The Indigo Thief (2 page)

She pounded a bony fist on his desk. Her suit flashed green. “Results, Hackner.”

She was next to him now, whispering in his ear. “That’s all I’m after. Kill Phoenix. Kill the other Lost Boys. And kill half the damned Federation, if that’s what it takes. The world almost ended once. It could happen again.”

He squeezed his briefcase and nodded. “You’re right, Miranda. Absolutely right.”

“Three years,” she said, her voice returning to the ConSynth’s depths. “That’s all it takes. Three years and you can wash your hands of this place like the men before you.”

She was right. He only had three more years as chancellor. Then she’d promised him freedom. His lips twisted into a grin. “Looking forward to it, Miranda.”

Three years could still be a long time.

“And Hackner?” she called as he pulled open his chamber doors. A chill ran down his spine. The ConSynth glowed green. “The megalodons were a nice touch.”

He shut the door behind him and steadied his breathing in the hall. He thought of Plumb’s white face and his cold, dead hands, and reminded himself that there were things in this world much worse than death.

Turning fifteen in the Hawaiian Federation was a pretty big deal, mostly because it meant there was a good chance I wasn’t going to die. Sure, there was always the off chance I’d keel over in the waiting room, die with only moments between me and my Indigo vaccination. But those kinds of deaths were few and far between, and most of us only knew a few kids who that happened to.

I’d made it to fifteen. I could count myself as one of the lucky ones who’d survived to adulthood. One of the sixty-seven percent of kids who beat the Carcinogens, and got to live a long happy life before their euthanization at fifty.

One of the
survivors
.

With a rattle, the subway pulled out of the station and dove into the glass cylinder that was the Pacific Northwestern Tube. The underwater Tubes were the quickest way to go from one island to the other, five times faster than traveling by boat. They carried people between islands like pipes carried water.

Most islands had many Tubes, but since Moku Lani was the least populated, we just had the one—the Pacific Northwestern. It had subway tracks, instead of car lanes, and always smelled vaguely like feet. Charming.

On the Tube, it only took twenty minutes to get to the closest vaccination clinic on Kauai. The Feds hadn’t bothered putting any clinics on Moku Lani, since it was essentially just a giant rock. They’d drilled into its core a couple of centuries ago to create subterranean levels, which they now used mostly for nuclear energy experiments and marine research. Otherwise, the place was pretty desolate.

Moku Lani was a quiet place to grow up, but not the greatest. There was a Buster’s Burgers, but nothing else really. Some kids sniffed glue for fun. I could hardly blame them. It was easier than wondering which friend the Carcinogens would get next. And if they weren’t getting your friends, wondering when they’d get you.

I tried to get Mom to come to my vaccination, but she was too terrified to ride the Tube anymore. She hadn’t done it since Dad died. I don’t think she was particularly fond of being basically twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

She was more interested in researching sharks—megalodons, specifically (think great whites on steroids)—than transportation. She couldn’t appreciate the photosynthetic plankton that glowed like stars beyond the Tube’s glass. They were the closest things we had to real stars anymore. The smog and clouds—which had smothered the islands ever since humanity’s fall in the Final World War—had darkened the world, exiling the old stars to occasional fleeting glimpses and history books.

Mom always made a big deal out of birthdays. A really big deal. She celebrated birthdays the way most people celebrated weddings., and today was no exception. I’d started my morning by finding approximately two million sticky notes decorating the door of my room, with cheesy messages laced with all sorts of Mom-isms. “
HAPPY FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY TO MY BABY!
” “
YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE
!” “
EVERY DAY YOU MAKE ME PROUD TO BE YOUR MOM
!”

I was pretty lucky to have her. We’d only gotten closer since Dad died.

Screens bubbled at the top of the subway’s doors. A news reporter sporting a fearsome unibrow flashed across one.

“Good morning,” she said, “I’m Priscilla Gurley and the time is eight o’clock. Today’s top story: LOST BOYS STILL LOST.”

The press got smarter everyday.

Mom might not have been able to come, but she’d sent Charlie with me. That was probably the next best thing. And if I was being honest, it might even have been better. Charlie had also just gotten her vaccination a few months ago.

Charlie pushed a strand of dark brown hair away from my eyes, then crossed and uncrossed her legs. She was antsy. “You nervous?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nah. I’ve made it this far, right? I’m one of the winners. Just a couple hours now.”

She nodded. The odds were good I’d make it, but I could tell she was scared. Our lives were fragile, and we knew it. The Carcinogens could strike a kid down at any time. The Indigo vaccine was the only thing that kept the adults in our world alive.

The Federation must not fall.
The Federal government drummed that mantra into our heads as fervently as it pumped the vaccine into our irises when we turned fifteen.

“Plus,” I said, “I’ve got my lucky socks on today.”

I rolled up my jeans to show her. They were Dad’s old pair. Red with pictures of cheeseburgers printed across the sides.

Charlie smiled and rolled her eyes. “I swear, Kai. You and those frickin’ cheeseburger socks.”

I grinned and quoted my father: “If a man’s brave enough to wear cheeseburger socks in public, he’s brave enough to do anything.”

I still missed Dad pretty much every day. His euthanization had been three years ago. I was lucky Mom still had two years left. Both of Charlie’s parents were already gone.

She smiled. “That’s a
cheesy
line, if I ever heard one.” She paused, then smirked. “
Bun
intended.”

You have to admire a girl who’s good with puns. I shook my head, feigning embarrassment. “Lord, just stop. Or I’ll quit taking you out in public. The chopsticks are already a bit much. But the puns? Now you’re pushing it…”

Charlie had pinned her blond hair back into a messy bun and secured it in place with a pair of chopsticks. She’d worn it like this every day since I’d met her in the fifth grade. The color of her chopsticks was determined by the day of the week. Mondays were maroon. Tuesdays, teal. Wednesdays, white. Thursdays, blue. And Fridays were whatever she wanted.

Today was a Friday (she’d skipped school to come to the clinic with me), and her chopsticks were lime green with margarita pendants that dangled from the ends. Her mom gave her this pair when she was seven. A souvenir from her work trip to Club 49.

I pulled the chopsticks from Charlie’s bun and shoved them under my lip. “Walruth,” I said.

She snatched them back and shook her head. “So immature, Kai-Guy.” I loved when she called me Kai-Guy.

She put a chopstick to her forehead and grinned.

“Unicorn!” I yelled.

An old woman—probably forty-eight or forty-nine—shushed us from the row behind. Charlie shook her head, holding the chopstick in place. “Not unicorn,” she said. “Narwhal.”

We both burst into laughter. Charlie’s laugh was something between a snicker and a snort. She was really beautiful—the kind of beautiful that made guys like me get sorta sweaty hands—but her laugh didn’t fit her looks. It belonged to an old woman choking on corn on the cob. It was the kind of laugh that made people wipe their brows, thinking:
Thank god—she’s like the rest of us.

I wiped one of my sweaty hands against my leg. “Narwhals are extinct,” I said, “like whales. Like seals. Like lots of things.”

“Like your dignity?” she teased and winked. I think she was trying to be seductive—she did that sometimes. But it usually ended up looking like a bug had flown into her eye. Maybe that made it even more seductive. I guess it was just the way Charlie did everything, really. She could’ve burped the alphabet and my hands would’ve gotten sweaty at the letter A.

Sometimes it still felt like we were those same two kids who had just met in the fifth grade. Not much had changed. I liked it that way. In a world where we were constantly told we didn’t have much time, it was nice to sometimes feel like time wasn’t passing.

A picture of a girl with long, dark curls and bright green eyes flashed on the screen.

Green eyes.

It wasn’t often we saw those. Most of us had shades of brown, which turned blue after we’d been vaccinated, a side effect of Indigo.

People born with naturally blue eyes died out soon after the Final World War. Scientists theorized that they were genetically more susceptible to the Carcinogens that filled the air after the bombs went off. They thought the weakness might be carried on the same chromosome as the gene for eye color, but weren’t able to test it since the corpses were all burned at sea.

The green-eyed girl on the screen held her left hand to her head. Her thumb was pressed to her chin, her index finger to the corner of her eye, and her middle finger pointed skyward. The rest of her fingers were pressed to her palm. It was like she was throwing up a gang sign.

The words
WANTED: MILA VACHOWSKI
were stamped across her face in scarlet letters. It wasn’t often the press showed us pictures like this. The Federation didn’t want to hurt its people—the Carcinogens in the air did enough of that on their own.

I stared at the girl’s mug shot and shook my head. “I hope they get her.”

Charlie nodded. “They’ve been looking long enough.”

“Wouldn’t know.”

She teased me with her elbow. “Maybe if you spent more time out of the water than in it.”

I grinned. Since there wasn’t much to do on Moku Lani, I usually swam. “I held my breath for five minutes and thirty-six seconds yesterday,” I told her. “Even saw a megalodon swimming on the other side of the nets.”

She slapped my arm. “C’mon, Kai. You’ve gotta stop doing that. Free diving isn’t safe. Those nets are about as reliable as Mr. Hoover.”

Mr. Hoover had been our teacher when we were in the sixth grade. He’d had a habit of forgetting what day of the week it was and not showing up to work. Once he came to school in a cape. He thought it was Halloween. It was December.

“Aw, come on, Charlie,” I said.

“I’m serious. One of these days, something’s gonna happen. The nets’ll go down and then it won’t be so funny. You really wanna do that to your mom?”

“She doesn’t mind me free diving. She thinks it’s good for me to get out of my head.”

I’d been free diving since Dad died. It was nice to be deep in the water. There was something about the quiet and the cold, being able to clear your mind of all thoughts but oxygen.

Charlie shoved her chopsticks back in her bun. “The nets aren’t safe, and you know it. The electrical signals go out all the time. I find it hard to believe a boy with a conspiracy theory about the lunch lady would be so trusting.”

Agnes Oldwinski had a lazy eye that spun inward whenever she spoke. She’d be staring you straight in the face—“Peas?” she’d ask—and then her left eye would spin inward. I couldn’t trust that.

Charlie pushed a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “How many copies of your birth certificate did you bring? Just answer me that, and then tell me you’re not paranoid.”

A copy of your birth certificate was required at every annual Federal physical. They made notes on it each year and signed it. We were required to have it signed every year in order to be eligible for a vaccine at fifteen. They had to keep the supply controlled somehow; there were never enough vaccines to go around. Production couldn’t keep up with demand.

Each vaccine had a dose of Indigo that lasted for thirty-five years. When a person reached their fiftieth birthday, it expired, and they were euthanized. The Carcinogens affected adults even worse than kids. Kids just fell to the ground, dead, but the adults went insane and died a slow, terrible death. Doctors dubbed it “Madness.”

I thought back to the birth certificate copies I’d scanned and printed that morning. “Four,” I said. I pointed to my cargo shorts. “One for each pocket.”

“None in my purse?”

Okay, I’d lied. I’d hidden an extra copy in her purse that morning. In case I got mugged or someone spilled coffee on me. I couldn’t be too careful. The copies were my ticket to a vaccine, and a vaccine was my ticket to life. I couldn’t admit my paranoia to Charlie, however.

I shook my head and made a mental note to grab the extra copy from her bag later. “Nope,” I said. “Just the ones in my pockets.”

“So you’re really not nervous, then?”

Her eyes were blue, like the eyes of all citizens over fourteen, but there was something different about hers. They were brighter. Not a normal shade of blue like the others, but a shade I called “Charlie blue.” She squeezed my hand, and my palms got sweaty.

“Maybe a
bit
nervous,” I said, “but it’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine.”

I was terrified.

I turned to the screen that flashed with the green-eyed girl’s mug shot. A diamond stud decorated her nose.

Charlie rubbed my hand. “You don’t need to be nervous, Kai. You went with me on my birthday a couple months ago, and I was fine, wasn’t I? I didn’t pass out in the waiting room or anything.”

I nodded. She was right. She hadn’t passed out.

But
I
had. In the waiting room while she was getting vaccinated. The nurses had revived me with promises of dinosaur stickers. I still had a T-Rex stuck to my notebook. I didn’t tell Charlie. I wanted her to think of me as a man.

I sighed. “It’s just, well, it’s the whole needle and iris thing, really. It’s not right, watching a needle come straight at your pupil like a rocket to the moon.”

“Don’t think about it like that. You’re numb when they do it.”

“I know,” I said, “but it’s the whole idea of it. I mean, why hasn’t someone been able to put the drug in a pill or a mist or, heck, even a handshake at this point?”