The Indigo Thief

by Budgett, Jay

  Mila nodded—she understood. She knew what it was like to hang your hopes and dreams on a person. She’d done it with her sister. The door slammed shut behind her.

  I ran my hands along the dark room’s walls, and hit a switch. The room lit up. I wandered to the green globe and pressed my fingers against its curved glass. Gases swirled around my fingertips, and the sphere hummed.

  And then I saw her. She was lying flat on the ground beyond the desk, her eyes shut, her arms folded across her chest. After all this time, I’d finally found the girl I’d been searching for.

  I’d found Charlie.

  Chapter 42

  On the outside, I was standing still in an ordinary room, but on the inside I was flying. Charlie lay there on the floor, her chest rising and falling in spurts. Since I’d last seen her, her cheekbones had gotten sharper, her eyes more sunken in her skull, and her long blond hair had been replaced by her bald head’s soft sheen. But she’d never looked more beautiful to me. It was like my heart hadn’t known a part was missing until it was found again. For the first time in a while, it remembered why it was still beating.

  I brushed Charlie’s cheek with my hand, and she yawned and smiled. Her eyes cracked open, the same brilliant blue I’d remembered. “Hey—hey there, Kai-Guy.” She winked. “I think I’m ready for my close-up.”

  I laughed and rubbed her cheek. “Of course you are.” I pulled her to her feet.

  “I apologize,” she said, only sort of laughing, “for looking like a hardboiled egg.” She glanced at her legs—they were thin. “Correction,” she said, “for looking like a hardboiled egg on sticks.”

  “But in a good way,” I said. “Like a classy hardboiled egg on a stick—the kind they’d serve as an appetizer in a fancy French restaurant.”

  She chuckled—that familiar laugh. “A French appetizer, huh? I suppose that’s mildly reassuring.”

  There was a fire in my chest. I wanted to kiss her and hug her and take her out to have a Cotton Candy Cocktail. I saw two pencils resting on the chancellor’s desk, and I offered them to her. “Like chopsticks,” I said.

  She rubbed her bald head. “For my hair?”

  I shook my head and grabbed a pencil from her hand. I held it to my head.

  She smiled. “Unicorn.”

  “Almost,” I said. “Narwhal.”

  “Heard they’re extinct.” She put her hand on my shoulder. My palms got sweaty.

  “You never know. I saw a dolphin.”

  “A real one?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “And I broke into a ministry.” Girls loved a bad boy.

  “Really?”

  “Not the one for education either. That one would’ve been pretty lame.”

  “You could’ve gotten yourself a lifetime of abacuses…”

  I pretended to nonchalantly flick dust off my shoulder. Pieces of lint just stuck to my sweaty palms. “I broke into the Ministry of Health.”

  She shrugged, but I could tell she was impressed. “That’s nothing,” she said. “I learned how to burp my ABC’s.”

  “Really?” I teased. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.” She breathed deeply. “A—”

  I was madly in love with Charlie Minos. I knew it right then—right at that moment—without a doubt. She was the only girl in the world who could’ve burped the ABC’s and had me at A.

  “Sage taught you,” I said. My heart was beating fast. I tried to catch my breath.

  “Yeah, she did. You’ve met her?”

  “She’s how I found you.”

  Charlie smiled. “She’s pretty unusual—a man-riding-the-subway-wearing-a-bag-of-peanuts-as-a-hat-and-declaring-himself-a-king kind of unusual—but I love her just the same.”

  “You love everybody, Charlie.”

  “At the risk of sounding as clichéd as every girl, in every movie, ever: I really missed you, Kai.”

  I should’ve kissed her then, but I was too nervous. Instead, I did the only thing I could think of: I put the two pencils between my teeth and clapped my hands. “WAL-RUTH!”

  Charlie laughed. “SOMEBODY GET THIS MAN A BAG OF PEANUTS—he needs to get on the nearest subway and wear it as a hat.”

  A woman in a sparkling sapphire suit appeared in the corner. I jumped back. How had she gotten in here? “Who’s your friend?” she asked Charlie.

  Charlie breathed hard. “We gotta get outta here, Kai.”

  The woman stepped toward us. “He’s cute.” She eyed me up and down, stopping at my socks. “Well… maybe not yet. But you can tell he’s going to be. If you squint your eyes a bit and turn your head to the side.”

  Charlie grabbed my hand and laced her fingers with mine. It was nice. I wished we’d done it before. “Come on, Kai.”

  “Guards are outside,” said the woman. She stared hard at Charlie, begging her, daring her to try and escape. “If you walk out now, you’ll both be killed. Why not stay in here with me? It’ll be just the three of us. Just for a bit.”

  Charlie’s arm was shaking, and ragged breaths rose from her hollowed chest. I stepped toward the woman. There was something familiar about her—like I’d seen her before. The desk’s green globe glowed brightly. “What do you want from us?”

  The woman spun away from me and into the center of the room. “Everything,” she said with a small smile. “I want everything.”

  Charlie was still shaking. I had to be brave. I had to remember my cheeseburger socks. “Well,” I said, “you can’t—uh—you can’t have it. You can't have—er—everything. You need to… share. And stuff.”

  She narrowed her eyes, amused. The way a twisted kid’s face got when he shook an ant farm. “Choice words. Who writes your dialogue?”

  I frowned. My hands were shaking now too. There was something abnormal about this woman. “Uh, I write it myself. I think.”

  The woman turned to Charlie. “Really?” she asked. “Really, honey? This is the best you could do? C’mon, darling. You were so cute when you still had your hair.”

  I stepped toward the woman. “She’s still cute.”

  The woman just laughed.

  Charlie’s hollow eyes stared at the floor. I squeezed her hand, and realized mine had gotten sweaty again. How did it always get so sweaty? I wanted to pull it away and wipe it on my shorts. What was I supposed to do? God, these were things they needed to teach you in school. Forget calculus.

  The woman’s gaze met mine and I stared straight into her blue eyes. They weren’t the usual blue or the Charlie-blue—they were a gray-blue. The color of rain-stained concrete. I knew those eyes. I’d seen them before, in a picture, not long ago.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  Charlie shook her head no, but I kept staring at the woman. I had to be sure before I said anything.

  “But are you afraid?” she asked Charlie, and Charlie nodded. She smiled. “Good. You’re a smart girl. You should be afraid. You should be absolutely terrified.”

  She spun around the room in circles. As she whirled, different dresses replaced her sapphire suit in flashes of color. At last she stopped, just inches from my face, and her dress settled into place as a blood red ball gown. She smiled, and it melted into a puddle of blood on the floor, revealing a black and green jumpsuit beneath.

  “I am the reason,” she said slowly, “the Hawaiian Federation exists. I am the creator of Indigo. I am the one who destroyed the world and saved it in a single swoop.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “The Indigo vaccine has been around for too many years.”

  Her lips curled into smile. “It’s quite possible, obviously,” she said, “because I’m still here. Indigo must have saved me.”

  I balled my hand into a fist. “Indigo has never saved anyone—not a single soul. All it does is kill people. Exterminate them, and the truth.”

  The woman cocked her head to the side, like a bird that’s spotted prey. I noticed the cleft in her chin, and then I was sure. She was the woman f
rom the Morier Mansion’s picture frame. The one with the sisters. She was the one in the middle.

  “You were in the Morier Mansion,” I said.

  Fear flashed in the woman’s eyes before being replaced with something more sinister: desperation. She didn’t want to be recognized.

  I stepped toward her. “You were in the Morier family portrait. I recognize your eyes and the cleft in your chin. You were the one in the middle. Your name is… Miranda.” I stepped closer. “Those were old pictures,” I said. “The colors were bleeding and everything. How is it possible that you were alive for those pictures?”

  Miranda cleared her throat. “For a minute there, I thought I was feeling something. Was it—dare I say it—mercy? But now, well, now it’s gone. I suppose mercy is like love.” She flashed her eyes toward Charlie and then back to me. “Ephemeral. Fleeting. In the palm of your hand one moment—gone in the next.”

  She was close to me. Close enough that I could reach out and touch her. I stepped closer again, but my shoe caught on its laces and I fell forward. I threw my hands out—and slid right through her. My face hit the ground.

  Miranda stood above me, looking down. My arms had plowed through her nonexistent torso.

  Charlie sucked in a breath. “Oh—oh my god.”

  Miranda wasn’t real—at least not really there. She was a ghost, a projection, a hologram, like the ones shouting jingles from Newla’s skyscraper balconies. But she was a damned good one.

  She stepped over my fallen body and smoothed the creases of her black and green jumpsuit. “This was not supposed to happen. This was not a part of the plan. You’ve doomed yourself, now. HACKNER!” she called. “HACKNER! GET IN HERE!”

  “You’re not real,” I said slowly. Charlie pulled me off the ground. “You’re not really standing here. You’re not really alive.”

  Her eyes spun in their sockets. She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, I’m real all right. I’m more real than anything you could ever imagine.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re an illusion—a hologram. You’re nothing.”

  Something in her gray eyes had been set on fire. “Just because something is an illusion, doesn’t mean it’s nothing. You have no idea what nothing is, boy—but in a minute, I’m going to teach you.”

  The door flew open, and the chancellor entered with a revolver in his hand. He pointed it in my direction, but Miranda shook her head. “The girl.” Hackner’s lips twisted into his Cheshire grin.

  Miranda circled us, disappearing and reappearing in the room’s corners. “I’ve been in love before,” she said. I wrapped Charlie’s hands in mine. Something told me to kiss her—right now before I lost my chance.

  “Years ago,” Miranda continued. “I felt the thickness—the drunkenness it brought to my blood. The way your heart boils in your chest. It was intoxicating—like good wine. But it was too intoxicating. Drink too much wine and it becomes a poison. Too much wine kills you.”

  “I’m not drinking wine,” I said. “I’m not drinking poison.”

  The chancellor lowered his gun.

  “Love,” said Miranda, “is a poison. Too much love kills you.”

  I thought of how far I’d come: the places I’d seen, the friends I’d met, Mom’s death. The way my life had changed in an instant. Charlie was still shaking, but when she squeezed my hand, my heart was warm—I wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I stared at Miranda. “It saves your life, too.”

  She laughed hysterically. So hysterically that even Hackner seemed alarmed. “You think I can’t get to you?” she said. “You think I don’t know how to take everything from you? Make you feel like nothing? Make you become nothing? You think I don’t know how to stop your pathetic heart, you little shit?” She glanced at Hackner. “I could have him shoot you in the chest right now, Kai Bradbury.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’d still be standing.”

  Hackner scratched his head. “How’s that?”

  “Because,” said Miranda, her voice shrill and mocking, “his heart—everything that matters to him—isn’t in his chest at all. Isn’t that right, darling?” Her body shook with laughter. “Your heart beats outside a body that’s all your own. It doesn’t beat in your chest at all anymore, does it?” She pointed to Charlie. “It beats in hers—in the girl you tore up half the Federation trying to save.

  “But I’m afraid you’ll soon realize that from the moment you brought her on the Pacific Northwestern Tube, you doomed her. You,” she spat, “not us, you are the one who has done this to her. You are the one who will be responsible—perhaps the only one responsible—for the death of Charlie Minos. You’re the one who killed her. Aim at the girl, Hackner. Aim at the girl and fire.”

  I moved to block the bullet, but I was too late. Hackner pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 43

  Sage heard the gun go off before the others, and knew instantly where the sound had come from. She turned and ran back down the hall toward the chancellor’s chambers.

  She smashed right into Chancellor Hackner, coming the other way down the hall. “Outta my way,” he growled as he pushed past her.

  Sage heard screeching wheels roll by—a trunk, she thought—and a familiar voice. “Bye, darling,” Miranda’s voice called to her.

  “Miranda? Where are you going?”

  Miranda laughed, her voice echoing back down the hall. “Ah, darling,” she said. “You really were a dumb bitch.”

  Sage curled her hands into fists. She knew now, for certain, that she’d been lied to all these years. Manipulated by a heartless woman who dribbled out feeble acts of affection. And she’d foolishly gobbled it up. After all, it was the only affection she had known for a long time—until recently.

  Sage had figured out some time ago that Miranda wasn’t really there. It had taken her a while, granted, but eventually she’d deduced why the woman never touched her, why she kept her distance. Why the woman needed her help mixing the antidote in the first place. Why, no matter how close Miranda got to her, Sage never felt her breath, her body heat.

  The blindness had actually helped her with this. Since she couldn’t see, she had grown accustomed to feeling a person’s presence—their heat, their smell, the subtle air currents as they moved. But with Miranda, she’d never felt anything but coldness.

  Miranda was a ghost in a box.

  Sage had never said anything, of course. She didn’t want to invoke Miranda’s wrath. And it was useful to her that Miranda think her stupid. But she knew far more than Miranda could have imagined.

  She’d even figured out where Miranda’s consciousness was housed: in the globe on the chancellor’s desk. Sage had gone out of her way to touch the globe from time to time, and noted Miranda’s irritated reaction. Yes, she was pretty sure. And she was willing to bet that if that globe ran out of energy—even for a split second—then Miranda’s consciousness would be lost.

  She’d heard the people, too—the ones that went wailing into the chambers and came out, weeks later, in bags. Strong and husky when they went in, thin when their corpse came out, their life energy burned away. The machine sapped their souls like lamps sapped electricity. Sage had a feeling there’d been a body in the trunk Hackner dragged as he ran by. Food for Miranda.

  Sage had a theory that Miranda had wanted to use Charlie as a battery. The girl was skinny now, but Sage still felt her energy, and she guessed Miranda could too. It explained why they’d carted her back and forth between the chancellor’s chambers and her cell: they were prepping her for the procedure.

  When Sage reached the doorway of the chancellor’s chambers, she heard Kai’s sobs emanating from within. She quickly joined him on the floor, and found that he was huddled over a body. Charlie—it had to be. The shot Sage heard must have been fired at her. Warm blood coated the floor—she was bleeding out.

  Sage turned to Kai. “Does she still have pulse?”

  Kai only moaned, inconsolable.

  Sage squeezed her eyes
shut tight. She didn’t have many friends to begin with, and she wasn’t about to just sit here as one died in front of her. “Does she have a pulse?” she asked again.

  “It’s—it’s weak,” he whispered. “Soon, she’ll be—” His breath caught in his throat.

  Sage jumped to her feet and searched the desk, hoping she hadn’t yet destroyed it. Nothing—it wasn’t there. She quickly reached her hand underneath—and there it was. The cardboard package—the other “paperweight.” Miranda hadn’t yet had a chance to destroy it.

  It was a long shot, but Sage didn’t have any other choice. She lifted the orb from its box.

  Just then the other two Lost Boys entered the room. They must have finally figured out where Sage had run off to.

  “Oh my god,” said Mila. “Oh—oh my god—”

  “I need help over here,” Sage said. Phoenix ran to her side. “Check the box for directions,” she instructed.

  Phoenix sighed. “They don’t put directions in the boxes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just—I know.” She heard him grab something from the box. “But we’ll need these clips, and these metal nodes. They’ve got special salve on their backs. They’ll need to go on Charlie’s temples after we’ve attached the battery.”

  Sage wondered how her new friend knew so much about it, but she was glad he did. She nodded and moved over next to Kai.

  Mila was breathing hard. “She—she’s dying, Phoenix.” Sage could hear the hesitation in her voice.

  “We can save her, Meels. Sage, hand me those cords attached to the ConSynth.” Sage passed him the two cords. They were hollow like tubing. “One for the current battery,” he said, “and one for when the battery needs replacement. The ConSynth can never be without power.”

  Sage’s arm brushed his shoulder—she could tell he was strong. “How—how do you know all this?”

  “Look—we don’t have much time. We have to find Charlie a battery. Are there guards in the hall?” Sage got the feeling he wanted to avoid the subject of how he’d known about the ConSynth.