“It worked,” Brynn said in amazement.
“Brynn get out of there!” Ty shouted in her ear. “Amber pull her out!”
“The pinch worked, Hadlock!” Brynn yelled, looking at Eris and her Workers in amazement and wondering how the Angel could possibly be in such a vulnerable state at that moment.
“It only lasts for a minute, you need to run,” Hadlock reminded her, trying to remain calm in the face of their plans falling apart around them.
“Come on,” Amber yelled at her, pulling Brynn by the wrist away from the woman who wanted to kill her.
“Right,” Brynn agreed, coming to her senses. “Jonah, we’ve got to leave now,” Brynn said over her shoulder, finally realizing the dire situation they were in.
Not hearing any response from her friend, she turned around to pull him away as well, knowing full well that the shock of seeing Eris frozen was enough to keep anyone from wanting to leave.
“Jonah!” Brynn shouted again, looking at her friend.
Her friend, however, was not looking at her.
Instead, Jonah stared straight ahead at the spot where Brynn had been only moments before.
His eyes unblinking and his body immobilized.
Just like Eris.
Chapter 22: Knowledge
“Stop it!” Brynn screamed as she forcefully fought against Amber who was dragging her backwards towards the train. “Let me go!”
“Ty, help me grab her,” Amber yelled back to the train car where half of their group sat waiting, complete shock and lack of comprehension on their faces.
They had no idea what had just happened.
“It’s not what you think,” Brynn shrieked in a complete state of terror, still using all of the strength she could muster to fight against the grips of Amber and Ty who had just joined them.
“What happened?” he asked Amber as he grabbed Brynn by the arm and began pulling her towards the train. “Where’s Jonah? Did Eris get him?”
“Jonah is an A.I.,” Amber said grimly as she continued to force her friend away from the facility.
“He’s not,” Brynn insisted, tears now pooling in her eyes as she pulled against her friends. “There’s something wrong with him. We can’t just leave him in there with her!” she cried. “She’s going to kill him!”
“Stop screaming,” Amber said harshly, slapping a hand over Brynn’s mouth and looping her other arm around the girl’s stomach to drag her onto the train. “You’re going to bring the Workers down on all of us.”
Brynn continued to struggle against her friend’s grasp but her fight was quickly leaving her as tears began pouring down her cheeks in full force. She shook with the effort of holding her emotions in but was failing miserably, gasping for air that wouldn’t seem to fill her lungs.
Amber, who had suddenly become the unspoken leader, shoved Brynn into a chair, looking over at Ty and saying, “Make sure she doesn’t try to leave, I’m going to go find Rusty so we can get out of here. The only reason we’re still alive is because Eris is frozen and can’t call the facility down on us.”
Ty sat silently next to Brynn, placing his arm over her shaking shoulders with a look of complete shock on his face.
“Rusty?” Hadlock called over the comms unit from his position at the front of the train.
They had already started it up and it had begun to slowly move forward.
“Rusty the train is moving you guys have to get here now or you’ll miss it.”
“They got her!” Rusty shouted once the static died down on her end.
They could hear a high pitched screaming coming from the entrance to A1 as Rusty appeared, carrying one of the twins over her shoulder.
Rusty and the girl were covered in blood, much like Eris had been, and Rusty wore a look of grim determination on her face as she carried the screaming girl into the train.
The two of them hopped in the car that was quickly picking up speed and shut the sliding door as they left A1, engulfing the group in an eerie half silence only broken up by the sobs of Brynn and the screams of the unknown twin. Rusty plopped down on a bench, letting the twin fall to the floor of the car in a heap; her small pale hands clawing at the ground and leaving little red lines wherever they touched.
“She killed Cambria,” Rusty whispered as her voice cracked, though her eyes were surprisingly dry.
“He didn’t know what he was,” Brynn said between muffled cries that were barely audible over the blood curdling screams Devey was emitting.
Bennett ran over to the girl and pulled her into a hug, trying to comfort her and quiet her terror but Devey lashed out, pushing Bennett away from her and continuing her ear piercing screaming.
“She didn’t just kill her,” Rusty went on in a shocked monotone over the noise Devey was making. She was apparently oblivious to the chaos going on around them as she stared off into the distance. “She completely ripped her apart. With her bare hands. In two seconds.”
“Stop it!” Devey screamed, her voice sounding like shattered glass as it broke over them. “We have to go get her!”
“She’s dead,” Rusty yelled. “You saw what Eris did to her.”
“Stop!” Devey shrieked again, clamping her hands over her ears and beginning to rock back and forth on the floor of the train car, her blood soaked clothes leaving red marks on the ground.
Dash and Tate sat in the corner of the car silently, Dash’s eyes watering with tears that he silently wiped away as Amber and Hadlock held a whispered conference. Rusty placed her hand against the window of the train car, leaving a bloody handprint on the glass.
“They have to know how we got in. They’re going to shut down the train tunnel and kill all of us,” she said slowly. “They’ll collapse the tunnel before they let us get away.”
“Rusty, that’s not helping,” Hadlock shouted over at the shell-shocked girl.
“Ty, he didn’t know what he was,” Brynn insisted, looking over at her friend and grabbing his face, forcing him to look into her eyes. “You have to believe me. He never knew what he was.”
“Brynn, we’ll talk about it later,” Ty said in a hushed voice, glancing tentatively over at Devey who was now emitting a low, strangled sob.
The entire train compartment was in a state of pandemonium and after a while, Brynn couldn’t tell who was crying, who was shouting, or what was real.
“Rift?” she heard Hadlock say from the train controls. “We had a leak in our group. You need to get everything out of the house, they know who we are and where our base is. We need to relocate on Halcyon and figure out what we’ll do from there.”
Hadlock paused for a moment and all that could be heard was Rusty’s heavy breathing, Devey’s whimpering as she rocked herself, and Brynn’s occasional sniffle as she tried to stop the tears that wouldn’t relent.
“I’m just hoping they don’t have a way to cave in the tunnel or we’ll all be dead pretty soon,” he went on, his one sided conversation echoing through the train car. “Yeah, we got the files and the bug planted,” he said.
He paused again and looked over at Brynn for a moment before quickly bringing his eyes to the floor and lowering his voice, though Brynn could still hear his last statement as it rang through her head.
“It was Jonah”
The train ride from A1 to Eastern Metropolis was a long and tense one. With the constant possibility of the A.I.s caving the tunnel in and the emotional strain they were all under, the train car felt more like a time bomb ready to go off.
Devey had fallen asleep on the ground, refusing to let anyone touch her and still soaked in her sister’s blood. Rusty had stopped repeating, “Eris ripped her apart” and instead rested her head against the window of the train car, her eyes wide and unblinking as she stared at the tunnel walls flying past. Tate, Dash, and Bennett kept to themselves, trying not to get in anyone’s way and keeping quiet while Amber and Hadlock talked in low voices at the front of the compartment about what information had been compromised b
ecause of Jonah.
Brynn lay on a bench with her head in Ty’s lap as his thumb made small circles over the back of her neck soothingly.
“He didn’t know,” Brynn said for the millionth time, her voice thick from her constant stream of tears. “He didn’t know what he was and we just left him there to die with her.” She wiped at her puffy sore eyes with the back of her hand.
“Brynn, if he’s really an A.I., Eris isn’t going to hurt him,” Ty reasoned softly, his gentle voice beginning to calm her nerves as it always did.
“But look what she did to him last time. She left that scar on his cheek.”
Ty stopped rubbing the small circles on the back of Brynn’s neck at this statement, his face reflecting the deep thought he had fallen into.
“A.I.s don’t get hurt. They don’t get scars,” Ty said in confusion.
“Exactly,” Brynn agreed. “So he can’t be an A.I., which means we left a human being from the opposition in the lair of a psychopath.”
“No Brynn, that’s not what I mean,” Ty said, trying to get his point across. “The pinch stopped Jonah, which means he’s an A.I.,” he began, “But he got that scar from Eris supposedly.”
“What are you trying to say Ty?” Brynn asked, finally sitting up to look her friend in the eye.
“I think Jonah might have set the whole thing up. If A.I.s can’t get hurt like us, then they shouldn’t get scars. So the only way Jonah could get a scar is if they redesigned his face to have one… which would make sense if he was working with them.”
“He wasn’t working with them Ty,” Brynn said in a dangerously low voice, her sadness now turning to anger. “He didn’t know what he was.”
“How do you not know you’re a robot?” Ty asked her incredulously.
“If they can suppress curiosity, why couldn’t they suppress someone’s memory? Maybe they erased any knowledge he had of his past life and made him believe he was a human.”
“What makes you think they can suppress curiosity? Why would they bother to do that, Brynn?” Ty asked in a pained tone, obviously thinking that now Brynn was just making things up to justify Jonah’s existence.
“They can suppress curiosity all right,” Rusty stated simply, her wide green eyes never blinking; still looking hauntingly out the window. “Why do you think you lot are so pliable?”
Brynn winced at the harsh way in which Rusty had decided to deliver this news. She supposed she couldn’t really blame her though, given the state of shock she was currently in.
“They suppressed our curiosity?” Ty repeated, his voice sounding distant as he looked over at Brynn, hurt in his eyes.
“Not Brynn’s, just everyone else’s,” Rusty added, very unhelpfully.
“How long have you known about this, Brynn?” he asked her, looking slightly disgusted that his best friend could keep something so monumental from him.
“I was going to tell you, I just had to figure out how,” Brynn pleaded.
“Let me guess,” he began, “Jonah doesn’t have suppressed curiosity either, does he? And somehow Eris just happened to know we were coming.”
“He’s not an A.I., Ty,” Brynn insisted firmly.
“Then what is he Brynn?” Ty asked incredulously.
“Maybe they didn’t need him? Maybe they needed more test subjects? Maybe they wanted an A.I. out in Seaside to keep an eye on the citizens without his knowledge?” Brynn said, listing the many possible scenarios she’d come up with to explain Jonah’s little secret.
“Or maybe the boy from the library had the answers to your questions all along.”
Chapter 23: Caves
The entire dynamic of the group had changed overnight and it left Brynn utterly off balance. Devey hadn’t spoken since her screaming fit in the train but no one seemed to press her on the matter. Everyone tip toed around the small, fragile girl as if she might shatter at any moment. The scowl she normally wore was gone, replaced by a haunted look that never left her angelic face.
The group had relocated to a large cave on the coast, far from Eastern Metropolis or any other city. Rusty explained to them that she knew about almost every cave system on the coast of Halcyon since she’d been forced to find one just right to store her submarine in and had come across, what appeared to be, an old Worker’s headquarters that had long since been abandon. This was where they would be spending their time.
After directing everyone to their new temporary headquarters, she’d left right away, fearing that Jonah would tell Eris where The Bucket was hidden and that the Angel, in turn, would completely destroy the mechanical feat Rusty had been so proud of.
Amber, who had never been one for having adventures, had changed in A1. Brynn hardly recognized her friend’s determination or sudden leadership skills. Amber had taken charge once Rusty left the group behind to go get Rift and any other recruits willing to join them in what now appeared to be an all-out war. Amber and Hadlock constantly held private conferences in the cavernous room near the sea, strategizing and keeping information on a need-to-know basis.
Apparently Jonah’s betrayal had left everyone with the feeling that sharing every detail of their plans wasn’t such a good idea.
Brynn and Ty didn’t speak for days after their return to the relative safety of the cave. They avoided eye contact and skirted the subject of Brynn’s lie until eventually, the sadness that Cambria’s death had left behind, forced them into an unspoken agreement that they had forgiven each other. Brynn could no longer face her quickly worsening nightmares on her own and Ty could no longer watch her wake every night in terror without wanting to help her. It was in his nature to watch over her.
The small group that made up The Alliance slept on the floor of the cavernous cave, crowded into one spot in a mess of clumsily scattered blankets and pillows. In the midst of the chaos, Brynn spent her evenings beside Ty, trying to stop the dark thoughts that wouldn’t seem to leave her alone. Her dreams were more vivid now, more violent than they had been before, though the walls still shifted and the lights still flickered on and off. In the background of her dreams, Brynn constantly saw a mangled and bloodstained version of Cambria, staring wordlessly at her.
Her normally pale skin looked more purple than white and the usual smile was gone from her face, replaced by a silent scream that even Brynn couldn’t hear. Her headaches were coming with more force now and the dizziness she had almost grown accustomed to over the last few months was now too much to handle.
Things were falling apart.
One night, when the rest of their party was asleep, resting up for the next day when Rusty would be back, Brynn replayed her conversations with Jonah to give herself a rest from her constant visions of Cambria’s lifeless body. She tried to find some clue that he had been working with Eris all along but didn’t find anything that suggested such a betrayal.
Jonah hadn’t ever approached her. Brynn found him in the library and practically forced him to work with her.
Jonah hadn’t ever come up with the ideas that ultimately led to them finding A1. Brynn had decided to jump off of the train.
If Jonah knew what was happening all along and was trying to lead Brynn to A1, he hadn’t done a very good job of it.
Brynn shifted next to Ty at the thought that she had left Jonah in A1 to die.
“Are you all right?” Ty asked sleepily.
Rolling onto his side to face Brynn and breathing deeply as he attempted to blink away whatever dream he had been having.
“Jonah didn’t know,” Brynn whispered, the phrase so common for her now that it almost felt rehearsed.
Ty sighed at this statement and brushed a few stray hairs away from Brynn’s face to get a better look at her, being quiet so that he didn’t disturb the others sleeping around them.
“I know you don’t want to believe that he betrayed us,” Ty began slowly. “As much as we didn’t get along, I never would have thought him capable of that. But it doesn’t change the facts Brynn. Jonah is an A.I., and
that means he’s been working with Eris.”
“The one fact doesn’t lead to the other,” she protested. “I know it seems bad because he didn’t know he was an A.I., but think back to all of the times I was alone with him, Ty. How many times could he have hauled me off to A1 forcefully? How many times could he have killed me or you?”
Confusion passed over Ty’s sleepy face for a moment before he answered.
“Eris loves her test results, right?” Ty asked, to which Brynn nodded in response. “Maybe this whole thing with you was a test to see how much they could get you to remember without having to torture the information out of you. She already knows that doesn’t work out too well since she killed Rachel without getting any answers. Maybe she’s getting smarter. She does have artificial intelligence; that means she’s capable of learning from her past mistakes.”
“But Jonah never approached me,” Brynn said, repeating the one thing that convinced her Jonah had nothing to do with Eris. “If I hadn’t happened to go to the library that day, I never would have met him.”
“I don’t know if that’s really conclusive evidence,” Ty began, but Brynn quickly cut him off.
“Even after I met him, he didn’t make an effort to seek me out, Ty,” she said pleadingly. “I had to go find him again and try to get him to help me. He didn’t come looking for me after we met.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Ty agreed halfheartedly, though Brynn could tell he was just saying it to get her to rest. He pulled her close to him, letting her rest her head against his chest and stroked her long black hair methodically. “We just can’t know anything for sure yet.”
Brynn touched her nose gently to Ty’s neck with closed eyes and breathed in his comforting scent, hoping that the familiarity she felt there would help her fall back asleep.
“Ty, I love you for always trying to keep me safe,” Brynn began, her eyes still closed and her voice barely above a whisper. “But I have to go back to A1 and get Jonah out of there whether you come with me or not.”
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