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

by Rachel Carter

  “Get to New York, find out who was trying to contact you. If it’s the Project, then you might be able to change our fate. You can fix this, Lydia.”

  If I am caught too, we will both be prisoners, waiting for a rescue that may never come, or a death sentence that definitely will. Chasing after the radio advertisement is a long shot, and odds are it won’t lead to anything. But there’s the smallest bead of hope inside of me—hope that I can save Wes and Tim and even Twenty-two. And right now that’s all we have.

  I reach out and touch his hair, his cheek, his lips. “I’ll make this right,” I whisper. “Believe in me.”

  “I always do.” He gives me that lopsided smile of his, the one I haven’t seen in months, and I do not think; I just press my lips hard against his, pulling away before he can react.

  It only takes a second to stand, to sprint toward the road. I do not turn around as I leap onto the back of a pickup truck and swing myself into the low bed, falling heavily onto my side. I lay my body flat on the cold metal, listening to the gunshots ring out, fade, and fall away, until all that’s left is the screaming of the wind.

  Chapter 12

  As soon as the truck stops, I crawl out from the back of the pickup. We are in the parking lot of a convenience store, though I don’t know what state this is. The truck was headed north when I jumped on it, but I couldn’t recognize any of the landmarks we passed, with the landscape altered so drastically since my own time. I can only trust we were moving in the right direction.

  It is barely morning, the light caught somewhere between black and gray, and the lot is deserted except for a large semitruck. During the drive here, I lay on my back and stare up at the stars, waiting for the moment the government would shut down the grid and grind the cars on the highway to a halt—but it never happened. The FBI and Secret Service must have been too far away to see which vehicle I escaped on, and they couldn’t justify stalling transportation across several states.

  The driver of the pickup never even knew I was in the bed of his truck as he automatically drove down the dark highway. Now he is inside the gas station, buying food or using the restroom. The old gas pumps, abandoned and no longer functional, aren’t far from where we’re parked. Cars run on solar power, and the grid provides the electricity. Drivers pay for their vehicles, they pay to use the roads, but they do not need to fill up their tanks anymore.

  The semitruck has New Jersey plates and an I Love New York sticker on the bumper. I hop up onto the back and crouch down, steadying myself as I lift up the unlocked back door. It’s heavy. I only manage a few feet—just enough for me to crawl inside. In the semidarkness, I shut the door again. Now the only light is a thin strip near the floor. The driver comes back within minutes. I hear him start the engine, the ground vibrates beneath me, and soon we are on the road. He is carrying bananas, hundreds of them, stacked in wooden crates all around me.

  When I am hungry I eat the underripe, still-green fruit. I try to sleep a little, my head resting on a crate, but I keep jerking awake, feeling Tim’s blood hot on my hands, seeing Wes kneeling in the dirt, his fingers white as he pressed them to his shoulder.

  Because the truck drives so smoothly, I barely feel it when we stop. A door opens and closes, and I crouch behind a box of bananas, waiting. I only hear silence.

  I lift the back door up a fraction of an inch and peer out the small sliver of space to see red brick and a stack of wooden frames. I push the door up farther, slide out, and close it again quickly.

  I am in a narrow alleyway, so tight that I have to squeeze against the side of the truck to inch my way forward. Up ahead I see light, white and blazing and preventing me from seeing the street. The closer I get to the sidewalk the more I make out: the long shape of a building, cars moving past in quick, efficient rows. It is a city, and I cross my fingers as I emerge from the alley. Someone bumps into me and I back up, watching the streams of people hurry past, speaking English, Chinese, Russian. The lights above are flashing neon, even though it’s midday. Times Square, New York.

  I’ve been to New York countless times with my grandfather, but I’ve never seen Times Square like this. The advertisements are holograms, three-dimensional images that pop out of their frames and fly into the air. The city is quieter, no horns honking, no brakes screeching. The cars move forward on the grid, orderly lines that stop and start on invisible magnetic tracks that are hidden in the concrete. The streetlights are gone, but the walking signs remain and pedestrians push forward as soon as the lights turn green.

  The heat is overwhelming, making the back of my shirt stick to my skin. I keep my head down, one hand pressed to my forehead like a visor. I had not thought past the initial rush to get to New York, but now I realize how exposed I am here in this massive crowd. If anyone scans my face with an I-unit I could be instantly detained. But maybe a crowd is the best place to be—most people ignore me, too busy looking at the gleaming metal towers that stretch up and up, the flickering images that move and dance in the open sky.

  I see my own image on one of the overhead screens, a 3-D projection of my face spinning around and around. Next to me are Wes and Twenty-two and Tim, a red Wanted sign over all our heads. They are pictures from the fund-raiser, and it is odd to see all of us dressed up in our gowns and tuxes again, especially now, when I’m covered in dirt and blood.

  I start to make my way south, toward where I think I’ll find 167 Eleventh Avenue. An older man bumps into me and apologizes, and I murmur a response. The crowd is thick, with people pushing in from all sides. I am jostled back and forth, and I hear the woman next to me whispering about my dirty clothes: the stained black T-shirt, the filthy jeans. Suddenly she disappears, and in her place is a tall, dark-haired boy who can’t be more than fifteen. He grabs my arm and I tense, afraid that if I fight against his hold it will bring too much attention. He leans down, his lips close to my ear. “There are seventeen shells where the water ends.”

  I freeze. “But the rocks are too sharp,” I whisper back.

  “I’ll take you to a place where they’re smooth.”

  Another code. He’s wants me to go somewhere with him.

  “The ocean or the lake?”

  “The lake.”

  The Center in New York City, an outpost where the Project trains and houses recruits. “The ocean” is the main Facility in Montauk.

  I nod, and keep my head bent as the boy leads me down a side street, away from the bustle of Times Square. The buildings close in tighter here, the holograms are gone, and somehow it feels even hotter—ever since the temperatures rose, New York is over 100 degrees every day in the summer.

  There’s a white van with sleek lines parked halfway down the block. I head toward it, not surprised when the boy presses a button on a key that opens the door.

  Inside, the vehicle is white, clean, and large. There’s no steering wheel. The boy sits in the driver’s side and presses a button near the dashboard. A screen flickers on in front of him. Destination? a soft female voice asks.

  “Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street,” the boy answers. I recognize it as the address for the new Center.

  Before the waters rose, the Center was hidden hundreds of feet below Central Park. It was massive, meant to house all the recruits, as well as the Project’s prison cells. But though the Facility in Montauk wasn’t flooded, the Center was, and the Project had to move it in 2029. Instead of going down, it now goes up, spanning an entire hundred-story skyscraper.

  “Activate air conditioning.” The boy’s voice is a little high, and I notice that he’s rail thin, with very little muscle tone. His slight build is unusual for a recruit, and I wonder how new he is, how raw.

  A blast of cool air hits me from vents in the dashboard as the van hums on, the engine smooth and quiet. We pull out onto the grid, slipping between two cars in an orderly fashion. I think of how New York used to be—the beeping of horns, the fighting over parking spots. The grid has taken that away, and it feels like a different
place with all this quiet.

  We’re headed uptown and I stare at the buildings as we pass. Everything is brighter and cleaner than I remember; there is no trash lining the gutters, and the buildings gleam with glass and metal. Wes and I were here just last year, but that was 1989, and then the streets were splashed with graffiti, the buildings run down and boarded up, drug dealers shouting at us as we walked. These days, it is impossible to live on the island of Manhattan unless you are a millionaire, and it shows—the city’s dark corners and edges have been wiped clean.

  Now that the Project has found me, the knot that has been sitting in the base of my stomach for days is slowly unraveling. They must have sent the radio message. We weren’t abandoned, not as completely as we’d feared. And now, with access to a TM, I’ll be able to go back in time to save Tim, Wes, and Twenty-two.

  The van stops at the Fifty-Sixth Street address, not far from the base of Central Park. The Center is in a new building, one that was constructed after a recent hurricane tore through the city. It has mirrored windows that act as solar panels, and reinforced steel columns embedded in every corner.

  From the outside it looks like any other office building on the block. The people on the street walk quickly with their eyes straight ahead. No one notices me and the dark-haired boy as we cross the busy sidewalk. As soon as we approach the building, a keypad appears on the wall and the boy types in a ten-digit code. The door slides open and we enter a narrow lobby.

  A young woman sits at a metal desk that’s perched in front of an elevator. Her dirty-blond hair falls in waves over her shoulders, and she’s wearing a simple beige dress. “May I help you?”

  “We have a meeting with Fortitude.”

  Her smile fades and she holds out her hand. In it is a small, round plastic disk. The dark-haired boy lifts his arm and passes his wrist over it like a scanner at the grocery store. It beeps. The girl moves it toward me. As I raise my hand, I see that she has a silver scar on her wrist where her tracker was installed. She is a recruit, just like the two of us.

  The device scans me and gives an identical beep. The girl sits back, staring ahead blankly as we skirt the desk and walk toward the elevators. This time we have to press our thumbs to a small keypad next to the door, and then look into a tiny hole for a retina scan. It is only after we are both cleared that the elevator door opens.

  The dark-haired boy and I do not speak as he pushes the button for the fifty-third floor. Before the elevator moves the light dims, and a red beam sweeps from the ceiling to our feet, covering our entire bodies. It is scanning for weapons, for tracking chips, and using facial recognition software to confirm our identities. When we are clear, the elevator jolts, moving so quickly that my stomach turns over.

  On the fifty-third floor, the door opens, and a guard in a black uniform gestures me forward. The dark-haired boy does not leave the elevator as I follow the guard into a long, mirrored hallway. Every surface is reflective, and the white lights in the floor bounce off the walls and ceilings, making it feel as though I am in the TM again, waiting for the moment that my body disintegrates.

  We pass through two hallways before the guard opens a door on the right and shoves me inside. The room is small with a desk in the middle and curved metal chairs on either side. One wall is a floor-to-ceiling window that looks out over the city. I see the rise and fall of the buildings—the skyscrapers downtown, the Empire State Building not far from here. The traffic on the grid looks like a choreographed ballet, cars starting and stopping in neat lines. Down by the water, a thick wall stretches along the shore, and I watch the waves crash against the opposite side, the sea spray dark and foaming as it coats the top of the concrete structure.

  When hurricanes tore through New York in the late 2020s, all of downtown was flooded, and thousands of people were forced to evacuate. But instead of abandoning the city, the mayor decided to build an eighteen-foot seawall around all of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. He implemented a wall tax that drove out the poorer residents, closed the ferries, and in 2032 dug up Battery Park and knocked down structures closest to the water’s edge, making the beaches deeper and higher.

  I learned about the new wall in training, but seeing it in person is like looking at an ancient moat that encloses the city, as though we are always awaiting an attack by sea.

  The door opens again and another black-uniformed guard moves to stand near the far wall. I take a step toward the desk as an officer walks in, his salt-and-pepper hair familiar in a way that makes my heart start to pound. General Walker.

  But then a woman with dark-red hair enters, and I fall back against the cool glass of the window, my hand coming up to clutch at my throat.

  She’s older, with faint lines around her green eyes, but this woman is the future version of me.

  Chapter 13

  “Seventeen,” the older man says.

  My mouth is open, but nothing comes out.

  “We are aware that this may be a shock.” Future me’s voice sounds familiar, but it is deeper than mine. Colder. She continues, “Regardless, you’ll need to debrief both of us on the events of the mission.”

  “You’re . . .”

  “You. Yes.” She wears a slim beige dress that clings to her thin frame, and her dark-red hair is pulled back in a tight bun. Her skin is as pale as mine. She looks like she’s in her late thirties, but I wonder how old she really is, in this age of stem-cell technology. Fifty? Sixty?

  She crosses the room and sits down at the desk, her movements quick and efficient, with a grace I’ve never been able to possess.

  The older man moves to sit next to her.

  “General Walker?” I whisper.

  “Colonel Walker. General Walker was my father.”

  The two men look startlingly similar, with the same graying hair, square jaw, and straight nose.

  “You can call me Agent Bentley.” This future version watches me closely as she speaks. Her voice isn’t as cold as the colonel’s, but it’s not exactly warm either. She seems . . . blank. Like a recruit.

  “Agent Bentley?” I glance between her and Walker. She’s not just a recruit—they’re using my last name, with a title I’ve never heard before in the Project. “What does that mean?”

  “Agent Bentley is here as a consultant. The mission you were on was significant. Since Bentley lived through it, she came back here as a favor to help us out. Now we’re especially thankful she did, since something in the time line was altered.” Colonel Walker gestures at the chair across from the desk. “Sit down, Seventeen.”

  But I cannot move away from the window, my muscles locked tight. “I would never help—”

  “Things change.” Colonel Walker raises his thick brows. “Sit, Seventeen.”

  This time it is a command, and I automatically cross the room and sink down into one of the sleek chrome chairs.

  “Tell us what happened in the woods,” Walker says.

  “Don’t you know already?” I glance at the future version of me—Agent Bentley. While Colonel Walker slouches, she sits perfectly still, her back straight. He isn’t treating her like a subordinate, which means she must have some power here.

  “The time line has changed,” she says. “You were supposed to be found in Times Square with Recruit Eleven, but this time you’re alone. Colonel Walker and I want to know why that shift occurred.” Her voice stays cool, but as she says Wes’s number, a muscle twitches in her cheek.

  “I . . . I don’t know.” I have a hard time looking into her—my—face, and I stare down at the silver metal desk as I answer. “This is my first time in the future. I didn’t even know something was different. Eleven . . . he couldn’t come with me.”

  “The president is dead, which means the mission was a success.” Colonel Walker reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. They are the new nontoxic, non-tar kind that burn clean. He lights one, blowing the smoke out into the room. “But we’re concerned about what this shift means. Eleven is
n’t our priority, but if he’s dead, then it could affect the time line in other ways in the future. We want to be prepared.”

  He speaks of Wes’s death so casually, and I struggle to keep calm. Agent Bentley is better at it, though I see the slight way she flinches at the colonel’s words.

  “Ti—” I stop. If Agent Bentley still has my memories, then she knows what name I was about to say, but she makes no comment. “Thirty-one was killed in the field. I was forced to abandon Eleven and Twenty-two when they were shot to come here. I’d like permission to go back to the start of this mission and change what happened, so they’ll survive.”

  “Now why would we authorize that?” Colonel Walker takes a long drag of the cigarette. It still smells like the old ones, sharp and acrid, and Agent Bentley scrunches up her nose as the smoke curls in front of her face. “Sardosky is dead. The nuclear war we’ve been trying to stop will never occur now. Except for the time line shift, the mission was a success. We don’t know yet how Eleven’s disappearance will affect the future time line, but it might be insignificant. He was an older recruit, right?” He looks over at Agent Bentley, who nods stiffly. “Then he probably wouldn’t have lived for much longer anyway.”

  I push forward in my chair until I’m sitting on the very edge. “Eleven is significant to the time line.” I know my voice is desperate, but I can’t help it. “I can go back to the woods. I can find them there before the Secret Service finds us. Sardosky will still be dead.”

  Colonel Walker is already shaking his head. “There’s no point. Maybe later, if we find out that Eleven was important in some way. Right now we’ll try to pinpoint the exact moment of the change, using Agent Bentley’s knowledge of what happened. But I suspect those three recruits are expendable.”

  “Expendable?” I whisper the word. A shadow passes over Agent Bentley’s face, but she makes no outward movement. I’ve always known that the Project felt that way about recruits, but this is Wes. And Tim. They don’t deserve to be treated like this.