“I sincerely doubt you’d help anyone in the world other than yourself.”
He grabbed the cord and pulled it up toward the ledge, hand over hand. “I could grant you a pardon.”
“Cut me down!” I yelled. “Or Dummy Dart me to hell. Really, whatever you have to do, just don’t pull me any closer. Your breath probably stinks like… fish tacos.”
Admittedly, not my best insult, but I hoped the confidence I feigned in my voice and the insults I hurled would be enough to provoke him. Get him angry enough to just cut the cord.
The insults rolled off his shoulders “The girl, too,” he said. “She doesn’t have to die.”
I felt my pulse rise and the blood boil in my chest. “It’s your fault! You’re the one who wants her to die—you even know the truth!”
“Come, now, Bradbury,” he said, shaking his head. “I think we both know it’s Mila Vachowski I want dead. I couldn’t care less about your friend Charlie. But, unfortunately, the public wants her head served up on a silver platter. And as chancellor, I’m forced to make that happen. Now, if I could serve the real Mila Vachowski’s head instead… well, that’d certainly make things easier for everyone. Wouldn’t you agree?”
I tightened my jaw, and told myself to think of Charlie. Of all the people she’d helped. The young girl on the Tube she’d probably saved. The way she snorted when she laughed, and the way the chopsticks in her hair made people stop and think. “You want Mila?” I said finally. “That’s all you’re after?”
He grinned again, and the hairs stood on the back of my neck. “I want all of them, Kai. Every single Lost Boy. Phoenix. Mila. Dove. Bertha. All of them. All the enemies of the state. All the terrorists. The ones trying to bring the Federation down.”
I felt a small amount of peace knowing he hadn’t learned about Sparky or Kindred. Both worked behind the scenes and didn’t go into the field. They were safe regardless of what happened today.
I closed my eyes, felt my wrist burn from the grappling hook’s pressure, and took a deep breath. “You’d let Charlie go, then? And clear my name? Absolve me of the charges against me?”
The chancellor nodded.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because,” he said slowly, “I’m tired of innocent people, soldiers, civilians getting killed trying to find five teenaged felons. I know you haven’t been doing this long, Bradbury. Otherwise we’d have had you on the record sooner. The Pacific Northwestern Tube was your first attack. Now, I don’t really believe you’re a bad man… just confused. And I’m willing to give you a second chance. Please, Bradbury, let me give you another chance.”
“How could I get them to you?”
The chancellor grinned. “I’m guessing the Lost Boys have a radio?”
I nodded.
“I trust that if you can hack into the Ministry of Health, you can hack into the Light House’s radio signal.”
He had a point. I had no doubt Sparky could. I stared into the chancellor’s blue eyes—he’d been pulling me higher as we talked. His face was only five feet from mine now as he leaned out the hole in the warehouse’s wall.
“And why should I trust you?”
He laughed. “I could ask you the same thing about the Lost Boys: how can you trust them?” He pulled me all the way up now, and held his face inches from mine. “Come now, Bradbury. I’ve done my research. And though you haven’t been with the Lost Boys long, I’d have expected you to do the same. I know who you care about; I know the people you’re looking for. I’ve got Charlie, Bradbury—but who’s got your mother?”
My throat tightened, and my heart burned in my chest. “Keep your eyes open, Bradbury. I’ll be expecting your call.”
And with that, he cut the rope.
The ground hurtled quickly toward me. What did the chancellor know about my mother? Why hadn’t he told me more? When would everything finally make sense? I was falling now, like the drops of rain around me. My clothes became damp as I raced through a cloud. In seconds, I’d splatter like an egg on the ground.
A metal prong flew past, and a thin cord spread out across my body like saran wrap—the same type of net used by the Caravite copters to grab the Indigo. A helicopter roared as it turned in the air. Suddenly my stomach settled in my chest—I was no longer falling. I hung from the side of Bertha’s copter like a caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon.
Federal copters dropped down from above, hovering over Bertha’s blades. They had no guns, no bullets, not even any darts. But still, they hung above us. They weren’t trying to kill us. They were just trying to push us down.
Bertha dropped her copter even lower in the sky. I couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from the ground. The Feds continued to hover overhead.
Below me, I saw two groups of men fighting against one another. The Feds, in their black and green uniforms, and the Caravites, dressed like ragtag gypsies in all sorts of attire. One group of Caravites stood farther from the rest, away from the outskirts of battle on the ground. The men in that group were tall, like the Federal guards, but lacked the standard black and green uniforms, their casual clothes instead confirming they were, indeed, Caravites. The Federal copters, looming over Bertha’s blades, were slowly forcing her in the direction of this lone group. I wondered why they didn’t just crash down on us now. I guessed they wanted us alive—wanted to learn more about the virus Phoenix and his team had created.
In the center of the isolated group of Caravites, I saw a single woman. The men hustled her from side to side. Her hair was in matted patches. She smiled and cried at the same time as her lips perpetually babbled and her tongue pushed in and out of her teeth. Her bright blue eyes wandered aimlessly. She was a woman clearly on the brink of psychosis.
One of the men mouthed something. Another put a hand to his ear and nodded before putting a gun to the woman’s head. We dropped lower in the sky. My saran-wrapped cocoon swung just a few feet from the woman’s head.
For a split second, her eyes stopped wandering, and I noticed her nose was angled sharp from the side. I knew that nose. Her eyes met mine.
Mom.
For a moment, she was lucid. Kai, she mouthed.
Then the man with the gun pulled the trigger.
Chapter 35
Dove’s face was solemn as he pulled me into the copter. “Balls,” he muttered. It was probably the only thing he could think to say. Mila and Phoenix sat facing forward. They stared straight ahead without saying a word.
The Caravites had killed my mother. They’d held her prisoner all this time—tortured her to insanity, held a gun to her head—and now they’d killed her. My neck was damp. Probably all the rain. I wiped it with my hand. My fingers were stained red. Blood. I felt sick to my stomach. I puked in the cabin’s corner. My heart was on fire. It burned, and burned like hell. Like someone had torn off a piece of it and then lit it on fire. I knew immediately the burning would never go away. My heart would never feel the same again: Mom was gone.
And if the Caravites had their way, then soon I would be too.
Bertha twisted the controls, and we shot into cloud cover. Apparently she thought we’d lost the Feds, but I knew that they’d never really been chasing us. The chancellor had only wanted to make sure I saw what they—the Caravites and Lost Boys—had done to my mom.
There was something I didn’t like about the chancellor—something slimy, a thirst for power maybe—but he’d been honest with me. He’d admitted he’d been holding Charlie to get to me and the other Lost Boys. He’d shown me the truth about Mom. It was horrifying and heartbreaking and scarring, but it was still the truth, and it was more than Phoenix had ever given me. Phoenix was right, after alclass="underline" the lies chewed you, but the truth devoured you whole.