I pull away, staring up at the harsh bulb overhead until my eyes are dry and itchy.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like hell.”
She laughs, the sound high and bright. “I can imagine. Come out of this bathroom. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
We enter the bedroom. A teenage girl with Nikki’s sharp features and Tag’s dark skin is standing near the door. “This is my daughter, Angela,” Nikki says.
“Hi,” the girl whispers. She can’t be more than thirteen, and her legs and arms look too long for her body.
“I’m Lydia.”
“I know. Mom talks about you a lot.”
“Stop it.” Nikki moves to hook her arm over Angela’s bony shoulder. “She’ll think I’ve gotten all soft in my old age.”
I study Nikki’s face, trying to match this older woman with the teenager I knew a few months ago. She still has the same squeaky voice, the pointed nose, but she is softer, less rough and abrasive. “I can’t believe you have a kid.”
“I have two kids. Chris, our son, is with Tag right now.” She pulls Angela in closer and I turn away from the easy affection between them. I haven’t seen my mom in so long, and I am afraid that soon I will start to forget how her blond hair felt after she brushed it, or how her pancakes tasted like almonds and butter.
“I thought we’d never see you again, after you left the squat that day,” Nikki says.
I sit down on the mattress, the iron frame squeaking under me as I stare up at them. “How did you end up here? What happened to the three of you?”
“LJ told Tag and me about the Montauk Project as soon as we realized you were missing. We didn’t believe LJ at first, but he convinced us it was real. I knew we needed to leave, and luckily Tag wanted to come with us.” She squeezes Angela’s side and smiles down at her. The girl has clearly heard the story before and lifts her hand to pick at her cuticles as we talk. “We went to Mexico and stayed with some family for about five years, but then LJ wanted to come back. He had a lead online that he thought could help him learn more about the Project. He was tired of running and decided to fight instead. The three of us changed our names and hopped cities for a few years. LJ was always into computers, you remember?”
I nod.
“He created a few safe places online where people could share information. A lot of them were just conspiracy theorists, but a few former soldiers stepped forward with their stories. At first the Project didn’t seem to notice, but then LJ realized he had a ghost tracing his message boards. That’s when we went off-line. It took a few more years to create all this.” She waves her free hand through the air at the room around us. “We were the first base of operations. But the resistance is spreading. There are two other organizations across the country doing the same thing now.”
When I imagined the resistance, it was one man in a room with a computer. Maybe two. This is more than I could have hoped for.
“What exactly does the resistance do?” I ask.
She frowns, and I wonder if she has told me more than she was supposed to. “LJ should tell you the rest. We’ll show you the control center. It’s just outside.”
She pushes open the bedroom door. The windowless space beyond has high ceilings and rusted pipes that run from corner to corner in crisscrossing lines. There are computers on tables crowded in the center of the room, though none of them are the modern, holographic kinds. Some are even old desktops with wide frames.
Tag is sitting in front of one, with a younger version of him leaning over his shoulder. The boy looks so much like eighteen-year-old Tag that I jerk back when I see him. Nikki smiles. “It’s uncanny, right?”
There are maybe twenty other people here, some bent over desks, some sitting on battered couches that line the water-stained cement walls or clustered in groups, in quiet conversations.
“Are you underground here?” I ask.
Tag and Nikki exchange a look, but it is LJ who answers, stepping out from a connecting hallway. “Yes. But we can’t tell you anything else.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“We don’t trust the Project.”
I don’t like the way he is lumping me in with them, but before I can protest, he motions me forward. “There’s something I want to show you.”
I follow him into a dark hallway. The ceilings are lower, the walls narrow. It feels like a tunnel, and even the lights are dimmer, as if the hallway was designed to conserve energy for the main spaces.
“How did you find this place?”
I don’t expect him to answer, but he says, “I built it not long after I started the resistance.”
“I thought it was just chat rooms and secret messages.”
He looks over his shoulder at me, raising his dark eyebrows. “It’s a little more than that.”
He stops and opens a door on the left. Inside an older woman is sitting in a rocking chair. In her arms is a small baby, its pink face scrunched up in sleep, a fist pressed to its tiny mouth. I glance around the brightly lit room. It is filled with cribs and cots, and dozens of children are sleeping or playing quietly in the corners.
“You have a nursery?” I ask.
The woman makes a shushing noise and LJ shuts the door again.
“We’ve been hacking into the Project’s mainframe to get updated copies of The List.”
“Those kids are supposed to become recruits,” I realize. “You’re getting them before the Project can.”
He nods. “We’ve been rescuing prospective recruits for years, as early as we can. It’s become the core of what the resistance does. Those people you saw out in the
