FYI: I realize Ado and Adam are really similar names. When I introduced their characters in the last book, I didn't realize they'd have any scenes together! Sorry about that. Might change Ado's name in future drafts!

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Eventually Ado came charging out of the bathroom, his face impassive once again, as though nothing had happened. He scanned the room to find me sitting stiffly in my chair and Adam passed out on Sage's bed. I raised my index finger to my lips to let him know he should be quiet and let him sleep. After all, Adam had been up all night waiting for his chance to steal the portal solution.

Ado raised his middle finger to me in response. Then he marched up the stairs and slammed the door closed behind him.

Adam stirred slightly, but didn't wake.

I got up to explore the cold, barren room. It really was depressing to think that Sage had been living down here. The walls were just gray plaster, no pictures or decorations of any kind. A metal bookshelf against one wall was half empty.

I couldn't help but think of the other Sage's apartment, the airy, chic top floor of the hotel she lived in with John. The one with the fire-engine-red bathroom and the flowing curtains over the majestically tall windows. The one that had haunted my memories as a child, knowing it was a place I needed to get to someday, but not remembering where I had seen it.

That was the real Sage. A bright, lively woman in a flowing white dress, beads on her wrists, a musky perfume, a ready smile.

How could the same human being live two such disparate lives? How could life—even a sad and oppressive life like this—kill the spark in someone who had been so very alive?

And this led me to another thought, one that made me hold my breath: Were we all just one fateful moment away from losing everything that defined us?

My eyes fell on Sage's half-empty bookshelf, a very familiar looking spine suddenly catching my eye. I did a bit of a double take, trying to make sense of why my mother's photo album was on Sage's shelf. It wasn't until I picked it up and looked at the well-worn cover, with unfamiliar markings and stickers all over it, that I realized it wasn't the same exact one; Sage and my mom must've gotten identical albums together.

They were good friends in high school, so this wasn't really surprising. I wondered if the albums were bought to commemorate their graduation, or just on a whim one day, maybe down at Graussman's Pharmacy after school. I liked to think of them like that, young and innocent.

For the second time in a day, I flipped through an old photo album, expecting to see familiar and comforting images.

And for the second time in a day, what I saw instead made me shiver down to my bones. A sensation oddly like brain freeze grasped hold of my frontal lobe for a second; a kind of cognitive dissonance. Because there was something very disturbing about this album too.

But this time, it wasn't because the pictures were of the wrong people.

They were the right people: Mom, Sage, John; their friends Jenny and Dave kissing; a photo taken in what looked like a friend's basement, Mom and John smiling together on the couch, and George sitting several inches away with a forced look of happiness creaking across his face. In fact, some of these pictures seemed to be taken on the very same day as the ones in Mom's album. Various outfits, a bright yellow hair scrunchie, and even a glimpse of a red plaid backpack all harkened back to very similar photos I'd seen before.

It was the backgrounds that were wrong.

They weren't taken at East Township, as they had been in Mom's album. Instead, they were at a very sterile-looking school with all gray walls. Flipping madly through the pages, I found one of Jenny and Dave smiling in front of the school's entrance, a sign above the portico welcoming new students to "Good Citizen Academy." And the words were repeated underneath in Russian.

I went back and frantically reviewed each and every picture. They were all like that. A movie theater with the film titles written in both languages. A guard in a red military uniform could be seen behind John in that one. A picture of Mom, sunlight streaming through her hair as she sat in a windowsill, reading a book with a Russian title.

I was so rapt in the photographs, I didn't immediately notice that Adam had woken up and was standing behind me, looking at the book over my shoulder. I was about to turn a page when his hand shot out, slapping down on a photo of Jenny in a plain gray schoolgirl's uniform.

The slapping sound make me jump with shock, and I turned to look at Adam over my shoulder. His eyes were glued to the photo, however. And then he looked at me.

"Do you still have the photos from my mother's album?" I asked.

He blinked a couple times while his ears caught up with his brain. "Yes," he stuttered, producing a waterlogged stack of pictures from his back pocket. They were a bit stuck together from being wet, but he managed to slowly peel them apart, one by one. He was holding them all awkwardly in his trembling hands.

"Over here," I said, indicating the table where I had gotten my scars. I laid the album I was holding at the top of the table, and Adam began spreading the photos from his pocket out in rows beneath it.

We both took a moment to scan the evidence before us, comparing and contrasting the two similar but eerily different realities that were coming into focus before our eyes.

"There," I said, pointing with my finger to the one photo I had remembered—the one where Jenny had been wearing that bright yellow scrunchie in a makeshift bun at the top of her head. Then I traced that finger up to the same exact photo from Sage's album, this time with Jenny standing in front of the Good Citizen Academy.

Adam had to back away, swallowing hard as he thought the pictures through.

"You said you suspected Jenny went back in time, did something to create this dimension?"

"Yes."

"And you looked for her everywhere?"

"I did. I tried the Today door, the Yesterday door..."

"But you were working your way back from our reality," I explained, pointing to the damp pictures he had procured from his pocket. "You were never going to find her there."

My outstretched finger slowly eked its way up to the top of the table, towards Sage's album. "You were on the wrong timeline, Adam. You needed to work backwards from here."

Adam nodded as his eyes flitted back and forth between the two sets of images, finally landing where my finger was pointing, on that picture of Jenny in the gray schoolgirl uniform.

"If we take the Yesterday door back from here," I continued, keeping my eyes peeled on Sage's book, "it will keep us in the same timeline as her. And once we find her—"

"We?"

"Yes, we."

But Adam bowed his head. "Marina, I can't let you—"

"I'm not going home yet, Adam. You heard what I said upstairs."

He shook his head, wrestling with some quiet struggle. But I had already made up my mind. The truth was, I wasn't just staying because I felt guilty. I had seen firsthand what happened when the evils of Down World were swept under the rug. I had already watched once as this dark and ugly reality found a way to slip through the cracks between dimensions and permeate my own.

Darkness finds a way. If I had learned nothing else about the portals, it was that. Darkness never lays idle for long. Ignore it at your own risk.

No, this whole world needed to be destroyed, for good this time. It's what I thought I had accomplished the first time I went through Yesterday, when I buried that beaker in the sand. But now I knew better: this world wasn't created when the lake portal was built; it was created by Jenny, who must have altered something far in the past. I didn't know when, exactly, but it was apparently prior to nineteen ninety-nine, when Sage's pictures were taken.

I didn't need to explain to Adam what we needed to do: find the exact moment Jenny had created it, and stop her.

Just then, the door to the basement shot open, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Adam pushed me back, turning to face our visitors, only to find that it was just Sage, wearily clomping down the cold tiled stairwell.

"Sage," I asked as she made it to the ground, stepping out from behind Adam, "can you tell us something?"

Sage's disapproving eyes fell with a sad resolve onto her photo album on the table. Meanwhile Adam, perhaps realizing that the damper set of pictures would be more than she could handle, started frantically gathering them up and shoving them back in his pocket.

"What do you want to know?" she asked in a smoky, tired voice, heading for her little cot to sit down.

"How long have the Russians been here? I mean, when did they first come?"

Sage looked at me like I had asked her why the sky was blue. She didn't seem interested in humoring me, and for a moment I wondered if she would even answer. But then she sighed and laughed to herself. "How nice it must be," she muttered, "to be an Otherlander."

My pride was a bit hurt at that, but Adam stepped forward to take up the baton.

"Can you just tell us, please?" he asked.

"The Russians came in the mid forties, after World War II was over. At first it was just to help us out, bring some industry. Everyone was glad to have them. After all, they were the most powerful country in the world, and we were one of the weakest. It made sense to let them in. Or so the history books tell us."

"And then?" I asked, my voice wavering with fear.

"And then they weren't so helpful anymore."

Next to me, Adam's body betrayed no obvious reaction to what Sage was saying. But as he was standing so close, I could hear his unstable breath seeping out of his throat.

"If you think about it," Sage said, nodding to herself in a resigned kind of shrug, "America was really over the minute those Russians dropped that atom bomb on Hiroshima."

Adam's hand instinctively thrust out to grab mine, but I was so numb with shock I couldn't even feel how tightly he was squeezing until, looking down, I watched in horror as my compressed fingers turned a blazing shade of red.

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Thoughts on the twist? Love you all for reading!