I see my own image on one of the overhead screens, a 3-D projection of my face spinning around and around. Next to me are Wes and Twenty-two and Tim, a red Wanted sign over all our heads. They are pictures from the fund-raiser, and it is odd to see all of us dressed up in our gowns and tuxes again, especially now, when I’m covered in dirt and blood.
I start to make my way south, toward where I think I’ll find 167 Eleventh Avenue. An older man bumps into me and apologizes, and I murmur a response. The crowd is thick, with people pushing in from all sides. I am jostled back and forth, and I hear the woman next to me whispering about my dirty clothes: the stained black T-shirt, the filthy jeans. Suddenly she disappears, and in her place is a tall, dark-haired boy who can’t be more than fifteen. He grabs my arm and I tense, afraid that if I fight against his hold it will bring too much attention. He leans down, his lips close to my ear. “There are seventeen shells where the water ends.”
I freeze. “But the rocks are too sharp,” I whisper back.
“I’ll take you to a place where they’re smooth.”
Another code. He’s wants me to go somewhere with him.
“The ocean or the lake?”
“The lake.”
The Center in New York City, an outpost where the Project trains and houses recruits. “The ocean” is the main Facility in Montauk.
I nod, and keep my head bent as the boy leads me down a side street, away from the bustle of Times Square. The buildings close in tighter here, the holograms are gone, and somehow it feels even hotter—ever since the temperatures rose, New York is over 100 degrees every day in the summer.
There’s a white van with sleek lines parked halfway down the block. I head toward it, not surprised when the boy presses a button on a key that opens the door.
Inside, the vehicle is white, clean, and large. There’s no steering wheel. The boy sits in the driver’s side and presses a button near the dashboard. A screen flickers on in front of him. Destination? a soft female voice asks.
“Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street,” the boy answers. I recognize it as the address for the new Center.
Before the waters rose, the Center was hidden hundreds of feet below Central Park. It was massive, meant to house all the recruits, as well as the Project’s prison cells. But though the Facility in Montauk wasn’t flooded, the Center was, and the Project had to move it in 2029. Instead of going down, it now goes up, spanning an entire hundred-story skyscraper.
“Activate air conditioning.” The boy’s voice is a little high, and I notice that he’s rail thin, with very little muscle tone. His slight build is unusual for a recruit, and I wonder how new he is, how raw.
A blast of cool air hits me from vents in the dashboard as the van hums on, the engine smooth and quiet. We pull out onto the grid, slipping between two cars in an orderly fashion. I think of how New York used to be—the beeping of horns, the fighting over parking spots. The grid has taken that away, and it feels like a different place with all this quiet.
We’re headed uptown and I stare at the buildings as we pass. Everything is brighter and cleaner than I remember; there is no trash lining the gutters, and the buildings gleam with glass and metal. Wes and I were here just last year, but that was 1989, and then the streets were splashed with graffiti, the buildings run down and boarded up, drug dealers shouting at us as we walked. These days, it is impossible to live on the island of Manhattan unless you are a millionaire, and it shows—the city’s dark corners and edges have been wiped clean.
Now that the Project has found me, the knot that has been sitting in the base of my stomach for days is slowly unraveling. They must have sent the radio message. We weren’t abandoned, not as completely as we’d feared. And now, with access to a TM, I’ll be able to go back in time to save Tim, Wes, and Twenty-two.
The van stops at the Fifty-Sixth Street address, not far from the base of Central Park. The Center is in a new building, one that was constructed after a recent hurricane tore through the city. It has mirrored windows that act as solar panels, and reinforced steel columns embedded in every corner.
From the outside it looks like any other office building on the block. The people on the street walk quickly with their eyes straight ahead. No one notices me and the dark-haired boy as we cross the busy sidewalk. As soon as we approach the building, a keypad appears on the wall and the boy types in a ten-digit code. The door slides open and we enter a narrow lobby.
A young woman sits at a metal desk that’s perched in front of an elevator. Her dirty-blond hair falls in waves over her shoulders, and she’s wearing a simple beige dress. “May I help you?”
“We have a meeting with Fortitude.”
Her smile fades and she holds out her hand. In it is a small, round plastic disk. The dark-haired boy lifts his arm and passes his wrist over it like a scanner at the grocery store. It beeps. The girl moves it toward me. As I raise my hand, I see that she has a silver scar on her wrist where her tracker was installed. She is a recruit, just like the two of us.
The device scans me and gives an identical beep. The girl sits back, staring ahead blankly as we skirt the desk and walk toward the elevators. This time we have to press our thumbs to a small keypad next to the door, and then look into
