He shrugs. “My sister was obsessed. The trashier, the better. After my dad died, it was just her, my mom, and me. I always got outvoted.”
“Your dad died?”
“When I was nine. It was a long time ago.”
In the distance there is the hoot of an owl, and we both tense, our heads turning toward the noise. After that it is silent, and I feel Tim’s body relax at the same time mine does. “You remember so much about your past,” I say. “Most recruits forget, after the first stage of training.”
“Yeah.” The word is short, brusque, but I hear the emotion behind it. “I remember everything.”
I stare at the dark silhouettes of Wes and Twenty-two, thinking of what she said will happen if we’re captured by the Secret Service. “What was it like?”
Tim is quiet, and at first I think he won’t tell me. But then he says, “It started small, with food and sleep deprivation. They threw me in a hole for days, maybe weeks. It was black in there, no light, no windows.” He stops, resting his head against the rough bark of the tree behind him.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say softly. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“It’s fine. I’d be curious too. I just try not to think about it. It didn’t last that long anyway. I learned pretty quickly that if I told them what they wanted to hear, they’d speed it up. I think that’s how I got out of it with . . . me still intact.”
He is so different from Twenty-two, and even from Wes. They both turned inward, building walls around themselves for protection. But Tim did the opposite, reaching out for human contact to feel normal again.
“What did you mean, in the hotel room, about us helping each other?” I ask.
“I wanted to escape.” His voice is just a little above a whisper. “I thought maybe we could work together. But there’s no point in running now, not as fugitives. We’ll have to get out of this time period first. Hopefully the Project will find us soon.”
“How can you be so sure they will?”
“What good does it do to leave us in the woods? If we’re caught we might talk. They won’t risk that.”
“Then why haven’t they come yet? It doesn’t make sense.”
He doesn’t answer and I turn to face him, feeling the moss give beneath my hand. “Did General Walker ever talk about your destiny with you?”
He shakes his head; I hear it scrape against the bark. “He told me I was needed on this mission, but he never used that word. Why?”
“He kept telling me I had a destiny to stop this nuclear war. But I’m starting to think it wasn’t true.”
“Maybe it was. Maybe killing Sardosky meant you fulfilled it.”
“If we did kill Sardosky. We might not have. We might have to repeat this mission again and again.”
I hear him take a sharp breath. “If it had failed, they would have stopped us in the beginning, way back in that hotel room. But they let this mission play out. There’s a reason for that.”
“I just wish we knew what it was.”
“If this mission wasn’t your destiny, then why would Walker bring it up?”
“I don’t know. But why wouldn’t it be your destiny, too? Why is it just mine?” Above our heads, thin clouds create a veil that blocks the shape and texture of the moon. But there is enough light to see the shadow of Tim’s face, the steady rise and fall of Wes’s and Twenty-two’s shoulders as they sleep. “Maybe he meant something else. Maybe this was just a cover for the real reason they made me a recruit.”
“Like what?”
I have no answer and I stay quiet, turning my head to stare into the woods. There is no movement, no noise, and I wonder how alone we are out here, how close the Secret Service truly are.
“Have you asked him about it?”
I follow Tim’s chin jerk to where Wes is lying on the ground. “No. There’s no point.”
“What happened with you two, anyway?”
“It’s complicated.”
He swings one finger in a circle, encompassing the small clearing, the looming trees. “We’ve got hours.”
I do not tell him about the moments when Wes kissed me or held me close, how his voice was so low when he said he loved me. But I describe my trip to 1944, changing the future by mistake, finding my grandfather again in 1989, and Wes’s betrayal. I tell him about the Project holding my grandfather hostage, and why I wasn’t brainwashed. By the time I am finished my throat is sore, and I reach for the jug of water—almost empty again—and tilt it back against my lips.
“That’s insane,” Tim says. “They just took me from my bed in the middle of the night. I didn’t think I was lucky, but maybe I was.”
“Lucky? You think this is lucky?”
“Well, not lucky, no. They tried to control me through physical torture, and that sucked, believe me. But it was like a Band-Aid being ripped off, not a long, slow, bleeding wound. Maybe that’s why they never broke me.”
Is that what I am, broken? I think back to the Lydia I used to be: impulsive but still analytical, loyal, able to laugh and joke. If I had been pulled from my bed one night, would I still be that person, even after months in the cold Facility? Would I be like Tim, eager to reach out to anyone who seems receptive?
The Project did break something in me, but it was Wes who made those first, initial cracks. They only finished what he started, and now I’m in pieces, with no idea how to put myself back together again.
I stare at Tim’s profile. His nose is wide, his mouth small for his face, but when he smiles he is almost as beautiful as Wes. I thought that shutting everything out was for my benefit, but maybe I was only playing into their hands, giving them what they wanted—a shell who
