Phoenix yanked Mila from the light pole. “Let’s go,” he said, muscles rippling as he walked.
I glanced at my own biceps. They belonged to a girl scout selling Thin Mints.
We hurried toward the Morier Mansion’s gates, dressed in all black, our faces covered by gray scarves like gypsies. No one in the city had looked twice at our disguises. We were fortunate Newla was such a bizarre place.
Two days ago, the other Lost Boys had shot down the Feds in copters using Bertha’s weapons. They’d spent the next day scanning Federal waters, and then Phoenix had insisted we return to Madam Revleon’s before launching the raid. He said he had a few things he needed to discuss with her.
Of course now, more than ever, I refused to believe a word he said. The truth might as well have been a dead language to him—like French, not spoken in a hundred years.
Bertha busied herself by preparing another set of Wet Pockets. She’d gotten to use her rocket launcher during the Feds’ attack, so she was in an extraordinarily good mood, not even saying a word when I insulted her last batch of Pockets.
We’d come across an abandoned speedboat earlier in the day. Phoenix guessed Federal ships had killed its owners on their way to raid the Caravan, but I doubted this, and guessed instead that it was Phoenix himself who’d killed them. It seemed too convenient that a boat would magically appear the very day we needed a lift to Newla. But there it was, and we used it. Kindred sewed us the gray scarves, and we’d arrived at the city by nightfall.
A crow screamed from the banyan tree’s gnarled branches as Phoenix rattled the mansion’s gate. He’d radioed Revleon before we left and told her we were coming—the gate was supposed to have been unlocked. This wasn’t a good sign.
Phoenix continued rattling the gate as I threw a leg over the fence. Mila sharpened her knife against the iron rods one final time, and then she and Phoenix followed me.
Phoenix rapped the mansion’s brass rings hard against the massive door. There was no response. He slammed them again. Nothing. Mila pounded the door with closed fists, and the crow called from the tree. Madam Revleon was clearly not home. I walked the mansion’s perimeter.
“Where are you going?” asked Mila. I shrugged and kept walking. A shutter on the manor’s left wing swung back and forth on rusted hinges in the cool night breeze. I lifted my face to the window’s edge. The screen had been torn open, and its mesh covering ripped to shreds, made transparent like a spider’s cobweb in the moonlight, framed by fragmented glass.
Someone had broken in.
I pulled myself onto the ledge, ducking past the shattered glass before rolling into the room. A coffee table sat sprawled on its side like a fallen soldier, a casualty in a war it didn’t know it was fighting. I could hear the brass ring clang against the door. If someone were here, they’d have run by now. I wondered again where Madam Revleon was.
The rest of the mansion was in similar disarray. Pictures were knocked from walls and glass cabinets lay shattered on the ground. There’d been a fight—that much was clear—but who’d won? I wasn’t even sure who I was rooting for. I twisted the front door’s lock and opened the door.
Phoenix stood in the doorway, confused. “How did you—?”
“Window was open.” I pointed down the hall. “Left wing.”
“Shit,” Mila muttered, eyeing the glass shards that littered the floor. “What the hell happened here?”
The foyer’s chandelier hung lopsided and rocked back and forth like a metronome. Tapestries had been torn from the walls, and lay sprawled across the steps of the grand staircase.
Phoenix held his head in his hands. “Have you seen her?”
I shook my head no.
“Probably hiding.” He pointed to the stairs. “Library.”
We hurried up the steps. Mila got there first, and stopped in the library’s doorway. “Oh my god.” She was hyperventilating. It was the most disturbed I’d ever seen her. I pushed past her.
Madam Revleon’s corpse lay bleeding in the room’s center. Blood pooled on either side of her limp body, and fallen bookshelves lined her torso, flanked by books spread on their spines. I felt sick to my stomach. I pulled my cheeseburger socks high on my calves and tried to slow my breathing. Be brave, I reminded myself.
Phoenix kneeled next to Madam Revleon’s body. It looked like the intruder, or intruders, had buried bullets in her chest. Her eyes were frozen wide, relics capturing her final moments of terror. The killers must have followed her into the room after a scuffle, maybe even forced her in here.
The arm of her sweater had been torn off, and the words “The Federation will not fall,” had been carved into her forearm. The bloody words shined in the room’s dim light. Feds had been here. Looking for Lost Boys—and maybe me—but they got her instead.
It was my fault that she was dead. And more innocent people would die if I didn’t do something. I shut my eyes and tried to remember the pages of the report I’d found earlier in the library. The Indigo Report…
They’d created some sort of contagion for the vaccine, and the Feds were trying to stop them from spreading it, from infecting all the vaccines they stole. It was an evil plan. I couldn’t be distracted by my own guilt right now. I had to think about stopping the Lost Boys, turning them over to the Feds, and freeing Mom and Charlie. Those were the only things that mattered now.
I tried to keep calm. If I blew my cover, Phoenix would kill me now, rather than later. I breathed deeply and scanned Revleon’s body. “Neevlor” was scribbled in black ink across her forehead. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Her right arm was positioned across her chest with two fingers pressed just below her right eye in the Federal salute. Her killers had made sure to arrange her corpse like this after she’d died.
“Check the desk,” Phoenix ordered Mila. “You know which drawer she kept it in.”
Mila tore open the drawers while Phoenix put his palm against Revleon’s head, shutting her eyes. He ground his teeth, and a lone tear rolled down his cheek, caressing his square jaw before sliding along the curve of his neck. He wiped it away when he saw me look.
“Anything, Meels?”
The drawers squeaked as she dumped their contents. “Nothing. I think they might have gotten it.”
“Shit,” he muttered, staring at the cold body. “We should’ve had her make more copies.”
“C’mon, Phoenix,” said Mila. “We talked about this. Dr. Neevlor agreed it was too risky.”
Neevlor. I stared at the name scrawled across Revleon’s forehead. I’d seen it before—in the Indigo Report. “Dr. Harper Neevlor” had been typed across its front page. He was its author. But why had the Feds scribbled his name across a dead woman’s forehead? A dead woman and an eccentric gypsy, at that. The gray scarves we’d worn around our heads would’ve looked normal in her closet.
This Morier Mansion must have been Dr. Neevlor’s house. It was the only explanation. He must have bought the property from the Morier family some years ago and lived here until his death. Or until the Lost Boys and Madam Revleon came in and killed him, adopting this place as their own. The denizens of the Skelewick district would have been too dazed to notice. They didn’t notice anything, really.
I stared at Revleon’s pale body and felt a pang in my heart. Blood had poured from her rosy cheeks into a puddle on the floor. Her words echoed in my head: It is not often one is offered the truth.
The truth. But what was the truth? What was the connection between Neevlor and Revleon? There had to have been something more between them for the Feds to have written his name across her forehead. Impulsively, I grabbed paper and pen from the desk and scribbled down the two names. Phoenix sat huddled over the corpse, and Mila continued to search for the Indigo Report.