Sugar Coated (12 page)

He really thought she was unstable. She wasn’t some sort of suicidal maniac—she just wanted to find answers. Apparently she hadn’t been clear enough with Ty on
that point.

“I want to see if I can get the train to stop in Aywon so I can see what it’s like, that’s all,” she answered honestly, hoping the alarm bells would stop going off in Ty’s overprotective mind.

“That’s still a really bad idea,” he told her. “But not nearly as bad as trying to derail a train,” he conceded.

“So, will you help me hack into the door?” she finally asked, crossing her fingers as she waited for his response. She could see the gears turning in his mind, which was more than she had hoped for.

“No.”

Chapter 12: Perspective

It was still dark when the train entered the station in Central Wildwood, though the early rays of sunlight were beginning to peek over the mist-covered mountains that surrounded the city. Exhausted from her lack of sleep on the train ride, Brynn immediately headed for the hotel she normally stayed at and tossed her bag on the floor, finding her desire to explore the familiar city slightly lessened by Ty’s refusal to help her with the door to the control room.

She fell into a light, restless sleep, imagining conversations with Ty and Jonah, trying to figure out which boy would be more willing to help her should she decide to take drastic measures in finding Aywon. She had already tried to hack into the train’s system to get into a room she was never supposed to see, but because she hadn’t succeeded, she figured that this didn’t really count as a drastic measure. Knowing Ty wouldn’t be willing to help left her only with Jonah, the boy she didn’t know very well, but trusted because he was like her. He wanted answers and didn’t take everything at face value. He knew the worth of a good adventure.

Three sleepless hours later Brynn finally pulled herself out of bed, groggily making her way into the hotel bathroom. The entire facility was lush and intricate, because even those who went on vacation to the mountains to "rough it" still wanted to eat, sleep, and bathe in decadent quarters. They only wanted to rough it during the day on a two-hour hike.

The dark granite shower had three showerheads that gently dripped water on her like a
heavy rainstorm, and as Brynn stood in the mist, her eyes closed and her exhaustion washed away as she thought about the door on the train she’d never have access to. She absentmindedly pushed a button in her shower to make the water smell like lavender and sage while her mind guided her through the train’s hallways once more.

Jonah may not have been a computer genius like Ty, but he had proved several times that he was clever and quick on his feet. It wouldn’t be totally out of the question to hope that he would be able to figure something out, if only Brynn could get him on the train with her. Because neither of them were Workers, she didn’t suspect that she’d have a hard time working with his schedule. Worst-case scenario, he’d have to move his library date with himself back a few days. Somehow, she thought he’d be able to manage that for a little adventure.

Standing in the stream of the warm-air body and hair dryers in her shower, Brynn formulated a plan. She wasn’t too happy about waiting an entire month to have Jonah come on the trip with her, but all things considered, it might seem a little overbearing if she asked him to travel to another city with her after only having known each other for about a month. At least with her trips being a month apart, it wouldn’t seem as weird if she asked him a few weeks from this trip.

The dark granite floors were cold on her clean, dry feet as Brynn walked over to the mirror to survey her appearance. She turned her face from side to side, wondering, for a moment, what Jonah saw when he looked at her. He hadn’t exactly exuded any clue that he thought she was pretty, but she had been treating him like another guy friend to go tromping through the ocean with. She hadn’t exactly tried to be feminine around him.

Looking into the mirror on the bathroom wall, she saw a girl with long, wavy black hair, bright blue eyes, and plump, full lips that all of her friends seemed to talk about. She wasn’t sure that this made her particularly pretty, but maybe after she and Jonah saved the world from whatever sinister thing lay behind the door in the train, she could be pretty for him.

Shaking the thoughts from her head for the time being, Brynn dressed herself in her default outfit, adding a turquoise scarf to wrap around her neck and a pair of turquoise gloves to account for the colder climate in Central Wildwood. She pulled her long dark hair up into the topknot she often wore and made her way into the living room of her suite.

“I need two bottles of water, some dehydrated food bars, a rope, a flashlight, and a first aid kit,” Brynn told her hotel room.

“Items at the dispenser,” her room replied in a kind enough voice, though it always gave Brynn a pang of sadness to hear a house voice that wasn’t Charlie’s, no matter how much that computer drove her crazy.

Brynn took her requested items from the wall dispenser and shoved them into her messenger bag before departing the hotel while munching on a dehydrated food bar. She wasn’t planning on getting lost in the woods on her trek today, but she wanted to be prepared for anything. Of course, if she ever really did get lost on the clearly marked paths of the woods that were within city limits, she'd only have to push her panic button on her tablet. Each tablet was built with a tracking device so if anyone ever got lost (or as lost as you could be within the confines of the city controlled "wild") they could be easily found in a short amount of time.

Central Wildwood was about as different from Seaside as you could get. Instead of the tall glass buildings that dotted the landscape in Seaside, here you found squat buildings made of brown and green logs, dark red brick, or dark grey granite. The colors of this city were all rustic and muted, while Seaside made a point of using the usually sunny days and bright green plant life to its advantage.

Even the weather in Central Wildwood was drastically different. In the trips Brynn had taken to this city countless times, she’d never once seen the sun. Instead, a constant grey cloud seemed to dominate the skies. While most of her friends found that aspect of Central Wildwood depressing, Brynn reveled in it. She loved the change in scenery and the threat that at any moment a rainy downpour could be released from the skies above.

As she walked through the streets of the city toward the mountains only a few blocks ahead, she nodded to people on the sidewalks. Though she hadn’t ever spoken to most residents of Central Wildwood on her numerous trips there, many of them had begun to recognize the girl with the big lips and blue eyes from her many silent journeys through their town.

The damp street eventually gave way to the wet, dark loam underfoot as the buildings of the city disappeared and the tall pine trees took over. A thick mist hung in the air and Brynn couldn’t see the trees more than a few feet in front of her, but she instantly loved the challenge this weather presented. She wasn’t sure what the goal of her trek was today, but walking through different scenery without the distraction of her friends or the pull of the ocean, she was able to give some more deep thought to her predicament.

“If for some reason Jonah isn’t smart enough to hack the door on the train, I need to have a backup plan,” Brynn thought aloud, finding that the thick mist made her feel alone enough to run through her plans vocally. Talking things through always helped her.

“So, how could I stop the train without having access to the control panel?” she asked the mist that swirled around her in a thick, heavy sheet. “I probably can’t,” she admitted dully, kicking a pinecone on the path so that it bounced ahead of her, making soft thuds in the earth as it went.

She pulled her scarf tighter around her neck as the temperature dropped the higher into the mountains she went. “Unless I blow a hole in the train wall and jump out, I might need to abandon the whole train idea,” she mumbled, biting her lip in frustration.

Though she hadn’t made any great breakthroughs in her constant search to find Aywon, she had been feeling closer to finding an answer as of late. With the help of Jonah, she had been able to rule out some of her wilder theories. The frequency of her odd dreams about the Angels had also given her more cause to pursue answers, just to explain where these ideas that were fueling her nightmares were coming from, if nothing else.

Then there was the voice.

That was a detail she couldn’t ignore. Brynn didn’t think she was as crazy as her friends seemed to believe, but she could readily admit that her dreams were something she could write off. Those could be the result of an overactive imagination. But to hear the voice from her dreams loud and clear over Amber’s movie making software? That couldn’t have been a coincidence. Not only was it the Angel’s voice, but it was talking about waves. Possibly the same waves that had almost killed Brynn only m
inutes before.

No, that couldn’t have been a coincidence. And so, for that reason, Brynn continued her trek through the woods, trying to clear her head enough to find a way back to Aywon. She needed answers, and for once she wasn’t going to stop just because no one seemed to be able to help her.

* * *

Around noon Brynn sat on the soft ground, leaning against a tree and taking one of her dehydrated food bars and a water bottle from her bag. She unwrapped the shiny silver wrapping on her bar and ripped a large piece off
with her teeth, not realizing until that moment how hungry she was. After all, with the exception of the bar she’d eaten at the start of her hike, she hadn’t eaten since her lavish meal on the train.

Tilting her head back and closing her eyes in the silent forest, she tried to formulate a new plan of attack for finding Aywon. Trains were the only method of transportation between cities. Even within a city the only way to get around was by bus, and unless she hijacked a bus, there probably wasn’t any way to get one of those out of
Seaside. She paused her thoughts briefly, considering for just one moment the possibility of stealing a bus before she quickly pushed that thought from her mind. She wasn’t
that
crazy.

If she couldn’t take a bus and she couldn’t take the train, the only other option would be to walk to her destination. Of course, Aywon was at least six hours from Seaside by train, so who knew how long that would take on foot. As she finished off her dehydrated food bar that had hardly made a dent in her hunger, she wondered if she could even carry all of the supplies she’d need to get there. And even if she could, what if she had been wrong and there actually wasn’t a city there? Then she would be stuck in the middle of nowhere without enough supplies to bring her back to Seaside.

She considered this for a moment. Brynn didn’t think of herself as a helpless girl. She was brave and strong and resourceful. But that didn’t mean she possessed the survival skills to live off of the land long enough to make it back to Seaside if her theory really was wrong.

“I can learn survival skills from a book,” she said suddenly, not wanting to give up when she had finally come up with a solution to her problem. She didn’t need to rely on the train to bring her to Aywon every month, sitting alone in her compartment hoping that this time it would stop. Instead she’d take control of what she wanted and leave the city on foot to find what she was looking for. Though this presented her with a new problem—how to get out of the city?

She hadn’t ever actually left the city before unless she was on a train. Back home in Seaside, she had been able to walk past the city limits toward the sea, so technically, she had gotten out of the city on foot. But that hardly counted.

“Perspective,” she told herself. “That’s what I need.”

Packing up her food and water, she slung her bag across her chest once more and stood to get a better look at the tree she had been leaning on. It was a tall, sturdy pine tree with tall branches, too high to simply reach out and grab. She lifted her foot to examine the bottom of her boot, glad to see rubbery tread there that would aid in her climb.

Though the lowest branches on the tall pine tree were far too high for her to grab, the bark on the trunk was full of deep valleys in the old wood, making the surface ideal for climbing. Using her fingertips to find subtle cracks in the bark and relying heavily on the rubber tread at the bottom of her boots, she propelled herself up, her limber fingers frantically scrabbling over the uneven surface of the tree trunk for another hand hold.

Once her fingers slid into yet another crack, she used her thighs to cling desperately to the thick tree trunk, knowing that she’d need to be calculating if she was going to make it to the lowest branches. She couldn’t just jump and hope her fingers found purchase.

Tilting her head up to survey what lay ahead, she cautiously released the tree with one hand and let her blind fingertips explore the rough bark. Brynn was surprised at how quickly she was able to make her way up the trunk of the large pine tree before she finally reached the lowest hanging branches. Once she made contact with those it was simply a matter of pulling herself up to perch carefully on the wood, climbing from branch to branch as she made her way toward the top of the tree.

One branch cracked under her foot, immediately causing Brynn to freeze in her swift upward progression.

“High enough,” she said, stepping down to the thicker branch beneath and holding back a shudder as she looked down at the ground far below her.

She hadn’t ever thought of herself as someone who was afraid of heights, but the only heights she had ever encountered had been seen safely behind the glass of a tall building. Now, with nothing holding her to the tree except her damp, frozen fingers, heights seemed to bother her a lot more.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, she looked out over the forest, seeing nothing but green pine needles in every direction. She could just skim the tops of the trees that descended back toward the town, but she wasn’t nearly high enough to survey the actual city itself.

Knowing that she couldn’t go any higher in that particular tree, Brynn made her slow descent back to the ground, taking more care now that she had broken one branch already. If she couldn’t see from that pine, she’d just have to go higher into the mountains to get a better angle on the city.