EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Thirty-One

In the early morning hours, a stillness came over the house. The sun wasn't up yet, but a faint glow was seeping out from beneath the slightly ajar door to a nearby room, followed a moment later by voices—soft, murmuring voices that sounded too polished, somehow, to be coming from anyone in the group I had met. I rolled over on the hard pallet they had given me to sleep on, hearing my back crack as I did so. The pallet was on the ground near a dirty window, pungent with mildew and the chalky smell of that inescapable yellow dirt.

The voices seeped through the air to me, incongruously perky. I stepped over the two other bodies that snored obliviously from other pallets on the floor—two of the men that had been in Jeffrey's entourage—and made my way to the room.

Now I could see that the warm light from under the door was artificial, and it surprised me because I hadn't been sure if they even had electricity on this side of the dome.

I pushed the door open to find Tina sitting on her own pallet in what must have been her bedroom. She had set it up as nicely as possible, considering that she hadn't had much to work with. There were some old pictures on the wall, clearly ripped out of old magazines she must have found from years before—advertisements for things like make-up and winter clothes, all with smiling, beautiful women and men in fancy coats.

She didn't notice me at first as I came into the room, returning the door to the same position behind me in order to keep the light from escaping and waking the others.

Instead, she was watching a screen under a tent of sheets in front of her. She giggled a few times as a woman's voice talked, and it took a moment to recognize the cadence and the laugh track. It was an old episode of a TV show I had seen a few times as a kid, about a girl who was a normal high-school student by day but a spy by night.

Tina laughed again at one of the jokes on the show, and then turned her head just slightly, enough to see my shadow there. She almost jumped out of her skin.

"Sorry," I whispered.

She quickly turned off the device and buried it under her covers, the words "Don't tell" escaping her lips almost involuntarily.

"Don't tell what?" I asked.

"Don't tell anyone in the dome."

My face must have revealed my confusion, and she just sighed and spun around in her bed to face me more fully. "Right," she said to herself, her tone low enough as to not wake the others just outside the door. "I guess you wouldn't know. You've never been on this side before."

I nodded, encouraging her to continue.

"We're not supposed to have them," she explained, nodding towards her sheets, where the device was buried. "I don't use it for anything bad, though. I just watch old shows."

"I didn't know you had electricity," I admitted.

"There's a generator in the back. My dad keeps it charged in case of emergency. Like I said, though, there's nothing contraband on it. It's my stepmom's old phone, and it's mostly just shows her kid used to watch."

"Your stepmom?"

"The tall lady. Patty."

I waited a beat, not wanting to force my way into the room if I wasn't welcome. But this was already more information than anyone else had given me about this side of the dome. What else could I get her to tell me? "I'm not going to turn you in," I promised her. "I wouldn't even know who to tell."

She smiled in acknowledgement, seeming to trust me again, and pulled the device out from under the sheets. She nodded to her pallet, indicating that I should sit and watch with her. "Have you ever seen this show?" she asked, her eyes turning bright.