Down World by Rebecca Phelps (best new books to read .txt) 📕

his head and smiling a bit to himself. He was clearly done with this lady and her weird metaphors. “I don’t know.”

“They don’t end,” I realized. “They go on forever.”

Sage smiled at me. “That’s right.”

“So what?” I asked. “What does that have to do with nuclear fission?”

“The pool is time,” she explained. “And yes, it goes on forever. And the sugar grain, in this scenario, was the explosion of the atom. But now imagine that there isn’t just one plane of time and space. There’s the plane that we live on, of course, which is like the surface of this table.”

We all looked at the flat surface of the beautiful table, the one that looked like it had been carved from a single tree.

“But there are also infinite planes. Above us, below us. Infinite tables.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“The other planes contain the other existences,” Sage said. “The ones that might have been if you had been born a second later, if you never existed, if you hadn’t . . .”

“ . . . had an accident,” I finished her thought, finally beginning to understand where she was going with all this.

“We aren’t supposed to know about those planes. They are parallel, they’re never meant to intersect. But when an atom is split . . . Have you seen a mushroom cloud?”

“Of course,” Brady said, the stiffness in his body reflecting a growing impatience with this whole conversation.

“It doesn’t just go out in a flat circle, does it? It goes everywhere, up, down. The waves of the energy explosion, they start to blur together the different planes.”

“But we never split an atom in our town,” I said, not sure what any of this had to do with the portals under the school. “Wasn’t that New Mexico or something?”

“That’s where they tested the bomb,” Sage explained. “But they first split the atom in that school. Of course, it wasn’t a school then, was it?”

“This is stupid,” said Brady, whose body suddenly burst up from the floor. He paced tensely over to the window.

I watched Brady as he stood by the open window, looking down on the town below. I wasn’t sure why this was upsetting him so much, but I needed to hear more.

“I wish it were,” Sage insisted. “The closer you go to the time of the explosion, the less you can see its effects. The waves haven’t had a chance yet to make much of a difference, to blur the planes too much. But over time, as the waves travel farther and farther, as they grow smaller and more intimate, well, then you can see it. Then things that shouldn’t exist together begin to do just that. And when you travel to another plane, you can see what might have been. Yesterday isn’t so bad. When you enter Today, things may seem normal, but they’re not. And Tomorrow—Tomorrow is the one you have to be really careful of.”

“You’re the one who labeled the doors,” I realized. “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. That was you.”

Sage smiled. “No, that was your mother.”

“But the doors all worked?” Brady asked.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re brick walls,” Brady said, clearly exasperated. “All the doors, just brick walls inside.”

“All of them?” she asked. It was clearly news to her. “Oh, dear. Did you hear that, John?” she called out. “All of them now.”

“Mmm,” John responded. “Probably for the best,” he added a moment later.

“It isn’t for the best,” I countered. “People are still trapped down there. My brother and Piper. Maybe my mom too.” Sage nodded as I spoke, unmoved.

I looked to Brady, who still stared out the window.

“Let’s go,” he said suddenly, turning to me. He reached out his hand as he walked over, and I couldn’t help but stand to take it. “She’s crazy,” he whispered to me, taking my hand with more force than I had anticipated.

“I wish I were,” Sage said, having overheard him. I was deeply embarrassed that we had offended her, and couldn’t figure out what had upset Brady so much. We were almost to the door when Sage stood up and said one more thing.

“Marina, there’s something else. It’s about the portal on the tracks.”

It was as though she had pulled me back with a string. I yanked my hand away from Brady’s. We both turned back to face her.

“We discovered that portal before we left the town. It’s why we left.”

I stared at her for a moment, a million emotions bubbling up.

“Your mother always suspected that Robbie had fallen into it. Right after the accident, she was going to try to follow him. But she knew there’d be consequences. She might miss the window and be hit by the train. Even if she could find the portal, who’s to say she wouldn’t be stuck in there with your brother forever? None of us had ever been in the train portal before. At that time, we didn’t even know how it worked. But one thing that seemed very clear was that you couldn’t just back out of it like you could with the other portals. And if she did get stuck, she’d never see you again.”

“She stayed for me?” I asked, and my voice sounded high and tinny in my ears. All this time she could have been with Robbie. But she stayed for me.

“And so she asked us if we could find a way . . . a better way, that is, to save him.”

“But you said the answer was no. How could you be sure?”

“Because what we did find . . .” Sage trailed off again. I’d never met someone so distractible; it was like trying to have a conversation while loud music was blaring. “What we did find was not good, Marina.”

I readied myself for whatever she was about to tell me. Brady had put his hand back on my lower spine, and I suddenly realized what he had been so upset about. He knew bad news was coming. He sensed it somehow. And he was trying to