Robbie once told me that he thought our lives were just a series of choices.

We were at our coffeeshop down the street, maybe a month after I'd moved to Boston. I didn't know about his condition yet. He had kept it hidden from me. He looked healthy and fit, still tan from a summer road trip with Piper up the East Coast. They had camped out under the stars most nights, and Piper had posted a million pictures of lighthouses glowing in the distance. Of lobster dinners. Of hands holding by lamplight.

Now he drank his iced coffee, his dark brown hair falling into his eyes. Though I now knew that half of his DNA came from his real father, John, all I could see was the resemblance to our mother. He had Mom's coloring. Mom's brown eyes, hooded under thick brows that sometimes concealed his thoughts. Mom's wiry hands that now encircled the coffee cup, wet from where the ice was melting.

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Just what I said," he answered. "We go on and on in some of my classes about human nature. Evil versus good. That kind of thing."

"Mm-hmm." I licked the foam off my cappuccino, happy as always just to hear his voice again, to know that he was safe.

"But honestly I think most people—I mean people whose brain chemistry is..." and here he waved indistinctly at his own head (a gesture I would later revisit with more insight)... "you know, normal. I think most people just make choices. Choices that probably make a lot of sense in the moment, or seem necessary in the moment, or just feel good in the moment."

I nodded, listening. Always listening. It reminded me of something my mom's old friend George had said to me once, on the day I buried the beaker in the sand. In this world, there's only the choices we make and the way we live with them.

"And those choices have consequences," Robbie continued. "And so people react to the consequences. And then there's more consequences."

Someone came up and gestured to our extra chair. Robbie smiled and pushed it closer to the man, who carried it away.

"Like that," Robbie continued, not pausing in his thoughts. "What if I hadn't given him that chair? What if he'd gotten angry? What if that anger made him snap and we'd had a fight?"

"Over a chair?"

"The chair isn't the point, M." He was getting upset as he talked. Too upset. Like something else was really bothering him.

"Okay, so you fight over the chair. Then what?"

"Then I don't know. Maybe I'm never allowed to come back. Maybe he storms out into the street and gets hit by a bus."

"Jesus, Robbie."

His eyes clenched shut for just a millisecond—just as long as it would take to get hit by a bus...or a train. To know you were dying.

How often did he think about it?

"It happens. Doesn't it?" he said now, back to normal. "People snap all the time. Things happen. People react."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying I don't know if there's really such a thing as evil. I mean, there's mental illness, of course. But outside of that, people aren't evil. They're just...reacting."

"Okay. So what does that mean for us?" I asked.

"It doesn't mean anything. It's just realizing that you are nothing but a series of choices. That all you can do is live with them. And know that they're flawed. Know that you're flawed. And..."

"And?"

"And forgive yourself."

*

I was sitting alone on my four-poster bed at Elaheh's fairy-tale house in the woods, replaying that conversation in my head, just as I had been all week. I had no idea how the Tomorrow doors worked. Was time passing on the other side, just as it did when you entered a Today door? Did that mean I had been missing for a week there too?

And if so, then I'd missed a week of school. I would never be able to make it up; I'd have to retake the whole semester. And, more importantly, it meant Robbie and Piper would've returned from their honeymoon to find me missing. They'd be frantic. They would have told Dad by now. Maybe the police.

Or maybe time wasn't passing there at all.

It was killing me to not know, just as it was killing me that Adam was out there somewhere. That I might never see him again.

I kept seeing his face, worry lines furrowing his brow, just before he disappeared.

He said everything he did was to keep me safe. And then he went through the door. At the time I had thought it was an accident—that he had just stood too close to it. Or else that he figured I'd be able to follow him, not realizing that the door would seal behind him.

Or maybe he meant that I should wait for him on our side. That he would be back for me when he was done doing...whatever he went to do.

But now, after a week of sitting on this bed, of only being allowed to go down to the courtyard for meals, to the kitchen for a cup of tea, to the bathroom down the hall, and then back to this room to sit like a prisoner, where I'd not been allowed to talk to Brady or even be alone in the room with him, where Layla had watched me like a hawk, and Elaheh had paced the halls at night to make sure I wasn't escaping, with Amalia acting like we were one big happy family—that oblivious smile plastered on her face—after this long week, I had finally realized something I should have known immediately:

I made the wrong choice.

Adam went through the door on purpose.

And I wasn't supposed to follow him.

Now my choice would have consequences, just as Robbie had warned me that day in the coffeeshop. Like dominoes, one choice would lead to the next, and my fate would fall in turn. Elaheh would never let me leave this place, whatever it was. I was a prisoner here.

I headed to the closet where someone—Amalia, no doubt—had hung dozens of those tunic-style dresses everyone here wore. My real clothes had been taken away from me to be "washed" and never brought back, so I had no choice but to pick one out. There was even a drawer full of underwear and bras, and I couldn't help but note that they were all in my size. She must have snagged my measurements when we were buying my bridesmaid's dress for Robbie's wedding.

More footsteps in the hallway jostled me from my thoughts. I was used to hearing them by now, and I could tell from the weight and the pace of them whether it was Elaheh guarding my door or Aunt Amalia offering me something to eat in a warm voice that betrayed no understanding of how much I hated her now.

But these footsteps were different. They were heavier.

I quickly threw on one of those tunics and stepped out of the closet. The doorknob jangled, and I braced myself for a confrontation. There were no locks on the doors in this house, but it was a prison just the same. Yet when the door opened, all the tension drained out of my body and I practically leaped forward.

It was Brady. He quickly closed the door behind him and put a finger to his mouth, gesturing for me to be quiet. I nodded that I would, but I knew our time was limited. Secrets were almost impossible in this house, and not just because of the devices jammed into our brains.

There were always people about. The house was open to everyone in the neighborhood, and it often doubled as a bit of a community center. The kids from the woods would play games in the living room, or the ladies would meet for afternoon tea.

I waved Brady closer, and spoke in a hushed tone.

"Brady—"

"Shh," he answered, his eyes returning to the closed door. But there was no one out there—no one that I could hear, anyway.

"Your sensor," I said, noticing that his red light had stopped pulsating. "Are you better?"

"I think so," he said. "Thank you."

"I didn't do anything."

"You did, though. They were able to find the solution in your download."

I shook my head in frustration. "I don't understand. If this technology has been around so long, why doesn't anyone else know how to fix it? Why did they need me?"

"I don't want to tell you more than you need to know."

"Please, Brady." I stepped closer and took his hand. He squeezed mine back for just a second before letting it go. "I need to know this."

He nodded sadly. "I'll tell you just a little, okay?"

"Okay." I was aware that I was standing very still, waiting for him to talk.

"The thing is," he began. "It was confidential. You and your partner had a patent on it, said it was too dangerous to be public knowledge. You destroyed the prototype. Destroyed all your papers. But then he..."

"He?" My heart was pounding. It was like he was talking about another person, someone from a movie I had never seen. "My partner?"

"He leaked it. Sold it, I mean."

I shook my head. What kind of a person would do something like that? And this was someone I had trusted? Someone I had worked with? How could I have been such a bad judge of character? Why didn't I stop him?

But then my brain remembered the critical piece of information:

"I was dead."

Brady looked down at the floor, unable to contradict me.

"I couldn't stop him because I was dead."

"I can't tell you anything else, M. I shouldn't have told you that."

I stepped closer to him. Close enough that we could hear each other by barely whispering. "Then tell me how to get home. You're better now and I need to go. I need to make sure Robbie isn't worried about me."

"You can't leave."

"Why not, Brady?"

"Your chip is in. It's too late."

I reached up and touched my sensor, its artificial warmth still shocking to feel beneath my fingers. I walked away from him, trying to catch my breath. My brain restlessly scanned for something to say that could save me. "Why did you let them put it in?"

"I didn't know they would. I swear. M, please." He walked up to me now, almost like he was going to put his arms around me. But then he caught himself, and his arms returned to his sides. "They talked about letting you go back after. I thought it was settled. I—I never would have let them bring you here if..."

"If what?"

"When I last talked to you on the phone, I said goodbye. And I meant it. I never thought I'd see to you again." He ended up near the bed, and he slumped down onto it, his head buried in his hands. "It's just that when the ICD isn't working right, it hurts so much. You can't think straight, like a migraine."

"It's okay, Brady."

"It's not. I don't remember. They may have asked for permission."

"Permission?"

"To put your chip in. I just...I don't remember."

I sat down next to him, a comforting hand on his back. None of this was his fault. He was clearly a pawn in Elaheh's game—a pawn hand-picked to entertain her daughter. But a new thought occurred to me, and my sensor whirred in my head, making me say it out loud. "If I don't go back, I'll never invent it."

"Hmm?"

"If I don't go back to the past, I'll never invent these things. So they have to let me. Or else..."

"M," Brady said, looking up at me with a pitifully sad expression, waiting for me to catch up. I finally did.

"Or else they'd be the only ones in the world who have them."

We sat in silence for a moment, letting the dim light of the room bathe us in what felt like a secret blanket. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. "I'm going back to the woods, Brady. To the door I first came in. Tonight."

"You won't find it."

"I'll just follow the path."

"No, M. You don't understand. It's only there if she wants you to find it."

I shook my head in anger. Elaheh had really planned everything about this place, down to the last detail. "Then I'll go to the school portals."

He looked up at me with those deep brown eyes that I had once been so crazy about, but the warmth seemed to have drained out of them. "If you go back, you'll just die again."

"I won't. I'll make better choices. I'll be careful."

"That's what everyone thinks."

"I need to get out of here, Brady. I need to escape."

"No, M." He said, smiling despite the gloom in his eyes. "Nobody escapes Pangaea."

***

NOTE: No, we're not in prehistoric times, I promise! But why do you think Elaheh and co. would name their colony "Pangaea"?  XO-Rebecca