Authors: Jay Budgett
“For once,” she said, “I’m pleased.” Her sinewy figure appeared behind him before flashing onto the chaise lounge.
“And why’s that?”
She pointed to a stack of white papers on his—
her
desk. “Ah,” he said. “I see we’ve begun recycling. Really, I’m surprised this office didn’t start sooner—”
“Results, Hackner,” she said through gritted teeth. “We’ve finally got results. They found the Indigo Report, you idiot.”
Hackner hated when she called him an idiot. He was the free world’s elected leader for God’s sake, and it’s not like they could’ve elected an idiot. He lowered himself into his chair and pressed his feet against the back of his desk—against the place where the prisoner named Charlie had hidden. Miranda had been raving about the Indigo Report ever since he’d arrived in office. Bitching about how badly they needed to find it, and how they had to keep it hidden from the public, though she never told him quite what it was.
He scanned the documents on his desk. God, there were a lot of words in these reports. He couldn’t be bothered with so many words. He was more a man of action. “Less reading, more rutting,” his father always said, and he couldn’t have agreed more.
Hackner saw the smugness line Miranda’s face like a red gloss. She always thought she was in control—that she knew everything. That she had all the power. At the end of the day, however, she was still tied to a small green orb. He grinned. “Since you’re so informed,” he said, “I’m sure you’re aware of the fire, the explosions at the South Atlantic car show, and the lockdown at the Newla-Maui border station?” He cracked his neck to the right. “Or did you miss those while you were busy panting over the Indigo Report?”
The lift in her brow told him that she had not been aware, though he knew she’d never directly admit it. Couldn’t confess that even a second had passed where she hadn’t been in total control—where things hadn’t gone perfectly according to plan.
He drummed his fingers along the ConSynth’s curved glass. “The Lost Boys are moving, Miranda.” He paused to let that sink in. “So where’s your boy? Where’s Mr. Kai Bradbury? Something tells me he’s already forgotten about the girl. I suppose the
glamour
of crime got to him.”
The chaise lounge sat empty. He heard her breathing behind his throat. Despite the chill that ran down the length of his back, he savored the sweet satisfaction of finally having the upper hand.
“I commissioned the construction of a second ConSynth,” she said quickly. “It’ll be done by the end of the week. Just a precaution.”
“Same color?” he asked. “I do find the green’s become tiresome.”
She ran her hand over his shoulder. He reminded himself that she couldn’t touch him—she was just a hologram, a consciousness suspended by the power of technology, and nothing more. “This one,” she said, “is going to be red, darling. I know you like red. And we wouldn’t want my dear Hackner to become bored with me, now would we?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “We certainly wouldn’t want that.”
She lay across his desk, hanging her bare leg just over his lap. She rubbed her hand along the length of her neck as her lips cracked into a smile. “I’d hate for you to get sick of me, like you have poor old Margaret.”
He tightened his jaw. “You were in my room. Again.” He wondered how many times Miranda would follow him without him knowing it.
“I’m always with you,” she said with a smile. “In the office, the boardroom, the bedroom: everywhere. There is nowhere you can hide from me. Not that you’d want to, of course.”
Hackner thought of the prick he felt every so often along his spine. A sure sign she was near—that she was watching.
Miranda kicked her heels on the desk. Hackner didn’t mind—her feet weren’t really there. “The prisoner in fourteen’s acting up again.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You don’t think he’ll come for her either?”
Hackner shook his head. “Doubt it. Let’s give her to R&D.”
“Since that’s worked so well in the past.”
Hackner shrugged. He couldn’t have cared less what they did to things in R&D. From all his encounters with them, he’d come to the conclusion they were about as scientific as eighth-graders pulling frogs apart for the science fair. No real genius, expertise, or talent. It was probably best that way. Made it easier to maintain what Miranda called a “healthy” level of progress. Which was no progress at all, in reality.
“What would you have me do with her?” he asked. “Give her two more weeks with Zane? She’s hardly even looked at the rope.”
Miranda waved away his suggestion. “I’m afraid she’s too far gone for that. I’ve seen her through cameras. At this point, her brains are like scrambled eggs. She can’t even feed herself—Sage does it all.”
The blind girl. How Hackner hated her. She’d already betrayed them once by helping Charlie try to escape. And Miranda had let her off easy. She didn’t want her precious pet refusing to mix his antidote. She’d only made Minister Zane give the girl ten lashes. Ten! It was ridiculous. The girl wasn’t even unconscious afterward!
He thought of the prisoner in cell fourteen again. “Perhaps the Ministry of Health, then? They could always use a fresh cadaver for experiments. And we could bring it to them still alive.”
Miranda grinned and cocked her head to the side like a bird examining its prey. “You can be brilliant sometimes. Did you know that, darling? It’s no wonder you got elected.”
“It’s settled, then,” he said. “I’ll have the guards take her this afternoon.”
Miranda chewed her bottom lip. “Perfect,” she said. “And might I also suggest that the guards who go with her go without uniform? In plain clothes, perhaps?” Miranda’s suggestions were never really suggestions: they were just funny ways of giving orders.
“Of course,” he said. “Whatever you wish.”
“We don’t need civilians seeing more men in uniforms—they’ve already got too much cause for concern. The Pacific Northwestern Tube has yet to be repaired. They’re still shuttling Moku Lani citizens back and forth to the other islands via ferry… Yes, guards in plain clothes will make things look a bit more normal. Let them blend in and keep things a bit calmer.”
Hackner nodded. She didn’t want the public knowing the government wasn’t fully in control. That they had no idea where the Lost Boys were or where they’d attack next. For all the Feds knew, every city was a target. The bombs could’ve already been laid, and they’d have no idea. The thin threads that had held their society together for so many years were unraveling. The world they knew was in jeopardy of becoming scrambled.
Scrambled. Like the brains of cell fourteen’s prisoner, Dr. Mary Bradbury.
Oahu’s once wondrous mountainsides had given way years ago to an endless crop of hospitals. The entire island was now a field of clinics and—as Gwendolyn soon informed me—waiting rooms.
She typed a code on a keypad to the left of the Ministry’s metal doors. “Lord knows I can’t stand those things.” Even the Ministry of Health’s back alley looked sterile. White dumpsters rested on the outskirts of the Ministry’s main marble tower.
“Mostly labs,” Gwendolyn acknowledged. “But there’s a small hospital on the third, fourth, and fifth floors for government officials. No waiting rooms for them, of course.”
“God forbid they have to wait even a minute like the rest of us,” muttered Mila.
The glass door slid open. Phoenix double-checked the device he’d slapped against the side of the building. I recognized it as the silver box from Bertha’s lab. A Video Loop Fractalfyer, she’d called it (also “deep shit”).
Phoenix, however, called it a “VLF” for short. He said it disrupted the building’s security feed flow, filling it with endless patterns of images from earlier in the day. Like looking through a kaleidoscope of monotony. Since Bertha designed it, I was naturally skeptical of its effectiveness.
“You’re sure it’ll work?” I asked.
“It’s Bertha’s,” said Phoenix. “It’s got to.”
“Dr. Howey,” said Gwendolyn, “will meet us on the third floor, in the janitor’s closet across from the women’s restroom.”
Mila pursed her lips. “Charming.”
We entered the building’s receiving zone in its vast warehouse, which occupied the first two floors. Rows of supplies sat on high metal shelves, and rovers ran along their lengths, plucking inventory as they went, racing straight past us with little regard for our appearance.
“Real secure,” muttered Mila. “Nice place to keep the world’s largest supply of Indigo.” She kicked a rover’s wheel as it passed. It beeped shrilly, but otherwise paid her no attention.
“There’s no Indigo on most of these floors,” explained Gwendolyn. “Just the occasional vaccine or two in transit. The reserves are in the building’s top six floors.”
“And how many floors are there exactly?” I asked.
“Ninety-nine,” she said without hesitation. She pressed her right two fingers below her cheekbone in the Federal salute, leaned against the door before us, and pressed her eye against its retina scanner.
“Really?” I asked. “They couldn’t make it a hundred?”
The scanner beeped and she removed her head. “It’s a metaphor,” she explained. “Despite the Ministry’s best attempts, the health of the nation is not—and will never be—one hundred percent. The ninety-nine floors remind us of this fact. They remind us to keep trying, keep reaching for that one hundred percent.”
“So…” I said. “Budget cut?”
“Yeah, honestly I think they just ran out of funding.”
We wandered through the Ministry’s floors without so much as a second glance. Gwendolyn told us that once you were in, people would figure you had a reason to be there. For all they cared, you could have a bomb strapped to your chest, and they wouldn’t give you a second glance—they were that absorbed in their research, that absorbed in leaving their names hallowed in the building’s sacred walls. Since the onset of the Carcinogens, the greatest legacy one could leave was an ounce of new knowledge in the medical sector.
Gwendolyn told us that most people who worked for the Ministry of Health were too busy to watch TV, which explained why they didn’t recognize us from news reports. Work was their life, and it stayed that way for most of them until they died.
This Ministry, in particular, made it a point to withhold promotions to positions of power from people with families. The Ministry needed leaders who were completely focused on leaving a legacy in the medical field—they couldn’t afford for employees to have distractions. Occasionally a family man slipped through, but even then his childless colleagues typically made it a point to cause him to fail.
A woman in a white coat and thick glasses hurried past us with a clipboard. She smiled at me and I smiled back. It was the first stranger to have smiled at me since we escaped Club 49. I guessed she liked my cheeseburger socks, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that the security alarms weren’t going off for once. Bertha’s device—the VLF—was working, and for that I was grateful.
When Gwendolyn opened the janitor’s closet door on the third floor, I saw that it, too, was oddly sterile. The shelves were lined with packaged dusters and bottled water used for mopping the floors. A man in his forties crawled out from between two shelves. His bald head shined like the Ministry’s marbled walls, and his navy suit hung in folds around his slight frame. In one hand, he clutched a leather padfolio.
He eyed us from behind a pair of clear, plastic glasses, and I recognized his face as a vaguely familiar. Had I seen him on TV?
Gwendolyn jumped back, startled. “Marvin!” she cried. “Dr. Marvin Howey, my dear, how are you?” She wrapped her arms around his tiny frame, crushing him between her sagging bosoms.
He straightened his glasses. “I’ve been better, though it’s certainly nice to see you again, Gwen.” He extended Phoenix a hand. “And to finally meet you, my good sir, in the flesh.”
Phoenix shook the man’s hand with a somber look. “A pleasure.”
Dr. Howey gave a lopsided smile. “The Lost Boys,” he said to himself. “Never thought I’d see the day.” He turned to Gwendolyn. “How much time do we have?”
“Enough.”
“There’s never enough time, my dear,” he corrected her. “Never enough.”
“Did you read the report?”
He gritted his teeth. “And then burned the copy, like you asked.” He stared at the closet’s sterile shelves, his gaze muddied for a moment, lost somewhere in the distance. “It was hard.”
“Reading the report?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Burning it.”
“It’s a pity you had to. The Feds stole Neevlor’s only other copy.”
“Oh?”
“They got Neevlor, too. They must’ve been scoping out the mansion for a while. How else could they have known?”
“Indeed,” he said, nodding. “How else could they have known?” There was something in his eyes that looked to me like feigned sincerity, as if he actually
knew
how the Feds had found Neevlor. Perhaps he’d been the rat. I wished Charlie were here. She was the best judge of character I knew. She’d know if the man was being honest.
Gwendolyn sobbed, and Dr. Howey rubbed her arm. “Dr. Harper Neevlor was a good woman,” he said. “She’ll live on forever through her work. The Indigo Report is monumental.”
Not for the first time, I wondered what Phoenix held over their heads to get them to do his dirty work—what it took to get people like Gwendolyn and Dr. Howey to give up their careers and possibly their lives. It didn’t make sense. Phoenix was just a kid, not much older than me. What did he tell these people he would do? What were they getting out of helping him? What kind of sick, twisted desires did Phoenix promise them would come true? There had to be something.
I thought about what Gwendolyn said earlier, about how their work was everything to these people. They had no families. No partners. Nothing else, really. Just their work. Their work was their legacy—the only way they could live on forever. Even Dr. Howey said it about Dr. Neevlor and the Indigo Report.
So that was it: legacy. The chance to have their work turn into legacy was what brought people like Gwendolyn, Dr. Neevlor, and Dr. Howey together. Phoenix promised them that history’s pages would not forget them. By working with him, they’d be assured to live on forever.