CHAPTER 19
I come to slowly and blink in the artificial light. I am lying on my side on a hard bed, facing a dull gray wall. I carefully stretch. My fingers feel like the bones have welded together, and I hear them pop as I move my hands out in front of my body.
What happened at Bellevue rushes back, and I sit up quickly. I close my eyes and wait for the world to steady. As soon as the nausea subsides, I open my eyes again. I am in a small room with no windows and only one fortified door.
I hear a low moaning noise, and I turn to see my grandfather lying on the white tile floor, tucked in next to the low cot I’m sitting on.
I scramble off the bed, falling to my knees next to his hunched figure.
“Grandpa,” I whisper, and lay my hands on his shoulders. When I touch him, he flinches away from me with a shriek. “Grandpa.” The word is broken this time, a low, fractured sound.
I don’t try to touch him again. Instead I slowly stand up and look around the room. It is clearly a cell, though it doesn’t look like the ones they threw Wes and me into in Montauk. We must still be in New York City, in the holding area of the Center.
Did they attack me when they discovered I wasn’t Seventeen? That I was somehow responsible for the rift in time? Or were they after my grandfather and the information he had on that disk? Maybe I was just a casualty of his abduction.
But as soon as the recruit saw me, she attacked. It was too personal to be a coincidence. They wanted me for some reason. But why? Have they finally decided to bring me in, to force me to become a recruit?
I hear a heaving sound, and a sour, sickly smell fills the air. I turn back to my grandfather. He has thrown up all over himself, and he’s rocking back and forth in the vomit. Where is Wes? Does he even know I was taken?
I kneel next to my grandfather again. But every time I touch him, he recoils. Finally I just sit next to him and hum a tuneless song under my breath. It seems to calm him.
I fight tears as I stare at the heavy metal door that separates me from freedom. I’m not sure how long I sit there with my grandfather, reliving the past few days, wondering where I went wrong, but I’m jolted back to the present by a scraping noise at the door. I freeze as it opens slowly.
It’s Wes, wearing his black recruit uniform. He slips quietly into the room.
“Oh my god,” I breathe. I stumble to my feet, almost tripping in my effort to reach him. “You’re here.”
My arms close around his. He is stiff, though he relaxes for a second, his hands coming up to lightly touch my back. But then he steps away from me.
We have to maintain cover. “What’s going on?” I whisper the words, trying not to move my mouth. “Do you know why they took me? How they found out about me?”
He doesn’t answer, but his gaze falls on my grandfather.
“We need to get him out,” I say. I rush back across the room until I’m standing near the bed and Grandpa. “We can take him with us to nineteen twenty. It’s the only way now.” I look up at Wes.
He still hasn’t moved.
“I can’t lift him alone. Help me?”
But Wes is silent.
I cannot place the look on his face—it is a combination of horror, regret, and fear. “What’s going on?” This time I don’t bother to whisper.
I hear a noise from the hallway. It sounds like thunder or a racetrack when the horses start sprinting toward the finish line. I stare up at Wes and watch as his previous expression is slowly wiped away until there is nothing left. He is a hollow shell.
The door bursts open and guards swarm into the room. I scramble to my feet. One of the guards grabs my shoulder. I fight back, lashing out with my arms and legs. I hit him in the knee and he falls, but there’s another one and then another, all coming for me. Together, two of the guards take hold of my arms, twisting them painfully behind my back.
“Wes!” I cry out.
I turn to the door, expecting to see him fighting, a pile of guards already at his feet. But he is just standing there; the soldiers rush past like he’s a rock in a stream, calmly parting the water in front of him.
“Wes?” My voice falls away as our eyes meet.
“Take the girl into an empty cell,” he says. “General Walker needs to question her.”
His face is no longer blank, but I almost wish it were. Because his expression is colder than anything I’ve ever seen, and it’s directed right at me.
That’s when I start to suspect I’ve been betrayed.
CHAPTER 20
This can’t be happening. Wes wouldn’t work against me. Not him. Anyone but him. I hold his gaze as the guards pull me from the room. He never loses his severe expression, and never softens, not even for a moment.
As I am forced out into the hallway, I glance back over my shoulder. My grandfather is still lying on the floor, slowly rocking. Sick, weak, and oblivious to what has just happened.
“Grandpa!” I scream. But he doesn’t look up.
The guards pull me across the hallway and throw me into a new cell. I land on my hands and knees on the hard tile. Wes is nowhere in sight.
The door shuts with a bang. I stay on my knees, my head down, my eyes unfocused as I stare at the blinding white of the floor. Soon I am completely numb.
I crawl forward and see that this room is identical to the one I was in before. I slowly heave myself up onto the bare mattress. How could
