Sugar Coated (27 page)

“Are you sure you don’t remember what Rachel did?” she asked, making Brynn sincerely wish she did remember. It would probably make the short remainder of her life much less painful.

“I don’t know,” Brynn whimpered, dropping her tough façade and becoming exactly what she was—a terrified little girl who was finally facing her nightmare.

Eris squeezed Brynn’s right arm where her icy hand held it right below the wrist. Brynn felt a snap that sent a shudder through her entire body and then heard a high-pitched scream that must have come from her, though she could barely remember emitting it through the blinding white pain. Her hand went numb instantly, though she didn’t experience any such luck with her arm, which was now throbbing with the worst pain she had ever felt. The Angel’s pupils seemed to be dilating with pleasure over Brynn’s obvious agony.

“I won’t ask you again,” Eris said quietly, her face still only inches away from Brynn’s.

“I don’t know anything!” Brynn screamed, a tear rolling down her cheek as she tried to turn her face away from the Angel in front of her. “Please,” she begged, her voice cracking on the word.

“It’s fine. I know how to handle this particular situation,” Eris said calmly, releasing Brynn’s good arm for a split second before the needle she held flashed through the air, landing in the side of Brynn’s neck.

Compared to the break in her arm, the needle was a welcome relief that sent a warm sensation through Brynn’s entire body, making her feel heavy inside. The warmth even seemed to dull the pain in Brynn’s arm as her eyelids grew heavy.

Brynn sleepily watched Eris toss the syringe to the side. As it flew through the air she saw something completely unexpected behind the woman. She couldn’t tell if it was the drugs making her hallucinate or if some miracle really had happened, but there stood Ty, one finger over his lips telling Brynn to be quiet, and his other hand grasping the metal water pitcher that, seconds before, had sat on the table next to the bed. He wore the most furious expression she had ever seen on his face and she was actually quite scared of him.

Brynn turned her attention back to Eris, not wanting to give Ty away. Her eyelids were fluttering open and closed as she tried to hold onto consciousness. The Angel leaned her face in even closer to Brynn’s so that she could whisper to her in her last conscious moments, “We’re going to have so much fun together, Brynn.”

Opening her seemingly swollen mouth to protest, she saw Ty bring the water pitcher back behind his head slowly. As he swung it quickly forward, the last sensation Brynn was aware of was the sickening sound of a dull thud and warm liquid that she sincerely hoped was water splashing across her face.

Chapter 28: Fog

Brynn’s fractured memory over the unknown space of time was more like a series of images that didn’t seem to make any sense. She saw the bright lights of A1 as the walls passed by her. She could feel Ty’s shoulder digging into her stomach as he hauled her away from the room in her nightmares. She briefly glimpsed a dark and damp room whose walls seemed to be made of an actual mountainside. She heard the creak of old rusted metal that rumbled underneath her, feeling like the movement of train tracks, though much slower.

Several times she opened her eyes groggily to see Ty standing over her and the dark stone ceiling above his head moving rapidly as a breeze ruffled his blonde hair. He said something to her that she couldn’t understand before she faded back into her drug induced sleep. At one point she saw a cloudy sky and felt rain on her face before the world went dark again, and the last time she opened her eyes under the effects of the medicine Eris had injected into her, she smelled old, moldy wood and felt a scratchy bed underneath her before slipping away.

* * *

“Brynn?” Ty said in his usual worried tone. “Can you hear me?”

Though she didn’t want to, Brynn opened her eyes slowly, taking in her odd surroundings. She appeared to be in a dirty wooden house with no windows and a dirt floor. She rolled her head from side to side, trying to make sense of what she was seeing and what had happened to her. Endless questions still flooded her mind and she couldn’t quite believe they had somehow managed to make it out of A1 alive.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“We’re in Central Wildwood,” Ty explained. “I didn’t think it would be safe to check into a hotel, so I broke into the basement of an old café. It looks like they use half of it for storage, but there’s a door that separates this half. I’m pretty sure they’ve forgotten it’s here,” he said, looking at the wooden door anxiously.

Brynn tried to sit up
, but instantly regretted putting any weight on her right arm. Pain shot through it like acid and she bit her lip to keep from screaming as she cradled the injured arm against her chest. It was heavily bandaged in the same scratchy material she rested her head on, and the pain had been reduced to a dull ache, though whether that was because of the medicine from Eris or the passing of time she wasn’t sure.

“I tried to wrap it
, but I don’t know what else to do,” Ty said hopelessly. “I think it’s just a crack because I couldn’t find a ridge or anything in the bone,” he offered. “It did swell a lot though. And the bruising is pretty bad.”

“Eris broke my arm with one hand,” Brynn said vacantly, remembering the feeling of her bone snapping like a twig under the woman’s strong grasp. “How is that even possible?” she asked, feeling very much justified in her fear of the Angel at that particular moment.

“I don’t think she’s human,” Ty admitted with a disbelieving shake of his head. “When I hit her with that water pitcher, it should have killed her,” he said, making Brynn feel awful that she had driven sweet Ty to the point where he had tried to kill someone for her. “But it didn’t kill her. It just knocked her out. She didn’t even bleed when I hit her. How do you not bleed after getting bludgeoned in the head by a thick metal object?”

“You should have seen how fast she was,” Brynn said, her mouth dry and her voice cracking. “If she had seen you, Ty, she would have killed you in a second,” she continued, her eyes welling up with tears at the thought.

“Well, I wasn’t going to let her kill you,” Ty answered matter-of-factly. “Isn’t that the whole reason I came with you and Jonah?”

“Jonah,” Brynn repeated, her mind working hard to remember if he had been in the room with Ty in those last moments. “Where is Jonah?” she asked.

Ty didn’t answer for a moment. He looked down at Brynn’s good hand, which he held, and sighed deeply. His thumb made small, gentle circles over her wrist as he opened and shut his mouth several times, trying to come up with the words he wanted to say.

“I never found him,” he answered slowly, still not meeting Brynn’s eyes. “But I couldn’t let you stay in that place. They were after
you
, Brynn—I had to get you out right away,” he said, trying to defend his decision to leave Jonah behind.

“I knew they had gotten one of you,” Brynn responded distantly as tears rolled freely from her eyes to pool in her ears. “Eris said they’d gotten my friend
…I just didn’t know which one of you it was.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ty said, sounding like he meant it. “I didn’t know what else to do. I found this little underground tunnel
deep inside the facility with this thing that looked like a miniature train car and I had to make a decision. I had to keep you safe. It was our only chance to get out.”

“I’m not mad at you,” she said sincerely. “From the way Eris talked, I think Jonah was already dead when you found me. If you had stayed there they would have just killed you too.” Brynn paused for a moment, trying to stop the liquid that spilled from her eyes. “This is my fault.”

“How is it your fault?” he asked, though Brynn knew the answer was obvious and he was just trying to make her feel better.

“This whole thing was my idea. I got Jonah to believe in A1 and come with me. Then you came to protect me. I lured both of you into an impossible situation.”

“Brynn, Jonah wanted to go more than you did. I could tell from the moment I saw him on the train that he was more determined than you,” Ty assured her. “I think if you hadn’t gone with him, he would have eventually discovered the city on his own.”

Brynn appreciated Ty’s attempt to make her feel better e
ven though she knew it was a moot point. Jonah wouldn’t have ever known about A1 if Brynn hadn’t brought it up that day in the library. If he hadn’t met her, he would have lived out his life as a brilliant, bored boy stuck in a dusty library filling his head with knowledge he’d never use and running through the waves for fun.

“At least Eris said it was quick,” Brynn said quietly, hoping more than anything that this would be the one true thing the Angel had told her.

They both fell into a silence that lasted days after Brynn’s final sad statement on the matter. Brynn cried quietly over Jonah while Ty tried to rewire his tablet so that it would run on a different frequency, enabling him to get a message to Amber and Bennett without the Angels of A1 finding out. He had even managed to disable his tracking device.

The silence continued on through the long days and sleepless nights. They would eat food from the storage room of the café, and Ty would occasionally re-wrap Brynn’s arm to make sure the blood was still flowing to her hand.

Eventually Brynn broke the quiet and told Ty about what she had learned in the records room. She told him about the other continents and how they had to find some way to get to Panurgic to see if the technology there could somehow help Brynn bring down A1. She was convinced that Eris wouldn’t stop until she got her information from Brynn, which meant she now had to live off the grid. She was sure they were monitoring everything in the hopes that they’d find where Brynn had escaped to.

Ty was less convinced that the people of Panurgic would be of any help, though he quickly changed his mind when Brynn told him of Halcyon’s impending termination date.

“If we don’t stop them somehow, they’re going to kill everyone on our continent because we’ll no longer be of use to them,” Brynn said grimly.

Ty considered this latest news quietly before agreeing to help Brynn get to Panurgic.

“Their technology had better be as good as you think it is, or we’re pretty much dead,” Ty told her.

“The files said they had to monitor creativity because the people kept creating weapons. They’ve got to know more about what’s going on than the Angels think,” she told him. “I think they might be trying to fight back.”

“Once I get this tablet rewired and get a message to Amber and Bennett that we’re still alive, we’ll start figuring out how to get there. Maybe they can get supplies for us, since we can’t exactly ask our houses for things anymore,” he said dismally.

“How much control do you think they have?” Brynn asked, “The Angels, I mean.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Ty said as he twisted two wires in his tablet together in the relative darkness of the old basement.

“I don’t know what else to call them,” she answered defensively, not having the energy to get into a full-fledged fight with him at the moment.

“Call them Workers like you used to, back when we were pretending things were normal with the world.”

“Back when we were stupid and happy?” she asked.

“Exactly,” he agreed.

“Fine. How much control do you think the Workers have?”

“A lot apparently. If they can really create humans like you said they can, then they must have the technology to control most everything,” Ty answered.

“I just can’t believe they haven’t found us yet,” she said suspiciously. “I mean, you found a great hiding place, but it’s not exactly A1. We’re in a musty old basement in a city I visit every month. You’d think after Seaside this would be the next place they’d look for us.”

“Maybe they’re not looking for you,” he answered with a shrug.

“I have secrets they want to discover and you tried to kill their leader with a water pitcher. I’m pretty sure they’re looking,” Brynn countered.

“Good point,” Ty agreed, a small spark coming to life between his fingers. “Hey, I think I might have done it,” he said. Brynn pushed herself up into a sitting position on the makeshift bed with her good arm and leaned over the screen of his tablet.

“You have a new message, apparently,” Brynn said, pointing to Ty’s video inbox.

“Maybe Amber and Bennett finally realized we’re gone,” he said with a wan smile as he opened the video file, but Amber and Bennett didn’t appear on the screen.

Instead, Jonah’s face materialized, looking tired, dirty, and smeared with blood
that she hoped wasn’t his own. Her heart lifted at the sight of her friend she had assumed dead, even if his current state looked almost as bad as the alternative.

“This had to be sent after we escaped, right?” she asked Ty hopefully, not quite sure she could believe Jonah had managed to escape on his own.

“It would have to be,” he answered, sounding almost as happy as Brynn that Jonah appeared to be alive.

“He made it out, Ty,” Brynn whispered, her eyes beginning to well up. She wasn’t quite sure what had happened to her but, the last few days had shown Brynn how close she always seemed to be to crying her eyes out. “Jonah’s alive.”

She couldn’t tell where he was by the video. His bloody face blocked out most of the screen and the background looked like nothing more than a dark mass.

“Brynn, Ty,” he began, coughing as he spoke. Brynn could only imagine what the Workers must have done to him to lead Eris to believe he was dead. “Those
things
tortured me until I was about to die, then they decided it would be better to let me suffer out the rest of my time slowly rather than finishing me off,” he said shakily on the video, his eyes looking sunken in.

Brynn and Ty didn’t need any explanation of who
they
were.

“They dumped my body in some sort of disposal room
, but I got out and escaped into the outskirts of Central Wildwood,” he explained, keeping things brief as the screen faded in and out.

Judging by the difficult time they had getting into the facility
, Brynn was sure Jonah’s story of escape was much more elaborate than what he had said, but his constantly fading screen made her okay with learning the rest of the story later. She was just glad that, for all of her tears over the past few days, Jonah was still alive. The brilliant boy she’d found in the library wasn’t lying with cold skin on a table in some white room—he was alive and warm and thinking of new ways to make her life exciting.

“His tablet must have gotten damaged,” Ty said in little more than a whisper as the screen faded then returned. “The newer models all have the battery that spontaneously regenerates. It shouldn’t be dying.” Brynn shushed her friend as Jonah continued to speak, hanging onto his every word.

“I found plans for a tunnel to this place called Panurgic. I can’t explain everything right now, but I think they can help us,” he said, making Brynn look over at Ty with an ‘I told you so’ expression. “If you guys get this, meet me at our tree in Central Wildwood a week from the day we entered A1,” he instructed as the screen went fuzzy again. “I think from there we can—” Jonah paused, and for a moment Brynn thought the screen had frozen, except that she could still see him breathing raggedly.

He turned his head slowly to the side, looking up at something or someone that they couldn’t see on the screen. Jonah opened his mouth as if he were about to say something before the tablet was knocked forcefully from his hands. It flew across the dark room and hit a wall as he yelled.

Then the screen went black.