“Lydia.” Wes says it firmly, but I feel his fingers gently graze my ankle.
It takes all my will to move away from the grate. I crawl forward into a new, twisting section of the air duct. My hands and feet feel numb, but I force myself to keep moving away from that room.
Wes turns us in two more directions.
I stop again when I hear a noise coming from somewhere below me. A muffled sound. Words, someone talking. I press my ear against the vent, then jerk away when the sound changes from low tones to high-pitched screaming. Screaming, screaming. Pain, madness, I can’t tell. It doesn’t matter. The sound goes on and on. I curl my fingers into the tin surface below me. I’d cover my ears if I had room to sit up. But instead I just listen to it, praying that the noise doesn’t belong to one of those broken children.
It stops eventually, but I hover in place, shaking and sweating. This time Wes is silent as he waits for me to recover. I can sense him behind me, and just having him nearby makes me feel less afraid.
Finally he whispers, “We’re close to Dr. Faust’s office.” I’ve heard that name before—when the two guards were talking while I was hiding in the time machine room. He must be one of the scientists with the Project. I wonder if Nikola Tesla is down there somewhere too. Nothing seems too far-fetched now.
When I move again, my muscles feel even more locked up, tighter and aching. Wes leads us to the right. After a few minutes, we come across another grate. Even before I reach it, I hear noises, the scratching of a pen, a man coughing. I move forward slowly, peering down into another room. There’s a desk directly below us. A man with slightly balding brown hair and hunched shoulders sits at it. He’s wearing a white lab coat. Wes grabs my foot, holding me in place.
There’s a muffled knock. “Come in,” the man at the table says. The door opens, and a soldier stands in the entryway. I can’t see his face, just the lower part of his body. He’s slim, wearing a black uniform similar to the army ones. He raises his arm, holding a rigid pose.
“At ease,” the man below me says. He has an accent that I can’t place. “Have they concluded the experiment?”
“Yes, Doctor,” the soldier says. His voice is softer, younger.
The man sits back in his chair, dropping the pen onto the table. “Give me the report.”
“Subject twenty-one did not return from the field, sir.”
He sighs, rubbing his eyes with his fingers. “Was it like last time?” I watch the slope of his nose, the angles of his elbows as he lowers them back to the desk. Wes is completely still behind me.
“Yes, sir.” The soldier hesitates, his formal tone wavering slightly. “He just disappeared, sir.”
“So we’ve lost another one.”
“Yes, sir. General Lewis is asking for you, sir.”
“Fine.” He sighs again, pushing his chair away from the table. He disappears from view, then reenters, moving toward the soldier. He’s a short man, heavyset, with wide shoulders. The younger soldier steps back to let him walk through the door first. It shuts behind them with an echoing bang.
I pull air into my lungs, the first real breath I’ve taken since they started talking. Wes nudges me. I crawl forward until I’m past the grate. As soon as my feet have cleared it, he yanks it up and out of its frame. He leans it against the side of the vent, then slides down into the office. I peer into the room.
Wes is standing on the doctor’s desk. He raises his arms to me. Using the side of the grate for leverage, I lower my feet down, and then let myself drop. Wes catches me easily. He holds me for a fraction of a second before letting go. Moving silently, he jumps off the desk and glides over to the door. He gives me a look and gestures at the desk. He’ll keep watch; I need to do the snooping.
I hop off the desk, then rifle through the papers on top. The doctor was writing in a leather journal filled with mathematic equations. I flip through it, catching the name “Tesla” printed at the top of a page. I can’t make sense of the math, so I close it carefully. There’s a filing cabinet near the wall and I head for it. All of the drawers are locked—complicated combination locks—except for one near the bottom, which is slightly ajar. The doctor must have forgotten to shut it before he left.
Wes watches me, but I can tell his concentration is on the hallway. I pull the drawer fully open. Inside are numerous files, all marked with the words “Confidential,” “Subject,” and numbers rising in sequential order: “Subject 1,” “Subject 2,” and so on. I pull out “Subject 1.”
The plain folder contains several pieces of paper. A black-and-white photo of a soldier rests on the top of the pile. He’s blond and smiling, wearing an army cap. The page below is covered in facts: name, age, occupation before the war, family, medical history. I flip past it.
The second page has a detailed account of how he volunteered for something called Operation Victory. I flip again. There’s a page of handwritten text; it looks like it was ripped out of a notebook. I skim it, catching words here and there: Subject did not respond as we anticipated … little contact after initial launch … subject appeared in machine two days past delivery point, his cognitive abilities severely altered.
I put the paper aside, then recoil in horror. I’m looking at another photograph, an “after” shot of the soldier. His eyes are glazed and unfocused, his mouth is permanently twisted.
I remember a story my grandfather likes to tell about something called the Philadelphia Experiment: In 1943, the government supposedly made
