“The mother trunk,” said Mila as she pulled herself behind me. Splinters had buried themselves in my palms, but too much adrenaline surged through my veins for me to care. We were swinging nearly thirty feet in the air, and falling from this height would kill or maim me. Failure to move assured the police would do the same. Splinters were the least of my worries.
Finally, Phoenix landed on the mother trunk. “Down the rabbit hole,” he said as I joined him. A mass of trunks rested below our feet, curving inward before spreading out to feed other trunks. Together, they formed a wide platform. One trunk that bled into the center stopped abruptly along the curve of another, its dark wood different than the rest. Phoenix ran his hand along the branches that lined the tree’s widest trunk, his brow furrowing as he searched along its spine.
There was a soft click, and then the dark trunk in the center lifted slightly upward. Mila ran her fingers along its seams and pushed up.
It wasn’t a trunk at all. It was a chute. One expertly disguised with painted lengths of wood, but a chute nonetheless. Phoenix was right: down the rabbit hole we would go. Mila lowered herself down the chute first, disappearing into the tree’s dark depths as she urged me to follow.
The police pushed forward, battering the wrought-iron fences down before them. Men with black shields and guns charged the mansion, firing a round of bullets as they ran. The mansion’s remaining glass windows shattered.
Phoenix stuck his head into the tunnel. “You sure you set it, Meels?”
“Five seconds!” she yelled back.
A wall of fire burst from the mansion’s depths, and the house’s insides were devoured by flames. Mila had set a bomb. Their way of ensuring the Feds didn’t get their hands on Revleon’s remains—or the other secrets that likely lay hidden inside the mansion’s walls. Flames burned through the same halls I’d just walked. I could still see Charlie’s face frozen on the screen.
Analysts estimate she’ll be executed by next Tuesday.
If I didn’t save her, she’d be dead in less than a week.
Phoenix pushed me forward. “We need to move, Kai.”
I joined Mila in the chute. There was no light, I realized, only darkness. With the Lost Boys, there was never any light. Maybe fire, but no light. With the Lost Boys, there was only darkness.
Chapter 28
My breathing echoed in the tunnel as I climbed farther down the banyan tree’s hollowed center. I lowered myself along the metal slats that had been affixed to the wall, forming a ladder.
Phoenix read my thoughts. “The Morier Mansion was built before the world fell—it’s the oldest building in the Skelewick district, which, of course, is the oldest district in Newla. The yellow lights give it away. The district runs on a different electrical circuit than the rest of the city. The council never figured it was worthwhile for the district to switch, I suppose. That, or they like laughing at the people lost in the yellow light. This tunnel was built shortly after the mansion, and goes deep into the island’s core, eventually connecting with the sewers and maintenance tunnels.”
Somehow it didn’t seem strange that a Skelewick denizen was crazy enough to erect such a tunnel. Maybe they’d been searching for a way to escape the district’s hypnotic glow.
“What is it about the yellow light that people find so hypnotizing?” I asked.
“Nostalgia, I suppose,” said Phoenix. “The yellow lights are antiques—remnants of a world gone by. I don’t imagine it’s the light itself that’s hypnotizing, but the past. The thing that hangs in the hollowed eyes and heavy hearts of lost souls.”
It made sense. For the lost souls, the man with the clocks had said. People searching for the thing that evaded us alclass="underline" time. Wondering how to get back the time they’d lost, searching for a way to change the past. School taught us that people used to live to a hundred, but I didn’t believe it. Fifty seemed old enough.
Mila’s feet splashed in a puddle at the base of the ladder. At the bottom of the chute was a tunnel about six feet wide and six feet tall. Phoenix had to duck his head just to walk. Mila cracked something in her pocket, and the tunnel was flooded with light.
“I wondered if you still had a few glow sticks,” said Phoenix. Mila patted her pockets. The glow stick’s light caught the corner of her jaw and lit her cheekbones in silhouettes.
“Always,” she said, smiling. She ran along the tunnel, and Phoenix and I followed. Echoes rang as our feet splashed in puddles that had formed over the years. The air stank of stale water, and the tunnel felt humid and hot, like it’d been filled with steam in a past life. The air felt thick and foreign in my lungs, like I was breathing in molasses. The glow stick’s light danced in the air with swirls of moisture.
“Where—uh—where are we?” I asked, moisture pouring into my mouth as I spoke.
Mila groaned. “Why’d we bring him again?”
Phoenix ignored her comment. I think he liked explaining the way the world worked—using the stuff he’d read in books. “Old lava tube,” he said. “That’s why the air’s so warm. It’s been abandoned for years.” He pointed ahead, down the tunnel where the glow stick’s light gave way to black. “They say it goes all the way to the Light House’s cellar.”
“The Light House?”
“You know,” said Mila, “the place where the chancellor lives. Big government building. Council meets there. Ministers, too. It’s even got a little prison. Shit—what do they teach you in school, anyway?”
Charlie could be in the Light House—in its prison, I thought. I might even be able to get the Lost Boys to take me. Her face was still frozen in my mind. Her bald head, her impending execution. The Feds had known she meant something to me, and they were using her to force me out of hiding.
I thought of the words carved into Neevlor’s forearm. The Federation will not fall. The Feds, it seemed, would do anything to stop the Lost Boys. At first I’d understood—they had a nation to protect, after all—but now, their methods were starting to seem… sinister. Too sinister. If they would do anything to stop the Lost Boys, then didn’t that make them just as bad?
I shook my head—I couldn’t think like this. Maybe what the Lost Boys were doing was intentional. They thought they could earn my trust by putting me in dangerous situations and then saving my life. That’s probably what they’d done to Bugsy—waited for him to trust them and then finally revealed the truth of their evil plans, swallowing him whole. Maybe that’s what Phoenix intended to do me before he tried to kill me.
No, I couldn’t focus on the Lost Boys’ lies, or even the Feds’ lies. It was all too much. I could hardly even tell the difference between the lies and the truth anymore. I had to focus on what I knew to be true without a doubt: Mom and Charlie. Saving them was my only real chance at redemption.
I sucked in a breath. “The tunnel goes straight there?” I asked. “All the way to the Light House?”
Phoenix nodded. “We think so, but there are walls and rubble in the way. Been there as long as anyone can remember, and there’s no way around it. I’m afraid it’s probably just an urban legend. My guess is that that branch just leads straight to the sewers.”
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. The acrid stink of sewage still clung to hairs in my nostrils from my previous escapade. “We almost there?” I asked. Mila nodded and shined the light toward a fork in the tunnel. We turned right.