“I’m not so sure,” Phoenix replied. “Not with all those Feds out. And Kai has no idea what he’s doing.”
“The shipment of vaccines will be moved from Club 49 after tonight,” the old woman insisted. “We have no choice. We must act now if the raid is to be successful. And don’t be so shortsighted, young man: I remember you making a worse mess of the city, and not so long ago. If anything, this boy should only remind you of your own foolishness.”
“Well, in his defense,” I said, pointing to Phoenix’s bulging muscles, “he’s a bit more capable.”
The woman sighed. “I do apologize for the disagreement, Mr. Bradbury. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Madam Revleon, and the Morier Mansion is my home. A land base of sorts for the Lost Boys, as well as for the Caravites. They can’t do everything from that floating island of rubbish—”
“New Texas,” said Mila.
“Yes, yes—New Texas, that’s right.” She rolled her eyes. “A bit smaller than the old Texas, I think, but never mind that. Though you’ll only be here a short while, please don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything, Mr. Bradbury. I’m sure we’ll see each other again very soon.” She turned to Mila. “Miss Vachowski, would you be so kind as to lead Mr. Bradbury upstairs to rest? You both have a long evening ahead of you. I think a moment’s rest is in order.”
Mila dragged me up the steps of the grand staircase, which fanned out at the bottom then spiraled tightly up to the top. The walls along it were decorated with scarlet tapestries. I pressed my fingers against the velvet words written below one of them: Veritas vos liberabit. Above them, a gold knight stood atop a sea of fallen corpses.
“Don’t touch that,” snapped Mila.
We moved through the mansion’s left wing, stopping at a room at the end of the hall. A bed covered by a gold canopy stood in its center. Mila plopped herself on its covers and tossed a pillow onto the floor. “You get ground,” she said.
I sighed. The wooden floor didn’t exactly look welcoming, and my back still burned where Churchill’s hook scraped it. I ignored Mila’s instruction and instead moved to an armchair with plush, satin cushions. The sharp face of a bird had been carved into its clawed wooden feet.
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.