Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

explained. “And I hopped back on. The conductor was there. It was the first time I saw him. He wasn’t there when I first got hit. And he asked me for my ticket, like he has every time since.”

“I’m gonna make some coffee,” Piper declared, apropos of nothing. I couldn’t tell if her cheeriness was real, or if it was her way of coping with stress. Either way, it made her seem impossible to know, like a Barbie doll on happy pills.

“Thanks, baby,” Robbie called to her, a smile finally cracking across his lips.

“And then?” I asked, trying to get Robbie focused back on his story.

“That’s it,” Robbie said. “I never tried it again. I assume the same thing would happen.”

I nodded. It made sense, of course, given what Sage had told me. The train connects all the planes that ever existed. So when the train pulled into a station, it was like it was visiting a certain plane. But then when it pulled out, that plane disappeared. Or at least, it disappeared as far as the train and its reluctant inhabitants were concerned.

“But you’ve seen Mom before,” I realized aloud, nodding to the newspaper, which had made its way to the floor.

“Yeah, I’ve been to that station a few times,” he conceded. “It’s always the same. Everyone dressed like it’s an old movie or something. And Mom is always in the paper for something different.”

“Piper?” I looked up to her as she was making the coffee. “Is that the same station where you got on?”

“No.” She sighed, looking like she was growing tired of this conversation. Or maybe she just didn’t like how it was affecting Robbie. “Different station, same dimension.”

“But why?” I couldn’t help but wonder out loud. “There are billions of dimensions. Why does the train keep getting sucked back to that one? It’s like it has some sort of pull or something . . .”

“I don’t know.” My brother shrugged. “We started showing up there a lot after Piper came. To be honest, I’m sick of trying to figure out how any of this works.”

“But maybe Piper connects you to it somehow since it’s where she got on—”

“Time for your lesson, baby,” Piper said, returning with three cups of coffee and handing me one. “Pick a subject.”

Robbie got up and started rifling through some of the books that they kept by the bed. I must have looked confused when he glanced up and caught my eye.

“Piper teaches me something new every day,” he said, smiling at her like she was the damn Mona Lisa.

“You can’t go through life with an eighth-grade education,” she said to me, clearly waiting for me to agree.

But this isn’t life, I thought to myself as he continued to scan the books.

I didn’t say it out loud. I just watched Robbie from a slight distance, as though he was a painting to be examined. I was still trying to gauge how four years on this train had affected my brother. He’d grown strangely quiet, like he had left the room but his body remained. Robbie had always been melancholy at times, so in some ways this gloomy air was a welcome reminder that I truly had him back.

But he never seemed to shake it off anymore.

I pictured myself on this train. All alone, for years, waiting for an end to a nightmare that might never come. And I knew that, had it been me, I wouldn’t have been strong enough. I would have gone crazy long ago.

This is no life, I repeated to myself. I have to get him out of here.

“Mmm, how about graphing?” Robbie asked, handing her a math textbook that looked like it was about forty years old.

“Oh, wow,” Piper said. “Okay, let’s see what I remember. Not my best subject.” She turned to me then. “Do you know a lot about graphing?”

“Make an x and a y line,” I stated, my mind already racing to another place, trying to connect the dots of the thoughts that were swirling around in my head. “And once you solve for where x and y intersect,” I continued, following my brother’s gaze out the window, “then you can chart the location.”

Piper nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.” She opened the book and reached into a tin cup on the windowsill for some pencils. “So let’s get started.”

“Excuse me,” I said, standing with no real idea where I wanted to go. “I’m gonna just . . . I’m gonna lie down.” I headed next door into the lounge car, and once alone, I plopped myself down on the sofa. My eyes scanned over the books, with their obscure titles and worn print. Some of them must have been from the original train library, maybe one hundred years old. Someone bought those books once. And that someone was no longer here.

There was a way off this train. I knew it—x and y always intersected somewhere. You just had to chart the right point. And find a way to get there. My mind kept returning to the idea that Piper’s presence was somehow luring the train back to the dimension where she had boarded. Was it possible that the conductor was trying to take her back to where she had come from, as if to say, “You can stay here, it’s where you belong”? So then why wasn’t the same happening for the place where my brother and I had boarded?

Was it because we had never really “boarded” at all? We’d been hit.

Robbie never saw the conductor until the first time the train stopped. And so he wasn’t a real passenger. Passengers have to be admitted. Passengers have to buy tickets. “Wait a second,” I said to no one. “Wait a second.”

I got up and crossed the little platform between cars, coming back into the bedroom car and closing the door behind me. “You’ve never bought a ticket,” I declared, looking at Robbie.

He shrugged. “I don’t have any money.”

“Of course the train won’t take you where you