The Institute

1

As far as Beaufort, the interior of the van was mostly silent. Dr. Evans did try to start a conversation once, again wanting them to know that he was an innocent party in all this. Tim told him he had a choice: either shut up and get a couple of the oxycodone tablets Dr. Roper had provided, or keep talking and endure the pain in his wounded foot. Evans opted for silence and the pills. There were a few more in the little brown bottle. Tim offered one to Mrs. Sigsby, who dry-swallowed it without bothering to say thank you.

Tim wanted quiet for Luke, who was now the brains of the operation. He knew most people would think him nuts for allowing a twelve-year-old to create a strategy intended to save the kids in that tunnel without getting killed themselves, but he noticed that Wendy was also keeping quiet. She and Tim knew what Luke had done to get here, they had seen him in operation since, and they understood.

What, exactly, was that understanding? Why, that aside from having a yard of guts, the kid also happened to be a genuine bottled-in-bond genius. These Institute thugs had taken him to obtain a talent that was (at least before its enhancement) little more than a parlor trick. They considered his brilliance a mere adjunct to what they were really after, making them like poachers willing to slaughter a twelve-thousand-pound elephant to get ninety pounds of ivory.

Tim doubted if Evans could appreciate the irony, but he guessed Sigsby could… if she ever allowed the idea mental house-room, that was: a clandestine operation that had lasted for decades brought down by the very thing they had considered dispensable—this child’s formidable intellect.

2

Around nine o’clock, just after passing the Beaufort city limits, Luke told Tim to find a motel. “Don’t stop in front, though. Go around to the back.”

There was an Econo Lodge on Boundary Street, its rear parking lot shaded by magnolias. Tim parked by the fence and killed the engine.

“This is where you leave us, Officer Wendy,” Luke said.

“Tim?” Wendy asked. “What’s he talking about?”

“About you booking a room, and he’s right,” Tim said. “You stay, we go.”

“Come back here after you get your key,” Luke said. “And bring back some paper. Have you got a pen?”

“Of course, and I have my notebook.” She tapped the front pocket of her uniform pants. “But—”

“I’ll explain as much as I can when you get back, but what it comes down to is you’re our insurance policy.”

Mrs. Sigsby addressed Tim for the first time since the abandoned beauty parlor. “What this boy has been through has made him crazy, and you’d be crazy to listen to what he says. The best thing the three of you could do is leave Dr. Evans and me here, and run.”

“Which would mean leaving my friends to die,” Luke said.

Mrs. Sigsby smiled. “Really, Luke, think. What have they ever done for you?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Luke said. “Not in a million years.”

“Go on, Wendy,” Tim said. He took her hand and squeezed it. “Get a room, then come back.”

She gave him a doubtful look but handed him the Glock, got out of the van, and headed for the office.

Dr. Evans said, “I want to emphasize that I was here under—”

“Protest, yes,” Tim said. “We got that. Now shut up.”

“Can we get out?” Luke asked. “I want to talk to you without…” He nodded at Mrs. Sigsby.

“Sure, we can do that.” Tim opened both the passenger door and the slider, then stood against the fence dividing the motel from the closed car dealership next door. Luke joined him. From where Tim stood, he could see both of their unwilling passengers, and could stop them if either decided to try making a run. He didn’t think that was very likely, considering one had been shot in the leg and the other in the foot.

“What’s up?” Tim asked.

“Do you play chess?”

“I know the game, but I was never very good at it.”

“I am,” Luke said. He was speaking low. “And now I’m playing with him. Stackhouse. Do you get that?”

“I think I do.”

“Trying to think three moves ahead, plus counters to his future moves.”

Tim nodded.

“In chess, time isn’t a factor unless you’re playing speed-chess, and this game is. We have to get from here to the airfield where the plane is waiting. Then to someplace near Presque Isle, where the plane is based. From there to the Institute. I can’t see us making it until at least two tomorrow morning. Does that sound right to you?”

Tim ran it in his mind, and nodded. “Might be a little later, but say two.”

“That gives my friends five hours to do something on their own behalf, but it also gives Stackhouse five hours to re-think his position and change his mind. To gas those kids and just take off running. I told him his picture would be in every airport, and he’ll buy that, I think, because there must be pictures of him somewhere online. A lot of the Institute people are ex-military. Probably he is, too.”

“There might even be a photo of him on the queen bitch’s phone,” Tim said.

Luke nodded, although he doubted if Mrs. Sigsby had been the type to take snapshots. “But he might decide to slip across the Canadian border on foot. I’m sure he has at least one alternate escape route all picked out—an abandoned woods road or a creek. That’s one of those possible future moves I have to keep in mind. Only…”

“Only what?”

Luke rubbed the heel of his hand up one cheek, a strangely adult gesture of weariness and indecision. “I need your input. What I’m thinking makes sense to me, but I’m still only a kid. I can’t be sure. You’re a grownup, and you’re one of the good guys.”

Tim was touched by that. He glanced toward the front of the building, but there was no sign of Wendy yet. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“That I fucked him up. Fucked up his whole world. I think he might stay just to kill me. Using my friends as bait to make sure I’ll come. Does that make sense to you? Tell me the truth.”

“It does,” Tim said. “No way to be sure, but revenge is a powerful motivator, and this Stackhouse wouldn’t be the first to ignore his own best interests in an effort to get it. And I can think of another reason he might decide to wait in place.”

“What?” Luke was studying him anxiously. From around the building, Wendy Gullickson came with a key card in one hand.

Tim tipped his head toward the van’s open passenger door, then brought his head close to Luke’s. “Sigsby’s the boss lady, right? Stackhouse is just her ramrod?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Tim said, smiling a little, “who’s her boss? Have you thought of that?”

Luke’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open a little. He got it. And smiled.

3

Nine-fifteen.

The Institute was quiet. The kids currently in Front Half were asleep, aided by sedatives Joe and Hadad had handed out. In the access tunnel, the five who had started the mutiny were also sleeping, but probably not deeply; Stackhouse hoped their headaches would be fucking them up most awesomely. The only kids still awake were the gorks, rambling around almost as if they had somewhere to go. Sometimes they made circles, like they were playing ring around the rosie.

Stackhouse had returned to Mrs. Sigsby’s office and opened the locked bottom drawer of her desk with the duplicate key she had given him. Now he held the special box phone in his hand, the one they called the Green Phone, or sometimes the Zero Phone. He was thinking of something Julia had once said concerning that phone with its three buttons. This had been in the village one day last year, back when Heckle and Jeckle still had most of their brain cells working. The Back Half kids had just offed a Saudi bagman who was funneling money to terrorist cells in Europe, and it had totally looked like an accident. Life was good. Julia invited him to dinner to celebrate. They had split a bottle of wine before, and a second bottle during and after. It had loosened her tongue.

“I hate making update calls on the Zero Phone. That man with the lisping voice. I always imagine him as an albino. I don’t know why. Maybe something I saw in a comic book when I was a girl. An albino villain with X-ray eyes.”

Stackhouse had nodded his understanding. “Where is he? Who is he?”

“Don’t know and don’t want to know. I make the call, I give my report, then I take a shower. There would only be one thing worse than calling on the Zero Phone. That would be getting a call.”

Stackhouse looked at the Zero Phone now with something like superstitious dread, as if just thinking of that conversation would make it ring in his—

“No,” he said. To the empty room. To the silent phone. Silent for now, at least. “Nothing superstitious about it. You will ring. Simple logic.”

Sure. Because the people on the other end of the Zero Phone—the lisping man and the greater organization of which he was a part—would find out about the spectacular balls-up in that little South Carolina town. Of course they would. It was going to be front-page news across the country and maybe the whole world. They might know already. If they knew about Hollister, the stringer who actually lived in DuPray, they might have been in touch with him for all the gory details.

Yet the Zero Phone hadn’t rung. Did that mean they didn’t know, or did it mean they were giving him time to put things right?

Stackhouse had told the man named Tim that any deal they made would depend on whether or not the Institute could be kept a secret. Stackhouse wasn’t fool enough to believe its work could continue, at least not here in the Maine woods, but if he could somehow manage the situation without worldwide headlines about psychic children who had been abused and murdered… or why those things had taken place… that would be something. He might even be rewarded if he could manage a cover-up that was watertight, although just keeping his life would be reward enough.

Only three people knew, according to this Tim. The others who had seen what was on the flash drive were dead. Some of the ill-starred Gold team might be alive, but they hadn’t seen it, and they would maintain silence about everything else.

Get Luke Ellis and his collaborators here, he thought. That’s step one. They might arrive as soon as 2 AM. Even one-thirty would give me enough time to plan an ambush. All I’ve got on hand are techs and widebodies, but some of them—Zeke the Greek, to name just one—are hard guys. Get the flash drive and get them. Then, when the man with the lisp calls—and he will—to ask if I am handling the situation, I can say…

“I can say it’s already handled,” Stackhouse said.

He put the Zero Phone on Mrs. Sigsby’s desk and sent it a mental message: Don’t ring. Don’t you dare ring until three o’clock tomorrow morning. Four or five would be even better.

“Give me enough ti—”

The phone rang, and Stackhouse gave a startled yell. Then he laughed, although his heart was still beating way too fast. Not the Zero Phone but his own box phone. Which meant the call was coming from South Carolina.

“Hello? Is it Tim or Luke?”

“It’s Luke. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you how this is going to work.”

4

Kalisha was lost in a very large house, and she had no idea how to get out, because she didn’t know how she’d gotten in. She was in a hall that looked like the residence corridor in Front Half, where she had lived for awhile before being taken away to have her brains plundered. Only this hall was furnished with bureaus and mirrors and coat racks and something that looked like an elephant foot filled with umbrellas. There was an endtable with a phone on it, one that looked just like the phone in their kitchen back home, and it was ringing. She picked it up, and since she couldn’t say what she had been taught to say since the age of four (“Benson residence”), she just said hello.

“Hola? Me escuchas?” It was a girl’s voice, faint and broken up by static, just barely audible.

Kalisha knew hola because she’d had a year of Spanish in middle school, but her scant vocabulary didn’t include escuchas. Nevertheless, she knew what the girl was saying, and realized this was a dream.

“Yes, uh-huh, I can hear you. Where are you? Who are you?”

But the girl was gone.

Kalisha put the phone down and kept walking along the hall. She peered into what looked like a drawing room in an old-time movie, then into a ballroom. It had a floor made of black-and-white squares that made her think of Luke and Nick, playing chess out in the playground.

Another phone began to ring. She hurried faster and entered a nice modern kitchen. The fridge was plastered with pictures and magnets and a bumper sticker that said BERKOWITZ FOR PRESIDENT! She didn’t know Berkowitz from a hole in the wall, yet she knew it was his kitchen. The phone was on the wall. It was bigger than the one on the endtable, certainly bigger than the one in the Benson kitchen, almost like a joke phone. But it was ringing, so she picked it up.

“Hello? Hola? My name is—me llamo—Kalisha.”

But it wasn’t the Spanish girl. It was a boy. “Bonjour, vous m’entendez?” French. Bonjour was French. Different language, same question, and this time the connection was better. Not much, but a little.

“Yes, wee-wee, I hear you! Where are—”

But the boy was gone, and another phone was ringing. She dashed through a pantry and into a room with straw walls and a packed dirt floor mostly covered by a colorful woven mat. It had been the final stop for a fugitive African warlord named Badu Bokassa, who had been stabbed in the throat by one of his mistresses. Except he’d really been killed by a bunch of kids thousands of miles away. Dr. Hendricks had waved his magic wand—which just happened to be a cheap Fourth of July sparkler—and down Mr. Bokassa went. The phone on the mat was bigger still, almost the size of a table lamp. The receiver was heavy in her hand when she picked it up.

Another girl, and this time clear as a bell. As the phones got bigger, the voices got clearer, it seemed. “Zdravo, cujes li me?”

“Yes, I hear you fine, what is this place?”

The voice was gone, and another phone was ringing. It was in a bedroom with a chandelier, and this phone was the size of a footstool. She had to pick up the receiver with both hands.

“Hallo, hoor je me?”

“Yes! Sure! Absolutely! Talk to me!”

He didn’t. No dial tone. Just gone.

The next phone was in a sunroom with a great glass roof, and it was as big as the table it sat on. The ringing hurt her ears. It was like listening to a phone channeled through an amplifier at a rock-and-roll gig. Kalisha ran at it, hands outstretched, palms tilted upward, and knocked the receiver off the phone’s base, not because she expected enlightenment but to shut it up before it burst her eardrums.

“Ciao!” boomed a boy’s voice. “Mi senti? MI SENTI?”

And that woke her up.

5

She was with her buds—Avery, Nicky, George, and Helen. The others were still sleeping, but not easily. George and Helen were moaning. Nicky was muttering something and holding out his hands, making her think of how she’d run at the big phone to make it stop. Avery was twisting around and gasping something that she had already heard: Hoor je me? Hoor je me?

They were dreaming what she had been dreaming, and considering what they were now—what the Institute had made them—the idea made perfect sense. They were generating some kind of group power, telepathy as well as telekinesis, so why wouldn’t they share the same dream? The only question was which one of them had started it. She was guessing Avery, because he was the strongest.

Hive of bees, she thought. That’s what we are now. Hive of psychic bees.

Kalisha got to her feet and looked around. Still trapped in the access tunnel, that hadn’t changed, but she thought the level of that group power had. Maybe it was why the Ward A kids hadn’t gone to sleep, although it had to be fairly late; Kalisha’s time-sense had always been good, and she thought it was at least nine-thirty, maybe a bit later.

The hum was louder than ever, and had picked up a kind of cycling beat: mmm-MMM-mmm-MMM. She saw with interest (but no real surprise) that the overhead fluorescents were cycling with the hum, going bright, fading a little, then going bright again.

TK you can actually see, she thought. For all the good it does us.

Pete Littlejohn, the boy who had been beating on his head and going ya-ya-ya-ya, came loping toward her. In Front Half, Pete had been kind of cute and kind of annoying, like a little brother that tags after you everywhere and tries to listen in while you and your girlfriends are telling secrets. Now he was hard to look at with his wet, drooping mouth and empty eyes.

“Me escuchas?” he said. “Hörst du mich?”

“You dreamed it, too,” Kalisha said.

Pete paid no attention, just turned back toward his wandering mates, now saying something that sounded like styzez minny. God only knew what the language was, but Kalisha was sure it meant the same as all the others.

“I hear you,” Kalisha told no one. “But what do you want?”

About halfway down the tunnel toward the locked door into Back Half, something had been written on the wall in crayon. Kalisha walked down to look at it, dodging past several wandering Ward A kids to get there. Written in big purple letters was CALL THE BIG FONE. ANSER THE BIG FONE. So the gorks were dreaming it, too, only while awake. With their brains mostly wiped, maybe they were dreaming all the time. What a horrible idea, to dream and dream and dream and never be able to find the real world.

“You too, huh?”

It was Nick, eyes puffy with sleep, hair standing up in stalks and spears. It was sort of endearing. She raised her eyebrows.

“The dream. Big house, increasingly big phones? Sort of like in The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?”

“Bartholomew who?”

“A Dr. Seuss book. Bartholomew kept trying to take off his hat for the king, and every time he took one off, there was a bigger and fancier one underneath.”

“Never read it, but the dream, yeah. I think it came from Avery.” She pointed to the boy, who was still sleeping the sleep of the totally exhausted. “Or started with him, at least.”

“I don’t know if he started it, or if he’s receiving it and amplifying it and passing it on. Not sure it matters.” Nick studied the message on the wall, then looked around. “The gorks are restless tonight.”

Kalisha frowned at him. “Don’t call them that. It’s a slave word. Like calling me a nigger.”

“Okay,” Nick said, “the mentally challenged are restless tonight. That better?”

“Yes.” She allowed him a smile.

“How’s your head, Sha?”

“Better. Fine, in fact. Yours?”

“The same.”

“Mine, too,” George said, joining them. “Thanks for asking. You guys have the dream? Bigger phones and Hello, do you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Nick said.

“That last phone, the one just before I woke up, was bigger than me. And the hum’s stronger.” Then, in the same casual tone: “How long do you think before they decide to gas us? I’m surprised they haven’t done it already.”

6

Nine forty-five, in the parking lot of the Econo Lodge in Beaufort, South Carolina.

“I’m listening,” Stackhouse said. “If you let me help you, maybe we can work this out together. Let’s discuss it.”

“Let’s not,” Luke said. “All you have to do is listen. And make notes, because I don’t want to have to repeat myself.”

“Is your friend Tim still with y—”

“Do you want the flash drive or not? If you don’t, keep talking. If you do, shut the fuck up.”

Tim put a hand on Luke’s shoulder. In the front seat of the van, Mrs. Sigsby was shaking her head sadly. Luke didn’t have to read her mind to know what she was thinking: a boy trying to do a man’s work.

Stackhouse sighed. “Go ahead. Pen and paper at the ready.”

“First. Officer Wendy doesn’t have the flash drive, that comes with us, but she knows the names of my friends—Kalisha, Avery, Nicky, Helen, a couple more—and where they came from. If their parents are dead, like mine, that will be enough to support an investigation, even without the flash drive. She’ll never have to say a word about psychic kids or the rest of your murderous bullshit. They’ll find the Institute. Even if you got away, Stackhouse, your bosses would hunt you down. We’re your best chance of living through this. Got it?”

“Spare me the sell-job. What’s this Officer Wendy’s last name?”

Tim, who was leaning close enough to hear both sides of the conversation, shook his head. This was advice Luke didn’t need.

“Never mind. Second. Call the plane your posse came down in. Tell the pilots they are to lock themselves in the cockpit as soon as they see us coming.”

Tim whispered two words. Luke nodded.

“But before they do that, tell them to lower the air-stairs.”

“How will they know it’s you?”

“Because we’ll be in one of the vans your hired killers came in.” Luke was pleased to give Stackhouse this information, hoping it rammed home the point: Mrs. Sigsby had swung and missed.

“We don’t see the pilot and co-pilot and they don’t see us. We land where the plane took off, and they stay inside the cockpit. With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“Third. I want a van waiting for us, a nine-seater, just like the one we drove out of DuPray.”

“We don’t—”

“Bullshit you don’t, you’ve got a motor pool in that little barracks town of yours. I saw it. Now are you going to work with me on this, or should I just give up on you?”

Luke was sweating heavily, and not just because the night was humid. He was very glad for Tim’s hand on his shoulder, and Wendy’s concerned eyes. It was good not to be alone in this anymore. He really hadn’t realized how heavy that burden was until now.

Stackhouse gave the sigh of a man being unfairly burdened. “Go on.”

“Fourth. You’re going to procure a bus.”

“A bus? Are you serious?”

Luke decided to ignore this interruption, feeling that it was warranted. Certainly Tim and Wendy looked amazed.

“I’m sure you have friends everywhere, and that includes at least some of the police in Dennison River Bend. Maybe all of them. It’s summer, so the kids are on vacation, and the buses will be in the town’s municipal lot, along with the plows and dump trucks and all the other stuff. Have one of your cop friends unlock the building where they keep the keys. Have him put the key in the ignition of a bus that seats at least forty. One of your techs or caretakers can drive it to the Institute. Leave it by the flagpole in front of the admin building with the keys in it. Do you understand all that?”

“Yes.” Businesslike. No protests or interruptions now, and Luke didn’t need Tim’s adult grasp of psychology and motivation to understand why. This, Stackhouse must be thinking, was a child’s harebrained plan, only half a step removed from wishful thinking. He could see the same thing on Tim’s face, and on Wendy’s. Mrs. Sigsby was in earshot, and she looked like she was having trouble keeping a straight face.

“It’s a simple exchange. You get the flash drive, I get the kids. The ones from Back Half, and the ones in Front Half, too. You have them all ready for their field trip by 2 AM tomorrow morning. Officer Wendy keeps her mouth shut. That’s the deal. Oh, you also get your piece-of-shit boss and your piece-of-shit doctor.”

“Can I ask a question, Luke? Is that permissible?”

“Go ahead.”

“Once you have somewhere between thirty-five and forty children crammed into a big yellow school bus with DENNISON RIVER BEND on the side, where do you plan to take them? Always remembering that the majority have no minds left?”

“Disneyland,” Luke said.

Tim put a hand to his brow, as if he had developed a sudden headache.

“We’ll be staying in touch with Officer Wendy. Before we take off. After we land. When we get to the Institute. When we leave the Institute. If she doesn’t get a call, she’ll start making calls of her own, starting with the Maine State Police, then moving on to the FBI and Homeland Security. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Last thing. When we get there, I want you there. Arms outstretched. One hand on the hood of the bus, one hand on the flagpole. As soon as the kids are on the bus and my friend Tim is behind the wheel, I hand you Maureen’s flash drive and get aboard myself. Clear on that?”

“Yes.”

Crisp. Trying not to sound like a man who’s won the big jackpot.

He understands that Wendy might be a problem, Luke thought, because she knows the names of a bunch of missing kids, but that’s a problem he thinks he can solve. The flash drive’s a bigger deal, harder to dismiss as fake news. I’m offering it to him pretty much on a silver platter. How can he refuse? Answer: he can’t.

“Luke—” Tim began.

Luke shook his head: not now, not while I’m thinking.

He knows his situation is still bad, but now he sees a ray of light. Thank God Tim reminded me of what I should have thought of myself: it doesn’t end with Sigsby and Stackhouse. They have to have their own bosses, people they answer to. When the shit hits the fan, Stackhouse can tell them it could have been much worse; in fact they should be thanking him for saving the day.

“Will you be calling me before you take off?” Stackhouse asked.

“No. I trust you to make all the arrangements.” Although trust wasn’t the first word that came to mind when Luke thought of Stackhouse. “The next time we talk will be face-to-face, at the Institute. Van at the airport. Bus waiting by the flagpole. Fuck up at any point and Officer Wendy starts making her calls and telling her tale. Goodbye.”

He ended the call and sagged.

7

Tim handed Wendy the Glock and gestured at their two prisoners. She nodded. Once she was standing guard, Tim drew the boy aside. They stood by the fence, in a blot of shadow cast by one of the magnolias.

“Luke, it will never work. If we go there, the van may be waiting at the airport, but if this Institute is what you say it is, the two of us will be ambushed and killed when we get there. Your friends and the other kids, as well. That leaves Wendy, and she’ll do her best, but it will be days before anyone shows up there—I know how law enforcement works when something comes up outside of normal protocol. If they find the place, it will be empty except for the bodies. They may be gone, too. You say they have a disposal system for the…” Tim didn’t know exactly how to put it. “For the used kids.”

“I know all that,” Luke said. “It’s not about us, it’s about them. The kids. All I’m buying is time. Something’s happening there. And not just there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m stronger now,” Luke said, “and we’re over a thousand miles from the Institute. I’m a part of the Institute kids, but it’s not just them anymore. If it was, I never could have pushed up that guy’s gun with my mind. Empty pizza pans were the best I could do, remember?”

“Luke, I just don’t—”

Luke concentrated. For a moment he had an image of the telephone in their front hall ringing, and knew if it was answered, someone would ask, “Do you hear me?” Then that image was replaced by the colored dots and a faint humming sound. The dots were dim rather than bright, which was good. He wanted to show Tim, but not hurt him… and hurting him would be so easy.

Tim stumbled forward into the chainlink fence, as if pushed by invisible hands, and got his forearms up just in time to keep from dashing his face.

“Tim?” Wendy called.

“I’m okay,” Tim said. “Keep your eyes on them, Wendy.” He looked at Luke. “You did that?”

“It didn’t come from me, it came through me,” Luke said. Because they had time now (a little at least), and because he was curious, he asked, “What was it like?”

“A strong gust of wind.”

“Sure it was strong,” Luke said. “Because we’re stronger together. That’s what Avery says.”

“He’s the little kid.”

“Yes. He was the strongest one they’ve had in a long time. Maybe years. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m thinking they must have put him in the immersion tank—given that near-death experience that enhances the Stasi Lights, only with none of the limiting injections.”

“I’m not following you.”

Luke didn’t seem to hear him. “It was punishment, I bet, for helping me get away.” He tilted his head toward the van. “Mrs. Sigsby might know. It might even have been her idea. Anyway, it backfired. It must have, because they mutinied. The Ward A kids have got the real power. Avery unlocked it.”

“But not enough power to get them out of where they’re trapped.”

“Not yet,” Luke said. “But I think they will.”

“Why? How?”

“You got me thinking when you said Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse must have their own bosses. I should have figured that out for myself, but I never looked that far. Probably because parents and teachers are the only bosses kids have. If there are more bosses, why wouldn’t there be more Institutes?”

A car came into the lot, passed them, and disappeared in a wink of red taillights. When it was gone, Luke continued.

“Maybe the one in Maine is the only one in America, or maybe there’s one on the West Coast. You know, like bookends. But there might be one in the UK… and in Russia… India… China… Germany… Korea. It stands to reason, when you think of it.”

“A mind race instead of an arms race,” Tim said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“I don’t think it’s a race. I think all the Institutes are working together. I don’t know that for sure, but it feels right. A common goal. A good one, sort of—killing a few kids to keep the whole human race from killing itself. A trade-off. God knows how long it’s been going on, but there’s never been a mutiny until now. Avery and my other friends started it, but it could spread. It might be spreading already.”

Tim Jamieson was no historian or social scientist, but he kept up with current events, and he thought Luke could be right. Mutiny—or revolution, to use a less pejorative term—was like a virus, especially in the Information Age. It could spread.

“The power each of us has—the reason they kidnapped us and brought us to the Institute in the first place—is just little. The power of all of us together is stronger. Especially the Ward A kids. With their minds gone, the power is all that’s left. But if there are more Institutes, if they know what’s happening at ours, and if they were all to band together…”

Luke shook his head. He was thinking again of the phone in their front hall, only grown to enormous size.

“If that happened, it would be big, and I mean really big. That’s why we need time. If Stackhouse thinks I’m an idiot so eager to save my friends I’d make an idiotic deal, that’s good.”

Tim could still feel that phantom gust of wind that had shoved him into the fence. “We’re not exactly going there to save them, are we?”

Luke regarded him soberly. With his dirty bruised face and bandaged ear, he looked like the most harmless of children. Then he smiled, and for a moment didn’t look harmless at all.

“No. We’re going to pick up the pieces.”

8

Kalisha Benson, Avery Dixon, George Iles, Nicholas Wilholm, Helen Simms.

Five kids sitting at the end of the access tunnel, next to the locked door giving (not that it would give) on Front Half’s F-Level. Katie Givens and Hal Leonard had been with them for awhile, but now they had joined the Ward A kids, walking with them when they walked, joining hands when they decided to make one of those rings. So had Len, and Kalisha’s hopes for Iris were fading, although so far Iris was just looking on as the Ward A kids circled, broke apart, then circled again. Helen had come back, was fully with them. Iris might be too far gone. The same with Jimmy Cullum and Donna Gibson, whom Kalisha had known in Front Half—thanks to her chicken pox, she had been around much longer than the usual residents there. The Ward A kids made her sad, but Iris was worse. The possibility that she might be fucked up beyond repair… that idea was…

“Horrible,” Nicky said.

She looked at him half-scoldingly. “Are you in my head?”

“Yeah, but not looking through your mental underwear drawer,” Nicky said, and Kalisha snorted.

“We’re all in each other’s heads now,” George said. He cocked a thumb at Helen. “Do you really think I wanted to know she laughed so hard at some friend’s pajama party that she peed herself? That’s an authentic case of TMI.”

“Better than finding out you worry about psoriasis on your—” Helen began, but Kalisha told her to hush.

“What time is it, do you think?” George asked.

Kalisha consulted her bare wrist. “Skin o’clock.”

“Feels like eleven to me,” Nicky said.

“You know something funny?” Helen said. “I always hated the hum. I knew it was stripping my brains.”

“We all knew,” George said.

“Now I sort of like it.”

“Because it’s power,” Nicky said. “Their power, until we took it back.”

“A carrier wave,” George said. “And now it’s constant. Just waiting for a broadcast.”

Hello, do you hear me? Kalisha thought, and the shiver that shook her was not entirely unpleasant.

Several of the Ward As linked hands. Iris and Len joined them. The hum cycled up. So did the pulse in the overhead fluorescents. Then they let go and the hum dropped back to its previous low level.

“He’s in the air,” Kalisha said. None of them needed to ask who she meant.

“I’d love to fly again,” Helen said wistfully. “I would love that.”

“Will they wait for him, Sha?” Nicky asked. “Or just turn on the gas? What’s your thinking?”

“Who made me Professor Xavier?” She threw an elbow into Avery’s side… but gently. “Wake up, Avester. Smell the coffee.”

“I’m awake,” Avery said. Not quite truthfully; he had still been drowsing, enjoying the hum. Thinking of telephones that got bigger, the way Bartholomew Cubbins’s hats had grown bigger and fancier. “They’ll wait. They have to, because if anything happens to us, Luke would know. And we’ll wait until he gets here.”

“And when he does?” Kalisha asked.

“We use the phone,” Avery said. “The big phone. All of us together.”

“How big is it?” George sounded uneasy. “Because the last one I saw was very fuckin large. Almost as big as me.”

Avery only shook his head. His eyelids drooped. At bottom he was still a little kid, and up long past his bedtime.

The Ward A kids—it was hard not to think of them as the gorks, even for Kalisha—were still holding hands. The overheads brightened; one of the tubes actually shorted out. The hum deepened and strengthened. They felt it in Front Half, Kalisha was sure of that—Joe and Hadad, Chad and Dave, Priscilla and that mean one, Zeke. The rest of them, too. Were they frightened by it? Maybe a little, but—

But they believe we’re trapped, she thought. They believe they’re still safe. They believe the revolt has been contained. Let them go on believing that.

Somewhere there was a big phone—the biggest phone, one with extensions in many rooms. If they called on that phone (when they called on it, because there was no other choice), the power in this tunnel where they were trapped would go beyond any bomb ever exploded on the earth or below it. That hum, now just a carrier wave, might grow to a vibration that could topple buildings, maybe destroy whole cities. She didn’t know that for sure, but thought it might be true. How many kids, their heads now empty of everything but the powers for which they had been taken, were waiting for a call on the big phone? A hundred? Five hundred? Maybe even more, if there were Institutes all over the world.

“Nicky?”

“What?” He had also been drowsing, and he sounded irritated.

“Maybe we can turn it on,” she said, and there was no need to be specific about what it was. “But if we do… can we turn it off again?”

He considered this, then smiled. “I don’t know. But after what they did to us… frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

9

Quarter past eleven.

Stackhouse was back in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, with the Zero Phone—still silent—on the desk. Forty-five minutes from now, the last day of the Institute’s normal operation would be over. Tomorrow this place would be abandoned, no matter how the business with Luke Ellis turned out. Containment of the program as a whole was possible in spite of the Wendy person Luke and his friend Tim were leaving down south, but this facility was blown. The important things tonight were obtaining the flash drive and making sure Luke Ellis was dead. Rescuing Mrs. Sigsby would be nice, but it was strictly optional.

In point of fact, the Institute was being abandoned already. From where he sat, he had an angle on the road that led away from the Institute, first to Dennison River Bend, then to the rest of the lower forty-eight… not to mention Canada and Mexico, for those with passports. Stackhouse had called in Zeke, Chad, Chef Doug (twenty years with Halliburton), and Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had come to them from the Hawk Security Group. They were people he trusted.

As for the others… he had seen their departing headlights flickering through the trees. He guessed only a dozen so far, but there would be more. Soon Front Half would be deserted except for the children currently in residence there. Maybe it was already. But Zeke, Chad, Doug, and Dr. Richardson would stick; they were loyalists. And Gladys Hickson. She would stick as well, maybe after all the others were gone. Gladys wasn’t just a scrapper; Stackhouse was becoming more and more certain that she was an out-and-out psycho.

I’m psycho myself for staying, Stackhouse thought. But the brat’s right—they’d hunt me down. And he’s walking right into it. Unless…

“Unless he’s playing me,” Stackhouse murmured.

Rosalind, Mrs. Sigsby’s assistant, stuck her head in. Her usually perfect makeup had eroded over the course of the last difficult twelve hours, and her usually perfect graying hair was sticking up on the sides.

“Mr. Stackhouse?”

“Yes, Rosalind.”

Rosalind looked troubled. “I believe Dr. Hendricks may have left. I believe I saw his car about ten minutes ago.”

“I’m not surprised. You should go yourself, Rosalind. Head home.” He smiled. It felt strange to be smiling on a night like this, but it was a good strange. “I just realized that I’ve known you since I came here—many moons—and I don’t know where home is for you.”

“Missoula,” Rosalind said. She looked surprised herself. “That’s in Montana. At least I suppose it’s still home. I own a house in Mizzou, but I haven’t been there in I guess five years. I just pay the taxes when they come due. When I have time off, I stay in the village. For vacation, I go down to Boston. I like the Red Sox and the Bruins, and the art cinema in Cambridge. But I’m always ready to come back.”

Stackhouse realized it was the most Rosalind had said to him in those many moons, which stretched back over fifteen years. She had been here, Mrs. Sigsby’s faithful dogsbody, when Stackhouse had retired from his service as an investigator for the US Army (JAG), and here she still was, and looking about the same. She could have been sixty-five, or a well-preserved seventy.

“Sir, do you hear that humming noise?”

“I do.”

“Is it a transformer or something? I never heard it before.”

“A transformer. Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

“It’s very annoying.” She rubbed at her ears, further disarranging her hair. “I suppose the children are doing it. Is Julia—Mrs. Sigsby—coming back? She is, isn’t she?”

Stackhouse realized (with amusement rather than irritation) that Rosalind, always so proper and so unobtrusive, had been keeping her ears peeled, hum or no hum.

“I expect so, yes.”

“Then I’d like to stay. I can shoot, you know. I go to the range in the Bend once a month, sometimes twice. I have the shooting club equivalent of a DM badge, and I won the small handgun competition last year.”

Julia’s quiet assistant not only took excellent shorthand, she had a Distinguished Marksman badge… or, as she said, the equivalent of. Wonders never ceased.

“What do you shoot, Rosalind?”

“Smith & Wesson M&P .45.”

“Recoil doesn’t bother you?”

“With the help of a wrist support, I manage the recoil very well. Sir, if it’s your intention to free Mrs. Sigsby from the kidnappers holding her, I would much desire to be a part of that operation.”

“All right,” Stackhouse said, “you’re in. I can use all the help I can get.” But he would have to be careful how he used her, because saving Julia might not be possible. She had become expendable now. The important thing was the flash drive. And that fucking too-smart-for-his-own-good boy.

“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

“I’m sure you won’t, Rosalind. I’ll tell you how I expect this will play out, but first I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“I know a gentleman is never supposed to ask, and a lady is never supposed to tell, but how old are you?”

“Seventy-eight, sir.” She answered promptly enough, and while maintaining eye contact, but this was a lie. Rosalind Dawson was actually eighty-one.

10

Quarter of twelve.

The Challenger aircraft with 940NF on the tail and MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the side droned north toward Maine at 39,000 feet. With a helping push from the jet stream, its speed was fluctuating gently between 520 and 550 miles an hour.

Their arrival at Alcolu and subsequent takeoff had gone without incident, mostly because Mrs. Sigsby had a VIP entry pass from the Regal Air FBO, and she had been more than willing to use it to open the gate. She smelled a chance—still slim, but there—of getting out of this alive. The Challenger stood in solitary splendor with its air-stairs down. Tim had raised the stairs himself, secured the door, and then hammered on the closed cockpit door with the butt of the dead deputy’s Glock.

“I think we’re all tight back here. If you’ve got a green board, let’s roll.”

There was no answer from the other side of the door, but the engines began to cycle up. Two minutes later they went airborne. Now they were somewhere over West Virginia, according to the monitor on the bulkhead, and DuPray was in the rearview. Tim hadn’t expected to leave so suddenly, and certainly not under such cataclysmic circumstances.

Evans was dozing, and Luke was dead to the world. Only Mrs. Sigsby was still awake, sitting upright, her gaze fixed on Tim’s face. There was something reptilian about those wide expressionless eyes. The last of Doc Roper’s pain pills might have put her out, but she had refused in spite of what must have been fairly bad pain. She had been spared a serious gunshot wound, but even a groove hurt plenty.

“You have law enforcement experience, I believe,” she said. “It’s in the way you carry yourself, and in the way you reacted—quickly and well.”

Tim said nothing, only looked at her. He had put the Glock beside him on the seat. Firing a gun at 39,000 feet would be a very bad idea, and really, why would he, even if they’d been at a much lower altitude? He was taking this bitch exactly where she wanted to go.

“I don’t understand why you’re going along with this plan.” She nodded at Luke, who—with his dirty face and bandaged ear—looked much younger than twelve. “We both know he wants to save his friends, and I think we both know the plan is silly. Idiotic, really. Yet you agreed. Why was that, Tim?”

Tim said nothing.

“Why you’d get involved in the first place is a mystery to me. Help me understand.”

He had no intention of doing that. One of the first things his mentor officer had taught him during the four months of his rookie probationary tour was you question perps. You never allow perps to question you.

Even if he had been disposed to talk, he didn’t know what he could say that would sound even marginally sane. Could he tell her that his presence on this state-of-the-art airplane, the sort of craft only rich men and women usually saw the inside of, was an accident? That once upon a time a man bound for New York City had suddenly stood up on a much more ordinary plane, agreeing to give up his seat for a cash payment and a hotel voucher? That everything—the hitchhike north, the traffic tie-up on I-95, the walk to DuPray, the night knocker job—had followed from that single impulsive act? Or could he say that it was fate? That he had been moved to DuPray by the hand of some cosmic chess player, to save the sleeping boy from the people who had kidnapped him and wanted to use his extraordinary mind until it was used up? And if that were the case, what did it make Sheriff John, Tag Faraday, George Burkett, Frank Potter, and Bill Wicklow? Just pawns to be sacrificed in the great game? And what piece was he? It would be nice to believe himself a knight, but more likely, he was just another pawn.

“Sure you don’t want that pill?” he asked.

“You don’t intend to answer my question, do you?”

“No, ma’am, I do not.” Tim turned his head and looked out at the leagues of darkness and the few lights down there, like fireflies at the bottom of a well.

11

Midnight.

The box phone gave its hoarse cry. Stackhouse answered. The voice on the other end belonged to one of the off-duty caretakers, a man named Ron Church. The requested van was in place at the airport, Church said. Denise Allgood, an off-duty tech (although they were all supposedly on duty now), had driven behind Church in an Institute sedan. The idea was that, after leaving the vehicle on the tarmac, Ron would ride back here with Denise. But those two had a thing going on, which Stackhouse knew about. It was his business to know things, after all. He felt sure that with the boy’s ride in place, Ron and Denise would be heading for anywhere that wasn’t here. That was okay. Although the multiple desertions were sad, maybe they were for the best. It was time to draw a line under this operation. Enough of his people would stay for the final act, which was all that mattered.

Luke and his friend Tim were going down, there was no question in his mind about that. Either it would be good enough for the lisping man on the other end of the Zero Phone or it wouldn’t. That was out of Stackhouse’s hands, and it was a relief. He supposed he had carried this streak of fatalism like a dormant virus since his days in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just hadn’t recognized it for what it was until now. He would do what he could, which was all any man or woman could do. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.

There was a tap at the door and Rosalind looked in. She had done something with her hair, which was an improvement. He was less sure about the shoulder holster she was now wearing. It was a bit surreal, like a dog wearing a party hat.

“Gladys is here, Mr. Stackhouse.”

“Send her in.”

Gladys entered. There was an air mask dangling below her chin. Her eyes were red. Stackhouse doubted if she had been crying, so the irritation was probably from whatever bad medicine she’d been mixing up. “It’s ready. All I need to do is add the toilet bowl cleaner. You say the word, Mr. Stackhouse, and we’ll gas them.” She gave her head a quick, hard shake. “That hum is driving me crazy.”

From the look of you, you don’t have far to go, Stackhouse thought, but she was right about the hum. The thing was, you couldn’t get used to it. Just when you thought you might, it would rise in volume—not in your ears, exactly, but inside your head. Then, all at once, it would drop back to its former and slightly more bearable level.

“I was talking to Felicia,” Gladys said. “Dr. Richardson, I mean. She’s been watching them on her monitor. She says the hum gets stronger when they link up and drops when they let go of each other.”

Stackhouse had already figured that out for himself. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went.

“Will it be soon, sir?”

He looked at his watch. “I think about three hours, give or take. The HVAC units are on the roof, correct?”

“Yes.”

“I may be able to call you when it’s time, Gladys, but I may not. Things will probably happen fast. If you hear shooting from the front of the admin building, start the chlorine gas whether you hear from me or not. Then come. Don’t go back inside, just run along the roof to the East Wing of Front Half. Understand?”

“Yes, sir!” She gave him a brilliant smile. It was the one all the kids hated.

12

Twelve-thirty.

Kalisha was watching the Ward A kids and thinking about the Ohio State Marching Band. Her dad loved Buckeyes football, and she had always watched with him—for the closeness—but the only part she really cared about was halftime show, when the band (“The Priiide of the Buckeyes!” the announcer always proclaimed) would take the field, simultaneously playing their instruments and making shapes that were only discernible from above—everything from the S on Superman’s chest to a fantastic Jurassic Park dinosaur that walked around nodding its saurian head.

The Ward A kids had no musical instruments, and all they made when they joined hands was the same circle—irregular, because the access tunnel was narrow—but they had the same… there was a word for it…

“Synchronicity,” Nicky said.

She looked around, startled. He smiled at her, brushing his hair back to give her a better look at eyes that were, let’s face it, sort of fascinating.

“That’s a big word even for a white boy.”

“I got it from Luke.”

“You hear him? You’re in touch with him?”

“Sort of. Off and on. It’s hard to tell what’s my thinking and what’s his. It helped that I was asleep. Awake, my thoughts get in the way.”

“Like interference?”

He shrugged. “I guess. But if you open your mind, I’m pretty sure you can hear him, too. He comes through even clearer when they make one of their circles.” He nodded to the Ward A kids, who had resumed their aimless wandering. Jimmy and Donna were walking together, swinging their linked hands. “Want to try?”

Kalisha tried to stop thinking. It was surprisingly hard at first, but when she listened to the hum, it got easier. The hum was sort of like mouthwash, only for the brain.

“What’s funny, K?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, I get it,” Nicky said. “Mindwash instead of mouthwash. I like that.”

“I’m getting something, but not much. He might be sleeping.”

“Probably is. But he’ll wake up soon, I think. Because we’re awake.”

“Synchronicity,” she said. “That’s some badass word. And it sounds just like him. You know the tokens they used to give us for the machines? Luke called them emoluments. That’s another badass word.”

“Luke’s special because he’s so smart.” Nicky looked at Avery, who was leaning against Helen, both of them dead asleep. “And the Avester’s special just because… well…”

“Just because he’s Avery.”

“Yeah.” Nicky grinned. “And those idiots went and souped him up without putting a governor on his engine.” His smile was, let’s face it, as fascinating as his eyes. “It’s the two of them together that put us where we are, you know. Luke’s chocolate, Avery’s peanut butter. Either of them alone, nothing would have changed. Together they’re the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that’s going to rip this joint.”

She laughed. It was a stupid way to put it, but also pretty accurate. At least she hoped so. “We’re still stuck, though. Like rats in a plugged pipe.”

His blue eyes on her brown ones. “We won’t be for much longer, you know that.”

She said, “We’re going to die, aren’t we? If they don’t gas us, then…” She tilted her head toward the Ward A kids, who were circling again. The hum strengthened. The overhead lights brightened. “It’ll happen when they cut loose. And the others, wherever they are.”

The phone, she thought at him. The big phone.

“Probably,” Nicky said. “Luke says we’re going to bring them down like Samson brought the temple down on the Philistines. I don’t know the story—nobody in my family bothered with the Bible—but I get the idea.”

Kalisha did know the story, and shivered. She looked again at Avery, and thought of something else from the Bible: a little child shall lead them.

“Can I tell you something?” Kalisha said. “You’ll probably laugh, but I don’t care.”

“Go for it.”

“I’d like you to kiss me.”

“Not exactly a tough assignment,” Nicky said. He smiled.

She leaned toward him. He leaned to meet her. They kissed in the hum.

This is nice, Kalisha thought. I thought it would be, and it is.

Nicky’s thought came at once, riding the hum: Let’s go for two. See if it’s twice as nice.

13

One-fifty.

The Challenger touched down on the runway of a private airstrip owned by a shell company called Maine Paper Industries. It taxied to a small darkened building. As it approached, a trio of motion-activated lights on the roof triggered, illuminating a boxy ground power unit and a hydraulic container-loader. The waiting vehicle wasn’t a mom van but a nine-passenger Chevrolet Suburban. It was black with tinted windows. Orphan Annie would have loved it.

The Challenger pulled up close to the Suburban and its engines died. For a moment Tim wasn’t entirely sure that they had, because he could hear a faint hum.

“That’s not the plane,” Luke said. “It’s the kids. It’ll get stronger when we’re closer.”

Tim went to the front of the cabin, threw the big red lever that opened the door, and unfolded the stairs. They came down on the tarmac less than four feet from the Suburban’s driver’s side.

“Okay,” he said, returning to the others. “Here we are. But before we go, Mrs. Sigsby, I have something for you.”

On the table in the Challenger’s conversation area he had found a goodly supply of glossy brochures advertising the various wonders of the totally bogus Maine Paper Industries, and half a dozen Maine Paper Industries gimme caps. He handed one to her and took another for himself.

“Put this on. Jam it down. Your hair’s short, shouldn’t be a problem getting it all underneath.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked at the cap with distaste. “Why?”

“You’re going first. If there are people waiting to ambush us, I’d like you to draw their fire.”

“Why would they put people here when we’re going there?”

“I admit it seems unlikely, so you won’t mind going first.” Tim put on his own gimme cap, only backward, with the adjustable band cutting across his forehead. Luke thought he was too old to wear a hat that way—it was a kid thing—but kept his mouth shut. He thought maybe it was Tim’s way of psyching himself up. “Evans, you’re right behind her.”

“No,” Evans said. “I’m not leaving this plane. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to. My foot is too painful. I can’t put any weight on it.”

Tim considered, then looked at Luke. “What do you think?”

“He’s telling the truth,” Luke said. “He’d have to hop down the stairs, and they’re steep. He might fall.”

“I shouldn’t have been here in the first place,” Dr. Evans said. A fat tear squeezed from one of his eyes. “I’m a medical man!”

“You’re a medical monster,” Luke said. “You watched kids almost drown—they thought they were drowning—and you took notes. There were kids who died because they had a fatal reaction to the shots you and Hendricks gave them. And those who lived really aren’t living at all, are they? Tell you what, I’d like to step on your foot. Grind my heel right into it.”

“No!” Evans squealed. He shrank back in his seat and dragged his swollen foot behind the good one.

“Luke,” Tim said.

“Don’t worry,” Luke said. “I want to but I won’t. Doing that would make me like him.” He looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “You don’t get any choice. Get up and go down those stairs.”

Mrs. Sigsby tugged on the Paper Industries cap and rose from her seat with such dignity as she could manage. Luke started to fall in behind her, but Tim held him back. “You’re behind me. Because you’re the important one.”

Luke didn’t argue.

Mrs. Sigsby stood at the stop of the air-stairs and raised her hands over her head. “It’s Mrs. Sigsby! If anyone is out there, hold your fire!”

Luke caught Tim’s thought clearly: Not as sure as she claimed.

There was no response; no outside sound but the crickets, no inside sound except the faint hum. Mrs. Sigsby made her way slowly down the stairs, holding onto the railing and favoring her bad leg.

Tim knocked on the cockpit door with the butt of the Glock. “Thank you, gentlemen. It was a good flight. You have one passenger still onboard. Take him wherever you want.”

“Take him to hell,” Luke said. “Single fare, no return.”

Tim started down the steps, bracing for a possible gunshot—he hadn’t anticipated her calling out and identifying herself. He should have, of course. In the event, no gunshot came.

“Front passenger seat,” Tim said to Mrs. Sigsby. “Luke, you get in behind her. I’ll have the gun, but you’re my backup. If she tries to make a move on me, use some of your mental juju. Got it?”

“Yes,” Luke said, and got in back.

Mrs. Sigsby sat down and fastened her seatbelt. When she reached to close the door, Tim shook his head. “Not yet.” He stood with one hand on the open door and called Wendy, safe in her room at the Beaufort Econo Lodge.

“The Eagle has landed.”

“Are you all right?” The connection was good; she could have been standing next to him. He wished she was, then remembered where they were going.

“Fine so far. Stand by. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

If I can, he thought.

Tim walked around to the driver’s side and got in. The key was in the cup holder. He nodded to Mrs. Sigsby. “Now you can close the door.”

She did, looked at him disdainfully, and said what Luke had been thinking. “You look remarkably stupid with your hat on that way, Mr. Jamieson.”

“What can I say, I’m an Eminem fan. Now shut up.”

14

In the darkened Maine Paper Industries arrival building, a man knelt by the windows, watching as the Suburban’s lights came on and it started rolling toward the gate, which stood open. Irwin Mollison, an unemployed millworker, was one of the Institute’s many Dennison River Bend stringers. Stackhouse could have ordered Ron Church to stay, but knew from experience that issuing an order to a man who might choose to disobey it was a bad idea. Better to use a stooge who only wanted to make a few extra dollars.

Mollison called a number pre-programmed into his cell. “They’re on their way,” he said. “A man, a woman, and a boy. The woman’s wearing a cap over her hair, couldn’t make out her face, but she stood in the doorway of the plane and yelled out her name. Mrs. Sigsby. Man’s also wearing a cap, but turned around backward. The boy’s the one you’re looking for. Got a bandage on his ear and a hell of a bruise on the side of his face.”

“Good,” Stackhouse said. He had already gotten a call from the Challenger’s co-pilot, who told him Dr. Evans had stayed on the plane. Which was fine.

So far, everything was fine… or as fine as it could be, under the circumstances. The bus was parked by the flagpole, as requested. He would place Doug the chef and Chad the caretaker in the trees beyond the admin building, where the Institute’s driveway began. Zeke Ionidis and Felicia Richardson would take up their stations on the admin building’s roof, behind a parapet that would hide them until the shooting began. Gladys would start the poison sucking into the HVAC system, then join Zeke and Felicia. Those two positions would enable a classic crossfire when the Suburban pulled in—that, at least, was the theory. Standing beside the flagpole with his hand on the hood of the bus, Stackhouse would be at least thirty yards from the crisscrossing bullets. There would be some risk of taking a spare round, he knew that, but it was an acceptable one.

Rosalind he would send to stand guard outside the door to the access tunnel on F-Level of Front Half. He wanted to make sure she didn’t have a chance to realize her long-time and beloved boss was also in the crossfire, but there was more to it than that. He understood that the constant hum was power. Maybe it wasn’t enough to breach the door yet, but maybe it was. Maybe they were just waiting for the Ellis boy to arrive, so they could attack from the rear and cause the sort of chaos they had already brought about in Back Half. The gorks didn’t have brains enough to think of something like that, but there were the others. If that was the case, Rosalind would be there with her S&W .45, and the first ones through that door would wish they had stayed behind it. Stackhouse could only hope the twice-damned Wilholm boy would be leading the charge.

Am I ready for this? he asked himself, and the answer seemed to be yes. As ready as he could be. And it might still be all right. On the outside, after all, it was Ellis they were dealing with. Only a kid and some misguided hero he’d picked up along the way. In just ninety minutes, this shit-show would be over.

15

Three o’clock. The hum was louder now.

“Stop,” Luke said. “Turn there.” He was pointing to a dirt track screened by huge old pines, its mouth barely visible.

“Is this the way you came when you escaped?” Tim asked.

“God, no. They would have caught me.”

“Then how do you—”

“She knows,” Luke said. “And because she does, I do.”

Tim turned to Mrs. Sigsby. “Is there a gate?”

“Ask him.” She nearly spat the words.

“No gate,” Luke said. “Just a big sign that says Maine Paper Industries Experimental Station and no trespassing.”

Tim had to smile at the expression of pure frustration on Mrs. Sigsby’s face. “Kid should be a cop, don’t you think, Mrs. Sigsby? No alibi would get past him.”

“Don’t do this,” she said. “You’re going to get all three of us killed. Stackhouse will stop at nothing.” She looked over her shoulder at Luke. “You’re the mind-reader, you know I’m telling the truth, so tell him.”

Luke said nothing.

“How far to this Institute of yours?” Tim asked.

“Ten miles,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Maybe a bit more.” She had apparently decided that stonewalling was useless.

Tim turned onto the road. Once he was past the big trees (their branches brushed at the roof and sides of the car), he found it smooth and well maintained. Overhead, a three-quarter moon cleared the slot through the trees, turning the dirt to the color of bone. Tim doused the Suburban’s headlights and drove on.

16

Three-twenty.

Avery Dixon seized Kalisha’s wrist with a cold hand. She had been dozing on Nicky’s shoulder. Now she raised her head. “Avester?”

Wake them up. Helen and George and Nicky. Wake them up.

“What—”

If you want to live, wake them up. It’s going to happen pretty soon.

Nick Wilholm already was awake. “Can we live?” he asked. “Do you think that’s possible?”

“I hear you in there!” Rosalind’s voice, coming from the other side of the door, was only slightly muffled. “What are you talking about? And why are you humming?”

Kalisha shook George and Helen awake. Kalisha could see the colored dots again. They were faint, but they were there. They went whooshing up and down the tunnel like kids on a slide, and that sort of made sense, because in a way they were kids, weren’t they? Or the remains of them. They were thoughts made visible, looping and dancing and pirouetting through the wandering Ward A kids. And did those kids look slightly more lively? A little more there? Kalisha thought so, but maybe that was only her imagination. So much wishful thinking. You got used to wishful thinking in the Institute. You lived on it.

“I have a gun, you know!”

“So do I, lady,” George said. He grabbed his crotch, then turned to Avery. What’s up, Boss Baby?

Avery looked at them, one after another, and Kalisha saw he was crying. That made her stomach feel heavy, as if she had eaten something bad and was going to be sick.

When it happens, you have to go fast.

Helen: When what happens, Avery?

When I talk on the big phone.

Nicky: Talk to who?

The other kids. The far-away kids.

Kalisha nodded to the door. That woman has a gun.

Avery: That’s the last thing you have to worry about. Just go. All of you.

“We,” Nicky said. “We, Avery. We all go.”

But Avery was shaking his head. Kalisha tried to get inside that head, tried to find out what was going on in there, what he knew, but all she got were three words, repeated over and over.

You’re my friends. You’re my friends. You’re my friends.

17

Luke said, “They’re his friends, but he can’t go with them.”

“Who can’t go with who?” Tim asked. “What are you talking about?”

“About Avery. He has to stay. He’s the one who has to call on the big phone.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Luke.”

“I want them, but I want him, too!” Luke cried. “I want all of them! It’s not fair!”

“He’s crazy,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Surely you realize that n—”

“Shut up,” Tim said. “I’m telling you for the last time.”

She looked at him, read his face, did as he said.

Tim took the Suburban slowly over a rise and came to a stop. The road widened ahead. He could see lights through the trees, and the dark bulk of a building.

“I think we’re here,” he said. “Luke, I don’t know what’s going on with your friends, but that’s out of our hands right now. I need you to get hold of yourself. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” His voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes. Okay.”

Tim got out, walked around to the passenger door, and opened it.

“What now?” Mrs. Sigsby asked. She sounded querulous and impatient, but even in the scant light, Tim could see she was afraid. And she was right to be.

“Get out. You’re driving the car the rest of the way. I’ll be in back with Luke, and if you try anything clever, like driving into a tree before we get to those lights, I’ll put a bullet through the seat and into your spine.”

“No. No!”

“Yes. If Luke is right about what you’ve been doing to those children, you’ve run up quite a bill. This is where it comes due. Get out, get behind the wheel, and drive. Slowly. Ten miles an hour.” He paused. “And turn your cap around backward.”

18

Andy Fellowes called from the computer/surveillance center. His voice was high and excited. “They’re here, Mr. Stackhouse! They’re stopped about a hundred yards from where the road turns into the driveway! Their lights are off, but there’s enough from the moon and the front of the building to see by. If you want me to put it up on your monitor so you can confirm, I—”

“That won’t be necessary.” Stackhouse tossed his box phone on the desk, gave the Zero Phone a final look—it had stayed silent, thank God for that—and headed for the door. His walkie was in his pocket, turned up to high gain and connected to the button in his ear. All of his people were on the same channel.

“Zeke?”

“I’m here, boss. With the lady doc.”

“Doug? Chad?”

“In place.” That was Doug, the chef. Who, in better days, had sometimes sat with the kids at dinner and showed them magic tricks that made the little ones laugh. “We also see their vehicle. Black nine-seater. Suburban or Tahoe, right?”

“Right. Gladys?”

“On the roof, Mr. Stackhouse. Stuff’s all ready. Only have to combine the ingredients.”

“Start it if there’s shooting.” But it was no longer a question of if, only of when, and when was now only three or four minutes away. Maybe less.

“Roger that.”

“Rosalind?”

“In position. The hum is very loud down here. I think they are conspiring.”

Stackhouse was sure they were, but wouldn’t be for long. They would be too busy choking. “Hold steady, Rosalind. You’ll be back at Fenway watching the Sox before you know it.”

“Will you come with me, sir?”

“Only if I can cheer for the Yankees.”

He went outside. The night air was pleasantly cool after a hot day. He felt a surge of affection for his team. The ones who had stuck with him. They would be rewarded no matter what, if he had anything to say about it. This was hard duty, and they had stayed behind to do it. The man behind the wheel of the Suburban was misguided, all right. What he didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, was that the lives of everyone he had ever loved depended on what they had done here, but that was over now. All the misguided hero could do was die.

Stackhouse approached the schoolbus parked by the flagpole and spoke to his troops for the last time. “Shooters, I want you to concentrate on the driver, all right? The one wearing his hat backward. Then rake the whole damn thing, front to back. Aim high, for the windows, knock out that dark glass, get head shots. Acknowledge.”

They did.

“Start firing when I raise my hand. Repeat, when I raise my hand.”

Stackhouse stood in front of the bus. He put his right hand on its chilly, dew-jeweled surface. With his left he grasped the flagpole. Then he waited.

19

“Drive,” Tim said. He was on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Luke was beneath him.

“Please don’t make me do this,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “If you’d just let me tell you why this place is so important—”

“Drive.”

She drove. The lights drew closer. Now she could see the bus, and the flagpole, and Trevor standing between them.

20

It’s time, Avery said.

He had expected to be afraid, he had been afraid ever since waking up in a room that looked like his room but wasn’t, and then Harry Cross had knocked him down and he had been more afraid than ever. But he wasn’t afraid now. He was exhilarated. There was a song his mom played on the stereo all the time when she was cleaning, and now a line of it recurred to him: I shall be released.

He walked to the Ward A kids, who were already circling. Kalisha, Nicky, George, and Helen followed. Avery held out his hands. Kalisha took one and Iris—poor Iris, who might have been saved if this had happened even a day earlier—took the other.

The woman standing guard outside the door shouted something, a question, but it was lost in the rising hum. The dots came, not dim now but bright and getting brighter. The Stasi Lights filled the center of the circle, spinning and rising like the stripe on a barber pole, coming from some deep seat of power, going back there, then returning, refreshed and stronger than ever.

CLOSE YOUR EYES.

No longer a thought but a THOUGHT, riding the hum.

Avery watched to make sure they were doing it, then closed his. He expected to see his own room at home, or maybe their backyard with the swing set and the aboveground pool his dad inflated every Memorial Day, but he didn’t. What he saw behind his closed eyes—what all of them saw—was the Institute playground. And maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was true that he had been knocked down there and made to cry, which was a bad beginning to these last weeks of his life, but then he had made friends, good ones. He hadn’t had friends back home. In his school back home they thought he was a weirdo, they even made fun of his name, running up to him and yelling “Hey Avery, do me a favory” in his face. There had been none of that here, because here they’d all been in it together. Here his friends had taken care of him, treated him like a normal person, and now he would take care of them. Kalisha, Nicky, George, and Helen: he would take care of them.

Luke most of all. If he could.

With his eyes closed, he saw the big phone.

It was sitting next to the trampoline, in front of the shallow ditch Luke had squirmed through to get under the fence, an old-fashioned telephone at least fifteen feet high and as black as death. Avery and his friends and the kids from Ward A stood around it in their circle. The Stasi Lights swirled, brighter than ever, now over the phone’s dial, now skating giddily over its gigantic Bakelite handset.

Kalisha, GO. Playground!

There was no protest. Her hand left Avery’s, but before the break in the circle could interrupt the power and destroy the vision, George grasped Avery’s hand. The hum was everywhere now, surely they must hear it in all those faraway places where there were other children like them, standing in circles like this. Those children heard, just as the targets they’d been brought to their various Institutes to kill had heard. And like those targets, the children would obey. The difference was they would obey knowingly, and gladly. The revolt was not just here; the revolt was global.

George, GO. Playground!

George’s hand dropped out and Nicky’s took its place. Nicky who had stood up for him when Harry knocked him over. Nicky who called him the Avester, like it was a special name only friends could use. Avery gave his hand a squeeze and felt Nicky squeeze back. Nicky who was always bruised. Nicky who wouldn’t knuckle under or take their shitty tokens.

Nicky, GO. Playground!

He was gone. Now it was Helen gripping his hand, Helen with her fading punk hair, Helen who had taught him to do forward rolls on the trampoline and spotted him “so you won’t fall off and split your stupid head.”

Helen, GO. Playground!

She went, the last of his friends from down here, but Katie took the hand Helen had been holding, and it was time.

Outside, faint gunfire.

Please don’t let it be too late!

It was his last conscious thought as an individual, as Avery. Then he joined the hum, and the lights.

It was time to make a long-distance call.

21

Through a few remaining trees, Stackhouse saw the Suburban roll forward. The gleam of lights from the admin building slid on its chrome. It was moving very slowly, but it was coming. It occurred to him (too late to do anything about it, but wasn’t that always the way) that the boy might no longer have the flash drive, that he might have left it with the one he called Officer Wendy after all. Or hidden it somewhere between the airport and here, with a last-gasp call from the misguided hero to tell Officer Wendy where it was if things went wrong.

But what could I have done about it? he thought. Nothing. There is only this.

The Suburban appeared at the head of the driveway. Stackhouse remained standing between the bus and the flagpole, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross. The hum had reached a near deafening level, and he wondered if Rosalind was still holding her position or if she had been forced to flee. He thought of Gladys and hoped she was ready to start the mix.

He squinted at the shape behind the Suburban’s wheel. It was impossible to make out much, and he knew Doug and Chad wouldn’t be able to see jackshit through the darkened rear windows until they were blown out, but the windshield was clear glass, and when the Suburban closed the distance to twenty yards—a little closer than he had hoped for—he saw the expansion band of the turned-around cap cutting across the driver’s forehead, and let go of the flagpole. The driver’s head began to shake frantically. One hand left the wheel, pressing a starfish shape against the windshield in a stop gesture, and he realized he’d been deked. The trick was as simple as a kid escaping by crawling under a fence, and just as effective.

It wasn’t the misguided hero behind the wheel. It was Mrs. Sigsby.

The Suburban stopped again, then began to back up. “I’m sorry, Julia, no help for it,” he said, and raised his hand.

The shooting from admin and the trees began. At the rear of Front Half, Gladys Hickson removed the covers from two large buckets of bleach positioned under the HVAC unit which provided heating and cooling to Back Half and the access tunnel. She held her breath, dumped the bottles of toilet bowl cleaner into the buckets of bleach, gave each a quick stir with a mop handle, covered the buckets and the unit with a tarp, then sprinted for Front Half’s East Wing with her eyes burning. As she ran across the roof, she realized it was moving under her feet.

22

“No, Trevor, no!” Mrs. Sigsby screamed. She was shaking her head back and forth. From his position behind her, Tim saw her raise one hand and press it against the windshield. She used her other hand to put the Suburban in reverse.

It had just started to move when the shooting began, some of it coming from the right, in the woods, some from ahead and—Tim was pretty sure—from above. Holes appeared in the Suburban’s windshield. The glass turned milky and sagged inward. Mrs. Sigsby became a puppet, jerking and bouncing and making stifled cries as bullets hit her.

“Stay down, Luke!” Tim shouted when the boy began to squirm beneath him. “Stay down!”

Bullets punched through the Suburban’s rear windows. Shards of glass fell on Tim’s back. Blood was running down the rear of the driver’s seat. Even with the steady hum that seemed to be coming from everywhere, Tim could hear the slugs passing just above him, each one making a low zzzz sound.

There was the sping-spang of bullets punching through metal. The Suburban’s hood popped up. Tim found himself thinking of the final scene in some old gangster movie, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow doing a death-dance as bullets ripped into their car and into them. Whatever Luke’s plan had been, it had gone disastrously wrong. Mrs. Sigsby was dead; he could see her blood spattered on the remains of the windshield. They would be next.

Then, screams from ahead and shouts from the right. Two more bullets came through the right side of the Suburban, one of them actually twitching the collar of Tim’s shirt. They were the last two. Now what he heard was a vast, grinding roar.

“Let me up!” Luke gasped. “I can’t breathe!”

Tim got off the boy and peered between the front seats. He was aware that his head might be blown off at any second, but he had to see. Luke got up beside him. Tim started to tell the boy to get back down, but the words died in his throat.

This can’t be real, he thought. It can’t be.

But it was.

23

Avery and the others stood in a circle around the big phone. It was hard to see because of the Stasi Lights, so bright and so beautiful.

The sparkler, Avery thought. Now we make the sparkler.

It coalesced from the lights, ten feet high and spitting brilliance in every direction. The sparkler wavered back and forth at first, then the group mind took firmer control. It swung against the phone’s gigantic receiver and knocked it from its gigantic base. The dumbbell-shape landed askew against the jungle gym. Voices in different languages spilled from the mouthpiece, all asking the same questions: Hello, do you hear me? Hello, are you there?

YES, the children of the Institute answered, and in one voice. YES, WE HEAR YOU! DO IT NOW!

A circle of children in Spain’s Sierra Nevada National Park heard. A circle of Bosnian children imprisoned in the Dinaric Alps heard. On Pampus, an island guarding the entrance to Amsterdam’s harbor, a circle of Dutch children heard. A circle of German children heard in the mountainous forests of Bavaria.

In Pietrapertosa, Italy.

In Namwon, South Korea.

Ten kilometers outside the Siberian ghost town of Chersky.

They heard, they answered, they became one.

24

Kalisha and the others reached the locked door between them and Front Half. They could hear the gunfire clearly now, because the hum had abruptly stopped, as if somewhere a plug had been pulled.

Oh, it’s still there, Kalisha thought. It’s just not for us anymore.

A groaning began in the walls, an almost human sound, and then the steel door between the access tunnel and Front Half’s F-Level blew outward, smashing Rosalind Dawson before it and killing her instantly. The door landed beyond the elevator, twisted out of shape where its heavy hinges had been. Above, the wire mesh guarding the overhead fluorescent tubes was rippling, casting crazy underwater shadows.

The groaning grew louder, coming from everywhere. It was as if the building were trying to tear itself apart. In the Suburban, Tim had thought of Bonnie and Clyde; Kalisha thought of the Poe story about the House of Usher.

Come on, she thought at the others. Fast!

They ran past the torn door with the torn woman lying beneath it in a spreading pool of blood.

George: What about the elevator? It’s back there!

Nicky: Are you crazy? I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m not getting in any goddam elevator.

Helen: Is it an earthquake?

“No,” Kalisha said.

Mindquake. I don’t know how—

“… how they’re doing it, but that’s what…” She took a breath and tasted something acrid. It made her cough. “That’s what it is.”

Helen: Something’s wrong with the air.

Nicky said, “I think it’s some kind of poison.” Those fuckers, they never stop.

Kalisha shoved open the door marked STAIRS and they began to climb, all of them coughing now. Between D- and C-Level, the stairs began to shake beneath them. Cracks zig-zagged down the walls. The fluorescents went out and the emergency lights came on, casting a flat yellow glow. Kalisha stopped, bent over, dry-retched, then started up again.

George: What about Avery and the rest of the kids still down there? They’ll strangle!

Nicky: And what about Luke? Is he here? Is he still alive?

Kalisha didn’t know. All she knew was they had to get out before they choked. Or before they were crushed, if the Institute were imploding.

A titanic shudder went through the building and the stairway tilted to the right. She thought of what their situation might be right now if they had tried the elevator, and pushed the thought away.

B-Level. Kalisha was gasping for breath, but the air was better here, and she was able to run a little faster. She was glad she hadn’t got hooked on the vending machine cigarettes, there was that, at least. The groaning in the walls had become a low scream. She could hear hollow metal crumping sounds, and guessed the piping and electrical conduits were coming apart.

Everything was coming apart. She flashed on a YouTube video she’d seen once, a horrible thing she hadn’t been able to look away from: a dentist using forceps to extract somebody’s tooth. The tooth wiggling while blood seeped out around it, trying to stay in the gum but finally pulling free with the roots dangling. This was like that.

She came to the ground level door, but it was slanted now, surreal, drunken. She pushed on it and it wouldn’t open. Nicky joined her and they pushed together. No good. The floor rose beneath them, then thudded back down. A piece of the ceiling came free, crashed to the stairs, and slid away, crumbling as it went.

“It’s going to squash us if we can’t get out!” Kalisha shouted.

Nicky: George. Helen.

He held out his hands. The stairwell was narrow, but the four of them somehow crammed together in front of the door, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. George’s hair was in Kalisha’s eyes. Helen’s breath, foul with fear, was in her face. They fumbled and joined hands. The dots came and the door screeched open, taking a section of the overhead jamb with it. Beyond was the residence corridor, now canted drunkenly to one side. Kalisha escaped the crooked doorway first, popping free like a cork from a champagne bottle. She went to her knees, cutting one hand on a light fixture that had fallen, spraying glass and metal everywhere. On one wall, askew but still hanging in there, was the poster of the three kids running through a meadow, the one that said it was just another day in paradise.

Kalisha scrambled up, looked around, and saw the other three doing the same. Together they ran for the lounge, past rooms where no stolen children would ever live again. The doors of those rooms were flying open and clapping shut, the sound like lunatics applauding. In the canteen, several of the vending machines had fallen over, spilling snacks. Broken nip bottles filled the air with the pungent aroma of alcohol. The door to the playground was twisted out of shape and jammed shut, but the glass was gone and fine fresh air came in on a late-summer breeze. Kalisha reached the door and froze. For a moment she forgot all about the building that seemed to be tearing itself apart all around them.

Her first thought was that the others had gotten out after all, maybe through the access tunnel’s other door, because there they were: Avery, Iris, Hal, Len, Jimmy, Donna, and all the rest of the Ward A kids. Then she realized she wasn’t actually seeing them at all. They were projections. Avatars. And so was the huge telephone they were circling. It should have crushed the trampoline and the badminton net, but both were still there, and she could see the chainlink fence not just behind the big phone but through it.

Then both the kids and the phone were gone. She realized the floor was rising again, and this time it wasn’t thumping back down. She could see a slowly increasing gap between the lounge and the edge of the playground. Only nine inches or so for now, but it was growing. She had to give a little jump to get outside, as if from the second step of a staircase.

“Come on!” she shouted to the others. “Hurry! While you still can!”

25

Stackhouse heard screams from the roof of admin, and the firing from there ceased. He turned and saw something he could not at first credit. Front Half was rising. A swaying figure on the roof stood silhouetted against the moon, arms outstretched in an effort to maintain balance. It had to be Gladys.

This can’t be happening, he thought.

But it was. Front Half rose higher, crunching and snapping as it parted company with the earth. It blotted out the moon, then dipped like the nose of a huge and clumsy helicopter. Gladys went flying. Stackhouse heard her scream as she disappeared into the shadows. On the admin building, Zeke and Dr. Richardson dropped their guns and cringed against the parapet, staring up at something out of a dream: a building that was slowly climbing into the sky, shedding glass and chunks of cinderblock. It pulled most of the playground’s chainlink fence with it. Water from broken pipes poured from the building’s tangled underside.

The cigarette vending machine tumbled from the broken door of the West Wing lounge into the playground. George Iles, gaping at the underside of Front Half as it rose into the sky, would have been crushed by it if Nicky hadn’t yanked him out of the way.

Doug the chef and Chad the caretaker came through the screening trees, their necks craned, their mouths open, their guns hanging from their hands. They might have assumed that anyone in the bullet-riddled Suburban was dead; more likely, they had forgotten it entirely in their wonder and dismay.

Now the bottom of Front Half was above the admin building’s roof. It came on with the stately, cumbersome grace of an eighteenth-century Royal Navy gunship under sail in a light breeze. Insulation and wires, some still sparking, dangled like broken umbilical cords. A jutting piece of pipe scraped off a ventilation housing. Zeke the Greek and Dr. Felicia Richardson saw it coming and ran for the hatch they had come up through. Zeke made it; Dr. Richardson did not. She put her arms over her head in a gesture of protection that was both instinctive and pitiful.

That was when the access tunnel—weakened by years of neglect and the cataclysmic levitation of Front Half—collapsed, crushing children who were already dying of chlorine poisoning and mental overload. They maintained their circle until the end, and as the roof came down, Avery Dixon had one final thought, both clear and calm: I loved having friends.

26

Tim didn’t remember getting out of the Suburban. He was fully occupied with trying to process what he was seeing: a huge building floating in the air and sliding over a smaller building, eclipsing it. He saw a figure on the roof of that smaller building put its hands over its head. Then there was a muffled crumping sound from somewhere behind this incredible David Copperfield illusion, a great cloud of dust arose… and the floating building dropped like a rock.

A huge thud shook the ground and made Tim stagger. There was no way the smaller building—offices, Tim supposed—could take the weight. It exploded outward in all directions, spraying wood and concrete and glass. More dust billowed up, enough to obscure the moon. The bus alarm (who knew they had them?) went off, making a WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP sound. The person who had been on the roof was dead, of course, and anyone who had still been inside was now nothing but jelly.

“Tim!” Luke had grabbed his arm. “Tim!” He pointed to the two men who had come out of the trees. One was still staring at the ruins, but the other was raising a large pistol. Very slowly, as if in a dream.

Tim raised his own gun, and a lot faster. “Don’t do it. Put them down.”

They looked at him, dazed, then did as he said.

“Now walk to the flagpole.”

“Is it over?” one of the men asked. “Please tell me it’s over.”

“I think so,” Luke said. “Do what my friend says.”

They plodded through the billowing dust toward the flagpole and the bus. Luke picked up their guns, thought about tossing them into the Suburban, then realized they wouldn’t be driving that bullet-riddled, blood-spattered vehicle anywhere. He kept one of the automatics. The other he threw into the woods.

27

Stackhouse took a moment to watch Chad and Chef Doug walk toward him, then turned to regard the ruins of his life.

But who could have known? he thought. Who could have known they had access to enough power to levitate a building? Not Mrs. Sigsby, not Evans, not Heckle and Jeckle, not Donkey Kong—wherever he is tonight—and certainly not me. We thought we were working with high voltage, when in fact all we tapped was a trickle current. The joke was on us.

There was a tap on his shoulder. He turned to regard the misguided hero. He was broad-shouldered (as an authentic hero should be), but he was wearing glasses, and that didn’t fit the stereotype.

Of course there’s always Clark Kent, Stackhouse thought.

“Are you armed?” the man named Tim asked.

Stackhouse shook his head and made a weak gesture with one hand. “They were supposed to take care of that.”

“Are you three the last?”

“I don’t know.” Stackhouse had never felt so weary. He supposed it was shock. That, and the sight of a building rising into the night sky, blotting out the moon. “Maybe some of the staff in Back Half are still alive. And the docs there, Hallas and James. As for the children in Front Half, though… I don’t see how anyone could have survived that.” He gestured toward the ruins with an arm that felt like lead.

“The rest of the children, though,” Tim said. “What about them? Weren’t they in the other building?”

“They were in the tunnel,” Luke said. “He tried to gas them, but the tunnel collapsed first. It collapsed when Front Half rose up.”

Stackhouse thought of denying this, but what good would it do, if the Ellis boy could read his mind? Besides, he was so tired. So completely used up.

“Your friends, too?” Tim asked.

Luke opened his mouth to say he didn’t know for sure, but probably. Then his head jerked around, as if he had been called. If so, the call had come inside his head, because Tim only heard the voice a space of seconds later.

“Luke!”

A girl was running across the littered lawn, skirting the rubble that had exploded outward in a kind of corona. Three others were following her, two boys and another girl.

“Lukey!”

Luke ran to meet the girl in the lead and threw his arms around her. The other three joined them, and as they hugged in a group embrace, Tim heard the hum again, but lower now. Some of the rubble stirred, pieces of wood and stone rising into the air, then falling again. And didn’t he hear the whisper of their mingled voices in his head? Maybe just his imagination, but…

“They’re still putting out juice,” Stackhouse said. He spoke disinterestedly, like a man passing the time of day. “I hear them. You do, too. Be careful. The effect is cumulative. It turned Hallas and James into Heckle and Jeckle.” He gave a single bark of laughter. “Just a couple of cartoon magpies with high-priced medical degrees.”

Tim ignored this and let the children have their joyous reunion—who on God’s earth deserved one more? He kept an eye on the Institute’s three adult survivors. Although they did not, in fact, look as if they were going to give him any trouble.

“What am I going to do with you assholes?” Tim asked. Not really talking to the survivors, just thinking aloud.

“Please don’t kill us,” Doug said. He pointed to the group hug that was still going on. “I fed those youngsters. I kept them alive.”

“I wouldn’t try to justify anything you did here if you want to stay alive,” Tim said. “Shutting up might be the wisest course.” He turned his attention to Stackhouse. “Looks like we won’t need the bus after all, since you killed most of the kids—”

“We didn’t—”

“Are you deaf? I said shut it.”

Stackhouse saw what was in the man’s face. It didn’t look like heroism, misguided or otherwise. It looked like murder. He shut it.

“We need a ride out of here,” Tim said, “and I really don’t want to have to march you happy warriors through the woods to this village Luke says you have. It’s been a long, tiring day. Any suggestions?”

Stackhouse seemed not to have heard him. He was looking at the remains of Front Half, and the remains of the admin building squashed beneath it. “All this,” he marveled. “All this because of one runaway boy.”

Tim kicked him lightly in the ankle. “Pay attention, shithead. How do I get those kids out of here?”

Stackhouse didn’t answer, and neither did the man who claimed to have fed the kids. The other one, the guy who looked like a hospital orderly in his tunic top, spoke up. “If I had an idea about that, would you let me go?”

“What’s your name?”

“Chad, sir. Chad Greenlee.”

“Well, Chad, that would depend on how good your idea was.”

28

The last survivors of the Institute hugged and hugged and hugged. Luke felt that he could embrace them like this forever, and feel them embracing him, because he had never expected to see any of them again. For the moment all they needed was inside the huddled circle they made on this littered lawn. All they needed was each other. The world and all its problems could go fuck itself.

Avery?

Kalisha: Gone. Him and the rest. When the tunnel came down on top of them.

Nicky: It’s better this way, Luke. He wouldn’t have been the same. Not himself. What he did, what they did… it would have stripped him, like it did all the others.

What about the kids in Front Half? Are any of them still alive? If there are, we have to—

It was Kalisha who answered, shaking her head, sending not words but a picture: the late Harry Cross, of Selma, Alabama. The boy who had died in the cafeteria.

Luke took Sha by the arms. All of them? Are you saying all of them died of seizures even before that came down?

He pointed to the rubble of Front Half.

“I think when it lifted off,” Nicky said. “When Avery answered the big phone.” And when it was clear Luke didn’t fully understand: When the other kids joined in.

“The faraway kids,” George added. “At the other Institutes. The Front Half kids were just too… I don’t know the word.”

“Too vulnerable,” Luke said. “That’s what you mean. They were vulnerable. It was like one of the damn old shots, wasn’t it? One of the bad ones.”

They nodded.

Helen whispered, “I bet they died seeing the dots. How awful is that?”

Luke’s answer was the childish denial grownups smile at cynically and only other children can fully understand: It’s not fair! Not fair!

No, they agreed. Not fair.

They drew apart. Luke looked at them one by one in the dusty moonlight: Helen, George, Nicky… and Kalisha. He remembered the day he met her, pretending to smoke a candy cigarette.

George: What now, Lukey?

“Tim will know,” Luke said, and could only hope it was true.

29

Chad led the way around the destroyed buildings. Stackhouse and Chef Doug trudged behind him, heads down. Tim followed, gun in hand. Luke and his friends walked behind Tim. The crickets, silenced by the destruction, had begun to sing again.

Chad stopped at the edge of an asphalt track along which half a dozen cars and three or four pickup trucks were parked, nose to tail. Among them was a midsized Toyota panel truck with MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the side. He pointed at it. “What about that, sir? Would that do you?”

Tim thought it would, at least for a start. “What about the keys?”

“Everybody uses those maintenance trucks, so they always leave the keys under the visor.”

“Luke,” Tim said, “would you check on that?”

Luke went; the others went with him, as if they couldn’t bear to be separated even for a minute. Luke opened the driver’s door and lowered the visor. Something dropped into his hand. He held up the keys.

“Good,” Tim said. “Now open up the back. If there’s stuff in there, empty it out.”

The big one called Nick and the smaller one named George took care of this chore, tossing out rakes, hoes, a toolbox, and several bags of lawn fertilizer. While they did it, Stackhouse sat down on the grass and put his head on his knees. It was a profound gesture of defeat, but Tim did not feel sorry for him. He tapped Stackhouse on the shoulder.

“We’ll be going now.”

Stackhouse didn’t look up. “Where? I believe the boy said something about Disneyland.” He gave a singularly humorless snort of laughter.

“None of your affair. But I’m curious. Where are you going to go?”

Stackhouse did not answer.

30

There were no seats in the rear of the panel truck, so the kids took turns sitting up front, starting with Kalisha. Luke squeezed in on the metal floor between her and Tim. Nicky, George, and Helen clustered at the back doors, looking out through the two small dusty windows at a world they had never expected to see again.

Luke: Why are you crying, Kalisha?

She told him, then said it aloud, for Tim’s benefit. “Because it’s all so beautiful. Even in the dark, it’s all so beautiful. I only wish Avery was here to see it.”

31

Dawn was still just a rumor on the eastern horizon when Tim turned south on Highway 77. The one named Nicky had taken Kalisha’s place in the front seat. Luke had gone into the back of the truck with her, and now all four of them were heaped together like a litter of puppies, fast asleep. Nicky also appeared to be asleep, his head thudding against the window every time the truck hit a bump… and there were a lot of bumps.

Just after seeing a sign announcing that Millinocket was fifty miles ahead, Tim looked at his cell phone and saw that he had two bars and nine per cent power. He called Wendy, who answered on the first ring. She wanted to know if he was all right. He said he was. She asked if Luke was.

“Yes. He’s sleeping. I’ve got four more kids. There were others—I don’t know how many, quite a few—but they’re dead.”

“Dead? Jesus, Tim, what happened?”

“Can’t tell you now. I will when I can, and you might even believe it, but right now I’m in the williwags, I’ve got maybe thirty bucks in my wallet, and I don’t dare use my credit cards. There’s a hell of a mess back there, and I don’t want to risk leaving a paper trail. Also, I’m tired as hell. The truck’s still got half a tank of gas, which is good, but I’m running on fumes. Bitch-bitch-bitch, right?”

“What… you… have any…”

“Wendy, I’m losing you. If you hear me, I’ll call back. I love you.”

He didn’t know if she heard that last or not, or what she’d make of it if she had. He’d never said it to her before. He turned off his phone and put it in the console along with Tag Faraday’s gun. All that had happened back in DuPray seemed long ago to him, almost in a life that had been led by another person. What mattered now were these children, and what he was going to do with them.

Also, who might come after them.

“Hey, Tim.”

He looked around at Nicky. “I thought you were asleep.”

“No, just thinking. Can I tell you something?”

“Sure. Tell me a lot. Keep me awake.”

“Just wanted to say thanks. I won’t say you redeemed my faith in human nature, but coming with Lukey like you did… that took balls.”

“Listen, kiddo, are you reading my mind?”

Nick shook his head. “Can’t do it just now. Don’t think I could even move any of the candy wrappers on the floor of this heap, and that was my thing. If I was linked up with them…” He inclined his head toward the sleeping children in the back of the panel truck. “It’d be different. At least for awhile.”

“You think you’ll revert? Go back to whatever you had before?”

“Dunno. It’s not a big deal to me either way. Never was. My big deals were football and street hockey.” He peered at Tim. “Man, those aren’t bags under your eyes, those are suitcases.”

“I could use some sleep,” Tim admitted. Yes, like about twelve hours. He found himself remembering Norbert Hollister’s ramshackle establishment, where the TV didn’t work and the roaches ran free. “I suspect there are independent motels where they wouldn’t ask questions if cash was on offer, but cash is a problem, I’m afraid.”

Nicky smiled, and Tim saw the fine-looking young man he’d be—if God was good—in a few years. “I think me and my friends might be able to help you out in the cash department. Not entirely sure, but yeah, probably. Got enough gas to make it to the next town?”

“Yes.”

“Stop there,” Nicky said, and put his head back against the window.

32

Not long before the Millinocket branch of the Seaman’s Trust opened at nine o’clock on that day, a teller named Sandra Robichaux summoned the bank manager from his office.

“We have a problem,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

She seated herself at the ATM video replay. Brian Stearns sat down beside her. The unit’s camera slept between transactions, and in the small northern Maine town of Millinocket, that usually meant it slept all night, waking up for its first customers around six o’clock. The time-stamp on the screen they were looking at said 5:18 AM. As Stearns watched, five people walked up to the ATM. Four of them had their shirts pulled up over their mouths and noses, like bandit masks in an old-time Western. The fifth had a gimme cap pulled down low over his eyes. Stearns could see MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the front.

“Those look like kids!”

Sandra nodded. “Unless they’re midgets, which doesn’t seem very likely. Watch this, Mr. Stearns.”

The kids joined hands and formed a circle. A few lines of fuzz ran across the picture, as if from momentary electrical interference. Then money began to spew from the ATM’s slot. It was like watching a casino slot machine pay off.

“What the hell?”

Sandra shook her head. “I don’t know what the hell, but they got over two thousand dollars, and the machine’s not supposed to give anybody more than eight hundred. That’s the way it’s set. I guess we should call somebody about it, but I don’t know who.”

Stearns didn’t reply. He only watched, fascinated, as the little bandits—they looked like middle-schoolers, if that—picked up the money.

Then they were gone.