Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

grabbed my suitcase and slunk into the bathroom. I changed my clothes quietly in the stall, my suitcase at my feet, and brushed my teeth at the sink. I thought about taking a shower but didn’t want to leave my suitcase unattended while I did it, and I didn’t have any shower shoes.

In the common room, I ate another Cup Noodles while I waited for Brady, and sat down at the computer. Each guest was allowed twenty minutes of free internet. I checked my email, both my real account and the one that Christy had set up. The only reply was from her, and it was simply a line of emojis showing happy and excited faces. There was nothing from my dad.

I suddenly thought of Brady, who seemed so comfortable traveling alone. I had asked him the night before if he wanted to email his dad, but he said he was still in Alaska on the salmon boat and couldn’t get emails.

I decided to look up the Alaskan salmon boats to see where his dad might be. Maybe I could surprise him with it when he woke up, letting him know that I’d found his dad’s boat. It would be nice to wake him up with some good news.

I typed Alaskan salmon boating into the search window, and several fishing sites came up. But as I started to skim through them, I noticed they all began with the same piece of information: salmon fishing is a summer thing. The season starts in May and it’s over by fall. After that, most of the fishermen come back home until the following season.

But that didn’t make any sense. Brady told me his dad had been on a boat since December. So either Brady’s dad was lying about what he was doing and where he was living, or Brady was lying about it in order to cover for him. But why?

I didn’t have time to finish the thought, as Brady walked into the room. I immediately closed the search window and tried to act natural as he poured himself a cup of coffee and came to sit at the table next to me.

“You gonna eat anything?” I asked.

“I can’t eat in the mornings,” he said. “Got a bad stomach.”

I finished my cup of soup and Brady finished his coffee. A light drizzle had begun to fall outside the window.

“Can I use your phone for a second?”

He handed it over and I found Kieren’s number. I really didn’t know what to say to him, but I wanted him to know we were okay. So I just typed: We’re here. All is well. I waited to hear the little swooshing sound that meant it had gone through and then handed the phone back.

“You ready?” he asked.

I nodded, not exactly sure what it was I was supposed to be ready for. “Where do we go?”

“I’ll tell you on the bus.”

We walked along the sidewalk to a bus stop and waited with a bunch of morning commuters. I tried to act natural, to look like I belonged there, though my paranoid brain was convinced everyone could see right through me.

“How far?” I whispered.

He showed me the map on his phone. “Just a few miles. We’ll take the bridge over the river and then keep heading down a little bit.”

I stood anxiously, clutching my suitcase, and Brady must have noticed how scared I looked. He put his hand on my back and whispered to me, “It’s okay.”

I took a deep breath and nodded, mostly for his benefit. The bus came, and we took our seats in a back row.

“So you know the science lab?” he began once we were seated.

I was still getting my bearings and almost didn’t hear him. “What’s that?”

“The lab behind the boiler room,” he continued, still speaking quite softly. I kept my head bowed near his so I could hear him.

“Yeah.”

“Piper found these notebooks that the Mystics left behind. Most of it was scientific equations that we didn’t really understand. It was pretty advanced. But there were pages and pages of notes too. Ideas about what made DW, about the balance of power.”

“Like you were telling me? About . . .” I looked around to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “About the sidewalk turning into a fence or something.”

He nodded. “One of the books was somebody’s journal. It didn’t have a lot of useful information in it, just a lot of personal stuff. But the last page was interesting.”

“What did it say?”

Brady reached into his pocket and pulled out a well-worn piece of yellowed paper. He unfolded it and handed it to me.

“See for yourself.”

The handwriting seemed to belong to a woman, judging by the roundness of the cursive letters. The penmanship was perfect. The paper felt very light, like it had been folded dozens of times and might disintegrate in my hands. I held it very carefully and had to squint a bit to make out the slightly faded text. My jaw dropped as I realized what it was about, and I reread the ending twice:

Whatever world we found down there, whatever power we discovered, he loves it more than he loves me. More than he loves any of us. He is our leader and our friend, and my only love. And when he goes, because he will go, I know that I will die.

—S

I thought that was the end of it, until I flipped the page over and found a postscript.

But in the meantime . . . I hear there’s an old hotel about an hour out of Portland, in a little town called Preston. And that’s where we’ll be, searching for absolution. We wanted to be Mystical. We wanted to be free. What fools we were. I am so sorry.

There was no more. “What does she mean? What did they do down there that was so terrible?”

Brady shook his head and shrugged. “I should tell you that Piper is not the only one who went to look for them.”

I waited