The Indigo Thief

by Budgett, Jay

  Gwendolyn passed out cobbler, but I felt sick to my stomach again and couldn’t finish it. I resigned myself to pushing it around my plate.

  Gwendolyn smiled at me from across the table. I felt bad for her, and for the fact that she lived entirely alone. No family and no friends, it seemed. I wondered how she’d become the Caravan’s ally, and how she’d met Phoenix.

  “How, uh, how did you know Dr. Neevlor?” I asked. I’d only known Neevlor briefly, but the name still felt thick and not quite right on my tongue. I kept wanting to call her Madam Revleon. It was strange how quickly you got attached to a name. “Did you work at the same Ministry together?”

  Gwendolyn shook her head and sipped from her glass of water, patting the corners of her pink lips with a napkin afterward. “Harper and I were neighbors for years. We used to ride the subway on the Tube together. She worked for R&D, and I worked for Health. Different Ministries, but they were only an island apart.”

  “So she lived in the house next door?”

  Gwendolyn nodded.

  “Was that before she moved to the Morier Mansion?”

  Phoenix pursed his lips and stared at Gwendolyn, watching her with burning eyes. Had he coached her on what to tell me? What was he worried Gwendolyn might say?

  She was too busy watching me spoon the cobbler to notice his stare. “Harper lived next to me for twelve years, but that was before she started her investigation… Before she wrote the Indigo Report and tried to get it published. Then everything changed.” Her eyes got watery again—the way they’d been when she’d stared at Mila. “They started trying to kill her.”

  “Who did?” I asked. “The Feds?”

  She nodded.

  “And you helped her get away,” I finished. “She came to you for help, and you helped her get to Newla. That’s where you met Phoenix and the Lost Boys. How you became connected to the Caravan.”

  It was all falling into place. Everything was making sense. Gwendolyn helped Neevlor escape from the Suburban Islands to Newla. Once there, they ran into Phoenix, who’d already staked out the mansion. He’d offered to help hide Neevlor, with the Caravan’s support, in exchange for the Indigo Report.

  He’d been looking for a way to start a war, and the contents of the Indigo Report gave him just what he needed. Taught him how to contaminate the vaccine with a virus.

  “You helped Neevlor get to Newla,” I said again.

  The secrets were falling into place. Phoenix couldn’t hide the truth forever.

  Gwendolyn, however, shook her head. “I didn’t help Dr. Neevlor at all.” She took a deep breath. “I told her to go to hell.”

  Chapter 31

  Hackner inhaled a final puff from his cigar before he patted Margaret’s arm—time for her to go. They’d been lying in his red satin sheets for nearly five whole minutes. It was about all he could stand of the woman once the deed was done.

  Her red hair matched the sheets and was sprawled about her head like a wicker basket. “Already?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes.” He patted her bum to push her out of the bed. “You really are wonderful, darling—and take that as a compliment, because there are two girls I see regularly who I don’t say that to. But, you see, there’s a nation I must run. A great one—the greatest in the entire world. She is my lady, and I her lad.”

  Margaret kissed his cheek and slid back into her black velvet dress. “God, I love that you’re so patriotic, baby. I shouldn’t be so selfish. You’re too good a man for me to keep you all to myself.”

  He waved off her compliment; the patriotic bullshit always got to them. “Don’t be silly, Marjorie—Margaret, definitely Margaret,” he said. She was too infatuated to notice the slip. “You really are quite wonderful.” He slid to the bed’s edge and buttoned his pants. “Same time next Tuesday?” She nodded. “And, please, try to be gentle with the door this time on your way out—no need to slam it, darling. It’s old wood.”

  Hackner tightened his tie before pushing open the mahogany doors between his room and the chancellor’s chambers. How long he had dreamt of the chambers being his before he’d actually earned their keys. And they belonged to him now—the keys and the chambers. His rightful jurisdiction as the Federation’s chancellor.

  “Hackner!” Miranda’s shrill voice called from the ConSynth. He laughed bitterly. The chambers would never be his. They had and always would belong to her.

  “Hackner!” she called again.

  “Yes, Miranda?” He pushed the door shut behind him. The others didn’t know—couldn’t know—of her existence. It was better for everyone that way. Sometimes, he wished even he didn’t know. Wished he still thought the government belonged to the people of the state rather than to her.

  “For once,” she said, “I’m pleased.” Her sinewy figure appeared behind him before flashing onto the chaise lounge.

  “And why’s that?”

  She pointed to a stack of white papers on his—her desk. “Ah,” he said. “I see we’ve begun recycling. Really, I’m surprised this office didn’t start sooner—”

  “Results, Hackner,” she said through gritted teeth. “We’ve finally got results. They found the Indigo Report, you idiot.”

  Hackner hated when she called him an idiot. He was the free world’s elected leader for God’s sake, and it’s not like they could’ve elected an idiot. He lowered himself into his chair and pressed his feet against the back of his desk—against the place where the prisoner named Charlie had hidden. Miranda had been raving about the Indigo Report ever since he’d arrived in office. Bitching about how badly they needed to find it, and how they had to keep it hidden from the public, though she never told him quite what it was.

  He scanned the documents on his desk. God, there were a lot of words in these reports. He couldn’t be bothered with so many words. He was more a man of action. “Less reading, more rutting,” his father always said, and he couldn’t have agreed more.

  Hackner saw the smugness line Miranda’s face like a red gloss. She always thought she was in control—that she knew everything. That she had all the power. At the end of the day, however, she was still tied to a small green orb. He grinned. “Since you’re so informed,” he said, “I’m sure you’re aware of the fire, the explosions at the South Atlantic car show, and the lockdown at the Newla-Maui border station?” He cracked his neck to the right. “Or did you miss those while you were busy panting over the Indigo Report?”

  The lift in her brow told him that she had not been aware, though he knew she’d never directly admit it. Couldn’t confess that even a second had passed where she hadn’t been in total control—where things hadn’t gone perfectly according to plan.

  He drummed his fingers along the ConSynth’s curved glass. “The Lost Boys are moving, Miranda.” He paused to let that sink in. “So where’s your boy? Where’s Mr. Kai Bradbury? Something tells me he’s already forgotten about the girl. I suppose the glamour of crime got to him.”

  The chaise lounge sat empty. He heard her breathing behind his throat. Despite the chill that ran down the length of his back, he savored the sweet satisfaction of finally having the upper hand.

  “I commissioned the construction of a second ConSynth,” she said quickly. “It’ll be done by the end of the week. Just a precaution.”

  “Same color?” he asked. “I do find the green’s become tiresome.”

  She ran her hand over his shoulder. He reminded himself that she couldn’t touch him—she was just a hologram, a consciousness suspended by the power of technology, and nothing more. “This one,” she said, “is going to be red, darling. I know you like red. And we wouldn’t want my dear Hackner to become bored with me, now would we?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We certainly wouldn’t want that.”

  She lay across his desk, hanging her bare leg just over his lap. She rubbed her hand along the length of her neck as her lips cracked into a smile. “I’d hate for you to get sick of me, like you have poor old Marga
ret.”

  He tightened his jaw. “You were in my room. Again.” He wondered how many times Miranda would follow him without him knowing it.

  “I’m always with you,” she said with a smile. “In the office, the boardroom, the bedroom: everywhere. There is nowhere you can hide from me. Not that you’d want to, of course.”

  Hackner thought of the prick he felt every so often along his spine. A sure sign she was near—that she was watching.

  Miranda kicked her heels on the desk. Hackner didn’t mind—her feet weren’t really there. “The prisoner in fourteen’s acting up again.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You don’t think he’ll come for her either?”

  Hackner shook his head. “Doubt it. Let’s give her to R&D.”

  “Since that’s worked so well in the past.”

  Hackner shrugged. He couldn’t have cared less what they did to things in R&D. From all his encounters with them, he’d come to the conclusion they were about as scientific as eighth-graders pulling frogs apart for the science fair. No real genius, expertise, or talent. It was probably best that way. Made it easier to maintain what Miranda called a “healthy” level of progress. Which was no progress at all, in reality.

  “What would you have me do with her?” he asked. “Give her two more weeks with Zane? She’s hardly even looked at the rope.”

  Miranda waved away his suggestion. “I’m afraid she’s too far gone for that. I’ve seen her through cameras. At this point, her brains are like scrambled eggs. She can’t even feed herself—Sage does it all.”

  The blind girl. How Hackner hated her. She’d already betrayed them once by helping Charlie try to escape. And Miranda had let her off easy. She didn’t want her precious pet refusing to mix his antidote. She’d only made Minister Zane give the girl ten lashes. Ten! It was ridiculous. The girl wasn’t even unconscious afterward!

  He thought of the prisoner in cell fourteen again. “Perhaps the Ministry of Health, then? They could always use a fresh cadaver for experiments. And we could bring it to them still alive.”

  Miranda grinned and cocked her head to the side like a bird examining its prey. “You can be brilliant sometimes. Did you know that, darling? It’s no wonder you got elected.”

  “It’s settled, then,” he said. “I’ll have the guards take her this afternoon.”

  Miranda chewed her bottom lip. “Perfect,” she said. “And might I also suggest that the guards who go with her go without uniform? In plain clothes, perhaps?” Miranda’s suggestions were never really suggestions: they were just funny ways of giving orders.

  “Of course,” he said. “Whatever you wish.”

  “We don’t need civilians seeing more men in uniforms—they’ve already got too much cause for concern. The Pacific Northwestern Tube has yet to be repaired. They’re still shuttling Moku Lani citizens back and forth to the other islands via ferry… Yes, guards in plain clothes will make things look a bit more normal. Let them blend in and keep things a bit calmer.”

  Hackner nodded. She didn’t want the public knowing the government wasn’t fully in control. That they had no idea where the Lost Boys were or where they’d attack next. For all the Feds knew, every city was a target. The bombs could’ve already been laid, and they’d have no idea. The thin threads that had held their society together for so many years were unraveling. The world they knew was in jeopardy of becoming scrambled.

  Scrambled. Like the brains of cell fourteen’s prisoner, Dr. Mary Bradbury.

  Chapter 32

  Oahu’s once wondrous mountainsides had given way years ago to an endless crop of hospitals. The entire island was now a field of clinics and—as Gwendolyn soon informed me—waiting rooms.

  She typed a code on a keypad to the left of the Ministry’s metal doors. “Lord knows I can’t stand those things.” Even the Ministry of Health’s back alley looked sterile. White dumpsters rested on the outskirts of the Ministry’s main marble tower.

  “Mostly labs,” Gwendolyn acknowledged. “But there’s a small hospital on the third, fourth, and fifth floors for government officials. No waiting rooms for them, of course.”

  “God forbid they have to wait even a minute like the rest of us,” muttered Mila.

  The glass door slid open. Phoenix double-checked the device he’d slapped against the side of the building. I recognized it as the silver box from Bertha’s lab. A Video Loop Fractalfyer, she’d called it (also “deep shit”).

  Phoenix, however, called it a “VLF” for short. He said it disrupted the building’s security feed flow, filling it with endless patterns of images from earlier in the day. Like looking through a kaleidoscope of monotony. Since Bertha designed it, I was naturally skeptical of its effectiveness.

  “You’re sure it’ll work?” I asked.

  “It’s Bertha’s,” said Phoenix. “It’s got to.”

  “Dr. Howey,” said Gwendolyn, “will meet us on the third floor, in the janitor’s closet across from the women’s restroom.”

  Mila pursed her lips. “Charming.”

  We entered the building’s receiving zone in its vast warehouse, which occupied the first two floors. Rows of supplies sat on high metal shelves, and rovers ran along their lengths, plucking inventory as they went, racing straight past us with little regard for our appearance.

  “Real secure,” muttered Mila. “Nice place to keep the world’s largest supply of Indigo.” She kicked a rover’s wheel as it passed. It beeped shrilly, but otherwise paid her no attention.

  “There’s no Indigo on most of these floors,” explained Gwendolyn. “Just the occasional vaccine or two in transit. The reserves are in the building’s top six floors.”

  “And how many floors are there exactly?” I asked.

  “Ninety-nine,” she said without hesitation. She pressed her right two fingers below her cheekbone in the Federal salute, leaned against the door before us, and pressed her eye against its retina scanner.

  “Really?” I asked. “They couldn’t make it a hundred?”

  The scanner beeped and she removed her head. “It’s a metaphor,” she explained. “Despite the Ministry’s best attempts, the health of the nation is not—and will never be—one hundred percent. The ninety-nine floors remind us of this fact. They remind us to keep trying, keep reaching for that one hundred percent.”

  “So…” I said. “Budget cut?”

  “Yeah, honestly I think they just ran out of funding.”

  We wandered through the Ministry’s floors without so much as a second glance. Gwendolyn told us that once you were in, people would figure you had a reason to be there. For all they cared, you could have a bomb strapped to your chest, and they wouldn’t give you a second glance—they were that absorbed in their research, that absorbed in leaving their names hallowed in the building’s sacred walls. Since the onset of the Carcinogens, the greatest legacy one could leave was an ounce of new knowledge in the medical sector.

  Gwendolyn told us that most people who worked for the Ministry of Health were too busy to watch TV, which explained why they didn’t recognize us from news reports. Work was their life, and it stayed that way for most of them until they died.

  This Ministry, in particular, made it a point to withhold promotions to positions of power from people with families. The Ministry needed leaders who were completely focused on leaving a legacy in the medical field—they couldn’t afford for employees to have distractions. Occasionally a family man slipped through, but even then his childless colleagues typically made it a point to cause him to fail.

  A woman in a white coat and thick glasses hurried past us with a clipboard. She smiled at me and I smiled back. It was the first stranger to have smiled at me since we escaped Club 49. I guessed she liked my cheeseburger socks, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the security alarms weren’t going off for once. Bertha’s device—the VLF—was working, and for that I was grateful.

  When Gwendolyn opened the janitor’s closet door on the third floor, I saw tha
t it, too, was oddly sterile. The shelves were lined with packaged dusters and bottled water used for mopping the floors. A man in his forties crawled out from between two shelves. His bald head shined like the Ministry’s marbled walls, and his navy suit hung in folds around his slight frame. In one hand, he clutched a leather padfolio.

  He eyed us from behind a pair of clear, plastic glasses, and I recognized his face as a vaguely familiar. Had I seen him on TV?

  Gwendolyn jumped back, startled. “Marvin!” she cried. “Dr. Marvin Howey, my dear, how are you?” She wrapped her arms around his tiny frame, crushing him between her sagging bosoms.

  He straightened his glasses. “I’ve been better, though it’s certainly nice to see you again, Gwen.” He extended Phoenix a hand. “And to finally meet you, my good sir, in the flesh.”

  Phoenix shook the man’s hand with a somber look. “A pleasure.”

  Dr. Howey gave a lopsided smile. “The Lost Boys,” he said to himself. “Never thought I’d see the day.” He turned to Gwendolyn. “How much time do we have?”

  “Enough.”

  “There’s never enough time, my dear,” he corrected her. “Never enough.”

  “Did you read the report?”

  He gritted his teeth. “And then burned the copy, like you asked.” He stared at the closet’s sterile shelves, his gaze muddied for a moment, lost somewhere in the distance. “It was hard.”

  “Reading the report?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Burning it.”

  “It’s a pity you had to. The Feds stole Neevlor’s only other copy.”

  “Oh?”

  “They got Neevlor, too. They must’ve been scoping out the mansion for a while. How else could they have known?”

  “Indeed,” he said, nodding. “How else could they have known?” There was something in his eyes that looked to me like feigned sincerity, as if he actually knew how the Feds had found Neevlor. Perhaps he’d been the rat. I wished Charlie were here. She was the best judge of character I knew. She’d know if the man was being honest.