"Stop!" I shouted before I even realized that I had opened my mouth. An immediate rush of embarrassment, mingled with fear of exposure, made my cheeks burn hot and my throat suddenly go dry.

Everyone in the room, from the scientists who had been staring dumbly at the new portals to the workers who had been buzzing anxiously around me, stopped like they'd been freeze-framed and stared at me.

Not knowing how I could possibly explain my presence, or get anyone to believe my story, I instead decided that the best course of action was simply to point out the obvious fact before me. My finger pointed up towards the door where Alexei had disappeared with the cannister of plutonium wedged under his arm.

"Stop him!" I choked out, my voice thin and airy. "He's getting away."

All the men in the room, still shaking their heads and muttering as they tried to decipher what exactly had happened just moments before, now looked even more perplexed as their eyes followed the line of my finger.

"Where is he?" asked the man with the thick accent.

A clamor of confusion followed suit, all the men in their white lab coats seeming to arrive in unison at the same conclusion that I had: Alexei was no longer in the room.

The man with the accent locked eyes with me for a moment, seeing what must have been abject panic on my face. He then turned to the little rolling table where the cannister had been and, seeing that it was just as absent as Alexei, his face contorted from confusion to terror. "Oh God," he muttered. "Where is Dr. Rostoff?" he asked the room, but no one responded.

And that was when I heard a sound that was so familiar to me I almost didn't think anything of it at first. It took my brain several seconds to latch onto an understanding that, yes, I really was hearing the thumping, chugging cacophony of a train approaching—the squeal of the brakes, the vibration of the floor as the massive behemoth approached, the swoosh of the releasing steam.

But how could a train be here? We were over a mile from the station.

I ran through the room then, hoping that people would be too distracted to have the presence of mind to stop me. I ran right past all those befuddled men in their lab coats, past the white-haired man with the thick accent, and through the door from which Alexei had escaped.

It led to the base of a small flight of concrete stairs, revealing that we were roughly ten feet below ground level. Blinded temporarily by the harsh daylight as I ran up two steps at a time, I froze in shock once my eyes landed on the sight before me.

The train track had been rerouted so that it ran directly behind the fort. One glance at the train spelled out the reason: it was only five cars long, and the middle three were all empty barrel-shaped hopper cars. Perfect for hauling in large quantities of raw uranium. Meanwhile, the last car, the one right in front of my face, was shaped like a silver bullet, encased in what appeared to be armored steel.

As I stood there gaping at the enormous train just feet from my eyes, the man with the accent caught up with me.

I turned to him in desperation, my palms slick with fear. "I can't explain right now," I began, "but you need to believe me. That man who took the cannister is a traitor. He's a Russian spy. We need to stop him."

To his credit, he didn't take too long to come around to this new information. I suppose it was a conclusion he had already begun to draw as soon as he saw his would-be colleague sneaking off with a cannister of plutonium.

"He must be inside," he said, nodding his head towards the sleek, bullet-shaped car before us. His thick Eastern European accent made the words sound crisp and urgent.

I watched uselessly as the man stepped onto the train car in front of me. I didn't dare follow once I saw the guard stationed at the door. There was no way he would let me on.

From where I was standing, though, I could see that the inside looked eerily like a stripped-down submarine. For a moment, my mind reeled with memories of the train between dimensions where my brother Robbie had been trapped for almost four years—a train that was devoid of any discernible humanity, floating endlessly into the black hole of time and space.

But this was not the same train. This one was quite real, as was the guard who stopped the scientist in front of me before he could fully step aboard.

"Sorry, Dr. Kleiner, but Dr. Rostoff has given strict orders. No one else is to board today."

"Daniel, you don't understand—" the man in the lab coat, Dr. Kleiner, began to protest.

"It's only for today," Daniel continued, his hands raised slightly in a definitive but gentle gesture. These two clearly had met before, apparently under less stressful circumstances.

My eyes darted left and right, my feet locked in place, as I half listened to their conversation. Dr. Kleiner continued to try to sway Daniel to let him on, but Daniel clearly had strict orders. Encouraged by the distraction the scientist was providing, I willed my feet a few inches to the left, down towards the front car of the train.

No one was watching me, I realized as I continued to shuffle down the length of the train cars. I was never going to be allowed onto the bullet car, but maybe there was another way.

And that's when the chugging started up again.

A quick glance to my left toward the first car at the head of the train revealed a chimney. The train was steam-driven, meaning that first car was the engine. And the engineers in that room would need to breathe. So there would have to be windows.

I doubled my speed, plodding towards that first car, but the train was starting to lurch away from me. Soon it would be going too fast to jump aboard. I let go of all thought and threw myself forward. I hadn't quite made it to the engine yet, so I had to settle for the first of the hopper cars. It had a slight shelf at the base, barely big enough for my feet to land on. My fingers grasped onto anything they could find—namely the molding that ran horizontally across the barrel of the car.

I was mere inches from the front of the car. If I could just slide the rest of the way, I'd be able to leap for the engine. But the shaking and rumbling of the train made that a very precarious proposition. At least we were pulling away from X10 and there didn't seem to be any prying eyes on my back.

Now the train was really starting to go. The wind whipped against my face, thrashing my hair loose of the bandana and into my eyes. Terrified of letting go of the quarter inch of metal that was keeping me upright, I could only shake my head in fast circles to try to get the hair away.

The train reached full speed within minutes, and I knew it was too late to jump. We were pulling away from the complex of buildings that formed the fort now, heading through a patch of trees. In a few minutes, we would probably be in town.

Would the train stop at the station? If not, it might be miles before it did.

What the hell had I done this time?

My fingers began to sweat, but I took deep breaths and willed them not to cramp up—not to let me fall. Looking towards the front of the train, I flinched for a moment at a slight movement before me.

Then I saw it again. It was a human hand, sticking out of the front of the engine car and flicking ash off a cigarette. That was it, I realized with a gush of relief—the window. I was right about the steam room. That was the way in.

Gathering all my courage, I slid my left fingers a quarter inch to the side, willing my right fingers to follow suit.

You can do this, Marina, I chanted to myself softly. You have to do this.

Left fingers, then right. Then the feet. Just a quarter inch more. Fingers. Feet. Breathe.

Fingers. Feet. Breathe.

And then a mighty leap of faith, my fingers grasping across the chasm between the hopper car and the engine, and I found a firm handhold to clutch. With all my might, I pulled myself the few inches between the two cars, and I was officially clinging to the outside of the engine, just inches from the window.

We were in the shadow of the trees still, and the flickering spasms of light that managed to hit the train were playing tricks on my eyes, messing with my depth perception. I reached a bit too far with the left hand and almost slipped, gripping the metal again so tightly I could feel three fingernails bend in on themselves.

But I knew I could breathe now. Because I had reached the window.

Grasping onto the window frame with a mighty effort, I yanked my whole body towards the comforting warm air inside. I didn't have time to register the shocked eyes of the man who turned in my direction.

"Holy—" he muttered.

"Help," I gasped, and before I knew it, he had grabbed my arm, high up by the shoulder, and was all but picking me up in his thick hulking hands and lifting me into the car.

Once fully inside, my body collapsed to the floor with relief. That was the craziest thing I've ever done, I thought with a self-chastising grunt. My fingers were still shaking with tension, my knees clutched up to my chest.

The man who had saved me took one last drag of the cigarette before flinging it out the window. "You better have a good story, kid."

"I do," I stuttered, still collecting my breath.

"Well?"

I swallowed hard, looking up into two crinkled deep brown eyes. His skin and hair were so covered in soot from the coal that I couldn't tell if he was thirty or seventy, but he was a large man, both in height and girth. He looked like he could bench press the train if he wanted to.

"There's a man on this train named Alexei Rostoff. He's a Russian spy and he's stolen something very important from the fort. We need to find him and stop him, before he gives it to the Russians."

Those two deeply cave-like eyes squinted down at me for a moment, then burst open with what I assume was amusement as a snort of disbelief escaped his bark-like lips.

"I'm serious."

"You're getting off at the next station."

"It's a cannister of plutonium. Enough to build a bomb."

"Look, I don't know anything about all that..." the man protested, already shutting me down.

"It's not just a bomb, it's—it's the biggest bomb in the world. You have to believe me."

He took out another cigarette and covered his hand with his map-sized palm to light it. His eyes traveled out the window for a moment, one hand returning to an enormous metal clutch that I assumed was some sort of brake.

"There's a war on, sweetheart. Lots of bombs."

"Not like this one."

He considered my words for a moment, the cigarette dwarfed by the sheer size of his weathered face as it dangled from his mouth. "What do you mean?" he finally asked.

"This one could blow up a city the size of Chicago."

The cigarette dangled limply for a moment, then plummeted to the ground. Coming back to reality, the man looked down at the floor where the burning embers were touching the wooden plank by his feet.

Then he furiously stamped it out with a reverberating thump. 

****

Tune in next Friday to see how this goes down, folks. And THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH for reading. YesterWorld has over 33,000 views with eight chapters to go! XO- Rebecca