Down World
Rebecca Phelps
CONTENTS
Dedication
Preface
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Three
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
DEDICATION
For my brother, who was lost, and then found.
PREFACE
So we’ve decided to leave. All of us, tonight. We’ll go as far as the train will take us. John says we have enough money left to buy a place out there, start fresh. And I want to believe him, believe we can put it all behind us. But I’m not so sure. The things we’ve seen in that dark world, and the things we did there . . .
I would follow John anywhere, and I know that now. And I’ll follow him again tonight. I know that too. But the world down below has changed him. Sometimes when I look in his eyes now, when he kisses me, it’s like he’s not there. He’s thinking, and he’s planning. He’s dark and then he’s light. And my deepest fear, if I’m being honest, is that one day he’ll just disappear. One day he’ll go down and he won’t come back. Because I think I know now, I know the truth. Whatever world we found down there, whatever power we discovered, he loves it more than he loves me. More than he loves any of us. He is our leader and our friend, and my only love. And when he goes—because he will go—I know that I will die.
—S
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
If Robbie were alive, he’d be a senior at this school. That was the thought that struck me when I entered East Township High on that August morning, the first of my sophomore year. I had never set foot in the school before, and I was scared out of my mind. I missed my friends at St. Joe’s, the Catholic school the next town over, where I had spent seventh through ninth grades. I missed Robbie. After three years, I still missed him. All the time.
And then there was that stupid little map.
The school had included the map in an orientation packet they’d sent me the week before, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. East Township, my father had warned me, had originally been built as an army base in the 1940s, and they had intentionally designed it to be confusing. (I guess so Nazis couldn’t sneak in and find the top-secret paperwork?) It was full of bricked-up doors, oddly sized rooms, and long twisting hallways that led to nothing.
And the map might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. Everything was color coded, without any indication of what the colors might represent, and not one damn “You are here” in the mix.
The first-period bell rang, and I found myself alone in the hallway next to my empty locker, turning the map in useless circles like a dyslexic juggler, tears stinging behind my eyes.
Pull it together, Marina, I reprimanded myself. Lost is embarrassing enough. Lost and crying is pathetic.
I laid the map out on the floor, desperately scanning for some indication of where my math lab might be, when a boy appeared over my head. He and a friend were strolling down the hall like they owned the place, not the least bit concerned that they, too, were apparently late for class.
I didn’t notice how cute he was at first: how only one cheek dimpled, or how his shoulder bones made a perfect T with his Adam’s apple. I didn’t notice that he smelled like lemon-scented laundry detergent and powdered sugar from the doughnut he was eating for breakfast. I was so wrapped up in being lost, and being angry that I was lost, that I didn’t notice him at all.
“Where you goin’?” he asked in his low voice, hovering above me. I barely even looked up.
“Nowhere, apparently,” I said in frustration, crumpling up the map and throwing it in my locker.
He chuckled, which finally made me look at him. I was shocked to feel my hands go clammy, and I wiped them on my jeans. The boy turned to the friend he had been walking with. “I’ll catch you later, man. I gotta help this one out before she burns the place down.”
“Later,” his friend said.
The boy dipped his head into my locker, so casually it might as well have been his own. “Let’s see what we got here, shall we?” He handed me the other half of his doughnut, like we were old friends. Something about him—his voice, maybe, or the flip of his hair—made me feel very safe all of a sudden. Like nothing was a big deal. He uncrumpled the map and spread it out, laughing and shaking his head.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“This map. It makes absolutely zero sense. You can eat that doughnut, by the way. It’s my second one today.”
I laughed and took a bite. It was weirdly delicious, and I wolfed it down like I’d never had a doughnut before.
“Okay, so first off,” he said, conspiring with me over the map, “this makes it look like the math rooms are downstairs. They’re upstairs.”
“Okay.”
“Second, this whole wing over here? It’s, like, never used for anything anymore. You don’t need that part. So we’ll just . . .” He ripped off half the map, balled it up, and threw it on the floor. I smiled, wiping powdered sugar off my mouth as I chewed the last of the doughnut.
“See, now it’s manageable.”
“Right, of course,” I said, like this was our shorthand. Something we had previously agreed on. How is it possible that I felt like I had known this boy my whole life?
He pointed to the number one on the map. “This your first class?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Math lab.”
“You don’t have Fitz, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I couldn’t remember. “Would that
