Jay Budgett - The Indigo Thief

Mila popped her head back into the room. “You coming, Kai? We’ve really gotta go…”

“I—I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I should wait here. Maybe Charlie will show up. I—I just need a minute. I’ll meet you at the top.”

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.

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I’d last seen her, her cheekbones had gotten sharper, her eyes more sunken in her skull, and her long blond hair had been replaced by her bald head’s soft sheen.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.”