“I just wish we knew what it was.”
“If this mission wasn’t your destiny, then why would Walker bring it up?”
“I don’t know. But why wouldn’t it be your destiny, too? Why is it just mine?” Above our heads, thin clouds create a veil that blocks the shape and texture of the moon. But there is enough light to see the shadow of Tim’s face, the steady rise and fall of Wes’s and Twenty-two’s shoulders as they sleep. “Maybe he meant something else. Maybe this was just a cover for the real reason they made me a recruit.”
“Like what?”
I have no answer and I stay quiet, turning my head to stare into the woods. There is no movement, no noise, and I wonder how alone we are out here, how close the Secret Service truly are.
“Have you asked him about it?”
I follow Tim’s chin jerk to where Wes is lying on the ground. “No. There’s no point.”
“What happened with you two, anyway?”
“It’s complicated.”
He swings one finger in a circle, encompassing the small clearing, the looming trees. “We’ve got hours.”
I do not tell him about the moments when Wes kissed me or held me close, how his voice was so low when he said he loved me. But I describe my trip to 1944, changing the future by mistake, finding my grandfather again in 1989, and Wes’s betrayal. I tell him about the Project holding my grandfather hostage, and why I wasn’t brainwashed. By the time I am finished my throat is sore, and I reach for the jug of water—almost empty again—and tilt it back against my lips.
“That’s insane,” Tim says. “They just took me from my bed in the middle of the night. I didn’t think I was lucky, but maybe I was.”
“Lucky? You think this is lucky?”
“Well, not lucky, no. They tried to control me through physical torture, and that sucked, believe me. But it was like a Band-Aid being ripped off, not a long, slow, bleeding wound. Maybe that’s why they never broke me.”
Is that what I am, broken? I think back to the Lydia I used to be: impulsive but still analytical, loyal, able to laugh and joke. If I had been pulled from my bed one night, would I still be that person, even after months in the cold Facility? Would I be like Tim, eager to reach out to anyone who seems receptive?
The Project did break something in me, but it was Wes who made those first, initial cracks. They only finished what he started, and now I’m in pieces, with no idea how to put myself back together again.
I stare at Tim’s profile. His nose is wide, his mouth small for his face, but when he smiles he is almost as beautiful as Wes. I thought that shutting everything out was for my benefit, but maybe I was only playing into their hands, giving them what they wanted—a shell who would do their bidding. But they can’t take everything from me. I won’t let them. It’s time I start remembering who I am.
“Tim,” I whisper.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Lydia. My name is Lydia.”
I can just barely make out the sheen of his teeth as he smiles at me in the dark.
Chapter 10
A raindrop falls on my cheek, startling me awake. I sit up on the moss, already wet with dew, and more rain hits my head, my bare arms. Tim stirs next to me, his hand coming up to swat his neck, as though the water is a fly buzzing in his ear.
Wes emerges from the woods and stops short when he sees me awake. “Twenty-two circled back to see if we’re being followed,” he says after a minute. “She’ll be here soon.”
“We need to keep moving, don’t we?”
He nods without looking at me. He hasn’t met my eyes since our conversation by the stream. I wonder if he even remembers the way his hand curled around mine when I touched his shoulder to wake him in the middle of the night. He had whispered my name, too, but the sound made him jerk fully awake and he sat up, pushing away from me.
Now he walks over to Tim and nudges him with his boot, just as Twenty-two appears at the tree line. “Get up. It’s time to go.”
At first the hiking is like yesterday, and we trudge forward, the few raindrops that squeak through the leaves wetting our hair and our shoulders. But by midday it is pouring, and I am soaked to the skin, my shirt plastered to my chest, the oversized jeans threatening to fall down to my ankles with the weight of the water. The ground, once hard, becomes muddy and soft, and our feet slip and sink into it.
I keep thinking of what Tim said last night about helping each other escape. Right now we need the Project—it’s the only way we’ll get away from the Secret Service. But what about afterward?
I told Tim part of my story, but I didn’t tell him about finding the list of future recruits with LJ in 1989, or about the mysterious Resistor. It’s not that I don’t trust Tim, but if a resistance movement does exist, then I don’t want to unintentionally put him in danger.
Though I’ve wondered about the resistance, before now I’ve never considered what it could mean if it existed. But opening up to Tim allowed me to hope in a way I haven’t been able to in months. If they’re real, could they help us? Would they be willing? It’s a long shot, but looking for them would give Tim and me a goal, a way to try and take back control of our futures.
Two hours, three hours pass, and the rain gets thicker, the mud deeper. And then Twenty-two takes a step, her foot sinks into the ground, and it doesn’t stop until she is submerged to the knee. “Eleven!” she shouts. Wes pulls her out and the hole makes a sucking noise when her boot pops free.
“It’s a marsh,” Wes says. “We can’t keep going forward. We’ll need to turn back and find another path.”
“It’s too dangerous.” I have to shout above the rain. “The Secret Service will have figured out that we’re not moving north by now. They could be right behind us. And the water is rising. The whole forest might flood.”
“We could climb up, wait it out in the trees,” Tim suggests.
But the trunks are slick, and I see Wes eye my leg, still not fully healed.
“Who knows how long the rain will last.” Twenty-two has her arms wrapped around her middle, her head bent low. “I don’t want to be stranded out here, with no food and no shelter.”
“We’ll make our way west.” Wes starts to move forward. “And try to find higher ground.”
We walk until the rain is so heavy that everything around us is blurry and dim. The small streams that wind through the woods have flooded in the quick storm. Wes leads us to a hill, a tiny oasis surrounded by water on all sides. Twenty-two keeps her head down, her shoulders hunched. Her face is a pale sliver hidden by the heavy ropes of her dark hair.
At the top of the incline, I step forward, but Wes pulls me back, his hand sliding across the wet skin of my arm. “Watch out!” he yells into the rain.
I had been walking on autopilot, my feet sinking into the mud over and over, but now I focus on the ground in front of me. I am standing on the edge of a deep square hole, the bottom filled with a layer of water and grass—the dug-out cellar for a house that was swept away by the flooding years ago. “Thanks,” I whisper to Wes, not sure he hears me above the endless falling water.
“There.” Tim points to the other side of the hill. Tucked up against the side of a tree is the dark frame of an old car. As we get closer, I see that the body is rusted, but the roof is still there.
Wes reaches for the door handle, struggling with the warped metal. Tim helps and together they manage to pry open the driver’s-side door with a low creaking noise.
We crawl in: Twenty-two and Tim in the back, Wes and me in front. The car has deep bucket seats, the leather faded and ripped. There are seeds on the ground near my feet, and I wonder how many animals have made this their home.
The rain pounding on the metal roof echoes through the small interior. It smells musty in here, like dirt and stale water. Twenty-two stays huddled, her arms wrapped around her middle. She will not lift her head, and her body is a shadow pressed against the door.
I am sitting in the driver’s seat. In front
of me the instruments are old and manual, with no digital screens like in newer cars. The steering wheel is still there, a thin circle of sharp metal. I grip it with both hands, trying to twist it back and forth. But it has long ago rusted in place, and the wheel won’t budge.
“What are you doing?” Wes whispers. His voice is low enough that Tim and Twenty-two can’t hear.
“Practicing my driving skills.”
He doesn’t smile, but his eyes crinkle at the corners and I know he’s amused. It feels like he and I are alone in here, and I can imagine us in a different lifetime, a normal Wes and Lydia driving in a car like this, the window down and the radio on.
“The keys are in the ignition. Maybe it’ll start.”
It is the first time he has even attempted a joke in this time period. I’m still not sure how to feel about him and his betrayal, but I don’t want to lose this moment. I reach over and turn the key.
The lights on the dashboard flicker on. I jerk back in surprise, the keys swinging in the air with the sudden movement.
“There’s still juice in it.” Tim leans forward into the space between the seats. “Listen.”
I hear a faint humming noise. Wes reaches forward and turns up the volume on the radio. A buzz of static fills the small car.
“It’s too loud,” Twenty-two says from the back. “Turn it off.”
“Wait.” I reach for the tuning dial and start to twist it slowly. “We might be able to hear the news. It could give us a clue about where the Secret Service is.”
It is mostly static—this far from civilization it’s hard to pick up any stations—but we finally hear the faint twang of a country song. I stop twisting and Wes turns the volume up. The song ends and a commercial starts, advertising for cars at a local dealership. Finally, the announcer’s voice comes on.
We’ll get back to the music in a sec, folks, but first we want to give you an update on the news that’s rocking the nation. Here’s the official report from Hill House.
The voice cuts out and a more professional-sounding woman begins speaking.
The suspects in the assassination of President Sardosky are still at large, and civilians along the East Coast are urged to wear their I-units at all times, so that any suspicious activity can be monitored by the FBI and the Secret Service. Officials believe the four have taken to the woods near the coastline, and northern states have been put on high alert as the suspects are most likely headed toward Canada. The four were initially identified as Michael Gallo, Samantha Greenwood, Bea Carlisle, and Paul Sherman, but the FBI has confirmed that those aliases were forged. We don’t know yet who the suspects were working for, or if this was an independent act of terrorism, but we can tell you that when they are found they will be prosecuted to the highest extent of the law.
Meanwhile, the funeral services for President Sardosky will be held . . .
Wes turns down the volume until the voice is just a low hum.
“He’s dead,” I say flatly. “We killed him.”
“Good.” Twenty-two lifts her head for the first time since the rain started. Her eyes are brighter than normal, dark and shining in the dim light of the car. “That means the mission was a success. We won’t have to do it again.”
“But why hasn’t the Project come for us yet?” Tim asks. “Why haven’t they tracked and rescued us?”
“We’ve completed the mission,” Twenty-two says. “But there were obvious complications. The Project will weigh the benefits of bringing us in versus the cost of leaving us out here. The odds are rarely in favor of the recruits.”
“We’re valuable to them.” I cannot keep the frustration out of my voice. “They wouldn’t just leave us here.” I think of what Twenty-two said earlier about the Secret Service torturing us for information. If the Project knows that’s a possibility, then they wouldn’t risk us falling into the government’s hands.
“Some of us are more valuable than others,” Twenty-two mumbles, and I think of what she said about me being special to General Walker in some way. “But I guess not valuable enough, huh? Not if they don’t come for you.”
“Maybe they can’t get to us.” Tim keeps his voice even, but he slumps back against the battered seat, his shoulders low. “Maybe the manhunt is too big for them to rescue us without drawing too much attention to themselves.”
“The size doesn’t matter. They could still find a way,” Wes says. “There might be another reason they haven’t come yet. The time line could have changed.”
No one speaks. Right now, the four of us are outside our normal times. If the past, and therefore the present, were altered, we would be completely unaware of it.
“But the president is dead,” I say. “So the time line couldn’t have changed that much. They know we’re out here. But we can’t count on them coming. We need to stick to the plan and make our way to Montauk before the Secret Service finds us.”
“You heard the radio,” Tim says. “They still think we’re going north. They have no idea where we are.”
“We can’t trust that.” Wes stares out the windshield at the water beating against the smudged glass. “They wouldn’t leak their military strategy to the local media. I bet they know we’ve changed direction by now. We need to try and steal a car. Quickly.”
I lay my palm against the steering wheel. This car might have a tiny bit of power left in the battery, but it isn’t going to take us anywhere.
“Turn the radio up.” Tim says. “They can’t track us in the rain, and we’re not going anywhere until it stops.”
Wes turns the knob and the announcer’s scratchy voice fills the car again, cut here and there by patches of static. We sit in silence, listening. Every once in a while they will play a song, or sometimes an advertisement, but mostly it is a constant, repetitive loop of the media’s reportage of the national manhunt to find the four people who assassinated the president.
The rain outside slows, then stops, until all that’s left are fat drops of water that fall from the branches overhead to splat against the roof of the car. The sun starts to shine again, runny and thin.
“Time to keep moving.” Wes reaches for his door handle, but I put my hand on his arm as something on the radio catches my attention.
“Wait. Listen.”
So come on down to Bentley’s Hardware where you’ll find half-price Peter-brand shovels and discounted mowers for the summer season. Sale ends Friday. That’s Bentley’s Hardware, one-six-seven Eleventh Avenue, New York, New York.
“Did that just say . . .” I whisper.
Wes frowns. “Bentley’s Hardware.”
“What does it mean?” I turn to look at him. “Is it a coincidence? Is there another Bentley’s Hardware?”
“It must be.” But I hear the doubt in Wes’s voice. “This is the future. Maybe your family moved to New York City after Montauk was flooded.”
“It said Peter-brand shovels. There are no Peter-brand shovels. And Peter is my grandfather’s name.”
“You can’t know all the brands of shovels, not in twenty forty-nine.” Wes turns down the radio, but I am breathing too hard to hear the silence. “Lydia, don’t jump to conclusions. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Then why was it on a New Washington radio station? It’s a New York store. It doesn’t make sense. Someone knows we’re here and is trying to send us a message.”
“You can’t know that.”
“You’re the one who said you don’t believe in coincidences, remember? And that far south, Eleventh Avenue is basically the West Side Highway. There are no family-owned hardware stores over there.”
Wes leans toward me, resting his hand on the gearshift between us. “Lydia, the city could have changed.”
“In just thirty years?”
It is Twenty-two who answers, the edge in her voice even sharper than normal. “It’s not likely that a small hardware store would be in that area.” She waits a beat. “I take it this name means something to you . . . Lydia?”
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Wes opens and closes his mouth, realizing his mistake. He turns to face her in the cramped space. “Twenty-two. We, Seventeen and I—”
“Knew each other before? I’m getting that.” She gestures at Tim. “What about you? You don’t seem surprised.”
“Leave Lydia alone,” he says. “Can’t you see how much this is affecting her?”
Wes looks at Tim. “You know her name. She told you her name.”
“She—”
“Can we please concentrate on what’s important here?” I raise my voice a little and they all fall silent. “I think this is a message for us. A location and a date. It might be from the Project. It says the sale ends on Friday. That’s in two days. We have to get there before then.”
“Lydia . . .” Tim leans forward between the seats and Wes pulls back, pressing into the side window. “You don’t know this was for you. There are a lot of Bentleys in the world. It could just be an advertisement, picked up by another channel. A coincidence.”
“It’s meant for me, for all of us. I can feel it.”
“You’re tired,” Wes cuts in. “We all are. We’ll keep moving, we’ll find a car, but it’d be impossible to get to New York in two days.”
“What if I went alone? What if I found help for us and came back for you guys?”
Tim is shaking his head before I even finish the words. “You have no proof this means anything. We can’t let you do it.”
“If they capture you, then we’ll all be at risk,” Twenty-two adds.
I catch Wes’s eye. He looks tired in the pale sunlight, a streak of dirt painted on the side of his cheek. “I can’t just sit here, doing nothing, waiting for those swarms of soldiers to find us,” I say. “This could be what we’ve been waiting for, the Project reaching out to us. This might be the only chance we have. Can’t you see that we have to try?”
Wes sighs, and I know he wants to agree with me, wants to give me something in exchange for what he took. But then he says, “It’s too dangerous, Lydia. And too much of a risk for something that’s probably a fluke.”
Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) Page 10
