Undone by Elizabeth Norris Read Free Book Online

the way. There are too many variables, too many consequences.”
    “Wait a minute,” Reid said, walking to Eli’s side. “We’re so close. We can’t go back to the machine. We have no chance of making that work!”
    I didn’t say anything. I knew what he was getting at. We had been stuck when it came to the machine. We didn’t understand some of his father’s notes, we couldn’t find some of the same materials he’d used, and if we fixed those problems, we still didn’t know how to give the machine enough power to open a wormhole. We also didn’t know how to give it “direction.” The same problem we were having now.
    Eli looked at me, and I saw him take a deep breath. He might want to get home more than any of us; he might even want to say Screw it, we didn’t know these people, and this was the price we had to pay.
    “Fuck,” he said.
    “Eli, come on,” Reid said. “We have to get home.”
    He shook his head and looked at Reid. “We’ve also gotta live with ourselves when we get there.”
    Reid turned away from us both, lacing his fingers on top of his head. I knew what he was feeling without seeing his face. I’d already faced that realization: After being an immeasurable distance from home for over six years, we’d come within inches of making it back, only to have it yanked away again.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. Not just because of the way this had turned out, but because it was my fault we were here.
    Eli punched me in the shoulder. Hard. I deserved it and worse. “We’ll get home,” he said. “Just another way.”
    I nodded, but I didn’t believe it anymore.
    I knew I would keep trying. I would devote my life to it if I had to, not necessarily for me, but for them.
    I just wouldn’t tell them I’d lost hope.

J anelle knew I had to leave.
    Even though I didn’t want to leave her .
    A lot had happened since I’d saved her life.
    Too much, it seemed, for just twenty-four days. It felt like we’d lived a lifetime together somewhere in between then and now.
    After her accident, she sought me out. I told her the truth. All of it. We found the answers to my questions about the portals. We saved the world, and we lost people close to us along the way.
    I fell for her even more. More than I’d thought possible. She fell in love with me, too.
    So she understood.
    For seven years I had thought about what it must have been like for my parents when I disappeared, when I went into the basement and just never came back. Did they know what happened to me? Did they call the cops? Did they search for me? Had they spent seven years counting the days and waiting for me to walk back through the front door?
    For my own sanity, I held on to the hope that I would see them again. My mother’s hazel eyes and my father’s lopsided smile. My too-smart-for-his-own-good big brother and our goofy dog. I needed to see them again, to explain what happened, to tell them what they meant to me.
    To apologize for being so careless.
    Every day that passed I thought about them and what it would be like to get back home .
    But when I finally got there, everything was all wrong.
    Home wasn’t anything like I’d imagined.

W e came home at night.
    For a split second my lungs burned, my skin felt like ice, and then my knees hit concrete, hard. Around me everything was dark, but it didn’t matter, because all I could see was Janelle. The wind moved through her hair, her eyes wet with tears, her hands dark with blood. Her voice echoed in my head: the quiet desperation in the way she said my name before I left her there. I held on to that moment, willed my mind to burn it into my memory. I didn’t want to forget what we’d just been through. I didn’t want to forget even a second that I’d spent with her.
    It all had just ended in the canyon behind Park Village. Reid was dead. Janelle’s friend Alex was dead. And Eli and I had just left Janelle and portaled home. In the end, what we’d tried so hard to do for seven