“No,” I whisper. I’m clenching my hands together so hard it feels like my skin is about to split open. “That’s impossible.”
Walker’s expression is solemn. “I’m afraid it’s not.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Wes is telling me that recruits never traveled before 1950 or after 2050. Now I guess I know why.
“I can’t . . . that doesn’t make sense. The time line changed. Just change it back.”
“It’s not always that simple.”
“But there has to be a way,” I say.
“That’s where you come in.”
I glare at him. “Are you saying this is somehow connected to me becoming a recruit?”
“I’m realizing now that it’s more complicated than even I knew. You made the link between John McGregor and Peter Bentley. That was a crucial connection that we did not have. As we speak, we have recruits traveling through time, figuring out where the original rift took place, the one that eventually effected McGregor’s defeat. It’s like a stack of dominoes. Your grandfather may have changed McGregor, but what happened to change your grandfather?” He raises an eyebrow. “I suspect we can attribute it to your unauthorized trip to nineteen forty-four with Eleven.”
“You knew we were in nineteen forty-four,” I breathe.
He continues as though I never spoke. “After Eleven brought us the information on McGregor, we were able to piece together your connection to the shift in the time line. Something you did in the nineteen forties changed the future. And now, the Montauk Project is in jeopardy. Now, the world is a different place.”
I feel my mouth fall open. “You’re saying it’s my fault there’s a nuclear war.”
“I’m saying you’re connected in some way.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He shrugs. “The origin of the time line shift and your involvement is new information to us. But you were on our radar long before this, Lydia.” He leans closer. “In exactly six months, we send a team of recruits into the future to stop the nuclear holocaust. They are able to infiltrate Sardosky’s inner circle and discover his motivations behind his decision. They don’t stop him, not yet, but they come close. You are part of that team, Lydia.”
I slowly shake my head. “It doesn’t matter. The world ends anyway.”
“So far, yes. But we’ve been experimenting with possible futures. Having you on the team is the closest we’ve come to preventing Sardosky from signing that act.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” I scowl at the general. “Why wouldn’t you just kill him when he was a child? Wouldn’t that solve all of your problems?”
“The time line is a little trickier than that. Killing Sardosky accomplishes nothing. The ripple effects through the time line are insurmountable.”
I swallow. “You say it as though you’ve already tried that option.”
He smiles. “Of course we have. We’ve also tried rigging the election. We’ve tried killing Sardosky’s parents, before they even met. But none of those things worked, and in some cases the nuclear attacks came sooner rather than later. The closest we’ve ever come has been through you and a few other carefully selected recruits.”
“But now you know where the shift in the time line came from. Can’t you just go back and fix it?”
“No.” He studies me with narrowed eyes. “You know where the shift came from. And now we have you and we can do what we want with you. Perhaps we’ll send you to nineteen forty-four first, to see if you can’t fix your mistake. Or maybe we’ll have you go kill your younger self.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He chuckles lightly. “Probably not. It would create an entirely new time line, and we can’t take that chance.”
“Is that why you didn’t take me when I was younger?” I ask. “I’ve always had this scar, even before I traveled to nineteen forty-four. That means you gave me the serum the day I was born. My name must have always been on that list.”
“I cannot comment on the other time line, but I can tell you that every capture of a recruit is precisely timed. Even if it is an orphan we find on the streets. We track them. We learn their history. We know who their great-great grandparents are. We often know more about our recruits than they ever know about themselves. Most importantly, we wait for the exact right moment to take them. You were not ready until your seventeenth year. We had been planning to acquire you in your own time, but then you conveniently landed on our doorstep.”
“I didn’t land on your doorstep,” I say bitterly. “You kidnapped me.”
He smirks a little, and his heavy, gray-brown eyebrows draw closer together. “Ah yes. Eleven helped with that, you know. He has been tracking you for a very long time.”
I remain still.
“Did he tell you what he does for us?”
“He said . . .” I bite my lip. “He said he gathers information and makes small changes in the time line.”
“Sometimes. But he’s also one of the main recruits in charge of extraction.” I must look confused, because he adds, “Bringing in recruits.”
“You mean kidnapping.” I think of all those times Wes shut down while he was talking about the Project snatching children off the streets. I assumed he didn’t want to relive the memory of when it happened to him, but maybe he didn’t want to be reminded of what they forced him to do to others.
General Walker shrugs. “He was assigned to you, Lydia. He’s been following you for months. Long before you stumbled into the TM in twenty twelve.”
I shake my head. “I don’t believe that.”
“Once we realized that you had assumed Seventeen’s identity and that you were in nineteen eighty-nine, we knew we needed to bring you in before you could do anything else to disrupt the time line. Eleven had a mission planned for yesterday afternoon, but all of our people were on high alert and instructed to bring you
