The Indigo Thief (26 page)

“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.”

I wrinkled my nose in disgust. The acrid stink of sewage still clung to hairs in my nostrils from my previous escapade. “We almost there?” I asked. Mila nodded and shined the light toward a fork in the tunnel. We turned right.

“Left was the Light House,” I said. It was more of a question than a statement. Phoenix nodded slightly, but Mila raised her eyebrows. “Or a dead end,” she reminded me. “Whether or not we could make it past the walls, the only thing that would be waiting at its end is death.”

“But you haven’t tried?”

Mila rolled her eyes. “It’s enough we know where the Feds are. We don’t need to serve ourselves up to them on a silver platter.”

“You don’t think they knew about the mansion? How did they find Madam Revleon, then?”

Phoenix tightened his jaw. “We should’ve been more careful. We shouldn’t have let her get so comfortable. She should’ve known to keep the lights off and the curtains closed in that old house.”

“You can’t just put someone in the shadows and expect no one to find them,” I said. “You can’t expect to hide people simply by turning off the lights—it doesn’t work that way. It’s only good for so long.” I thought of Mom, and how the Caravites might be hiding her, and waited for his reaction. His face was cold, but a flash of surprise flickered across Mila’s face.

Phoenix stared at the tunnel’s worn floor. “She wasn’t in the shadows,” he said. “She was in the shadows of the shadows. The darkest part of the city’s darkest district.”

“You really like the dark, don’t you, Phoenix?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I prefer firelight.”

Mila slapped the glow stick against the tunnel’s wall. “You girls want to argue all day,” she said, “or are you ready to move?”

Phoenix stared at me firmly, his eyes unblinking. “We’re ready.”

We’d reached a dead end. Another set of metal bars ran up the wall like a ladder. I felt the air in my lungs thin here; the moisture must have been dissipating up the makeshift chimney. “Where does this go?” I asked.

Mila began climbing. “Up,” she said simply.

“South Atlantic,” said Phoenix.

I shivered, remembering the documentaries we’d watched in middle school about South Atlantic crime rates. In them, drug addicts convulsed on street corners and stores were bordered up with bulletproof glass rather than wood.
The underbelly of Newla
, the documentary’s host had called it.

“Don’t look down,” reminded Mila as we climbed. “Long way to fall.”

“Thanks for that,” I said. Then to Phoenix: “Is there another city district we could go to instead? Maybe one that’s a little safer? A little less sketchy?”

He laughed. “You’re crawling out of the ground from a lava tube. I think you can manage a ‘little sketchy.’” He had a point.

At the top of the chimney was a landing surrounded by concrete walls. On one side was a black square door, like the wrong side of a bank vault. Phoenix grabbed the glow stick from Mila and twisted a series of black knobs on the door. It sprang open, and the sweet smell of pomegranate incense mixed with lemon—and maybe grapefruit—burned my nose.

Phoenix crawled through the doorway, and Mila and I did the same. A circle of wide-eyed civilians stared in silent awe as we emerged into the back room of a shop covered in tie-dyed fabrics. Phoenix waved off their stares.

“As you were,” he said. “You are merely hallucinating. Excellent choice of drugs—very potent. Thank your dealer.”

The group nodded, and a guy in a pink bandana promptly fell asleep. Phoenix shut the vault door behind us and covered it with fabric. A woman in red sunglasses stared at a bag of pills she held in her hand. “We’ve gotta get more of these,” she said.

We hurried from the back room into the store’s main area. A thin layer of smoke swirled in the air as we moved past chunky lava lamps. The cashier behind the counter stared at us with wide eyes.

“Narnia,” whispered Mila in his ear. “It’s real.” He shut his eyes, nodded, and ran to join his companions. A sign over the register read, in green, yellow, and red letters: “
Dredson’s Divine Herbal Incenses.”

Phoenix tossed me a pair of sunglasses and a black poncho from behind the counter, and we exited by the front door. It was nighttime, and the fluorescent streetlights were momentarily blinding after our eyes had grown accustomed to the glow stick’s soft light and the Skelewick street lamps. We kept our heads down and merged with the crowds that hurried along the cobbled sidewalks.

On the next street corner, a man groaned and rocked himself back and forth, his arms across his chest and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. I looked away. “Is it always like this—busy?”

Phoenix shook his head. “There’s a car show this weekend, and that’s where we’re headed.”

“A car show in South Atlantic?”

“Mostly stolen,” he said. “Which is why we’re here: no better place for us to get a car. They’ve already made fake plates for them to put them in the show. If one goes missing again… well, it’s not exactly like the new owners can file a police report.”

Phoenix always seemed to be one step ahead.

We moved along, following Phoenix, and soon came upon a series of white canvas tents towering over a street blocked off with orange cones. I wondered how far our sunglasses and ponchos would get us, and simultaneously prayed that most of the city’s cops were still back at the Morier Mansion fighting the fire. Phoenix slipped a guard at the gates several bills, and we pushed through into the crowded tents.

“Pick a car,” said Phoenix.

I pointed to a yellow one on a pedestal, with windshields that slid open in lieu of doors.

“Too high-profile,” he said, shaking his head. “Try another. On the floor, preferably.”

I pointed to a black jeep in the corner. Its window tint was the same shade as its paint. The car was largely a shadow under the tent’s bursting fluorescent lights. Phoenix liked shadows.

“Not bad,” he said, turning to Mila. “You see it, Meels?”

Meels had already started toward it, and we pushed through the crowd after her. When we arrived at the jeep, I heard a clank and saw the metal boot attached to the car’s front wheel roll off. Phoenix hopped in the passenger side, and I climbed in the back.

Mila adjusted a mirror and glanced back at me from the driver’s seat. “Ready?” she asked, and the car’s engine roared. I felt a twinge of pride in my chest as its lights flickered on—glad to have been of some use to the group for once.

I shook my head. These two were not my friends; they were murderers. I should have felt no pride in being “of use” to them.

The jeep surged forward, carving a path through the crowd. People ran screaming as we tore through the white tent, swerving around both cars and civilians. There was a concession stand at one end of the tent, and Mila aimed the jeep right for it. Workers dove screaming from the stand as we slammed directly into it.

Mila held her foot on the gas and the engine groaned. Finally, the wooden stand splintered into pieces us as we roared ahead.

A bit farther on sat a stack of metal boxes that flashed and hummed, and Mila crashed right into it. Sparks flew like bolts of lightning, and the jeep moaned loudly as its engine died. I saw bundles of sparking wire hanging along the car’s edge, and then the tent’s lights flickered and went dead. It seemed we’d crashed into its main power supply. I guessed this was why Mila didn’t usually drive.

“Get out,” said Phoenix. The airbag hung limply in front of his face. “Now, Kai.”

Mila’s head lay smashed against the steering wheel. I pushed open the door and climbed out, dodging the sparking wires and twisted metal as I fled. Phoenix quickly joined me, Mila’s limp body dangling from his arms.

“Pick a car,” he said again. Screams sounded throughout the tent, and engines roared as other cars were freed from metal boots under the cover of dark.

Here and there, cars sprang to life, and their headlights lit the tent, illuminating the chaos that now surrounded us. I immediately pointed to a red convertible in the corner. Phoenix quickly cut its boot and then keyed in. He laid Mila in the back, pointed me to the passenger’s seat, and then started the engine. Mila groaned in the back. Cars raced alongside ours as we joined the fray.

I realized then that Phoenix had never intended to drive off in the jeep: the crash had been part of his plan from the beginning. He’d
intended
for Mila to slam into the generators and knock out the power, enabling the other cars to be stolen. These were all just movements in his well-orchestrated symphony. The guards could’ve stopped one car from fleeing from the tent, but they couldn’t stop them all. You couldn’t stop a parade. You couldn’t stop a symphony. And Phoenix was the conductor.

Away from the tent, we glided along the neighborhood’s worn streets, eventually merging onto the highway that led us out of the South Atlantic district, and then out of Newla altogether.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Suburban Islands,” said Phoenix, his eyes darting back and forth as we weaved through traffic. “We’ll have to stop at a border station in Maui. Should be there in a couple of hours. Go ahead and sleep, Kai. Get some rest while you can.” Mila snored in the back, and he winked. “I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said. “For all of us. Don’t you worry.”

I watched as he ran his hand along the gun’s length in his pocket. Rest was not an option. If I was going to live—and I needed to if I was to save Mom and Charlie—then from here on out, I would have to keep my eyes open. To close them would mean darkness—and in Phoenix’s world, darkness meant death.

Traffic in the Pacific Southwestern Tube slowed to a crawl at the Maui border station. Unlike the Pacific Northwestern, which contained only subway tracks, the Pacific Southwestern had wide lanes for cars and the commuter traffic that moved between Maui and Newla. A line of cars thirty vehicles deep had formed ahead of our red convertible. Mila cursed under her breath, and I pretended to wipe nonexistent sleep from my eyes. I’d been feigning sleep for the past three hours.

“Sorry,” said Phoenix. “It’s not usually like this.”

“It’s fine,” I said. I thought of Charlie’s face—her smile that wrinkled to one side when she spoke, her big blue eyes that glowed brighter than any other vaccinated person I’d met. “Not like I had anywhere else to be.” I lied—I could’ve been saving Charlie.

“No hot dates? But you’re a wanted man, Mr. Bradbury…”

I felt sick to my stomach. Here he was, joking with me, when he knew eventually he’d have to kill me. “Turns out,” I said, “the Feds like bad boys more than girls do.”

Mila smirked. “Not true.”

“Yeah?” I turned in my seat. She had a bump in the center of her forehead from where she’d struck the airbag. “Then how come you aren’t back at
Dredson’s Divine Herbal Incenses
? Some bad boys there, if I ever saw them.”

“Burnouts aren’t bad boys,” she said. “They’re just burnouts.”

“Maybe I’ll be a burnout one day. Once all this is done.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “But it’d be a waste of your lungs.”

It was the first time Mila had paid me a compliment. “Are you saying I’ve got good lungs, Miss Vachowski?”

She rolled her eyes, and I grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Nah,” she said, “just a fact.”

“It’s a compliment,” said Phoenix, smiling. I felt sick again.

Suddenly the car behind us slammed into our bumper, and we lurched forward. Phoenix tried to hit the brakes, but the momentum shoved us forward, crumpling our front fender against the car bumper ahead of us. Phoenix gave a signal and we threw on our sunglasses. He jammed his arms against his side door, but it was too crumpled to budge. I tried my handle. Jammed, too.