How can it not exist? Is this a dead end, or even more of a clue that someone was trying to reach me?
I cross the highway when the cars on the grid glide to a smooth stop and stare at where the address should be. All that’s left is the remnant of a small park that was cut in half by the seawall. Now there is only a tiny patch of green with a rusted bench. An older black man is sitting on it reading a book.
When I get closer, he lifts his head. He looks right at me and I quickly turn, hoping he didn’t have time to scan me. But I hear his book shut as he sets it aside, hear him get to his feet. I start to walk in the opposite direction, wondering if I should run, or if that will give me away too quickly. He clears his throat loudly. “Nikki says hi.”
I stop moving. How does he know that name?
“So does LJ. He wanted to come, but we thought it would be best if it was just me.”
The cars on the highway rush past. They are right next to us, but the sound cannot drown out my heartbeat, ringing in my ears. I slowly turn. He grins and I recognize him then, his wide smile, his broad, blunt features. “Tag?” I whisper.
The last time I saw him—only nine months ago—he was a skinny eighteen-year-old orphan who loved to paint. But this person is a man, his chest is filled out, his hair mostly gray.
“How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t easy. You’re a hard girl to track down.” He turns his head, taking in the busy streets. “It’s not safe here. Will you come with me?”
I do not hesitate. “Yes.”
Chapter 15
I sit up on the narrow bed. Above me is a single naked bulb hanging on a swinging cord. Tag brought me into this room before he took off the blindfold that he asked me to wear. “It’s not because we don’t trust you,” he said as he tied it around my head in his car. “We just need to keep this place a secret from everyone. It’s safer that way.” In the blackness it was impossible to tell where we were going, but we couldn’t have traveled for more than half an hour.
There is a knock on the door, and it opens before I can respond.
“Lydia. You’re here.”
A man enters the room, his honey-colored skin glowing even in the faint light. Like Tag, he looks to be in his sixties. But that doesn’t keep me from recognizing him.
He smiles, and I remember that day in my father’s hardware store when this man came looking for me, how my hand hovered over the plastic phone, ready to call for help.
He sits down in a chair next to the bed. The walls in here are gray concrete, and there are no windows. The room reminds me of the cells in the Montauk Facility, though it isn’t as clean. There is dirt and dust collecting in the corners, and the metal bed frame is chipped and creaking underneath me.
We are silent for a minute, watching each other. From somewhere outside the room I hear a banging noise, then muted voices. Finally I say, “I know who you are.”
“Jay? Or maybe you remember the Resistor?”
But I shake my head. “Jay. Little Jesse. LJ. The Resistor. It all makes sense now.”
“You were always quick, Lydia.” His smile widens.
“That day in the hardware store. Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”
He shrugs his thin shoulders. Unlike Tag, LJ has not filled out as much, and I can see the fourteen-year-old boy in his round face, his large brown eyes. “You didn’t know me yet. I thought you had already been back to the eighties, that you had already met me in the past. But you were confused and scared. I figured it was best to leave it.”
“I can’t believe it was always you.” I shake my head. “You contacted us from the future, fed us information when we needed it. Warned us both that we were meant to become recruits. You started a resistance.” I push forward on the bed, but my arm buckles under me as pain radiates up my wrist. I lift my hand and stare down at it. The skin near my wrist is red and puffy.
“We used an EMP device to short-circuit your tracker.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you feel it, in the car?”
I remember Tag taking my arm as he led me down the street. I thought I felt the sting of something, but I couldn’t be sure, not with all the other cuts and scrapes all over my body.
I flex my wrist. Without my tracking chip, the Project will never know where I am again. The future Lydia told me to make my own choice, but there is something very final about deactivating my chip. I can’t go back now, and I’m not sure what that decision means for me, Wes, or my grandfather.
“You should have asked me first,” I say.
The smile fades from his face and he runs his hand over his head, his buzz cut not quite hiding his balding head. “Don’t you want to be free from the Project, Lydia? It’s time their hold was officially broken. Not just over you, but over everyone.”
I clutch my wrist to my chest. My skin feels raw, heavy and irritating. “What does that mean?”
But he just slaps his hands against his knees and pushes up from his chair. “Let’s talk after you’ve had a minute to process all this. There’s a bathroom through there, if you want to splash cold water on your face.”
I see the battered metal door across from the bed, the edge of a chipped sink visible through the opening.
“I’m glad you’re here, Lydia. We have a lot to discuss, when you’re ready.”
I stare into the cracked mirror above the sink. It is lined with green and black mold, and the basin below is rusted brown. I turn on the faucet and hear the pipes whine. A thin trickle of water comes out and I cup it in my hands, splashing it onto my face.
I step back and stare down at my body. The wound on my leg has scabbed over, but I have new injuries—the scrape on my arm where a bullet grazed me, the raw bruise on my wrist. My eyes have purple smudges underneath, and my cheekbones are even sharper, too thin after almost a week with constant hiking and little food.
The resistance movement is real. It wasn’t a fantasy, a lost hope. And now the sacrifices I made to leave the Center—not knowing what would happen to my grandfather, a future where I might have done good—feel less scary. A resistance could have resources. They could help me.
A knock on the bathroom door interrupts my thoughts. “Come in.”
The door opens to reveal a middle-aged woman with dark curly hair and a round, plump face. “Oh, Lydia,” she whispers. “You look exactly the same as I remember.”
“Nikki.” I breathe her name and then I am in her arms and she is laughing into my hair.
“We didn’t think we’d see you again. LJ tried to find you years ago, but we couldn’t pin down your location, and we figured the Project had you. But then we saw your face plastered all over the news, and we knew we had to find a way to bring you in. I’m so glad you heard the radio message. It was the only way we could think of to contact you.”
She smells like soap and freshly baked bread. I slowly, tentatively lift my hands and press them to her back. This is the first time anyone has embraced me in months, and somehow it means even more coming from Nikki, the tough girl from the streets of New York who used to call me Princess. She tightens her hold and I feel the tears threatening to spill over. I could handle it—fearing for my grandfather, Tim’s death, abandoning Wes in the dark field—if I didn’t have comfort, if I could force myself to stay strong. But being held by her is making me come undone.
I pull away, staring up at the harsh bulb overhead until my eyes are dry and itchy.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like hell.”
She laughs, the sound high and bright. “I can imagine. Come out of this bathroom. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
We enter the bedroom. A teenage girl with Nikki’s sharp features and Tag’s dark skin is standing near the door. “This is my daughter, Angela,” Nikki says.
“Hi,” the girl whispers. She can’t be more than thirteen, and her legs and arms look too long for her body.
“I’m Lydia.”
“I know. Mom talks
about you a lot.”
“Stop it.” Nikki moves to hook her arm over Angela’s bony shoulder. “She’ll think I’ve gotten all soft in my old age.”
I study Nikki’s face, trying to match this older woman with the teenager I knew a few months ago. She still has the same squeaky voice, the pointed nose, but she is softer, less rough and abrasive. “I can’t believe you have a kid.”
“I have two kids. Chris, our son, is with Tag right now.” She pulls Angela in closer and I turn away from the easy affection between them. I haven’t seen my mom in so long, and I am afraid that soon I will start to forget how her blond hair felt after she brushed it, or how her pancakes tasted like almonds and butter.
“I thought we’d never see you again, after you left the squat that day,” Nikki says.
I sit down on the mattress, the iron frame squeaking under me as I stare up at them. “How did you end up here? What happened to the three of you?”
“LJ told Tag and me about the Montauk Project as soon as we realized you were missing. We didn’t believe LJ at first, but he convinced us it was real. I knew we needed to leave, and luckily Tag wanted to come with us.” She squeezes Angela’s side and smiles down at her. The girl has clearly heard the story before and lifts her hand to pick at her cuticles as we talk. “We went to Mexico and stayed with some family for about five years, but then LJ wanted to come back. He had a lead online that he thought could help him learn more about the Project. He was tired of running and decided to fight instead. The three of us changed our names and hopped cities for a few years. LJ was always into computers, you remember?”
I nod.
“He created a few safe places online where people could share information. A lot of them were just conspiracy theorists, but a few former soldiers stepped forward with their stories. At first the Project didn’t seem to notice, but then LJ realized he had a ghost tracing his message boards. That’s when we went off-line. It took a few more years to create all this.” She waves her free hand through the air at the room around us. “We were the first base of operations. But the resistance is spreading. There are two other organizations across the country doing the same thing now.”
When I imagined the resistance, it was one man in a room with a computer. Maybe two. This is more than I could have hoped for.
“What exactly does the resistance do?” I ask.
She frowns, and I wonder if she has told me more than she was supposed to. “LJ should tell you the rest. We’ll show you the control center. It’s just outside.”
She pushes open the bedroom door. The windowless space beyond has high ceilings and rusted pipes that run from corner to corner in crisscrossing lines. There are computers on tables crowded in the center of the room, though none of them are the modern, holographic kinds. Some are even old desktops with wide frames.
Tag is sitting in front of one, with a younger version of him leaning over his shoulder. The boy looks so much like eighteen-year-old Tag that I jerk back when I see him. Nikki smiles. “It’s uncanny, right?”
There are maybe twenty other people here, some bent over desks, some sitting on battered couches that line the water-stained cement walls or clustered in groups, in quiet conversations.
“Are you underground here?” I ask.
Tag and Nikki exchange a look, but it is LJ who answers, stepping out from a connecting hallway. “Yes. But we can’t tell you anything else.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“We don’t trust the Project.”
I don’t like the way he is lumping me in with them, but before I can protest, he motions me forward. “There’s something I want to show you.”
I follow him into a dark hallway. The ceilings are lower, the walls narrow. It feels like a tunnel, and even the lights are dimmer, as if the hallway was designed to conserve energy for the main spaces.
“How did you find this place?”
I don’t expect him to answer, but he says, “I built it not long after I started the resistance.”
“I thought it was just chat rooms and secret messages.”
He looks over his shoulder at me, raising his dark eyebrows. “It’s a little more than that.”
He stops and opens a door on the left. Inside an older woman is sitting in a rocking chair. In her arms is a small baby, its pink face scrunched up in sleep, a fist pressed to its tiny mouth. I glance around the brightly lit room. It is filled with cribs and cots, and dozens of children are sleeping or playing quietly in the corners.
“You have a nursery?” I ask.
The woman makes a shushing noise and LJ shuts the door again.
“We’ve been hacking into the Project’s mainframe to get updated copies of The List.”
“Those kids are supposed to become recruits,” I realize. “You’re getting them before the Project can.”
He nods. “We’ve been rescuing prospective recruits for years, as early as we can. It’s become the core of what the resistance does. Those people you saw out in the main room were all once targeted by the Project, too.”
The resistance is saving these kids from the short, brutal life of a recruit, but he’s still kidnapping them, stealing them away from whatever families they may have.
“Aren’t you worried you’re doing the same thing the Project is, taking them from the only lives they know?”
He starts walking down the hallway again. “What life did they have if we just let the Project take them? Most of them were abandoned, homeless, or about to be swallowed up by the system. We’re rescuing them.”
I think of Tim, who lived for years with his family before the Project came for him. Would he have been better off if someone like LJ had taken him as a child?
We have reached the end of the twisting corridor. “This is what I really wanted to show you, Lydia.”
He pushes the door open, and I feel myself go white, the blood draining from my cheeks.
There, in the middle of the room, gleaming silver under fluorescent light, is a TM.
Chapter 16
I stare up at the large, circular structure. Modern TMs have clouded glass on top, with slick silver on the bottom, but this one is made of interlocking pieces of scrap metal, like an oversize steam pipe. Long wires connect it to a computer mainframe that sits on a broad desk.
I walk closer to the machine, my footsteps loud against the concrete floor.
“Early on we made contact with one of the Project’s engineers, and brought him into the resistance. It took a few years, but he and I were able to use Tesla’s alternating current theory to create this. We made sure to build it in an area with a lot of magnetic energy.”
I move until I’m standing next to the TM. The top reaches all the way to the high cement ceiling, disappearing into it like a tube. “Does it work?”
“Fairly well.”
The room isn’t large, and the TM dominates its space. Overhead a metal catwalk curves between two walls. LJ moves to sit down at the desk. “This is why we live so simply. All our resources go into this.”
I run my hand down the metal side, my fingers catching on the exposed bolts. With a TM, I do not need the Project to help me rescue Tim and Wes. I can go back to the start of the mission myself and change our future. I can save all of us, without having to embrace the destiny that Walker laid out for me. Hope is like a vine growing inside of me, spreading through my stomach, my chest, my heart.
“You’ve sent people back already?” I work to keep the eagerness out of my voice. Nikki said they saw my picture on the news and knew they needed to bring me in, but there must be more to it. LJ would not be watching me so closely if he didn’t want something.
“I was the first to travel,” he says. “I went to nineteen eighty-nine.”
He is silent while I piece it together. “That’s how you sent us those messages. They weren’t from the future. You had just timed it perfectly to be in nineteen eighty-nine when we were connecting the dots.”
He picks up a pen from th
e desk, tapping it on the wooden surface. It is a careless action, but I see the tension in his lined forehead, the rigid set of his shoulders. “I was also the one who gave your grandfather the disk with the list of recruits.”
I turn until my back is to the TM. “Why didn’t you just tell us the truth? Why the message boards and the floppy disk? You know how scared we were when we found our names on that list.”
“I couldn’t. Things had to happen exactly as I remembered them happening. Otherwise the butterfly effect could have ruined everything.”
“The butterfly effect.” I slump back against the metal, sliding down until I’m sitting on the ground. “I am so sick of those words.”
It feels odd to be leaning so casually against a TM. In the Facility it is treated like a god, something to fear and worship, despite knowing it will ultimately destroy us.
“But the butterfly effect is true. I know, better than anyone.” He sighs, and suddenly he seems years older, his chin dipping into his jowls, his eyelids heavy and red. “I tried to save Maria. It didn’t work.”
Maria. The pretty dark-haired girl we tried to rescue from a club after LJ saw her name on the list. “I’m sorry.”
He looks away, concentrating on the desk in front of him. “I’ve been through time a lot now. You know how hard it is on your body. I don’t know how the recruits can last for so many years.”
I think of Wes’s hand shaking against the white linens of the dinner table, Twenty-two’s body facedown in the dirt. “I don’t think many of them do.”
“That’s why we have to stop them for good, Lydia.” He gets up from his chair and walks closer to me. I have to tilt my head back against the TM to look into his face. “And we need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“Go back to the beginning. Stop the Montauk Project from ever existing in the first place.”
I sit in the small bedroom, staring at a poster of a shirtless singer I don’t recognize, one of those baby-faced teens who never seem to go out of style no matter the decade. Angela is sheltered down here—LJ says he keeps them off the grid as much as possible, no I-units, no government-run internet, only an old television—but she is still a teenage girl. Sitting on her narrow bed, staring at her dresser crammed with knickknacks, her books stacked on the floor, I am jealous of her space, of the tiny corner of the world that belongs only to her. It was something I took for granted when I had it, and miss it now that I don’t.
Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) Page 14