The Indigo Thief

by Budgett, Jay

  There were no guards in the hall—they’d all disappeared. Gone to the roof, probably, to assist with Hackner’s escape copter. There was no more time. If they wanted to save Charlie, they needed a battery.

  Sage felt along the length of one of the cords Phoenix had handed her. One end led to the globe—the ConSynth, Phoenix had called it—and the other end led to a needle wrapped in plastic packaging. Like an IV of sorts. But this kind didn’t feed you, she knew. You fed it, and it drained you to the bone.

  She touched Charlie’s hand one last time, and then slid the needle into her own vein.

  Phoenix grabbed her arm. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Sage felt sleepy. She shook her head. “We both know there are no guards outside. This has to be done.” She’d failed Charlie once already, when they’d tried to escape. She wouldn’t do it again.

  She’d lived a decent life. She’d had her share of sorrow, sure, but she’d also had joy and—now—hope. That was something that Charlie had helped her to see. It was all right, now, if this was how she spent the rest of her life. Sage was prepared to save her friend; perhaps because she knew her friend had already saved her.

  Phoenix took her hand and pressed it to his head, holding two of her fingers and her thumb spread against the side of his face, her wrist turned outward, not inward like the federal salute. This was something different—something good.

  “The Lost Boys’ salute,” he told her. “Open eyes, ears, and heart. I salute you, Sage.”

  She smiled. A tingling sensation rushed up the length of her arm and filled her insides. She felt warm, the way she’d felt the first time she met Charlie. When she knew she’d made a new friend.

  Miranda had never known Sage at all. Sage wasn’t dumb. She was brave.

  And she had friends.

  This was enough. This was more than anything she’d known in a long, long time. Her body was tingly and warm as the ConSynth’s drugs washed over her like a wave. It felt like she was being lifted in the air. Like she was basking in the sun’s warmth on a Kauai beach. Like Charlie was touching her hand against Sage’s cheek. Her whole body radiated warmth. There was a splintering moment of joy.

  Rapture.

  And then, nothing.

  Chapter 44

  Phoenix slid the metal nodes over Charlie’s temples, and I watched as her body convulsed and Sage’s went limp. Charlie’s head rolled back and her mouth foamed, her whole body shaking.

  Mila pressed my face to her shoulder. “Look at me,” she said. “Don’t think about anything else. Just look at me.”

  What were they doing to Charlie? Oh, god, what were they doing to her? We were inside, but somehow it felt like it was raining. Everything in my world was falling down, like concrete chunks from the tunnel’s ceiling. I’d missed my one chance to kiss Charlie, and I’d never get it again. Soon, she’d be gone—if she wasn’t already.

  A guttural moan escaped her lips and her chest lurched. She quivered and shook, then fell back to the ground, her skin cold and gray. Mila squeezed me tight against her shoulder. I reached for Charlie’s wrist. There was no pulse.

  She was dead.

  It felt like the floor had fallen out from under us. My heart plummeted in my chest. Miranda should have killed me. I guessed she sort of did. The glass orb glowed red next to Sage’s limp body. Swirls danced beneath its rounded glass.

  The word CALIBRATING flashed across the sphere. A clock appeared amid its swirls, and it blinked 72:00. I watched Phoenix peel the metal nodes from Charlie’s forehead.

  “What—what did you do to her?” The words caught in my throat and I fought hard to swallow tears.

  Phoenix lifted Sage’s body in his arms. “Sage saved her. Charlie’s going to be all right.”

  The heat had gone out from the room. I looked at Charlie’s body: cold, lifeless. I pressed my hand against her cheek, caressed bones that stood out so easily. Her eyes were shut tight and her face looked peaceful, as if she’d merely dozed off for a brief nap. I’d never see her Charlie-blue eyes again.

  Phoenix grabbed my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here, Kai. The others are meeting us at the top.”

  I couldn’t stop staring at Charlie. Phoenix put his hand on my shoulder. “She’ll be okay,” he said. “She’s in here now.” I rubbed the red glass orb and stared at its blinking clock. “You’ve got to trust me, Kai.”

  I nodded and tried to ignore the weight that settled on my shoulders like an iron coat.

  “Check the desk,” said Phoenix to Mila. “Do you see anything?”

  “Phoenix—we don’t—there’s no time.”

  She, too, had been rattled by Charlie’s death. I glanced at Sage’s body, hanging limp in Phoenix’s arms. Her cheeks were rosy, her lips parted in a brief smile.

  “Check the desk,” said Phoenix again.

  Mila flipped through stacks of paper. “Memo, memo, magazine, memo, analytics report, oh god—” She held up a familiar book that was now bound together by brass rings. “The Indigo Report.”

  Phoenix nodded. “Take it with us.”

  I glanced one last time at Charlie’s body and stroked her hand with mine. Her spirit was no longer there; only her physical body remained. And Charlie had always been so much more than just a body. I had to trust Phoenix. She was okay. Somehow, she was okay.

  Together, we ran through empty halls toward the elevators. Phoenix carried Sage’s limp body, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. I gripped the red orb, the ConSynth, between my hands, the red swirls spinning around my fingertips in shapes that looked like hearts.

  The elevator chimed when we reached the twentieth floor.

  “Get down,” I said to Phoenix and Mila. We all threw ourselves against the sides and dropped to the floor. Bullets pounded the elevator’s back wall the minute the doors opened. I slid Mila a gun across the tiled floor, and she threw a hand out and fired into the fray.

  Her gun froze and she showed me her cartridge. “Shit,” she muttered. “Outta bullets.”

  Through the open doors, I saw the row of guards shift their guns toward another elevator as it, too, chimed. They fired several round in its direction.

  Who was in there? Kindred? Sparky? Bertha? Dove? Did they know to duck? Were they hit? I glanced at Sage’s limp body. When was this all going to be over?

  A voice thundered a poor rendition of the mariachi classic: “DAW-DUH-DUH, DAW-DUH-DUH, DAW-DUH-DUH! DAW-DUH-DUH, DAW-DUH-DUH, DAW-DUH-DUH! DAW-DUH-DUH! DAW-DUH-DUH, DAW-DUH-DUH! DUH-DAW-DUH-DAW-DUH-DUH-DUH-DAW!”

  Big Bertha was here.

  She fired back at the guards, knocking them one by one to the ground. Her bullets made a piercing sound, unlike normal bullets, when they struck flesh. She must’ve rigged something from old weapons she’d found in the basement.

  The guards stared at the doors, stunned, while she reloaded.

  “DAMN IT, CRAIG!” shouted an injured guard curled on the floor. “MY OTHER SHOULDER!”

  We ran past the group as they continued to stare, dumbstruck, at Bertha’s elevator. Glancing around, I noticed this floor was different than the others. Like the Indigo Reserve at the Ministry of Health, it was more of a warehouse than anything else, equipped with massively high vaulted ceilings that reminded me of airplane hangar. Racks of supply-filled shelves lined one side of the room, rows of helicopters the other. Hordes of men were piling into the copters. The chancellor and Miranda had to be among them.

  “Anyone see Sparky?” said Phoenix as we ran toward the safety of the shelves. There were at least two hundred guards in the room. Even without working radios, they flocked to this floor like bees to a hive.

  “Not yet,” said Mila. “How much time do we have?”

  Phoenix shook his head. “Don’t have a watch.”

  I reached down into my shirt and pulled out the glowing watch. “Five minutes,” I said, and we ducked behind a row of shelves.

  Phoenix admired the watch’s white glow. “Where’d you get
that from?”

  “Skelewick neighborhood.”

  His lips turned up in a small smile. “You used the tunnel.” I nodded. “I thought you might have—it was the sort of crazy thing I would’ve tried.”

  Mila pulled cardboard boxes off the shelves. “Bullets,” she said, reloading her gun.

  The guards closed in on Bertha’s elevator—a few had broken from the line and pretended to wander the shelves, searching for the group of intruders who’d run past them so easily. But as soon as they felt they’d made a good show of it, they took off toward the copters to escape.

  Bertha’s singing had quieted now—she must be running out of ammo. Mila charged.

  As she fired at the line of men, a few fell to the ground, but a couple of them made a dash straight for Bertha’s elevator, guns swinging across their chest as they ran. Bertha was done for.

  A copter lifted off the ground at the massive room’s other end. Its blades sliced through the air like butter, creating gusts of winds like hurricanes as it lifted toward the room’s high vaulted ceiling. I squinted and saw two figures plummet from its side, abandoning ship.

  Phoenix had seen the figures too. “Sparky and Kindred,” he said.

  The helicopter slammed into the ceiling, sparks flying from its blades as they cut through the warehouse, its burning wreckage lighting the other helicopters as it fell.

  The room broke into chaos. The guards running toward Bertha’s elevator turned and headed for cover. Bertha, and now Dove I saw, took advantage of the opportunity to dash from their elevator toward the shelves. I waved to them, and they joined us in the shadows.

  Bertha looked at Sage’s limp body and frowned. “What the hell happened to her?” Her eyes followed the cord from Sage’s arm to the orb in my hands. “Wait—where’s Charlie?”

  I stared at the ground and took a deep breath.

  Bertha stepped back. “Oh,” she said quietly amidst the chaos. “I’m—I’m so sorry, Kai.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I glanced at the red orb. “Phoenix says Charlie’s in here.”

  “In a big-ass Easter egg?”

  “Well—it’s not an egg, exactly,” I explained. “It’s an orb.”

  “Right,” she said. “An orb.” Dove still looked confused, but Bertha whispered in his ear, “Already cremated her,” and he gave me a sympathetic nod.

  At the other end of the aisle, I saw the shadows of Sparky and Kindred. “Over here!” I yelled. “Hey! Over here!”

  More copters burst into flames like fireworks. Men were on fire, and ran like screaming torches. Kindred and Sparky limped over to where we stood. Sparky clutched Tim’s body tightly to his chest.

  “You two all right?” said Phoenix.

  “Affirmative,” said Sparky.

  Mila grabbed Tim from Sparky’s arms—a tourniquet had been wrapped around his wound. The sloth stretched his uninjured arm toward her face and stuck out his tongue. Mila wiped tears from her eyes and laughed.

  “How do we get out of here, Sparks?”

  “I coded a glitch in the system,” said Sparky. “When the bomb goes off, the computer will reset itself. The restart should disable the lockdown, and open the building’s doors and windows as it recalibrates security settings.”

  Phoenix nodded. “You’re a genius, Sparky. We can hijack a helicopter and be out of here in less than a minute. Simple.”

  Through the shelves, I saw guards swarm the few remaining helicopters. Apparently having decided it was every soldier for himself, they fired bullets at each another and jockeyed for the limited spots, scrambling to get away from the stronghold that had become a prison. As one copter lifted from the ground, guards below threw themselves at its landing skids. It teetered in the air, the extra weight throwing it off balance, and then it slowly lowered back to the ground, its blades ripping into two other copters, lighting them into oblivion.

  Phoenix was wrong—this would not be simple.

  The building shook, and we were knocked to the ground. Supporting columns moaned and shelves fell like dominos, crashing into each other as the room continued to shake. We jumped out of the way as the shelf we hid behind toppled.

  Bertha’s bomb must have gone off. The ceiling was falling down around us in chunks. Screams saturated the air as falling shelves crushed guards.

  There wasn’t much time. The entire Light House was crashing to the ground.

  Chapter 45

  “Give me your gun,” Phoenix said to Bertha as we ran. She tossed him her weapon, and he caught it between his neck and shoulder, reminding me again that he was more Hercules than man. “You take Sage,” he said to Dove, and passed the girl over to him. “Don’t let her get far from Kai, or the cord will come undone.”

  Phoenix fired a test shot from the gun, and the bullet hissed as it left the barrel. “What the hell are these?” He turned to Bertha. “Some sort of dart?”

  She smiled. “Not darts—nails.”

  “Nails?”

  “Rusty ones,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Only thing they had in the basement.”

  No wonder the guards had fallen so quickly—the nails had broken into shrapnel as they flew from the barrel.

  Dove scrunched his nose. “God, did it stink down there! Worst smelling basement I’ve ever been in!”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t just a basement, Dove. There are catacombs down there.”

  Bertha’s face looked queasy, but Dove nodded, unfazed. “Ah, catacombs,” he said, knowingly. “I thought it had something to do with cats. Litter boxes smell terrible.”

  Kindred patted his arm. “Bless your heart, dear.”

  We ran toward the burning chaos, entering the fray as guards killed one another, too preoccupied with their own survival to pay any attention to us. Phoenix fired nails at any guard foolish enough to get in our way. We ran to the warehouse’s other end, toward an area where the ceiling slid back into pockets, revealing open sky.

  Behind us, guards clawed at one another. Fingers gouged eyes, feet crushed ankles, and blood coated the floor like syrup. Phoenix pointed to the closest copter. Its engine was already humming, and its blades fired up. Guards swarmed it, attracted to the engine’s hum like bugs to light.

  Bertha whacked a guard with her pink flip-flops, and then spun them in the air like a pair of nunchucks, knocking more guards to the ground. Phoenix and Mila fired their guns, and nails and bullets flew through the air.

  Kindred rubbed the glass orb in my hands. “I’m so sorry, dear,” she said. “But it is a lovely vase.”

  I shook my head. “Charlie’s in here.”

  She smiled knowingly—like it made perfect sense. “How wonderful, dear!”

  We pushed through to the revving copter, Phoenix and Mila taking out most of the guards with their guns. A young man in uniform, however, remained in the pilot’s seat. Bertha elbowed past him, and he pointed his gun in her direction. Her hair stuck out to the sides in patches and her eyes were wild.

  The young man snickered. “A girl in the pilot’s seat? Just crash the copter now, why don’t you?”

  Bertha beat the shit out of him with her flip-flops, then tossed his abused body to the ground and slammed the door shut behind him. She wiped snot and sweat from her face before settling into the pilot’s seat.

  Dove threw up his hands. “WOO!” he shouted. “GIRL POWER!”

  Mila rolled her eyes. The ground shook again. The floor below the copter was cracking into pieces.

  “Get us in the air, Bertha!” shouted Phoenix. “Now, preferably!”

  The landing skids lifted, and we hovered. The floor we’d rested on moments before crumbled into pieces like bread. Men threw themselves at our landing skids, a few successfully grabbing on, and the copter rocked from the extra weight. But Bertha flicked the controls, and the men fell into the growing abyss.

  Another copter hovered near ours, and its rotor caught our skids, jerking us in the air.

  Bertha sucked in a breath. “Fasten
your seat belts, boys and girls.” She glanced back at the cabin. “And sloths. Tim—I’m looking at you… I can wait.”

  “BERTHA!” Phoenix yelled. “The whole building is going down!”

  “JUST LIKE THE LEVEL OF RESPECT IN THIS COCKPIT!”

  She flicked the controls, and we sailed up and out of the warehouse. Rising copters crashed to the ground, falling into an abyss of fire and smashed rotor blades.

  As our copter hovered in the air, a few others joined us. Below, I saw the supply shelves plummet through the floor as the Light House’s insides were consumed by fire.

  At last, one final copter darted out the opening, billows of smoke erupting from the tumbling ruins behind it. It hovered near the others for a moment, then darted toward us. As it approached, its door swung open, and we were greeted by Chancellor Hackner’s twisted grin. Beyond him, an orb glowed green in the cabin.

  He waved at me through the open door, his smile so white it burned through our fogged glass. There were other men in his copter I didn’t recognize—probably ministers, council members, or other corrupt politicians.

  I glanced at Mila. “Pull the door open.”

  She gave me a look. “You’re kidding me.”

  Phoenix threw it open and tossed me his gun. I leaned out the door while he held my legs.

  “Pity about the girl,” the chancellor shouted. “It was never my intention for you to have to live without her. If I had my way, you wouldn’t have lived at all. You will forgive me, though, won’t you, Bradbury?”

  “GO TO HELL!”

  I aimed at his throat and fired. A nail flew out in shards, bouncing off the side of his copter.

  His lips twisted into another grin. “You can’t be serious, Bradbury,” he laughed. “This is too rich.” I fired again. The nails struck empty air. He laughed harder. “You’re killing me, Bradbury. God, this is good—your mother’s drool had better aim.”

  “Aim high,” said Phoenix. “Just above his head, brace the butt of the gun against your shoulder, and lean with it when it kicks.”

  I tightened my grip on the trigger. Hackner grabbed a gun from his cabin and aimed in my direction. I fired again.