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

I crouched down to check on him. “You okay?”

“It’s just actually seeing her,” he muttered, and his eyes took on that distant look they had had on the train, when I was afraid he was losing his mind. “She’s right there.”

“Baby?” Piper asked, coming down to sit with him. “Is that her?”

Robbie nodded, and she put her arms around him.

“She’s so beautiful,” Piper said, meaning it as a form of comfort. Like my mother’s beauty would be a consolation of some kind.

I shimmied up the wall a bit to peek back in, and I realized that our mother—or rather, her DW doppelgänger—seemed to be the guest of honor at this party. She was holding court in the center of the room as people came up to greet her and shake her hand.

“I think this is it,” I told them. “What we saw in the paper, she’s being presented with something.”

“I don’t want to look,” Robbie said. “I don’t want to see her like that.”

“We should go,” Piper said. “This isn’t what we thought it would be. We should go.”

“I just don’t understand it,” I said, talking more to myself than anyone else.

“What?” Robbie asked.

“Sage said the planes were crossing because you were stuck in the train portal. That when I took you out, things would go back to normal. Why is it like this?”

I didn’t have much time to sit with that question before something quite chilling happened in the room. Robbie and Piper weren’t looking in the window anymore, and I was glad, because at that moment another person walked in, shaking hands and looking very much at home. And that person was Robbie.

Of course, it wasn’t really Robbie. It was some sort of cruel twin, the one who belonged here with this version of our mother. Ana doesn’t have a daughter. She only has a son.

I was confused for a moment. Kieren had told me once that when you cross into Down World, you take over the other version of yourself. That way, there are never two of the same person at the same time. But then I thought about it. We weren’t in Down World. Down World was in us. And my real brother, the one crouching by my feet, was the one who belonged here. So the young man standing next to my mother—he was Down World Robbie. And he wasn’t supposed to be here.

I was relieved when a whistling came from the woods, giving me an excuse to turn my attention elsewhere. At first, I couldn’t see anyone out there, but when the whistling came again, I got excited, thinking it was probably Kieren.

“He found us,” I said, grabbing Robbie’s hand and leading him into the marsh as quickly as possible, making sure he didn’t have a moment to look back in the window. We’d made it just beyond the glow of light from the house when a figure became clear in front of us.

“Come on,” the voice said. “Hurry.”

We followed the shadowy figure through a small patch of marsh and back to the main road, around a bend from the pyramid house. A car was idling there, and I recognized it as Scott’s. The boy who stood before us wasn’t Kieren; it was Scott himself.

“Where’s Kieren?” I asked.

“They’re waiting for you. It’s not safe here anymore. Get in.”

Scott seemed to be making a concerted effort not to look at Robbie, but Robbie was looking right at him and seemed almost frozen as a result.

“Scott,” Robbie whispered. It seeped out of his mouth, almost like a question. They hadn’t seen each other in so long, I wondered if Robbie wasn’t sure it was the same boy he had grown up with.

“Hey,” Scott said, still not looking Robbie in the eyes. “You should get in the car.”

“Scott, it’s me,” Robbie said, a desperation creeping into his tone. “Look at me.”

But it was asking the impossible. Scott simply couldn’t do it. He kept nodding and motioning to the car, his eyes eager to land on anything but his old friend.

I had begun to understand something since my mother went missing. When faced with the impossible, most people shut down. You may think you’ll be brave, or that you’ll scream or cry or fight. You may think you know yourself, know how you’ll react. But when the unthinkable happens, when your old friend who’s been dead for four years is suddenly staring you in the eyes, you don’t know what you’ll do. You don’t know who you’ll be.

Scott couldn’t look at Robbie. And I didn’t blame him.

We got in the car, and nobody said a word.

The new meeting place was Kieren’s rec room. There were two reasons for this—one, of course, was that the pyramid house and all its neighbors had been taken over by the new elite. Somehow our town, I gathered, had once again become an important military base. And that meant that “important” people needed somewhere fancy to live again.

The second reason, I discovered as soon as we arrived at the house and snuck around the back to enter through the sliding door, was that Kieren’s father had at some point been brought into the fold about the portals, and was now leading the meetings.

When I saw him at first, I panicked. I had only met the man a handful of times, and that was many years ago. He had always been an intimidating figure, cold and very tall, with closely cropped hair that gave him the appearance of a drill sergeant. And I knew that in some ways that was how Kieren had always seen him—a man barking orders that he was inadequate to follow.

Now he stood in front of us, almost blocking the door with his imposing shoulders, and I didn’t know what to say. Should I explain why we were here? Should I call him by his name, Mr. Protsky? It sounded weird in my head, because I had never used it before. As a child, I was always too scared