EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Twenty

"Brady, look at me," I said, standing to meet him.

But he wouldn't do it. Instead, he looked toward the small wading pool where the dragonflies were dancing under the moonlight.

"Please."

He finally turned to me, his brown eyes reflecting the glow from another string of lightbulbs that arced under the canopy.

"I was worried about you," I said.

"I'm fine." He offered me the weakest of smiles to accompany the lie, and I couldn't help but notice that he had grown a bit thinner. He was almost twenty-two now, a few months older than Kieren and Robbie, but a wrinkle was already creased across his forehead.

A flash of what he had looked like when I'd first seen him at East Township teased my brain—handsome, confident. Powdered sugar from the doughnut he ended up giving me for breakfast dusting the top of his lip.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"I'm not supposed to tell you that part yet."

"Brady, come on." My hand instinctively reached for his as I said it, and he grabbed onto it for just a second before dropping it again like it might burn him. It broke my heart to see the sadness in his eyes, the acquiescence to some oppressive force that was telling him what to do, what to say.

But I remembered now that Brady was never quite as strong as I had wanted him to be at fifteen. He had followed Kieren when he was younger, after all, like a soldier into an inevitable war. And he had cried in my arms when we couldn't find Piper in the diner under the lake.

My betrayal of him must have been the last straw, breaking him. He stood in front of me now, his shoulders stooped, somehow defeated. And I thought of what he had told me about his father once—in and out of jail, skipping out on Brady's life and leaving him to be raised by an older cousin. We all try so hard not to become our parents, but is this what his father was like?

I swallowed down the thought, trying to figure out how to proceed. "Whose house is this? Principal Farghasian's?"

"Yes."

"It's beautiful."

He nodded, admiring the house with a distant smile. "It is."

"So if you can't tell me where I am," I began, "can you tell me something else?"

"Depends."

The one-word answers were starting to drive me crazy. I knew I didn't deserve much more, but I missed my friend who I had talked to so honestly once. "Brady, what's the date?"

"It's the future, M. I'm sure you guessed that already."

"But we aren't any older."

He only shook his head, frustrated. "We're kind of isolated here. You only become your other self if you're somewhere nearby. If you're too far away, then you don't. That way if your other self is in, like, China or something, you won't just evaporate."

"Oh," I said, nodding. "We never knew that before."

"Yeah, well, a lot of time has passed. People have learned more about it." He still wasn't really looking at me, and the hostility never left his tone. But maybe I could get him to open up if we talked more.

"That must cause quite an imbalance between the dimensions," I realized. Matter would have to be borrowed from one dimension and lent to the other, which was the biggest taboo of the portals. Of course, Brady knew that, didn't he? Is that why he had sent Piper her old jacket? To remind her of all the rules they had broken together? To rub their transgressions in her face, just as she was trying to start a new life?