EverWorld (Book 3 of the Down World Series)

Chapter Twenty-Two

In the dream I was running for a train.

And I was a child, maybe seven years old. But then I was nineteen, and then I was an old woman. Fifty or seventy or twelve. And I was running for the train.

And Robbie was on the train. I had to get to him. I had to save him.

But then it wasn't Robbie. It was Brady.

And Adam was with me, running by my side. He took my hand. We were running for the train. But it was getting away from us—no, we were pushing it away. Like an inner tube floating on still water. The harder we ran, the more waves we created, ripples undulating out into the water. And we were in a lake, drowning.

And Adam's hand slipped out of mine. And he was drowning. And I couldn't save him.

His skin was turning blue, his beautiful green eyes fading to gray and finally to black.

And I was in the pyramid house then. And Kieren climbed in through the window. And I was crying. And he said, "You shouldn't have done it, M. Now look what you've done."

And I said I didn't mean it.

And he said, "Look what you've done to me."

**

When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was pain. A sharp, dull, excruciating pain in my heels. I was lying on a rigid, cold table. Metal. And my heels were pressed hard against that metal—so hard that the circulation was cut off. But now that I was stirring, sensation was pulsating back into my feet and it felt like a floodgate of blood was beating against every nerve ending.

But then the pain in my heels was going to have to wait, because it was competing with the stabbing pinch in my left temple.

I was woozy and weak. I could barely lift my hand, and it seemed to take an eternity to get it all the way up to my head. Or across to my head, really, because I was still lying prone on that table. But I knew, in the split second before my fingers finally found their target, what I would find.

There was a bulge beyond my hairline. A small concave protrusion.

They had implanted my device.

"No," I tried to say, but only a whistling breath escaped.

"Don't try to sit up," a voice ordered. "Give yourself time."

"What did you do?" This time a whisp of sound formed every other word.

"I told you." The voice belonged to Elaheh, who was sitting in a chair watching me. We were in a large, clean white room. Some sort of makeshift operating area. "You can't be here without it. There are rules."

"Amalia told you not to."

"Amalia will understand."

I shivered with cold and weakness. I didn't have the strength to argue. Whatever drugs she had given me to knock me out were still in my system, and I couldn't resist an overwhelming desire to sleep.

"Do you need anything?" I heard her say. "Water?"

But I was already drifting into darkness.

I woke again in the room I had fallen asleep in the night before—a beautifully appointed and quite spacious bedroom, in a lovely four-poster bed with olive and burgundy curtains pulled back on either side. No light entered the room from its one window, draped as it was in a thin white curtain. But I could hear a plaintive cry from a nightingale just outside the house.

I had no idea how much time had passed, hours or days. But I was still wearing the pajama set my aunt had loaned me before bed, just as I had been when Elaheh had implanted my device.