CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Betrayal

"Bonka, please help her!" Charlie screamed, clinging to the limp young girl who lay draped in his arms. She was still as carved marble, the only movement the ripples in her skirt and sweater against the humid breeze. Her white eyes, slathered behind smears of cream and radiant starlight, rolled back like glass marbles into her head.

"Please!" Charlie cried again, tears welling over his cheeks and dropping onto Verona, "She needs our help! We can't lose her, too!"

"Charlie," Bonka murmured deeply to him, striding close and placing his gloved hand onto the boy's shoulder. "She isn't lost. Not a single one of you have been misplaced."

The kneeling child, clutching the girl to his breast in a display not unlike Pieta, the sculpture by Michelangelo, dabbed his dirty fingers to his eyes and glanced hesitantly up at the man who towered over him.

"What do you mean?" Charlie asked straightforwardly, no longer enthralled by Bonka's treacherous tour of this miserable factory. He had just brought his wrist to Verona's face to wipe some of the cream away from her airways when Bonka hoisted the boy to his feet. The mindless girl slipped from Charlie's grip and fell limply onto the iron grate below them with a clunk.

Dazed, Charlie shouted: "Bonka!"

"Be silent, child!" Bonka boomed back at him, and Charlie felt the air knocked violently from his lungs.

The silence in the hot, wet air between them was palpable for just a moment, before the man spoke again:

"Listen to me. You will have your answers, and I will have mine. Charlie-"

His voice stopped abruptly, a machine considering his words carefully.

"You must forget about the other children, as they would have forgotten you."

"They wouldn't have forgotten me," Charlie said firmly, but his voice wavered.

"Would they not?" Bonka asked, his voice piqued with what sounded, to Charlie, like legitimate curiosity. "Do you truly believe Gloop, the boy who was denied of any life worth living, of love and thrill and fear; do you think he would blink an eye before deserting you to a fate as frightful as his own? Do you believe Viola, a girl tormented by her mother's betrayal and the oppressive perspectives of her upbringing, would have not wrested your survival from your breast in the same way she wrested from Verona her prize? And this girl at our feet, now, poor Verona-"

He motioned carelessly to the body at Charlie's feet.

"Do you suspect she, the girl with a life so rich and opulent and full of ecstasy, a life so full it pressed sap and syrup from its very pores - so full that she could no longer find joy in anything at all, and bid me to rid her of it - do you fathom she would have chosen your life, your memory, over her own pursuits?"

The tall, frightful man closed his lips and allowed Charlie a moment to consider his words.

Charlie's shoulder sank and he shook his head, "No, I don't fathom that any of them would."

Bonka smiled at him.

"But," Charlie's spoke again, his bottom lip quivering, "Bonka-"

Bonka silenced him. "This is a good thing for you, Charlie," he promised.

Charlie shook his head again, his face downturned to his tattered brown shoes standing atop the iron grates over a dark sea of gurgling cream. "I trusted you, and it's all been for naught."

The betrayal in his words hung tangibly in the shadows around them.

Bonka smirked. "Yes, it has been- but I never requested your trust, as you've never requested, in turn, that I trust you."

Charlie turned his eyes to look at Bonka: a shining, waxen pink figure with a face as proud as he'd ever seen, when the shrill voice of another boy suddenly pierced the silence in his ears:

"Get out of there, Charlie! You have to get out of there!"

Charlie jumped and looked around frantically. He peered anxiously into the scarlet shadows of the beeping and humming machines, the churning vat of pulverized Gloop, and then down to the glimmering cream that burned as acid now through Verona's pale skin and skull, revealing a brain; round and bright, it was unlike anything he had ever seen-

"JUMP, CHARLIE! JUST JUMP!"

Bonka's ears seemed deafened to the howls of the shouting invisible child, and he watched Charlie with disdain and confusion as the boy in front of him swivelled about.

He was not, however, deafened to the loud CRASH! that echoed suddenly throughout the entire chamber, stirring the cream below them and setting the room ablaze with spinning red and orange lights. Sirens blared, and now Bonka, too, looked around madly. Charlie gripped his palms tightly to his ears, and still he heard the child's voice:

"JUMP INTO THE CREAM! I'LL GET YOU OUT! JUMP!"

"DAMN YOU!" Bonka shouted at the din.

Charlie diverted his gaze to the sea of frothing and heaving cream that bubbled and leapt against the dock towards him. Jump in? Surely not- he'd face the same fate as Gloop, whatever had happened to that boy, or perhaps even worse. Would he be directed to the pulverisation chamber, to cry in agony forevermore in the very same vat? Would he dissolve into the nether around him, encapsulated forever in his final moments of agony and despair, never to see his mother and father ever again? It couldn't be worth the risk- no, it absolutely couldn't!

Charlie fell to his knees, his pants tearing against the ridged iron.

"STOP! LEAVE ME ALONE!" He screamed.

But the voice was relentless: "PLEASE, CHARLIE, JUMP!"

Bonka threw his cane into the turbulent syrup beside him, tearing off his gloves with a force that would have astonished Charlie, should he have seen it - but what was perhaps more astonishing was the dark metal that comprised his digits. Indignant, the crackling marble statue of a man strode towards the boy that lay cowered and quivering before him, coated in revolving discs of hot orange and pungent yellows that illuminated the shadows that had draped him prior, emanating from the blaring alarms that surrounded him. He bent forward and gripped Charlie's collar tightly, once again hoisting the perspiring teen onto his limp legs.

"Claim him, then, Child in the Light!" Bonka spat furiously, his voice so thunderous it shook the air behind Charlie's ribs. "There is nowhere you can hide him from me!"

And then, as the clamour of another explosion far within the factory shook all the walls around them, and before Charlie could notice the grin that flickered across the face of his aggressor, Bonka thrust the boy off the platform and into the molten cream below.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed the rising action within this chapter, and that you're looking forward to the the bizarre twists and turns in the chapters ahead. Please follow, favourite, or leave a review if you're enjoying the story so far!