Rose Tinted (9 page)

Chapter 10: Alliance

One thing Brynn was very sure of after spending a few hours in the hotel room with Rusty, was that she liked to eat.

A lot.

For such a skinny girl she had already polished off more food than Brynn would eat in a week, and she didn’t look as if she would be slowing down any time soon. Brynn had made introductions when Amber, Bennett, and Jonah had rejoined the group and Rusty barely stopped eating long enough to say hi between mouthfuls of potatoes and bread. The group had all sat around staring at the redhead in awe as they pretended to eat their own food.

Brynn waited uncomfortably for Rusty to begin explaining her plans to them since she had seemed
to be in quite the rush to get off of Halcyon back in the alleyway. Still, she knew better than to ask the girl a question, scared she might send her back into a tirade about how ignorant Halcyonites were and how Brynn was on a need to know basis.

“This is the best part of Halcyon,” Rusty finally said, her mouth full and her voice muffled. She wore a content smile as she washed down the food with a large glass of water, her long lanky frame lounging sideways on an arm chair so that he
r legs dangled over the arm. “I may have to put up with a lot when I’m here, but the food more than makes up for it.”

“Don’t you have food on wherever you
’re from?” Amber asked with her arms crossed over her chest. She and Rusty hadn’t gotten off to the best start since the very first thing Rusty had said to her was, “Oh
you’re
more like a typical Halcyonite. Dumb as a box of rocks.”

“We trade hours in the factory for food, clothes, water… pretty much everything. And since Rift and the rest of us are so busy building up the rebellion
, we can’t work in the factories much. We have people in The Alliance specifically assigned to work to provide food for everyone in the house and trust me, it’s not nearly enough,” she said, stuffing another roll into her mouth.

“You can’t ask your wall screen for more?” Bennett asked, making Brynn want to shoot her a look
to silence her.

Bennett hadn’t quite understood the concept that Panurgic was
very
different than Halcyon and every time she spoke, she only solidified Rusty’s belief that people from Halcyon were too pampered to understand what work was.

“We don’t have wall screens,” Rusty said simply, actually being a lot ni
cer than Brynn had anticipated until she added, “We can’t all expect to get anything we want without anyone to actually make it. Where do you think the material for all your clothes comes from, Princess?”

“Okay,
you don’t need to be rude about it,” Brynn interjected.

She was fine with Rusty saying condescending things to her, but not to her friends who honestly didn’t mean any harm.

“I was just stating a fact,” Rusty said, raising her hands up in surrender.

“Why don’t you tell us how you plan to get us to Panurgic,” Jonah said from the corner of the room.

He hadn’t taken his eyes off Rusty since she had gotten there and Brynn could sense the distrust coming off of him in waves. She had recognized his intelligence right away but it didn’t cause Jonah to warm up to her the way Ty had.

“You need to fuse that blue
cord to the red one instead and remove the black chip with that yellow dot on it if you
really
want to disable any tracking linked to the tablet,” Rusty said to Ty, ignoring Jonah’s statement.

It seemed that the only person who was getting along with Rusty was Ty, who shared a love of technology with her.

“That’s brilliant,” he said in awe, quickly following her directions. “I thought I could just override the tracker by hacking into the system.”

“You can but it’s more effective to remove it all together. Just to be safe,” she said, actually smiling at him and giving Brynn a small pang of unexpected jealousy.

“She’s amazing,” Ty said to Brynn. “How do you know so much about technology if Panurgic is so far behind?”

“We’re not far behind. We just don’t use technology for luxury over there like you guys do. We use it for more industrial
purposes, which allows me to modify it for my own uses.”

“I still say you’re brilliant,” he responded once more, giving more body to Rusty’s already inflated image of her intelligence.
“How did you get involved with this rebellion?” he asked, and much to Brynn’s surprise, Rusty actually answered his question.

At least she knew for future reference who to use to get information from the cryptic girl.

“Rift is our unofficial leader,” Rusty began, still eating as she spoke but finally slowing down after hours of packing food into her system. “He’s about thirty five-ish now, which is quite a feat for someone on Panurgic. We have a high mortality rate compared to you guys. It’s mostly from all of the factory accidents and bad working conditions.”

Rusty spoke about the death toll on Panurgic so candidly that Brynn had to wonder what kind of life this girl must lead to find the topic so unimportant. It occurred to
Brynn that her life really may have been more sheltered than she wanted to admit.

“When Rift was little
, his parents died in a factory accident and he went out to live in an old boarding house that the city had abandoned a while ago. He’s pretty good with computers too,” she said before quickly adding, “though not as good as me.”

Amber scoffed from the bed but didn’t say anything.

“While he was at this boarding house he learned how to hack into the city’s computer and he
somehow
managed to stumble across Rachel’s video transmission.”

“So it’s real then,” Jonah said with a grin, looking over at Brynn with excitement lining his features.

The pieces were beginning to fall into place.

“What did it say?” Brynn asked anxiously.

“I’ll have you watch it once we get to Panurgic, but the gist of it was that Rachel had done three things in her attempt to stop Eris but they were only temporary fixes to a long term bug. Like a patch,” she added to Ty who nodded in understanding. “So the person who found her video transmission would be tasked with using this knowledge and Rachel’s attempt to slow Eris down to stop them all together.”

“Oh good
, I’m glad she just left us a
little
job,” Amber said incredulously, voicing exactly what Brynn was thinking.

“I like a good challenge,” Rusty replied with her wide smile.
Amber just rolled her eyes. “Rift has been trying to figure out how to take Eris down ever since he found the video, since these stupid tests are pretty much the reason his parents are dead. So he’s been working on this for a long time; taking in data, building up our armory, finding recruits, pretty much anything he can do to outsmart and outnumber her.”

“Good luck outsmarting her,” Brynn said hopelessly, wondering if this girl really understood what they were up against. “She’s pretty smart.”

“We’re smarter,” Rusty said without a hint of sarcasm.

“Where is Rift finding recruits?” Jonah asked.

“He takes in orphans around Panurgic, which is like taking in airheads on Halcyon: they’re
everywhere
,” she said dramatically. “Factory accidents, bad working conditions, people trying to escape. There are a lot of deaths once people get old enough to realize they can run away from the cities and be better off. That’s how Rift found me,” she said almost proudly. “My parents died in a factory accident too when I was four, so I tried to run away. Built a little vehicle and everything.”

“When you were four?” Ty asked, his voice a mix between awe and skepticism.

“You have to grow up fast on Panurgic,” she answered in her smoky voice. “Rift saw that I was smart and took me in for the cause. He’s good at finding smart orphans who hate Eris… even if they don’t realize it’s her they hate at first. Once we see the video we all know who’s responsible.”

“So this Rift guy just has a giant house full of smart orphans and no one’s suspicious?” Amber asked, not quite buying the story.

“He got an official job change from Factory Worker to Orphanage Guardian so the paperwork would all check out. Once we get old enough to no longer be ‘orphans’ who need care, he lets us stay there under the title of teacher or caregiver.”

“What exactly does Rachel’s video say?” Brynn asked, knowing full well she was changing the topic a bit
, but too curious to care at the moment.

“A lot. You’ll just have to watch it,” Rusty said, placing another empty plate in the already large stack on the side table next to her chair.

“What are the three things she did to slow Eris down?” Brynn asked, not giving up easily.

“The first thing is you
, obviously,” Rusty said, pointing to Brynn and smiling. “She snuck her DNA into the human creation bay in the hopes that the person who was made from that sample would possess her knowledge… or at least enough of her knowledge to finish what she started.”

“And the other two things?” Jonah asked, as enthralled with this story as Brynn was.

“The second was the video transmission so that she could build a group of followers who knew the truth and knew that Eris had to be destroyed,” Rusty said, ticking the second thing off on her finger. “And the third was something about home.”

“
Something
about home?” Brynn asked, wishing Rusty wasn’t so impossible to get information from.

“The video very conveniently cuts out on that part,” Rusty said. “I don’t know if Eris somehow found the video and managed to
sabotage it, or it really was bad timing that the video didn’t pick up the last thing.”

“Eris didn’t do it,” Brynn said confidently. “She wants to know what the third thing is just as badly as I do.”

“All I know, is that Rachel said something about the way home,” Rusty said with a shrug, patting her stomach that still didn’t look any bigger than it had when she began her epic feast.

She twisted her long red hair around her finger so that the blonde tips stuck out like a bouquet of fiery flowers.

“The way home,” Brynn repeated, thinking back to her nightmares. “Eris said something about that in one of Rachel’s memories.”

“What did she say?” Jonah asked, walking over to Brynn and placing a hand on her shoulder.

“She asked Rachel if she couldn’t go home. If she had done something to keep them from going home,” she said, trying desperately to remember but finding that her crippling headache instantly came back when she attempted to recall the information.

She placed a hand over her forehead and closed her eyes against the pain, trying not to
draw attention to the episode.

Ty shot her a worried look but Rusty looked thrilled with the revelation.

“See? This is exactly why we need you,” she exclaimed happily. “You’ve got insider information that will help us fill in the missing pieces.”

“Glad I can help,” Brynn said, dropping her hand from her head as the pain passed.

“So, shall we go?” Rusty finally said, the grin never leaving her interesting face.

“Go where?” Bennett asked.

“To Panurgic,” she answered with a hint of annoyance.

“You still haven’t told us how you plan to get us there,” Jonah pointed out.

“Are we going through the Worker tunnels?” Ty asked.

“We’re definitely not taking their train unless we want to get killed,” she said.

“Just tell us,” Brynn practically shouted, her temper growing short in the presence of this mysterious and frustrating new player in their game.

“We’ll go under water.”

Chapter 11: Under

The trek to Rusty’s underwater machine took long enough to instill in the group a deep-seated belief that the machine in question, in fact, did not exist. They left Eastern Metropolis the same way they had gone to find the Worker transport tunnel, but continued on far past the rocky cliff that jutted out from the rest of the landscape.

Bennett and Amber were skittish of the trip from the beginning, not having ever been in the ocean like the rest of the group. Even walking along the beach seemed to take all of the courage they possessed and Amber eyed the turbulent salt water suspiciously as if it might suddenly take shape and chase after her.

After the group had been walking for several hours, the novelty of the whole adventure was quickly wearing off.

“Rusty
, are we getting close?” Bennett asked from the back of the group, pulling on the straps of her backpack.

They had all taken a few minutes to pack any supplies they might need w
hich, to Bennett, meant more clothes than she could carry. Luckily, seeing her friend’s choice in “supplies” Amber had displayed a rare moment of responsibility by packing more food and supplies than clothes.

“We’re almost there,” the red haired girl called back in her husky voice.

Rusty’s backpack consisted entirely of food and she had explained to the group that it was her responsibility to bring as much food back to Panurgic as she could to ensure that their little band of rebels didn’t starve to death.

“Is it really this far away?” Brynn asked, growing more and more suspicious of Rusty’s true intentions the farther away from the city she took them.

The landscape had already turned from the wide open sandy beach, to a coastline filled with rocky walls and inlets.

Brynn had to admit to herself that she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Rusty wasn’t a genius recruiter from The Alliance at all and was, in fact, just a crazy person who had persuaded a gullible group of people to follow her to their deaths. It was amazing how similar a genius and a psychopath were.

“We’ve been walking for hours.”
Brynn stated dryly.

“I had to keep it far from the city so the A.I.s wouldn’t find it,” she explained, once again using her strange name for the Workers.
Brynn opened her mouth to ask Rusty why she used the odd name when she was quickly cut off by Rusty’s proud, “Aha!”

“Is this it?” Ty asked, looking skeptically at what appeared to be nothing more than a pile of seaweed and old foliage
hanging on a rocky outcropping.

“Of course not
, silly,” Rusty said, ruffling Ty’s hair affectionately before sweeping the green cover from the mouth of a cave majestically. “It’s hiding.”

Brynn and Jonah exchanged wary glances but followed the strange girl dutifully into the dark cave.

“This place looks like a dead end to most people,” she shouted over the sound of rushing water, causing Brynn to wonder if she was mentally stable. “But it actually lets out into a big open cavern with a lake inside.”

“And your machine is in the lake?” Brynn yelled back, finding that her voice was almost completely drowned out by the quickly intensifying volume of the waves crashing against the walls of the
rock outside.

“It’s not really a lake,” Rusty called back in her
I’m a genius and you aren’t
voice. “It’s an air pocket in the rock. The water is part of the ocean and I just drive my beautiful Bucket right under the rock.”

“She calls the machine
The Bucket?” Brynn heard Bennett whisper behind her back.

“Doesn’t inspire much confidence,”
Amber agreed as the sound of the waves began to fade the deeper they walked into the dark, wet, stone passageway.

Eventually the group was engulfed in complete silence
as Rusty pulled a flashlight from her backpack and shone it around the large empty cavern she had described to them. The ceiling of the cave was high though the walls seemed narrow and quickly made Brynn feel claustrophobic. A steady dripping was the only sound to be heard in the peaceful yet eerie space.

“Where is it?” Ty asked, obviously excited by the prospect of such advanced technology.

He didn’t even seem to be scared by the prospect of travelling under the ocean, which surprised Brynn. She could remember when simply standing on the beach made him nervous.

“Right there,” Rusty said, the misty beam of her flashlight cutting through the darkness to what looked like a rusty metal bowl resting above the calm water.

Though Brynn couldn’t quite put her finger on it, something about the whole scene made her very nervous. Rusty pushed a button on the wall and the dark water was soon illuminated by bright underwater lights, showing her exactly what was going to carry her from Halcyon to Panurgic.

In the ghostly green water sat something that very much resembled a metal egg, though the front
curve of the machine was all glass. A hatch sat above the water level and Brynn couldn’t help but feel that there was nothing Rusty could say to assure her that the hatch was water tight.

“It’s really…” Brynn began, though her words trailed off into the silence of the cavern. She had meant to say scary, or big, or something equally disbelieving but Ty quickly finished her sentence for her.

“Amazing,” he breathed, his brown eyes wide as he took in the scene before him.

“I made it out of some scrap metal and spare parts from the old train station,” Rusty said proudly, the ever present red dust on her face becoming runny from the mist that hung thickly in the cavern air.

“Why is it all covered in rust?” Amber asked skeptically, voicing Brynn’s concern.

The device didn’t look stable at all.

“Everything in Panurgic is rusty,” she said. “Everything worth keeping at least. It’s really wet there so the metal goes rusty quickly. Then they throw it out and I take it.”

“Is that why you’re always covered in that dust?” Ty asked,
brushing a finger across her cheek to gather some of the red powder there and instantly causing a fire to burn in Brynn’s stomach that she tried to ignore.

“That’s why the
y call me Rusty,” she explained with a grin. “I’m always building things like this so I’m constantly covered in rust dust.”

“How do we get in?” Brynn asked, afraid of the answer that she felt she already knew.

“That’s the unfortunate part,” Rusty said with a slight grimace. “The Bucket is too big to get it really close to the walls of the cavern so we have to… swim.”

“You’re kidding me
, right?” Amber said from behind the group, sounding like she’d reached her breaking point. “You can build
that
thing but you couldn’t build a little vessel to get us over there? That’s ocean water,” she pointed out.

“It is,” Rusty agreed sagely.

“It leads out to the ocean,” Amber tried again, attempting to get a point across that Rusty wasn’t picking up on. “What if the tide goes out and we get sucked under the cave wall and into the ocean?”

“That doesn’t really happen,” Rusty laughed, shaking her head and grinning.
“I’ve done it hundreds of times and nothing’s ever happened to me.”

“Brynn
, I’m not doing this,” Amber whispered to her friend, slight panic in her voice.

“If she says it’s safe I’m sure it is,” Brynn attempted weakly.

“You’re scared too,” Bennett pointed out.

“Yeah but we can overcome our fear right? That’s always a good thing to do,” Brynn said, trying to sound motivational but failing miserably.

“I’ll go first you bunch of babies,” Rusty said with a long suffering sigh.

Pulling her backpack off and lifting it above her head with one hand
, she gingerly lowered herself into the seemingly serene water. The lights she had somehow installed around the cavern lake caused the pool to look a luminescent green; the same color as her eyes. As she swam silently through the large lake to the eerily quiet machine, her eyes almost appeared to glow.

“Almost there,” she called back to the frightened group of people who could ea
sily tell she was almost there.

When she reached the machine she threw he
r bag up to the hatch and Brynn couldn’t help but be impressed that she hadn’t overshot it. She quickly reminded herself, however, that Rusty had been doing this for a long time.

“Just have to open it up,” she yelled to the group as she used the
tarnished makeshift ladder on the side of the machine to hoist herself out of the water.

Her dripping clothes cast a chorus of noise through the deathly quiet space and as she reached the top of the machine
, it let out a loud, low, metallic creek that resonated through the water, sending chills down Brynn’s spine.

“Hatch is a bit r
usty,” she called with a laugh, proud of her own play on words.

She threw her weight into the metallic wheel and it began to turn slowly, emitting a screeching sound and causing the group on the land to cover their ears.

“Got it,” she told them as the hatch popped open in a puff of condensation.

She threw her bag into the expanse below and Brynn could see the shadow of the bag falling on the cave wall underwater as it reflected through the glass front of the machine.

“Who’s next?” she asked, her voice echoing eerily in the cavern as the bobbing of The Bucket cast shadows skittering around the room.

Brynn looked over the edge of the ground and balked at the blackness of the water below them. The lights turned the surface of the pool light green but about ten feet below that
, the light faded to a deep black abyss.

“How deep is this water?” Brynn asked, finding that for the girl who was supposed to be fearless, she had suddenly become quit
e the coward.

“Oh right,” Rusty said finally. “You guys are all scared of water
, right?” she asked.

No one answered her but she nodded slowly as she remembered.

“They gave you an irrational fear of water to keep you trapped on your continent,” she explained, though Brynn didn’t need to be told something she was already painfully aware of.

Because she was made from Rachel’s DNA
, Eris hadn’t been able to plant the fear of water in her system. That, however, did not stop her from being logical; and jumping into a black bottomless pit of cold ocean water did not sound logical to her.

“Not sure why they bothered. It’s not like you were inventive enough to find your way off the continent anyway.”

“Why didn’t they program you guys to be scared of water?” Brynn asked.

She had thought all of the test subjects had been given a fear of water and had their curiosity suppressed.

“No need. Instead they gave us a desire to work, so that doesn’t leave much time for exploring.”

“What happened to you then?” Jonah asked reasonably.

“A desire to work isn’t specific enough, apparently. It very easily turns into a desire to work towards destroying a tyrannical psychopath,” Rusty said matter-of-factly. “So who’s next?” she repeated in a chipper voice.

“I’ll go,” Ty volunteered, swallowing hard and trying to look tough.

Brynn could see right through his façade and walked over to him, taking his hand in hers.

“Can I come with you?” she asked, finding that she didn’t want to brave the eerie water alone.

“Yeah,” he said automatically in a relieved voice.

Apparently he hadn’t wanted to go alone either.

“I’ll go first,” Brynn said as she held her backpack above her head the way Rusty had.

She sat on the ledge of the rock and gently dipped her toes into the water. It didn’t immediately seep into her boots and for a moment she had been lulled into a false sense of security. As she lowered herself completely in
to the icy water, however, the frigid salty liquid instantly poured into her boots, freezing her toes within seconds. Goosebumps sprang up over her arms and she tried to keep her teeth from chattering.

“
Whoa,” Brynn said, letting out a loud breath at the shock of the temperature.

“Cold?” Ty asked with a look of concern on his face as he followed Brynn’s lead. “Oh yeah,” he breathed the second he got into the water.

His default outfit was much less substantial than Brynn’s and his brown pants, tennis shoes, and cream T-shirt were doing nothing to keep him warm, instantly clinging to his body.

“Let’s go,” he said, anxious to get out of the water.

As they swam slowly through the silent cavern, Brynn tried not to look at the unknown expanse of black water below her feet. It didn’t take much to imagine some terrible creature swimming up out of the depths and dragging her down into an icy grave.

As they approached The Bucket, however, she wasn’t sure which was more terrifying; the deep water underneath them, or the large metallic machine in front of them.

“You go first,” Ty said through chattering teeth, allowing Brynn to climb up the rusty ladder ahead of him.