The resistance is saving these kids from the short, brutal life of a recruit, but he’s still kidnapping them, stealing them away from whatever families they may have.
“Aren’t you worried you’re doing the same thing the Project is, taking them from the only lives they know?”
He starts walking down the hallway again. “What life did they have if we just let the Project take them? Most of them were abandoned, homeless, or about to be swallowed up by the system. We’re rescuing them.”
I think of Tim, who lived for years with his family before the Project came for him. Would he have been better off if someone like LJ had taken him as a child?
We have reached the end of the twisting corridor. “This is what I really wanted to show you, Lydia.”
He pushes the door open, and I feel myself go white, the blood draining from my cheeks.
There, in the middle of the room, gleaming silver under fluorescent light, is a TM.
Chapter 16
I stare up at the large, circular structure. Modern TMs have clouded glass on top, with slick silver on the bottom, but this one is made of interlocking pieces of scrap metal, like an oversize steam pipe. Long wires connect it to a computer mainframe that sits on a broad desk.
I walk closer to the machine, my footsteps loud against the concrete floor.
“Early on we made contact with one of the Project’s engineers, and brought him into the resistance. It took a few years, but he and I were able to use Tesla’s alternating current theory to create this. We made sure to build it in an area with a lot of magnetic energy.”
I move until I’m standing next to the TM. The top reaches all the way to the high cement ceiling, disappearing into it like a tube. “Does it work?”
“Fairly well.”
The room isn’t large, and the TM dominates its space. Overhead a metal catwalk curves between two walls. LJ moves to sit down at the desk. “This is why we live so simply. All our resources go into this.”
I run my hand down the metal side, my fingers catching on the exposed bolts. With a TM, I do not need the Project to help me rescue Tim and Wes. I can go back to the start of the mission myself and change our future. I can save all of us, without having to embrace the destiny that Walker laid out for me. Hope is like a vine growing inside of me, spreading through my stomach, my chest, my heart.
“You’ve sent people back already?” I work to keep the eagerness out of my voice. Nikki said they saw my picture on the news and knew they needed to bring me in, but there must be more to it. LJ would not be watching me so closely if he didn’t want something.
“I was the first to travel,” he says. “I went to nineteen eighty-nine.”
He is silent while I piece it together. “That’s how you sent us those messages. They weren’t from the future. You had just timed it perfectly to be in nineteen eighty-nine when we were connecting the dots.”
He picks up a pen from the desk, tapping it on the wooden surface. It is a careless action, but I see the tension in his lined forehead, the rigid set of his shoulders. “I was also the one who gave your grandfather the disk with the list of recruits.”
I turn until my back is to the TM. “Why didn’t you just tell us the truth? Why the message boards and the floppy disk? You know how scared we were when we found our names on that list.”
“I couldn’t. Things had to happen exactly as I remembered them happening. Otherwise the butterfly effect could have ruined everything.”
“The butterfly effect.” I slump back against the metal, sliding down until I’m sitting on the ground. “I am so sick of those words.”
It feels odd to be leaning so casually against a TM. In the Facility it is treated like a god, something to fear and worship, despite knowing it will ultimately destroy us.
“But the butterfly effect is true. I know, better than anyone.” He sighs, and suddenly he seems years older, his chin dipping into his jowls, his eyelids heavy and red. “I tried to save Maria. It didn’t work.”
Maria. The pretty dark-haired girl we tried to rescue from a club after LJ saw her name on the list. “I’m sorry.”
He looks away, concentrating on the desk in front of him. “I’ve been through time a lot now. You know how hard it is on your body. I don’t know how the recruits can last for so many years.”
I think of Wes’s hand shaking against the white linens of the dinner table, Twenty-two’s body facedown in the dirt. “I don’t think many of them do.”
“That’s why we have to stop them for good, Lydia.” He gets up from his chair and walks closer to me. I have to tilt my head back against the TM to look into his face. “And we need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“Go back to the beginning. Stop the Montauk Project from ever existing in the first place.”
I sit in the small bedroom, staring at a poster of a shirtless singer I don’t recognize, one of those baby-faced teens who never seem to go out of style no matter the decade. Angela is sheltered down here—LJ says he keeps them off the grid as much as possible, no I-units, no government-run internet, only an old television—but she is still a teenage girl. Sitting on her narrow bed, staring at her dresser crammed with knickknacks, her books stacked on the floor, I am jealous of her space, of the tiny corner of the world that belongs only to her. It was something I took for granted when I had it, and miss it now that I don’t.
“I brought you these.” Tag is standing in
