Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

the twin is the worst kind of imposter. The twin takes everything, even the face, even the voice, and corrupts it.

Was it really possible that this twisted image of my mother was just a different version of her? The same woman, simply on a different path? A path without me. A path without my father. A path, apparently, that made her happier than we ever could.

We had billions of universes, according to Sage. There were billions of me’s too. Somewhere. Somehow. Were they happy? Were they scared? Would they ever be free?

“Keep them away from the tent,” my mother instructed. And I recognized the man she was talking to—it was her lover from the hotel, the Russian guard. He came and grabbed Kieren and started to put him in handcuffs.

There were other guards there as well, three of them. They began to restrain Robbie and Piper. Scott simply stood nearby and watched.

The woman with my mother’s face approached me. “I’m sorry. But I can’t let you go in.”

“How did you know?” I asked. “How did you get here in time?”

She smiled. “I saw you last night, outside the window of the pyramid house. I knew you would try.”

I felt my shoulders droop in despair. We had been so close. And now it was all for nothing. We were too late. There was nothing we could do to stop her.

“You have to understand,” she said, “things end up the way they’re meant to. We always think we can change them. That if we just did one thing differently, made another choice in a key moment . . . But nature finds a way.”

“This isn’t nature,” I said, looking around me at the science lab. “This isn’t right. You’re not right. You have to let us go.”

“Let’s head upstairs,” my mother said. “It’s almost curfew.”

They began to walk back out the door, two of the guards prodding the others along, and my mother’s boyfriend coming to take my arm. I began to really panic. If I left this room, it was all over. They’d never let us sneak down here again. And we’d be trapped in this terrible reality forever.

I didn’t have time to form a plan. We were walking out the door, the others already in the hall before us, when I swung around and poked my fingers into the man’s eyes. I don’t know what made me think to do that. I must have seen it in a movie once, or in some online defense video.

He doubled over in pain, grabbing his eyes, and my mother whipped around to see what had happened. I shoved the man away from me and ran back into the room, slamming the door before the others could get back to me, and turning the bolt lock.

I was alone in the science lab, but I knew it was only a matter of moments before they got the door open. So I spun and ran into the tent and down the spiral staircase.

This was it. If this didn’t work, there was no plan B. I took one of the coins Kieren had handed me out of my pocket, walked up to the door to Yesterday, and slid it into the opening that I had thought was a peephole. At first, nothing happened, and I was crushed by the feeling that I had been wrong.

“Come on,” I whispered. It was practically a prayer, and I thought of the masses I used to attend at St. Joe’s. I never took Communion because we weren’t religious, but I would watch the row of kids who did go up to take the wafers. On their knees, their eyes closed, waiting and waiting for something close to God to come to them.

“Please,” I said. “Please work.”

And then the brick faded away, and only a bright light remained.

I took a deep breath, hearing the guards banging on the door above me. Reaching into my back pocket, I took out the photo from Mom’s album and held it in my hands, concentrating on the tan, happy people on that beach. And then I walked through the door.

CHAPTER 22

Once the yellow glow had subsided, the first thing I became aware of was sunlight. It surrounded me so completely, blanketing my whole body, that I thought at first I must have been trapped in some ongoing state of transition. The yellow light simply wouldn’t fade.

But then I blinked and I heard splashing.

Taking a step away, I saw that I had come out of the back of the boathouse—the one that George had converted into his cabin on the other side. I was facing the woods, the sun piercing through the leaves onto my face. The splashing and laughing grew louder, coming from the beach on the other side of the small building.

Turning around, I could still see the yellow outline of the Yesterday door scorched into the wall itself, like the faded image of a screen saver burned into a computer screen. But even as I stood and looked at it, the yellow began to fade even further, and the red outline of bricks began to appear in its place.

The door was sealing itself.

I instinctively thrust a hand forward to try to stop it, even though I knew that wasn’t possible. The faintest dark horizontal line in the upper-right corner of the brick indicated where the coin slot remained. My hand whipped to my pocket, feeling the flattened penny lodged there. I had one chance. A one-way ticket back.

At least one key fear was allayed as soon as I looked down at my body: I had been slightly afraid that I would be five years old again in this portal, but I seemed to be intact. Did that mean that my five-year-old self would be missing somewhere? If so, I needed to act quickly.

Peeking around George’s small cabin, I saw about a dozen people laughing and splashing in the water. It was like the picture I still held in