Rose Tinted (15 page)

“I know,” she said simply, not sounding like she was offended that Brynn thought she was uninformed, but simply like she was answering an easy yes or no question. “So what did you dream about tonight?” she asked, guessing where the conversation was heading.

“Rachel and this other scientist who worked in A1 had some sort of house…,” Brynn said, not quite satisfied with the explanation she was giving. “Or a base or hiding place.
I don’t really know what it was,” she finished, hoping she was making sense in the late hour.

“Like some sort of safe house?” Royter asked, raising a black eyebrow at Brynn.

“Something like that,” she agreed. “I should probably tell The Alliance tomorrow just in case she hid information there. I just wish she had been a bit more specific about its location. Narrowing it down to Arcadian doesn’t really help me.”

“If I were you,” Royter began, before stopping
mid-sentence.

She squinted her eyes for a moment as she stared out over the foggy field below the house and the factory filled city that lay beyond.
She didn’t speak again for a moment and Brynn almost wondered if she had forgotten what she was going to say.

“What?” Brynn pressed.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone about the safe house,” Royter finally finished, not looking at Brynn.

She kept her eyes trained straight ahead.

“Why shouldn’t I tell The Alliance?” Brynn asked, genuinely interested in Royter’s reasoning behind this revelation. “Aren’t you on their side? Shouldn’t you want me to share every bit of information I have?”

“I know Rusty and Hadlock put a lot of stock in their little inventions
, but knowledge is the only power any one of us has. Give that away and you have nothing,” she said with a shrug. “I, personally, don’t think power is something we should be giving away freely when we have so little of it.”

“But isn’t that the whole reason I’m here?” Brynn asked, still confused. “The only reason The Alliance has been looking for me for so long is because they think I have information they don’t have. Information like this.”

“I’m not telling you what to do,” Royter said simply. “You’re a grown woman capable of making her own decisions. I’m just telling you that I’d keep that particular bit of information to myself until it became absolutely vital to our mission. If you’re on a need to know basis, why shouldn’t they be?” she asked quite reasonably.

“I guess that makes sense,” Brynn agreed, not sure when she had gone from loving the ambition of The Alliance, to withholding information from them on the word of a girl she barely knew.

The two girls sat in silence for a while longer, both pondering over different things before Brynn finally broke the quiet.

“So what are
you
doing up here?” Brynn asked. “You never told me.”

“Same thing as you,” Royter answered with a smile in Brynn’s direction. “The house is too crowded so I come up here
to think sometimes.”

Brynn nodded at this statement but didn’t say anything.
She didn’t know what to say.

She was sure she should trust Royter
, but this short five minute conversation was the most Brynn had gotten out of her since meeting her. It was always difficult to trust someone who kept their own secrets so close to the chest.

“What exactly do you do for The Alliance? Rift was very vague about your role,” Brynn asked.

“I deal in the one thing worth trading,” Royter answered simply. “I collect information and help spread the word to other cities.”

“And people just believe you when you tell them there’s some sinister plot going on?” Brynn couldn’t keep the disbelief from her voice.

“Things are different here,” she said. “People on Halcyon wouldn’t believe it because they don’t
want
to. Everything is perfect there. Why change it?”

“Fair point
.”

“On Panurgic people are hoping for a change. They’re more than willing to believe that their lot in life isn’t final. That there’s some way for them to change their
fate.”

“Is it really that bad here?” Brynn asked.

She was sure hard work was never a fun thing, but it didn’t seem like the quality of life was as bad as everyone let on.

“Working isn’t what’s difficult. If anything it gives you some purpose in life. I feel like I’d have a harder time living on Halcyon where I never did anything productive,” Royter began, casting a qui
ck glance in Brynn’s direction.

She was actually quite surprised that she was getting the girl to speak to her so
freely and so she said nothing and let her continue.

“The thing that’s hard is never
progressing. We work hard but there’s no possibility to work towards a better life. Nothing changes here and while it does help that you can change your profession as you get older, you never really progress. Life without progression just doesn’t make any sense.”

“No one progresses on Halcyon,” Brynn pointed out, never having thought of it before but now finding the concept very odd.

“Yeah, but people don’t really care as much because they have everything they want. It’s a lot more obvious when you’re miserable.”

Brynn mulled this over for a moment in silence. It was true that life on Halcyon had always been comfortable
, but that had never been enough for her. She’d always wanted more and the suffocating feeling that a lack of progression brought on was not a foreign one to her. She understood the restlessness Royter spoke of.

“Why do you think the A.I.s built A1 on Halcyon?” Brynn finally asked, not sure where the question had come from.

Royter was silent for a long time, staring off into the distance and breathing slowly. Brynn wondered if the girl had heard her question before she finally answered.

“I think the lack of curiosity and the fact that Halcyonites are already so happy made it an ideal location. Why go looking for something when you have everything?”

“You know about the curiosity?” Brynn asked, slightly amazed by this revelation.

“All of us do,” Royter answered, giving Brynn an odd look.

“I haven’t told anyone in my group yet,” she admitted, though she was sure Jonah already knew since he had seen the records room where the information was kept. “I don’t know how you drop something like that on someone.”

“I don’t think they’ll take it as hard as you think. Besides, it’s not like it’s an irreversible thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“The suppressed curiosity is just an impulse they placed in your brain,” she explained. “The more you explore and
discover, the more you learn to be curious. Just because they took away the natural inclination doesn’t mean you can’t teach yourself to be curious.”

“Well that makes it better,” Brynn admitted, feeling like she wouldn’t mind telling her friends the news if she could quickly assure them that they had probably already overcome the suppression.

“You don’t seem to have any lack of curiosity,” Royter said.

“That’s because of Rachel,” Brynn reminded her.

“I wonder then,” Royter began slowly, her eyes locked on Brynn, “if you’d be curious about something The Alliance and the A.I.s don’t feel the need to share with those they don’t find important.”

Chapter 19: Ruin

Brynn wasn’t sure when she had consciously decided to follow a girl she hardly knew into the cold, muddy world outside of the boarding house. One minute, she and Royter had been talking on the roof
, and the next she was trailing behind the girl through a muddy landscape that offered absolutely no light through the cloudy night sky.

Royter walked expertly through the sinking ground, looking as if the mud didn’t
affect her at all as Brynn struggled to keep her boots from being swallowed whole. With each step she took, a deep slurping noise could be heard as the mud reluctantly surrendered her knee high boots back to her. The wind had died down considerably though a small breeze still blew, making the air much chillier than Brynn cared for.

She had asked Royter numerous times where they were going but the girl only told her that she would see once she got there.

They hadn’t gone through The Moor as Brynn had hoped, instead they walked parallel to it, though the lights from the factories quickly faded into the distance, once more engulfing both girls in darkness.

“How far are we going?” Brynn asked after a while, pulling her
brown jacket tightly around her and wishing she had brought gloves or a scarf.

Royter wore all black, making it difficult for Brynn to follow her in the darkness. The only
hint that she was still on the right path was the small patch of bare neck that could be seen below Royter’s black bob and above her black jacket collar where something that looked like a tattoo of a bird peeked through. Brynn made a mental note to ask her about the picture another time, when she wasn’t close to being swallowed up by the muddy ground.

“We’re almost there,” the girl replied. “It’s surprisingly close, which seems risky on a continent full of curious people who’re likely to run away because they don’t like their lot in life.”

Brynn didn’t understand what Royter was talking about but continued to follow her anyway, knowing that soon enough all would be explained. At least, she hoped all would be explained. If this excursion went anything like all of the other adventures Brynn partook in, all she’d get would be more questions and absolutely no answers.

“Here we are,” Royter finally said, coming to an abrupt stop in front of a small town.

The little wooden houses and few factories that sat squat at the center of the town were dark and silent.

“Where is everyone?” Brynn asked, getting the feeling that the town wasn’t asleep; it was abandon
ed.

“Gone,” Royter said cryptically.

“They all just… left?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she answered. “They were
terminated.”

The
word ‘terminated’ sat heavily in Brynn’s mind and she couldn’t help but feel that using the euphemism didn’t make the loss of human life in this town any better.

The
silent town suddenly seemed even more eerie to Brynn who couldn’t suppress a shudder at what she was hearing. The small, dark windows seemed to peer back at her as she stared at the still scene. She could imagine little children pressing their faces up against the glass or running happily through the street. The image left a sour taste in her mouth.

“Killed by who?” Brynn managed to ask, though she already knew the answer.

“Eris learned everything she needed to from them so she released the sugar scented gas into the town,” Royter explained. “They probably thought someone was baking cookies,” she added with disgust in her voice, making the exact same comparison Eris had once expressed.

Brynn could remember the way Rachel had taken a deep breath when the gas had entered her chamber, welcoming death it had seemed. And suddenly, something didn’t make sense to Brynn. If she was a clone of Rachel, how could she possibly dream in a memory that had happened after Rachel put her DNA into the human creation bay?

“Unless we were still linked somehow at that point,” Brynn mumbled.

“What?” Royter asked, looking at if she thought Brynn might be unstable.

She wasn’t quite ready to share her suspicions with the girl she didn’t trust yet, and so instead she said, “I thought they only terminated entire continents, not individual towns.”

“Apparently this town was too useless. It didn’t give
them what they wanted, so they got rid of it.”

“How did no one else find out about this?” Brynn asked. “It’s so close to The Moor. Surely someone has wandered out here and found a
n empty town?”

“I think Rift knows about it,” Royter said quietly. “But I don’t think he wants anyone else knowing that we’re all a button push away from being killed. I think he wants us to feel safer than we are.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Brynn protested. “If anything, this would help his cause.”

“He wants us to feel picked on,” Royter said. “He wants us to feel out of control enough to do something about it and join his cause. He doesn’t want us to feel like no matter what we do we’re beat. If that were the case
, no one would join him, they’d all be too scared to cause problems because we can be so easily destroyed.”

Royter didn’t continue, though she looked like she wanted to. Instead she walked into the empty city, Brynn following closely behind her.
They wound through silent cobblestone streets past small homes and large factory buildings. Brynn sniffed the air a few times, swearing she could still smell the sugar that clung to the walls and for the first time in her life, she didn’t crave sugar cubes.

“How did you find this place?” Brynn asked as they neared the center of the small town where a dried up fountain marked the town’s main focal point.

“I like to know things so I make it my business to collect knowledge,” she answered, walking on silent feet to the fountain and siting on the dusty stone there.

“How do you know this town was destroyed by Eris? Maybe the citizens left because of something else.”

Royter gave Brynn a pitying look and suddenly made her feel very naive for asking such a childish question.

“Hadlock isn’t the only one who can look up records from A1,” she said.

“Does Rift know that you’ve found this city?” Brynn asked, beginning to wonder how much she could really trust the man she didn’t know at all.

“I don’t think so,” Royter answered uncertainly. “I feel like he would have talked to me about it if he did. He’d want to make sure I
didn’t tell anyone else so he can keep them all blissfully ignorant enough to follow him.”

“If you think he’s so awful
, why are you a part of his movement?”

“I don’t necessarily think he’s awful,” she answered. “I think his heart is in the right place for wanting to get rid of the A.I.s and carry out Rachel’s wishes.”

“But?”

“But, I don’t think withholding information is the way to do what he wants. He pretends he wants to teach his followers the gritty truth so that they’ll be scared into helping him, but he doesn’t tell them everything. A little fear is a good reason to join a rebellion; a lot of fear is a good way to break a rebellion.”

“So you don’t think he should withhold information from us?” Brynn asked, slightly incredulously.

“I don’t,” she confirmed.

“And yet you don’t think I should tell him what I found out tonight?” Royter’s mixed signals were beginning to give Brynn a headache.

“If he does it
, why shouldn’t you? It only seems fair, right?” she asked.

“I guess,” Brynn answered, still confused. She had been right, this trip hadn’t offered her any answers, only more questions.

“Brynn, do me a favor,” Royter said after a moment of silence. “Don’t be so trusting of people when you leave for Halcyon tomorrow. It’s just going to get you into trouble.”