The Indigo Thief

by Budgett, Jay

  Gwendolyn sobbed, and Dr. Howey rubbed her arm. “Dr. Harper Neevlor was a good woman,” he said. “She’ll live on forever through her work. The Indigo Report is monumental.”

  Not for the first time, I wondered what Phoenix held over their heads to get them to do his dirty work—what it took to get people like Gwendolyn and Dr. Howey to give up their careers and possibly their lives. It didn’t make sense. Phoenix was just a kid, not much older than me. What did he tell these people he would do? What were they getting out of helping him? What kind of sick, twisted desires did Phoenix promise them would come true? There had to be something.

  I thought about what Gwendolyn said earlier, about how their work was everything to these people. They had no families. No partners. Nothing else, really. Just their work. Their work was their legacy—the only way they could live on forever. Even Dr. Howey said it about Dr. Neevlor and the Indigo Report.

  So that was it: legacy. The chance to have their work turn into legacy was what brought people like Gwendolyn, Dr. Neevlor, and Dr. Howey together. Phoenix promised them that history’s pages would not forget them. By working with him, they’d be assured to live on forever.

  Dr. Neevlor had discovered how to engineer a virus—one powerful enough to control most of the free world—and implant it in the Indigo vaccine. By the time the Report was written, she’d already done it. Her discovery was powerful and dangerous—too much so for the government to let it fall into the wrong hands—so they shut it down.

  But she’d kept working at it—kept a copy of the original report—and so they had to have her killed. Somehow, however, she escaped and ran into Phoenix, maybe in the slums, maybe in the Skelewick district, and he promised her sanctuary. A single copy of a report wasn’t the sort of thing that left a legacy, but he promised her a revolution—one made possible by her discovery. Together, they could turn the people against the government and begin a new world.

  Power and legacy: the kinds of promises that made people like Gwendolyn, Neevlor, and Howey forget who they were in order to find out who they could become, how they would be remembered.

  It made me sick.

  Dr. Howey led us to his office on the seventh floor. The elevator’s doors closed behind us, and I stared at the black domed cameras lining the halls. A placard on one side of the elevator read “Indigo Reserve Board Offices” in blue letters. I’d heard of the Indigo Reserve Board before. It was the governing organization that determined distribution of Indigo supplies and directed how to manage the continual shortage of vaccines.

  Suddenly I realized where I’d recognized Dr. Howey’s face from: he’d been on TV several times since his appointment some odd number of years ago. He was the current chairman of the Indigo Reserve Board—the most influential man in the world when it came to the Indigo vaccines. Only the chancellor’s influence rivaled his when it came to Indigo supply.

  He shoved a key into a door at the end of the hall, and the door’s frame glowed a soft white, beckoning like the Daisies in Club 49. The room we entered was also entirely white, populated mostly by a brilliant chandelier several stories long hanging from a vaulted ceiling. Its glass bulbs glowed brightly, and a plush ivory chair rested beneath it in the room’s center. Yet for all its whiteness, the room didn’t seem sterile, but heavenly.

  “Please, take a seat,” said Dr. Howey to Gwendolyn. “We can start whenever you’re ready, my dear.”

  I threw Phoenix a confused look, but he simply stared at the hanging chandelier as Gwendolyn breathed deeply and lowered herself into the chair, her body shaking and glowing beneath the fixture’s brilliant light.

  Dr. Howey pushed a button on the chair’s side and it reclined slowly.

  Gwendolyn’s blue eyes shined brightly. “I think I’d like some music.”

  Howey shuffled to the wall and pushed a button. A cello’s soft hum echoed in the chambers.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s lovely.” She shifted in her seat. “What do people usually say, Marvin? What is there to say at a time like this?”

  He pulled a syringe from his pocket. “It depends on the person, Gwen.”

  What was he doing? I tried to get Phoenix’s attention, but he was still staring at the light. Mila traced her foot against the floor’s marbled lines.

  Gwendolyn exhaled slowly. “Will it hurt?”

  Dr. Howey searched for a vein. “You’ll just feel a prick.” He plunged the needle into her arm.

  She sobbed quietly. “How—how long do I have?”

  I felt sick to my stomach. The room’s walls were bending. It was the first time I’d ever been present for a euthanization. When Dad’s time came, he’d gone in with Mom. I stayed in the waiting room with Charlie. She held my hand, rubbed my head, and somehow made my world a bit brighter despite the despair. I wished she were here now.

  Dr. Howey rubbed Gwendolyn’s hand. “You’ve only got a few minutes. It was a strong dose. You’ll feel radiating warmth within a minute, and a little euphoria.”

  “Th-thank you, Marvin,” she said, the words catching in her throat. “That sounds n-nice.”

  Dr. Howey kissed her forehead. “I’ll miss my dear Gwendolyn,” he said. “I’ve missed you a lot these past few months. The Lottery’s new Director just isn’t the same.”

  “You should know by now not to call it that,” she said. “It’s no lottery at all. It’s not random, just data and statistics. The Longevity Observation Termination Telesis Operative is well named.” Gwendolyn turned. “Mila?”

  Mila kept her head down, but Phoenix muttered, “She’s dying, Meels,” and pushed her forward.

  Mila wrapped her hands around Gwendolyn’s, and the smile faded from the dying woman’s lips. “I’m so sorry… This is all disgusting. This whole thing. This whole place. Everything I’ve done. Don’t give me a coffin,” she said. “I’ve already buried myself in regret.”

  Mila breathed deeply. “You didn’t know what you were really doing. You couldn’t have known about Sarah, or all the others—they didn’t tell you.”

  Gwendolyn stared at the chandelier. “Ah,” she said, “but I think a part of me did know. When I saw the names spit out of the system—saw the results of the physicals, the diagnostic tests, and the reports on lung capacity. I saw them—the children behind the statistics—but I was too afraid to do anything.”

  Mila was shaking. She shut her eyes tight. “There aren’t many names that I remember pulling,” Gwendolyn continued, “but your sister’s was one of them. Vachowski is not a common surname. Her initials, S.V., are the consonants in the word “save.” I should’ve put her name back in the system. I should’ve saved the girl.”

  “Then why didn’t you? She was too young when it happened.”

  A tear rolled down Gwendolyn’s cheek. “I wish I could have. Trust me—I wish all the time that I could have. But her lung capacity was only fifty percent. There are never certainties behind the math, but fifty-percent lung capacity means they’ll almost always be dead by ten—usually eight. Your sister was lucky to have made it to nine.”

  Gwendolyn’s breaths were coming in spurts now, like a weight was pressing against her chest. “I th-think it’s time for me to go,” she said. “E-everything’s warm now, and the l-light is s-so brilliant. Maybe I’ll be forgiven for what I’ve done.”

  I wondered what Gwendolyn had done. What was the Lottery? How were children being killed? Nothing made sense. The more questions that were answered, the more confused I became. Gwendolyn mentioned something about diagnostic tests and lung capacity—she must’ve meant the results of our annual Federal physicals.

  Mila’s voice turned soft. “Maybe you will, Gwendolyn.”

  The woman’s head lolled to her side, and Dr. Howey felt her wrist for a pulse.

  My mind still raced with thoughts, trying to process what Gwendolyn and Mila had said: the Ministry of Health put the data from our physicals into a system. Maybe they used it to track the nation’s health over time, or determine how
to allocate vaccines. Maybe there was a way to figure out which children were more susceptible to the Carcinogens, and who could make a recovery with the help of medication. Maybe Gwendolyn had pulled Sarah’s name from the system and prevented her from getting the medication she’d needed.

  I’d never heard of any medications, other than Indigo, that could fight the Carcinogens, but based on their conversation, it seemed like such medications might exist.

  Dr. Howey rubbed Gwendolyn’s cheek. “Dead,” he confirmed. “Goodbye, my friend.”

  I felt a pang in my chest. The woman with the phoenix fan was gone—the only other person in the room who’d known Charlie.

  Howey pulled another syringe from his suit pocket and jabbed it into his own vein, laughing as he did so. Phoenix ran toward him. “What the hell are doing, Howey?”

  The room’s door slammed open. A squadron of guards stood in formation on the other side, their guns aimed in our direction.

  Phoenix stared at Howey and shook his head. “You double-crossed us.”

  “It had to be done,” he said. “Indigo had to be saved. It’s my life’s work.” He gave a signal, and the guards stepped forward.

  I scanned the room for a place to hide, but there were none. It was just vaulted ceilings, a brilliant chandelier, and us.

  Phoenix shook his head. “This could have been your life’s work. What we’re trying to do right here, right now. You read the Indigo Report—it could have been your legacy. ”

  “Oh, it will be,” Dr. Howey said, laughing. “I’ll be forever remembered in textbooks for catching Phoenix McGann and the other Lost Boys. Neutralizing the greatest threat to national security in all of history. You, Phoenix, are my legacy.”

  “But Gwendolyn—”

  “Is dead,” Howey finished coldly. “And she was a confused woman. The Indigo Report went to her head in her last months. She was always a numbers person. Ideas weren’t good for her head. Our system is perfect. The world is in order. There will be no war.”

  “Then you’ll burn with us,” shouted Phoenix. “You’ve already betrayed your country enough. Mila snagged your badge in the closet. We have what we need to continue. And I assure you, we’ll get what we came for. You’ll not be remembered as a hero. Not by anyone. The people will want to forget your name.”

  Dr. Howey’s eyes fluttered as the euthanasia medicine coursed through his veins. “The people will want no such thing.” The syringe fell from his hand. “I’ll be d-dead. In a m-minute. And so will y-you, Ph-Phoenix McGann.” He gave the guards a final signal as he collapsed to the floor.

  Like torrential rain, the bullets poured over our heads.

  Chapter 33

  Phoenix knocked me to the floor as he fired at the ceiling, the bullets from his gun joining the fray. Federal bullets raced past my ears as I slammed against the tiled floor, and overhead, I watched Phoenix’s bullets slam into the chandelier’s crystals. The fixture rocked in the air. One by one, the crystals the bullets hit fell from the air, raining brilliant light as they broke on the ground.

  “MOVE, MEELS,” Phoenix yelled. Mila rolled from Gwendolyn’s chair, pulling something from Howey’s pocket before rolling again to the room’s edge. The chandelier shook as Phoenix fired at it again. I crawled to the room’s corner, and prayed that the brilliant light pouring from the raining crystals would blind the guards. More crystals fell, and I watched the guards stare, dumbstruck, at the rain.

  Mila joined me in the room’s corner. “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Royal euthanization room,” she said. She pointed to the ceiling. “Mostly for government officials, hence the fancy chandelier.”

  Phoenix fired again, and the chandelier moaned. Above us, the ceiling cracked, and the guards stepped back in the doorway. Phoenix fired a final time before joining us. The walls shook as crystals poured from the fixture, covering Gwendolyn’s body in streams of light.

  Phoenix pointed to the doorway. “Five seconds,” he said, pushing us forward. “Move.”

  My legs burned as we ran. Adrenaline coursed through my veins—Phoenix had saved my life once again. The Feds had tried to end it, but Phoenix had saved it. Why? What fate did he have in store for me? Or was he just raising a lamb for the slaughter?

  He aimed his gun at the guards as we charged. The men stared at the ceiling with lowered weapons, dazzled by the brilliance of the falling chandelier. Behind us, I smelled smoke rise and thunder echo as the ceiling’s cracks snaked down the walls. The great chandelier was falling. Its light and rubble would erase Gwendolyn’s and Dr. Howey’s corpses forever.

  I heard a loud snap as the chandelier’s cords broke and it plummeted from the ceiling. “JUMP!” yelled Phoenix, and Mila and I obeyed without hesitation. The ground shook as the chandelier smashed into a million pieces, and we hurtled past the guards who fell in the wake of the chandelier’s shockwaves. Jumping from the ground had saved us from a similar fall.

  “Elevator?” I asked, only slightly hopeful, as we ran.

  Phoenix shook his head and pointed to a doorway at the hall’s end. “Stairs,” he said. “Safer that way. Fewer people will see us going to the top.”

  I braced myself for ninety stories of stairs.

  As we ran, I felt a pang in my chest: I missed Gwendolyn. It was hard to believe she was gone. Only a few minutes ago we’d been talking to one another and laughing. She made me think of my own mom. I think it was the chili. Mom always made chili when it was cold outside. Then I felt another ache in my chest: I missed Mom. But I breathed deeply and shook it off—I couldn’t think about Mom now. I had to keep running, keep moving with the Lost Boys. That was my only chance of finding her, wherever she was.

  We pushed into the stairwell, and stood at the edge of a column of stairs that wrapped around the building’s corner. A hollow column stretched high in its center, running from the building’s first floor to its top. Mila pulled something that looked like a gun from her pocket. Bertha’s invention: the Grappling Gun. She leaned against the railing and fired it toward the highest set of stairs she could see. A grappling hook affixed to a cord launched from its end in lieu of bullets, and a clink echoed as it attached itself to a railing high above. Mila pulled hard on its cord, checking that it was secure. I searched my pockets, thinking I might’ve been given a similar weapon, but I felt only bundles of paper like lint. I was the only one who hadn’t been given a gun for the mission. If I wanted to survive, I was at their mercy.

  “Grab on,” ordered Mila. I wrapped my arms around the curve of her waist as Phoenix wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Mila pulled her weapon’s trigger again, and we shot through the stairwell’s hollow center, racing past landings as we rose.

  The gun jerked to a stop, and we pulled ourselves over the railing to safety. A placard on the wall read, “Floor 31.” Mila fired the gun again, and again I wrapped my arms around her waist. We repeated the process twice more in total. By the end of it, my arms felt sore in their sockets.

  “Better than an elevator?” asked Mila.

  I puked over the railing’s edge in response.

  This floor’s placard read “Floor 92,” and when I looked left of the landing, I noticed the stairs stopped abruptly here. The Indigo Reserves rested overhead, and must have been secured with a separate entrance.

  Phoenix ushered us out of the stairwell and into the hallway. “You got the keys?” he asked Mila.

  She pulled a keychain from her pocket.

  “And the badge?”

  She nodded again.

  “Let’s move, then.”

  Phoenix scanned the badge to the right of a metal door in the hall’s center and pulled a circular device from his pocket. He placed it between his upper and lower eyelids and covered his iris before pressing his face against the door’s retina scanner.

  “Digital retina duplicator,” he said to me as the scanner beeped and the door clicked open. “Sparky hacked the system and downloaded Howey’s retina signature last ni
ght.”

  “Couldn’t he have hacked the codes from Howey’s badge, then?” I asked.

  Phoenix shook the badge in the air. “The badge contains a small blood sample. The codes are fragments of his DNA that aren’t stored on the server.”

  “Right,” I said, as if storing blood droplets in ID badges made perfect sense.

  The room we entered consisted of walled concrete and steel pillars. A single staircase in its center led directly to the ninety-third floor. We climbed, and at the top of this staircase, we found another door and a slab of thick glass guarding the Indigo Reserve room’s entrance.

  Around us, six women in white lab coats stood flabbergasted at their workstations. The first to recover from the shock pulled a gun from under her desk. Another threw a handful of mints at us. The one with the gun shook her head and muttered, “Jesus, Trish.”

  I’ve seen many movies where the hero gets shot. Usually, he’s breaking into a bank vault at the end of the movie, and some clerk behind the counter pulls out a gun and shoots him in the chest. Despite the blood that pours out of him, he manages to stanch the bleeding, continues robbing the bank, and then sleeps with the nearest blonde before receiving any medical attention. I knew this was not one of those movies.

  Phoenix fired his gun twice in the air, and the Federal employee who’d been holding hers threw it across the floor, crying.

  I picked the gun up off the floor.

  “We need someone to give us an eye,” said Mila. “Now.”

  The group of women gave more watery sobs, and I heard one of them mutter something about Trish giving up one of hers because she had a lazy one. Trish responded to this suggestion by showering the mutterer with a handful of Tic-Tacs.

  Mila shook her head. “Oh, for God’s sake. You get to keep it in your head. We just need it for a minute.”

  “Sorry, Trish,” muttered a woman.

  An employee with black hair hurried toward the stairs and the retina scanner. “But I don’t the know codes,” she said.