Indigo(14)
“Luis is counting on me,” she whispered.
And if it wasn’t Luis, it was someone else who needed her help just as badly. Several someones, if Bullington’s intel was good.
Steeling herself with this certainty, she took two long steps and slipped into the blackness that pooled in the kitchenette. It swallowed her whole and the world went dim. Then it went cool, and comfortable.
Indigo was back, and Indigo wasn’t afraid.
Indigo was in charge.
Her strength had returned, and her confidence along with it—as she moved through the margins of the world, ducking in and out of the crevices no one but her ever noticed.
Neither Nora nor Indigo knew the Castle Hill area of the Bronx well, so she hopscotched a few blocks at a time—popping out of a doorway here and emerging from an underpass there, getting her bearings.
She rolled out from under a stationary cargo car in the railyard, then tumbled underneath one parked beside it, only to hesitate in the murk, trying to remember how this end of the city was shaped. When she thought of the bridge, she mostly though of the toll lines, and the long metal cables that stretched toward the sky; she had to think of it another way, from underneath—where the skater kids ground their boards on the cement and scraped their wheels along the curbs.
Was she close enough to touch it with her powers? She shut her eyes and used the billowing dark to feel around—the tentacles of gloom working like fingers, prying apart the nooks and crannies until she found what she was looking for.
There.
A smooth place, where three young people huddled together and whispered about a friend nobody’d seen in too many hours.
She sighed, exhaled, and clung to a dark place behind a jumbled pile of concrete dividers discarded by the city. They made a crude stack with thick shadows, thick enough to let Indigo hide and watch, and listen, and draw her conclusions.
Two girls and a boy. None of them older than eighteen, and all of them still awake from the night before. They’d been scouring the streets looking for Luis, so they were way ahead of her—except they didn’t know there was a cult, and a warehouse, and a place where Luis or someone very much like him would certainly die before long, if Indigo couldn’t find him first.
She darted away again, letting the shadows whisk her to the old sanitation plant. She hid herself in the gloom of its thick brick walls and the spires of its three spindly towers—then she found an alley behind an apartment block. She had to find the Children of Phonos, but she had so little to go on … a warehouse on the point, somewhere in Castle Hill. If Bullington’s last words could even be believed.
There wasn’t much industrial work in the area anymore, but she knew of a few old places along Zerega Avenue, beside Westchester Creek. She’d find warehouses there. A handful of them, maybe more. Her phone said it was almost eight thirty, so workers would be arriving for their jobs.
The blocks should be bustling. It might not be easy to hide.
Trial and error brought her to a makeshift fort made of shipping containers—all of them empty and reeking of rust. Indigo wrapped herself in the darkness there, cocooning herself from head to toe in its protective bubble … and she watched.
Mostly men came and went from the two businesses in her immediate line of sight. They wore jeans and light jackets and carried lunch pails or sacks. They cast away cigarettes, throwing them into the dew-damp grass by the door before going inside to work.
Nothing suspicious, and nothing abandoned.
Up on the nearest warehouse roof, a water tower offered enough shade to carry her, and to give her a better vantage point. She gulped at the height, then calmed herself and climbed to the edge in full view of anyone who might’ve looked up into the morning light.
No one did.
None of the drones who trudged to work, none of their bosses who exited cars while chattering on cell phones, toting their hard hats. None of the heavy-equipment operators, warming up their machines and sparking up cigarettes to warm their hands. Not even the stray dogs, sniffing at the edges of the properties—scavenging for discarded crusts and apple cores. No one looked up, while Indigo surveyed the district. No one noticed her on the roof’s edge, leaning over like a gargoyle and watching the world wake up.
One by one, she dismissed the larger buildings as they bustled to life. But farther down the queue—beyond the edge of her vision—were several others. She crouched down and pulled the shadows over her head like a blanket.
Two blocks down, she found another shipping container. They were ubiquitous, empty and decaying, all corroded edges and jagged sheet metal. They couldn’t hurt her. Not while she wore the shadows for armor and peered through a hole in the rust that was big enough to crawl through.
She wrinkled her nose. The container smelled like pennies at the bottom of a well.
In her new line of sight was another working factory with the usual staff of bored-looking people in blue-collar clothes, and a warehouse in the midst of being converted to loft spaces. At the warehouse, a fleet of construction workers arrived in pickup trucks, and foremen strolled around with blueprints tucked under their arms.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, Indigo saw a flash of red.
Not the brownish red of the rust around her, and not a bloodred or an orangey crimson. It was more like a proper high-class scarlet, and it stood out like a sore thumb in this world of gray scale, denim, and mud with a smattering of yellow hard hats.