Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) (6 page)

Chapter 7

“L
ydia.”
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, brushing 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.

The thick boughs of green create a canopy overhead, blocking any moonlight that might slip down through the leaves. Wes leads our way, ducking under low-hanging branches, moving us north and east, toward the ocean. Twenty-two follows directly behind, her back straight, her shorter legs quickly scrambling over a fallen branch, around a large boulder. They never seem to tire, never seem to fade. Tim and I keep up, but barely. I hear him stumble behind me, know that he is still clutching his arm to his chest, face white as the blood continues to seep. I push myself forward, refusing to think about water or food or rest. The fire in my leg has turned to lava, hot and boiling under my skin.

When the light is starting to streak gray and watery through the pines, Wes finally slows. It has been hours since we heard any noise from behind us, and there are only the sounds of the forest—birds singing to each other from across the treetops, the rustling of the needles in the wind. A while back we found a small stream and crossed it several times, my sandaled feet sinking into the cold water. The fragile satin of my shoes is still not dry, but it was enough to fool the dogs, to put a few miles between us and them.

“Up ahead,” Wes says. “Through the trees.”

I look where he’s pointing and see a barn, one side caved partway in, the roof slanted down, the red color faded and worn. A house once stood nearby, but there is only the foundation left, a slab of concrete already crumbling at the corners.

“We can rest,” I whisper.

“No.” Twenty-two sounds almost angry, so different from her usual blankness. “We’ll be too exposed. We need to keep moving.”

“We can’t keep going on like this. You and I are in gowns. Someone needs to bandage Ti—Thirty-one’s wound. And we need food.”

“Someone owns this.” She puts her hands on her hips. Her skin is flecked with dried blood, and I see tiny cuts where the glass bit into her. “What if they come back?”

“Anyone who used to live here is long gone.” Tim is still pale, but his voice is clear and strong. “The house was probably lost in a flood years ago. This area is all floodplains now. But it’s summer, and the waters are low. The barn should be dry.”

These woods stretch all the way to the dunes, and the newly formed beaches where the waters rose. After the string of natural disasters, people learned from past mistakes and stopped trying to rebuild near the oceans or on old floodplains. Now the waters rise naturally in the spring, spilling over from the rivers and the oceans and onto land like the woods we’ve been hiking through all night.

The nearest town or city isn’t for miles, the old ones swept away years ago, the highways and roads rebuilt farther inland. We are in the middle of nowhere out here, lost in a wilderness where there used to be none.

“We’ll stay long enough to get cleaned up,” Wes says. “We could all use new clothes, if we can find them.”

Twenty-two opens her mouth, but shuts it when Wes gives her a look. She scowls and keeps her hands firmly on her hips, though she follows us through the last few feet of the pine forest. At the edge of the old lawn there is a tangle of weeds and brambles to cross, and they pull at the ruined silk of my dress, scratch the swollen skin of my ankles. After the protection of the woods, it feels overly exposed in this small clearing, and we sprint as we push through the long, untamed grass of the forgotten yard. The barn door is at an angle, and we slip through just as dawn breaks against the edge of the trees.

Inside it smells like sweet hay and dry wood and the musky, warm scent of horses, though the barn is long empty. The caved-in wall is on the right side, resting on the wooden beams of the old animal stalls and letting in light through the splintered boards. It’s a large space, with a hayloft above our heads and a tack room in the back. I can see a strip of darker wood that runs near the floor—the flood line, where the water rose, and still rises in the rainy months. The way the color fades as it gets to the top reminds me of the rings on a tree, a slow marking of time.

“If there are clothes, they’ll be in the back,” Wes says.

“I’ll look.” I walk forward, the heels of my sandals sinking into the soft dirt floor. Wes moves to follow me, but Twenty-two holds him back with a hand on his arm. It is the first time she has touched him not in character as Bea, and I stop, frozen, unable to look away from where she curves her fingers into his mud-spattered black jacket.

“Come on.” Tim stands beside me. “I want to see if they have any medicine.”

“Fine. Let’s look.” It is such a small thing, her hand on him, so why does it make my chest hurt so much? I touch the exposed skin near my collar, remembering a time when Wes’s pocket watch would have swung there. It was the only thing that he had from his old life, from his family, who died or abandoned him so long ago. When he first gave it to me, I knew that he loved me. But then he took it back in 1989, and I was no longer sure of anything.

I turn, knowing Wes is watching, but then Twenty-two whispers something and he whispers back. Tim and I are already too far away to hear.

The tack room is on the left side of the barn, spared from the fallen roof. We push open the door to see a small workbench, a cot, a set of drawers. The walls are lined with old tools—a rusted scythe, a saw with rotting wooden handles. Propped against the wall is an old shotgun.

Tim picks up a box of shells on the desk. “At least we’ll have a weapon we can use.”

I find clothes in the drawers: old workpants, T-shirts, moth-eaten sweaters. This room must have housed a field hand at some point. Judging by the size of his clothes he was around the same build as Wes. There are also two pairs of scuffed boots tucked up underneath the cot, and a boxy TV sits on a milk crate in the corner. It is not a plasma, not a hologram, not even solar powered, and I wonder if maybe this place was abandoned long before the flooding.

I find a bottle of rubbing alcohol in a chipped enamel cabinet on the wall. It will have to be enough; there are none of the modern 2049 bandages that automatically clean the wound and knit the skin back together, eliminating any risk of infection. Tim stands next to the high bench, finally letting go of his elbow and laying his left arm flat on the rough wood. The gash there is deep, running the length of his forearm. The bleeding has stopped, but it has not scabbed over yet, and the wound is still a deep red, the color of ripe cherries. I rip up an old T-shirt and soak a strip in the alcohol. It stings the small cuts that line my wrist. When I start to clean his arm, Tim grits his teeth, his hand clenching into a fist then opening over and over.

There is dirt caked in the open wound and I carefully pick out the larger chunks with my fingers. “Was this from the crash?”

“I think from when the door was pushed in, but I don’t really remember. It was hazy.”

“You didn’t black out?”

I glance up to see him shake his head, his thick neck barely moving. “You were the only one who did. The impact was right on your side.”

“It felt like I was being crushed.”

“You were.” He is silent for a beat. “Eleven was worried.”

“Was he?” My voice is carefully even.

“He was out of the car before we’d even stopped moving. I don’t know how he was strong enough to rip that door away from you.”

“I’m a member of the team. Of course he’d try to help me.” I keep my head bent, my eyes on his cut. It starts to bleed again, a slow, steady trickle, and I press the cloth into it.

“I don’t think that’s all it is.”

I stay quiet.

“You two have a history?”

He says it like a statement instead of a question, and again, I do not answer. His wound is clean now, and I wrap a new piece of cloth around it, tying the ends together tightly.

“How is it possible? We were in the same training group. When could you have met him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I gather the bloody, alcohol-soaked rags and move to turn away, but Tim reaches out, his hand circling my wrist.

“You can trust me, you know.” His eyes look almost as green as mine, soft in the morning light that creeps in through the cracks in the walls. “You don’t have to hide from me.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Then answer one question.”

The dust from the barn dances in the air between us. I don’t respond, but I don’t pull away from him either.

“Were you brainwashed?”

I shake my head, so slightly I barely move, but I know he sees it when his eyes crinkle at the corners.

“You remember your family, don’t you? I’m not the only one?”

“I . . . was close to my grandfather. He helped raise me.” Now I do pull away, holding the dirty rags close to my chest.

“Where is he now? Back in your own time?”

I shrug, trying not to think about the floor of that cell, my grandfather rocking back and forth, lost and alone.

“I’m sorry, Seven—” He makes a scoffing noise. “I feel ridiculous calling you by a number. Will you tell me your name?”

I open my mouth, but then slowly shut it again. In the hotel room when he first said his name, I felt a rush of belonging, of understanding. But now our situation is even more hopeless, and knowing his name seems pointless. I am Lydia, but whether I like it or not, I’m also Seventeen. If we make it through these woods, if we can evade the Secret Service and not get killed or captured, I still have years and years of working for the Montauk Project ahead of me. I cannot even try to escape, because they’ll kill my grandfather if I do. Will telling Tim my name only hurt me in the long run? Do I even want to remember that I’m still Lydia, when my future as Seventeen is laid bare in front of me, bleak and endless?