Jay Budgett - The Indigo Thief

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.

“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.”