Yesterworld: Down World Series Series, Book 2, page 11
“What will you do if you find her?”
He smiled through closed lips, his focus drifting to a faraway place—a place with Jenny in it. “Bring her home.”
I stayed on the floor while he headed for the window. “Do you, um, need me to give you a ride or something?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.
“I’ll get myself home. Don’t worry about me.”
He nodded, turning to me once more before climbing back out.
“Thank you, Marina. For telling me the truth.”
I didn’t have time to ask him what he meant by that before he was gone. I knew I should get up and go. It was late, and I was shaking with exhaustion—suddenly dead tired. God, when had I last slept? I knew I should have been terrified alone in the abandoned house, but somehow a warm, glowing feeling came over me instead. A euphoria that was either from memory or sheer fatigue, I couldn’t tell which.
This was the room Robbie and I had snuck away to that night; the room where Kieren later told me that Robbie wasn’t dead, giving me hope again for the first time in years. This was the place where I had conquered fear, where I had become the warrior I was always meant to be.
And it was these thoughts—Robbie, Kieren, loss, hope, and strength—that lulled me to sleep on that cold wood floor, my backpack doubling as a pillow, my mother’s photo album just inches from my face, opened to the last page, robbed now of its most precious possession.
° ° °
The sun was in my face.
Shit. I had slept through the night in the house, and now dawn was finding me alone and stiff, miles from home. I swallowed down a bitter taste and rubbed my tongue over my chalky front teeth. As I sat up, the crick in my neck felt like a noose, and I knew I had to shake out my sore back and get myself home before my dad woke up.
Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I was surprised to feel metal scrape against my cheek. I pulled my hand away and saw what I had forgotten to ask about: my ruby ring.
It was back on my finger. For a second, I tried to remember if Adam had given it to me. But no, he hadn’t. That meant he must have come back in the night and put it on my hand while I slept.
Why would he do that? Maybe he’d just remembered it on his way home and didn’t want to wake me when he saw me sleeping here? Still, it seemed suspicious.
I didn’t want to linger on my doubts for too long, though. I had to get home before Dad and Laura woke up and found me gone.
I reached for Mom’s photo album and was about to snap it closed and throw it in my backpack when my eye caught on something that didn’t seem right: the page it was open to was empty. I blinked twice, turning it back another page.
This one wasn’t empty at all. And that’s when I knew something was very, very wrong.
My heartbeat screeched to a halt, then sped up like a bullet train.
I forgot to breathe, my suddenly shaky fingers struggling to turn the pages.
It was the pictures. These were the wrong pictures.
They weren’t of my mother. They were of me. Picture after picture of me. Me in a diner, a coffee cup on the table. Me on a street with half-built houses. Me with Brady. No shoes on our feet. Wet hair. Me in a school that wasn’t a school. Me in a long line to see a nurse in a 1950s outfit. Me with Sage. And Caryn. And Milo. In the basement of Sage’s diner.
Me in the fancy hotel with the evil version of my mother—the one who had no idea who I was.
They were surveillance photos, in black and white. Taken under the lake. One after another after another, filling the place where my mother’s photos had been.
And the pictures that had been there before—they were all missing. Adam had taken every last one of them while I’d slept.
I looked around frantically for the thief, but I knew he’d be long gone. I had been asleep for hours. Dead asleep. Drugged? The water bottle from the night before sat by the window, clear as light, half empty.
I shook out my head, trying to make sense of this. There was only one conclusion to draw.
Adam knew.
He knew about the world under the lake the whole time. Was he even looking for Jenny at all, or was that just a ruse to get me to help him? He knew there’d been a portal leading to a world where my mother and John were very powerful, a world where maybe he could be too.
The only thing he didn’t know—he couldn’t have known—was how to get back in now that the portal was gone.
Until I told him. Pink solution in a beaker.
Oh my God. What had I done?
Chapter Sixteen
I reached the school in record time, my sides stitching up with the effort, and my head pounding from the residual effects of whatever Adam had put into that water bottle. It was probably 6:30 in the morning when I arrived, and I prayed that the custodian had already unlocked the service entrance behind the gym.
When I got there, hopping off my bike and not even bothering to lock it up, I saw that the entrance wasn’t just unlocked, it was open. Someone had already been through it—someone too excited to remember to close it.
I worked my way cautiously through the school to the boiler room, just in case Adam was still lurking in the hallways for some reason. Just in case he had his gun.
Please don’t let me be too late, I repeated frantically inside my head.
By the time I’d made it through the boiler room and past the door leading to the twisting and turning abandoned hallways, I was on the verge of exploding with nerves. But my feet moved of their own volition, faster and faster, knowing time was seeping by—time in which he might be escaping.
Reaching the science lab at last, I cautiously turned the knob, anticipating that Adam might be waiting on the other side. I didn’t have any kind of weapon, nothing to fight him off with. My mind flitted briefly to the time I had managed to elbow him in the ribs, temporarily deterring him. But he had recovered quickly. He was far too strong for me to beat.
Still, I had to try.
But when I entered the room, Adam was nowhere to be found.
Someone had definitely been there, however. A rack of six empty glass vials that usually sat on the back countertop had been carelessly knocked over; one of the vials was conspicuously missing.
What did he need a vial for?
On the blackboard, a familiar symbol caught my eye. A circle, like a large white sun, being bombarded on all sides by glowing red arrows. The first time I had seen this symbol, I hadn’t had the slightest idea what it was. But I did now.
It was a uranium core, being compressed on all sides to create a nuclear chain reaction. This was what Sage had warned me about, that the first experiments with splitting atoms actually happened in our town, in this very lab. This was the nuclear fission that had made the portals appear in the first place.
And this was the lab where my mother had found the beaker with that mysterious pink solution. All Adam would need was a small sample of it, and he could create any portal he wanted anywhere in the world. And thanks to me, he now knew when in history to find it.
That would explain the missing vial: if he used the photos from Mom’s album to go back to the beach on the night I buried Mom’s beaker, all he would need to do was hide somewhere and wait.
Eventually, he would spy George and me burying the pink solution. Then, after we left, he could dig it up and help himself to a vial of his own.
He must have gone through Yesterday.
My head whipped to the green tent that held the spiral staircase.
Was I already too late? I flung myself down the stairs, my body whipping around the central post like a ballerina.
I landed with a thud as my eyes widened in horror. The door to Yesterday was closed, but the edges were still emitting a slight yellow radiation, confirming my initial fear: someone had been through it tonight. But that wasn’t what shocked me.
No, what was really shocking was the door to Today, which was wide open, glowing with a translucent blue that washed the entire chamber in undulating ripples. This was clearly the door he had just gone through.
My mind raced to catch up with the logic behind Adam’s actions.
He’d gone into Yesterday, nabbed a vial of solution, made the portal somewhere—maybe in the woods this time—and then . . . he’d come home and gone back to the underlake world through Today?
Why would he do that?
Unless . . . unless he didn’t want to go to the past. He wanted to go to the modern-day version of the world under the lake. Why?
There was a small pile of something on the floor by the portal, barely visible in the dim light. I leaned down and picked up a handful of it and was surprised to find that it was very fine gravel.
Was this the token he had used to bring him back to the world under the lake?
But as I struggled to understand, I was yanked back into the present moment because now the waves of aquamarine were fading. Before my eyes, the color was seeping away from me, turning duller and duller until the outline of red bricks began to emerge from the remnants. No, my mind screamed, no, don’t let him get away!
Before I could even decide what to do, I hurled my entire body into the dimming blue glow, letting it swallow me up and suck me in. And then I was fully surrounded by churning bubbles, which faded to yellow and finally to murky brown.
It was like being plunged into an arctic sea. I was in the freezing water, being tossed around like a jellyfish, completely immersed in an ocean of blue so dark it was almost black. No, not an ocean.
A lake.
Oh, God. He’d built the portal in the lake, just like last time.
The icy water seized my entire body. My muscles clenched, and my clothes felt like a straitjacket pinning me into place. I used all my might to swim for the surface, but the light was playing tricks on me. Just as I was about to break through to the air, my head smashed against the lake floor. I had been here before, I remembered. Down was up. I followed the direction of my air bubbles, only to find that they were going towards my feet.
Panic overtook me as I started to follow them up, my fingers already numb.
But that’s when I saw Adam, just inches from me. His eyes were blasted open in panic. He was drowning, lost and flailing.
I reached out and grabbed his shirt. He resisted at first, but then all strength seemed to seep out of his body. With the last of my power, I pushed the water away with my free hand, grabbing on to Adam for dear life with the other.
A second later, just before all my breath was gone, we burst through the top of the lake water. The frigid air seared my lungs.
Adam bobbed to the surface beside me, stiff as a board. And looking around, I knew immediately that I was a million miles from home.
PART TWO
Chapter Seventeen
“George!” I screamed, still trying to tread water in the middle of the lake without letting Adam’s rigid body slide off my chest where I was holding him up. “George, help!”
I scanned the shoreline desperately for George’s little cabin—the structure he had converted from a small boathouse that had resided on the shore on the other side of reality. But the cabin seemed abandoned. The telltale plume of smoke from the chimney that indicated he was home and cooking in his small kitchen was absent.
I struggled to catch my breath; Adam’s body was growing too heavy for me to hold up as my arms started to give way and my icy lips chattered just above the waterline. But then George appeared in his doorway, confused at first, looking around for the source of the sound.
“George, here!” I shouted with what little breath I could spare.
“Help,” I whispered, no longer having the lung capacity to shout.
I saw him run for the water and dive in. I turned my attention back to Adam’s stiff face, using one hand to try to slap him back to consciousness while I dog-paddled with the other. Finally, George reached us and took over the duty of towing in Adam so I could focus on getting myself to shore.
Halfway there, I flipped over to a backstroke, both because it was easier to float that way and so I could confirm that George was successfully towing Adam in.
It seemed to take forever to get there, but finally, I was able to crawl from the water and hurl my body onto dry sand. I was panting and scraping at the beach, trying to bring feeling back into my ice-cold fingers, as George dragged Adam onto the strip of ground next to me.
George tried to shake Adam, but nothing came of it.
“I don’t—I don’t know how—” George began.
“I do,” I said, wracking my brain to try to remember the details of the CPR lessons we had been forced to take in gym last year. I laid Adam’s arms out by his sides so he was flat on his back and tilted his head up a bit to open his airway.
Taking a deep breath, I began compressions on his chest. One, two, three, four. I couldn’t remember how many, so twenty would have to do. My hands warmed slightly with the contact, and I pinched his nose and tried breathing into his mouth.
Nothing happened.
I tried again, but he was cold as ice, his lips almost blue.
I steadied my anxious mind, pressing my left hand over my right and thumping away at Adam’s chest again. One, two, three, four.
“Breathe, Adam,” I whispered through my tight throat. “Please breathe.” I looked up at George, who sat hopelessly staring down at the dying man before him.
And then Adam’s whole body exploded. He flipped over onto his side and threw up what seemed to be a gallon of water. He was breathing.
Oh, thank God. He’s breathing.
Although George must have had no idea what was going on, he bent over in relief, letting out a sound that was half chuckle, half moan.
“George,” I began, catching my breath again while Adam recovered. Relief was quickly replaced with something more necessary: reality. “Go get your shotgun.”
° ° °
George ran towards the cabin while I watched Adam pant and catch his breath. My shirt had turned into an icicle, and I struggled to wring it out. I stood up to my full height—all five foot four of me—and did little jumping jacks to try to heat up my core.
Adam started to prop himself up onto all fours, then stretched back onto his bent legs. I could hear his teeth chattering, which I took as a sign that he was warming up. But as his strength came back to him, I knew I had to keep the upper hand before he recovered completely.
Hurry up, George.
“Just stay down, Adam.” I pushed the icy strands of hair out of my face, keeping my eyes trained on him.
“Why the hell . . .” he wheezed in a scratchy voice. Coughing a couple times, he was able to speak again. “Why did you follow me?”
“Why did you build a portal?”
“You lied to me.”
“You roofied me!”
“It was just a sleeping pill! It’s over-the-counter.”
He started to stand, and George wasn’t back yet. Panicking, I gave in to an instinct to keep Adam down, and I threw myself onto his back before he could rise. But I instantly realized I’d made a huge mistake. In one fell swoop, Adam flipped his entire body over onto his back, pinning me beneath him. I smashed against the sand with a grunt.
A split second later, Adam had flipped over again, pinning my arms up over my head, his legs on either side of me.
“You really wanna wrestle me?” he said, his forceful voice almost teasing me. “I was all-state for three years.”
“Get off me!” I screamed, my knee rising on its own to smash him in the groin. I must have hit the mark because his eyes crossed slightly, and he fell off me onto his side. I started to crawl away, but before I’d made it more than a couple of inches, he grabbed hold of my ankle.
“Ahem!” George’s voice shouted loud and clear above our heads.
We both stopped what must have seemed like a comical mismatch of flailing to look up at him, standing calmly with the shotgun in his hand, pointed at the sky. “Who was the shotgun for, Marina?”
“Him,” I screamed, at the exact same time as Adam shouted, “Her!”
“Don’t trust her, George,” Adam continued, pulling me closer before I could stand and holding me in a half nelson with one arm twisted behind my back. It hurt like crazy, and I couldn’t help but turn in to the twisting arm to relieve the pressure, making me face Adam again. “She’s working with her mother.”
“You lying sack of—”
“Keep the gun on her, George.”
I blanched for a second, trying to figure out how Adam even knew George’s name. But then I remembered—he’d met all of them in high school, when he was with Jenny.
What kind of nonsense had he filled their heads with?
“He’s lying to you, George,” I explained, trying to keep my cool, although I was still forced to face Adam. I tried whipping my body left and right to free myself, but it was useless.
“I have the pictures to prove it, George.”
“Those pictures show me helping Sage!”
Before this charade could go on any further, we were both stopped in our tracks by a shotgun blast. Adam, seeming to be acting on instinct, pulled me into him and covered my head with his hand. But a moment later, we both realized we were fine, and I pushed myself away from him, childishly slapping at his chest.
George had fired the gun into the sky.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Adam,” George said in his calm voice. “She just saved your life.”
Adam and I sat next to each other, both panting from exertion, while he took this in. I glared at him out of the corner of my eye and saw that the news was having an effect on him. He looked chastened.
“Is that true?” he asked George.
George only nodded, and I could feel Adam’s body shrink a bit by my side.
“Let’s get inside,” George said, scanning the trees that surrounded the lake. “They’ll be coming now.”
Chapter Eighteen
I toweled off my hair by George’s small stove while Adam went in the bedroom to scavenge for a dry shirt that might fit him. The cabin was littered with a million small reminders that this was indeed the world under the lake and not the one above: a mug with Russian writing on it; a photo of a pinup girl wearing one of those furry Russian hats. Even George’s shotgun had a hammer and sickle engraved on it. It just didn’t make any sense to me. This world was never supposed to exist.
