Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You)

by Rachel Carter

  “What happened here?”

  I jump, realizing he’s speaking to me.

  “I . . . I . . . he fell, he just started shaking. I don’t know what’s happening.” I am scared enough for my voice to tremble naturally. What do I do now? Backup is already on its way. I could disable the agent and barricade the door until Sardosky is dead, but then they’d know I had a hand in this. I would never make it out of here alive. And who knows what would happen to Wes, Tim, and Twenty-two?

  The Secret Service agent skirts the couch and falls to his knees next to Sardosky. The president’s lips have turned blue, his eyes still open but glazed over, unseeing and empty. “Why didn’t you get help?”

  “It just happened. I haven’t had time.”

  He presses two fingers to Sardosky’s neck. “He’s still breathing. The ambulance will be here in seconds. Move to the side; I’ll deal with you later.”

  Time to abort.

  “Please . . . my fiancé doesn’t know I’m here. Can I leave?”

  The agent looks up at me quickly, taking in my wrinkled gown, my shaking hands. “Just go. You’ll only get in the way.”

  “Thank—”

  I can’t finish the word before the door swings open again. It is Tim, wide-eyed and frantic. “It’s mayhem out there. We need to go.”

  I wave my arm through the air in a stopping motion, but it is too late. The agent heard every word. He springs to his feet, and I see Tim jerk back, not realizing that someone else was behind the couch. The agent takes in Tim’s waiter uniform and my formal dress, and his hand falls to the gun at his side.

  “You two know each other?”

  “Go.” I spit the word at Tim, then run for the door. I hear a shot fired, and the bullet hurtles past my cheek, close enough for me to feel the heat of it. Another shot, but it misses too and I grab Tim’s arm as I pass, pulling him behind me. We run out into the hallway, then quickly enter the ballroom. People are running in every direction and the screaming is so loud I’m surprised I didn’t hear it in the library.

  “Samantha!” Wes is halfway across the room, fighting the crowd to reach me. Twenty-two is right behind him. Tim and I run toward them, shouldering and pushing people out of our way.

  “We heard the president had a heart attack,” Twenty-two says, still in character.

  “They know.” I let go of Tim and clutch the lapel of Wes’s jacket. “They’re coming. We need to leave.”

  Wes looks over my head. I follow his gaze to see a cluster of Secret Service agents pointing in our direction.

  “Come on, before they seal the exits.” Twenty-two turns and we follow her as she pushes through the crowd, using her small body as a battering ram. A loud noise comes from somewhere above our heads—a siren, an announcement. Please remain calm. Due to an investigation we ask that you remain in this room so that we can question those involved. You are in no danger.

  People around us murmur, then still, gathering into tight groups as they speculate about what happened. It is the mentality of those witnessing a fire or a car accident—the need for companionship, for information, to see the disaster firsthand.

  Twenty-two reaches up and pinches her eyeballs, pulling out her I-units and throwing them to the ground. She grinds her heel into each one. Wes, Tim, and I copy her actions. Other people can still scan us, but at least now the Secret Service won’t be able to track our movements.

  “What do we do?” Tim whispers. He is hunched over slightly, trying to hide his unmistakably large frame.

  “The windows.” Wes’s voice is impassive, blank, despite the men in suits who are pushing through the crowd to find us. “There’s no point in being subtle now. If we try for the doors, then they’ll either lock us up or shoot us.”

  “Would locking us up be so bad?” Tim asks. “Then maybe the Project can get us out later.”

  Wes turns to him. “Is that a risk you want to take?”

  Tim doesn’t answer, and I shake my head. “We’ll run. It’s our only option.”

  “Get to the windows,” Twenty-two says.

  The four of us keep our shoulders bent, our faces away from the I-units of the other guests as we make our way past the table where the president was sitting only minutes ago. The Secret Service agents push through the crowd, searching for us, but without our I-units we have become harder to find in this teeming mass of people. It doesn’t take long to reach the edge of the room. The ballroom is on the ground floor, overlooking the front of the hotel. The window is tightly locked and stretches up at least twenty feet. Wes is right—this won’t be subtle, but there’s no choice now.

  He picks up a chair and throws it through the window in front of us. We all duck and cover our heads as glass pours down like beating hail, small slivers bouncing off our hair and shoulders. I feel a piece slice into my upper arm and the rush of blood that follows. Someone screams, and the mood of the crowd shifts again, louder, on the verge of frenzied. I see a woman run past, her silk dress slapping against her legs. The Secret Service seem to disappear, lost in the panic and noise.

  Twenty-two uses her hand to push some of the remaining glass out of the frame. Blood from her palms smears across the window ledge as she launches herself through the open space. Tim is slower, trying not to touch the jagged pieces. “Go, go, go,” Wes yells. I follow, leaping through the frame. My long gown gets caught on a protruding shard, and it tears through the thin fabric. I land half on a bush, half on the sidewalk and I quickly scramble to my feet, turning to watch Wes jump through after me. For a second he appears frozen in midair, silhouetted in the dim light, splinters of glass reflecting all around him.

  He falls hard beside me, landing on his back against the pavement. Twenty-two and Tim are already in the street, running for a parked car. I help Wes get up, and we keep our fingers linked together as we chase after them. In the distance I hear more sirens. They are getting closer.

  Twenty-two kicks through the back window of the car. There’s no way to get the doors open without an electronic key, so she dives inside despite the glass. She crawls into the front seat. Tim follows her, clumsy, like he has forgotten how to move his body.

  Wes lets go of my hand and climbs in first, reaching back to help me up over the rounded hood. My knees, now bare where my gown was ripped, sink into the broken pieces of glass, but I don’t have time to check and see if they’re cut. I slide through the window and join Tim in the back as Wes moves to the passenger’s seat.

  “Can you start it without the key?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “It wouldn’t matter anyway. They’ve frozen the grid.”

  I look out the window. Drivers don’t exist in 2049; vehicles run on a system of automated tracks that are built into every road, eliminating accidents and traffic jams. But now they are at a standstill, motionless in the middle of the street. The Secret Service must have shut down transportation as soon as they realized there was an assassination attempt.

  “We need to get it off the grid,” Wes says. “I’ll disconnect it from the mainframe. You hot-wire the engine.”

  “Okay.” Both of their voices are calm, maddeningly so, as though they are discussing what to eat for dinner. I feel Tim dig his fingers into the seat next to me, the tension coming off his body in waves.

  “Here.” I take off my shoe and toss it to the front of the car. “Use this.”

  Wes jams the pointed heel into the plastic box under the steering wheel, prying it open to reveal a tangle of wires. Thank God this is an older model of car, and it still has a steering wheel, still has the capacity to be driven off the grid. It means we have a chance.

  Twenty-two bends down, ripping through the hardware with her hands while Wes uses my heel to force open the dashboard. He starts fiddling with the wires there too, a mess of red and blue and green and white lines. Twenty-two is successful first and the engine sparks, catches, and rolls over, humming underneath us. But we’re not moving. Wes is taking longer to override the system, and I see hi
s hands start to shake, the vibrations traveling all the way up his arms until it seems that his whole body is trembling.

  “Shit,” Tim breathes, and I turn to see a dark-suited member of the Secret Service standing just inside the broken window of the hotel. She raises her gun and points it at the car.

  “Hurry, Wes.” I try, but cannot keep the panic out of my voice. “You can do this. Just breathe.”

  Sweat falls from his forehead, sliding down into his hair, and finally the shaking subsides. I hold my breath as he connects two wires. “Do it now.” His voice is strained.

  Twenty-two steps on the pedal and the car surges forward, just as the gunshots start. I hear the bullets crack against the pavement behind us.

  “Go, go, go,” I whisper. Twenty-two yanks us into the road, swerving around the frozen, stalled cars. I turn to look out the shattered back window. Three Secret Service agents have emerged from the front doors of the hotel and are now climbing into their own black car. In less than two seconds they are following us, easily breaking out of the grid.

  “They’re right behind us,” Tim says. Shots ring out again, ricocheting off the back of the car in a torrent of metal on metal. Tim and I both duck down, folding our bodies in an effort to stay out of range.

  “Faster!” I shout at Twenty-two.

  She swerves us to the right, left, right again. There are parked cars everywhere and it’s like we’re in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to navigate a suddenly abandoned civilization. But these cars aren’t empty, and the people inside stare at us as we pass. I wonder if the I-units of these strangers are being monitored even now, telling the Secret Service exactly where we are. A human tracking system.

  We leave the new city and pick up speed on the highway. In the distance I see where the ocean has risen, where the old city is crumbling into the sea. A few buildings remain, their windows broken and empty, half buried in the water at their base. In the distance, the Washington Monument rises out of the waves, a single beacon left standing in the ruins.

  I slump down farther. With the back window gone, the air whips through the car like a funnel, ringing in my ears and sending my hair flying around my head. The black car isn’t far behind us, and now another has joined it. They’re both gaining speed.

  Wes glances back at me. His hands are clenched in front of him, and I know it is killing him that Twenty-two is the one driving, that he is not in control. “Keep down. Your hair is like a bull’s-eye.” Every word he says is shouted over the wind.

  “I’m trying.” I hear more gunshots, loud even over the whipping air, the roaring engine. One flies through the car, cracking the windshield, and now it is a spiderweb of glass with a neat hole where the bullet has flown back into the night. Twenty-two shifts her body, trying to see through the side that’s still clear. Tim, hunched over, his muscled frame pressed against his knees, turns his head toward me. His eyes are too hidden to see in the darkness of the car, especially now that we have left the city and the streetlights are gone, but I know he is scared. He puts his hand out on the seat between us. Like mine, it is spotted with blood. I stare at it for a second, at how broad his palm is, open and exposed, his fingers slightly curled. When the gunshots start again I reach out and clutch his hand to mine, assuring us both that the bullets have not found us yet, that we are still alive.

  We are getting farther from the city, and the new-growth forest emerges, lining the side of the road. This highway is emptier than the dense city streets were, but there are still cars dotted in our path. Twenty-two weaves us in and out, back and forth, making my body slide across the seat—first into Tim, then pressed against the window. I try to brace myself, though the turns are too quick, we are going too fast.

  But not fast enough, and the cars behind us are creeping closer. Up ahead a semitruck is lengthwise across the road, halfway through a turn when the grid shut down. Twenty-two cuts the wheel to the right and we skid along the asphalt, narrowly missing a minivan with two little kids inside, their pale faces pressed to the darkened windows. “Hold on,” I hear her say, and I know it is serious because her voice has finally changed, finally lost that detached, unshakable quality. Now she sounds shrill. Panicked.

  She jerks the wheel to the left and the car angles so quickly that it seems we will flip over. My stomach drops as if we are on a roller coaster, the very moment of descent. Tim grips my hand in his as I squeeze my other one into the battered leather seat, trying to hold on.

  “On the left!” I hear Wes shout, and then something slams into the side of the car in a blast of noise and sparks and screeching tires. I am thrown forward and feel Tim’s fingers slip away from mine. My body is in the air. My head collides with something hard. I fall back against the seat as the window explodes, as the metal erupts, and my body, just skin and blood and bones, is no match for the force of it.

  Chapter 7

  “Lydia.” Someone is shaking me. “Open your eyes.”

  I feel pain, a fire burning up my leg. I blindly reach out with my hands. Something touches my fingers, forces them down.

  “Open your eyes,” the voice repeats, and it is so urgent, so desperate that I do. All I see is black.

  “You need to try and move. We only have a few minutes.” It is Wes, and I turn my head toward his voice. He looks fuzzy at first, but then his shape forms, standing in the doorway of the car—though there’s no door now, just a twisted clump of metal pushed to the side.

  “I’m pinned.” I choke out the words. “I can’t move.”

  “You’re not pinned.” He puts his hand on my forehead, slides it down the side of my cheek. He is so warm that I lean in to him, trying not to close my eyes again. “I pulled the metal away. You have a cut on your leg, but it’s not too deep. It already stopped bleeding.”

  I look down. He has ripped the hem off my dress and used it to bandage my lower thigh. The silk is sticky, but the blood doesn’t look like it’s spreading.

  I sit up, wincing when the movement reaches my left leg. Wes’s hand falls away from my face. I see Twenty-two standing near the headlights, her gown torn off at the knees, blood trickling from a cut under her eye. Tim is propped against the open driver’s-side door, one hand clutching the opposite elbow, his face chalky, his lips cracked. Only Wes is unscathed, though his dress shirt is ripped across the collar and I see a bruise forming on the sharp line of his chin.

  “Hurry up,” Twenty-two snaps. “They’re coming.”

  The crash. The Secret Service chasing us. We need to keep moving. I push up from the seat and take the hand that Wes offers me. Both of my shoes are on again; he must have slipped the other one back on my foot while I was unconscious. He pulls me out of the car. My leg is not as bad as I first thought; it only throbs a little when I put my weight on it.

  “The woods,” Wes says. “We can lose them there.”

  There’s a car flipped over across from us, dark and silent, and from somewhere behind the semitruck, orange flames throw black, tar-like smoke up in the air. I can’t find any agents, but a small group of civilians stands near the side of the road. Their hands are pressed to their mouths, their bodies turned toward each other. They have seen everything with their I-units, which means the rest of the Secret Service won’t be far behind.

  “We need to move quickly.” Twenty-two walks away, her strides long for her small body, her ragged dress hanging from her shoulders. The three of us follow. Wes easily matches her quick steps, and soon they are almost running, their heads tucked low as they cross the dirt-packed breakdown lane—a remnant of the old highway—and enter a short patch of grass that separates the road from the forest up ahead.

  Tim and I run too, but we are slower, and I limp stiffly while he never lets go of his elbow. The pale skin of his arm has turned dark with blood and I wonder how badly he’s injured, if maybe we should stop. But behind us I can still hear the crackling of the fire. It is only a matter of minutes before backup arrives.

  The grass around us is high, brushi
ng against the shreds of my gown. It smells like turned-over earth and new leaves, almost erasing the heavy metallic smoke that coats my nose, my throat.

  “There’s another car coming,” Tim whispers, panting around the words. My ears ache from the crash, the gunshots, the screaming wind, and I barely hear him. “It’s getting closer. Can’t you hear the engine?”

  “Not yet.” I jog a little faster. “They won’t stop looking for us. Wes is right; the only way we’ll have a shot is if we can disappear into the woods.”

  “The Project will find us first.” Tim moves until he’s running next to me, until we’re pushing through the long grass side by side. “They’ll track us using our chips. We won’t be out here for long.”

  I bite my lip, not answering, not wanting him to hear the doubt in my voice. Walker may have gone on and on about my destiny, but if Sardosky is dead, that means I’ve already fulfilled it. I don’t trust the Project not to leave us out here, four more casualties of the mission.

  In front of us, Wes and Twenty-two are two hunched figures, their heads tucked low. Despite the moonlight overhead, the fire at our backs, I cannot make out the details of their bodies, and when the forest claims their shadows, I force myself to move faster, to fight my way to the hollow safety of the woods.

  The trees around us are top-heavy pines that stretch six feet before their branches start. I walk the way the Project taught me: on the balls of my feet, bringing my weight forward and putting almost no pressure on the ground. It is easy to be silent here, with this carpet of pine needles beneath us and almost no underbrush to crush or snap.

  We walk and walk, not talking, not slowing. We are pacing ourselves, moving quickly but not running, always aware of who is hunting us. Sometimes we can hear them—the faraway bark of a dog, a shout carried on the wind.