Sugar Coated (5 page)

The Worker had the same violet eyes as her own Angel, with those sharp, angular features. Her skin was almost a translucent white, and Brynn silently wondered how her friends would explain that oddity. They would probably say they have to dye their skin to somehow help them
improve their work performance.

This Angel had short black hair that was bluntly cut so that it fell right below her eyes. She also had the same sharp line of bangs going across her f
orehead that Brynn’s Angel had.

Sticking her chin out and mustering the same courage she’d found as a child confronted by these terrifying Angels, Brynn walked over to the Worker and looked h
er directly in her violet eyes.

“I need to find a map,” she said confidently, hoping that by acting confident she woul
dn’t seem scared of this woman.

“A map,” the woman repeated slowly, her eyes locked on Brynn and a small sideways s
mile playing on her peach lips.

Brynn couldn’t quite put her finger on it
, but something about her just wasn’t natural. She wasn’t sure if it was the cadence of her speech or the way her eyes stayed locked on Brynn’s without blinking.

“Yep,” Brynn finally said when it became clear that this woman wasn’t goi
ng to volunteer information.

“I’d say you belong in the basement. That’s where we keep all of our useless things,” the woman answered in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, her smile slowly creeping across the other side of her face so that it re
ached her prominent cheekbones.

Though she tried to keep her cool, Brynn’s smile faltered as she registered
what the woman had said to her.

“So the maps are in the basement?” Brynn clarified, pointedly ignoring th
e woman’s thinly veiled insult.

For a moment there was silence as the woman stared at Brynn, the smile plastered to her face. She didn’t make a move to answer her; she simply stared into Brynn's bright blue eyes with her own intelligent lilac ones. Then, as if a spell had been broken, she abruptly looked down at the tablet she had in front of her and began swiping her finger across the screen as if she were turning pages before saying, “That’s correct.”

Brynn tilted her head to the side and furrowed her brow at the woman’s odd behavior. “Okay,” she said slowly as she turned on her heel on the carpeted floor. “Thanks.”

She didn’t look back as she made her way to the small, darkened do
orway that led to the stairwell muttering under her breath, “Psychopath.” For some reason she couldn’t quite explain, Brynn didn’t feel safe being in the large, dark, and foreign library building alone with that particular Angel. Even though she knew the Angel from her dream was far from friendly, something about her was familiar and it made her feel safe. This one, however, didn’t seem warm in the slightest. The only thing familiar about her was her oddly colored eyes.

Suppressing a shudder, Brynn made her way down two flights of carpeted stairs in the small, dingy stairwell before coming to the open doorway that led to the basement. It wasn’t quite what she had expected it to be. For some reason in her mind, she saw stone floors, walls, and ceilings with water dripping down in an endless stream, making the
lit torches on the walls hiss.

Instead, what she saw was very similar to the main floor, but without the windows letting light in. Small
, orange orbs of light hung from the ceilings, making everything seem more richly colored than they probably were in reality. The maroon carpet still covered the floor and there were rows and rows of dark wooden bookshelves, packed with dusty old volumes. A few small wooden tables sat vacant around the room and a number of plush forest green armchairs dotted the space, giving the distinct feeling that if you sat on one, a cloud of dust would engulf you.

As she walked into the room she noticed that she wasn’t quite as alone as she thought. A boy sat in one of the dusty old armchairs. If he noticed her enter the room, he didn’t show any signs of it. Instead his eyes flew across the pa
ges of the book he was reading.

Brynn thought for a moment that the boy looked as though he could be related to her. He had the same bright blue eyes and black hair, though his hair was
cropped short. His skin however, was sun-kissed and tan, where Brynn’s was pale no matter how much time she spent outside. He also didn’t have Brynn’s full lips that everyone seemed to be so jealous of.

Brynn considered clearing her throat just to announce her presence, but the moment to do so passed and she then felt that it would only b
e awkward to try to talk to the complete stranger, so she followed his example and didn’t say anything. Walking through the rows of books, Brynn realized she had no idea how to find what she was looking for in the building. She pulled her tablet out of the olive green canvas messenger bag she had slung across her chest and touched the screen that would connect her to her house.

“How can I help you?” her house asked in its distinct child’s voice.

“Shhh,” Brynn said instantly, not realizing how loud her house would sound in such a quiet space. “Charlie, I need your help.”

“Are you in trouble?” her house asked, not actually sounding con
cerned despite Brynn’s wording.

“I’m in the library and I need to know where I can find maps,” Brynn told her. “I’m in the basement.”

“I can’t connect to the library’s mainframe. It runs on a different system,” her house informed her, sounding less regretful and more matter-of-fact.

“Can’t you try to talk
to it anyway?” Brynn persisted.

“I can try,” Charlie told her, leaving
Brynn in silence for a moment.

She continued to walk past bookshelf after bookshelf, looking at the odd combination of letters and numbers on each shelf. It was like a foreign langu
age she was trying to decipher.

Stopping at a section on topography, Brynn looked through the
empty space right above the books at the boy sitting silently by himself in the library. She hadn’t ever seen him before in the city and he looked about her age, or maybe a year or two older. Wanting to get a closer look, she pushed several books aside and bent closer to the gap in the bookshelf, studying the silent stranger.

She was relieved knowing that his eyes were blue and not purple, instantly bringing his threat level down quite a bit. One ankle rested on his knee and he moved his foot in a silent rhythm to a beat only he could hear. Something he was reading in his book made his mouth curl up into a smile on one side and involuntarily Brynn smi
led too at this simple gesture.

He wore black fitted jeans and a grey T-shirt. Though it was hard to gauge in his current sitting position, Brynn guessed he’d stand about six feet tall. With his athletic build, she wondered for a moment if maybe Ty would know him from any pick-up gam
es played at the Rec buildings.

“She doesn’t like me,” Charlie’s voice suddenly rang out from the tablet in Brynn’s hand, piercing through the silence like an alarm. She looked up just in time to meet the boy’s eyes as he glanced curiously over at her before she ducked down behind the bookshelf, covering her face in embarrassment. “I don’t think the library computer is very social,” Charlie went on, unfazed by Brynn’s reaction. “She didn’t want to talk to me at all.”

“That’s fine,” Brynn said in quick whisper, pushing the power button on her tablet without an explanation to Charlie and quickly shoving the device back into her bag.

She straightened up and peeked over the top of the books once more to see that the boy had gone back to reading his book. The smile, however, was now firmly in place, ca
using Brynn to blush profusely.

Deciding there was no way out of her embarrassment now, she walked out from behind the cover of the bookshelf and stopped in front of the boy, clearing her throat to announce her presence. She didn’t quite trust that she could talk to him yet without making an e
ven bigger fool out of herself.

“Oh no, are we done playing now?” the boy asked, putting his book down on his lap and looking up at Brynn with his clear blue eyes. “I was actually enjoying that
game,” he went on with a smile.

Brynn wrinkled her nose in embarrassment at being caught. “Yeah, sorry about that. You just looked really familiar and I couldn’t quite figure out where I’d seen you before,” she lied, trying to salvag
e at least some of her dignity.

“I’m not sure that you have,” he told her, looking around at the empty basement. “Unless you spend most of your time hanging around dusty old li
braries by yourself like I do.”

“Can’t say that I do.” Brynn looked around at the vacant space with its dingy furniture and poor lighting. “You spend a lot of time down here?” To her, he didn’t really seem like the type who wouldn’t have friends surrounding him all the time.

“I like how real everything feels,” he said simply, shrugging his shoulders at this explanation.

“Real?” Brynn asked, though she was pret
ty sure she knew what he meant.

“You know, real books, real paper pages, a real building with wooden doors an
d no glass. Real,” he said, emphasizing his point by waving his hand to indicate the room they sat in.

“No electronic books for you
then?” she asked with a smile.

“They don’t smell the same,” he answered, returning her smile and giving her a warm feeling in her stomach.

“Ah yes, of course. Well, since you spend so much time down here, do you think your nose could point me in the direction of the maps?”

The boy laughed at her joke, a sound that was deep and rich and seemed to fit with their surr
oundings in the “real” library.

“I
think I can help you with that—” he raised his eyebrows at her, wordlessly asking her a question.

“Brynn,” she said, extending her hand. He took her small hand in his own large one and
gave it a firm shake.

“Jonah,” he said, offering his own name in return. “So what do you need a map of? Are you going on a trip?” he asked as he stood and guided her through th
e rows of bookshelves expertly.

He didn’t even look at the little plaques attached to the bookshelves to read the numbers. He knew where he was going simply from having traveled these
carpeted paths so often before.

“Hopefully I’m going on a trip,” she answered mysteriously. “I need a world map.”

“That’s easy enough to find,” he told her, still weaving in and out of bookshelves in this basement that seemed to go on forever.

If Jonah were to disappear and leave her there, Brynn doubted she would ever be able to find her way back to th
e stairwell she’d entered from.

Jonah finally stopped at a dusty bookshelf that looked just like all of the other ones they’d passed in front of. She wasn’t sure how he knew this was where he needed to be, but his tan hands instantly flew to the third shelf up and pulled an old book off.

“Here’s a book of maps,” he explained, handing the book over to Brynn. “The world map of Halcyon should be the very first one in there.”

As if his words had created the contents of the book, the first page Brynn turned to
, showed their world in a sketch of greens and blues. The large land mass in the center of the ocean seemed so small on the map, and the complete lack of any other land made it seem even more remote to Brynn as she stared at it.

“Are you looking for someplace in particular?” Jonah asked, looking at the ma
p over her shoulder.

“I’m looking for a place called Aywon,” she told him, hoping that maybe his infinite knowledge of how to find things
, wasn’t limited only to the library books.

“Aywon,” he repeated. “Never heard of it.”

Brynn sighed deeply at his answer and looked back down at the book she held. “No one seems to have heard of it,” she said glumly.

“If no one’s heard of it, where did
you
get the name from?” he asked, quite reasonably. “There must be someone who’s heard of it if you aren’t making it up.”

“It’s somewhere between Seaside and Central Wildwood,” Brynn explained, still scanning the map for answers. “I went to Central Wildwood on vacation with my parents when I was nine, and the train stopped in Aywon. I’ve wanted to check the place out ever since then, but I can’t ever seem to find it.”

Jonah looked down at the map as well, a quizzical look on his face. “Are you sure you heard the name right?” he asked, meeting her blue eyes with his own.

“Positive,” Brynn answ
ered after a moment of thought.

“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” he said regretfully, actually sounding like he meant it. “I hope you can
find what you’re looking for.”

“Thanks,” Brynn said, giving the boy a small smile as she watched him walk back to his seat. She made a mental note to follow the same path back to the stairwells so she wouldn’t end up lost in
the labyrinth of books forever.

As soon as Jonah was out of earshot Brynn turned her tablet back
on and connected to her house.