Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

I had thought about it. That somewhere there was another version of me, sitting around with no parents. I called my DW parents and told them the truth: I wasn’t their real daughter. They had another daughter waiting for them on the other side, and they should go back to her. They shouldn’t wait for me. After I hung up, I was going to come home myself, to that empty house.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I overheard Sage and John talking about the portal under the lake. About trying to keep me away from it. And of course, like a fly to honey, I had to see for myself.” She laughed, shaking her head. “Isn’t that right, baby? I’m always getting myself into trouble.”

“Always,” Robbie agreed, smiling at her with a newfound attention. “It’s how you got here,” he joked, and they both laughed.

“I had this idea that maybe I could go visit DW sometimes. That my other self and I—maybe we could share those parents. Take turns, maybe. I know it was stupid. I just wasn’t ready to say good-bye.”

I nodded, and my eyes flitted to Robbie.

“So I went to the lake and found that portal under the water. Isn’t it terrible under there? So depressing, all those Russians. The folks at Sage’s diner told me I had to go back through the lake immediately. And I was going to. But the idea—the idea that our town was awful, like that place. That we were suffering. I don’t know, I just had to see. Like, maybe there was something I could do. Maybe that was the reason for the whole trip, even. I never felt like I had a purpose before. Suddenly I did—what if I could help people? What if I could save our whole town somehow?”

Robbie sat and listened, his eyes still haunted with a distance that kept him somewhere far away from me.

“Okay,” I said. “So how did you end up on this train with Robbie?”

“I went to the station in the world with the Russians,” she began, “like I said I would. Sage had loaned me some money for a ticket. A train came. And when the door opened, I handed the ticket to the conductor and got on.”

“And?” I asked. “Was it the wrong train?”

She smiled and shrugged. “It was this train. Once I was on, the conductor was nowhere to be found. I walked through the cars until I reached the front. And that’s when I met your brother.”

My mind was spinning. “You just got on?”

“Yes,” she said. “Your brother was sitting right here, where I am now, working on some little thing.” She smiled, like she was telling an adorable story about a toddler she used to babysit for. She continued to talk about him like he wasn’t even there, which he might as well not have been. He had tuned us out completely and was staring out the window. “He had a bunch of wires laid out in front of him. You took them out of the lamps, didn’t you, baby? And he was connecting them together with a bunch of circuits from the train engine. Like he was making a little computer or something.”

“A motherboard,” I said. “Is that it, Robbie?” I thought of the long hours we’d spent helping our father in his workshop.

“He’s always doing stuff like that,” she said fondly. “Has he always been so smart?”

I stood up and looked out the window at the passing landscape, which was now a deeply wooded area, growing dark as the long day had finally come to a close. If what Piper was saying was true, it meant getting hit wasn’t the only way onto this train. And so maybe it wasn’t the only way off it either.

“It was a coincidence,” Robbie finally said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“This train, the one we’re on, it goes between all the dimensions and stops for a bit wherever it happens to be. It doesn’t stay long. Piper just happened to be in the wrong station at the wrong time.”

“It was the right station,” Piper corrected him, a warm crinkle forming on the side of her eyes as she smiled at him. “At the right time.”

“So the train does stop,” I realized out loud.

“Yes,” she said. “But we never know when, and we never know for how long. So we’re always afraid to go too far. We don’t want to get stranded somewhere. That’s why we have such a random assortment of food,” she said with a chuckle. “We grab whatever is nearby, or in the station where we’ve stopped, and then jump back on.”

“And the conductor?” I asked. “Can you ask him where we’re going?”

“Can I tell you something scary?” she asked, and I had to laugh. As though this whole thing didn’t already count as “something scary.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think there is a conductor,” she told me. “We never see him, except when the train is about to leave the stations. He peeks out his head and shouts, ‘All aboard,’ and when we get back on, he’s just gone. It’s like he’s a ghost or something.”

I thought about this, trying to figure out where this train fit into the intersecting mesh of planes and dimensions that Sage had told me about. And trying to figure out who the conductor in charge of it might be.

That night, I caught Robbie up on everything that had happened since he’d left, including the fact that Mom had disappeared and Dad was in some sort of detainment center. I didn’t want to worry him, but I didn’t want to lie to him either.

After a while, he said he was too tired to keep talking. Piper insisted on giving me their bed, and went next door to share the couch with Robbie.

The night passed slowly, trickling by as the chugging sound of the train kept a steady beat, both in and out of my dreams. I woke up several times to look through the rear window into the other car, just