“They’re from the other side,” said the waitress, bringing us a glass of water, which I immediately gulped down only to feel it sitting poorly in my stomach.
“Mmm,” Sage responded. “Well, they need to prove it.”
“They already did,” the waitress insisted. “They thought Paris was the capital of France and they had one of those dollars.”
“Parlor tricks,” Sage continued. She squatted down by my side, all but pushing Brady out of the way. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She got some sort of shot,” Brady explained, and his voice couldn’t mask his concern any longer. Hearing that Brady sounded nervous completely destroyed any confidence I had left.
“Let me see,” Sage said, a certain gentleness working its way back into her tone.
Brady finished rolling up my sleeve, and I could hear an audible gasp come out of some of the people in the group upon seeing my arm. But Sage remained calm. I tried to look down and see what they were all reacting to, but the rolled-up sleeve was in the way and I lacked the energy to even pull it aside to see it myself.
“It’s infected,” Sage explained. “The ball will have to be removed, and you’ll need an antibiotic.”
“What ball?” Brady asked. “You mean the vaccine?”
“That’s what they tell us,” Sage said, still staring at my arm. Then, probably realizing she was being vague, she looked up at Brady. “It’s a tiny ball that releases a constant stream of vaccine. We have a lot of diseases here. But people from the other side often have a bad reaction. We don’t know why.”
Brady stood up and grabbed his upper arm, almost instinctively. “I feel fine.”
Sage looked up at him. “Did you get one too?”
Brady looked at his arm, flustered. “I mean . . . ,” he began. “They said we had to, so . . .”
“We should take yours out, too, just in case.” Sage sighed. “Then we’ll drop you back off at the high school.”
“I told them we could help them,” said the waitress.
“Well, you shouldn’t have said that, Caryn,” Sage said. “He’s a ticking time bomb and she’s already exploded.”
I shivered again. Why did she say that? What the hell did they put in me? I tried to close my eyes and will it away, as though DW was a bad dream you could wake up from. But this was no dream. The pain stabbing out of my arm was real, and it was probably already too late to do anything about it. Still, I had to try.
“Sage,” I said, and I could hear that my voice was barely a whisper, so I said it again. “Sage, please. Help us.”
Sage looked down at me and then back at Brady, who still stood by my side.
“Did you tell them my name?” she asked Caryn.
“Not exactly. I told them the password,” Caryn replied.
Sage sighed. “Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Your name is Sage,” I said, finding all my remaining strength to continue talking. “On the other side, you were a friend of my mother’s. You live in the hotel, on the top floor, with your husband, John. The bathroom is painted . . .”
I had to catch my breath and I could hear a wheezing sound when I inhaled. Whatever this infection was, it was spreading very quickly, and I could tell from the hot, dizzy feeling in my head that I was probably running a very high fever.
“ . . . fire-engine red,” I continued, feeling myself lose consciousness. Brady was there to catch me as I began to slump over, and then everything went black.
I woke up this time stretched out on a cot, in a darkened room. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, but it seemed like only minutes. A cool washcloth was on my forehead and it was the only thing giving me any relief.
I became aware that Sage was by my side, and then felt a stinging sensation in the bicep of my noninfected arm. I looked down to see she was giving me an injection.
“It’s okay,” Sage said. “It’s an antibiotic. It should work quickly, and you’ll feel better soon.”
I nodded, realizing that the deep pain in my other arm had gone from a sharp pulsing to a dull thud. I looked down and saw that the entire sleeve had been ripped off my shirt and a bandage was wrapped tightly around the site where I had been given the shot.
“We took it out,” Sage explained. “It’s a good thing you were passed out, because it kills when it’s embedded like yours was.”
As she was saying it, I heard Brady grunt from a nearby corner of the room. His sleeve was rolled up, and Caryn the waitress was digging into his arm with a pair of tweezers.
“Sorry,” she said, her face contorting a bit with a sympathetic pain.
“It’s okay,” Brady said, trying to sound tougher than I imagined he actually felt in the moment. “Do you need more light or something?”
“No, I can see it,” she said. “I’ve almost got it. I’m sorry, I’ve only done this a few times before.”
“And it hurts like hell every time,” teased one of the boys from earlier, who was sitting at a table nearby playing cards with the others.
“You want to come over here and take over, Milo? I’ll get you a pair of gloves.”
“I’m no surgeon,” replied the boy.
“Neither is she,” said the other boy, and they all laughed at Caryn’s expense.
I sat up a bit to watch the scene, relieved that the fever seemed to have broken. I was already feeling better, though still a bit woozy.
“Got it!” Caryn cried, removing the tweezers from Brady’s arm. Whatever she’d taken out must have been almost microscopic in size, because the tweezers looked empty from where I was sitting.
“Run and flush it with the other,” said Sage, and Caryn did as she was told, beelining for a nearby bathroom. “Can’t have them finding those if they ever raid the place.”
Sage left my side and went to start wrapping fresh gauze around Brady’s injection site. “Keep this clean,” she instructed him. “And change the bandage once a day for three days, you got it?”
Brady nodded, looking back at me.
I offered him a weak smile, wanting to let him know I was feeling better.
“If you need the vaccines so much,” I began, turning to the boy at the table who was apparently named Milo, “why did you take yours out?”
Milo shrugged. “I had a reaction like yours. I think it’s because I’m part Otherlander.”
“Otherlander?” I asked, figuring he must have meant our plane.
“Oh, please,” said Caryn, returning from the bathroom. “You’re not Otherlander.” She then turned her attention to me. “People here sometimes refer to the other side like being part Cherokee or something. It sounds cool, but it’s probably not true.”
“Won’t you get busted if you don’t have the vaccine?” Brady asked.
“You sound like one of them,” said Milo. “You sure you’re not a spy?”
I felt a surge of panic take over me. We couldn’t lose the trust of these people. We needed them to get back to the lake. I started to stutter out a response, but I didn’t know how to prove our innocence any more than I already had.
“He’s messing with you,” said Caryn. “We know you’re not spies.”
“Will you help us?” asked Brady, who continued to stand a slight distance from the others. “We need to get back to the lake.”
“Here we go again,” said Milo, throwing down his cards and going to a small refrigerator for a drink. “We’re not the Otherlander Underground Railroad, buddy. You got yourself over here, get yourself back.”
I tried to stand then, but felt the weakness still lingering in my legs and had to immediately sit back down. Milo’s reference to the Underground Railroad threw me, as it was something that existed in our plane too. I remembered what Sage had told me—the planes split off from each other when a different action occurred, causing different results
. So this plane and ours had been the same once, a long time ago. When did they split? And why?
“Sage?” I asked, still unable to leave the cot. “What happened here?”
Sage looked to Milo, who was sulking by the fridge, drinking something out of a dark bottle. “It doesn’t matter,” she began. “We can take you to the lake, if that’s what you want. But it needs to be tonight. If they’ve seen you at the high school, they’ll be looking for you by tomorrow.”
“You all keep saying ‘they,’” I realized out loud. “Do you mean the—the Russian people?”
“What Russian people?” Milo asked. I could tell from his tone he was messing with me.
“Everyone speaks Russian here.”
“They speak English too. What’s the problem?”
I turned to Caryn, realizing I would never get a straight answer out of Milo. “Is this Russia or something?”
“No, nothing like that,” she assured us, shaking her head. “It’s not that bad.”
“We saw a picture of a man,” Brady said. “A man with black hair. It said he was the leader. His portrait was hanging over the door in the hotel.”
“Of course,” said Sage. “You’re required to have at least one hanging in every building. We’ve got one here, don’t we, Milo?”
“Sure do.”
“Where did you put it again?”
“It’s in the john,” he replied, and the others all laughed. “On the back of the toilet lid.” The others erupted with an even louder response, and finally it felt like the tension in the room might be dissipating. “What? Gotta have something to aim for.”
“Who is he?” Brady asked, his voice still tense despite the others’ laughter.
“President Koenig,” Caryn answered.
“Did he do this?”
Caryn turned to Sage, clearly trying to determine how much she should say. “Yes.”
“So vote him out,” Brady continued. “I mean, you have elections here, don’t you?”
“There are elections, yes. But we don’t—they’re not for us,” Caryn continued.
“We have the wrong papers,” Milo chimed in. “It’s not a free-for-all here.”
“Well, what happens when his term is up?” I asked.
Caryn just smiled, like she found me adorable. “What’s a term?”
The room fell silent, everyone turning to their own thoughts.
“Collect yourself for a moment and then we’ll take you,” said Sage. She then went to sit on a small, neatly made bed in another part of the room. It was the first time I realized that this was where she lived, and we were all crashing it in the middle of the night. She looked tired, and I felt terrible for being such a burden.
“I have to ask,” said Brady, his mouth clenching around the question. “Did a girl named Piper come through here? About this tall,” he gestured, “with long brown hair.”
“Jesus, he’s with her,” said Milo. “That figures.”
“She went to the train,” said Caryn. I thought Brady would leap across the room to her on hearing this, but he managed to steady himself. Finally a specific answer, and finally some proof that we were right about Piper. She did come through the lake portal, and she was here.
“The train?”
“Is she your girlfriend?” asked Caryn, who clearly already had a crush on Brady.
“Yes,” he answered, anxious for her to continue. “What train? You mean the train station?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t say any more,” said Sage, sitting up on her cot. “If you want to get back to the lake, we should go in about twenty minutes. They turn the perimeter lights at the hotel off at one, and that’s the best time to sneak in.”
“But wait,” Brady insisted, getting more and more agitated. “I need to know why she went to the train station.”
“She said she wanted to see how far it spread. I assumed she meant the disease. To see if it had gotten to your town, who else was affected. She said she wouldn’t be able to rest until she knew. She was supposed to come back in a few days, but she never did.”
I could feel Brady deflating like an old balloon. We were so close, but she was still lost to us. Why hadn’t she come back? What happened to her when she got home? Did she get the disease?
I turned to Sage, who was sitting up on her cot looking somehow defeated and sad. She rubbed her graying hair, shaking her head slightly. “Over and over again,” I heard her mutter.
“Sage?” Brady asked. “Do you know why she wouldn’t come back?”
“How should I know?”
“Can you help us find her?” Brady continued, a pleading aspect to his voice denoting a new kind of fear.
“I didn’t put a GPS in the girl,” Sage spat at nobody in particular. “I offered to take her back to the lake that night, but she insisted on going on this fool’s errand first.”
“There must be someone we can call?” asked Caryn. “Can’t you see how worried he is?”
“I’m not your parents!” shouted Sage. “Start taking responsibility for your own horrible choices.” Her newfound anger was short-lived, burning up inside her for a moment or two, before she too seemed to shrink before our eyes, lying back down and staring at the ceiling above her little cot. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “But I really don’t know.”
“So she’s stuck,” said Brady, almost to himself. “She’s stuck here somewhere in this nightmare ass-backwards place.”
“Watch it,” said Milo, his forceful tone making me momentarily afraid that he might tackle Brady. And even though Brady was pretty tough, one look at Milo told me he could pummel just about anybody in his path. “You’re no better than us.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Brady, trying to defuse the bomb he had lit.
“Let me rest,” said Sage. “Everybody be quiet. Give me a few minutes of peace.”
“Excuse me,” Brady said, bolting out of the room and up the stairs.
I stood, finding my footing once again and feeling stronger already. But inside, I was falling apart, realizing how desperate this situation was becoming. Piper was slipping farther and farther away from Brady. I couldn’t wait to get out of here, and away from these people.
“Sorry,” I said to Milo, who didn’t seem to care in the least what I thought. I followed Brady up the stairs.
Searching the diner, I finally found him sitting alone in the last booth. His head was buried in his arms and I realized that he was crying. My first instinct was to leave him alone, give him some privacy. But he was my friend, and I didn’t want him to think that nobody cared what he was going through.
I sat down next to him and put my hand on his back. “It’s okay,” was all I could think of to say.
“I’m never going to see her again,” he said, his voice muffled by his sleeve.
“Of course you are,” I told him, wanting desperately to hug him. “You know where she is. She took the train back home. She just took it from here is all.”
“We have to go back to the lake in a few minutes,” Brady reminded me, looking up. “It’s too late.”
I nodded, trying to think of what choices we still had.
“Besides,” Brady continued, “if she wanted to be with me, she wouldn’t have left. It’s like you said earlier, isn’t it? If she loved me, she would have stayed.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” I said, thinking of my mother’s words. You are my warrior. My mother had stayed with me as long as she could before going in search of Robbie. It felt like an abandonment at first, but that’s because I didn’t know. Sometimes people do things for all sorts of hidden reasons.
“She probably really did think she’d be right back,” I said. “And she knew you were strong enough to be on your own until then.”
“But I’m not strong,” Brady sai
d. “And I’m so sick of having to act like I am all the time. This isn’t fair. I should get to keep one thing.” He started crying again, and I took his hand.
“Brady,” I whispered, trying to calm him, although he was already collecting himself. “Look at me.”
He turned his head. I took in his devastated eyes, realizing that if he listened to what I was about to say, I might never see them again.
“Piper needs you right now, do you hear me?”
He calmed himself and nodded, seeming to throw the emotion away from his face. I could hear him clear his throat as embarrassment crept in.
“You still love her?”
He stared at me for a moment, as if surprised by the question. His hand was still holding mine, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if he was trying to decide the answer, or if he was thinking about me.
But then he pulled away from me. “Yes,” he admitted. “I do.”
“Go get her, then. Go to the train, go to our town, and find her. When you have her, you can both come back here together and come through the lake portal.”
Brady exhaled slowly, thinking about what I was telling him. “It’s too dangerous, Marina. We’ve already been down a day.”
“You heard what George said. You can stay up to a week. It’ll take you one day to get there and find her, and another to get back.”
He nodded, seeming to visualize the journey.
“Just promise me—if you can’t find her right away . . .”
“I’ll come back.” He smiled. “I promise. I won’t stay too long.”
I sighed, relieved to hear the confidence back in his voice.
“What about you?”
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