The statue of Stalin was coated in bronze. Sitting on a rearing horse with a flowing mane that just grazed the muscular leg of its rider, the figure towered over the stone base designed to hold it. And in the dull light of this cloudy day, it reflected a distorted golden version of Adam's and my faces back at us, our expressions unreadable in the dark metal.

"A fearless leader, boldly guiding the people into the future," I read the plaque out loud.

Adam said nothing in response, but simply turned away. "Sage's house is over by the old grounds."

"Okay."

We started walking in silence, taking in the streets and the people of our town as we went. It was nineteen ninety-nine, and the twenty years we had shaved off history showed itself in subtle ways.

Gone were some of the fashions I had been expecting to see based on Mom's photo album and reruns of old TV shows: black chokers, slips worn as dresses, and overplucked eyebrows. Fashion was as malleable as politics, I guessed, and the cultural influences that had inspired those looks were apparently absent in this version of history.

We had come back to a month in the dead of winter, and the thick coats and fur hats many people sported seemed instead to be inspired by Russian styles. The barefoot children were mostly absent as well, and in fact, the whole town seemed somehow less bleak than it had in the present-day we had just left.

Maybe it was the thin layer of snow dusting the sidewalks, or the dove singing on the bare branch of a newly planted tree that produced the effect. There was a promise in the air of this place that was nowhere to be found on the other side of those twenty years.

I shivered a bit with no protection from the chill. "If we have any of Sage's money left, we should buy some coats."

"Agreed. We'll find a store in town."

I inhaled a sharp gust of cold air, and my teeth began to chatter.

"Almost there," Adam assured, putting his arm around me and rubbing my shoulder.

"Okay."

It was awkward walking like that, and after a moment, he pulled his arm away again and we both put our hands in our pockets and continued on a few inches apart.

I realized that I needed to be careful. Down World can make people feel close to each other, like co-conspirators in a crime. It had happened with Brady too.

But Adam wasn't Brady.

After a while, we reached the old grounds, which existed now not as the shiny amusement park they would become after the Russians renovated them, nor as the gas station and fast-food restaurants they had been in my reality. Instead, they were somewhere in between: rusted and abandoned structures, vaguely meant to emulate a Nordic village, but sadly neglected by time and covered in a blanket of dirty snow.

Adam nodded to the neighborhood across the street, and we walked one more block to a small, simple house painted a dull white with two spiny, bare bushes plopped haphazardly on either side of the front door. Only a windchime of little moons and stars jangling into a shooting comet indicated that, somewhere inside this house, a woman of great spirit still lived.

We stomped out our feet on the cement stoop, leaving traction-shaped clumps of caked-on snow behind. Adam cleared his throat, and I offered him an encouraging smile.

"Lose the FitBit."

"Right," I stammered, loosening the band and shoving it in my pocket.

Adam knocked on the door, but his hand froze before he could lower it. "Oh," he remembered, "and hide the ring."

I looked down at Sage's ring on my frozen finger and pried it off just as the door was opening, wedging it into the tight inner pocket of my jeans. I looked up when I heard Adam gasp.

Jenny was standing in front of us, a smile on her welcoming face, arms crossed over her ample chest to protect herself from the chill. "Can I help you?" she asked.

And although she clearly didn't know who Adam was, his face still exploded in happiness at the sight of her.

*

We sat around the small living room—Adam, me, and Sage's mom, who insisted that we call her Cherie—balancing little cups of hot cocoa in our laps.

"It's pronounced Sherry," she told me in a warm honey voice when I accidentally used the French pronunciation. "Now what did you say you were looking for again?"

"I'm doing research for a paper," I improvised, glancing quickly over at Adam to see if he wanted to add anything, but he was distracted by the chatter from the other room. Sage and Jenny were in the den, watching TV and laughing over something I couldn't hear. "It's an essay on the history of the town."

"I see."

"I heard you were the one to talk to."

Cherie turned to Adam. "Now you're a little old to be writing a paper?"

Adam came back to the conversation, flustered as he hadn't been listening.

"This is my history teacher," I covered for him. "Mr. Martel."

Cherie put her cup and saucer down. "That's nice. None of my teachers ever came with me to do research."

Adam cleared his throat, turning on the charm that always made his eyes glint, and that could make certain women not ask too many questions. "Your mother worked at the facility?" Adam stated more than asked. "At the base?"

"And how did you know that?"

"Public records," he smiled. "I'd love to hear more about it."

I couldn't tell from the slight smile on Cherie's face if she was believing all of this or not, but she certainly didn't seem to mind the attention. There was no evidence of a man in the house—only women's coats on the rack; only Cherie and Sage in the pictures on the mantle. I had noticed Cherie quickly removing a bandana from her head and combing her hair with her fingers when we walked in. It's strange what women will say when a handsome man is asking the questions.

"My family were Russian Jews. They came here in the twenties, speaking only Yiddish, desperate to escape the ghettos they'd been living in. They were given a new name, one that was supposed to sound American: Wexler. My mother, Golda, was the first person in my family to learn to read and write. She was eighteen when she started working at the facility, and she had no idea what it was she was working on. They had her monitoring these little knobs and gauges, trying to keep them within a certain range. She didn't learn until years later what they were for."

"What were they for?" I asked, swallowing hard as I anticipated the answer.

"Monitoring the enrichment of uranium. We were working on our own atom bomb. They had brought in hundreds of young women who were working day and night, with no idea what they were working on—no idea that when those little gauges started spinning, it was because the uranium was reaching high levels."

I nodded, imagining the room as she described it, and remembering from an old physics class how the uranium was probably shot through a racetrack-shaped series of tubes, magnetized to separate the useless isotopes of the element from the rarer ones that could power a sustained nuclear reaction.

"And we were close to finishing the bomb, really close," Cherie continued. "But then..." she looked around, into the high-up corners of her living room, then down at the lamps. It was as though she suddenly remembered that someone might be listening, and she corrected her posture and placed her hands on her lap. "Thankfully," she continued, "the Russians beat us to it. The day they announced they had the bomb, the government shut down the facility and sent all the women home."

"When was that?"

"July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five. Although I'm sure you know that part. 'The date of our great salvation' and all that."

I remembered what Adam had told me on the street: the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August of that year. So the Russians had had the bomb for at least a month by that point.

Whatever Jenny did, she did it before July of nineteen forty-five.

Adam was momentarily distracted by a fresh wave of laughter from the den, but then turned back to Cherie. "What happened to your mother after that?"

"She did what all the girls did, I guess. Married the first soldier that stepped off the bus after the Russians dropped the bomb. My sister was born a year later, then three boys—two who lived—and finally me. I always joked that my family came all this way to get away from the Russians, and then they followed them here."

I smiled along with her. Adam had been right—this woman was very nice, but maybe a little too trusting.

"Mom," came a familiar voice from the archway connecting the two rooms. "We're gonna go out," Sage said, nodding over her head to Jenny, who was waving her fingers by her head in an effort to dry what appeared to be fresh red nail polish.

"That's fine, Sage."

"Can I have the car?"

"I need it for work." Cherie smiled at us, embarrassed by the interruption.

"Why do you need to work? They're not even in town."

"Because they'll be back in a few days and the colonel wants his house dusted."

"Maybe we could do it," offered Jenny between breaths on her nails. "We don't mind cleaning."

I couldn't help but notice Adam turn away and smile at that. Was it some private joke between him and the other Jenny—the one he had known?

"Yeah, you work too hard, Mom," Sage seconded, seeming to get excited about the idea.

Cherie seemed to be considering it, but obviously knew better than to think this was some altruistic offer. "Not after last time."

"I swear, we'll just clean this time," Sage insisted.

"If one beer bottle is missing from that house, Sage..."

"It won't be, I promise."

Adam seemed to sense an opportunity here, and he stood up, doing his best impression of the responsible adult. "Maybe I could help?" he offered. "What exactly are we doing?"

"We're gonna go clean a house," Jenny smiled, a bit too enthusiastically. "You guys could come out with us after," she offered, looking at me but clearly meaning Adam.

"Yeah," Sage agreed, smiling maliciously at her friend, "you could meet Jenny's boyfriend Dave after."

"Shut up," Jenny whispered, but Sage just laughed.

"We'd be happy to help," Adam agreed, gesturing to me that it was time to go.

"Thank you," I said to Cherie, placing my hot cocoa back on the table. Once she had walked over to the girls, I leaned in to Adam. "What are you doing?" I whispered.

"We need more info," he whispered back. "Something specific. Maybe the girls know more."

I gave him a warning look, not wanting to push it since everything we'd told them so far was a lie. But he wasn't interested in my hesitation, pulling me up by the arm and leading me to the door.

We started to walk out with the girls, who grabbed their boots and coats, pulling each other's hair out of the way of their scarves almost like sisters. I had never realized that Sage and Jenny were so close. I always thought my mom was the glue that held all their friendships together. But maybe things were different in this plane.

It was the small things that tended to change from one reality to another.

"Hey, are you Mexican?" Sage asked me, a warm energy radiating off of her.

"Half. Why?"

"Mmm. You look like a friend of ours."

"She does, doesn't she?" Jenny whispered to her.

Adam stiffened by my side, eager to change the subject. "Where is the house?" he asked, following Jenny out the door a bit too eagerly.

"Oh, it's wicked, you'll love it," Jenny said, smiling at Adam a beat longer than necessary. "It's got like a million rooms."

"And the best part," Sage added, "it's shaped just like a pyramid."

****

So you guys excited to see the Pyramid house again?? LOVE to hear your thoughts on these chapters! XO- Rebecca