The Indigo Thief

by Budgett, Jay

  The arm of her sweater had been torn off, and the words “The Federation will not fall,” had been carved into her forearm. The bloody words shined in the room’s dim light. Feds had been here. Looking for Lost Boys—and maybe me—but they got her instead.

  It was my fault that she was dead. And more innocent people would die if I didn’t do something. I shut my eyes and tried to remember the pages of the report I’d found earlier in the library. The Indigo Report…

  They’d created some sort of contagion for the vaccine, and the Feds were trying to stop them from spreading it, from infecting all the vaccines they stole. It was an evil plan. I couldn’t be distracted by my own guilt right now. I had to think about stopping the Lost Boys, turning them over to the Feds, and freeing Mom and Charlie. Those were the only things that mattered now.

  I tried to keep calm. If I blew my cover, Phoenix would kill me now, rather than later. I breathed deeply and scanned Revleon’s body. “Neevlor” was scribbled in black ink across her forehead. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Her right arm was positioned across her chest with two fingers pressed just below her right eye in the Federal salute. Her killers had made sure to arrange her corpse like this after she’d died.

  “Check the desk,” Phoenix ordered Mila. “You know which drawer she kept it in.”

  Mila tore open the drawers while Phoenix put his palm against Revleon’s head, shutting her eyes. He ground his teeth, and a lone tear rolled down his cheek, caressing his square jaw before sliding along the curve of his neck. He wiped it away when he saw me look.

  “Anything, Meels?”

  The drawers squeaked as she dumped their contents. “Nothing. I think they might have gotten it.”

  “Shit,” he muttered, staring at the cold body. “We should’ve had her make more copies.”

  “C’mon, Phoenix,” said Mila. “We talked about this. Dr. Neevlor agreed it was too risky.”

  Neevlor. I stared at the name scrawled across Revleon’s forehead. I’d seen it before—in the Indigo Report. “Dr. Harper Neevlor” had been typed across its front page. He was its author. But why had the Feds scribbled his name across a dead woman’s forehead? A dead woman and an eccentric gypsy, at that. The gray scarves we’d worn around our heads would’ve looked normal in her closet.

  This Morier Mansion must have been Dr. Neevlor’s house. It was the only explanation. He must have bought the property from the Morier family some years ago and lived here until his death. Or until the Lost Boys and Madam Revleon came in and killed him, adopting this place as their own. The denizens of the Skelewick district would have been too dazed to notice. They didn’t notice anything, really.

  I stared at Revleon’s pale body and felt a pang in my heart. Blood had poured from her rosy cheeks into a puddle on the floor. Her words echoed in my head: It is not often one is offered the truth.

  The truth. But what was the truth? What was the connection between Neevlor and Revleon? There had to have been something more between them for the Feds to have written his name across her forehead. Impulsively, I grabbed paper and pen from the desk and scribbled down the two names. Phoenix sat huddled over the corpse, and Mila continued to search for the Indigo Report.

  Neevlor and Revleon. I traced the two names I’d written on the page with a finger. What was the connection? I wrote the names again, this time with space between the letters.

  Then it hit me. They were the same.

  The two names used the same letters. I rearranged them on the page. Revleon was an anagram for Neevlor. A perfect match. Dr. Harper Neevlor wasn’t a man, but a woman. The very woman sprawled across the floor of the library. This gypsy woman had been the author of the Indigo Report.

  “It’s gone,” said Mila finally. Her curled black hair covered her face. “They must have found it and taken it with them.”

  The Feds had stolen the report and killed its author. I tried again to remember the excerpts I’d read. Something about Indigo vaccines being tainted with viruses. Contaminated samples. Dormant poisons. What had Madam Revleon—Dr. Neevlor—done?

  The truth was a mirage. The more I learned, and the closer I got, the farther away it seemed. I remembered Sparky’s words: Phoenix wants a revolution.

  Phoenix wanted to contaminate the vaccines, and infect the Indigo supplies with a virus to make the Federation fall. And Dr. Neevlor had been helping him. Phoenix didn’t want just war—he could’ve used the guns for that. It would’ve kept things much simpler, but he didn’t want simple. He wanted control. Power. That’s what he was after. And that’s what Vern didn’t want him to have. Vern wanted peace, and Phoenix wanted power. More Lost Boys meant more power. That’s why Vern wanted Phoenix to kill me—and after he was done using me for whatever sick purpose he’d planned, that was why he’d do it.

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. My feet dragged me out of the library and into the hall. There in front of me was a framed picture of a family. Three women in suits, staring at a camera. The picture was creased in its corners, and its colors had bled out and faded on the photo paper. I could just barely make out the navy color of the suits. The one in the middle was the prettiest. She sat with her head cocked to one side and had a cleft pressed in the center of her chin. All three had gray-blue eyes. I wondered if they’d always been that way, or if they’d been blue, and the photo had faded. Someone had scribbled names over their faces in cursive. Myra, Miranda, Mary. Beneath that: The Morier Sisters.

  Farther down the wing, a TV mumbled in the master suite. I wandered over to investigate.

  The bedspread on the master bed had been folded over, its covers neatly tucked. A reading light glowed white from a bedside table—it seemed Dr. Neevlor had been preparing for bed. She’d found eternal rest instead.

  I plopped myself on the bed’s edge and stared at the screen, wanting to feel numb. To let the television’s mindless drone wash over me. Forget what I’d learned, and become a true denizen of the Skelewick district. Be a lost soul rather than a Lost Boy. Maybe the man on the street could give me a watch.

  A news report bubbled across the screen. “LOST BOY FOUND” flashed in brilliant red letters. “Fat chance,” I muttered, laughing at the irony. The police probably caught some poor soul drunk off Neglex and liquor, then propped him on the screen to hide their own ineptitude.

  “Mila Vachowski,” read the reporter with the fearsome unibrow, “was found earlier today in the city of New Los Angeles. A member of the Lost Boys, Vachowski has been at the top of the Federation’s Most Wanted for multiple months. She now awaits trial, slated to begin tomorrow, with a verdict to be reached later this week. Analysts estimate she’ll be executed by next Tuesday.”

  They cut to a clip of the defendant’s mug shot, and my heart exploded in my chest. The bombs were dropping around me, but this time from the inside out. Soon the walls would close in. There’d be no numbness left to wash over me. The shaved head shown on the screen wasn’t Mila, and it wasn’t a drunken stranger.

  It was Charlie.

  Chapter 27

  Gunshots fired in the mansion’s courtyard finally tore my eyes from the screen. The news broadcast suddenly cut to a clip of the Morier Mansion, surrounded by blue and red lights that broke the Skelewick district’s usual yellow twilight.

  “BREAKING NEWS,” the screen read in scarlet letters. “LOST BOYS FACE POLICE STANDOFF IN SKELEWICK DISTRICT.” The men that had broken in through the window must’ve still been here when we’d first arrived. They must’ve run to get reinforcements when they’d heard us coming.

  I had to get out. If the Feds caught me now, I wouldn’t be able find Mom or save Charlie. Or tell the courts they had the wrong girl. Maybe they knew. Maybe they didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I had to save her before time ran out. It wasn’t her fault any of this ever happened. I should never have chased Mila.

  “Kai!” Mila called my name from down the hall. It should’ve been her face on the screen, not Charlie’s. She and Ph
oenix were the real killers—the real terrorists. Charlie was the kind of girl who helped snails cross the street, while Mila and Phoenix let men die in megalodon’s mouths. But at the moment, the terrorists were my only chance of getting away. I swallowed my pride and ran back down the hallway.

  “Where were you, Kai?” asked Phoenix.

  I didn’t look him in the eyes. “I felt sick,” I lied.

  “Death can do that,” he said, nodding as if it made perfect sense. As if I were so blissfully unaware of his deception that I didn’t know he was going to try to kill me.

  “Which window?” asked Mila.

  Phoenix pointed down the hall. “Third guest room on the left.”

  The room was remarkably similar to the one in which Mila and I slept during our last visit. She pulled back the window curtains and snapped opens the shutters, her face stern. Past the banyan tree blue and red lights still flashed, and police copters circled.

  Phoenix cut the screens and grabbed one of the tree branches that extended overhead. He wrapped his hand tightly around it and, without warning, leapt from the window. Mila ushered me forward, but I stepped back.

  “Come on,” she said. “Just grab hold of the branch. Haven’t you ever used the monkey bars?”

  I stared at the ground, a good thirty feet below. “This is different.”

  “You’re right,” she said. She pushed me onto the windowsill. “You don’t get killed if you don’t make it across the monkey bars.”

  Phoenix swung his leg over the branch and disappeared into a mess of twigs, roots, and leaves.

  “Hiding in a treehouse won’t help,” I said. “If we’re dead, we’re dead.”

  She slapped her hand against my back, knocking me forward. I bounced from the balls of my feet and grabbed the branch, which shook from my weight.

  “Go on,” Mila urged. I swung my leg over like Phoenix, and climbed up. The branch felt solid beneath my feet. I ran ahead, twigs slapping me in the face, wondering how Phoenix had made it look so easy. I spat out the leaves that gathered in my mouth, then heard Mila’s footsteps behind me over the sirens’ drone.

  If the Newla police force were here, then the Feds would soon be here, too. Probably already were, for that matter. Probably grabbed tacos down the street to make it look less obvious that they’d already been here on a mission to steal the report. Wanted to wait to make it look like we were the ones who’d done this to Revleon. That we were the ones being caught red-handed.

  Phoenix leapt from one trunk to another, and I did the same. Gnarled roots hung below my feet like branches, an odd trait characteristic of banyan trees. I wrapped my hands around another branch and followed Phoenix, who was headed toward the main trunk in the center—though it was more like a series of trunks. In the center, each individual trunk was indistinguishable from the others; they were wrapped around one another like tangled threads.

  “The mother trunk,” said Mila as she pulled herself behind me. Splinters had buried themselves in my palms, but too much adrenaline surged through my veins for me to care. We were swinging nearly thirty feet in the air, and falling from this height would kill or maim me. Failure to move assured the police would do the same. Splinters were the least of my worries.

  Finally, Phoenix landed on the mother trunk. “Down the rabbit hole,” he said as I joined him. A mass of trunks rested below our feet, curving inward before spreading out to feed other trunks. Together, they formed a wide platform. One trunk that bled into the center stopped abruptly along the curve of another, its dark wood different than the rest. Phoenix ran his hand along the branches that lined the tree’s widest trunk, his brow furrowing as he searched along its spine.

  There was a soft click, and then the dark trunk in the center lifted slightly upward. Mila ran her fingers along its seams and pushed up.

  It wasn’t a trunk at all. It was a chute. One expertly disguised with painted lengths of wood, but a chute nonetheless. Phoenix was right: down the rabbit hole we would go. Mila lowered herself down the chute first, disappearing into the tree’s dark depths as she urged me to follow.

  The police pushed forward, battering the wrought-iron fences down before them. Men with black shields and guns charged the mansion, firing a round of bullets as they ran. The mansion’s remaining glass windows shattered.

  Phoenix stuck his head into the tunnel. “You sure you set it, Meels?”

  “Five seconds!” she yelled back.

  A wall of fire burst from the mansion’s depths, and the house’s insides were devoured by flames. Mila had set a bomb. Their way of ensuring the Feds didn’t get their hands on Revleon’s remains—or the other secrets that likely lay hidden inside the mansion’s walls. Flames burned through the same halls I’d just walked. I could still see Charlie’s face frozen on the screen.

  Analysts estimate she’ll be executed by next Tuesday.

  If I didn’t save her, she’d be dead in less than a week.

  Phoenix pushed me forward. “We need to move, Kai.”

  I joined Mila in the chute. There was no light, I realized, only darkness. With the Lost Boys, there was never any light. Maybe fire, but no light. With the Lost Boys, there was only darkness.

  Chapter 28

  My breathing echoed in the tunnel as I climbed farther down the banyan tree’s hollowed center. I lowered myself along the metal slats that had been affixed to the wall, forming a ladder.

  Phoenix read my thoughts. “The Morier Mansion was built before the world fell—it’s the oldest building in the Skelewick district, which, of course, is the oldest district in Newla. The yellow lights give it away. The district runs on a different electrical circuit than the rest of the city. The council never figured it was worthwhile for the district to switch, I suppose. That, or they like laughing at the people lost in the yellow light. This tunnel was built shortly after the mansion, and goes deep into the island’s core, eventually connecting with the sewers and maintenance tunnels.”

  Somehow it didn’t seem strange that a Skelewick denizen was crazy enough to erect such a tunnel. Maybe they’d been searching for a way to escape the district’s hypnotic glow.

  “What is it about the yellow light that people find so hypnotizing?” I asked.

  “Nostalgia, I suppose,” said Phoenix. “The yellow lights are antiques—remnants of a world gone by. I don’t imagine it’s the light itself that’s hypnotizing, but the past. The thing that hangs in the hollowed eyes and heavy hearts of lost souls.”

  It made sense. For the lost souls, the man with the clocks had said. People searching for the thing that evaded us all: time. Wondering how to get back the time they’d lost, searching for a way to change the past. School taught us that people used to live to a hundred, but I didn’t believe it. Fifty seemed old enough.

  Mila’s feet splashed in a puddle at the base of the ladder. At the bottom of the chute was a tunnel about six feet wide and six feet tall. Phoenix had to duck his head just to walk. Mila cracked something in her pocket, and the tunnel was flooded with light.

  “I wondered if you still had a few glow sticks,” said Phoenix. Mila patted her pockets. The glow stick’s light caught the corner of her jaw and lit her cheekbones in silhouettes.

  “Always,” she said, smiling. She ran along the tunnel, and Phoenix and I followed. Echoes rang as our feet splashed in puddles that had formed over the years. The air stank of stale water, and the tunnel felt humid and hot, like it’d been filled with steam in a past life. The air felt thick and foreign in my lungs, like I was breathing in molasses. The glow stick’s light danced in the air with swirls of moisture.

  “Where—uh—where are we?” I asked, moisture pouring into my mouth as I spoke.

  Mila groaned. “Why’d we bring him again?”

  Phoenix ignored her comment. I think he liked explaining the way the world worked—using the stuff he’d read in books. “Old lava tube,” he said. “That’s why the air’s so warm. It’s been abandoned for years.” He pointed ahead, down
the tunnel where the glow stick’s light gave way to black. “They say it goes all the way to the Light House’s cellar.”

  “The Light House?”

  “You know,” said Mila, “the place where the chancellor lives. Big government building. Council meets there. Ministers, too. It’s even got a little prison. Shit—what do they teach you in school, anyway?”

  Charlie could be in the Light House—in its prison, I thought. I might even be able to get the Lost Boys to take me. Her face was still frozen in my mind. Her bald head, her impending execution. The Feds had known she meant something to me, and they were using her to force me out of hiding.

  I thought of the words carved into Neevlor’s forearm. The Federation will not fall. The Feds, it seemed, would do anything to stop the Lost Boys. At first I’d understood—they had a nation to protect, after all—but now, their methods were starting to seem… sinister. Too sinister. If they would do anything to stop the Lost Boys, then didn’t that make them just as bad?

  I shook my head—I couldn’t think like this. Maybe what the Lost Boys were doing was intentional. They thought they could earn my trust by putting me in dangerous situations and then saving my life. That’s probably what they’d done to Bugsy—waited for him to trust them and then finally revealed the truth of their evil plans, swallowing him whole. Maybe that’s what Phoenix intended to do me before he tried to kill me.

  No, I couldn’t focus on the Lost Boys’ lies, or even the Feds’ lies. It was all too much. I could hardly even tell the difference between the lies and the truth anymore. I had to focus on what I knew to be true without a doubt: Mom and Charlie. Saving them was my only real chance at redemption.

  I sucked in a breath. “The tunnel goes straight there?” I asked. “All the way to the Light House?”

  Phoenix nodded. “We think so, but there are walls and rubble in the way. Been there as long as anyone can remember, and there’s no way around it. I’m afraid it’s probably just an urban legend. My guess is that that branch just leads straight to the sewers.”