“Pick a car,” he said again. Screams sounded throughout the tent, and engines roared as other cars were freed from metal boots under the cover of dark.
Here and there, cars sprang to life, and their headlights lit the tent, illuminating the chaos that now surrounded us. I immediately pointed to a red convertible in the corner. Phoenix quickly cut its boot and then keyed in. He laid Mila in the back, pointed me to the passenger’s seat, and then started the engine. Mila groaned in the back. Cars raced alongside ours as we joined the fray.
I realized then that Phoenix had never intended to drive off in the jeep: the crash had been part of his plan from the beginning. He’d intended for Mila to slam into the generators and knock out the power, enabling the other cars to be stolen. These were all just movements in his well-orchestrated symphony. The guards could’ve stopped one car from fleeing from the tent, but they couldn’t stop them all. You couldn’t stop a parade. You couldn’t stop a symphony. And Phoenix was the conductor.
Away from the tent, we glided along the neighborhood’s worn streets, eventually merging onto the highway that led us out of the South Atlantic district, and then out of Newla altogether.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Suburban Islands,” said Phoenix, his eyes darting back and forth as we weaved through traffic. “We’ll have to stop at a border station in Maui. Should be there in a couple of hours. Go ahead and sleep, Kai. Get some rest while you can.” Mila snored in the back, and he winked. “I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said. “For all of us. Don’t you worry.”
I watched as he ran his hand along the gun’s length in his pocket. Rest was not an option. If I was going to live—and I needed to if I was to save Mom and Charlie—then from here on out, I would have to keep my eyes open. To close them would mean darkness—and in Phoenix’s world, darkness meant death.
Chapter 29
Traffic in the Pacific Southwestern Tube slowed to a crawl at the Maui border station. Unlike the Pacific Northwestern, which contained only subway tracks, the Pacific Southwestern had wide lanes for cars and the commuter traffic that moved between Maui and Newla. A line of cars thirty vehicles deep had formed ahead of our red convertible. Mila cursed under her breath, and I pretended to wipe nonexistent sleep from my eyes. I’d been feigning sleep for the past three hours.
“Sorry,” said Phoenix. “It’s not usually like this.”
“It’s fine,” I said. I thought of Charlie’s face—her smile that wrinkled to one side when she spoke, her big blue eyes that glowed brighter than any other vaccinated person I’d met. “Not like I had anywhere else to be.” I lied—I could’ve been saving Charlie.
“No hot dates? But you’re a wanted man, Mr. Bradbury…”
I felt sick to my stomach. Here he was, joking with me, when he knew eventually he’d have to kill me. “Turns out,” I said, “the Feds like bad boys more than girls do.”
Mila smirked. “Not true.”
“Yeah?” I turned in my seat. She had a bump in the center of her forehead from where she’d struck the airbag. “Then how come you aren’t back at Dredson’s Divine Herbal Incenses? Some bad boys there, if I ever saw them.”
“Burnouts aren’t bad boys,” she said. “They’re just burnouts.”
“Maybe I’ll be a burnout one day. Once all this is done.”
“Go ahead,” she said. “But it’d be a waste of your lungs.”
It was the first time Mila had paid me a compliment. “Are you saying I’ve got good lungs, Miss Vachowski?”
She rolled her eyes, and I grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Nah,” she said, “just a fact.”
“It’s a compliment,” said Phoenix, smiling. I felt sick again.
Suddenly the car behind us slammed into our bumper, and we lurched forward. Phoenix tried to hit the brakes, but the momentum shoved us forward, crumpling our front fender against the car bumper ahead of us. Phoenix gave a signal and we threw on our sunglasses. He jammed his arms against his side door, but it was too crumpled to budge. I tried my handle. Jammed, too.
Phoenix pulled something from his pocket and pressed it against the windshield, which immediately shattered into tiny pieces. We crawled out.
The Tube’s familiar glass curve hung overhead. Agents were stepping out of the border patrol stations wearing yellow and orange jumpsuits with X’s across their fronts, just below the letters “M.T.C.” Agents of the Ministry of Transportation & Commerce.
“Fantastic,” muttered Mila. “Absolutely fantastic…” She pulled her poncho’s hood over her head and kept her eyes down as the agents approached.
Phoenix glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “Ministry of TC,” he whispered. “Also known as the Ministry of Total Crap.”
I stifled a laugh as the agents approached a truck driver six cars ahead. We were part of an eight-car pile-up that blocked an entire lane. Around us, cars swerved to stay ahead of traffic.
The agents moved along the line, hopping from car to car, collecting license and registration as they passed. “What do we do?” I asked Phoenix.
“Just keep your head down, and trust me.”
A chubby and slightly balding agent approached us. “License and registration, please.”
Behind his sunglasses, Phoenix smiled brilliantly. “Of course, of course.” He placed a hand on the agent’s shoulder. “But you see, my friend, our glove box is jammed.”
The agent pushed off Phoenix’s hand. “You can’t get it out?”
Phoenix reached for his wallet. “I’m afraid the impact was too great.” The agent pinned Phoenix’s hands behind his back.
“I’ll have to take you into custody, then. All three of you, that is. This car could be stolen for all we know,” he said as he cuffed our hands. “Just had a big riot down in South Atlantic.”
“You don’t say,” said Phoenix. “Wasn’t there a car show there this week?”
The agent nodded suspiciously. “Yeah. Some idiot tried to run off with a jeep. Ended up crashing into a generator. Serves the low-life right, if you ask me.”
The agent led us to the Maui border office for the Pacific Southwestern Tube, where he parked us on a bench and then disappeared into the back. The office was littered with pictures of baby seals, tossing their heads as they swam through the water, whiskers drenched and brown eyes wide and saucer-like. Phoenix tilted his head toward the pictures. “Shame they went extinct.”
“I always thought there were more farther out at sea?” I said.
Phoenix shook his head. “That’s just what they say when they don’t want you to know the truth.”
I thought of all the things Phoenix had said to me because he didn’t want me knowing the truth.
At last the agent who had cuffed us trotted in from the back room. “The commissioner will see you now. And for goodness’ sake, take off your sunglasses. We’re inside.”
Phoenix smiled, but made no attempt to take off the glasses. As we followed the agent into the back room, I saw that Mila still had her head down and her hood up. Silently, I wished she’d take off the stupid hood. The sunglasses were bad enough. The hood raised even more suspicions.
A man in his forties sat at a small table, and pointed toward three folding chairs on the opposite side. “Take a seat,” he said. A brown mustache curled around the sides of his nose. He wore the same orange suit as the others, except that his had the word “Commissioner” embroidered along his back. Behind the commissioner sat what I guessed was a two-way mirror.
“Names?” he barked, not even lifting his eyes from his notebook.