YesterWorld (Book 2 of the Down World Series)

Original Edition: Chapter Forty-Two

"Stop!" I shouted before I even realized that I had opened my mouth. An immediate rush of embarrassment, mingled with fear of exposure, made my cheeks burn hot and my throat suddenly go dry.

Everyone in the room, from the scientists who had been staring dumbly at the new portals to the workers who had been buzzing anxiously around me, stopped like they'd been freeze-framed and stared at me.

Not knowing how I could possibly explain my presence, or get anyone to believe my story, I instead decided that the best course of action was simply to point out the obvious fact before me. My finger pointed up towards the door where Alexei had disappeared with the cannister of plutonium wedged under his arm.

"Stop him!" I choked out, my voice thin and airy. "He's getting away."

All the men in the room, still shaking their heads and muttering as they tried to decipher what exactly had happened just moments before, now looked even more perplexed as their eyes followed the line of my finger.

"Where is he?" asked the man with the thick accent.

A clamor of confusion followed suit, all the men in their white lab coats seeming to arrive in unison at the same conclusion that I had: Alexei was no longer in the room.

The man with the accent locked eyes with me for a moment, seeing what must have been abject panic on my face. He then turned to the little rolling table where the cannister had been and, seeing that it was just as absent as Alexei, his face contorted from confusion to terror. "Oh God," he muttered. "Where is Dr. Rostoff?" he asked the room, but no one responded.

And that was when I heard a sound that was so familiar to me I almost didn't think anything of it at first. It took my brain several seconds to latch onto an understanding that, yes, I really was hearing the thumping, chugging cacophony of a train approaching—the squeal of the brakes, the vibration of the floor as the massive behemoth approached, the swoosh of the releasing steam.

But how could a train be here? We were over a mile from the station.

I ran through the room then, hoping that people would be too distracted to have the presence of mind to stop me. I ran right past all those befuddled men in their lab coats, past the white-haired man with the thick accent, and through the door from which Alexei had escaped.

It led to the base of a small flight of concrete stairs, revealing that we were roughly ten feet below ground level. Blinded temporarily by the harsh daylight as I ran up two steps at a time, I froze in shock once my eyes landed on the sight before me.

The train track had been rerouted so that it ran directly behind the fort. One glance at the train spelled out the reason: it was only five cars long, and the middle three were all empty barrel-shaped hopper cars. Perfect for hauling in large quantities of raw uranium. Meanwhile, the last car, the one right in front of my face, was shaped like a silver bullet, encased in what appeared to be armored steel.

As I stood there gaping at the enormous train just feet from my eyes, the man with the accent caught up with me.

I turned to him in desperation, my palms slick with fear. "I can't explain right now," I began, "but you need to believe me. That man who took the cannister is a traitor. He's a Russian spy. We need to stop him."

To his credit, he didn't take too long to come around to this new information. I suppose it was a conclusion he had already begun to draw as soon as he saw his would-be colleague sneaking off with a cannister of plutonium.