“You have to.” He steps forward and his hands close around my upper arms.
“Why are you saying this?”
“Lydia.” He squeezes me so hard I wince. At my expression, he lets go immediately. “They know,” he says quietly.
“Who knows?”
“The Project. They know the time line is different. They had been monitoring this election in the past, and it changed. Now they’re investigating the rift.”
My fingers twist in the soft material of my T-shirt. All of a sudden I can’t get enough air. “Do they know about me? Are they coming here?”
“Not yet.” His voice, his face are blank. “One of the recruits who was in nineteen eighty-nine reported that a change happened in New York City.” At my questioning look he explains, “A city council election has a different outcome. One that isn’t . . . favorable for the Project. The information traveled to two thousand twelve. I’ve been ordered to investigate what it means. They’re sending me to the past tomorrow.”
An election changed. Was it because of something that I did in 1944? “Can they connect that to me?” I ask. “To us?”
“Not yet.”
“It might have nothing to do with us. Recruits are all over history, changing the past. Maybe this recruit just screwed up.” But the date—1989—is the same year my grandfather disappeared. Could it be connected?
Before I can tell Wes this, I hear him say, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll keep them away from you no matter what.” I glance up. He’s standing over me, his hands tight at his sides. “You’ll be safe. But you have to protect yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
Wes’s eyes dart toward my cluttered desk. “You can’t have any more connection with the Montauk Project. Burn everything and forget about it. Live your life here.”
I press my lips together, afraid that I’m about to cry. “I’m trying, Wes, but I don’t think I can do it. My grandfather is gone. My parents . . . everything is different. I miss you.”
We stare at each other silently. Wes is the first one to look away. “Lydia,” he whispers. “I watched a girl kill herself today.” I make a small noise, but he keeps going. “One of the recruits took her gun and . . . right in front of me. Close enough that her blood soaked through my shirt. It’s on my skin.” He pauses. “She was the one who told them about the rift in time. They were investigating her, she . . .”
I climb out of the bed and lean into him, my cheek pressed against his shirt, his chest. I can feel the blood, sticky and cold, but I don’t care. Wes, who not too long ago could barely smile at me, is too emotional to finish telling me what happened. His arms close around me and we stay there for a while, holding each other.
“I’m so sorry, Wes.” I whisper the words into his chest.
“I keep thinking that it could be you. That I’ll be washing your blood off me.” He says it so quietly I almost don’t hear him.
“It won’t.”
“This is what they do. They kill everyone around them. And when we survive, it’s not really living. She’s not the first recruit to take her own life, and I doubt she’ll be the last.”
I pull back to look up into his face. “Who was she?”
“They called her Seventeen. I don’t know what her real name was. Maybe she didn’t even remember anymore.”
Wes is known in the Facility as Eleven. Now that Seventeen is dead, a newly trained recruit will take her place. And on and on the cycle goes. I don’t know how many Elevens there have been before Wes. I’m too scared to ask.
“Was she a new recruit?”
Wes is in shadow, his expression hidden from me. “No. She wasn’t. She was almost nineteen.”
“Isn’t that when you get too old to travel through the machine?”
“Sometimes.” He abruptly lets go of me and walks to the window. He peers out at the night sky. The stars are tiny dots of light above the black, hunched shapes of the trees.
“She killed herself during a patrol of the woods around Hero. I was with her. They told me to keep an eye on her, to make sure she wasn’t lying about the election. After she . . . I hid her body. And I walked here. I had to see you, to warn you . . . I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I’m glad you came,” I say softly.
He shifts slightly and I look at his profile in the moonlight—his sharp chin, the slight bump on his straight nose. The moon is behind him, the light gliding through his hair like some misplaced halo. “I have to go bury her.”
“Will you tell them what she did?”
“Not yet. I don’t want them to find her. They . . . do experiments on us.”
Horror uncurls in my chest. I feel my mouth fall open. “They experiment on your bodies after you die?”
Wes keeps his face turned away from mine. “They want to study the effects of the TM on a deceased recruit. I didn’t know Seventeen, not really, but I wouldn’t let that happen to anyone. Not if I can help it.” He is quiet for a moment. “I should go.”
No.
He twists his head until our eyes meet.
I feel my whole body shudder as I see the blank resolve on his face. “Wes . . . don’t.”
“Good-bye, Lydia.”
I rush forward, but I can’t move quickly enough. He ducks down and out of the window. By the time I reach where he stood, he has already disappeared into the deep shadows near the side of the house.
“Come back,” I whisper into the night.
But there’s no answer.
I sink down on my bed in the dark. Wes is gone, this time for good. There will be no more shells on my windowsill. This is my life now—a mother and father I don’t know, a
