Wes’s expression is dark, his mouth turned down at the corners. “I don’t know. He freaked out after seeing your scar.” He gently pushes up my sleeve, exposing the small, round mark on my upper arm.
“You have a matching one.” I put my finger on his arm, touching the stiff material of his shirt. “I saw it back in nineteen forty-four when we were in that cell in the Facility.”
He looks down at his arm, surprised. “I do have a scar there. Just like yours. I never put it together.”
“Is it where your chip is implanted?”
“No, that’s here.” He pulls up his sleeve to expose a thin silver line on the inside of his arm.
“He called our matching scars the mark of the traveler. You’ve never heard of it before?”
“No.”
“How old were you when you got yours?”
He frowns. “I don’t remember getting it, but I first noticed it after I was already taken in by the Project.”
“Then why would I have it too?”
“I don’t know.” Wes’s voice drops. “But McGregor, your grandfather, these marks . . . Something is going on. We need more information.”
“They won’t let us see his file, and we’re not going to get anything else out of Grandpa. At least not now.”
“We need to know what he knows.”
I look down the empty hallway. Grandpa is a dead end. If only we could see his file.
My gaze falls on the open door of the nurses’ station.
“I have an idea.”
Wes raises an eyebrow. “What are you thinking, Lydia?”
“Just cover me.”
I creep into the open door of the office. There are windows along the front wall that look out into the hallway, so I duck down and crawl along the floor until I reach the file cabinet. I find the A-E section and try to open it. It’s locked. Of course.
Wes is standing in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s alternatively watching me and scanning the area around the office. I spin around on my heels.
“Toss me your knife.”
He pulls it out of his pocket and throws it at me.
I yank the cap off the end and insert the pins into the lock. It gives way with a small popping sound. I smile up at him. “I love this thing.”
He smiles back. “I’ll get you one.”
“You better.” I rifle through the names until I find Bentley, Peter. I pull out the thick folder. Behind the file is a plastic bag with his name on it, so I pull that out, too. I slide the folder into the neck of my dress and throw the bag at Wes. He unties his sports jacket from around his waist and hides the plastic bag in it. I slam the drawer shut and just manage to dash out of the office before the nurse comes back around the corner.
“Sorry about the wait,” he says cheerfully. “Ready to get out of here?”
“Definitely,” I answer.
We sit down on a sidewalk bench, facing each other. I pull the folder out of my dress and put it between us. Wes drops the small bag next to it, and I peer through the clear plastic. It holds a belt, shoestrings, and a copy of The Metamorphosis.
We don’t speak as we each take a section of papers from Grandpa’s file.
I find a handwritten note and start to scan it: Peter is more lucid today, though he still shows signs of his delusion, even after putting him on Haldol. Up his dosage?
“Do you know what Haldol is?” I ask Wes.
“I think it’s an anti-psychotic,” he answers absently as he rifles through my grandfather’s admission papers.
I turn back to the notes. He is obsessed with a conspiracy theory called the Montauk Project, and worries that “they” are coming after him. It is built on his continuous claim that he recently saw and spoke with his late father, though he has been missing and presumed dead for the past forty years.
“Wes, look at this.” I show him the passage I just read. “There’s no way he could have talked with Dean, right?”
“I don’t know.” Wes stares down at the paper. “Dr. Faust claimed that Dean was sent to the nineteen twenties, but it was an old machine and Dean wasn’t very young. He could have traveled anywhere in time.”
“If he survived it, which is unlikely.” I remember the files I found back in 1944, of all the soldiers they tried to send through time. I forget sometimes, that the Project isn’t all bad; in the beginning they were trying to send those soldiers on missions that would help them prevent World War II by killing Hitler. But even then, human life wasn’t as important as the mission, and the TM had turned those men into vegetables, if it didn’t kill them immediately. That was before they realized children have a better chance of making it out alive.
“Some of those soldiers did survive the traveling, they just got lost somewhere in time,” Wes says. “Not all adults die from the TM.”
“I guess it’s possible that the TM screwed up and sent Dean to the eighties instead of to the nineteen twenties.”
Wes frowns. “But how would your grandfather have seen or talked with him, if he was brain-dead and under surveillance by the Project?”
“I don’t know. How could my being in the past affect McGregor’s outcome? What is the mark of the time traveler?” I drop the paper back down and press one hand to my forehead. “I’m so sick of all these questions.”
We’re sitting on a bench on a narrow side street. Every now and then, people walk by and yellow cabs pass, but it’s like we’re in our
