haven’t heard or seen any evidence that he has succeeded, but a small resistance could exist. For one brief moment, I consider asking Thirty-one, consider opening up to someone in a way I haven’t in months.
There’s a muffled sound from the hallway and I automatically take a step backward, away from the bed and Thirty-one. Wes and Twenty-two will be back soon. They can’t find us questioning the Project. Wes might understand . . . at least, the old Wes would have. But Twenty-two is too much like the other recruits: unfeeling, hidden, more robot than human. I don’t know if I can trust Thirty-one, or even Wes, but I know I can’t trust her.
“We were chosen for a reason. If we’re too distracted, we will fail.” I mimic Lieutenant Andrews with his clipped,
military tone.
Thirty-one stares at me, but I do not waver, keeping my expression empty, my mouth a thin line. Finally he sighs and stands up from the bed. “Right.”
He sounds disappointed, but I can’t be what he wants. I can’t be his lifeline. The only person who matters now is my grandfather. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to save him.
When Thirty-one steps closer to me I freeze, my new muscles flexing under my skin. Those hours and hours of training take over, and I have to fight the urge to twist his arm up over his back, to show him that even though he’s strong, I’m quicker. But he stops just before he can touch me and looks down into my face. He’s not much taller than I am, and even this close I do not have to tilt my head back to look at him.
He leans forward slightly, moving until his mouth is hovering right above my ear. “Tim,” he whispers.
I stop breathing.
“My name is Tim.”
He pulls back, watching my face, waiting for my reaction. I do not give anything away, but when he turns his back to me, I finally allow myself to smile. It is just a small one, a tilt of my lips, the slight pressure on my cheeks. But for the first time in nine months, it’s there.
Despite what I said to Wes earlier, I remember my name, my identity. Lydia Bentley. And so does Thirty-one . . . Tim. I had thought that all the recruits were like Wes and Twenty-two, broken and lost and cold. But maybe Tim really is who he says he is: different from the others, capable of memory, of feelings, not a mindless slave of the Montauk Project.
And maybe that means I’m not as alone as I thought.
Chapter 3
“The fund-raiser starts in less than an hour,” Wes says to the three of us as we stand in a half circle in the center of the room. The red-tinted light is gone. Right after Wes and Twenty-two returned, Tim walked over to the lamp and switched it off.
“It’s like a whorehouse in here.”
“Leave it,” Wes said. “Ly—Seventeen put it on.”
“It’s fine. The red was too overwhelming anyway,” I put in quickly, afraid someone may have noticed his almost-slip. I do not want Tim and Twenty-two to know that we have any sort of history. Things are already too complicated as it is.
At my words, Wes gave me the same hard look he just gave Tim. I refused to flinch, refused to change my expression. He turned away first, but I saw how he closed his eyes for half a second, the deep breath he took.
Now he stands across from the bed, addressing all of us. “Alan Sardosky has been the president of the United States for the past five years, and is currently in his second term. Right now he is fairly well liked by the American public, but over the course of the next year, he becomes more and more of a recluse, and his paranoia increases to the point where he no longer leaves Hill House, this decade’s version of the White House. This campaign fund-raiser is his last public appearance before that starts happening. Which is why General Walker chose it for our first assassination attempt.”
Tim and I stand side by side, listening to Wes. It is information I already know: we’ve all been prepared for the events of tonight, and normally we would complete our task without discussion. But because it is my first time in the field—and most likely Tim’s—Lieutenant Andrews explained that we would be briefed again before the mission. I still find myself hanging on Wes’s words, knowing that the minute he is finished talking we will be sent down into the ballroom to kill the president.
“In a year and a half, Sardosky proposes, lobbies for, and signs an international nuclear arms act. Twenty other countries sign too, including Russia and China, all agreeing to disassemble their nuclear weapons and, ideally, end the threat of nuclear war for good. The two most problematic holdouts are North Korea and Iran. When the U.S. puts pressure on North Korea, threatening to invade if they don’t cooperate, the North Koreans retaliate by launching a series of nuclear attacks. Within a week, North Korea bombs Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC.”
“Sardosky and most of his staff live through the attack, and in response, the administration levels half of Asia. Millions die, and the radiation sparks a worldwide famine when crops fail,” Twenty-two adds. She sounds almost bored. “We need to prevent it from happening by bringing down the man who put all this in motion in the first place.”
“Even though he was trying to do something good,” I say without thinking.
All three of them turn to stare at me, and I press my palms into my sides, feeling the silk of my gown slide between my fingers. “I just . . . he didn’t mean to destroy the world. He was trying to help people. To end the threat of nuclear war.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Twenty-two’s expression is cold. “This isn’t our first mission to stop the aftermath of this treaty. The Project has already tried to get Sardosky out of office before his second term. We’ve tried to stop him from proposing the treaty, to stop him from signing the treaty—to stop North Korea from reacting to the United States’ pressure. Nothing has worked; every mission has ended in the same way: nuclear war. This is the next logical attempt to stop it from happening. Sardosky has to die.”
I do not respond. The Project makes calculated choices, weighs the odds and experiments until they create changes that have the smallest impact on the time line. Killing someone as important as the president has a large impact, and they wouldn’t do it unless they’d considered every option, unless this was the final choice.
But could this really be my destiny, as General Walker told me it was? Killing a man who’s trying to make the world a better place, even if he doesn’t succeed?
I don’t know if I believe in destiny anymore, but if I don’t go along with what the Project wants, then my grandfather will be the one who gets hurt. Either way, someone dies. It may sound heartless, but I will always save my grandfather over Alan Sardosky.
“If we fail to kill Sardosky on this mission, we’ll be sent back again and again, won’t we?” Tim asks. He is standing straighter than he was before, looking more like a recruit than he did when we were alone together. “And what if killing Sardosky doesn’t even work? What if we still end up with a nuclear war?”
Wes gives Tim a grim look. “We don’t know yet if killing him will stop the war, but it’s the only viable option left. The Project believes this is the solution, so we need to do our best to succeed tonight. If we can’t kill the president, then we’ll come back again until we do. It’s our job.”
Tim doesn’t answer.
“Remember that as soon as we leave this room, I am thirty-year-old Michael Gallo, a financial analyst at an international shipping company. I’ve been invited because one of the president’s friends, a Mr. Tierney, is trying to set up an export business in Washington and he wants to do business with the company Michael Gallo works for.” Wes glances at me, but when our eyes meet he looks away. “Seventeen is Samantha Greenwood, my fiancée. Twenty-two is Bea Carlisle, Samantha’s cousin, and Thirty-one is posing as a waiter. Everyone is clear on this?”
We nod.
“Twenty-two is a dead ringer for Sardosky’s mistress, who’s been away from the capital for weeks. She’ll seduce the president, and try to convince him to meet her in a private room.” He gestures at the other girl’s small, dark features, her petite frame. She doesn’t smile at Wes—she probably hasn’t smiled in years—but her mouth parts slightly, her head tilts down and to the side, and suddenly I believe she’s capable of seducing anyone. It makes me inch toward Wes, though I refuse to let myself think about why.
“Thirty-one can’t hold on to the poison; the guards physically search the waitstaff. Seventeen and I will pass it off to him after we go through security. He’ll doctor a drink and deliver it to the president. I’ll infiltrate the control room of the hotel and disable the security cameras in the room where Twenty-two leads the president. It will take one solid minute for the drug to take effect, at which point the president will have what appears to be a completely typical heart attack. If Sardosky gets h
elp too quickly, then he could recover, which is why we need the attack to happen in private. By the time Twenty-two runs out of the room looking for help, the president will be dead. In the confusion, we disappear. Seventeen.” He turns to me, but keeps his eyes on the wall behind my head. I wonder if it is hard for him, seeing and treating me as another recruit. But why would it be? He’s the one who put me in this position. “Do you understand your job while this is going on?”
“I’ll create a distraction in the main room that will occupy security long enough for them not to notice that the feed of an adjoining room has been cut. It has to last at least five minutes,” I answer. “Thirty-one will act as my backup in case something goes wrong.”
“What will you do?” Tim asks me.
“Huh?”
“How will you distract them?”
“There’s a congressman from Michigan who’s having an affair with his aide. Both his wife and the other woman will be there tonight. The wife likes champagne and apparently has a temper. A few whispers, and she’ll make the scene for us.”
“Really?” Tim makes a huffing noise. It is not quite laughter, but it’s close. Twenty-two looks at him sharply.
“According to her history, she likes to throw things,” I say, a little defensively. “It’s the best way to keep a large number of people distracted.”
“Fine,” Wes says. “I’m running point for the mission. Once we put in our I-units, we won’t be able to communicate as ourselves. From that point on, you will all become your aliases. Here.” He hands us each a small contact-lens case. Inside is an I-unit, the future’s version of a cell phone and personal computer, all in one, made to become a part of its wearer.
“You both know what an I-unit is, right?” Twenty-two asks us, unable to keep the condescension from her voice.
“Of course.” Tim is impervious to her tone, and I realize how seriously he is taking this; even though he looks like a bumbling Captain America, he knows that this mission is life or death. If we fail, the Secret Service will descend, and as soon as we run they’ll start shooting. We have no real identities in 2049 beyond the ones that have been created on our I-units. If the Secret Service doesn’t shoot us on sight, then we’ll be faced with treason charges and locked up, or possibly executed. We’re relying on success or on the Project coming to rescue us—and I don’t trust that they will.
Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) Page 2
