EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Part Three, Chapter Thirty-Four

Note: If this were a play, the song above would play in the dark theater before the lights came up for act 2. So, if you have a moment, maybe listen to it first. XO

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I stood in the shower for a lot longer than the five minutes allotted per session. Streams of yellow dirt whirled into a tidepool at my feet and disappeared down the drain, eaten up by the giant mechanism below Pangaea that meticulously scrubbed all the water and pumped it back up through a network of pipes toward the surface, ready to be used again. And when the water grew cold, I turned the knob as far as it would go, greedily claiming the last of its heat.

Finally there was nothing left. I turned it off and stood with my hands on the shower wall, Sage's ring glistening on my finger, feeling the steam escape my back and trying to remember how to breathe.

This is only one reality.

I had been repeating the words nonstop since learning that Adam and Kieren were dead. That the two of them had somehow formed a friendship and gone off to fight in a war that apparently had started because of me.

That they were dead because of me.

There wasn't enough water in all of the dome to wash that fact away.

But this was only one reality.

I would create another. I would create a thousand more if it would bring them back to me.

"Marina?" my mother called. She was in my room at Elaheh's house, probably sitting on that four-poster bed waiting for me to leave the bathroom now that the water had turned off. But I couldn't convince my feet to move. "Marina, are you ready to come out?"

I'm not five, my brain answered her. I don't need you to tell me when to finish my shower.

But I couldn't say that out loud. We had been silent the whole drive back to the dome, at first because I was crying and then because I wasn't. The car was self-driving, I had realized after a bit, but there was a man in front anyway—a bodyguard. Not wanting him to hear anything he shouldn't, Mom simply stroked by hair as we drove, but didn't look at me. Finally we passed the checkpoint and entered the dome.

My mother remembered both of her realities—the one with me, where Robbie had been hit by a train, and the one where she'd raised him in Portland and had abandoned me as a baby. The reason she remembered them both is because she had lived them both. When she'd gone through the Yesterday door the night she called me a warrior, she had been transplanted back into her younger body. And there she had stayed, replaying the previous ten years of her life like rereading a Choose Your Own Adventure book and making different choices.

Which meant the woman sitting on my bed now, waiting for me to leave the bathroom, was a decade older than she looked—on the inside, anyway.

Amalia had been waiting on the front porch of the house when we'd pulled up, and I'd walked right past her without saying a word, conscious of how I must have looked with the yellow dirt caked to my hair and my skin.

"Just let her take some time," I'd heard my mom whisper to her as I'd entered the house, bee-lining for my room and the shower to wash it all away.

But now I had no choice but to confront them all. They'd be waiting for me; they'd be demanding explanations of what I'd seen outside the dome.

Let 'em wait, I figured. I owed those women absolutely nothing.

But it wasn't my mother's voice that interrupted my thoughts next. It was Minerva speaking inside my head—that incessantly gentle voice that I'd clearly selected for her in order to invoke a sense of calm in the people hearing it. A voice that, despite being free of any accent, still reminded me of my abuela.