“It’s all right,” he said soothingly, rubbing her back with his free hand that she wasn’t laying on. “I’m right here.”
“You always are,” she replied.
And even with her friend locked up, a group of people who didn’t believe her, and a complete and total suicide mission to prepare for, Brynn did something she couldn’t quite explain. She tilted her head up and brushed her lips lightly against Ty’s, not quite kissing him as she breathed him in.
A look of complete confusion passed over his sleepy features that made Brynn smile for the first time in a long time. She could feel his entire body tense at her actions, as if he didn’t want to move an inch in case he misunderstood what she was doing, before she pressed her full lips against his. Despite the fact that she was pretty sure Ty was half asleep, his arms tightened around her small body, pulling her closer to him. He knotted his fingers in her hair and inhaled deeply as he kissed her, seeming to breathe the moment into his very being.
Though she knew it could have only lasted a few seconds, it seemed like minutes passed before Brynn gave him one last gentle kiss and nudged his nose with her own, pulling away slightly and looking up at Ty through her eyelashes in the darkness.
“Thank you for actually believing all of the crazy stuff I tell you,” she whispered finally, running her long fingers up and down the length of his back as she spoke.
“Is that how you normally thank people?” he asked, his cheeks obviously flushed, even in the darkness.
“Not usually,” she answered, knowing that she had inevitably made things weird between them.
Tomorrow she was sure they’d be awkward around each other and worried about what their late night kiss might mean when all they should have been doing was focusing on their mission. But right at that moment, Brynn wasn’t thinking about their mission the next day, or how weird things were going to be, or if her kiss with Ty meant she didn’t care about rescuing Jonah. Instead she allowed herself one moment of peace and selfishness in her otherwise chaotic existence.
“If that’s how you’re starting to thank people, I’ll have to start doing more nice things for you,” he said, half joking.
“I hope you remember that when we get to A1 and I ask you to complete some impossible task,” Brynn whispered back, suppressing a yawn and wondering when her eyelids had suddenly gotten so heavy.
“I will,” Ty answered, though his voice seemed distant to her, as if it were fading with her consciousness.
“I’ve been right about everything else, Ty,” she whispered, though with her mind slowly slipping into sleep, she wasn’t sure her words made sense. “I’m right about Jonah.”
She was vaguely aware of the soft pressure of Ty’s lips against hers for only a second before she heard him say, “Goodnight, Brynn.”
Just as Brynn had anticipated, in her moment of weakness, bad judgment, or whatever else she was calling it, things had gotten weird between her and Ty. As they stood in a group the next day listening to Rusty’s plans, Brynn knew her mind needed to be on their next trip to A1 where she might very well get kidnapped and murdered, but instead she was wondering if she was standing too close to Ty; or perhaps not close enough.
He could sense the change in their relationship as well as he shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. When he spoke to Brynn he would find a reason to touch her arm or her back, then, as if suddenly realizing that maybe things hadn’t changed between them, he would quickly drop his hand and look down at the ground.
Brynn was determined to keep things as normal as possible and make up for leaving Jonah in A1. She had to save him to make things right and so, she put her feelings aside as she usually did and tried to focus on Rusty’s run down of the days to follow.
“We’re going to take the car I built a while back. I haven’t really given it a proper test run but I think it should be okay,” Rusty was saying, running her fingers wildly through her long red hair like she couldn’t stand still no matter how hard she tried.
“That’s comforting,” Tate said from the back of the group.
“Yeah, and you’re not even coming,” Hadlock put in, apparently lacking faith in Rusty’s abilities.
“How many people does the car fit?” Rift asked.
He had been all business since his return and the group had finally become efficient in his presence.
“Normally it only fits five; two in front and three in the back. But I’m sure we could fit a third person in the front seat, it just might not be as comfortable.”
“That’s not too bad actually,” Ty said. “I thought it would be much more crowded than that.”
Brynn didn’t bother to mention the fact that if everything went according to plan, they’d actually have seven of them coming back instead of six. She knew that her ‘plan’ wasn’t exactly high on the agenda of the group who thought Jonah had betrayed them.
She had thought the facts over, every free second since she’d left A1 and had come to a few decisions. Brynn could admit that Jonah was an A.I.. The evidence was just too monumental to deny. That, however, didn’t mean that Jonah had been working with Eris. The more she thought back on her conversations with him, the more she came to believe this.
No matter what, she knew no one else would believe her, but they hadn’t seen the way Jonah had looked when she’d almost fallen from that tree overhanging the ocean on Panurgic. He had looked as if his whole world had just ended when her foot slipped, and that proved to her more than anything that he wasn’t working with Eris.
He actually cared about her.
Eris’s disdain for Brynn was so all-encompassing that she couldn’t hide it if she tried. Jonah had never so much as looked at Brynn sideways and she knew he couldn’t fake that kind of affection for her.
“Brynn?” Rusty said, her voice a little worried.
“Huh?”
“I asked you if you’re claustrophobic,” Rusty said, apparently not for the first time.
“Oh, no I’m not… why?”
“Air vents,” she said simply.
Apparently Brynn had missed a big chunk of Rusty’s speech and she felt her cheeks flush as the group looked at her.
“Are you going to be okay to go with us?” Hadlock asked, looking at her apprehensively. “Because Rift isn’t really on board with bringing our information source into A1 anyway. He just figured we wouldn’t be able to stop you.”
“Yeah, I’m fine I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” she said quickly. Ty tensed next to her and she could have slapped her palm over her face in embarrassment as she realized how that had sounded. “Nightmares,” she mumbled by way of explanation.
“Nightmares?” Rusty repeated, sounding more excited than someone should when they hear their friend is having bad dreams. “Did you learn anything new?”
“Actually I did!” Brynn exclaimed, suddenly understanding Rusty’s excitement.
She had almost completely forgotten to tell The Alliance about the strange sketch Rachel had burned.
Her kiss with Ty was clouding her thinking.
“Is it something that can help us with our mission?” Rift asked.
“I think it might be the third thing,” Brynn answered.
“What is it?” Hadlock and Amber said at the same time.
“I’m not quite sure what it is. It looked like blueprints for some kind of mechanical vehicle or something. I tried to memorize it so I could draw it for you guys,” she offered helpfully.
“Here,” Ty said instantly, handing over his tablet and letting his fingers linger on hers for a moment too long.
She very pointedly ignored the chills that went down her spine.
“Thanks,” she muttered as she pulled up a blank screen to draw on.
She moved her fingers quickly over the smooth surface, drawing almost mechanically as her memory took over. It was as if Rachel were inside of her mind, guiding her fingers around each curve of the sketch to make sure she got it just
right. When she finished, the group was staring at her strangely.
“What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“You were drawing that with your eyes closed,” Amber answered, sounding like she wasn’t sure if she should be impressed or frightened.
Brynn didn’t say anything. She wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. So instead she handed the tablet over to Rift for evaluation.
“Rusty, have you seen this before?” he asked her.
“It looks like a ship,” Rusty said slowly, as if she were trying to remember the word for what she was looking at.
“Royter will you go through Hadlock’s files while they’re gone and see if you can find anything about ‘ships’?” Rift asked the mysterious and quiet girl with the short black hair who stood stoically behind him.
She didn’t say anything but nodded as she transferred the sketch from Ty’s tablet to the handmade one Hadlock and Rusty had built, before handing it back to Ty.
“I knew you’d remember something,” Rusty said happily, giving Brynn a quick wink. “Now everyone get your stuff and we’ll head out.”
As the group scattered to gather up their things, Brynn stopped Ty, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him away from everyone else.
“What was she saying about air ducts?” Brynn asked.
“You really were spacing out, weren’t you?” he asked with a laugh. “She said we’re going to go in through the air duct system since they already know about the front entrance and the underground tunnel. We definitely don’t want to try the same trick twice.”
“We probably don’t want to try any trick,” Brynn said dryly. “And how are we destroying the gas when we get in?”
“Hadlock wrote some sort of computer virus to destroy whatever they already have stockpiled and he’s giving us a bug to plant in the facility so that he can manually override the gas emitters all over the planet.”
“Oh good, so just an easy job this time,” Brynn said sarcastically.
“Should be a piece of cake for you. This is old hat right?” Ty joked, bringing his hand up to her cheek for just a brief moment before walking away.
Brynn felt a jolt of nerves at the prospect of revisiting A1, but the secret she kept from her companions weighed more heavily on her than anything.
Though she would do what she could to help them plant the bug and destroy the gas, her main purpose for entering the terrifying facility once more was to rescue a friend she’d left behind.
She only hoped she wouldn’t be too late.
Chapter 25: Car
Riding in the ‘car’ Rusty had built turned out to be one of the most terrifying experiences of Brynn’s life. And that was saying something coming from a girl who’d been in A1, the ocean, and faced the awful Eris on numerous occasions.
The car was a structure built from metal pipes that had been welded together. It was completely open as compared to the closed-in train cars they were used to, and the large wheels were rubber rather than metal. The group had strapped themselves into the car with harnesses, though Amber, who sat in the front middle where there wasn’t actually a seat, had to use a makeshift harness.
Brynn suspected that the car wouldn’t be such an alarming device if Rusty hadn’t been driving. It was almost certain that ‘laying low’ wasn’t an easy task when driving across the desert landscape on the way to A1 in a car that kicked up so much dust the group was entirely covered from head to foot. But the fact that Rusty was screaming happily at the top of her lungs and trying to locate any bump in the road to drive over didn’t really help their predicament at all.
The engine alone was loud enough to give away their location at the drop of a hat. All you had to do was listen and you’d know exactly where they were. But the long trail of dust that spanned out behind them in an endless wall was like a giant sign, pointing the A.I.s to Brynn and her friends.
Needless to say, they felt very conspicuous driving through the desert.
“Rusty!” Brynn shouted from the backseat.
She gripped Ty’s hand tightly in her own, trying to blink away the dust in her eyes and hoping Rusty could hear her over the din of the loud engine.
“Rusty!” she called again when the girl didn’t respond.
“What?” Rusty called back, taking a break from her manic screaming but still going just as fast through the bumpy desert.
She wore large brown goggles that blocked out the dust, allowing her to continue driving like a maniac unhindered.
“Maybe you should slow down!” Brynn yelled.
“Or stop screaming at least,” Ty suggested with a grin, in an unusually good mood when he was on his way back to A1.
“You guys take the fun out of everything,” she pouted, adjusting the goggles she wore and turning her attention back to the endless sandy landscape in front of them.
Apparently their advice didn’t make a dent in her intentions because she continued to make sharp turns and even got all four wheels of the car off the ground at one point as she sped over a hill, giggling like a crazy person all the while.
“If we’re going to die in there, I want to make sure my last few hours are amazing,” she called back, causing Brynn to grip Ty’s hand even tighter.
They were clearly in the company of a psychopath.
By nightfall they had reached A1. The facility stood ominously in the distance. Its lights glistening like thousands of stars in the night sky. Brynn swallowed hard at the sight, remembering the way she, Ty, and Jonah had stood out in the sandy darkness not too long ago.
So much had changed in such a short time, but she was still as determined as ever to find answers and protect her friends, despite all of the horrible things she’d seen since that fateful night.
“Are we going in during the night or will we wait until it’s light out?” Amber asked, looking at the facility as if she could size it up right then and there.
“I don’t want to waste any time. We need to hide the car, get in there, plant the bug, and get right back out. I don’t need anyone else dying because we’re taking too long,” Rusty said, able to be as blunt as she wanted to be now that Devey wasn’t with them. “Besides, now that they don’t know we’re coming we should get right back in there. They’ll be expecting us to take a long time to recover from our last trip.”
“That’s all well and good, but do we actually know what we need to do to navigate through the vents?” Brynn asked skeptically, ignoring the dig at Jonah.
“Of course,” Hadlock answered, sounding offended. “The main air duct is located on the wall closest to us. We’ll pop the grate off and wriggle through there until we find the control room where we need to plant the bug.”
“Do you think it’s really good for all of us to go in when all we need to do is plant a bug? Isn’t that like asking for casualties?” Ty pointed out.
“I’ve got two bugs and we have two groups taking different routes in case…,” Hadlock let his words trail off.
“In case one of our groups doesn’t make it,” Brynn finished for him.
“It’s important that we get this bug planted. Even if we never stop Eris, we can still slow her down and prolong everyone’s lives.”
“Which I’m sure they’d appreciate if they knew we were doing it,” Bennett said with a what can you do shrug.
“I want Rusty and Ty to go together,” Hadlock said, handing them one small device. “And Amber, Bennett, and Brynn to go together.”
Ty looked over at Brynn with a worried look in his eye. He seemed like he might protest but thought better of it. As much as she hated to admit it, she was glad she wouldn’t be going with Ty, though it made absolutely no sense to her that Hadlock would group the two tech savvy people together. She definitely didn’t question his choice though, since it would be easier for her to slip away from Amber and Bennett to go find Jonah. If she was with Ty he’d insist on coming with her and probably end up getting himself hurt. She didn’t want that to be her fault so instead s
he shot him a reassuring smile and shrugged her shoulders.
“Where will you be, Hadlock?” Amber asked, surveying their surroundings.
“I’ll be just a few feet from the air vent system, hiding in the bushes,” he said sullenly, as if hiding in bushes were very beneath him. “I’m a little worried that the comms units won’t work in the air vent system since you’ll be surrounded by metal, but luckily I brought a map for you guys to follow.”
“What about once we’re inside? How will we know if the Workers are coming?” Brynn asked, suddenly worried.
“The communication system should pick up again once you’re out of the vent,” he said unconcernedly, as if their lives didn’t rely on this very important fact.
“On that very confidence inspiring note, shall we go?” Rusty asked in a chipper voice.
Crawling through the air vents was a lot harder than Brynn thought it would be, and their white clothing was quickly becoming brown with the dust they were picking up.
For a spotless high-tech facility, they had a lot of dust.
The cold metal box was so confined that they couldn’t actually crawl on their hands and knees. Instead the group had to lie on their stomachs and use their elbows to drag the rest of their body across the slick metal surface.
They had all entered the vent together though they would soon be splitting up as they came to a fork in the tunnel.
“Ty and…,” Hadlock began to say, but his voice quickly cut out and melted into static, just as he said it would.
“Do you guys have the map?” Brynn called back in a hushed voice.
Despite the cold air blowing past them, she was sweating with the effort of dragging herself through the small confined space. Her arms burned and her breathing was heavy.
“I think Rusty and I are supposed to go right at this fork and you guys keep going straight,” Ty said from behind Brynn. “Then you keep going straight past two more forks before turning right. You’ll need to backtrack to get to the room from the way you’re going.”
“Ty?” Brynn said.