Rose Tinted (20 page)

The self she was before facing Eris and seeing the woman stained with Cambria’s blood.

“Fine, it sounds like something you’d see in a movie,” she corrected, not denying for a second that she definitely wouldn’t read a book.

“Do you know where Rusty hid the car?” Brynn asked.

“I don’t, but Rusty will be back tomorrow. When she gets back we can decide who’s going back to A1 and we’ll start off again.”

“It feel
s like we just left A1. Oh wait. We did,” Tate joked dryly.

“Why wait until Rusty gets back?” Brynn wasn’t in much of a mood for sitting around and waiting for things to happen while Jonah got tortured because she had left him. “Why don’t we decide who’s going right now?”

“I’m in,” Bennett said enthusiastically, surprising everyone in the room that, despite the horrors they’d witnessed on their last trip in, she was still ready and willing to help her friends.

She was nothing if not a loyal friend.

“I’m definitely going,” Amber stated. “I can throw a wild guess out there and say Brynn and Ty are going?”

“Good guess,” Ty answered, glancing over at Brynn nervously. She hoped he wouldn’t voice the thoughts she knew
were passing through his head.

If her friends knew she wanted to try to rescue Jonah
, they wouldn’t let her go with them. They’d think it was a waste of manpower when they had more important things to take care of. It was for that reason that Brynn simply kept her mouth shut and smiled at being recruited to go back. She didn’t want to give her true intentions away.

“I have to go to direct you guys,” Hadlock said, “And Rusty will need to go to operate the car. I think that’s more people than we can actually fit in the car but we’ll just be really comfy.”

“And we’re going to shut down the gas production?” Bennett asked.

“Not just shut it down. I want to destroy the gas she’s already made a
nd stockpiled, shut down the gas production, and plant a bug in the facility that will disable the gas emitters all over the world. That way, when Eris realizes she can’t stop us and she’s desperate to prove she still has power, she won’t have anything to threaten us with.”

“Awesome,” Amber said eagerly.

She had definitely been transformed into someone who liked to take action. Brynn was glad that her friend had suddenly become so willing to help, but she worried that she was turning into someone as reckless as Brynn.

“All right. Those of you coming tomorrow go pack your bags and be ready to leave as soon as Rusty gets here in the morning,” Hadlock said, clapping his hands together happily.

As the group split up to complete their various tasks, Brynn pulled her tablet from its case. She had felt it vibrate during Hadlock’s little group meeting and wondered who could possibly be sending her a transmission.

Opening the message and hoping Rusty wasn’t in any trouble
, Brynn’s heart stopped at the words on the screen.

The address the message had been sent from was a complicated string of letters and numbers that she didn’t understand. But despite the cryptic origins of the message, she knew exactly who it was from
, and all she could do was hope that this message meant that he was still alive.

The words read:
Please help me.

Chapter 24:Promises

Brynn stared straight ahead at the screen in front of her. She sat cross legged on the soft white floor of a small room in A1 though she didn’t feel particularly frightened right at that moment. She could hear an odd mechanical sound on the other side of the door but paid it no mind, knowing that in that moment, it wasn’t important.

The stark white facility didn’t seem as cold or harsh to her for some reason and she was almost relaxed as the screen informed her that her transmission had been sent successfully. Smiling to herself and tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Brynn stood up calmly, taking the small handheld computer with her. She looked over at the door as another loud bang resonated through the room.

“Open the door
, Rachel,” she could hear Eris screaming.

A terrifying sound to say the least.

But she didn’t shiver like she knew she would if she were actually Brynn in that moment and not Rachel. Instead she smiled at the wall, raised the computer above her head, and threw it at the door as hard as she could, watching it shatter into a million little pieces.

“Open it!” Eris yelled again, still
pounding the wall, “Or I’ll scratch your pretty eyes out.”

Rachel sighed deeply, a little sadly Brynn thought if she was being honest. She couldn’t ignore how calm the girl seemed when she knew she was about to die. Instead of panicking the way Brynn would
have, she pulled a sugar cube from her lab coat pocket and popped it into her mouth for the last time, the taste bringing a thousand memories flooding into Brynn’s mind instantly.

Rachel walked to a small receptacle on her wall, placed the glass tube that held her DNA inside, pressed a button, and watched her future generation disappear into the white folds of the facility.

She sat on the floor once more and rested her back against the soft wall, still calm. Looking around the small room that offered her no escape she pulled a folded up piece of paper from her pocket. Unfolding it gingerly, taking all the time in the world that Brynn was sure she didn’t have, she revealed some sort of sketch that made no sense to Brynn’s mind, though Rachel seemed to think it was an important thing to study right before dying.

The sketch appeared to be some sort of blueprint, though for what, Brynn wasn’t sure.
It was a large disk-like structure with large spheres on the bottom that were labeled ‘engine’. An endless number of markings and numbers filled the blueprint and Brynn tried desperately to memorize it, knowing that it would be important for her to tell The Alliance when she woke up, but try as she might, she couldn’t make sense of the paper.

“Why is it taking you so long to override her hack?” Eris spat just beyond the door. “She’s not exactly one of
us; she couldn’t have been
that
brilliant.”

Rachel emitted a little laugh as she pulled a lighter from her pocket. Igniting the small device
, she held the open flame to the paper that was pinched between her long fingers, letting it lick the white material and turning it instantly brown. As the flame grew bigger Brynn felt the need to pull her hand away, but Rachel just continued to hold it, letting the flames almost engulf her hand before allowing it flutter to the ground, reveling in the burning on her skin. Once the paper had been reduced to nothing more than a small pile of ash, she swept the remains into a small air vent on the floor.

Getting to her feet and facing the door that was now sliding open
, Rachel smiled at the sight of Eris in her full rage. The Angel stormed over to her, shoving her fist into Rachel’s stomach and sending her crashing against the wall with a thud. She grabbed her face with her cold strong hands, squeezing her cheeks painfully and forcing Rachel to look into her purple eyes.

“What did you do?” she
whispered, only inches from Rachel’s face.

Becoming quickly enraged by the girl’s silence she pushed her head
agonizingly into the wall, bringing her face even close to Rachel’s.

“If you don’t tell me what you did
, I’ll take the utmost pleasure in thinking of creative ways to extract the truth from you, Rachel,” Eris said venomously, her hand moving from Rachel’s cheeks and down to her thin throat.

Her purple eyes darted back and forth over Rachel’s face for a moment before she realized that the girl really wasn’t going to
say any anything. For the first time since her nightmares had begun, Brynn hadn’t tried to speak to Eris.

For the first time, she completely agreed with Rachel’s vow of silence.

“Fine,” Eris said slowly, twisting Rachel’s arm painfully behind her back at an impossible angle and forcing her out of the room and into the hallway.

“If you refuse to talk to me
, I’ll just show you how much damage your stupidity has already caused,” Eris told her, the walls shifting and fading away for a moment before coming back into focus. Brynn’s dream was starting to fall apart again.

After a moment Eris opened a door to a dimly lit room, shoved Rachel forcefully in, and shut the door, calling through the wall, “Enjoy the consequences of your actions.”

The smug smile Rachel had worn the entire time Eris had been pushing her through the facility instantly vanished as she looked around the dark room.

It was a room Brynn had seen before in her nightmares.

The tables that lined the space were eerie now that she knew what rested on them and she prayed silently that she’d wake up before reliving that experience again.

She saw her breath coming out in
little puffs and knew she was in the freezer where Rachel had discovered Maxwell’s body.

Brynn twitched violently, waking herself up from her nightmare unintentionally.
Ty had his strong arms wrapped securely around her though they had started the night sleeping an appropriate distance apart. Yet there he was, protecting her from her own nightmares like he always did. It didn’t seem to matter to Brynn that they were sleeping on the floor in the middle of all of her friends; without Ty’s presence, Brynn felt alone.

Reliving the experience of finding Maxwell once more hit too close to home for
her and she moved closer to Ty’s sleeping form, hoping he never met the same fate because of her actions. She couldn’t bear to lose another friend.

Brynn
thought about the way her life might have been if she hadn’t had so many questions. Maybe suppressed curiosity was a blessing.

If she had neve
r decided to go looking for A1, would Jonah be trapped now? Would they be torturing him to get to Brynn?

She
replayed the night before she had left for A1 in her head. She remembered how desperately Ty tried to keep her there with him. Even if Jonah had been suspicious of Ty’s intentions from the beginning and thought his only motivation in this whole ordeal was to bring Brynn back home, would that have been such a bad thing? Ty had pleaded with her that night, saying that he couldn’t lose her.

Then he kissed her.

She had tried desperately to keep the memory from her mind but at that moment, scared for what the day ahead of them would bring and wrapped up in Ty’s arms, she let herself remember. Of course that meant she let herself remember the confusing feelings that accompanied Ty’s actions.

Between trying to save the world from a psychotic A.I. and trying to break her friend out of the top secret facility he was being held in
, Brynn hardly thought it was appropriate to worry about her boy problems.

Ty versus Jonah didn’t exactly seem lik
e an end of the world decision when compared to the
actual
end of the world decisions she’d have to make soon.

And yet she couldn’t help but feel guilty that as Jonah lay rotting in some stark white padded room, she was snuggled up in Ty’s safe arms, thinking about how he had looked at her the night before she’d started this whole mess.

His warm brown eyes always held so much love when they were turned towards her. Like everyone else in the room looked at her but only he really
saw
her. She often thought of him as overbearing and overprotective, but assessing her current situation, she was beginning to feel as if those traits were necessary when dealing with Brynn’s adventuring spirit.

“Brynn?” Ty asked, opening his sleepy brown eyes and looking down at her.
“Did you have another nightmare?” he whispered in the darkness of the cave, surrounded by the deep breathing of the other members of The Alliance.

She nodded her head but didn’t say anything, embarrassed that her thoughts hadn’t actually been on the very serious task at hand.

“It’s all right,” he said soothingly, rubbing her back with his free hand that she wasn’t laying on. “I’m right here.”

“You always are,” she replied.

And even with her friend locked up, a group of people who didn’t believe her, and a complete and total suicide mission to prepare for, Brynn did something she couldn’t quite explain. She tilted her head up and brushed her lips lightly against Ty’s, not quite kissing him as she breathed him in.

A look of complete confusion passed over his sleepy features that made Brynn
smile for the first time in a long time. She could feel his entire body tense at her actions, as if he didn’t want to move an inch in case he misunderstood what she was doing, before she pressed her full lips against his. Despite the fact that she was pretty sure Ty was half asleep, his arms tightened around her small body, pulling her closer to him. He knotted his fingers in her hair and inhaled deeply as he kissed her, seeming to breathe the moment into his very being.

Though she knew it could have only lasted a few seconds, it seemed like minutes passed
before Brynn gave him one last gentle kiss and nudged his nose with her own, pulling away slightly and looking up at Ty through her eyelashes in the darkness.

“Thank you for
actually believing all of the crazy stuff I tell you,” she whispered finally, running her long fingers up and down the length of his back as she spoke.

“Is that how you normally thank people?” he asked,
his cheeks obviously flushed, even in the darkness.

“Not usually,” she answered, knowing that she had inevitably made things weird between them.

Tomorrow she was sure they’d be awkward around each other and worried about what their late night kiss might mean when all they should have been doing was focusing on their mission. But right at that moment, Brynn wasn’t thinking about their mission the next day, or how weird things were going to be, or if her kiss with Ty meant she didn’t care about rescuing Jonah. Instead she allowed herself one moment of peace and selfishness in her otherwise chaotic existence.

“If that’s how you’re starting to thank people
, I’ll have to start doing more nice things for you,” he said, half joking.

“I hope you remember that when we get to A1 and I ask you to complete some impossible task,” Brynn whispered back,
suppressing a yawn and wondering when her eyelids had suddenly gotten so heavy.

“I will,” Ty answered, though his voice seemed distant to her, as if it were fading wit
h her consciousness.

“I’ve been right about everything else, Ty,” she whispered, though with her mind slowly slipping into sleep, she wasn’t sure her words made sense. “I’m right about Jonah.”

She was vaguely aware of the soft pressure of Ty’s lips against hers for only a second before she heard him say, “Goodnight, Brynn.”

Just as Brynn had anticipated, in her moment of weakness, bad judgment, or whatever else she was calling it, things had gotten weird between her and Ty. As they stood in a group the next day listening to Rusty’s plans, Brynn knew her mind needed to be on their next trip to A1 where she might very well get kidnapped and murdered, but instead she was wondering if she was standing too close to Ty; or perhaps not close enough.

He could sense the change in t
heir relationship as well as he shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. When he spoke to Brynn he would find a reason to touch her arm or her back, then, as if suddenly realizing that maybe things hadn’t changed between them, he would quickly drop his hand and look down at the ground.

Brynn was determined to keep things as normal as possible and make up for leaving Jonah in A1. She
had
to save him to make things right and so, she put her feelings aside as she usually did and tried to focus on Rusty’s run down of the days to follow.

“We’re going to take the car I built a while back. I haven’t really given it a proper test
run but I think it should be okay,” Rusty was saying, running her fingers wildly through her long red hair like she couldn’t stand still no matter how hard she tried.

“That’s comforting,” Tate said from the back of the group.

“Yeah, and you’re not even coming,” Hadlock put in, apparently lacking faith in Rusty’s abilities.

“How many people does the car fit?” Rift asked.

He had been all business since his return and the group had finally become efficient in his presence.