Sugar Coated

by Shannen Crane Camp

  “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 even 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.

  Acknowledgements

  I’ve got to admit, this book never would have been written if The Husband and his brother Joe didn’t insist on getting together for every Superbowl in Idaho. Without that three hour car ride home, I wouldn’t have filled the edges of a phonebook with the plot for all three books as The Husband and I bounced ideas off of each other. So thank you sports…even though I don’t like you very much most of the time. And thank you Camp family, for giving us a reason to drive three hours in the dark Idaho wilderness.

  Jared, Danni, Amber, Andrea, Bremen, and Rachel need a huge thank you for reading this book when it still had it awful original title and was filled with typos and things that defied the laws of physics… in a bad way. Not in a creative way (which reminds me, thanks Bremen, for explaining to me how wind draft works…that would have been embarrassing).

  A big thank you to my family and friends for putting up with me constantly complaining about a certain infamous sugar cube in the literary world and for assuring me it’s not that big of a deal.

  A ginormous amount of love to my publisher and lit family for their amazingness. I can’t even believe how wonderful you guys all are and I couldn’t have made up a better lit family if I tried. One house united!

  Cindy Bennett, Jackie Hicken, Jolene Perry, and Heather Pead. You are my book people. That’s really all I can say on that matter. I’ll never be able to thank you guys enough for your support, and every book I write, gets out into this world because of the help you give me.

  Mom and Dad, thanks for raising a reader and buying me the 10,000 Goosebumps books I just unpacked from a box.

  And of course, I always have to thank my Heavenly Father for blessing me with a love of writing, without it I wouldn’t be in the best profession ever.

  Husband. You are so mint.