Episode 52: Freak Out (Indigo)

Indigo opened an eye and blinked at the blurred red numbers on the clock.

5:02 am. The perfect time to be awake. She loved being pregnant. She loved knowing that a new person grew inside her, changing and preparing for his life day by day. She just adored, in addition to that, being sick every morning. And getting up several times in the middle of the night as a punishment for having a few sips of water before bed.

She made her way to the bathroom, aware that this was the easiest this walk would be for the next several months. It would get increasingly difficult, and then when the baby came it would be temporarily impossible without someone screaming at her for putting him down.

Her babies loved to scream. Some moms would have complained about that, but she loved the vigor that it represented. Intense kids meant whole people, nothing subdued about them.

She hoped she had never ever made any of them feel like they needed to hide parts of themselves from her, but she probably had. They were almost all teenagers and adults, there were bound to be some secrets.

Sawyer had an unfortunate penchant for messes and dead animals and spilled food. Indigo banned soda in the house, with the understanding that they’d do it anyway but at least they weren’t drinking anything worse. She wasn’t sure that technique would work with Sawyer.

Mallory, too, she worried about; she’d learned how to be secretive from Spence, and even though she seemed to be open Indigo thought there were probably emotions and ideas which she hid from her parents..

Spaden, she didn’t think she’d ever need to worry about. His life goal was to become Zero, and he was capable of it. Nothing at all to worry about, except if he ever met a girl. By his age, Spence was already divorced, so she figured Spaden was handling his teenage years pretty well.

Spence…Spence was like having a migraine in an art museum. Thousands of paintings to study, all of them unique and exquisite, but the migraine blurred it and confused the message. Indigo was immensely proud of him – and immensely worried for him.

Camilla was a walking disaster. She-

Camilla.

Camilla hadn’t come home last night.

A cold bolt of lightning shot through Indigo.

She reviewed the afternoon. Yesterday had been chaotic – the boys exhausted from the fire, the little girl dying, the adoption, the stranger coming home with Nim and Soren. But Camilla had said something, something about a date…

Indigo rubbed her forehead. She crossed the room and sat on Zero’s side of the bed. She shook him, not rough enough to alarm him but enough to be sure he’d wake. “Paszh,” she whispered.

His eyes opened, grey-black in their dim bedroom. “Indy.” He slid his hand through her hair to the back of her head.

“Where’s Camilla?” she asked him.

Maybe she was wrong, maybe she’d been busy with Silas and she’d missed Camilla’s dramatic return.

“She didn’t come home,” Zero confirmed. He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands and sat up.

“I don’t think so,” Indigo said. “I’ll check.” She ran out of the room before he could stop her and paused in the hall, breathing.

He handled emergencies so well, when all she wanted to do was panic.

No. That wasn’t true. All she wanted to do was get to the bottom of the where’s-Camilla mystery. Her body might want to panic, but her mind knew better.

Hand on the knob to Camilla’s bedroom, she paused again. She couldn’t shake her sense of foreboding.  She already knew Camilla wouldn’t be inside; she was wasting time by being here.

It had to be ruled out.

She opened the door and peered in. No silhouetted lump on the bed. She switched the light on.

No Camilla.

She knew better than to touch anything. She turned the light off and closed the door.

Back in their bedroom, she stopped just inside the door. She met Zero’s eyes in the hollow darkness. “No,” she said.

He must have already guessed, from her body language, because he was standing while she spoke. “We should ask Spence,” Zero decided.

Camilla and Spence had always been close. If she’d told anyone who she was dating, it would be him. Knowing Camilla, though, she wouldn’t have remembered his name long enough to tell Spence about it.

It was just a date. Camilla was an adult. There was an obvious answer here. “She said she had a date,” she admitted. Or assured Zero, she wasn’t sure which. “I shouldn’t worry.”

He pulled her into a hug. “I’ll track her. Peace of mind while she runs around with her latest interest. Will you meet me in the office?”

Indigo nodded her head against his chest. She loved him in these situations – calm, confident, competent. When Spence died two years ago, he’d been like this then too. And he’d solved the problem and Spence was fine now.

She passed him his clothes, and they separated outside the room: Zero, to make the tracking spell; Indigo, to find Camilla’s hair brush.

She went back into Camilla’s room, careful not to touch anything in case it would be important later, and grabbed her brush off her dressing table. She removed three hairs, more than enough for Zero, and made her way through the dark apartment to his office.

She paused in the hall when she realized she heard noise coming from Sawyer’s room.

What was he doing up at this hour? It was normally a fight to get him up for school.

She opened his door, clearing her throat to warn him before she swung it open all the way.

“Sawyer?” she asked.

Camilla wasn’t in there either, but Sawyer was, with a hot glue gun and plates of glass.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He was covered in sludgy green moss and he smelled like the bad end of a pond.

“Making a cage for my slither thing.” He ran a strand of glue down the side of a glass plate and fixed another sheet of glass to it.

Spatial awareness. He was definitely developing skills, at least there was that.

She really wanted to investigate the slither thing, but it would have to wait. “Have you seen Camilla?” she asked.

He shrugged his right shoulder. “Wasn’t in the rift.”

Which, apparently, Sawyer had been.

Indigo was dying to know if Zero was like this as a boy or if it had taken both of them working together to create this masterpiece.

“Okay, well…don’t forget you promised Aadya you’d help in the greenhouse today.”

He hadn’t, but maybe it would keep him out of trouble and Aadya distracted.

“‘Kay,” he agreed. His eyes were on his project.

“Don’t start a fire,” she warned.

“‘Kay.”

“Sawyer?”

She waited until he looked up at her, eyes wide and ringed in brown from probably being out all night. No wonder they couldn’t find Camilla; they couldn’t even keep track of Sawyer.

When he met her eyes, she reiterated, “No fire. You turn that thing off before you fall asleep.”

He smiled, beatific. “I will. Don’t worry. Wouldn’t want my slither thing to get hurt.”

Of course not.

“Have a good morning,” she told him.

She ducked out of his room and headed to Zero’s office.

He already had the spell ready, in the time it had taken her to find the hair and talked to Sawyer, and he held the dish toward her in silence, waiting for the hair. She dropped it in and slid into the nest of his arm while he mixed the spell and poured it on one of the many maps he’d spread out on his table.

It landed in a congealed lump and stayed in place.

The corners of Zero’s mouth tightened.

She’d seen him do other tracking spells over the years: Usually, the liquid moved itself across the map toward wherever the missing person was.

When he’d done it for Spence two years ago, it had rolled off the map in all directions. It was how Zero had known Spence was dead.

She’d never seen the spell do this before. “What does that mean?” she asked.

Alive, but nowhere?

“We need to speak with Konrad,” Zero said. He drew his arm around her.

“Konrad,” Indigo repeated, processing.

Maybe alive, but nowhere really meant alive, but hidden.

“He’s training Spence right now,” she told Zero.

Zero reached for the shoes he kept beside his office door for emergencies. While he tied them, Indigo went into the kitchen and scrawled a note to Spaden to please watch Silas when he woke.

She grabbed a stick of peppermint gum from the drawer and followed Zero out of the apartment. Between Zero and Konrad, she knew they’d find Camilla soon. If they couldn’t, no one could.

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