Sugar Coated (25 page)

The door to the facility was so unimpressive that she wondered if they weren’t actually breaking into a maintenance closet. The massive building that spread out for miles couldn’t actually be reduced to a single unguarded entrance, could it? She tried to spot security cameras
attached to the walls of the building, but found nothing but an endless expanse of smooth concrete walls, unblemished by cameras, windows, or doors.

“This is really it,” she said almost reverently as the three assessed the small distance between them and the base. “We’re really going inside.”

“Assuming it’s not locked,” Ty said from beside her, pulling at the sleeves of his white outfit and looking over at Jonah guiltily.

“It’s all right. I’m an expert at picking locks now. Just one of my many talents,” Jonah stated in such a cocky voice that Brynn had to suppress a laugh.

“Just when I start to think you aren’t that bad,” Ty said, shaking his head.

“Do you guys want me to be the human sacrifice and go see if the door is locked?” Jonah asked seriously, looking as if he were about to bolt toward the entrance at any moment.

“We really don’t know anything about this place, do we?” Brynn asked, suddenly overwhelmed by their lack of knowledge. “I mean…we have absolutely no idea what we’re going to find in there,” she elaborated.

“I know,” Jonah said. “Isn’t it exciting?”

“We don’t know if we should be scared or excited.”

“I’m voting for excited,” Jonah said, trying to emphasize his point.

“What if we walk through the door and we just get killed? Point blank. No questions asked, they just kill us?”

“Okay, I’m going to say that’s enough out of Brynn for right now,” Jonah said, placing his hand over her mouth. “I’m going to that door in about two seconds. You guys can either let me find out if the coast is clear or follow behind me. It’s up to you,” Jonah said.

And with that he ran around the sparse cover of the bush and bolted straight for the door to A1.

Chapter 25: Inside

Ty and Brynn didn’t have much time to think as they watched their black-clad friend running through the soft sand toward the door of a very ominous looking facility. Brynn’s mind had gone blank and she was left with nothing more than her natural instincts, which told her to run as fast as she could so that Jonah didn’t die on her behalf.

Not even bothering to grab their backpack full of supplies, Brynn sprinted after her friend. She wasn’t surprised to hear Ty following behind her, assuming that he had probably been waiting to follow her lead.

Jonah had reached the front door before Brynn was even halfway to the facility. She watched him turn the handle and open the heavy metal entrance, white light pouring out of the building. At least she knew her dreams had been right about the bright interior.

Once Ty and Brynn were finally at Jonah’s side, they peeked inside the building.

“Well, we’re not dead,” Brynn whispered as they stepped into the stark white confines of the facility.

Everything was blindingly bright and sterile, smelling like industrial cleaners and cotton. Jonah closed the door behind them, which resonated with a deep thud through the room.

“What is this place?” Ty asked, looking around in amazement.

Brynn hadn’t let herself try to make sense of the room once they had entered. Instead she had gone straight to doing a security check
, but found, much to her surprise, that there weren’t any cameras visible in this room either.

“They’re either really stupid or really confident that no one knows about this place,” Brynn said, trying to check every corner of the room for a hidden camera.

“It’s like you said—why would someone jump off a train to find a city that doesn’t exist?” Jonah asked, his eyes flicking around the room like Brynn’s as he searched for cameras.

“What are all of these tubes?” Ty asked.

The room they stood in was completely white, as Brynn had expected. Jonah stood out like a sore thumb in his black outfit, but she tried to ignore that panic-inducing detail.

Surrounding the three were rows of metal tubes that ran from the floor up into the ceilings. They each looked like they could fit a person inside of them and had a grey metal grate for a floor.

“Are they for storage?” Brynn asked, though she wasn’t quite sure whom she was asking. It wasn’t like her friends knew any more about this place than she did.

“I bet they’re elevators,” Jonah said, walking up to one of them and examining it closely. “I mean, look around. There aren’t any doors in here except the one we came in. These must be the only way deeper into the facility.”

Brynn had been too busy looking for security cameras to notice the lack of doors until Jonah pointed it out. Now it seemed obvious what the tubes were intended for, though their size startled her.

“They can only fit one person inside at a time,” she said, her voice cracking slightly at the chilling implications of this statement.

“We have to go in alone,” Ty echoed, sounding as haunted by this idea as Brynn, though he didn’t know the real reason for her distress.

The tubes had brought a violent flashback of her nightmare with the Angel. She had been strapped inside of a clear tube that the Angel filled slowly with water, causing Brynn to choke and drown as the woman smiled down at her. The endless similarities of this facility to the one in her nightmares were setting her on edge and she feared she’d soon lose her nerve if they didn’t move quickly.

“Well…pick a floor, I guess,” Jonah said, stepping up to one of the metal tubes with its door already open for him.

He looked over at Brynn questioningly until she and Ty followed suit. After all, if Jonah was willing to be brave when his clothing was practically begging to be spotted, she could be too.

“Promise me you’ll be careful if anything happens to me and I’m not there to protect you?” Ty asked Brynn, grabbing her arm to stop her from going into the tube.

He held his pinky out, causing Brynn to smile up at him. She locked her pinky with his and they both kissed their thumbs.

“Promise,” she agreed before releasing his hand and stepping up to her own elevator.

“Third floor?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at Jonah.

“See you there,” he said, giving her one last wink before he stepped into the tube that instantly sealed itself behind him.

Brynn glanced over at Ty on her other side nervously. He looked unhappy with the idea of letting Brynn out of his sight but gave her a brave smile and stepped into his own tube. Finally, Brynn slowly stepped into the elevator, letting the world close off behind her.

The sound in the tube was muted and echoless, the air feeling all wrong with the constant breeze that seemed to come from nowhere. She looked down at the buttons in front of her only to find that they weren’t typical elevator buttons. Instead they seemed to be broken down into three separate columns headed with the titles
Test 1
,
Test 2
, and
Test 3
, followed by a series of numbers that she guessed indicated floors.

She tried to open the elevator door to step out and give her friends new instructions since the third floor could be one of three floors, but the doors didn’t budge. No matter what she did, she was unable to get back out of the elevator.

She hoped Ty and Jonah would be in sync enough with her to just go to the third floor of the first test, though a fear was already growing in her stomach that the three might be separated. Trying to ignore the fear, she firmly pushed the button for the third floor of Test 1.

The metal circle below her feet shuddered into life as Brynn lowered slowly into the
floor of the facility, and felt panic wash over her. She could imagine Jonah at that moment, wearing a smirk, and Ty whose brow would be furrowed. She wasn’t sure which expression she matched more.

Her joy over finding the facility had been overwhelming, but now that she was actually faced with the enormity of the situation, her knees felt weak. They had absolutely no clue what they were doing, where they were going, or what kind of people ran this place. They could be dead in seconds if the facility was as sinister as Brynn’s dreams led her to believe.

While she was weighing her odds of survival in the strange facility, a button caught her eye. Beside the three columns of buttons labeled with the various testing floors, Brynn saw three isolated ones that read,
Control
,
Records
, and
Labs
.

“Records,” she breathed, thinking of the library with its endless wealth of knowledge that was completely useless in answering her questions.

She couldn’t even begin to imagine what kinds of books were held in this facility—books that would hold the answers to every question she had ever dreamed up. She made a mental decision that as soon as she stepped off of the elevator, she would tell Ty and Jonah to get right back on so they could go to the records room. She knew Jonah wouldn’t have any objection to something so closely resembling a library and she could always convince Ty that a records room would be the last place they’d store murderous Angels with deadly weapons. It was the best decision all around.

It took
longer than she had anticipated to get to the third floor, descending much farther underground than three stories. When the metal grate finally came to a stop and the grey metal door of the tube slid open, Brynn was met, not with a cavernous facility, but with a small white hallway. She stepped out of the elevator, puzzled by this surprisingly simple hallway, and instantly did her security check, wondering why there didn’t seem to be any cameras anywhere. It didn’t make any sense to go to such lengths to make sure people couldn’t find your base and then to ignore security within it.

She also couldn’t help but notice the complete lack of people anywhere in the facility. Since they’d arrived, they hadn’t run into a single life form. Brynn had found it strange that there weren’t any guards, but now that they were inside of the building she was beginning to find the complete lack of life very ominous. It was as if they weren’t Angels at all, but rather ghosts.

Brynn continued to wait nervously in front of her now closed elevator, unsure of what was taking the others so long. She kept glancing down either side of the hallway, amazed and relieved that no one was in sight. She tapped her thumb nervously against her pant leg, waiting another five solid minutes before deciding her friends had pushed the wrong buttons. Not wanting to be a sitting duck in the hallway, Brynn entered the elevator, letting her finger rest lightly over the button for
Records
before giving it a firm push.

Once more the grate came to life and began taking her even further down into the facility, making Brynn feel slightly claustrophobic from the miles of ground pushing in on her from all sides. Her ears popped before the elevator finally stopped moving and deposited her in the only room she’d seen so far that wasn’t stark white and brightly lit. Instead, this room was dim like the library and amazingly small. Looking around, Brynn guessed that it was even smaller than her bedroom back in Seaside. It housed three large, square computers that were alive with flashing lights, buttons, and large glowing screens.

She could hear the soft humming coming from the three machines and stepped up to the middle kiosk, looking down at the screen that very clearly read
Children
. Puzzled by this odd description of the records it held, she decided to move on to a less confusing computer.

The machine on the left identified itself with glowing letters that read
Tests
. This was something Brynn could understand, so she touched the screen to gain access, hoping it didn’t have a password or tissue memory. Upon touching the screen, however, three different options popped up. The first two didn’t seem very special; they simply said
Test 1: Panurgic
, and
Test 2: Arcadian
. The third, however, sent her mind reeling as she tried to understand what she was reading. She stared, dumbstruck, at the name of her own planet in glowing letters on this strange computer:

Test 3: Halcyon
.

Chapter 26: Secrets

“Halcyon,” Brynn said aloud, staring down at the screen and wondering why she could see her planet’s name depicted clearly there.

Her mind coming up with every worst-case scenario she could muster, she touched the screen right over that one fateful word. At her touch, three more options came up on the idiot-proof computer:
Backlog
,
Data Gathered
, and
Timeline
.

“Might as well start at the beginning,” sh
e said to herself, forgetting that she was in a strange place where people could burst out of the elevator at any moment and try to kill her. Instead, her focus was trained on the screen in front of her as she clicked on
Backlog
and watched the endless text loading on the screen.

Her eyes flew across the words, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The beginning seemed to be pretty basic, if not completely impossible.
Society created
,
continent populated
,
memories generated, testing begun
. Brynn shook her head in confusion.

“How does someone
make
a society?” she asked the empty room with its quietly humming machines. Trying to make sense of the completely incomprehensible words she read, she went back to the previous screen and tried out
Data gathered
.

This screen made more sense and was written in complete sentences,
making it easier to see what the author was trying to say.

Longevity of life is the highest of the three tests, though progress is limited by laziness. Disease, unrest, and poverty have not become a byproduct of the continent of Halcyon. The population suffers greatly because of the selfishness of its inhabitants. Children are not wanted until it is biologically too late, and even then they worry about the ruination of their human figures, therefore we’ve had to fill the orphanages manually many times to repopulate. Little is known about the surrounding continents and the inhabitants do not seem to question the fear of water. Eris’s ability to suppress curiosity has eradicated threat of invention or uprisings.

“Ability to suppress curiosity,” she repeated, her voice barely above a whisper. This person was talking about her planet. Or continent. They had called it a continent as if more of them existed where her map only showed ocean. “No wonder they wanted to instill a fear of the water.”

Brynn rubbed her hands over her arms, trying to stop the chill that was entering her body. She looked around the room suspiciously, wondering why people who could create societies and populate them somehow wouldn’t be swarming all over her for discovering their secrets. There was no way that they, with their infinite knowledge, didn’t know she was there.

She thought of Ty and Jonah. They were definitely going to be caught as well, if they weren’t already being tortured by the Angel.

“There’s no way we’ll walk away from thi
s,” she told the room. Trying to shake her fear, she opened the last file labeled
Timeline
, hoping that what she found there would inspire some hope.

Originally Halcyon was intended as a 100-year program. When we began collecting data and found that a perfect society requires more aspects to be judged, the program was extended. As of the present date, we anticipate maximum learning capabilities have almost been reached and the continent will be scheduled for termination in due time.

Brynn’s mouth fell open in shock as her body went numb. She could feel the blood slowly leaving her arms and legs as they began to tingle. She re-read the file, wanting to make absolutely certain she had read the screen correctly. Her eyes flicked back and forth rapidly, hoping that by reading the words again she could change them.

She could have read the same sentence a million times for all the good it did her. She sat on the floor for a moment, trying to take everything in. All of the lies she had been fed as a child, the fact that her entire planet was nothing more than a test, everyone’s lack of curiosity in the truth. But that last part wasn’t true. Brynn and Jonah were curious, weren’t they? If their curiosity was supposed to be dampened, how did you explain them?

Brynn’s brain worked frantically, trying to find a connection between her and Jonah that would make them different from her friends. Her mind went back to an old conversation between the two when they stayed in Central Wildwood. Brynn had called her parents to check in and she had asked Jonah about his family. He had told her that he was adopted as well and she thought nothing of it. Almost half of the kids in the city were adopted.

“Wait,” she said aloud, standing up and walking over to the computer labeled
Children
. Something wasn’t quite adding up in her mind and she instantly thought back to a sentence she had read.
We’ve had to fill the orphanages manually many times.
“How do you manually fill an orphanage?” she asked the empty room.

Having children was something almost frowned upon in Seaside. A
dopting children was normal, but actually having your own children was just a quick way to ruin your figure. Even those couples that adopted often would wait until they were older because children meant one thing: less time to do what you wanted.

Brynn hadn’t ever questioned why the orphanages always seemed full of children needing to be adopted when no one ever seemed to
have
children, but now that she really thought about it, it made absolutely no sense.

“Where are all of these kids coming from?” she asked. “Where did I come from?”

Brynn’s parents, Orson and Lia, were very open with her about the fact that she was adopted. Most of her classmates were and so there was nothing taboo about discussing the subject. But they had never spoken of her birth parents. Most kids didn’t ask because it wasn’t something that held any great importance in their society, but as she read the chilling words on the computer screens, she began to wonder if that was really because it didn’t matter, or because these Angels had somehow managed to suppress their curiosity on the subject.

She tried desperately to think of other people she knew who were adopted besides her and Jonah. Did they seem to be more curious than Ty, Amber, and Bennett, who showed absolutely no interest in the many questions Brynn raised? She didn’t really think so, but maybe she hadn’t spent enough time with them to discover the extent of their curiosity.

Trying to keep herself calm and focused amid her world crumbling down around her, she accessed the information on the computer titled
Children
, hoping her questions about where she had come from might be answered. She was imagining everything from farms where orphans were grown like livestock to a breeding facility for humans. The glowing words on the screen seemed to confirm the fears that had arisen since her discovery of the small records room.

Tissue samples are fabricated and children genetically engineered to populate orphanages in Halcyon. Such lengths have not been necessary on Panurgic and Arcadian, as the inhabitants there are more concerned with maintaining a steady population to ensure work is completed. Eris found that genuine human tissue was too unpredictable and difficult to control in a test environment. Fabricated tissue samples were created to ensure curiosity could be suppressed and physical traits easily modified to a societal mean.

Brynn stared at the screen, sure she understood the implications of what she read, but unable to compute it. If she was right in her understanding, she hadn’t ever been born. She had been made in a lab somewhere in this facility and placed in an orphanage under the pretense that she had lost her parents. But why bother with the fake backstory of dead parents at all? She supposed most people wouldn’t be comfortable with the idea that their precious new baby was actually a genetic experiment created specifically to be compliant and uninteresting.

“What happened to me?” she asked the computer, though she knew it wouldn’t answer her. Had she been a mistake? Where did her curiosity come from if it was supposed to have been suppressed by this Eris person?

The room seemed to be spinning and Brynn was sure this much knowledge should never come to a person all in a matter of minutes. It had only taken a few clicks on the computer screen to turn her world upside down. She hadn’t even been able to answer her many questions—instead more questions were coming in to her mind at an alarming rate. Trying to stabilize her thoughts and regain her balance, she went back to the first computer, wanting to find out exactly what these other continents were. With shaking hands she opened the file for the first test titled
Panurgic
, unsure of what to expect.

A diagram came to life on the screen, showing Brynn the familiar shape of Halcyon on the map she thought she had studied thoroughly. Instead, what she saw was the same map she’d looked at for years with two other continents in the ocean she always thought empty.

She assumed that the blue, glowing continent the computer had highlighted was Panurgic. Touching the land mass on the screen, the same three options came up for this continent that had come up for Halcyon:
Backlog, Data Gathered,
and
Timeline.

Feeling that
Data Gathered
had served her well before, she touched it, opening the text file that explained exactly what this continent was capable of.

Longevity of life is the lowest of the three tests, though creativity, industriousness, and progress are the highest. The inhabitants are work-oriented, taking no time for leisure and spending most of their days creating many of the items used in Test 3: Halcyon.

Brynn stopped reading for a moment, looking down at the clothing she wore. Surely this couldn’t have been made by the people in Panurgic. Most of her clothes had been specifically designed on the kiosk in the clothing store. They couldn’t have made it and shipped it clear over the ocean to her in a matter of minutes. That obviously wasn’t what they had meant by their explanation.

Looking around at all of the technology and raw materials that went into creating a facility, however, that did seem believable. Perhaps these people were the ones who created the basic materials needed for houses and computers. A chill went through Brynn’s body as she continued to read.

Technology on Panurgic is more advanced than the other two tests. Many items having been invented by the inhabitants themselves, though creativity has to be strictly regulated to ensure weapons and methods of water and air transport are not created.

“Water and air transport,” Brynn repeated, finally finding something that seemed more exciting than terrifying.

If these people really were such great inventors, they may be able to invent some sort of human flight mechanism to travel across the ocean. She wondered briefly what they would make of Halcyon with its wall screens that created anything they wanted and no work to be done.

Returning to the screen that showed the completed map of the world, not the fake map Brynn had studied her whole life, she tried to memorize exactly where Panurgic was, hoping that if she got out of A1 alive she might be able to travel there somehow and learn about their extensive technology.

While her eyes flew across the screen, her attention was caught by something else in the room—a small, red, blinking light on the wall near the ceiling. She was sure the light hadn’t been blinking when she’d first entered the room and her body instantly went cold.

The Angels knew she was there.