Find Me Where the Water Ends (So Close to You) (8 page)

She is on her knees, leaning toward me. I press shaking fingers into the moss as I inch backward.

“Thirty-one remembers his dad. You weren’t even surprised by that. There is no way you both could have gone through what we did and still remember. You don’t know what it’s like to feel electricity shooting through you, burning you alive. You don’t know how it feels to have water poured in your face, to think you’re drowning for hours and hours.” She looks nothing like a recruit now, her eyes bulging, her upper lip curled.

“You’re right,” I whisper. “I don’t.”

She sits back, running a hand over her face.

I stand up slowly. Her words run through me like ice water, making my joints feel stiff and frozen. I know we are in danger out here; I have been briefed on what could happen if we’re caught. I even took a training course on tactics for withstanding torture. But I’m not ready to hear the truth of our situation out loud.

Twenty-two stares down at the ground, one open palm pressed to her forehead as she tries to regain control. I suddenly need to be out of this clearing, away from her. I pick the plastic container up out of the supplies from the barn. “I’ll just go get water,” I say. She ignores me.

Before I leave the clearing, I grab the shotgun, tucking it underneath my arm.

Tim is standing knee-deep in the stream when I push through the trees and onto the tall bank. He has found a natural pool, where the water is still and glass-like this time of night. Wes is standing on rocks near the shore and when he sees me he puts his finger to his lips.

Tim lowers his hands into the water, so gradually that it’s hard to see if he’s moving at all. His fingertips break the surface, not even making a ripple, then slowly, slowly, sink down until he’s submerged to his wrists. I see a large catfish nearby, spinning in lazy circles. Tim moves his fingers in small waves and the catfish comes closer. He waits until it is right on top of his hand, and suddenly there is an eruption of water as he hurls it toward the bank.

Wes catches the slippery fish as though they have done this hundreds of times, bends over, and bashes a rock against its head. The catfish bleeds red, and the color leaks onto Wes’s hands, a watery pink against his skin. “Finally.” Tim wipes his brow with his hand, flinging drops of water onto his cheeks and eyelashes. “I thought we’d never get one.”

“We can’t cook it,” I say. “No fire.”

“We’ll eat it raw.” He pushes through the stream and climbs up onto the bank next to Wes. “Now that there’s not as much pollution in the water it should be fine.”

“Raw fish. Lovely.”

“It’s better than starving,” Wes says softly.

“I’m not complaining.” I don’t look at him, staring down at the fish instead. The mouth is open, the eyes like small marbles. It died in the middle of gasping, struggling to breathe again.

“I’m not saying you were.”

Tim pauses from wringing the water out of his pant leg. He looks between the two of us and clears his throat. “Why don’t I take the fish back to the clearing? You can get water, or, you know, whatever.”

“No, it’s—”

“Yes,” Wes cuts me off. “Take the fish back; we’ll be there in a minute.”

“Sure thing.” Tim grabs the tail from Wes, then reaches down to take the shotgun. As he straightens he winks at me. I frown, but he has already turned around, is already disappearing into the trees.

For the first time in days, I am left alone with Wes.

Chapter 9

W
es
kneels down to wash his hands in the stream, the blood slowly dissipating in the clear water. My feet itch to walk up the steep bank, to disappear while I can. But I can’t seem to make myself move.

He stands again and slowly turns to face me. I stare at the bump on the bridge of his nose, at the long slope of his forehead. “Are you holding up okay?” he asks. “It’s been a rough few days.”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

He steps forward on the rocky shore. We are almost close enough to touch, though I keep my hands near my sides. How can he smell so good after hiking for days without a shower? I am streaked with dirt, my heels are rubbed raw from the large boots, and my hair is looped in a knot on the top of my head that I’ve tied with the same type of string I’m using to hold my pants up. He is just as dirty, but somehow it looks good on him—the waves of his hair are more defined, his cheeks are tanner than usual. Only his eyes show how weary he is.

“I always worry about you.”

He sounds sincere, but how do I know if it’s real? Keeping my head down, I walk around him toward the water.

“You don’t believe me.” His voice is flat.

I lay the plastic jug in the stream and concentrate on the way the water rushes in, tumbling over itself. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“Lydia.”

The jug grows heavy in my hands and I crouch to set it down on the rocks. “What do you want me to say?”

He runs his wet fingers through his hair, making the strands slick against his head. “Look at me. Please.”

I stand up again. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want us to be like how we used to be.”

“Are you kidding?” I stare at him. “How could we ever go back to that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But it’s what I want.”

I twist away until I’m facing downriver, the point where the water disappears into the trees. “I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t know who you are. Maybe I never did.”

“You did, more than anyone.”

“The Wes I knew never would have been capable of using me for a mission. I thought that I got through to you, that I changed you. I was an idiot. I should have listened when you told me you weren’t capable of loving someone.”

I feel him take a step forward.

“You did change me.” His voice is pleading. “Let me explain, Lydia.”

I shake my head. “I thought I wanted to hear your explanation. For months, I waited for you to find me, to tell me what happened. But you were never there. And now . . . I don’t think I want to hear it anymore.”

“What does that mean?”

I turn. He is closer than I thought, only a step or two away, and the weak light of early evening makes the angles of his face seem sharper. “It means that you broke my heart. And I’m not sure I want to trust you with it again.”

He frowns, a deep line appearing between his eyes. “You don’t mean that.”

“I had to move on as much as I could, without you. The Project still has my grandfather locked up somewhere. That’s all I’m focused on right now. I need to keep my head down so they don’t kill him.”

“Lydia—”

“It doesn’t matter what happened nine months ago. You’ve been lying to me from the beginning.”

“I haven’t been.”

“You have.”

He looks away, staring down at the rocky shore. “It doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You don’t care what the truth is.”

“I know what the truth is.”

“You don’t.”

“Here’s my truth, Wes.” It is the first time I have said his name and I hear him take a ragged breath. “You always knew I was destined to be a recruit. You knew what the polypenamaether scar looked like, and you knew I had it on my arm. They sent you after me, and that was why you followed me to nineteen forty-four, not because you saw something special in me. Maybe it turned into something more, I don’t know. Maybe you did have a good reason for giving me up to General Walker in the end. But remember that day with LJ?”

He runs his hand over his jaw and I know he is picturing that sweltering, small space in the East Village, LJ—Tag’s roommate—leaning over his computer as he and I both realized we were always destined to become recruits.

“You were lying then. You were lying even before that. How do I separate the truths from the lies?”

“You’re right.” He raises his eyes to mine. “I always knew you were supposed to be a recruit.” His voice is different now, resigned and soft. “I was tasked with bringing you in, and that’s why I followed you to nineteen forty-four. I had been watching you for months, with your friends in school, with your grandfather when you visited Camp Hero. I knew everything about you. When I first tried to get you out of the forties, it was because I knew you would screw up the time line by being there, and that would just make my mission harder.”

I feel the acid rise in my throat. I knew I was his mission, but I had still hoped I was more than that, that maybe he felt the same immediate connection I did.

“But, Lydia.” He puts his fingers under my chin, lifting my face when I would turn away. “I
did
change. In nineteen forty-four you were so defiant, so ready to protect your family, even at the risk of your own life. It changed me, seeing that devotion. All I wanted was to have this red-haired girl care about me, too. I was upset in LJ’s room, because I never wanted you to know that you were supposed to become a recruit. I wanted to keep you away from this life. But I wasn’t lying when I told you I fell in love with you. Everything I did after that was for you.”

I pull my face away and his hand is suspended between us, grasping only air. “Turning me in was for me? All that lying was for me?”

“I was pro—”

But I cut him off. “Don’t say you were protecting me. Don’t say it. Loving someone means you trust them enough to deal with the truth together. It doesn’t mean you shelter them with lies.”

He is silent and the stream sounds impossibly loud, the water churning over the rocks and tiny waterfalls.

“There was a reason for what happened,” he says softly. “For what I said that day, for why I turned you in.”

“I can’t hear it. Not now.” It is getting closer to night, the treetops outlined black against the sky. My leg is throbbing and I shift my weight, aware of every cut and bruise on my body. “In the barn, when Twenty-two pressed the knife to my neck, I thought you had something to do with it.”

He takes a step back, and even in the near dark I see the color drain from his face. “You really thought I would try to kill you?”

“I see the way you are together. You lied to me about not knowing her.”

He shoves his hand through his hair again. “I . . . there was . . .”

It makes it worse, that he has no answer, that he has no good reason for lying. I picture the way they stood so close together, how she tilted her head back to stare at him, how he bent to hear her better. “She told me you were on missions together, before this. Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t want you to think there was something between us. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter.” I think of Twenty-two’s face when she described the torture. “You know why she’s scared of water.”

But he doesn’t understand what I mean. “I pulled her out of the water once. It was on a mission. She hasn’t been able to handle it since.”

“I thought it was—” I shake my head. “You saved her life?”

The recruits have been taught to hide all emotions, not to care about anything but the Project. It takes something huge to open them up, even in a small way. I can imagine Twenty-two on the bank of some faraway river, coughing and gasping as she relived the feeling of being tortured. And then there was Wes’s face looming over her. She must have known, in that moment, that he was her key, that she was still capable of wanting.

But still.

“She pulled a knife on me.”

“You know why she did that.”

“Does that excuse it?”

He doesn’t answer, just looks down at the rocks at our feet, and I realize that for him, it does. He is not on my side, even though Twenty-two threatened me. He understands her, maybe more than he ever understood me. “She won’t do it again,” he finally says.

“How comforting.” I reach down and pick up the jug. The water sloshes against the lid and I struggle to keep it upright. Wes lifts his arm, then sees my expression and drops his hand to his side. “I’m going back.”

He reaches out again and touches my shoulder. I flinch at the contact. “Lydia . . . I don’t want to leave things this way.”

“I need time.”

He looks over my head to the north, where the Secret Service are probably scouring the dark woods to find us. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

“But I still need it.”

He takes his fingers away from my arm and closes his eyes for a few seconds. I look away before he can open them again, afraid that I will give in if we stare at each other for long enough. Instead I grip the slippery plastic jug in both hands, holding it tight to my body as I make my way back up the bank.

Tim leans against the tree next to me, our legs stretched in front of us on the moss. It is spongy, almost as soft as a mattress, but we cannot sleep yet. We are scanning the forest, listening for a snapping branch, watching for a stray beam of light. After we ate the slimy catfish, Tim and I volunteered to stay awake for the first shift. Though Wes’s expression darkened, he didn’t protest, just lay down on the ground with his back to both of us. Twenty-two is not that far from him, her body curved in his direction. If they reached out they would be touching, and I stare at them more than I stare out at the trees, cringing every time one of them shifts in their sleep.

“He’s not into her,” Tim whispers.

I jerk my head away from the center of the clearing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He snorts under his breath. “Yeah, right.”

“I’m keeping watch, that’s all.”

“It’s like you’re in some daytime soap. Jealous over a pretty boy.”

“I don’t know a lot of soap operas where everyone’s running for their lives.”

“Then you don’t watch enough TV.”

“And you do?”

He shrugs. “My sister was obsessed. The trashier, the better. After my dad died, it was just her, my mom, and me. I always got outvoted.”

“Your dad died?”

“When I was nine. It was a long time ago.”

In the distance there is the hoot of an owl, and we both tense, our heads turning toward the noise. After that it is silent, and I feel Tim’s body relax at the same time mine does. “You remember so much about your past,” I say. “Most recruits forget, after the first stage of training.”

“Yeah.” The word is short, brusque, but I hear the emotion behind it. “I remember everything.”

I stare at the dark silhouettes of Wes and Twenty-two, thinking of what she said will happen if we’re captured by the Secret Service. “What was it like?”

Tim is quiet, and at first I think he won’t tell me. But then he says, “It started small, with food and sleep deprivation. They threw me in a hole for days, maybe weeks. It was black in there, no light, no windows.” He stops, resting his head against the rough bark of the tree behind him.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I say softly. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“It’s fine. I’d be curious too. I just try not to think about it. It didn’t last that long anyway. I learned pretty quickly that if I told them what they wanted to hear, they’d speed it up. I think that’s how I got out of it with . . . me still intact.”

He is so different from Twenty-two, and even from Wes. They both turned inward, building walls around themselves for protection. But Tim did the opposite, reaching out for human contact to feel normal again.

“What did you mean, in the hotel room, about us helping each other?” I ask.

“I wanted to escape.” His voice is just a little above a whisper. “I thought maybe we could work together. But there’s no point in running now, not as fugitives. We’ll have to get out of this time period first. Hopefully the Project will find us soon.”

“How can you be so sure they will?”

“What good does it do to leave us in the woods? If we’re caught we might talk. They won’t risk that.”

“Then why haven’t they come yet? It doesn’t make sense.”

He doesn’t answer and I turn to face him, feeling the moss give beneath my hand. “Did General Walker ever talk about your destiny with you?”

He shakes his head; I hear it scrape against the bark. “He told me I was needed on this mission, but he never used that word. Why?”

“He kept telling me I had a destiny to stop this nuclear war. But I’m starting to think it wasn’t true.”

“Maybe it was. Maybe killing Sardosky meant you fulfilled it.”

“If we did kill Sardosky. We might not have. We might have to repeat this mission again and again.”

I hear him take a sharp breath. “If it had failed, they would have stopped us in the beginning, way back in that hotel room. But they let this mission play out. There’s a reason for that.”

“I just wish we knew what it was.”

“If this mission wasn’t your destiny, then why would Walker bring it up?”

“I don’t know. But why wouldn’t it be your destiny, too? Why is it just mine?” Above our heads, thin clouds create a veil that blocks the shape and texture of the moon. But there is enough light to see the shadow of Tim’s face, the steady rise and fall of Wes’s and Twenty-two’s shoulders as they sleep. “Maybe he meant something else. Maybe this was just a cover for the real reason they made me a recruit.”

“Like what?”

I have no answer and I stay quiet, turning my head to stare into the woods. There is no movement, no noise, and I wonder how alone we are out here, how close the Secret Service truly are.

“Have you asked him about it?”

I follow Tim’s chin jerk to where Wes is lying on the ground. “No. There’s no point.”

“What happened with you two, anyway?”

“It’s complicated.”

He swings one finger in a circle, encompassing the small clearing, the looming trees. “We’ve got hours.”

I do not tell him about the moments when Wes kissed me or held me close, how his voice was so low when he said he loved me. But I describe my trip to 1944, changing the future by mistake, finding my grandfather again in 1989, and Wes’s betrayal. I tell him about the Project holding my grandfather hostage, and why I wasn’t brainwashed. By the time I am finished my throat is sore, and I reach for the jug of water—almost empty again—and tilt it back against my lips.