Stay safe out there, friends. Thinking of everyone who reads this and sending you love!

XO- Rebecca

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"When Rain comes home and sees that these are missing," Sage said as she climbed out of my mother's bedroom window, two Russian uniforms draped over her arm, "she'll go ballistic."

"We'll have them back before she gets home," I lied, taking Sage's hand to help her climb out while Adam reached for the uniforms.

After discovering Jenny's portrait on the pharmacy wall, Adam and I had realized that the picture itself could be the token to take us to her. He had carefully chipped off a bit of the painted brick and handed it to me. Now we just needed a way down to the portals. And that meant getting past the guards at the school.

"There's another problem anyway," Sage added now that she was back on her feet, straightening her crumpled pants. She held up the two military IDs she had taken from my mother's drawer. My mother's photograph looked enough like me that I could pass for her. I wasn't the problem.

The problem was Adam.

I held up John's fake ID next to Adam's face and it was immediately obvious that they weren't the same person. Everything from their coloring to their jawline was different. Adam looked at the picture and frowned.

"We could cut the photo out of the ID Ado made," I suggested.

"It won't look the same."

"Close enough, though?"

Adam shrugged, digging out the paperwork Ado had prepared from his pocket and comparing it to the Russian ID. "It'll have to be."

While Adam got to work peeling back the plastic cover of his old ID to remove his photograph, Sage pulled me aside. Her face had turned down and she seemed to be balancing too many thoughts in her head.

"What is it?" I asked softly.

"Are you sure about this? Once you go down..."

I stiffened as a military car drove by slowly on the road by my mother's house—very slowly. The two men inside were looking around the neighborhood, their jaws stiff under their caps, just to see if there was anyone they could mess with. They slowed to a crawl when they saw the three of us standing on the lawn by the side of the house.

Sage waved to them with a sarcastic smile on her face.

One of the men clenched his already stoic face and then the two of them drove on.

"If you look right at them, they figure you have nothing to hide," she advised.

"Good to know."

Sage looked aimlessly around the street, her body slumping with a weariness that I knew would eventually overtake her in this world. Even at seventeen, life was taking its toll on her. Some people, I figured, never really get a chance to be young.

"Once you go down, you were saying?"

"Yeah," she nodded, looking back to me with a resigned smile. "Once you get a taste, you just want more and more. The best thing to do is never start."

"I understand. But we don't have a choice."

"Everybody has a choice," she countered. "But it seems like you've already made yours."

I glanced over at Adam, who nodded to me that the photograph was fitting in well enough. Then I turned back to Sage, giving her a warm hug. "Thank you, Sage. For everything."

*

I rubbed my thumb somewhat neurotically over the rough nugget of brick that Adam and I had chipped off of Jenny's painting—a bit with a swirl of golden hair—which I now kept in my uniform pants pocket.

We were standing on the edge of the woods by the school, exactly where we had been the night before, and Adam was finishing up digging the dirt back over the hole in the ground where we had buried our backpacks. I twirled Sage's grandmother's ring, which was back on my right ring finger now, and took a deep, steadying breath. Adam laughed when he noticed me.

"What?"

"This cap is too big on you," he said, trying to straighten it, but it kept sliding back down. "Hold your head up."

I did, which left me staring right up into his eyes. He cleared his throat, taking his hands away.

"How's mine?" he asked, jutting out his chin a bit under his own red cap.

"You look perfect," I smiled, admiring how Adam's broad shoulders stretched the thin fabric of the uniform a bit too taut. He seemed to enjoy the compliment.

"Hey, we got this, right?" he said, a shade of worry overtaking his face.

"Yeah, of course. Just look like you know what you're doing, and you're in a huge hurry, and you're really important. That's what Sage said."

"So be myself?" he joked.

"Exactly."

And with stiffened backs and heads held high, we marched past the high school entrance, around the side of the building, and into the fort.

Following Adam's lead, I flashed my ID badge with confidence at the guards who stood sentinel at every turn and entryway. They were mostly kids, as my mother had said they would be, somewhere between my age and Adam's. Their eyes ranged from bored to vacant, with the occasional peppering of cruel. Being handed a gun in a holster and the instructions to stand still for hours on end tends to bring out one of those two dispositions in people.

Frankly, I was more afraid of the bored ones than the cruel ones. Idle hands and all that.

We had never gone to the portals this way, of course, but my intrinsic knowledge of the layout of the building, of the placement of those portals and the curve of the decades-old hallways, gave me a second sense of where to go. Adam seemed to have it too, because every time we reached a fork in the road, we both seemed to turn, acting completely on instinct, in the same direction.

Finally we reached a hallway that, despite the erasure of two decades, looked almost the same as it had the night—or two nights, rather—that I had walked down it with my brother and my friends, heading for Yesterday.

"This is right," I whispered to Adam, and the slight "Mm" he gave in response made it all feel real suddenly.

I had taken a lot of risks in the portals before. I'd gone into other dimensions and other times. I'd survived the interdimensional train that showed me glimpses of a thousand other lives led by a million other people, all blissfully ignorant of each other's existences.

But this would be the furthest I'd ever gone.

The moment the portals were built.

What would it look like? This was the very facility where the first fission reactor went critical—the splitting nucleus of one atom smashing into the neighboring atoms, and splitting them in turn, creating a chain reaction. Somewhere else on these grounds the enriched uranium itself had been produced. That was where Cherie's mother had worked, monitoring the gauges. Would I be able to get back onto the grounds, see that lab? Watch those scientists at work?

The greatest physics lesson in history was on the other side of the door I was about to cross. The most significant scientific breakthrough of all time. The most brilliant minds. I had never been so excited. I rubbed my sweating palms on my pants.

Adam and I flashed our IDs one more time to the guards at the end of the hallway that led to the science lab, and one of them—a young man with acne on his chin—actually yawned as he looked it.

No wonder it had been so easy for John and my mother to sneak in the other night. It made sense to me, though. People only balk at the unusual. That was one thing I'd learned in my travels. As long as things seemed normal, felt right, you could get away with murder. And everything can be normalized in the end.

We made it to the science lab, locking the door behind us. I couldn't help but laugh. It looked exactly the same.

"Has this place ever changed?" I asked.

But that's when I noticed that Adam looked a bit green.

"Are you all right?"

He sighed. "We're going back far, Marina. I've never gone this far."

"Me neither."

"It's a risk. The portals won't even be there yet. We'll have to wait for them to be built... before we can come back."

Some footsteps in the hallway were followed by an older man's booming voice, asking a series of questions. A squeaky voice, which I could only assume belonged to the kid with the acne, came willowing back, uncertain in tone. And then the man's footsteps grew closer.

"We don't have time for this, Adam. What are you saying?"

His eyes searched mine for a moment, an affection tinged with sadness. He reached into his pocket and held out a flattened penny, offering it to me. "I want you to go into Today."

"No."

"Your father will be worried about you."

"He won't. We'll go back together... when we're done."

"I'm worried about you. It's too risky."

"You need me, Adam. I need to get into this lab and see how exactly these portals were built—what it is that Jenny did that gave all the power to the Russians."

"I can get into the lab myself."

"What do you know about physics?" I teased, but he only looked angry in response.

A rustling of the doorknob told us that our new friend was close. The man outside could be heard muttering to himself as his keys began to jangle.

Adam grabbed my hand and we ran together down that spiral staircase. We had only moments to decide. Not letting go of my hand, Adam pressed the penny into it, his eyes imploring. We were standing in front of Today.

But with my other hand, I brought out that piece of brick with Jenny's yellow hair on it instead. I folded it gently into his palm and led him a few steps away, to the Yesterday door.

"You told me to trust you once," I reminded him. "Trust me now. We'll go home when we've finished this."

Footsteps passed overhead, heavy and stiff. It was now or never, but Adam's face had not relaxed.

I reached to put the flattened coin into the slot of Yesterday, but Adam stopped my hand in midair before it could get there. He took a step closer then and slid my cap off of my head, peering down at me, our faces almost close enough to touch. My heart was racing as I got lost in the bottomless well of his green eyes.

Was he right? Could he have continued without me?

Was I just not ready to leave him yet?

All these thoughts would have to find some other refuge, because the heavy soles of officious feet were clomping down the spiral stairs, and holding tight to Adam's hand, I inserted the penny into the slot and all but pulled him with me into the past.

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Keep reading for chapter 34!