Rose Tinted (10 page)

Her frozen hands barely worked as she climbed slowly up the ladder, causing the machine to let out its deep metallic groan once more.

“That sound is terrifying,” Brynn told Rusty as the girl offered her hand to help her up.

“I think it’s soothing,” Rusty said with a shrug. “
Just climb down the hatch and hope your cowardly friends make it as far as you.”

Chapter 12: Bucket

Brynn entered the underwater machine as she was told and was instantly surprised by how warm the interior of The Bucket was. Warm orange lights cast a welcoming glow over the large oval room. There were no private rooms in The Bucket except for one small sectioned off place that Brynn assumed was the bathroom.

A few red velvet couches dotted the interior and Brynn had to wonder if Rusty had stolen them from some coffee shop in Eastern Metropolis.
They looked far too luxurious to be anything from Panurgic, and the more Brynn inspected her surroundings, the more she realized how nice all of the furnishings were inside of the terrifying metal egg.

Intricately woven rugs covered the metal floors, stained glass lamps rested on fancy wooden end tables, and big fluffy down blankets seemed to be draped over every available piece of furniture.
Brynn had to half wonder if Rusty had volunteered to take her trips to Halcyon in order to get away from the dreary existence of living on Panurgic.

“Much nicer than I expected,” Ty said directly behind Brynn, making her jump when she felt his breath on her neck.
“I can’t believe she built this.”

His voice held an awe that Brynn had never heard before, and for reasons she couldn’t understand, she hated it.

“You realize we’re probably going to die in here right?” Brynn asked, looking around the cozy interior of the water machine with less pleasure now.

“When did you and I switch places?” Ty asked with a laugh, walking to the glass covered front
of The Bucket and inspecting dozens of blinking lights, knobs, and other things Brynn didn’t understand.

Things that made perfect sense to people like Rusty and Ty.

“I never thought I’d see a scenario where I was excited for an adventure and you were terrified. It’s kind of nice being the reckless one,” he said with a playful smirk in her direction as Jonah jumped into The Bucket without a sound, not even bothering to use the ladder as he fell gracefully from the open hatch.

“Not bad,” he said with a whistle, raising an eyebrow and joining Ty at the front of the room. “Not bad at all.”

Brynn looked out the glass front of the water machine but didn’t dare walk to the front of the room with the boys.

She didn’t think having everyone’s weight in one part of the room was a very good idea. Plus she really didn’t want to look out the window to see the ghostly green water that currently surrounded them.

“I’m getting the feeling Amber and Bennett won’t be joining us,” Jonah remarked to Ty.

He leaned up against the walls of The Bucket with his arms folded easily over his chest, his ever present smirk challenging Brynn to be the adventurous girl he ha
d met in the library not so long ago.

“Although I thought the same thing about Brynn when we first got into the cavern.”

“I was the first one to get into this death trap,” Brynn countered, determined to prove to Jonah just how adventurous she was. “You forget so soon.”

“Fair enough,” he replied just as a high pitched scream rang through the silence of the cavern, followed by a splash.
“Looks like they’re coming after all.”

“How long will it take us to get to Panurgic?” Brynn asked a distracted Rusty hours later.

Brynn’s
knuckles were white as she clutched the arm of one of the overstuffed red velvet sofas. Her eyes were closed and she attempted to refrain from looking out of the glass window at the front of the room that revealed a much too dark, swirling mass of water in front of them.

It had never occurred to her just how much water was in the ocean until she was travelling through it in an unstable rusty old machine
, built by a girl her age, out of spare parts from a condemned train. When she thought of it that way, it made it pretty obvious to her why she was feeling so panicked.

The only problem was, everyone else seemed to be taking the whole thing very well. Even Amber and Bennett who were terrified of the ocean (and had a fear of water medically planted into their psyche by Eris) were chatting with Rusty at the front of the machine like they were shopping in Seaside rather than who knew how far under the water with death possible at every turn.

Brynn felt an arm encircle her shoulders as Ty gave her a squeeze, leaving the front of the vessel for the first time since they’d descended into the ocean. He had been like a kid ever since Rusty started explaining what everything was and how it worked.

“You doing okay
?” he asked her in a voice so calm she shot him an annoyed look.

“How are
you
okay?” she asked incredulously. “
You
of all people!”

“Ouch,” he said as he pulled his arm away from her and instead rested his hands awkwardly in his lap.

She didn’t feel great about lashing out at her best friend, but ever since they’d left A1, she’d been on edge. Now, finding herself in a situation as the only scared person in a group full of notoriously cowardly friends, she was even more off balance.

Brynn tried to ignore the headache and blurred vision that was trying to overpower her at the moment, not wanting another reason to appear weak in front of her suddenly strong friends.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, meaning it even though it had sounded like the least sincere apology ever spoken.

“Your head?” Ty guessed.

“No,” she lied, slightly annoyed that he knew her so well.

“I know it’s kind of scary being underwater but you were the one who wanted answers,” Ty reasoned. “Just think of how simple our lives would have been if you’d never set foot in that library.”

Brynn glanced over at Jonah as he slept on one of the couches in the oval room. His arm rested lightly over his eyes and Brynn was instantly reminded of the time the three of them had stayed in their tent in the barren wasteland between Seaside and A1.

At the time
, Brynn had been sure she and her friends were about to die from heat stroke. Now something more sinister than heat stroke was tracking them across the planet and the mere thought made her instantly exhausted.

“You really should try to rest,” Ty suggested, the old familiar concern back in his voice.
“You look like crap,” he added with a grin in her direction.

“I hate you sometimes,” she joked as she let herself sink into the comfort of the sofa.

Ty draped a blanket over her gently as she began to instantly sink into a deep sleep.

“You love me,” he corrected her. “You just aren’t ready to admit it yet.”

And with that, he kissed her forehead and she drifted off to the place where her nightmares lived.

Her nightmares, at that particular moment, apparently lived in the only dark room she’d ever seen in A1. The facility was notoriously immaculate and blindingly bright, but her current circumstances found her in a more subdued part of the sprawling city-like base.
While the room she had awoken in was still perfectly clean with a disinfected smell wafting around her, the dim lighting and silence scared her more than anything else.

Brynn had long since given up trying to figure out the chronological order of her dreams. Ever since she’d escaped from A1
, her mental trips into the facility every night had been unstable, fuzzy, and totally out of order. Glad that she had at least found herself out of Eris’s company tonight, she scanned her surroundings, wondering what Rachel had in store for her this time.

The room seemed to be a lab of some sort, with metal tables situated every foot or so. White sheets covered whatever
experiments lay on the tables and Brynn had to wonder why this memory in particular would be important enough for her to dream about it.

In her experience
, she had never had an insignificant dream. It was as if Rachel had somehow ensured that every time Brynn slept, she’d receive a clue from some monumental event in her past life.

Today, however, she stood alone in an empty room surrounded by
tables and an odd smell she hadn’t ever encountered before. She walked between rows of tables and didn’t notice until she began the movement, that she could see her breath in front of her. The room felt like a freezer and the more closely she observed it, she realized she could hear the gentle mechanical whir of a cooling implement.

She
was
in a freezer.

“What would Rachel be doing in a freezer?” she asked herself.

As soon as the words escaped her lips, (an occurrence that shouldn’t have been possible in her current dream state) the walls began to shift out of focus. The lights flickered out for a moment before coming back to life, blindingly bright as they had been in her previous dream, before coming to rest on the dim setting she had started the memory out with.

Trying to ignore the many reasons why her dreams might suddenly be falling apart since leaving A1, and hoping it had nothing to do with her encounter with Eris, she resumed her walk around the strange room. As much as it didn’t make sense for Rachel to be in a freezer, it made even less sense to her why hundreds of tables with sheets would be there.

Compelled by one sheet in particular, Brynn walked deliberately over to a lone table near the wall. She felt a sense of dread creep through her body, though she had no idea what had invoked the emotion. All she knew was that Rachel didn’t want to look under the sheet but felt that she had to.

She reached out with one shaky, pale hand towards the white linen, grasping it firmly in her determined fingers.
As she began to slowly pull the sheet away, the faint smell of sugar hit her nose and suddenly, Brynn wanted to back away. She wanted to be anywhere but in that room with what she suddenly realized would be under that particular sheet.

Her eyes prickled with tears and she desperately wished she had control of her own body. She tried to tell Rachel mentally to run away from Eris, and A1, and the horrible secrets the place held.

But instead she pulled the sheet away and saw Maxwell lying on the cold metal table. His smirk gone and his face much too pale.

He was too incredibly still.

She heard a scream that had either come from her or Rachel and instantly knew in her gut; that had been the last time Rachel ever uttered a sound.

Now she understood the girl’s silence.

Brynn woke with a start in the semi darkness of The Bucket’s only room.
The orange lights that lined the oval walls had been dimmed, and in the silence she could hear the steady breathing of her friend’s around her, telling her that everyone was asleep. She glanced towards the front of the room, expecting to see Rusty at the controls but instead saw Ty there, steering the vessel confidently.

“What did you dream about,” Rusty whispered in the darkness
, startling Brynn.

She was perched on the coffee table with her long legs folded in half so that she
could hold her knees against her chest. She watched Brynn with her wide luminescent eyes in the stillness, intent on getting an answer.

“What are you talking about?” Brynn asked, the lie sounding much more convincing in her head than it had when it actually escaped her lips.

“It’s not like I don’t know about the dreams,” Rusty stated simply. She wasn’t a person to beat around the bush. “We’re on the same side. Just tell me what you found out.”

Brynn sighed deeply. The last thing she wanted to do was reveal the emotional dre
am to the least emotional girl in the world. She could already imagine Rusty’s dry response of, “Oh they killed someone? So what? People die on Panurgic every day.”

“Spill it,” Rusty prodded.

“You already know what happened. It wasn’t anything new. They killed Maxwell,” Brynn said.

She had tried to keep her voice neutral but it cracked on the last word.

Maxwell meant something to her.

It didn’t matter that she hadn’t ever met him herself. It was what he represented that scared her. Eris burned every last person out of Rachel’s life and she was perfectly capable of repeating the action in Brynn’s. She just
wondered how many of her friends would have to die before her spirit broke like Rachel’s and she simply ceased speaking all together.

She knew she never should have told her friends about her suspicions. She should have just kept it to herself and tried to bring down A1
alone so they wouldn’t be in danger.

“Who’s Maxwell?” Rusty asked, puzzled.

She knitted her eyebrows together, searching her immensely large brain for any recollection of the name.

“Rachel never mentioned him in the video?” Brynn asked, shocked by this revelation. She couldn’t imagine losing Ty or Jonah and never mentioning it to anyone.

“Maybe it happened after she made the video?” Rusty offered.

“Yeah
, it must have,” Brynn agreed slowly.

She tried to piece together the broken memories Rachel had left her with, trying to understand the order of events she had been given. She could imagine Rachel hoping that the ‘meeting’ her co-workers had with Eris’
s department didn’t end badly. Maybe she even hid away in A1 thinking she could find a way to break them out.