Last two chapters of Part 2! Love to hear your thoughts.

*****

"Well, come on then," John called to me when he saw me hanging back in the car. "This is what you came for, right?"

Adam had already gotten out, walking towards the center of the abandoned structures next to Sage and Jenny. I struggled to make out the outline of what the place had looked like when I'd been here last. The funhouse where Sage and John had been drinking their coffee was now just a shack with a bunch of cracked mirrors nailed to the surface, reflecting pops of color as we all gathered in front of it.

Nothing else was recognizable at all. Half the small buildings were missing parts of their roofs; inside a nearby shack, I could make out the corner of soiled mattress. Graffiti on the wall was full of sloppily written expletives naming some of the activities that had happened on that mattress.

My stomach turned looking at it, a feeling overwhelming me that, just by being here, I was somehow complicit in something sleazy and immoral.

The group of friends had gathered in a circle, right in the middle of the clearing that formed the center of these ramshackle buildings. They all took hands, and I looked to Adam for some clue as to how I was supposed to behave.

"If you're here, then be here," my mother suddenly demanded. "You came all this way..."

"Rain," Sage admonished her.

"What? Let's be honest, shall we?" She turned to me, her cold eyes bearing only the slightest resemblance to the ones I had once loved more than anything. When had she last been a real mother to me? When had I last seen love in those eyes?

You are my warrior.

"You came here to see what it's like, right?" she teased, her gaze unrelenting. "Everybody wants to know what it's like. So come have a taste."

"I told you," I protested weakly, "I'm just writing a paper."

John laughed to himself, and the girls all followed suit. Even George sighed, tired of all the pretense. "You think you're the first ones to try this?" John demanded. "Kids show up here all the time. They come in on the train or they hitchhike. They heard a rumor somewhere. Someone in their school had a story. Although I will say," he laughed, looking at Adam, "this is the first time I've ever heard the 'he's my teacher' line. You like 'em young, huh, dude?"

Adam clenched his jaw, and I could see the fire burning in his eyes. If John said one more thing, this whole experiment could explode before we learned anything useful.

"You're right," I blurted out, trying to diffuse the tension. "You caught us. Sorry. Didn't mean to lie. We were just curious. Weren't we, Adam?"

His mouth twitched with a passing burst of anger, but then he looked at me and I smiled, trying to get his eyes to soften. After a moment they did, and he nodded to me with a kind of apologetic shrug.

"We shouldn't have lied," Adam picked up where I left off, "she's not writing a paper. We came to learn what you know. We won't tell anyone."

"Damn right you won't," John countered.

"Can we get started?" Jenny asked no one in particular. "It's cold and I want to get there."

Sage cleared her throat, and everybody took hands. She waited a moment for Adam and I to catch up. I entered the circle and held George's hand on my left, Jenny's on my right.

"We bless our journey," Sage began, her head lowered and her voice solemn. "That we may be safe on the other side, that we may become enlightened in our travels... and that we aren't caught."

"So say us all," everyone said in unison, except Adam and myself.

"All right," my mother broke away from the group. "The clothes are in the car. I'll get them."

"Whose turn is it?" Jenny asked.

"Mine," she called back as she walked to the car, "and John's."

"It was your turn last time!"

"We didn't get to finish," John answered for my mother as she crawled into the back of John's truck, retrieving something.

"How is that fair?" Jenny asked. "Dave, say something."

"What do want me to say?" Dave asked.

"I don't know, maybe grow a pair and stand up for us."

A chorus of "ooohs" escaped the others' throats as my mother came back with what appeared to be two Russian guard uniforms dangling from hangers, complete with crisp little caps.

"Don't worry, Jugs, I'll take you down next time," John teased, grabbing the jacket that my mother tossed him and swapping it out for his winter coat.

Jenny looked to Dave for support, but he had tuned her out again, rubbing his chilled hands and talking with George.

"Why do you need the uniforms?" I asked my mother, feeling braver now that they had already shown us so much.

She was stepping into the guard's pants over her leggings, and she looked up to smile at me. "Aren't you the curious one?"

"How do you think we get in?" John asked. "It's a military fort."

"Through the high school?" I asked, feeling that somehow they were all just laughing at me, that this was part of the fun for them—stringing us along as some sort of twisted game. Like any drug, you can get numb to the portals after a while. So the stakes must always be raised.

"Come on," my mother offered, "we'll show you."

We piled back into the cars and drove to a place just a few minutes from the school, then pulled over to the side of the road. When we all got out, my mother and John had completed their transformation into young Russian guards. With her hair pulled tightly back under the cap and the jacket buttoned to her neck, she looked eerily like the adult version of herself who ruled over this world, twenty years in the future.

The drawing wasn't completed, but the outline was there.

"We go in two at a time," my mother informed me as I stood, cold and obviously confused, at the lip of the woods near the Good Citizen Academy. "The school part is guarded at night, but the fort has deliveries at all hours. Most of the soldiers are about our age anyway. You just need the right paperwork."

"Why keep the fort connected to the school at all?" I wondered out loud. "You'd think they'd just build a new school somewhere."

"Are you kidding?" my mother asked, condescension dripping from her voice. "This is the perfect arrangement for them. The Russians ship their new curriculums directly to the fort. With the buildings connected, it's a one-stop shop to filter their propaganda into the school. We're sitting ducks in there, waiting to be spoon-fed whatever they're serving."

John came up and took my mother's hand, tugging her along. "Rain, let's do it."

"Now that's all you're gonna see tonight," my mother smiled, tipping her cap in my direction. "Hope you had enough of a thrill."

"I still say it's our turn," Jenny protested.

But John just laughed at her, and for some reason—maybe because he knew he could get the reaction he craved there—he turned to Adam. "It's hot when they're so anxious, isn't it?"

I had to grab Adam's arm to keep him from lunging at John. But that just made John laugh even more as he and my mother walked towards the imposing lights of the fort. He made it a few steps before turning back to face Adam, dying to get one more jab in. "You're a slave up here, my friend. They own you up here. But down there," he nodded over his shoulder to the buildings—and the portals they contained—"down there, we take what we want. Down there I'm a king."

Adam's muscles clenched even tighter under my hand, and it was all I could do to detain him.

"Get yourself home now," John teased before turning and taking my mother's hand. I stood by Adam's side, watching them walk away until they turned the bend.

Adam jerked his arm away from me with a ferocity that made my bones rattle. He paced away a bit, collecting his breath.

Sage turned to me, a softness in her expression. "Sorry about John."

But I could only shake my head, not sure what to say.

Jenny was still irate as well, turning on Dave. "You never defend me!" she shouted. "He says whatever he wants to me and you never do anything about it!"

"Well, what do you want me to say, Jenny?"

"He's basically calling me a whore!"

But Dave just shrugged in response. "Is he wrong?"

"Screw you!" she screamed, hitting his arm.

"No, screw you. I'm outta here." And with that, Dave stormed off, leaving Jenny fuming behind him, breathing heavily and pulling at her hair.

Sage actually yawned at this point, and it was pretty obvious that this was not an atypical way for one of these evenings to end. Then Sage turned to me.

"Listen," she whispered, "do you have a place to stay tonight?"

I looked into her generous face, an urge to lie coming over me. But to what end? "No," I admitted.

She sighed, shaking her head to herself. "Okay," she mumbled, taking out her mother's keys to the pyramid house. "Don't make me regret this."

Adam came back up now, having cooled himself down.

"Just leave it exactly the way you found it, okay? And you have to be out by morning."

"Of course, I promise."

"George?" she turned to her friend. "Will you give them a ride and then bring my car back? Jenny and I are going to walk home."

"Yeah, you got it," he nodded. It occurred to me that he and Sage probably had the purest friendship in the whole group, and I was glad that, at the very least, they remained close well into adulthood. That was why George had let himself be trapped under the lake, after all. To keep an eye on Sage. I had to wonder if I would do the same if a friend needed me.

"Actually," Adam interjected, "you can just take her, George." He nodded towards me, not even saying my name. "I'm gonna walk the girls home."

The look I gave Adam must have revealed how I felt about this arrangement. After all that, he was going to leave me to take Jenny home? What happened to "I want nothing to do with her"?

George looked to Jenny to make sure it was okay with her, but she was already eyeing Adam with a coquettish grin. Before I could protest, Adam had already walked off with Jenny and Sage, his hand on Jenny's back.

I looked to George, who offered me the most pathetic of shrugs. 

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Keep reading for chapter 30!