Rose Tinted

by Shannen Crane Camp

  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 dream 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.

  She could imagine the video being made sometime in that period before she had discovered Maxwell’s body and stopped speaking all together.

  “This is why we need you, Brynn,” Rusty said in a way that she felt carried more weight than the erratic girl normally possessed. “I know it hurts you, but we need the information in your head.”

  Brynn looked over at Rusty, the girl who was rude, brilliant, and never too serious about anything. It made her wonder what things she had seen in her life to make her that way. She tried to detach herself from being serious in order to keep from getting attached to people, that much was clear. Brynn could see that she wasn’t the only one who had lost things because of Eris and then she thought back to the secrets that apparently resided in her head.

  Secrets that Rusty and her cause needed.

  Secrets that Eris desperately wanted.

  Secrets that she couldn’t recall even if she wanted to, and she sighed with the weight of it all.

  “Doesn’t everybody?” Brynn finally asked mirthlessly.

  Chapter 13: Panurgic

  Brynn hadn’t realized just how awful being stuck in a small confined room with five other people could be, until she had spent one week in that very situation. She hadn’t expected the journey to be a quick one since Rusty had designed the machine herself, but one week had never gone by as slowly as it had aboard The Bucket.

  Ty and Jonah, who had been getting along better than normal at the beginning of the trip were now constantly at each other’s throats, snapping at the smallest comment and making life very awkward for Brynn who frequently had to choose who she would spend her time with.

  Because Bennett was so anxious for an excuse to talk to Jonah, she gladly volunteered to keep him company so that Brynn could try to calm Ty down. In the end, Jonah just ended up being annoyed, Ty would mock him, and the whole group would fall into an uncomfortable silence with Rusty muttering about how often airheads fought.

  “How do you even know where you’re going?” Amber asked on the last day of their journey.

  Everyone was anxious at the prospect of finally seeing the sunlight again, something they had definitely taken for granted before.

  “I know,” Rusty answered mysteriously, not bothering to answer a question that was apparently so beneath her.

  Amber let out a frustrated little sigh and stomped over to one of the many sofas, plopping into it and shooting Rusty death glares that she very pointedly ignored.

  Ty and Bennett were playing a game against each other on their tablets, while Brynn and Jonah sat on a couch near the back of the room, trying to figure out their next move.

  “I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t run away with me when I asked you, huh?” he said, nudging Brynn with his shoulder and instantly reminding her of the kiss they had shared.

  She tried to push the memory from her mind to keep from getting distracted, though in reality, it was one of the few good memories she possessed after leaving A1.

  “Try to seduce me all you want, I’ll still be headstrong and do whatever I think is best,” she tried to joke, her laugh coming out all wrong.

  “You’re giving me permission to seduce you?” he asked her with a devilish grin that made the blood rush to her cheeks.

  “Stop changing the subject,” Brynn said, “We’re supposed to be figuring out what we’ll do when we get to Panurgic.”

  “You always have to suck the fun out of everything, don’t you?” Jonah asked. “But if you insist, I guess we’ll just meet with Rift to see what he knows and go from there.”

  “That doesn’t really sound like a plan,” Brynn said with a frown. “What if he doesn’t really know anything? Or what if he refuses to help us.”

  “Why would he refuse to help the girl from the video he’s religiously followed his whole life?”

  “I’m not really Rachel,” Brynn reminded him, facing the fact that she couldn’t seem to forget.

  No matter how brave she tried to be or how much she wanted to get rid of the threat of Eris, she’d never be as smart or courageous as her DNA donor. The longer her nightmares persisted, the more skittish and paranoid she became, and Brynn couldn’t help but feel that her mind was slowly unraveling.

  “You’re as good as,” he said in a way that left n
o room for question. “You have her memories, you’re made from her DNA, and somewhere in your head, you have her secrets. We just have to figure out where they’re hiding.”

  “And there’s the problem,” Brynn said with a sigh, slouching down into the soft velvet couch in aggravation. “If she wanted to hide her secrets in my mind, she definitely did a good job.”

  “They’re in there,” Jonah said, stroking Brynn’s hair and looking at her like a puzzle he was trying to solve. “Don’t worry Brynn. We’ll find them.”

  “You kids ready to get off The Bucket?” Rusty called from the front of the much too small room.

  Through the murky beam of light that cut through the water ahead of them, a dark stone wall could be seen. The Bucket slowed gradually to a stop in the dark water and let out a deep metallic groan that resonated around the room.

  “Did we stop?” Bennett asked, looking up from her game with Ty in confusion.

  “Are we about to surface?” Ty asked urgently, his eyes brightening with excitement as he practically leapt off the couch and ran over to where Rusty stood by the controls.

  “How exactly does this huge metal thing rise to the surface?” Amber asked. “It’s so heavy.”

  “I wouldn’t want to confuse you with the mechanics of it, but I built compartments in the side of The Bucket that either store water to sink us or air to bring us back to the surface,” Rusty said in her most condescending tone.

  She paused and stared at Amber to see if her response had sunk in, thoroughly misreading Amber’s annoyed glare for ignorant confusion.

  “Let’s see,” Rusty said almost to herself, “How can I relate this to shopping?”

  “I’m going to kill her,” Amber said to Brynn, so seriously that Brynn felt the need to step in.

  “We should probably hurry up and surface so we can meet up with Rift and get this all figured out,” Brynn said quickly, trying to stop the confrontation between Amber and Rusty that was bound to happen eventually.

  “You’re the boss,” Rusty answered with a shrug before adding, “Sort of.”

  She proceeded to push buttons, pull levers, and do other things that Brynn didn’t understand until she heard an odd mechanical sound coming from the walls of the room.

  It sounded to her as if bubbles were rushing through the walls as the water left the compartments Rusty had built and air filled the spaces. The Bucket began to move slowly upward towards the dark surface of the water and Brynn hoped they wouldn’t end up in another cavern pool to swim through. She didn’t think she’d have the courage to go through that ordeal twice.

  The Bucket felt as sturdy as solid ground when it reached the surface and Brynn couldn’t understand how Rusty had figured out technology that was so advanced. As difficult as the girl was to work with, she had to admit, she really was a genius.

  Ty didn’t say anything when Rusty stepped away from the controls, but he watched her walk over to the ladder leading up to the hatch with a reverent awe. Brynn rolled her eyes at the gesture before glancing at Jonah to make sure he wasn’t making a fool out of himself on Rusty’s behalf too.

  He watched her as well, but his eyes held a suspicion that Ty’s definitely didn’t. It didn’t take long for Brynn to remind herself that her boy problems could be sorted out after she saved the world and everyone on it.

  Walking through a landscape unlike any Brynn had ever seen, with wet hair and dry ‘new’ clothes, only one thought passed through her mind: It’s all real.

  She had known that A1, Eris, and the testing were real, but until she walked through the foggy rolling green hills of Panurgic, it had all felt like a bad dream that she would wake up from.

  And yet there she was.

  On a completely different land mass that she and her friends hadn’t even known about until a few weeks ago. It was amazing to Brynn how much everything could change in such a short period of time.

  Brynn and her friends had changed (at Rusty’s request) into clothes that would help them fit in on Panurgic. Even Amber and Bennett were more than willing to wear the brown, threadbare clothes after having swum through the freezing cold water to exit The Bucket.

  Unstylish clothes were better than wet clothes it turned out.

  The walk from the cavern where Rusty stored The Bucket to the old boarding house she called home was much shorter than the trek from Eastern Metropolis. Only an hour had passed before they were standing outside in the damp foggy air, looking up at the large wooden house in wonder.

  “Welcome to The Moor,” Rusty said grandly, waving her arm at the rickety old house.

  “You even named your house?” Amber asked in the manner of someone who thought the idea was ridiculous.

  “The city is The Moor,” Rusty corrected, not taking offense to Amber’s tone. “The house is just a house.”

  Talking, clanging, and general chaos could be heard from outside of the unstable structure and Brynn was instantly reminded of the loud night club in Eastern Metropolis. If anything, she knew, this would be quite a bit different from that noise. This din was less enjoyable.

  “Ready for the pandemonium?” Rusty asked with a much too wide smile as she escorted them over the porch and into the dark stuffy house.

  The whole structure seemed very different from anything Brynn had seen back in Halcyon. The entire house was made from wood and didn’t seem to have any SmartHouse wiring whatsoever. No mechanical voice greeted her when she entered (which made her miss Charlie), no wall screens could be found anywhere, and most of all, it was dirty.

  The house didn’t pick up after its owners.

  Brynn and her friends stood crowded in the doorway as if frightened to enter any further into the unfamiliar structure. The whole thing was entirely too archaic to make them comfortable.

  The sound of machines humming loudly could be heard from somewhere upstairs, and it didn’t take long before a young boy who couldn’t be older than nine or ten ran down the wooden stairs on bare feet.

  The boy was small for his age, with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes that slanted slightly in the corners.

  “Do you see that,” Brynn whispered to Amber, staring at the boy who was almost to the bottom of the stairs, still running.

  “He looks just like Ty,” Amber agreed with a nod, her eyes wide as she watched the boy rush past Rusty.

  “Oy!” Rusty called to him. “Where’s Rift?’

  “He’s out,” the boy shouted back over his shoulder, taking a corner so quickly Brynn thought he’d surely slip and fall, but in an instant he was gone, his thumping bare feet receding into the back of the house.

  “Who was that?” Jonah asked, watching the empty hallway where the boy had been only seconds before.

  “Dash,” Rusty said in annoyance. “He’s our little gopher. Sends messages to other cities and does some spying for us.”

  “He’s so young,” Bennett remarked sadly.

  “His parents died years ago so we recruited him,” Rusty shrugged her shoulders matter-of-factly.

  “Ty, did you see him?” Brynn asked, still amazed by just how much the boy had looked like her friend.

  “He looks like my dad when he was younger,” Ty answered distantly.

  “Was your dad on ‘orphan’?” Rusty asked, putting air quotes around the last word.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then he was probably one of the people made in the lab. He and Dash’s family were probably made from the same sample,” Rusty answered dryly, as if this weren’t a shocking discovery.

  “That’s…” Ty began, though he didn’t finish his sentence.

  There was really too much and yet not enough to say when you found out you were made from the same DNA as another person you’d never met. Brynn knew this fact very well.

  “Of course orphans on Halcyon aren’t the same as orphans on Panurgic,” Rusty went on. “Our orphans actually had parents at one time who died. Your orphans are just given the title when the A.I.s decide to make someone in the lab but
don’t want to weird out the citizens on your little Utopia.”

  “Yeah we know,” Amber said in annoyance.

  Brynn had filled her and Bennett in on everything she thought might be useful to them on the ride to Panurgic. Of course, she’d left out the little detail about their curiosity being suppressed. She still wasn’t sure how to breach that subject with them.

  “Well I guess we’ll start with the twitchy one upstairs,” Rusty said with a long suffering sigh. It was apparent that she was less than happy to be stuck in a house with a bunch of other ‘geniuses’ as she called them. “You’ve already met the spazzy one.”

  Rusty led the group up the old wooden stairs to the room where all of the noise seemed to be originating. When she ushered them inside, it was instantly clear where Ty would be spending most of his time.

  Despite the old exterior of the house, this room was alive with technology. Screens lined every wall, computers were stacked on the floor, and every spare surface was covered with tablets, keyboards, and other odd electrical devices.

  “Wow,” Ty said, voicing everyone’s thoughts perfectly.

  “This is Hadlock,” Rusty said reluctantly, pointing to a boy a few years older than Brynn who was buried in piles of cords.

  He had light brown hair that stuck up in every direction and dark blue eyes that seemed to constantly be blinking behind his thick black glasses as he took in the group of people around him. Brynn couldn’t help but think of a squirrel when watching the boy turn his head from side to side while examining the group.

  “Hadlock, these are the newest recruits from Halcyon,” Rusty informed the boy.

  He let out a short laugh, as if he thought she might be joking, then quickly replaced his smile with a serious look.

  “Sorry. Did you say you recruited people from Halcyon?” he asked, finding the prospect very amusing.

  “Don’t be rude,” Rusty said, shocking Brynn completely.