Thank you, friends, for getting Everworld to 20,000 views! Some of you have been with Marina on this crazy journey for a year and a half now, and I just want to tell you how much that means to me. Sending you all love from LA!

Now, back to the story...

****

The following night, I asked Minerva to wake me up at three a.m., though I didn't tell her why.

The house was asleep, the lights dimmed. Even the crickets had stopped their chirping, and a sliver of moonlight above my window cast the forest in long shadows.

It was now or never.

I crept down the hall, past the other bedrooms, and lingered for only a moment outside Brady's door. If I asked him to run away from this place with me, would he do it? Or would he turn me in? I couldn't risk finding out the answer. So I simply touched the door lightly, silently promising him that I would see him again someday.

Somehow.

I tiptoed down the hall and out into the courtyard, and was just about to cross the threshold of Elaheh's property when I felt the presence of someone behind me. That was really the only way to describe it—I felt them there. Or sensed them, really—a warm feeling that began in my ICD and traveled down my spinal column, making me stop before I could cross the gate.

At first I thought it must have been Minerva, warning me not to do it. But this feeling was different somehow. More personal.

And then I heard Brady's voice in my head, as clearly as if we were talking on the phone. He said, "You won't make it."

I turned around to face him, and he was standing on the porch, his eyes still bleary with sleep, his fingers touching the sensor at his temple. He had transmitted the sentence to me, and I had received it.

I touched my own sensor and thought the words, "I have to try." And the sad smile that crossed his lips told me he had heard it.

So it wasn't just Minerva who could talk to me this way; anyone with an ICD could do it—a little extra talent they performed, in addition to teaching foreign languages and impeding the fight-or-flight response that made people lie. What else could they do?

Brady walked up to me then, his eyes casting one furtive glance behind him to make sure we were alone. Then he took my hand and led me to the gate, which he opened with the gentlest lifting of the latch. Like all doors in Pangaea, it was not locked.

He waited until we were several feet away from the door before he spoke out loud.

"I told you. You won't be able to find the door back home. It's only there when Elaheh wants it to be."

"I'm not going to the door," I whispered.

"Then where?"

"The train."

He sighed, long and heavy, and a flicker of that spark I had fallen so hard for at fifteen flashed across his deep brown eyes.

"Don't," he said. "Stay here. With us. You'll be happy. There are other young people, you just haven't met them yet."

"Brady, stop." I touched his arm, and it was like I had flicked a switch. His eyes closed in understanding. Nothing he said would make me stay. "You could come with me."

"I'm happy here."

"With Layla?"

"Yes."

I looked back at the gate, and it was like I could feel Layla's presence behind it, sleeping in their warm bed. "Good," I said. "You deserve that. You deserve everything."

"Please don't go, M. I'm really scared for you. There are things you don't know—"

"I know about Jin," I answered. His eyebrows shot up into a question, darkening the crease across his forehead.

"What do you know?"

"I know how it ended."

He shook his head in sadness. "So then you know why you have to stay. It'll just happen again if you leave."

"It won't."

"M, please, listen to me."

I put a quieting hand on his arm, and he swallowed down the rest of what he was going to say. I knew I couldn't tell him that I was really going to find Adam. I didn't even want to mention that name around him, now that we seemed to finally have found a way back to our friendship.

But I also knew that if Adam was trapped out there somewhere, somewhere in the "dead zone," as Remedios had called it, I wouldn't be able to sleep until I found him.

"I promise I'll be back," I whispered. "But now I have to go."

Instead of responding, he put his arms around me. I let myself linger for only a moment in his warm embrace, then leaned up and kissed his cheek. "I'll, um, call you," I said, touching my ICD, "when I get there."

"Your device won't work outside the perimeter," he said.

"Oh. Then I'll call you when I'm back."

"M, wait—"

But I couldn't wait. If I delayed it anymore, I might lose my courage. I might be tempted to stay in that house, in this world where I didn't belong, and live at the mercy of Elaheh bringing my brother to me—bringing my life back to me.

I wouldn't live at her mercy.

That's not how the game was played.

I turned and ran, feeling the air grow between Brady and myself, and letting the darkness of the night envelope me until there was nothing left but me and the long, winding path to the train station.

*

Getting onto the train wasn't the hard part. It was free for residents of Pangaea, and apparently Elaheh had programmed my ICD to emit a signal indicating that I was exactly that. The hard part was not showing my shock when I saw the station, not tipping my hat to the fact that I was surprised by how it looked.

Because the station had been designed to look familiar. It was almost a replica of the one in my home town, the way it had looked when Robbie and I were children, right down to the ivy clinging to the walls and the vending machine inside selling candy. Of course there was no cash used in Pangaea; all transactions were done with a silent touching of one's temple—the money flying from one digital account to another as smoothly as water flowing into a basin. So the children in the station had only to touch their temples to make their favorite treat fall into the base of the machine.

But as I waited on the platform for the train that I hoped was heading towards town—my real town—I noticed other differences as well. The dome above our heads was meant to emulate the real atmosphere, right down to the sun that rose slowly in a far eastern corner and started easing its way across the horizon while the early-morning commuters sipped their coffee, their eyes scanning left and right over the newspapers only they could see.

And yet, it wasn't perfect. Sometimes a cloud would glitch away. The light would shift too suddenly from the pink of dawn to the yellow of morning. Thunder cracked somewhere far off, but there was no rain. It was just a warning to let people know that sprinklers were about to start watering the green areas around the station.

By the time I got on the morning train and found my seat, I didn't want to look at any of it anymore. It was like being trapped in a video game, the uncanny valley between home and an illusion. I closed my eyes, not really sure what I was supposed to do next.

"Where are you headed?"

The lady next to me was older, wearing an indistinct black dress that could have been from a hundred years ago or a hundred years in the future. She was smiling, a physical book laying open in her lap.

"New Ohio," I answered quickly, hoping it sounded natural. "To visit my grandmother."

"Oh, that's a lovely colony. The most realistic beaches. You're too young to remember, but when I was your age, the beaches were just like that. Of course, the sand is a little course. But it'll wear down with time."

I forced a smile, wanting desperately to ask her what had happened to those real beaches. Instead I looked at her lap. "What are you reading?"

She flipped the cover over and showed me: an ornate design of roses and buds, all twisting around a hidden opening in a large stone wall. The Secret Garden.

"My mother used to read it to me," she said. "When I couldn't sleep, I'd imagine I was in the garden, tucked away in the all those magical flowers, and everything was safe and wonderful. I still like to hold the real books, feel them in my hands. The paper is the same, at least."

Her voice was getting softer as she spoke, and soon she had drifted off to sleep, the book clutched in her arms like a shield.

But that's when we were plunged into a void.

I leaned over the woman and peered out of the window. We had left the dome, and I whipped my head back to see it receding into the distance—a blue marble in a sea of darkness. But looking carefully now, I could see that it wasn't dark outside, just brown.

"I don't like the dead zones," said a child behind me. "They scare me."

"Close the shade, honey," said the child's mother. "Just play your game. It'll be over soon."

I stood up and started heading down the long aisle of the train car, acting like just another passenger looking for the bathroom. No one seemed to pay me much attention. Most of them had the glazed-over eyes that I now realized meant they were watching something on their own personal screen. Some of the younger ones twitched their fingers left and right, their faces either alight with excitement or clenched in apprehension. Their indicators glowed green.

They were playing video games.

I passed from car to car, heading towards what I hoped was a caboose, and they were all the same. Families clustered together, heading to visit distant relatives. Some people wore patchwork clothes, and it took me a second glance to realize why: they were woven together from pieces of previous garments. Everything in Pangaea was recycled.

And I thought of the train that my brother had been trapped on for almost four years—the way the floorboards had been worn away so completely that in places you could see through to the tracks passing below; the errant flapping pages of ancient books whirled by the wind in the library car; Robbie and Piper's mismatched collection of stolen food.

My brother had used everything he could find to get by. He was a survivor too. Would he like it in Pangaea? Would this place give him peace?

But all those thoughts scattered away from me when I reached the last car of the train. I was relieved to find that it was almost empty, and the few passengers who occupied it had clearly chosen it for the privacy it offered. There were only about five of them, all completely rapt in whatever entertainment was passing before their unfocused eyes.

I put my hands against the glass of one of the windows, reading the fine print above it: In case of emergency, pull cord to sound alarm and detach window from frame.

I wrapped my fingers around the thin string and took a deep breath, closing my eyes for only a moment while I said a silent prayer to a God I hadn't believed in since I was a child.

And then I pulled the cord.