But that was easy enough to feel when I was lying by myself on a hard mattress, staring up at the underside of a white bunk, the facility’s fluorescent lights bright even in the dead of night. Now, with Wes so close, his large fingers curved around the delicate bones of my wrist, I feel that resolve start to waver. I want to know what he has to say. I want to know why the future me forgave him, and how he made her smile like she forgot, if only for a moment, that she had become a slave to the Project.
“I missed you,” he whispers, his deep voice so low, so soft, and I close my eyes. But then his fingers trace the scar that covers the pale skin on the underside of my wrist, and I pull away.
“Don’t.”
He steps back. I feel the heat of him leave, and I am only cold in its place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Twenty-two will be waiting. I have to remember why I’m here.” I look down at my arm, my back still to Wes. In the shadowed light of the room you almost can’t see the slim, raised white ridge. But I know it’s there. I always know it’s there. Somewhere under my skin, tucked against the muscle and the white, ropey tendons, is their tracking chip. The way the Project follows my every move through their facility, through the outside world. It is the thing that marks me as theirs.
Wes doesn’t say anything, and I ignore his presence as I carefully open the case, pull out a thin lens, and place it over my eye, repeating with the second one. I blink, and it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust, for the tears to settle, for my vision to clear. It is my first time wearing an I-unit, though I have been practicing with ordinary contacts for weeks. It is against Montauk Project policy for inventions to be shared across eras, so although I know how an I-unit works in theory, I have never worn one in practice.
Menu, I think, and a scrolling list appears before my eyes with words like Contacts, Calendar, Messages, Internet. I can see through the black lettering, though the world behind it is slightly fuzzier.
Off, I think, and the menu disappears.
I swing around the room, imagining that it will look different somehow, with this thing creating a veil over my eyes. But no, there is the wooden dresser, the gold picture frame against the wall, the TV, dark and quiet.
My eyes settle on Wes. He is staring back at me, and I know he’s wearing his I-unit too. As soon as I focus on his face, faint red lines shoot out in front of my eyes, mapping the angles of his features, his head. It is not just scanning his image, but linking to a database that stores his online presence, including his social media sites, his work history, and pictures of him that have been posted on the web.
A small profile appears. Because our aliases have a relationship, I have access to his entire I-unit profile, full of milestones, dates, and pictures of events we’ve both attended. Michael Gallo, it says, with a photo of Wes and a brief résumé. Engaged to Samantha Greenwood. I see the words on the bottom. And there is the history of us, or the fake us. Met in 2042, senior year in college. Traveled to England, France, Russia, and South Africa from 2043 to 2048. Engaged in Johannesburg June 15, 2048.
Wes’s eyes are unfocused, and I wonder if he’s reading the same words I am. Not that it matters. This is a fake life, for a fake couple. Once I thought we would have that kind of future together, and I believed it enough that I left behind my family and friends to follow him into the past. But I was wrong, and even the memory of the future us embracing in that hallway is not enough to make me believe that we can ever start over again.
Chapter 4
Wes offers me his arm. I rest my hand on his jacket as we walk down the long hallway. To our right are framed portraits of men and women long dead; to our left is a balcony that looks out over a ballroom. In between the tall columns of the banister I see a flicker of light from the chandeliers, the swirl of a couple spinning on the dance floor.
My heels clink against the marble, loud even above the swelling of the violins that seeps up from below. Wes is as quiet as he usually is. We haven’t spoken a word since we left the hotel room, not even when we went through security—metal detectors that scanned for everything from weapons to foreign chemicals. Luckily the poison, hidden in the bottom of a lipstick tube in my clutch, was undetectable. But not one of us is armed, and I cannot help feeling nervous as we reach the top of a large, gold staircase.
The hallway was dark and narrow, but now the party is spread out in front of us: light and noise and people in a room the size of a football field. There are floor-to-ceiling windows, dozens of round tables at the far end, and a small orchestra set up next to the dance floor. Like the hotel room upstairs, it is decorated in
