Wave after wave of grief seized me.

When I closed my eyes, all I could see was my mom's face, fading into nothing. The look in her eyes was pure love.

She loved me. After everything we'd been through.

After all the years I hated her. All the years we were apart.

In the end, she loved me.

And I let her die.

I opened my eyes, trying to erase the imprint of her face, but she was still there, floating in the hot, tight air of the train car. Her beautiful eyes filled the gaps between the wooden planks in the floor. Her long fingers. Her soft hair. Her smell. She was everywhere.

And she was nowhere.

I let the tears come in a torrent, the pain grip me so tight I thought I would choke on it. And I wanted to choke. I wanted to sleep. Anything but this pain. Anything but feel this way for one more moment.

I never thought anything could hurt as much as the night I heard that Robbie had died. But this was worse. Because I didn't even get to tell her how much I loved her.

I was thinking it, but I didn't say it. She died without hearing me say the words.

When the thudding began, soft and constant, and growing louder as it approached, I didn't know if it was real or just the pounding of my heart against my chest. The dull angry pulse of immeasurable sadness.

And then the thudding grew louder. Footsteps.

I felt the Conductor's presence above me before I had really registered that he was there. The air felt heavier somehow when he was near, like a cold breeze coming off a mountain. I looked up through stinging eyes and he was watching me.

I couldn't even think to be scared. Let him kill me if he wanted. Let him end it.

"Tickets," he said, extending a bony hand in my direction.

I stood to meet him, his emaciated face only inches from my own. A thought exploded into my mind as I looked at him.

"Can you take me to Yesterday?" I asked, hearing the rip in my voice. "Please? Let me do it over. Let me save her." My lips trembled so bad with the words I could barely form them, and my vision blurred as even more tears formed and fell down my face.

He just shook his head.

"Why not?"

"The train moves forward," he answered, the croaking of his voice like wind blowing through the branches of a tree.

"Only forward?"

He nodded.

I took a deep breath, letting the words sink in. It was official, then. No more door to Yesterday beneath the school. No taking the train back in time. There would be no more do-overs.

What was done was done. I would never see Mom again.

I let the steady thrumming of the train beneath my feet fill my ears for what felt like an eternity. I knew I needed to shake away the dark thoughts that were drowning me. I knew from my own experience, and from what Adam had told me, that time didn't just move forward on this train—it sped up. Every minute I lingered here could equal twice as many outside.

And that was time Robbie didn't have to spare, not if Alexei still had him locked up somewhere under the rose garden. I had to get back. I had to find him.

When I looked up again, the Conductor was still in front of me, waiting for his payment.

I wiped the tears off my cheeks, steadying myself. Now was the time to be strong. Now was the time to survive.

Otherwise, Mom had died for nothing.

I cleared my throat and reached into my pocket for the flattened penny, placing it in his hand. The metal clanked against bone like a bullet sliding into a chamber.

"Then take me back to where you picked me up."

He nodded and began to walk away.

"Wait," I said, reaching into my pocket once more, and pulling out another flattened penny I had stashed there.

"The fare is one ticket," he said in his creaky voice, the words echoing off the train's ancient walls.

"I know," I said, straightening my spine. "The second one is for you."

The deep sockets of his eyes widened, and he tilted his head back, questioning.

"I'm freeing you," I explained, placing the coin in his hand next to my own. "After I get off, you take the train wherever you want to go. Take it home if you can, back where you came from. It's not the same now as it used to be, but it's still your home."

He shook his head, his lips spreading into a fine line over his paper-thin white skin. "Too far," he said.

"It's not," I insisted. "It where you were made. Do you remember that day? The day I spilled the uranium on the tracks? I saw you there. You were a man then."

He shook his head.

"You've been trapped on this train ever since."

A slow creaking came from deep inside him. A memory. An echo.

"You remember, don't you? When you were human? You can be human again once you step off this train. I don't know what that will mean for you. Honestly, I don't know if you'll still be alive. But you won't be trapped anymore."

"Too late now," he answered.

But I shook my head. He was wrong. "Time is only a measurement," I said, Aunt Amalia's words returning to me with such clarity I could almost see her neat cursive letters floating before my face as I said them. How far does it go? she had asked. And I knew the answer now. I knew it in my bones. "It goes where we take it. And now you can take it home. You're free."

The Conductor closed his hand slowly over the two coins and looked around the abandoned car. The wind whipped through the cracks in the floor, swirling the dust at our feet in endless circles. And then he walked way. He passed into the next car, and I watched him go until I couldn't see him anymore.

I turned back to the window, watching the world streak past me, and bracing myself for what would happen when Alexei saw that I was back.

**

As soon as I stepped off the train, my first suspicion was confirmed: it was later than when I had entered it. The sky had been gray with storm clouds then, but it had been daytime. Now it was pitch black out, and a cold wind whipped across the platform as the train pulled away.

I shivered in my sweater, and my hand instinctively wrapped around the wedding ring on my finger, as though somehow it could keep me warm. Taking a few steps away from the track, I watched as the train pulled away, waiting to see it melt into the dark horizon in the distance.

But it didn't melt.

It evaporated.

One second it was there, and the next it was gone. The air around the tracks suddenly seemed lighter, as though a great cosmic energy had dissipated. Had it really been that simple? All this time, the answer was right in front of us. The train was gone.

And the Conductor with it.

I was still in Down World, in a dimension to which I did not belong. And I was still in my slightly older body, as was evidenced by the ring on my sharper-looking fingers.

And that meant, unless something had gone terribly wrong, that I could still back up into the portal I had entered. So I swirled the colors away, just as I had in the previous doors. And I watched the stars of the night sky blob together and make a prism of dark and light.

The next thing I knew, I was back in the large underground room beneath the rose garden. I braced myself to confront Alexei, but he wasn't there. The room was quiet, and only the dimmed blue light of the servers and a low hum from Minerva's central computer filled the silence around me.

A quick glance at that main computer now showed the time: 2:38 a.m.

I allowed a deep exhale to escape my lungs, a brief reprieve. If it was that late, maybe Alexei had gone to bed. That would give me an advantage. I could sneak out, I could find Adam and bring him back here to help me end this thing once and for all.

As soon as his name popped into my mind, I reached down for that ring finger. It was bare, of course, as I knew it would be. I was back in my nineteen-year-old body. Still, it left a terrible emptiness in my heart to see it gone.

I started to make my way to the spiral staircase, hoping that there wouldn't be a lock at the top. That I would be able to sneak off the grounds.

But I didn't make it more than a foot.

A loud click sounded against a far wall, and suddenly the room flooded in a wash of ocean blue. The computers all started humming around me. They were awake. Someone had turned them on.

And one glance down the long corridor to my right revealed who it was. About fifty feet away, Jin was walking towards me, his eyes so wide with awe at what he was seeing that he didn't even notice I was standing there.

I leapt out of his sightline, landing with a thud on the floor behind one of the large towers of computers.

"Who's that?" Jin asked the air.

I pulled in my feet and clasped my hand over my mouth, willing my breath to still. I knew I couldn't trust Jin, not if he was already working with Alexei. I could tell from the look in his eye as he took in the room that he was entranced by it. He was already hooked on the drug of power. And if he knew I was here, he would tell Alexei.

Jin started to walk toward me, and I became aware that the sensor in my temple was glowing a bright red—the color of fear. Minerva was reading my brain chemistry.

Her voice sounded silently inside my head:

I'm sensing elevated cortisol levels, Marina. Are you in danger?

I shook my head, unwilling to even think the response lest Jin hear it somehow. But I knew he couldn't. Minerva was inside my head.

He grew closer and closer, and I could only shut my eyes and pray that he didn't see me crouched down on the floor. When he was within a few feet, I knew I had only one chance.

Minerva, I thought silently inside my head, blow a wire in the corner of the room.

Which wire?

Any wire. It doesn't matter.

And just like that, a spark ignited over to Jin's left, drawing his attention.

"Shoot," he said softly before changing course and heading in the direction of the noise.

I let out a silent exhale, looking around for some escape. My fingers traced the bare skin of my hand where Adam's ring had been just minutes before.

And then I realized something. A long shot, but the only one I could think of.

Minerva, I said silently.

Yes?

There's an ICD in a cabin in the woods, less than a mile from here.

A slight whirring in my temple followed. And then Minerva spoke: Serial number 69870838, model 3T. I'm aware of it. It is not installed.

Yes, that's the one, I answered, watching out of the corner of my eye as Jin walked farther away.

What about it, Marina?

I crossed my fingers, praying that this would work.

Turn it on, I said.

****

Just a couple chapters left. Love to hear your thoughts up to this point. :)