Down World, Rebecca Phelps [book recommendations based on other books .TXT] 📗

said Sage, finally standing and approaching to give Robbie’s beautiful new girlfriend a hug. Piper, in turn, was warm and overjoyed to see Sage, hugging her back with an intense sincerity. “You made it home,” Sage said, clearly relieved.

“I did. Marina told me what you did for her . . . and for Brady.”

“Have you seen him?” I asked Sage. “Did he come back?”

Sage shook her head gently. “I don’t know. If he did, he didn’t stop to say hi.”

A flash of worry passed over Piper’s face, but then she turned back to Robbie, who offered her an encouraging embrace.

“Why are you here then, Sage?” I asked again, not caring this time if I sounded rude.

“The highway runs both ways, doesn’t it?” asked Sage, not the least bit perturbed by my tone. “We heard what was happening in the town.”

“Who told you?”

“I did,” said Mr. Protsky, sitting down and helping himself to a cup of coffee from the nearby pot.

Seeing him sit down with such familiarity next to Sage and John, I realized something that I had never put together before. And I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

“You know each other,” I said, quite dumbly.

“Can we get some breakfast, Dad?” Kieren asked. “M and I could run and get something . . .”

“I’m not going,” I said, finally doing the math. “You went to the high school too,” I said to Mr. Protsky. And then I looked at Sage and John, and even at sullen George, who sat like a log the whole time, sipping his coffee, deeply immersed in whatever thoughts occupied that sad old brain of his.

“I did,” Mr. Protsky admitted.

“So you know,” I began. “You know about DW.” I replayed the last four years of my life, the rift between our families after the accident. The way my mother hated Kieren and hated his whole family. “You always knew about it.”

“I knew that there was a group of kids messing around with something in the basement,” he said, nodding to Sage and the others. “We didn’t exactly run in the same circles, though, and I figured it had nothing to do with me.”

“But you knew that our mom was part of the group,” I insisted, still reeling from the fact that I’d never put this together. I looked to Robbie, who seemed to be processing this information as well. How could we have not known this growing up?

“Have you known this whole time that Robbie was in DW? Since the start? And that our mother would try to go in after him?”

“Your mother called me, right after the accident. She said she suspected it, and she told me about the portal on the tracks. But I told her not to try to follow him, that it was too dangerous. At that time, it was soon enough after he had entered . . .”

“Go on,” Robbie prodded, hearing for the first time what had been happening on the other side of reality from his imprisonment on that train.

Mr. Protsky finally turned to Robbie, and his voice shifted. A sadness entered it, a weakness. His eyes kept blinking, like Robbie was the sun and he couldn’t stand to stare straight at him. Yet he continued.

“I was hoping you’d find your own way out. I knew if we sent anyone in after you, they would just . . .”

“Be stuck on the train too,” finished Piper, taking Robbie’s hand. “And you were right—we would have been stuck there forever,” she added, turning to me. “But we were saved.”

“So why aren’t things back to normal?” I asked. Sage and John exchanged a look, and I turned to confront them both. “You said when I took Robbie out, that things would go back to normal.”

“That’s not exactly what I said,” Sage explained.

“Yes, it is,” I almost shouted. “You said he was trapped between the planes, that that was the problem. Well, he’s not trapped anymore! I saved him.”

Robbie put his hand on my back, and Kieren had begun to pace. I was upsetting everyone in the room, but I didn’t care anymore. I had done everything I was told. Why wasn’t it enough?

“Why isn’t everything okay now?” I asked, hearing the hysteria in my own voice. “Why have the planes crossed like this?”

“You were supposed to push him,” came the calm, otherworldly voice of George, who still sat in a trance next to his friends, not looking up to meet my eyes.

“What?” I asked, my head spinning. Robbie had to steady me for a moment as I tried to gain my balance.

“Push him off the train,” George explained. “Back through the portal. That was the way.”

“You’re wrong,” I said, looking at John. “You said that was the only way off the train, but you were wrong. You don’t need to go back out through the portal. You just need to pay for your ticket. That’s how we got here. You just need . . .”

“A special coin,” John finished my sentence. “A coin made on the rails at the portal site.”

I felt like a dead weight had come from nowhere and collapsed on the building. Nobody spoke for a moment.

“You knew,” I said, realizing the gravity of what John had tried to do. He had commanded me to kill my brother, knowing that it wasn’t necessary. “You knew about the coin, and you still told me pushing him was the only way off the train.”

“I didn’t say it was the only way off the train,” John explained, trying to remain calm. “I said it was the only way that would work.”

“He’s not supposed to be here, not like this,” said Sage, trying, as she always seemed to be doing, to soften the blow of her husband’s words. “Your mother and her son—the other Robbie—they’ve taken the place of the ones who were here.”

“No,” I immediately countered. “Mom went into DW. She’s probably trying to make her way back right now.”

“Your mother is gone,” Sage said, her voice oddly