“No. It’s not what I want.” I drop my voice. “What I want is to be with you. I want to fight against our fate. To try and figure out some way to save both of us from the Project without losing everyone else I love too.”
He sighs and stares down at his feet. “I want that too. But it’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“It just isn’t. They’ll always find us. We can’t get away from them.”
“So that’s it?” I throw myself down onto one of the pews. It squeaks under my weight and a puff of dust flies up around me. “They just get to win? To wreck both of our lives?”
“We don’t know that’s what the list means. They probably don’t know about you at all.”
“Oh, wake up, Wes. We just watched Maria disappear tonight. I don’t know how my name ended up on that list, but I’ve had this scar my whole life, even before I went back in time. It means something.”
He shakes his head. “No. You’ll still be safe. You have to live a normal life.”
“What’s normal?” I stand up again, my hands in fists at my sides. “Was it normal that I ended up going back in time? That my great-grandfather created the program that’s responsible for snatching you off the street? That you randomly saw me in the woods one night and that stopped you from killing me when you found me inside the Facility? We’re so far beyond normal, Wes. I don’t think my life can ever go back to that.”
He steps forward and closes his hands over my shoulders. “It has to.”
“Why? What are you so afraid of? Why can’t we work together to figure out a solution to this?”
“There is no solution. I’m condemned to this life, but you can still get away.”
But I’m on a roll now, and I barely hear him. “Why were you shaking the other day in the bathroom? What are you hiding from me?”
“Nothing.”
“The mood swings. The twitching. The pushing and the pulling. You can’t think I wouldn’t notice that something is wrong.”
“I . . .”
“Don’t shut me out anymore,” I whisper.
“I’m not trying to. I just . . . don’t know how to deal with this.” His grip is almost painfully tight.
I go still. “Deal with what, Wes?”
“I’m . . .” He clenches his jaw and turns away.
“Wes.” I move in close to him. “I came to the past for you. There’s nothing you can tell me that will change how I feel. I’ll do anything to help you. You have to trust me.”
“I don’t think even you can help me this time, Lydia.” His voice cracks.
“Try me.”
He closes his eyes. “I’m dying, Lydia. And I don’t know how to stop it from happening.”
CHAPTER 17
We sit side by side on the dirty pew. Wes is so motionless that I’m not sure he’s even breathing anymore.
I keep his hand clasped in mine and wait until he’s ready to speak.
It takes a few minutes for him to start. “Seventeen killed herself, but it wasn’t because the Project was investigating her.”
I think back to that broken look on his face, the night he came to my room. I had never seen him so upset. Until now, maybe.
“Her body was starting to show signs of deteriorating,” he explains. “I saw it that night on patrol. She was shaking, her concentration was off. She couldn’t hear as well, couldn’t see things that were right in front of her. As soon as I saw her, I knew she didn’t have long before they realized she was done.” He pauses and gives me a sideways glance. “She was already nineteen. Had been traveling through time for the past eight years. The TM was wearing her body down. It happens to all of the recruits, eventually. Once the Project notices, they dispose of us.”
I force myself to ask, “How? What do they do exactly?”
His fingers spasm in mine, and I bear down hard on our joined hands until it stops. “They kill us, but not right away. First the scientists use our bodies for research, to study how much damage the TM does. It’s rare that a recruit even makes it to eighteen or nineteen; most of us die in the field before then. It’s why the older recruits are more valuable. They’re usually . . .” His voice falters a little and I press into his shoulder. “Alive. For the experiments. At least in the beginning.”
“God.”
“Sometimes it even happens when we’re conscious.” He sounds remote, detached. Pretending he’s not afraid. “Getting samples from a live person is the best way to get results.”
“So Seventeen killed herself,” I say softly. “To not go through that.”
He nods. “But as soon as I saw her that night, I knew I wasn’t far behind. I was starting to twitch sometimes. Small stuff, but it had never happened before that. And I’m eighteen now, in my time.” His mouth twists. “Happy birthday to me.”
“Wes . . .”
“It’s why I had to see you that night when I came to your room. I didn’t know how much time I had left. And then you begged me to take you with me, and I couldn’t say no. I just wanted to be near you before it was too late. But then we kissed in the subway, and I knew it wasn’t fair to you. It was selfish to put you at risk. To pretend that we could have a future together when we can’t.” He sighs. “I know I’ve been acting strange, but I just don’t know how to deal with this. Maybe if you hadn’t come into my life, it might have been different. I might have stayed cold, I might have even welcomed it. But now . . .”
“I would have understood if you had told me.”
He gives me a half smile. “No, you wouldn’t have. You would have done everything in your power to try and save me.”
I open my mouth to argue, but
