EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Forty-Five

The train track.

I was standing in the middle of it, two metal rails running along either side of my body, the wooden planks extending in equidistant rows towards a familiar sight on the left. And a feeling of peace took over my body, because it was a sight that I had known my whole life, a view I could have painted with my eyes closed:

Home.

I was in my own town, and the little train station where Robbie and I had waited with Kieren for our dads' train to pull in from work was only a heartbeat away. It looked impossibly small in the gray light of day. Its ivy-covered walls were long gone, but someone had placed two twin potted Ficus trees on either side of the stout wooden front door.

A glance up at the roiling sky revealed swirls of storm clouds, just as there had been in the two previous doors. What was it about storms that had drawn Alexei to these particular places? Was it some kind of joke? Or a way to clue me in as to how far in the future I had landed? Because if we were too far ahead, all three of these doors would have either led to the inside of a dome...or a wasteland of dust.

And these storm clouds above me were real, as were the rain drops that now began to plop on top of my head.

I shivered against the sudden chill, and was about to step off the track when I noticed the yellow light reflecting through my legs onto the silver rails.

And then I heard the rumbling, upon me in an instant.

Realization struck me in the same moment that my torso turned, my hands shooting up to cover my face.

And the word "no" was lost somewhere between my throat and the impact of the train as it smashed right into me.

*

Bum bum

bum bum

bum bum

I knew this sound. I knew this view: discarded ticket stubs and stray pieces of paper swirling in the breeze that was drawn up from the open slats of the ancient, dilapidated train bottom, revealing the passing track below.

I knew the smell of it too: stale metal, rotting wood.

I knew the feeling deep in my gut that the train was going too fast, and yet was not quite moving. Because the view out the window was right but not right. My home, my city, my country.

And yet none of those things.

I was on the Conductor's train.

The train where my brother had been trapped for almost four years.

And just like last time, I was in the very back of the train, despite having been sucked through a portal at the front of it.

But there was one key difference between now and then. This time, my pockets were empty of spare coins, and so I had no idea how I'd ever get off of it.

And yet that wasn't the thought that scared me the most, not yet anyway. That honor was reserved for the sudden onslaught of panic that I was in the past, not the future. That Alexei had dumped me in that moment three years ago when I had first boarded this train, and Robbie and Piper were trapped in the front. I ran for the door at the front of the car, almost tripping over one of those missing planks, my shoe precariously perched on its edge. I had to make it to the front, to see if Robbie was there.

I reached for the handle at the end of the car, and it took me a moment to recognize my own hand. It wasn't just that my fingers looked somehow more defined, giving the impression that I was bit older. It was the square-cut emerald ring on my finger that threw me off.