Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) (20 page)

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Cakes should not be made without sugar and butter. It’s a crime.”

Wes laughs, his hand curled tight around mine. I move closer to him, wanting to be in the moment, but I cannot shake this nagging feeling I’ve had since we came back from East Hampton.

“Wes? Do you feel like someone is watching us?”

He stops walking, his body still as he listens. “I can’t hear anything but the water,” he says after a moment.

“I’m not saying it’s something you can hear, I just have this feeling. Like there’s someone staring at my back. I’ve had it all night. And then this morning on the dunes—”

“Do you think you’re being overly suspicious?” His voice is soft. “You spent the last week in the woods being hunted. It’s normal that you’d still feel that way.”

“I guess so.” He starts moving forward again and I let him pull me along, our hands still clasped together.

He might be right—maybe I am overreacting, still remembering how it felt to sleep with my heart in my throat, wondering if every sound, every breeze was a sign that the Secret Service had found us. But Wes has also spent the last six months alone, never looking over his shoulder. Am I paranoid or has he lost his instincts?

“Don’t worry.” He squeezes my hand, turning to look at me in the fading light. “Tomorrow morning this will all be over.”

It’s not exactly reassuring, but I try and smile at him. I must have been mistaken; there are not many places for a person to hide out here, with the ocean to our left and the dunes to our right.

Inside his tiny house he pulls out the bags of supplies we bought in East Hampton and we sit side by side at the table. We are silent as we separate out the ingredients, using small lead pipes to contain the explosions.

“The fuses can’t be too long,” Wes says when we are almost finished mixing the materials. “Otherwise a guard might be able to stop them before they explode.”

“But how are we going to get out in time?” I lift up one of the small fuses he’s already cut. “This would only give us thirty seconds.”

He takes it from my hand, fitting it into the end of the pipe. “We have no choice. We’ll have to steal timers from inside the Facility. We can wire and rig the bombs in the TM room after we send Faust through time, and set the countdown for two minutes. Even if they find the bombs, a guard wouldn’t be able to stop one in time. Deactivating a timer isn’t as simple as cutting a fuse.”

“Will we have time for that? It won’t be easy to sneak around, especially if we have Faust with us and we’re trying to keep him quiet.”

“We’ll have to make it.” He sounds distracted, and I stare down at his bent head as he concentrates on installing the fuse. “We need to make sure the TM explodes, but I’m also planning on living a long life with you, Lydia. That means we need to make it out alive.”

I smile. “Only you can be romantic while assembling a deadly weapon.”

“I try.” He looks up and grins, the dimple cutting deep into his cheek.

Earlier, I left a note for Dr. Bentley on the desk in his study. I wrote that I had heard some soldiers in town talking about testing bombs near the southwest bunker of Camp Hero at dawn, and how they’re sure it won’t be safe. I asked him to check it out with the other volunteer doctors and nurses from the hospital, because I thought some men would end up injured. I know he’s the type of doctor who will go, even if my information wasn’t certain.

As soon as Wes and I have assembled three bombs, we lay out the contents of LJ’s file. Most of the documents are things we already know—a layout of Camp Hero, a brief description of how to get into the entrances. But one paper is a detailed map of the Facility, and another is a write-up on Faust, including details about his schedule. He lives in the Facility, eats and sleeps there, and almost never leaves. It will make him easy to find, and we use the map to pinpoint the exact location of his office, and the entrances we’ll use to get in and out.

When it is close to midnight, Wes stands up from the table. “Come here.” He lifts his shirt over his head and I stare at his bare chest.

I move toward him because I cannot help it, we are magnetic, and his fingers tangle in the loose strands of my hair. He kisses me, then pulls back. “I love the freckle you have right here.” With his opposite hand he touches my face, just below my eye.

I run my fingers over his shoulders. He has twin bullet holes, one on each arm, and I trace the raised white flesh on his right shoulder. The one on the left side is newer, still an angry pink. “It’s strange to see this healed. For me, it happened three days ago.”

He twists, pulling me down beneath him on the bed. “Wes . . .”

“What?” His voice is muffled against my collarbone.

“We have to concentrate.”

“On what?” His hand cups my cheek, his mouth moving lower.

“The plan.”

He lifts up until he’s staring me in the face. “We’ve been over the plan a hundred times. We’ve made the bombs. We put the letter on Jacob’s desk. All that’s left is to execute it, and we can’t do that for hours.”

“Aren’t you scared?” I ask.

He twists his finger around a lock of my hair. “A little. But we’ve been in the Facility before, and this time there are fewer soldiers and no cameras. We’ll be fine.”

But I can’t relax. Everything is riding on tomorrow.

“We’re trained for this,” Wes says. But then he sees the way I bite my lip and he sighs. “Lydia, don’t worry. We’re ready. And you’re here, in my bed, and I don’t want to think about what could go wrong tomorrow.” He moves his hand from my hair to my cheek, running the backs of his fingers down to my chin. “Let’s think about something else, okay?”

I nod, knowing I need to trust him, to believe that we will succeed. He leans over and kisses me, and then I stop thinking about anything at all.

We get dressed in the early morning, when the sky is just starting to lighten and the moon is low on the horizon. I put on Wes’s old recruit uniform, washed and tucked away in a drawer. It is too big on me, but I roll up the sleeves and the pant legs. Wes is dressed in black too, in a tight T-shirt and rugged work pants.

When we leave the shack, the fog from the ocean hits us, damp and thick, making it hard to see where we’re walking. Wes takes my hand and we stumble over to his truck, our shoes slipping on the wet grass.

Maybe it is the mist, maybe we are both still wrapped up in what it felt like to lie in each other’s arms all night, but neither of us senses her presence until it is too late. Wes reaches for the handle of the passenger’s-side door when he freezes, slowly turning to face the beach. I turn with him, and that’s when I see her, standing on the top of a dune, her black uniform molded to her body, the rolling mass of waves at high tide crashing on the sand behind her. It is Twenty-two. She’s holding a gun, and it’s pointed right at us.

Chapter 23

S
he
steps down off the sand, the high sea grass winding around her legs. Neither Wes nor I moves as she approaches. “You need to come with me,” she says, the sound of the crashing waves nearly drowning out her words. “General Walker sent me to bring you back.”

“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—”

“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.