“Tim,” I whisper.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Lydia. My name is Lydia.”
I can just barely make out the sheen of his teeth as he smiles at me in the dark.
Chapter 10
A raindrop falls on my cheek, startling me awake. I sit up on the moss, already wet with dew, and more rain hits my head, my bare arms. Tim stirs next to me, his hand coming up to swat his neck, as though the water is a fly buzzing in his ear.
Wes emerges from the woods and stops short when he sees me awake. “Twenty-two circled back to see if we’re being followed,” he says after a minute. “She’ll be here soon.”
“We need to keep moving, don’t we?”
He nods without looking at me. He hasn’t met my eyes since our conversation by the stream. I wonder if he even remembers the way his hand curled around mine when I touched his shoulder to wake him in the middle of the night. He had whispered my name, too, but the sound made him jerk fully awake and he sat up, pushing away from me.
Now he walks over to Tim and nudges him with his boot, just as Twenty-two appears at the tree line. “Get up. It’s time to go.”
At first the hiking is like yesterday, and we trudge forward, the few raindrops that squeak through the leaves wetting our hair and our shoulders. But by midday it is pouring, and I am soaked to the skin, my shirt plastered to my chest, the oversized jeans threatening to fall down to my ankles with the weight of the water. The ground, once hard, becomes muddy and soft, and our feet slip and sink into it.
I keep thinking of what Tim said last night about helping each other escape. Right now we need the Project—it’s the only way we’ll get away from the Secret Service. But what about afterward?
I told Tim part of my story, but I didn’t tell him about finding the list of future recruits with LJ in 1989, or about the mysterious Resistor. It’s not that I don’t trust Tim, but if a resistance movement does exist, then I don’t want to unintentionally put him in danger.
Though I’ve wondered about the resistance, before now I’ve never considered what it could mean if it existed. But opening up to Tim allowed me to hope in a way I haven’t been able to in months. If they’re real, could they help us? Would they be willing? It’s a long shot, but looking for them would give Tim and me a goal, a way to try and take back control of our futures.
Two hours, three hours pass, and the rain gets thicker, the mud deeper. And then Twenty-two takes a step, her foot sinks into the ground, and it doesn’t stop until she is submerged to the knee. “Eleven!” she shouts. Wes pulls her out and the hole makes a sucking noise when her boot pops free.
“It’s a marsh,” Wes says. “We can’t keep going forward. We’ll need to turn back and find another path.”
“It’s too dangerous.” I have to shout above the rain. “The Secret Service will have figured out that we’re not moving north by now. They could be right behind us. And the water is rising. The whole forest might flood.”
“We could climb up, wait it out in the trees,” Tim suggests.
But the trunks are slick, and I see Wes eye my leg, still not fully healed.
“Who knows how long the rain will last.” Twenty-two has her arms wrapped around her middle, her head bent low. “I don’t want to be stranded out here, with no food and no shelter.”
“We’ll make our way west.” Wes starts to move forward. “And try to find higher ground.”
We walk until the rain is so heavy that everything around us is blurry and dim. The small streams that wind through the woods have flooded in the quick storm. Wes leads us to a hill, a tiny oasis surrounded by water on all sides. Twenty-two keeps her head down, her shoulders hunched. Her face is a pale sliver hidden by the heavy ropes of her dark hair.
At the top of the incline, I step forward, but Wes pulls me back, his hand sliding across the wet skin of my arm. “Watch out!” he yells into the rain.
I had been walking on autopilot, my feet sinking into the mud over and over, but now I focus on the ground in front of me. I am standing on the edge of a deep square hole, the bottom filled with a layer of water and grass—the dug-out cellar for a house that was swept away by the flooding years ago. “Thanks,” I whisper to Wes, not sure he hears me above the endless falling water.
“There.” Tim points to the other side of the hill. Tucked up against the side of a tree is the dark frame of an old car. As we get closer, I see that the body is rusted, but the roof is still there.
Wes reaches for the door handle, struggling with the warped metal. Tim helps and together they manage to pry open the driver’s-side door with a low creaking noise.
We crawl in: Twenty-two and Tim in the back, Wes and me in front. The car has deep bucket seats, the leather faded and ripped. There are seeds on the ground near my feet, and I wonder how many animals have made this their home.
The rain pounding on the metal roof echoes through the small interior. It smells musty in here, like dirt and stale water. Twenty-two stays huddled, her arms wrapped around her middle. She will not lift her head, and her body is a shadow pressed against the door.
I am sitting in the driver’s seat. In front of me the instruments are old and manual, with no digital screens like in newer
