YesterWorld (Book 2 of the Down World Series)

Original Edition: Chapter Thirty-Eight

The bus finished its chaotic thrusting as soon as it hit paved road again, and it was like we had suddenly entered another dimension, not just another street. The wheat fields and the dirt gave way to cement and brick, the town that I had known intimately my whole life beginning to take form in front of me like the first strokes of a pencil drawing. It wasn't flesh and blood yet, not as I had always known it, but the bones were there.

"Are we meeting her at the club?" I asked.

"No, she gave me another address. She's, um..."

"What?"

He hesitated. "She's only expecting me."

"Well, she's about to be disappointed," I said, my eyes trained out the window as the bus pulled up to the same stop where we had gotten on it the night before. I knew it had been my idea to leave the two of them alone at the club, hoping it would loosen up her lips, but now I had thought better of it. Maybe my presence would let her know that Adam wasn't kidding around, that we were here for something more serious than a reunion.

Adam shot me a smile out of the corner of his mouth, but said nothing. "We stay on the bus. It's another mile or so, she said."

"Fine." I thought about our situation as the bus chugged on, a thick, noxious black smoke puffing out of the exhaust behind us. "You know, I was thinking. Maybe we don't have to get into the fort at all."

"How's that?"

"Well, when I went into the past before, I came back home through the place where I had entered. It was like the outline of the door stayed behind, and I just needed a coin to open it. If we could get her to the pharmacy where we first showed up—"

But I stopped talking when I saw the disappointed look on Adam's face. "Sorry, Marina, I thought you knew," he finally said.

I swallowed hard, waiting for him to say something. Knew what?

"That door only remains for a few hours. If you miss that window, then the Today door is the only way to go home."

"Oh," I nodded, trying not to look freaked out. "I see."

"Is that why you agreed to come, Marina? Did you think it would be that easy?"

Yes.

"No. Of course not."

He smiled and patted my hand, letting his warm fingers rest over mine. "We'll get into the fort. Don't worry."

"We should do it soon, though, shouldn't we? I mean, before Jenny gets a chance to do... whatever it is that she did."

"I was thinking that too," he agreed. "Unless..."

I looked at him, but his eyebrows were knit together and he was staring distractedly out the window. "Unless?"

"Unless she's already done it."

Now I followed his gaze out to the street as we wound our way past the newly erected buildings and into a wooded area, the bus jerking a bit as we left the town behind and continued on to a very different part of the landscape. It took me several minutes to realize these were my woods—the ones I'd ridden my bike through hundreds of times. In fact, maybe some of these were the same exact ones I had touched and run through and played beneath during my lifetime.

Soon the bus pulled over to the side of the road, and Adam signaled to me that it was time to get off. Somehow, despite the fact that these trees should have been the most familiar sight we'd yet seen, I felt even further from home than I had in the wheat fields.