EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Note: I had a million people last week ask me who Jin is. He's the cute lifeguard from the pool that Marina went on a bad date with. I blame myself for everyone not remembering; that was half a pandemic and an entire U.S. presidency ago! I know this book is unrolling a bit slowly. But, hey, you want me to get it right, don't you? XO

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There was one room in the house I hadn't been allowed to enter.

Like all the other doors in Pangaea, it wasn't locked. It was just off-limits. Hidden behind a nondescript door that could have been mistaken for a closet, I hadn't even been aware that there was anything special about the room until about my second week at the house.

That's when I first noticed Elaheh sneaking into it after dinner one night, when she clearly thought no one was looking.

Later, a man I didn't know had come into the house. This wasn't unusual; people came and went all the time. But he bee-lined for the door, then emerged twenty minutes later and left without a word to anyone. Visiting Elaheh's without at least taking a cup of tea or saying hello to whoever was in the living room was simply not done.

The first time I tried to approach the door was in the morning, about four days after I had been essentially exiled to my room. I was on the way back from the bathroom and no one was around. I decided to risk it, as the door was only feet away. But as I got closer, something strange happened.

I had the overwhelming feeling that I should stay away. No, it wasn't a feeling, really. It was a message. A message that began somewhere in my brain and started to spread outward, radiating through my body like an electrical current. And the message was quite simple: Don't do it.

Having suffered panic attacks for years, I was used to messages like this that started somewhere deep in my thought process—little warnings from my innermost mind letting me know that I was in danger. The creeping hands of panic were starting to spread through me.

It wasn't until I had returned to my room that I realized why this message seemed different.

It didn't originate with me at all.

It was my ICD. Elaheh must have programed it to keep me out of the room.

So on the night after I realized that Jin must have been my partner—the second half of the Dynamic Duo—I knew I had to override that message, no matter how hard. Because whatever it was that Elaheh didn't want me to know, it had something to do with him. And it had something to do with that room.

I waited until everyone else had gone to bed, then waited half and hour more.

I turned the handle softly, and as I did so, I felt a strange thrumming sensation in my temple. My ICD was warm and I could see from the corner of my eye that it was pulsating a faint green light, just as Remedios' had done when she was learning Swedish in class.

Something about this room had activated it.

The room itself looked like a home office, the walls all lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, housing hundreds if not thousands of books. Several titles leaped out at me from their beautifully-bound covers: Moby Dick. The Poetry of Rumi. The Bluest Eye. And One Hundred Years of Solitude.

These were books the two women of the house had taken with them from the other world. Real, physical books that they could hold in their hands. But why, when the ICDs could clearly teach anything digitally? Was it just their way of remembering what was lost?

And there was something else in the room, too. A large machine took up the center of it, encased in a metal frame. It was an enormous computer, beeping and flashing with dozens of little lights and switches. Layla had said the women were "downloading" me—storing information from my chip.