“Sage taught you,” I said. My heart was beating fast. I tried to catch my breath.
“Yeah, she did. You’ve met her?”
“She’s how I found you.”
Charlie smiled. “She’s pretty unusual—a man-riding-the-subway-wearing-a-bag-of-peanuts-as-a-hat-and-declaring-himself-a-king kind of unusual—but I love her just the same.”
“You love everybody, Charlie.”
“At the risk of sounding as clichéd as every girl, in every movie, ever: I really missed you, Kai.”
I should’ve kissed her then, but I was too nervous. Instead, I did the only thing I could think of: I put the two pencils between my teeth and clapped my hands. “WAL-RUTH!”
Charlie laughed. “SOMEBODY GET THIS MAN A BAG OF PEANUTS—he needs to get on the nearest subway and wear it as a hat.”
A woman in a sparkling sapphire suit appeared in the corner. I jumped back. How had she gotten in here? “Who’s your friend?” she asked Charlie.
Charlie breathed hard. “We gotta get outta here, Kai.”
The woman stepped toward us. “He’s cute.” She eyed me up and down, stopping at my socks. “Well… maybe not yet. But you can tell he’s going to be. If you squint your eyes a bit and turn your head to the side.”
Charlie grabbed my hand and laced her fingers with mine. It was nice. I wished we’d done it before. “Come on, Kai.”
“Guards are outside,” said the woman. She stared hard at Charlie, begging her, daring her to try and escape. “If you walk out now, you’ll both be killed. Why not stay in here with me? It’ll be just the three of us. Just for a bit.”
Charlie’s arm was shaking, and ragged breaths rose from her hollowed chest. I stepped toward the woman. There was something familiar about her—like I’d seen her before. The desk’s green globe glowed brightly. “What do you want from us?”
The woman spun away from me and into the center of the room. “Everything,” she said with a small smile. “I want everything.”
Charlie was still shaking. I had to be brave. I had to remember my cheeseburger socks. “Well,” I said, “you can’t—uh—you can’t have it. You can’t have—er—everything. You need to… share. And stuff.”
She narrowed her eyes, amused. The way a twisted kid’s face got when he shook an ant farm. “Choice words. Who writes your dialogue?”
I frowned. My hands were shaking now too. There was something abnormal about this woman. “Uh, I write it myself. I think.”
The woman turned to Charlie. “Really?” she asked. “Really, honey? This is the best you could do? C’mon, darling. You were so cute when you still had your hair.”
I stepped toward the woman. “She’s still cute.”
The woman just laughed.
Charlie’s hollow eyes stared at the floor. I squeezed her hand, and realized mine had gotten sweaty again. How did it always get so sweaty? I wanted to pull it away and wipe it on my shorts. What was I supposed to do? God, these were things they needed to teach you in school. Forget calculus.
The woman’s gaze met mine and I stared straight into her blue eyes. They weren’t the usual blue or the Charlie-blue—they were a gray-blue. The color of rain-stained concrete. I knew those eyes. I’d seen them before, in a picture, not long ago.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
Charlie shook her head no, but I kept staring at the woman. I had to be sure before I said anything.
“But are you afraid?” she asked Charlie, and Charlie nodded. She smiled. “Good. You’re a smart girl. You should be afraid. You should be absolutely terrified.”
She spun around the room in circles. As she whirled, different dresses replaced her sapphire suit in flashes of color. At last she stopped, just inches from my face, and her dress settled into place as a blood red ball gown. She smiled, and it melted into a puddle of blood on the floor, revealing a black and green jumpsuit beneath.
“I am the reason,” she said slowly, “the Hawaiian Federation exists. I am the creator of Indigo. I am the one who destroyed the world and saved it in a single swoop.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “The Indigo vaccine has been around for too many years.”
Her lips curled into smile. “It’s quite possible, obviously,” she said, “because I’m still here. Indigo must have saved me.”
I balled my hand into a fist. “Indigo has never saved anyone—not a single soul. All it does is kill people. Exterminate them, and the truth.”
The woman cocked her head to the side, like a bird that’s spotted prey. I noticed the cleft in her chin, and then I was sure. She was the woman from the Morier Mansion’s picture frame. The one with the sisters. She was the one in the middle.
“You were in the Morier Mansion,” I said.
Fear flashed in the woman’s eyes before being replaced with something more sinister: desperation. She didn’t want to be recognized.
I stepped toward her. “You were in the Morier family portrait. I recognize your eyes and the cleft in your chin. You were the one in the middle. Your name is… Miranda.” I stepped closer. “Those were old pictures,” I said. “The colors were bleeding and everything. How is it possible that you were alive for those pictures?”
Miranda cleared her throat. “For a minute there, I thought I was feeling something. Was it—dare I say it—mercy? But now, well, now it’s gone. I suppose mercy is like love.” She flashed her eyes toward Charlie and then back to me. “Ephemeral. Fleeting. In the palm of your hand one moment—gone in the next.”
She was close to me. Close enough that I could reach out and touch her. I stepped closer again, but my shoe caught on its laces and I fell forward. I threw my hands out—and slid right through her. My face hit the ground.
Miranda stood above me, looking down. My arms had plowed through her nonexistent torso.
Charlie sucked in a breath. “Oh—oh my god.”
Miranda wasn’t real—at least not really there. She was a ghost, a projection, a hologram, like the ones shouting jingles from Newla’s skyscraper balconies. But she was a damned good one.
She stepped over my fallen body and smoothed the creases of her black and green jumpsuit. “This was not supposed to happen. This was not a part of the plan. You’ve doomed yourself, now. HACKNER!” she called. “HACKNER! GET IN HERE!”
“You’re not real,” I said slowly. Charlie pulled me off the ground. “You’re not really standing here. You’re not really alive.”
Her eyes spun in their sockets. She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, I’m real all right. I’m more real than anything you could ever imagine.”
“No, you’re not. You’re an illusion—a hologram. You’re nothing.”
Something in her gray eyes had been set on fire. “Just because something is an illusion, doesn’t mean it’s nothing. You have no idea what nothing is, boy—but in a minute, I’m going to teach you.”
The door flew open, and the chancellor entered with a revolver in his hand. He pointed it in my direction, but Miranda shook her head. “The girl.” Hackner’s lips twisted into his Cheshire grin.
Miranda circled us, disappearing and reappearing in the room’s corners. “I’ve been in love before,” she said. I wrapped Charlie’s hands in mine. Something told me to kiss her—right now before I lost my chance.
“Years ago,” Miranda continued. “I felt the thickness—the drunkenness it brought to my blood. The way your heart boils in your chest. It was intoxicating—like good wine. But it was too intoxicating. Drink too much wine and it becomes a poison. Too much wine kills you.”