“What the hell are you thinking?” I snap at Althea. Wes quickly shuts the office door.
I run forward, pushing Faust back in his chair, and press my hands to the wound, a little below his shoulder. It has missed his heart, but he could still bleed out.
Wes pries the gun from Althea’s hands. She stands in the middle of the room, watching me impassively. “He needed to die, didn’t he? I knew neither of you would do it. I had to.”
“Not here.” Wes’s voice is harsh. “Not like this. We can’t have a dead body on our hands. What if someone finds it? What are we going to do with him?”
She lifts one shoulder. “Dump him in a supply closet. Who cares?”
The doctor groans, sweat forming on his forehead. I can almost smell his fear, sour and sickly sweet.
“He’s not dead yet,” I snap. “Stop talking about him like he’s dead.”
“Give me the gun and I’ll finish him.” Althea holds out her hand and Wes scowls at her.
The blood is seeping through my fingers. I feel it, warm and thick. A red drop falls onto the white tile floor. All of a sudden I am crouched in the leaves and the pine needles, the gunfire drowning out Tim’s wet, strained breathing.
“Wes . . .” I whisper. “I can’t do this.”
He quickly comes over, holding a large handkerchief in his hands. He nudges me out of the way and presses it onto Faust’s bleeding chest. I step back on shaking legs. There’s blood all over my fingers, and I wipe them on my shirt. Wes holds the gun out to me with his free hand and I take it from him and tuck it into the waistband of my pants.
I spin to face Althea. “We were going to send him through the TM. It’s a better punishment for him.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “He should be dead. He’s the one who started all this. Without him, none of us would have ended up here.” Her fingers are digging into her arms, so hard they are turning white with the pressure. Soon she will break through the skin. “We have to kill him. He stole our lives. It’s only fair.”
She is starting to snap. Being in this room, seeing the man who created the Montauk Project is breaking her. “We need the timers,” I say quickly. “They should have them in their weapons room; there’s no Assimilation Center here yet. It’s in the East Wing, Level Three—”
“I know where it is.” Her arms drop and she squares her shoulders. “I’ll get what I can and meet you in the TM chamber in fifteen minutes.”
“Fine. Just go.”
She quickly leaves the room, perhaps grateful to have a task to get her out of this office, even if it does come from me. I have a moment of panic, wondering if we can trust her, but then I turn back to Wes. She shot Faust because he’s connected to the Project; her only priority is to make it out of here.
“How is he?” I ask.
“Alive.” Wes keeps the handkerchief pressed to the wound. The blood is slowing. “He’ll make it; it’s mostly a flesh wound. But we can’t leave him here.”
“I know. We’ll take him to the TM chamber. It’s what we were planning anyway.”
Dr. Faust is breathing heavily, slumped back in his chair, and he turns his glazed eyes to Wes. “It’s you,” he whispers. “You were here before.”
Wes doesn’t answer him. “Lydia, the journals.”
“Right.” I turn to the file cabinet, ripping open the bottom drawers. They are filled with files on dead soldiers, information on the subjects they’ve sent through time—but nothing about the TM or Tesla. I try the top two drawers, but they’re sealed with the kind of combination locks that look like they belong on an industrial safe. “What is it?” I ask the doctor. “What’s the code?”
“Not . . . telling you,” he croaks out.
Wes leans onto his chest, pressing into the bullet wound. The doctor groans again. “I can’t. . . . I won’t.”
“The more you fight us, the worse it will get,” Wes says.
The doctor stares up at him and suddenly smiles, his teeth still clenched against the pain. “You’re magnificent,” he breathes.
Wes flinches, moving his head back.
I glower at Faust. “If he’s so magnificent, then tell him the codes.”
Wes presses down again, not hard, but enough to show we’re serious. The doctor gasps. “Seven, ten, one, eight, five, six.” He spits the numbers out.
“Tesla’s birthday,” I mumble. “I should have known.”
I spin the dial quickly, and the first drawer opens. Inside are personal documents—a birth certificate from Austria, a passport, proof of US citizenship. I open the lock on the second drawer. The first thing I see is a folder with NIKOLA TESLA on the front in bold letters. I pull it out and leaf through the handwritten sheets of paper. Most are covered in equations; a few have pictures of machines with detailed instructions. I stop at one that resembles the TM. Tesla’s Machine. It is circular, stretching up and narrowing into a tube that only stops at the top of the paper, implying that it goes on and on. I shove it back into the folder, and tuck the whole thing under my arm. There is only a thick notebook left in the drawer and I open it. It is in different handwriting—it must be Faust’s—and is filled with more detailed notes on the TM, various formulas and possible renderings.
I turn, holding both the folder and notebook in my hands.
“You can’t take those!” Faust yells though his voice is weak, his face lined with deep wrinkles. “There’s nothing else like that in the world. If you destroy it, you destroy me. You destroy everything Tesla and I have built.”
“From what I’ve read about Tesla, I don’t think he’d approve of what you’ve been doing with his ideas,” I say.
The doctor’s mouth falls open. It is the
