The Indigo Thief (12 page)

Mila’s slow, steady breathing started in a matter of minutes; the soft bed quickly lulled her to sleep. I was exhausted from the day’s ordeal, but unable to get comfortable in the chair. So I got up and wandered out into the hall, admiring the brass light fixtures that lined the black wooden walls.

Phoenix and Madam Revleon muttered something at the foot of the stairs.

“…megalodon researcher, really?”

I strained my ears to hear their hushed whispers, but they soon moved from the staircase. I shuffled down the hall, poking my head into the various rooms. Bedroom. Bedroom. Bathroom. Billiard parlor. Bedroom. A room lined with barred glass windows. All of them dark.

At last I reached the room at the end of the wing. Inside, a reading lamp had been left on, lighting a walnut desk. Papers and open books were sprawled across its surface. I thumbed through a few of the papers. They looked like copied pages from a handwritten journal.

One sheet caught my attention—the cover. I ran my fingers over its title:
The Indigo Report.
The name of a single individual was printed beneath it:
Dr. Harper Neevlor.

Below that, someone had sketched a bird on fire. I knew that image: the woman on the Tube with the fan. The bird had been covered in flames when she flicked her wrist. It was the exact same image. A Phoenix.

Phoenix McGann.

Was it the Lost Boys’ symbol? I flipped through the rest of the pages. Excerpts caught my eye as they turned in my hand.

Yesterday, I began testing Indigo with aquatic subjects. The fish had thrown themselves from the tanks by noon. Out of a hundred subjects, there were no survivors. The Indigo appears to have been tainted. Perhaps genetically altered.

I do not venture to make a formal hypothesis at this point. The data is far too limited. On a personal level, however, I begin to suspect something has been done to my sample of vaccines. Something horribly wrong.

Colleagues mock me for pressing on with the research. They tell me the vaccine is foolproof. That quality control measures do not allow for tampering. But I am unconvinced. I will continue my experiments with these samples and present my findings to the Ministry at the study’s conclusion.

From there, the pages were out of order. I scanned the remaining documents as best as I could.

—my sample of vaccines remains unstable. Continued use on subjects results in certain death—

—located an irregularity in the samples. Possibly a bacterium? Or a virus? It remains dormant at the time of vaccination, but continued injections cause the strain to multiply—

—abuse potential is great. The laboratory can no longer contain—

—Ministry has warned me about the study’s continuation. They fear it is not safe. The results could be capable of dissolving the very fabric of society—

—Burned the lab. The data is lost. The experiment has been labeled a failure. The Ministry revoked my access to the laboratory. The last remaining charts now exist only in the pages of this notebook. I have decided to call it the Indigo Report—

—they are coming to kill me in my sleep. They want the results. The study was conclusive. The findings contained in these pages are undeniable—

The papers slipped from my hands onto the floor. I cursed under my breath and hurried to pick them up. Madam Revleon and Phoenix might learn I’d been here. That I’d seen the report.

Who was Dr. Neevlor? What had been done to his sample of Indigo vaccines? And what sort of substance had they been tainted with?

By now he was surely dead, and his secrets buried with him. In my hands, however, I held a fragment of the truth: the Lost Boys were doing something terrible to the vaccines. Meddling with them in some way.

They weren’t thieves; they were something else. Maybe full-blown terrorists. The Federation had always been right. The Lost Boys had lied to me. About Mom dying, too. And now, I was certain. She was alive. I could save her.

I’d seen pieces of a plan to pull apart the entire empire, to destroy the Federation itself. I scanned the study’s rich wooden bookshelves—antiques built to hold antiques. You never really saw these old, static books anymore. Pretty much everyone just bought a single book and then downloaded stories onto its pages, the text refreshing itself with each new novel.

The books on the shelves weren’t novels, though; they were textbooks. Had this once been Dr. Neevlor’s home? Did the Lost Boys and Madam Revleon steal it from him? The denizens of the Skelewick district would probably have been too dazed to notice if they had.

I ran my fingers along the spines of a few of the books:

Optometry & Infectious Diseases.

Microbiology: a Clinical Perspective.

Pharmacological Design & Operation.

Physics and Structures of Clinical Viruses.

Understanding Viruses.

Evolution of a Synthetic Molecule.

Synthetic Viruses, Ailments, & Other Macrobiotic Apparatuses.

The black parade of titles continued forever. The seeds of revolution just chapters away. I pulled one book at random from the shelf.
Engineering an Epidemic
, its cover read. It was dog-eared in several places.

The floor creaked behind me, and the book fell from my hands.

“What exactly are you doing, Mr. Bradbury?” Madam Revleon snatched the book from the floor. “
Engineering an Epidemic
? Heavy reading for a boy who should be getting his rest, don’t you think?”

“I—well—you see the thing is—I just thought it might be fine if I—er—just looked around?”

She traced the book’s blue spine with a bony finger. “I admire the occasional sleuth. It’s not often one is offered the truth. At least, not readily.”

Her eyes flashed to the disheveled desk—she knew. “Phoenix is waking Miss Vachowski. You’ll leave for Club 49 within the hour. You don’t have long before midnight. You’ll need to be in the club by then, at the latest.” She looked at my soiled outfit and grimaced. “Grab a new gown from my closet. Wigs are in the cupboard across the hall. Though I expect you’ve already found those, too.” She dropped a ball of something that felt soft like velvet in my hand. “Synthetic skin,” she explained. “You’ll need it again for tonight—the wrinkles and all that. Mila will do your makeup when you’re done.”

“Madam Revleon?” I asked.

“Yes?” She slid the book back into its place on the shelf.

“How long ago did you buy this place? I—I think it’s really nice.”

She smiled and straightened the pages I’d spread across her desk. “Oh, I didn’t
buy
this place,” she said. “It was given to me by an old friend.”

Club 49’s bright lights flashed on the gold pavement. The golden road ran from the city’s center to the nation’s most infamous nightlife destination. Club 49 was a nightclub, euthanasia clinic, and mortuary all wrapped up into one.

Its slogan—
People Are Dying to Get Into Club 49—
flashed across its main entrance in silver letters. Throngs of people waited outside its grand doorways, vying for a chance at entry, eager to see the forty-nine-year-old volunteers—victims—who awaited certain death and spectacle.

I wondered what sort of person would choose this flashy building as the place to spend their final moments. I suppose it offered people without families an opportunity to claim their fifteen minutes of fame.

I glanced at a clock by the club’s entrance. It was only eleven.

“The club lifts off the ground at midnight,” explained Phoenix, when I asked what happened inside the club. “Euthanasia is administered to the forty-nine-year-old guests turning fifty tomorrow via their Daisies—glowing necklaces with thick white beads—at exactly midnight. The crowd then lifts their corpses to ‘Heaven’—a white conveyer belt lowered at 12:01—in a process called ‘Rapture.’ After Rapture, you’ll be moved on to another conveyer belt, where an attendant will check your pulse to make sure that you’re dead. From there, management disposes of the bodies in an incinerator. Some are even turned into little green wafers.”

I must have looked worried.

“I’m kidding about that last part,” he said, chuckling. “And don’t worry—we’ve sewn a tracking device into your new wig, so we can keep an eye on you at all times. The building’s blueprints are highly confidential, which is why we need a body—you—on the other side. Sparky can hack the system remotely once the signal’s been moved into the nightclub’s classified areas. We’ll intercept you once he’s secured your coordinates. Before you hit the incinerator.”

Mila smiled. “At least that’s what we’re aiming for.”

“Are you ready?” said Phoenix.

I nodded, but my shaking hands said otherwise. I curled them into fists. I wished I had on my cheeseburger socks. Now wasn’t the time for nerves.

Mila straightened my wig. “You’ll be fine.”

Phoenix nodded. “We wouldn’t have brought you with us otherwise.”

“Where exactly in the club is the Indigo supply?” I asked. “You’re sure it’s here? Why would they even have it here?”

I felt sick to my stomach just talking to them about Indigo. I knew now that they didn’t want to simply steal it and sell it—they wanted to
manipulate
it. Put some sort of virus in it, then redistribute it. I wanted to run from them right then. But I didn’t have a choice if I wanted to save Mom and Charlie. It was stay with the Lost Boys or die. And a dead Kai was slightly less useful than a live one.

Slightly.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Phoenix. “You swam into a megalodon’s mouth. Club 49 is kindergarten in comparison.”

I chewed my lip. “They don’t kill kids in kindergarten.”

The two winced. They thought I was being difficult. Either that, or they
did
kill kids in kindergarten. And I highly doubted it was the latter.

Nancy Perkins had scheduled her euthanization at Club 49 for tonight. She’d intended to enter the nightclub through its side entrance—the one reserved for Daisy wearers—and enjoy the copious amounts of attention lavished on her as a result of the necklace. Celebrate both her fiftieth birthday and death. The last night of her life.

But it wasn’t Nancy Perkins who’d be entering Club 49’s side entrance tonight and given a Daisy. It was me. Celebrating a fiftieth birthday instead of a fifteenth birthday, thinking all the while that I was far too young to die.

“Bertha made you a device,” Phoenix said as he slapped a metallic sticker to my neck. “It emits a signal that will neutralize the euthanasia at the time of the Daisy’s injection. It’s a simple device, really. It can’t fail.”

Just like a Wet Pocket
, I thought. I winced, thinking of the pain I’d felt in my shoulder. Madam Revleon had rubbed one of her many odd healing creams on it, and the burning had since subsided, but the failure of Bertha’s previous invention didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

“Neutralizing euthanasia injections,” I muttered. “So simple.”

Phoenix ignored my remark. “We’ll join you before long,” he said. “We have to wait in line at the grand entrance. Only you can use the side one. We’ll meet you inside.”

Lucky me.

I patted my face. The synthetic skin was remarkably real to the touch, but in my head I knew I was still just wearing a glorified pancake.

A host smiled at me as I approached the side entrance. His hair shined with a sheen only possible after being smothered in gel. “Good evening, miss,” he said brightly. The preferential treatment started early. “First and last name, please.”

I cleared my throat, raising my voice an octave. “Nancy Perkins,” I said. For once it wasn’t so bad being a late bloomer.

“Welcome, Miss Perkins. If you’d be so kind as to place your eye against our retina scanner—standard protocol to verify identity, of course. I’d be more than happy to hold your sunglasses.”

I blinked hard behind my polarized lenses. Phoenix hadn’t said anything about a retina scan. I wasn’t vaccinated—if the glasses came off, the game was up. My eyes were brown, not blue. And my retina signature certainly wasn’t Nancy’s.

There had to be another way.

A woman with red hair wrapped in a sparkling bun leaned against the retina scanner at another station. She wore orange horn-rimmed glasses and didn’t take them off for the scanner. It beeped loudly and flashed green. Her host ushered her in.

Like kindergarten,
I thought. Phoenix was right—this wasn’t supposed to be difficult.

“It’s not fair,” I whined, pointing toward the woman. “She wore her glasses for the scanner, but I can’t? That ain’t right.”

“But, madam, her lenses weren’t polarized—”

“
Madam
? Are you going to call me Grandma, too?”

“Miss!” he said quickly, covering his mistake. “I meant ‘miss,’ of course. That woman’s glasses weren’t polarized. They’re not like yours—they’re not colored.”

I felt the imaginary Nancy’s blood boil. I stepped back. “So that’s what this is about? We’re back to judging things by
color
?
BY COLOR?”

The other hosts frowned. Mine grew increasingly flustered, beat down by his colleagues’ angry glares. “Er—I’m sorry madam. I mean miss, definitely miss—but your glasses—”

“I know.” I raised my voice. “IT’S THE COLOR! COLORED ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU—”

The host ushered me forward without another word. The retina scanner beeped its objections, but he knocked it to the ground, muttering something about it being defective. The other hosts looked on.

“Enjoy your stay, miss,” he grumbled.

Stay.
People who came through these doors didn’t leave.

I wandered into the victims’ grand foyer, an oasis of gold. It adorned the walls, the frames, even the floorboards. King Midas would’ve crapped himself.

The ceiling, however, was a starry abyss. Walls melted into nothingness, and specks of light broke the darkness. Stars, looking just like the real ones. The ones we could see before the war. Buttons of light swaddled in black cloth.

“Lovely, aren’t they?” A small woman in black stood beside me, her eyes turned to the ceiling. Fine lines traced the cracks between her lips. She turned, and her blue eyes stared back at me beneath a head of mousy brown hair.