Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You)
Page 21
“You’re alive,” I whisper. “I thought . . .”
“That I was dead? Is that why you left me?” Neither of us answers. “I eventually broke out of a federal prison, and made it to Montauk on my own.”
Wes steps away from the door of the truck so that his body is partially in front of mine. “How did you find us?”
She turns the gun until it’s pointed at him. “One of the scientists here logged that he saw a girl who had a similar appearance to Seventeen exit the TM. The general said that if I found her, Eleven would be there, too.” Her mouth twists slightly.
“We tried to go back for you,” I say. “There were too many bullets. We couldn’t reach you.”
She keeps the gun on Wes, ignoring me. The wind from the ocean whips through her sleek, dark ponytail, sending pieces of hair fanning out over her shoulder. “I’ve been instructed to use force, if necessary. He doesn’t need you both, just Seventeen. Eleven is expendable.”
I jerk forward, but Wes puts his arm out to stop me. “I’m not going.” I spit out the words.
She steps closer, her eyes on Wes’s arm, curled protectively across my body. “I’ll shoot him if you don’t.”
Wes is silent, his muscles tight, his gaze trained on Twenty-two. Her hand trembles. It is just a moment, just a second, but we both see it.
“I have to complete this mission,” she states. “I have to do whatever it takes to bring Seventeen back to General Walker.”
“I know why they want me. But I won’t do it.” I am shouting at her now, and still the words are lost, muted by the constant wind.
“Seventeen is valuable to the Project.” Her eyes flash, though otherwise she keeps her face carefully empty. It is like she is a thin sheet of ice—tranquil on the surface, water raging underneath. “Eleven is too old. He has been traveling too long.”
“He saved you.” I push against Wes’s arm, and he lowers it slowly. “He saved your life and you fell in love with him. I watched how you looked at him in the woods. Do you think I didn’t see it? You can’t shoot him, any more than I could.”
“And I watched you!” Her voice finally cracks, the gun swinging toward me. I stop moving, and Wes’s body becomes even more solid beside mine. “I watched you flirt with Thirty-one. I watched Eleven staring at you anyway, trying to protect you. I even watched you an hour ago, sleeping in the same bed together. I’ll be happy to deliver you back to Walker.”
“What will happen then?” I demand. “You’ll keep going through the TM until your body falls apart, until you’re killed, like Tim? Is that what you want?”
“What else is there? You don’t know. Not like we know.” Her eyes dart toward Wes, then back to me. “You weren’t tortured. You didn’t have to . . .”
“You’re right, I wasn’t tortured. But Wes was, and he’s not choosing to remain loyal to the Project. He’s choosing to get out.”
“There is no way out!” She screams the words. “They’re everything, they’re everywhere!”
“There is a way—” I start to speak but she cuts me off.
“You’ve brainwashed him,” she says harshly. “You’ve made him doubt the Project. It’s your fault they want him dead.”
I rear back and Wes touches my elbow. Twenty-two glares at me, so hard I can feel the heat of it.
“It’s not Lydia’s fault,” Wes says. “She hasn’t done anything other than help me change, and help me realize that they don’t have the right to control us.”
“Lydia,” Twenty-two spits out. “Her name. You all knew it. Why? How?”
“Because I told him.”
Wes’s grip on my arm tightens. He looks down at me briefly before he turns back to face Twenty-two. She is watching him with a desperation I didn’t know she was capable of. “Because for the first time in years, I cared about someone else’s name.” Wes’s voice is steady. “For the first time in years someone asked me what mine was. She helped me remember.”
“Wes?” She half chokes on the name.
I clench my hands into fists, not liking the way she says it, as though it belongs to her.
“And you could remember too,” Wes says, “if we stop the Project now.”
The gun drops half an inch. “What are you talking about?”
Wes lets go of my arm and steps forward. Twenty-two swings her gaze to his, her eyes widening, her mouth parting as he draws near.
“There’s a way to erase everything that happened,” he says. “There’s a way for us to go back to the beginning.”
“What do you mean?” she whispers. I cannot hear her over the wind and the waves, but I watch her mouth the words. I take a step closer, but as soon as I move she lifts the gun again, her eyes narrowing on mine.
“Okay, okay.” I hold my arms up like a criminal. “I’ll stay here. I’m not moving.”
Wes raises his hand, moving it downward in a soothing motion. It works to distract her, and Twenty-two stares at him. “Don’t you want to make it all go away?” he asks. “Don’t you want to stop being a recruit?”
Her recruit mask cracks and breaks apart, and I can suddenly see the longing in her eyes. “Yes. It’s all I want.”
“What was your name?”
She swallows. “I don’t remember.”
“Think. What’s your name?”
She opens her mouth and a low sound escapes.
“What?” He leans forward. “Say it louder.”
“Althea. My name is Althea.”
“Greek,” I say, and her eyes swing to me. She is blinking rapidly.
“My mother was Greek. She . . . died. I had no family. They found me.” She raises one of her hands and presses it to her forehead. I can see it shaking, even through the fog that surrounds her.
“Althea.” Wes says her name. “We can send you back to your own time. What year were you taken from?”
“Two thousand and four.”
“You can go back there. We’ll send you back, and you’ll rejoin the time line. We’ll destroy the TM and then no one will be hunting you. You’ll be free. You won’t forget the Project, but you can have your life back again. Create a new life. A family, maybe.”
“A family,” she repeats, as though it is both sacred and forbidden, a word that must be whispered instead of shouted.
“Give me the gun.” Wes holds his hand out. “Help us.”
“I . . .” She looks at him, down at the gun, over at me. “I don’t know how.”
“Just let go.”
She stares at him blankly.
“I understand that it’s hard,” Wes tries again. “The Project has been making choices for us for too long. But this is your choice. They can’t do it for you, not this time.”
I watch her wrestling with the decision, her brown eyes darkening, her small, compact body braced against the haze that rolls in off the ocean. It is not the choice that is hard, it is the making of it, the act of remembering freedom. She closes her eyes, her jaw tightens, and then she slowly drops her arm. Wes takes the last few steps to reach her and forces the gun from her limp hand. She doesn’t fight him, her body swaying toward his.
He turns to face me. “Let’s go.”
I nod and open the door of the truck.
“We should use the bunker in Sector Three-J,” Twenty-two—Althea—interrupts me.
She sits between us on the bench seat of Wes’s truck, listening to me fill her in on our plan, her back straight, her eyes on the windshield. The old, nearly broken-down vehicle lurches along the road, whining over hills and vibrating under us.
“It makes more sense to use Four-B. It’s closer to the entrance, and less commonly used by the Facility,” I explain.
“That’s because it’s more exposed. The army base patrols that area. Three-J is the better option.”
“The base patrols it in the evenings. It’s morning now. This is the quietest time for the camp, but the Facility will be all over the J entrance. We’re using Four-B.”
“But it isn’t—”
&nb
sp; “Lydia’s right,” Wes says. “We need to focus more on the Facility than the army base.”
“Fine.” Althea crosses her arms over her chest. “Keep going.”
I try not to sigh.
Before we reach Camp Hero, Wes pulls the truck off the main road, following a small beach path and parking behind a sand dune. “We’re on foot now,” he says as he turns off the engine and opens his door.
Wes swings the canvas knapsack containing our bombs onto his back, and we walk through the woods until we reach the edge of the camp. There is no fence around the perimeter in 1945, but civilians rarely come out here; HIDDEN LAND MINE signs are posted in the woods to keep out enemies, and soldiers routinely patrol through the trees. The lack of a fence allows us to approach from the west side of the woods, and we keep low and quiet, ducking beneath branches and avoiding the dry patches of leaves underfoot.
The sky is now a light blue, with rays of sunlight just starting to break at the edge of the trees. Dr. Bentley will be here soon, waiting to see what my letter meant by explosions in the woods.
The Four-B entrance is in the southwest area of the park, and we reach it quickly. We only hide once, when the patrol passes along the road in front of us. Instead of the larger groups of alert soldiers I saw in 1944, this one has only a few men, smoking cigarettes and talking loudly as their guns swing against their backs. They pass by, never once looking into the woods where we’re crouching, still and silent.
The concrete bunker is in a small, empty clearing, hidden in the woods off one of the main roads. It is embedded in a man-made hill, two wings fanning out on either side of it. In my time, the concrete would appear sealed shut, but in 1945, there is a large metal door on the front, a padlock with a thick chain coiled around the handles.
We all move toward it quickly, though I’m the first to reach the lock. Althea makes a noise and steps forward, but Wes stops her. I pull a bobby pin from my hair, fit it into the small opening, and quickly twist until I hear the tumblers give, one by one. The lock pops free. I yank it off and Wes helps me untangle the heavy chains around it.
We pull open the metal doors that are set into the cement. The dusty room inside is being used as a storage unit for the army base; wooden crates are stacked against a side wall and a quadruple fifty-caliber machine gun is perched in the middle. It looks like a small tank, with wheels and a space at the top for the driver to sit.
“The door’s in the back,” Wes whispers.
We skirt the gun and move to the far wall. Althea and I both take out our metal keys at the same time, and this time I gesture her forward.
The light is weak in here, with only the blue gray of morning spilling in through the open door. Twenty-two runs her fingers along a section of the wall until she finds the tiny slit and slides in the key. As soon as she pulls it out again, a door opens in the concrete, the lines of it so smooth that no one would ever suspect it was there.
Wes pries it open with his fingers, and we go in, walking slowly down the long, dark flight of stairs in front of us. Twenty-two is first, I’m in the middle, and Wes follows.
As we descend, the musty smell from the bunker above us slowly disappears, overwhelmed by bleach and acid. I suck in my breath. There is a dim overhead light at the bottom of the stairs, just enough to make the small landing visible. We crowd together in front of a scarred metal door that looks like it hasn’t been opened in months. There is another slit by the side of it and Althea jams in her key again. A red light flashes above the door. I grab the handle and push it open to reveal a clean, white hallway ahead of us. It is so much easier to break into the Facility in the 1940s, before there were rooms that scanned your body, and DNA testing.
The three of us slip inside. Wes, still holding the gun, is on point. I follow behind him, hugging tight to the walls. We move slowly, peering around corners before we turn them, crouching in door frames when we hear footsteps up ahead. But this part of the Facility is quiet. The soldiers bunk in the opposite wing, and the TM chamber is in the very heart of the Facility. The scientists have their offices here, not far from the labs and the dormitories where they keep the newly kidnapped children.
We round a corner and I immediately recognize the hallway where Faust’s office is: the white walls, the bright lights overhead, the three metal doors.
“That’s it,” I whisper to Althea. “The door in the middle is Faust’s office.”
She nods. The corridor is empty, and she strides across it. Wes and I follow, pausing when she stops in front of the door.
“The gun.” She holds out her hand.
Wes doesn’t move, the weapon tight in his grip. It has a silencer, which means she brought it from the future. At the look in her eyes, I lean forward, ready to react if she tries something. Is she about to turn on us, now that we’re trapped down here?
She impatiently juts her hand forward. “If he’s in there, someone will have to detain him. You two know what you’re looking for. I don’t. I’ll handle Faust while you find the documents.”
Wes glances at me. I think of Althea’s face earlier, when Wes told her she could go back to her own time, and I nod. He slips the gun into her hand.
She twists the doorknob and pushes. We enter the room. Dr. Faust is sitting behind a wide desk, a journal open in front of him. He looks up, startled. “What—”
But he doesn’t have the chance to finish before Twenty-two raises the gun and shoots him in the chest.
Chapter 24
Blood blossoms across his white shirt like a rose fully opening for the first time. It would almost be beautiful, if I couldn’t see his pale face, his mouth open in horror, the way he claws at the edge of his desk.
“What the hell are you thinking?” I snap at Althea. Wes quickly shuts the office door.
I run forward, pushing Faust back in his chair, and press my hands to the wound, a little below his shoulder. It has missed his heart, but he could still bleed out.
Wes pries the gun from Althea’s hands. She stands in the middle of the room, watching me impassively. “He needed to die, didn’t he? I knew neither of you would do it. I had to.”
“Not here.” Wes’s voice is harsh. “Not like this. We can’t have a dead body on our hands. What if someone finds it? What are we going to do with him?”
She lifts one shoulder. “Dump him in a supply closet. Who cares?”
The doctor groans, sweat forming on his forehead. I can almost smell his fear, sour and sickly sweet.
“He’s not dead yet,” I snap. “Stop talking about him like he’s dead.”
“Give me the gun and I’ll finish him.” Althea holds out her hand and Wes scowls at her.
The blood is seeping through my fingers. I feel it, warm and thick. A red drop falls onto the white tile floor. All of a sudden I am crouched in the leaves and the pine needles, the gunfire drowning out Tim’s wet, strained breathing.
“Wes . . .” I whisper. “I can’t do this.”
He quickly comes over, holding a large handkerchief in his hands. He nudges me out of the way and presses it onto Faust’s bleeding chest. I step back on shaking legs. There’s blood all over my fingers, and I wipe them on my shirt. Wes holds the gun out to me with his free hand and I take it from him and tuck it into the waistband of my pants.
I spin to face Althea. “We were going to send him through the TM. It’s a better punishment for him.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “He should be dead. He’s the one who started all this. Without him, none of us would have ended up here.” Her fingers are digging into her arms, so hard they are turning white with the pressure. Soon she will break through the skin. “We have to kill him. He stole our lives. It’s only fair.”
She is starting to snap. Being in this room, seeing the man who created the Montauk Project is breaking her. “We need the timers,” I say quickly. “They should have them in their weapons room; there’s no Assimilation Center here yet. It’s in the East Wing, Level Three—”
“Fine. Just go.”
She quickly leaves the room, perhaps grateful to have a task to get her out of this office, even if it does come from me. I have a moment of panic, wondering if we can trust her, but then I turn back to Wes. She shot Faust because he’s connected to the Project; her only priority is to make it out of here.
“How is he?” I ask.
“Alive.” Wes keeps the handkerchief pressed to the wound. The blood is slowing. “He’ll make it; it’s mostly a flesh wound. But we can’t leave him here.”
“I know. We’ll take him to the TM chamber. It’s what we were planning anyway.”
Dr. Faust is breathing heavily, slumped back in his chair, and he turns his glazed eyes to Wes. “It’s you,” he whispers. “You were here before.”
Wes doesn’t answer him. “Lydia, the journals.”
“Right.” I turn to the file cabinet, ripping open the bottom drawers. They are filled with files on dead soldiers, information on the subjects they’ve sent through time—but nothing about the TM or Tesla. I try the top two drawers, but they’re sealed with the kind of combination locks that look like they belong on an industrial safe. “What is it?” I ask the doctor. “What’s the code?”
“Not . . . telling you,” he croaks out.
Wes leans onto his chest, pressing into the bullet wound. The doctor groans again. “I can’t. . . . I won’t.”
“The more you fight us, the worse it will get,” Wes says.
The doctor stares up at him and suddenly smiles, his teeth still clenched against the pain. “You’re magnificent,” he breathes.
Wes flinches, moving his head back.
I glower at Faust. “If he’s so magnificent, then tell him the codes.”
Wes presses down again, not hard, but enough to show we’re serious. The doctor gasps. “Seven, ten, one, eight, five, six.” He spits the numbers out.
“Tesla’s birthday,” I mumble. “I should have known.”
I spin the dial quickly, and the first drawer opens. Inside are personal documents—a birth certificate from Austria, a passport, proof of US citizenship. I open the lock on the second drawer. The first thing I see is a folder with NIKOLA TESLA on the front in bold letters. I pull it out and leaf through the handwritten sheets of paper. Most are covered in equations; a few have pictures of machines with detailed instructions. I stop at one that resembles the TM. Tesla’s Machine. It is circular, stretching up and narrowing into a tube that only stops at the top of the paper, implying that it goes on and on. I shove it back into the folder, and tuck the whole thing under my arm. There is only a thick notebook left in the drawer and I open it. It is in different handwriting—it must be Faust’s—and is filled with more detailed notes on the TM, various formulas and possible renderings.