I'd love to hear your comments on this one!

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The sun was in my face.

Shit. I had slept through the night in the house, and now dawn was finding me alone and stiff miles from home. I swallowed down a bitter taste and rubbed my tongue over my chalky front teeth. Sitting up, the creak in my neck felt like a noose, and I knew I had to shake out my sore back and get myself home before my dad woke up.

Rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I was surprised to feel metal scrape against my cheek. I pulled my hand away and saw what I had forgotten to ask about: my ruby ring.

It was back on my finger. For a second, I tried to remember if Adam had given it to me. But no, he hadn't. Which meant he must have come back in the night and put it on my hand while I slept.

Why would he do that? Maybe he just remembered it on his way home and didn't want to wake me when he saw me sleeping here. I guess that was nice of him.

I rolled my neck a few times, then rubbed my hand over my little ring. It was reassuring to feel it nestled back into its place on my small finger. I could still remember the day my mother had given it to me in the kitchen. How happy she had looked, how young.

Her album was by my feet, and before putting it back in my backpack, I decided to indulge in something I hadn't let myself do in a while: stare at her old pictures, remembering when she had been with me, when she had been happy. Though it was long ago.

It took me a moment after opening up the album, however, to realize that something was very, very wrong. My heartbeat screeched to a halt, then sped up like a bullet train. I forgot to breathe, my suddenly shaky fingers struggling to turn the pages.

It was the pictures. These were the wrong pictures.

They weren't of my mother. They were of me. Picture after picture of me. Me in a diner, a coffee cup on the table. Me on a street with half-built houses. Me with Brady. No shoes on our feet. Wet hair. Me in a school that wasn't a school. Me in a long line to see a nurse in a nineteen-fifties' outfit. Me with Sage. And Caryn. And Ado. In the basement of Sage's diner.

Me in the fancy hotel with the evil version of my mother—the one who had no idea who I was.

They were surveillance photos, in black and white. Taken under the lake. One after another after another, taking the place of where my mother's photos had been.

And the pictures that had been there before—they were all missing. Adam had taken every last one of them while I slept.

I looked around frantically for the thief, but I knew he'd be long gone. I had been asleep for hours. Dead asleep. Drugged? The water bottle from the night before sat by the window, clear as light, half empty.

I shook out my head, trying to make sense of this. There was only one conclusion to draw.

Adam knew.

He knew about the world under the lake the whole time. Was he even looking for Jenny at all, or was that just a ruse to get me to help him? He knew there'd been a portal leading to a world where my mother and John were very powerful, a world where maybe he could be too.

The only thing he didn't know—he couldn't have known—was how to get back in now that the portal was gone.

Until I told him. Pink solution in a beaker.

Oh my God. What had I done?

*

I reached the school in record time, my sides stitching up with the effort and my head pounding from the residual effects of whatever Adam had put into that water bottle. It was probably six-thirty in the morning when I arrived, and I prayed that the custodian had already unlocked the service entrance behind the gym.

When I got there, hopping off my bike and not even bothering to lock it up, I saw that the entrance wasn't just unlocked, it was open. Someone had already been through it—someone too excited to remember to close it.

I worked my way cautiously through the school to the boiler room, just in case Adam was still lurking in the hallways for some reason. Just in case he had his gun.

Please don't let me be too late, I frantically repeated inside my head.

By the time I made it through the boiler room and past the door leading to the twisting and turning abandoned hallways, I was on the verge of exploding with nerves. But my feet moved of their own volition, faster and faster, knowing time was seeping by—time in which he might be escaping.

Reaching the science lab at last, I cautiously turned the knob, anticipating that Adam might be waiting on the other side. I didn't have any kind of weapon, nothing to fight him off with. My mind flitted briefly to the time I had managed to elbow him in the ribs, temporarily deterring him. But he had recovered quickly. He was way too strong for me to beat.

Still, I had to try.

But when I entered the room, Adam was nowhere to be found. Someone had definitely been there, however. A rack of empty glass vials that usually sat on the back countertop had been carelessly knocked over; one of the vials lay in shattered pieces on the floor.

What did he need a vial for?

On the blackboard, a familiar symbol caught my eye. A circle, like a large white sun, being bombarded on all sides by glowing red arrows. The first time I had seen this symbol, I hadn't had the slightest idea what it was. But I did now.

It was a uranium core, being compressed on all sides to create a nuclear chain reaction. This was what Sage had warned me about, that the first experiments with splitting atoms actually happened in our town, in this very lab. This was the nuclear fission that had made the portals appear in the first place.

And this was the lab where my mother had made that mysterious pink solution. All Adam would need was a small sample of it, and he could create any portal he wanted, anywhere in the world. And thanks to me, he now knew when in history to find it.

My head whipped to the green tent that held the spiral staircase. Was I already too late? I flung myself down the stairs, my body whipping around the central post like a ballerina.

I landed with a thud as my eyes spread in horror. The door to Yesterday was still emitting a slight yellow radiation, confirming my initial fear: someone had been through it tonight. But that wasn't the most striking change.

The entire antechamber, which often glowed with a slight purplish aura, was now bathed in fluorescent pink. The source was the door to Today, which burst with a neon-like explosion of color. It hurt my eyes to look at it, and yet it was also intoxicating. My fingers reached out towards that seductive light, which drew me in like a whirlpool.

More shards of broken glass littered the floor, and I heard them crunch beneath my shoes. Adam had smashed the vial against the portal door, and the pink goop he had stolen now oozed its way over the opening, spreading slowly in translucent rivulets to the ground.

My mind was racing to catch up with Adam's logic. If he went into Yesterday to snatch up that solution and make sure that the lake portal did get built after all, why not just go through it then and there?

Unless... unless he didn't want to go to the past. He wanted to go to Today.

But as I struggled to understand, I was yanked back into the present moment because now the color was fading. Before my very eyes, it was seeping away from me, turning duller and duller until the outline of red bricks began to emerge from the remnants. No, my mind screamed, no, don't let it disappear.

Before I could even decide what to do, I hurled my entire body into the dimming pink glow, letting it swallow me up and suck me in. And then I was fully surrounded by churning bubbles, which faded to yellow, and finally to blue.

It was like being plunged into an arctic sea. I was in the freezing water, being tossed around like a jellyfish, completely immersed in an ocean of blue. No, not an ocean. A lake.

I swam for the surface, but the light was playing tricks on me. Just as I was about to break through to the air, my head smashed against the lake floor. I had been here before, I remembered. Down was up. I followed the direction of my air bubbles, only to find that they were going towards my feet.

Panic overtook me as I started to follow them up, my fingers already turning numb.

But that's when I saw Adam, just inches from me. His eyes were blasted open in panic. He was drowning, lost and flailing.

I reached out and grabbed his shirt. He resisted at first, but then all strength seemed to seep out of his body. With all my might, I pushed the water away with my free hand, grabbing onto Adam for dear life with the other.

And a second later, just before all my breath was gone, we burst through the shelf of the lake water. The frigid air seared into my lungs. Adam bobbed to the surface beside me, stiff as a board. And looking around, I knew immediately that I was a million miles from home.

END OF PART ONE

KEEP READING FOR PART TWO OF YESTERWORLD