So Close to You (So Close to You - Trilogy) (20 page)

I nod, my eyes wide. My heart is pounding, so loudly I imagine Wes can hear it. I start to panic. Maybe this is a mistake. But then Wes squeezes my hands and I feel a little bit better.

I sit down on the edge of the hole, still holding on to Wes. He slowly lowers me into the depths of the Facility.

I
drop
down into a dark, narrow vent. It only curves in one direction, and I crawl forward on my hands and knees. I hear Wes enter behind me.

“Follow it,” Wes whispers, so soft I barely hear him. As quietly as I can, I crawl through the tight space. It comes to a fork.

“Left.”

Sweat drips into my eyes as I move. It stings, but there’s no room to sit up and wipe it away. The air is stale and filled with dust and it smells like old batteries again, mixed with the burning scent of bleach. I have to cough but I fight the feeling, a tickling sensation growing and growing in my throat.

Wes guides me left again, then right.

Up ahead is a patch of light and I crawl toward it on my hands and knees. It’s a metal grate, an air vent, looking down into a fluorescent-lit room. There’s an empty desk, a hard-backed chair. Nothing else. “Keep moving,” Wes whispers.

There’s another grate up ahead, a glow of light. I crawl toward it, then suck in a breath as I realize there are people inside, sitting on the white floor of a large, empty room. No one speaks or moves. They’re all dressed in matching gray nightgowns, and their bodies are small and delicate—too small to be adults.

I crawl closer, then freeze. I feel Wes tense behind me. The room is filled with
children
, maybe ten of them, anywhere from five to twelve years old. Some are pale, some have darker skin, but they’re all skinny to the point of starvation, and their hair has been cut razor short. They are covered in bruises. One of them, a gaunt, yellow-haired girl in the corner, lifts her head and looks right at me. I flinch, though I’m unable to pull away from her vacant stare. She’s like a zombie, there’s so little life in her face.

“Lydia.” Wes’s voice is hard, completely devoid of emotion. “Don’t stop moving.”

“What is this place?” I breathe.

I remember Grant telling me that the Montauk Project kidnapped children to use for experiments. I never could have believed that he was
right
. But here’s the proof, right in front of me. Acid rises in my throat as I unconsciously press one hand into the sharp metal of the grate. As if I can reach out and touch them. Pull them to safety.

“Lydia.” Wes says it firmly, but I feel his fingers gently graze my ankle.

It takes all my will to move away from the grate. I crawl forward into a new, twisting section of the air duct. My hands and feet feel numb, but I force myself to keep moving away from that room.

Wes turns us in two more directions.

I stop again when I hear a noise coming from somewhere below me. A muffled sound. Words, someone talking. I press my ear against the vent, then jerk away when the sound changes from low tones to high-pitched screaming. Screaming, screaming. Pain, madness, I can’t tell. It doesn’t matter. The sound goes on and on. I curl my fingers into the tin surface below me. I’d cover my ears if I had room to sit up. But instead I just listen to it, praying that the noise doesn’t belong to one of those broken children.

It stops eventually, but I hover in place, shaking and sweating. This time Wes is silent as he waits for me to recover. I can sense him behind me, and just having him nearby makes me feel less afraid.

Finally he whispers, “We’re close to Dr. Faust’s office.” I’ve heard that name before—when the two guards were talking while I was hiding in the time machine room. He must be one of the scientists with the Project. I wonder if Nikola Tesla is down there somewhere too. Nothing seems too far-fetched now.

When I move again, my muscles feel even more locked up, tighter and aching. Wes leads us to the right. After a few minutes, we come across another grate. Even before I reach it, I hear noises, the scratching of a pen, a man coughing. I move forward slowly, peering down into another room. There’s a desk directly below us. A man with slightly balding brown hair and hunched shoulders sits at it. He’s wearing a white lab coat. Wes grabs my foot, holding me in place.

There’s a muffled knock. “Come in,” the man at the table says. The door opens, and a soldier stands in the entryway. I can’t see his face, just the lower part of his body. He’s slim, wearing a black uniform similar to the army ones. He raises his arm, holding a rigid pose.

“At ease,” the man below me says. He has an accent that I can’t place. “Have they concluded the experiment?”

“Yes, Doctor,” the soldier says. His voice is softer, younger.

The man sits back in his chair, dropping the pen onto the table. “Give me the report.”

“Subject twenty-one did not return from the field, sir.”

He sighs, rubbing his eyes with his fingers. “Was it like last time?” I watch the slope of his nose, the angles of his elbows as he lowers them back to the desk. Wes is completely still behind me.

“Yes, sir.” The soldier hesitates, his formal tone wavering slightly. “He just disappeared, sir.”

“So we’ve lost another one.”

“Yes, sir. General Lewis is asking for you, sir.”

“Fine.” He sighs again, pushing his chair away from the table. He disappears from view, then reenters, moving toward the soldier. He’s a short man, heavyset, with wide shoulders. The younger soldier steps back to let him walk through the door first. It shuts behind them with an echoing bang.

I pull air into my lungs, the first real breath I’ve taken since they started talking. Wes nudges me. I crawl forward until I’m past the grate. As soon as my feet have cleared it, he yanks it up and out of its frame. He leans it against the side of the vent, then slides down into the office. I peer into the room.

Wes is standing on the doctor’s desk. He raises his arms to me. Using the side of the grate for leverage, I lower my feet down, and then let myself drop. Wes catches me easily. He holds me for a fraction of a second before letting go. Moving silently, he jumps off the desk and glides over to the door. He gives me a look and gestures at the desk. He’ll keep watch; I need to do the snooping.

I hop off the desk, then rifle through the papers on top. The doctor was writing in a leather journal filled with mathematic equations. I flip through it, catching the name “Tesla” printed at the top of a page. I can’t make sense of the math, so I close it carefully. There’s a filing cabinet near the wall and I head for it. All of the drawers are locked—complicated combination locks—except for one near the bottom, which is slightly ajar. The doctor must have forgotten to shut it before he left.

Wes watches me, but I can tell his concentration is on the hallway. I pull the drawer fully open. Inside are numerous files, all marked with the words “Confidential,” “Subject,” and numbers rising in sequential order: “Subject 1,” “Subject 2,” and so on. I pull out “Subject 1.”

The plain folder contains several pieces of paper. A black-and-white photo of a soldier rests on the top of the pile. He’s blond and smiling, wearing an army cap. The page below is covered in facts: name, age, occupation before the war, family, medical history. I flip past it.

The second page has a detailed account of how he volunteered for something called Operation Victory. I flip again. There’s a page of handwritten text; it looks like it was ripped out of a notebook. I skim it, catching words here and there:
Subject did not respond as we anticipated … little contact after initial launch … subject appeared in machine two days past delivery point, his cognitive abilities severely altered
.

I put the paper aside, then recoil in horror. I’m looking at another photograph, an “after” shot of the soldier. His eyes are glazed and unfocused, his mouth is permanently twisted.

I remember a story my grandfather likes to tell about something called the Philadelphia Experiment: In 1943, the government supposedly made a ship travel through time and space. The ship vanished and then showed up in another location before reappearing in the original spot. There were rumors that when the ship disappeared, the men aboard went mad, driven insane by traveling through magnetic waves. I think of my own trip through time, the ripping feeling, as if my body was a puzzle being slowly taken apart and put back together again.

I hold up the photo. “What is this?” I hiss.

Wes looks down at it. “The TM was still being perfected in nineteen forty-four,” he whispers. “There were complications with the traveling.”

My eyes widen. “Is this going to happen to us if we try to leave this time period?”

He shakes his head, then holds up a finger so I’ll be quiet.

I’m not very reassured, but I gather up the file and stuff it back into the drawer. I pick out another folder, and another. Either there’s a large red
LOST
stamped over the face or the “subject” looks like the man in the first photograph. A few have lost body parts. An ear here, a finger there.

I shove the second-to-last folder back into the drawer. There’s only one left and I pull it out slowly. This one is different. There’s a stamp on the front that says
THE RECRUITMENT INITIATIVE
. Inside is only one sheet of paper—a mission statement for something called “Project Hero.” I scan the paper. On the top, right under the title of the mission, is the name Dean Bentley.

I swallow hard as I stare at the words. Dean must be going on this mission. He must be one of these subjects, which means he’s in even more serious trouble than I thought.

Suddenly Wes is at my shoulder. “We need to go now,” he whispers. I jump to my feet and stuff the confidential file into my shirt when his back is turned. He grabs my hand and pulls me to the door. We fly out into the hallway.

Wes takes a left and sprints down the brightly lit hall. He moves so fluidly, so fast. I trail behind him, desperately trying to keep up.

I hear a sound coming from a connecting hallway. It sounds like someone running. Wes and I hurry in the other direction, turning right when we hit the end of the hall. The new corridor is empty, blindingly white—the floors, the walls, the ceilings. There are stairs at the end and we glide down them.

I’m breathing hard by the time Wes stops. He presses me against the wall and angles his body in front of mine. “Did you find what you needed?” he asks quietly.

I nod, panting too hard to answer. He smiles slightly. He grabs my hand again, pulling me behind him. We turn into a new hallway and Wes slows. I glance around. All of the hallways look the same, but there’s something familiar about this one. I see a door on one side, and my stomach starts to sink.

Sure enough, Wes slides it open. We’re not in the time machine room like I feared, but we are in the observation room next to it. This must be the other side of the two-way mirror. It’s a dark, narrow space, with a few chairs, a desk, and a large monitor.

I can see the TM through the tinted window. It looks innocent enough sitting there; the metal is dulled and the room is barely lit. But I know better.

Wes grabs my hand to pull me through a connecting door, which will lead down to that room. I yank away from him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” My voice is low and rough.

He turns to me. His eyes are narrowed. “You said you have what you needed. We can both go back now.”

“Wes.” I press my hand to my forehead. Anger is rising inside of me. “I have things I need to do here. I thought you understood that.”

He takes a step closer. “You said you wanted to find the truth. You found it. Time to go.”

I back away from him until my body hits the door we just came through. “It’s not that easy,” I snap.

“Why not?” He has a stubborn set to his jaw that puts me on edge. “Are you hiding something else from me?”

My mouth falls open. “You’re one to talk. You haven’t told me
anything
. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know anything about the Montauk Project.”

My voice gets louder and louder but I’m past the point of caring. “What about how dangerous that machine is? I saw the pictures of those men who went insane. Were you even going to tell me?”

His voice rises too, and I don’t think he’s even aware of it. “I’m trying to protect you! I’m trying to get you back home where you’ll be safe. Why do you keep fighting me?”