There is a knock on the door, and it opens before I can respond.
“Lydia. You’re here.”
A man enters the room, his honey-colored skin glowing even in the faint light. Like Tag, he looks to be in his sixties. But that doesn’t keep me from recognizing him.
He smiles, and I remember that day in my father’s hardware store when this man came looking for me, how my hand hovered over the plastic phone, ready to call for help.
He sits down in a chair next to the bed. The walls in here are gray concrete, and there are no windows. The room reminds me of the cells in the Montauk Facility, though it isn’t as clean. There is dirt and dust collecting in the corners, and the metal bed frame is chipped and creaking underneath me.
We are silent for a minute, watching each other. From somewhere outside the room I hear a banging noise, then muted voices. Finally I say, “I know who you are.”
“Jay? Or maybe you remember the Resistor?”
But I shake my head. “Jay. Little Jesse. LJ. The Resistor. It all makes sense now.”
“You were always quick, Lydia.” His smile widens.
“That day in the hardware store. Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”
He shrugs his thin shoulders. Unlike Tag, LJ has not filled out as much, and I can see the fourteen-year-old boy in his round face, his large brown eyes. “You didn’t know me yet. I thought you had already been back to the eighties, that you had already met me in the past. But you were confused and scared. I figured it was best to leave it.”
“I can’t believe it was always you.” I shake my head. “You contacted us from the future, fed us information when we needed it. Warned us both that we were meant to become recruits. You started a resistance.” I push forward on the bed, but my arm buckles under me as pain radiates up my wrist. I lift my hand and stare down at it. The skin near my wrist is red and puffy.
“We used an EMP device to short-circuit your tracker.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you feel it, in the car?”
I remember Tag taking my arm as he led me down the street. I thought I felt the sting of something, but I couldn’t be sure, not with all the other cuts and scrapes all over my body.
I flex my wrist. Without my tracking chip, the Project will never know where I am again. The future Lydia told me to make my own choice, but there is something very final about deactivating my chip. I can’t go back now, and I’m not sure what that decision means for me, Wes, or my grandfather.
“You should have asked me first,” I say.
The smile fades from his face and he runs his hand over his head, his buzz cut not quite hiding his balding head. “Don’t you want to be free from the Project, Lydia? It’s time their hold was officially broken. Not just over you, but over everyone.”
I clutch my wrist to my chest. My skin feels raw, heavy and irritating. “What does that mean?”
But he just slaps his hands against his knees and pushes up from his chair. “Let’s talk after you’ve had a minute to process all this. There’s a bathroom through there, if you want to splash cold water on your face.”
I see the battered metal door across from the bed, the edge of a chipped sink visible through the opening.
“I’m glad you’re here, Lydia. We have a lot to discuss, when you’re ready.”
I stare into the cracked mirror above the sink. It is lined with green and black mold, and the basin below is rusted brown. I turn on the faucet and hear the pipes whine. A thin trickle of water comes out and I cup it in my hands, splashing it onto my face.
I step back and stare down at my body. The wound on my leg has scabbed over, but I have new injuries—the scrape on my arm where a bullet grazed me, the raw bruise on my wrist. My eyes have purple smudges underneath, and my cheekbones are even sharper, too thin after almost a week with constant hiking and little food.
The resistance movement is real. It wasn’t a fantasy, a lost hope. And now the sacrifices I made to leave the Center—not knowing what would happen to my grandfather, a future where I might have done good—feel less scary. A resistance could have resources. They could help me.
A knock on the bathroom door interrupts my thoughts. “Come in.”
The door opens to reveal a middle-aged woman with dark curly hair and a round, plump face. “Oh, Lydia,” she whispers. “You look exactly the same as I remember.”
“Nikki.” I breathe her name and then I am in her arms and she is laughing into my hair.
“We didn’t think we’d see you again. LJ tried to find you years ago, but we couldn’t pin down your location, and we figured the Project had you. But then we saw your face plastered all over the news, and we knew we had to find a way to bring you in. I’m so glad you heard the radio message. It was the only way we could think of to contact you.”
She smells like soap and freshly baked bread. I slowly, tentatively lift my hands and press them to her back. This is the first time anyone has embraced me in months, and somehow it means even more coming from Nikki, the tough girl from the streets of New York who used to call me Princess. She tightens her hold and I feel the tears threatening to spill over. I could handle it—fearing for my grandfather, Tim’s death, abandoning Wes in the
