Sugar Coated

  “It’s a smaller city, so they notice outsiders more,” Brynn reasoned, though her explanation didn’t fool either of them.

  “If you say so,” he responded.

  Brynn’s point was continually disproved throughout the day as various citizens of Central Wildwood greeted her, or as she showed Jonah to little-known spots in the city that only someone who had spent a significant amount of time exploring would be familiar with.

  As the sun was beginning to make its descent in the sky, Brynn brought Jonah to the wooded mountainside. She wanted to show him where she had climbed the large tree to make the discovery that was, apparently, a well-known fact.

  “Now I feel like we’re actually roughing it,” Jonah panted as he followed behind Brynn up the steep hillside, trying to avoid fallen tree branches and underbrush. “This is pretty intense.”

  “It’s no ocean, but it’ll do,” Brynn said with a slight challenge in her voice as she smiled over at Jonah. “Up for a climb?”

  “Wait, a climb? What have we been doing this whole time?” he asked incredulously.

  “That was a hike. But this,” she said, pointing up at the large pine tree, “is a climb.”

  “So now that you think I can get us off the train without getting killed, you want to let the tree finish us off? Is that what’s going on here?” he asked.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she told him, beginning to scale the pine like an expert, using her legs to grip the trunk while her hands found purchase to pull her up.

  “You’re like a squirrel!” he exclaimed from the ground, watching in amazement as Brynn quickly disappeared into the lush branches of the tree.

  “You’re like a rock,” she teased from her leafy hideout, the cold mist clinging to her jacket and hair.

  “I don’t think I can do that cute little wiggle you did to get up there,” Jonah said, eyeing the tree suspiciously as if it would suddenly grow spikes if he tried to scale it. “Hold on.”

  He disappeared from Brynn’s line of sight for a moment, the pine needles obscuring her view, before he returned wielding two metal trail markers that looked like big red triangles.

  Running purposefully toward the tree, he suddenly broke from his beeline path and headed toward the adjacent pine before using his feet to repel from one trunk to the trunk Brynn had just climbed, digging the metal trail marker deep into the wood. Brynn looked on open-mouthed, unsure of where he had picked up that useful skill, but suddenly finding her little shimmy very juvenile. He brought his free hand back behind him and swung it toward the trunk above his head, digging the second trail marker into the wood a bit further up.

  After repeating this action a few more times he was suddenly standing on a branch beside Brynn’s, sweating, panting, and grinning all at the same time.

  “I can see why you like this adventure stuff. It’s fun,” he said after a long pause.

  “Well, that’s one way to climb a tree,” Brynn replied, trying not to sound as impressed as she was.

  “Race you to the top?” Jonah asked, causing Brynn to balk while she considered what he was actually saying.

  “Of the tree?” she asked, wanting to clarify. Jonah didn’t bother to respond, but instead winked at her before climbing through the branches faster than a tree squirrel. “That’s not fair. You have a head start,” she yelled at him as she pulled herself further up into the huge pine, using all of her arm strength to propel her swiftly forward while still trying to dodge the pinecones Jonah’s ascent was dislodging.

  Disregarding any thought of how high she was climbing, Brynn pushed through the branches expertly, quickly catching up to Jonah, who wasn’t as sure on his feet as Brynn. She passed him up easily and continued her hasty climb until one of the skinny branches broke under her foot, sending her plummeting through open space for several sickening seconds before her back made contact with a particularly thick branch. She let out a loud sound as the air rushed from her lungs in a painful gust, leaving her speechless and scrambling to grab the branch beneath her before she slipped again.

  She could see Jonah’s shocked face above her for a moment before her body tilted to the side, threatening to fall once more. Panicked, Brynn brought her hands and feet behind her and interlocked them so that when her body left the tree branch, she was still dangling from it, her dark hair falling in sheets around her face as she stared at the ground far below.

  “Are you okay?” Jonah called, moving the tree from side to side as he rushed down to a branch next to Brynn.

  His hands wrapped around her waist and pulled her up into a sitting position, allowing the ground below to leave her direct line of sight. She was silent for a moment as her lungs slowly permitted her to breathe once more, her back aching where it had come into contact with the tree branch.

  “I’m normally a much better climber than that,” Brynn finally managed to gasp.

  “Just like you’re normally a much better swimmer than what I’ve seen?” Jonah asked with a laugh, still gripping Brynn’s arm tightly as if he was afraid to let her go after that scare.

  “Exactly,” she responded in a voice still raspy from losing the air in her lungs.

  “I guess we’ll have to fix the situation the same way we fixed the other one then,” he said very seriously.

  “Hot chocolate?”

  Chapter 17: Nightmares

  Brynn and Jonah sat on the floor in the middle of their hotel room, the map he had ripped from the library book sprawled out between them and now covered in writing where they had made guesses about Aywon’s location. Taking a sip of her hot chocolate, Brynn traced her finger slowly along the map, wishing that it would reveal its secrets to her as she stared at it.

  “I think we need to jump early. That way we at least know which direction to head once we’re on the ground,” Jonah said again, still trying to emphasize his point to Brynn.

  “If we’re still alive when we hit the ground,” she pointed out, rubbing her back, which was still sore from her fall earlier that day.

  She tried to magnify that pain in her mind to imagine what the impact of hitting the ground at a high speed would feel like, but couldn’t seem to properly conjure up that unreal pain. Somehow she secretly didn’t want to imagine it, afraid she would back out of the plan she had come up with.

  “We’ll be fine. I’m working on that part right now,” Jonah assured her, tapping his head as if the information for their escape lay somewhere in there.

  “Okay, so how early were you thinking for the jump?” Brynn asked, not wanting to talk about the possibility of their deaths anymore.

  “Well, the way I figured it, if we jump right at six hours into the trip we’ll already be past the city because the train would have had to slow down for a while when it stopped before. Does that make sense?” he asked, to which she nodded, trying to follow his reasoning. “I’d just rather know for sure which way we’re supposed to travel in case we miss the city by a lot.”

  “Assuming there is a city,” Brynn muttered.

  Jonah looked over at her quizzically and then sighed. She had been going over worst-case scenarios that whole day, feeling more responsible for this whole plan now that someone else was actually coming along with her. When it was just Brynn, it didn’t matter if she was wrong or not because no one else would be affected by her mistake. Now the stakes were much higher.

  “Do you think you didn’t really see those Workers when you were little?” he asked, going over the same line of questioning he had been chanting the entire day trying to get her back on board with her own plan.

  “I know I saw them and I know what that Worker told me, but…maybe she was lying,” Brynn responded, wanting to examine every possibility so that if she was wrong she could at least say she had tried to warn Jonah. “What if there is no city and we’re just stuck in the wilderness until we starve? It’s not like we can just hop back on the speeding train.”

  “Does your tablet work during the entire train ride?” Jonah asked f
or the hundredth time that day. Brynn didn’t respond but simply nodded. “Then that means it’ll work out in the ‘wilderness’ and we can just call someone for help if we get stuck.” Jonah stated matter-of-factly.

  Brynn didn’t bother to mention her fear that her tablet’s signal was connected to the train itself, not wanting to fight that battle quite yet.

  She was still determined to find Aywon, but almost wished that Jonah hadn’t decided to come with her. Handling her failure privately was one thing, but having someone else witness it as well was a whole different story. What scared her even more than not finding Aywon, however, was finding it and learning that her suspicions were right; that there really was something sinister going on. Where would that leave Jonah and Brynn if they were caught?

  “You’re making the face again,” Jonah pointed out as he drank his hot chocolate.

  “What face?”

  “The face you’ve been making all day where your eyebrows come together and you pucker your lips out. It would be cute if it wasn’t so sad,” he said with a laugh.

  “I don’t do that,” she stated even as she made the face.

  “Okay,” he replied, still laughing at her. “So I think we should set a date to leave. That way we don’t get lazy on making preparations and you,” he emphasized, looking accusatorily at Brynn, “can’t keep postponing it.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Brynn admitted guiltily, starting to feel sleepy as they made their plans. “How about one month from today? That way we have enough time to slowly gather supplies from our houses without looking suspicious.”

  “Good point. And we’ll have time to figure out how to get off the train without dying,” Jonah added as an important afterthought.

  “Always a good thing,” Brynn agreed with a yawn.

  “Tired?” Jonah asked, though his voice sounded far away to Brynn. She nodded in response to his question. “It’s been a long day. Why don’t we get some rest? Our train leaves pretty early tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said, amazed at how quickly her drowsiness had come over her as she climbed under her thick down comforter. She was vaguely aware of Jonah asking the room to turn the lights off and the sound of him climbing into his own bed as her thoughts became fuzzy and she slipped quickly into sleep.

  * * *

  “It’s like talking to a wall,” Brynn heard the Angel say, instantly making her not want to open her eyes to the blindingly white room she knew she’d find herself in.

  “Rachel?” the beautiful voice said again impatiently. “I understand that you value your sleep time, since that’s all you seem capable of doing, but this is important. Open your eyes and listen to me—without burning out your mental capacity for thought, that is,” the woman said sarcastically.

  Reluctantly Brynn opened her eyes and instantly regretted it, finding that the room was even more harshly lit than she remembered. It took her a moment to find the Angel standing over her, the only thing setting her apart from the vast expanse of white being her purple eyes.

  “There we go,” she said in a voice full of mock encouragement. “Hopefully that monumental task didn’t overload you too much.”

  If Brynn had the strength to roll her eyes, she would have done it. But as it stood, she only seemed able to lie in one spot, staring up at the woman who apparently loathed her.

  “I know we’ve been through this same battle over and over. For some unfathomable reason you seem reluctant to tell me what exactly you did,” the Angel said calmly, her terrifying eyes locked on Brynn like a hawk watching its prey. “I guess I can understand your dilemma after what happened to your friends,” she said nonchalantly, instantly grabbing Brynn’s attention.

  Her thoughts went straight to Ty, Amber, and Bennett. The Angel couldn’t know about them, could she?

  It took her several moments to remind herself that this Angel thought she was someone else. She kept calling her Rachel instead of Brynn. Whoever Rachel was, it sounded like she was in big trouble.

  “Your friends didn’t catch on to what was happening as quickly as you. And they obviously didn’t possess your sense of self-preservation. Or sheer dumb luck and stupidity, which seems the more likely motivation behind what you did,” she stated as a slow smile crept onto her perfect face. “Listen, I’m the head of my department. You’re the head of yours…or at least…you were before I killed them all. So I like to think we’re on the same page here. That we understand each other.”

  The woman waited for a moment, as if thinking Brynn would respond. She couldn’t, of course. Just as she hadn’t been able to respond to any of the other questions the Angel had asked her over the course of many years.

  “You’re relatively smart…for what you are. I don’t understand why this seems to be so difficult for you. So let’s try this a different way,” she said, making Brynn tense her body, preparing for whatever new form of torture she would be subjected to.

  Instead of walking away to push a button or grab a sinister-looking device, the woman simply sat on a chair beside Brynn’s bed and leaned over so that her face was close to Brynn’s before she began whispering to her.

  “Do you want to know what we did to your friends?” Brynn attempted to shake her head, knowing that whatever she was about to tell her, she probably didn’t want to know. “We told them there was a mandatory meeting and ushered them into a room. You were supposed to be there too, of course, but we’ll ignore that little oversight. They didn’t even look suspicious that they were in that room and we were nowhere to be found,” she said with a smile, as if reliving a fond memory. “They were too stupid to realize something was wrong. And of course, you didn’t share what you had learned with them. So you just let them walk to their deaths. Very brave, by the way,” she added sarcastically, giving Brynn a meaningful look.

  “So, all of your friends and colleagues sat in that room idiotically waiting for a meeting to start as we pumped gas in through the air conditioning vents. All in all, it didn’t take very long, though a few of them showed quite an impressive resistance to the poison. Honestly, I wish I had brought a notepad to record the data so I could examine it later,” the Angel said in a voice so cold and devoid of emotion Brynn had to suppress a whimper. Then she smiled again and let out a soft laugh, remembering her favorite part of the horrible story. “I bet when they smelled the gas most of them thought we were baking them sugar cookies—until people around them started falling to the ground, that is. That would probably clue in even the slowest of them. Though with them, you just never know.”

  Brynn had had enough. She clamped her eyes shut, hoping she could wake up and forget the horrible things this woman was saying. Brynn had always known her Angel felt sinister, but hearing that she had actually killed a room full of people was shocking. Even more shocking was the fact that she seemed proud of her accomplishment. Brynn wished more than anything that she had control of her body during these dreams, but all she seemed capable of was lying there and listening to the woman speak.

  “I know that you think if you tell us what you did we’ll kill you too. That’s the only reason you won’t talk. It’s your only bargaining chip,” the Angel said like a trusted confidante who understood exactly what she was going through. “But I’ll make you a deal—you tell me what else you sent out besides that transmission, and I’ll make sure they take good care of you,” she said, almost believably, though Brynn was pretty sure she didn’t want to be “taken care of” by anyone associated with the Angel.

  “Okay, you caught me,” the Angel finally said with a smile, though a look of frustration was passing over her face and it seemed like she may not be able to control her rage much longer. “I lied. I’m just going to kill you either way and I think we both know you’ll never tell me what you did. So I’ll spend my time coming up with the most creative ways to extract the truth from you. And believe me Rachel, I have an overactive imagination.”

  * * *

  Brynn woke with a start, sitting bolt up
right in her bed and panting. She could feel cold streams of sweat running down her back and she had to place a hand over her stomach to keep from throwing up. Her dreams had become more and more vivid lately, which she wasn’t too thrilled about. All she could think about was the Angel looking at her with those unfeeling violet eyes while she described killing people with joy.

  Keeping one hand firmly grasping a handful of her comforter for support, she looked over to Jonah’s bed to make sure she hadn’t woken him only to find that he was sitting outside on their balcony staring up at the sky. The blue tinted night gave him a serene look and Brynn walked on shaky legs to join him.

  As she slid open the glass door and sat on the hard chair next to him, she glanced over at his face, which was full of confusion.

  “What are you doing up?” he asked before he actually got a good look at her face and raised an eyebrow. “Are you okay? You look terrible.”

  “You always say the nicest things,” she joked.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he responded with a disarming smile.

  “I don’t sleep very well,” Brynn explained. “I have nightmares.” She emphasized this point with a yawn as she grabbed a blanket from the patio table and wrapped it tightly around her.

  It was as if the blanket had been placed there by the hotel just for Brynn. As if it knew she would have a nightmare and would need some fresh air.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Jonah asked cautiously, searching Brynn’s face for the answer.

  “I’ve told my friends a little about it already and they just think I’m crazy,” she mumbled.

  “What if I promise not to think you’re crazy?”

  Brynn looked over at Jonah’s face, which reflected the blue of the night on his tan skin.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  “Promise,” he repeated.

  “I’ve had the nightmares since I can remember,” she began tentatively.

  “Are they always the same?” he asked.