YesterWorld (Book 2 of the Down World Series)

Original Edition: Chapter Sixteen

I'd love to hear your comments on this one!

****

The sun was in my face.

Shit. I had slept through the night in the house, and now dawn was finding me alone and stiff miles from home. I swallowed down a bitter taste and rubbed my tongue over my chalky front teeth. Sitting up, the creak in my neck felt like a noose, and I knew I had to shake out my sore back and get myself home before my dad woke up.

Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I was surprised to feel metal scrape against my cheek. I pulled my hand away and saw what I had forgotten to ask about: my ruby ring.

It was back on my finger. For a second, I tried to remember if Adam had given it to me. But no, he hadn't. Which meant he must have come back in the night and put it on my hand while I slept.

Why would he do that? Maybe he just remembered it on his way home and didn't want to wake me when he saw me sleeping here. I guess that was nice of him.

I rolled my neck a few times, then rubbed my hand over my little ring. It was reassuring to feel it nestled back into its place on my small finger. I could still remember the day my mother had given it to me in the kitchen. How happy she had looked, how young.

Her album was by my feet, and before putting it back in my backpack, I decided to indulge in something I hadn't let myself do in a while: stare at her old pictures, remembering when she had been with me, when she had been happy. Though it was long ago.

It took me a moment after opening up the album, however, to realize that something was very, very wrong. My heartbeat screeched to a halt, then sped up like a bullet train. I forgot to breathe, my suddenly shaky fingers struggling to turn the pages.

It was the pictures. These were the wrong pictures.

They weren't of my mother. They were of me. Picture after picture of me. Me in a diner, a coffee cup on the table. Me on a street with half-built houses. Me with Brady. No shoes on our feet. Wet hair. Me in a school that wasn't a school. Me in a long line to see a nurse in a nineteen-fifties' outfit. Me with Sage. And Caryn. And Ado. In the basement of Sage's diner.

Me in the fancy hotel with the evil version of my mother—the one who had no idea who I was.

They were surveillance photos, in black and white. Taken under the lake. One after another after another, taking the place of where my mother's photos had been.

And the pictures that had been there before—they were all missing. Adam had taken every last one of them while I slept.

I looked around frantically for the thief, but I knew he'd be long gone. I had been asleep for hours. Dead asleep. Drugged? The water bottle from the night before sat by the window, clear as light, half empty.

I shook out my head, trying to make sense of this. There was only one conclusion to draw.

Adam knew.

He knew about the world under the lake the whole time. Was he even looking for Jenny at all, or was that just a ruse to get me to help him? He knew there'd been a portal leading to a world where my mother and John were very powerful, a world where maybe he could be too.

The only thing he didn't know—he couldn't have known—was how to get back in now that the portal was gone.

Until I told him. Pink solution in a beaker.