The Institute

1

Luke slipped into a nap crowded with unpleasant dream fragments, only waking when the ding-dong went for supper. He was glad to hear it. Nicky had been wrong; he did want to eat, and he was hungry for company as well as food. Nevertheless, he stopped in the canteen to verify that the others hadn’t just been pulling his leg. They hadn’t been. Next to the snack machine was a fully stocked vintage cigarette dispenser, the lighted square on top showing a man and woman in fancy dress smoking on a balcony and laughing. Next to this was a coin-op dispensing adult beverages in small bottles—what some of the booze-inclined kids at the Brod called “airline nips.” You could get a pack of cigarettes for eight tokens; a small bottle of Leroux Blackberry Wine for five. On the other side of the room was a bright red Coke cooler.

Hands grabbed him from behind and lifted him off his feet. Luke yelled in surprise, and Nicky laughed in his ear.

“If you wet your pants, you must take a chance and dance to France!”

“Put me down!”

Nicky swung him back and forth instead. “Lukey-tiddy-ooky-del-Lukey! Tee-legged, toe-legged, bow-legged Lukey!”

He set Luke down, spun him around, raised his hands, and began to boogaloo to the Muzak drifting from the overhead speakers. Behind him, Kalisha and Iris were looking on with identical boys will be boys expressions. “Wanna fight, Lukey? Tee-legged, toe-legged, bow-legged Lukey?”

“Stick your nose up my ass and fight for air,” Luke said, and began to laugh. The word for Nicky, he thought, whether in a good mood or a bad one, was alive.

“Nice one,” George said, pushing his way between the two girls. “I’m saving that for later use.”

“Just make sure I get the credit,” Luke said.

Nicky quit dancing. “I’m starvin, Marvin. Come on, let’s eat.”

Luke lifted the top of the Coke dispenser. “Soft drinks are free, I take it. You just pay for booze, smokes, and snacks.”

“You take it right,” Kalisha said.

“And, uh…” He pointed at the snack machine. Most of the goodies could be had for a single toke, but the one he was pointing at was a six-token buy. “Is that…”

“Are you asking if Hi Boy Brownies are what you think they are?” Iris asked. “I never had one myself, but I’m pretty sure they are.”

“Yessum,” George said. “I got off, but I also got a rash. I’m allergic. Come on, let’s eat.”

They sat at the same table. NORMA had been replaced by SHERRY. Luke ordered breaded mushrooms, chopped steak with salad, and something going under the alias of Vanilla Cream Brulay. There might be smart people in this sinister wonderland—certainly Mrs. Sigsby hadn’t seemed like a dummy—but whoever made out the menus was perhaps not one of them. Or was that intellectual snobbery on his part?

Luke decided he didn’t care.

They talked a bit about their schools before they had been torn out of their normal lives—regular schools, so far as Luke could tell, not special ones for smart kids—and about their favorite TV programs and movies. All good until Iris raised a hand to brush at one freckled cheek, and Luke realized she was crying. Not much, just a little, but yeah, those were tears.

“No shots today, but I had that damned ass-temp,” she said. When she saw Luke’s puzzled expression, she smiled, which caused another tear to roll down her cheek. “They take our temperature rectally.”

The others were nodding. “No idea why,” George said, “but it’s humiliating.”

“It’s also nineteenth century,” Kalisha said. “They must have some kind of reason, but…” She shrugged.

“Who wants coffee?” Nick asked. “I’ll get it if you—”

“Hey.”

From the doorway. They turned and saw a girl wearing jeans and a sleeveless top. Her hair, short and spiky, was green on one side and bluish-purple on the other. In spite of this punk ’do, she looked like a fairy-tale child lost in the woods. Luke guessed she was about his age.

“Where am I? Do any of you know what this place is?”

“Come on over, Sunshine,” Nicky said, and flashed his dazzling smile. “Drag up a rock. Sample the cuisine.”

“I’m not hungry,” the newcomer said. “Just tell me one thing. Who do I have to blow to get out of here?”

That was how they met Helen Simms.

2

After they ate, they went out to the playground (Luke did not neglect to slather himself with bug-dope) and filled Helen in. It turned out that she was a TK, and like George and Nicky, she was a pos. She proved this by knocking over several pieces on the chessboard when Nicky set them up.

“Not just pos but awesome pos,” George said. “Let me try that.” He managed to knock over a pawn, and he made the black king rock a bit on its base, but that was all. He sat back and blew out his cheeks. “Okay, you win, Helen.”

“I think we’re all losers,” she said. “That’s what I think.”

Luke asked her if she was worried about her parents.

“Not especially. My father’s an alcoholic. My mother divorced him when I was six and married—surprise!—another alcoholic. She must have figured if you can’t beat em, join em, because now she’s an alkie, too. I miss my brother, though. Do you think he’s all right?”

“Sure,” Iris said, without much conviction, and then wandered away to the trampoline and began to bounce. Doing that so soon after a meal would have made Luke feel whoopsy, but Iris hadn’t eaten much.

“Let me get this straight,” Helen said. “You don’t know why we’re here, except it maybe has something to do with psychic abilities that wouldn’t even pass an America’s Got Talent audition.”

“Wouldn’t even get us on Little Big Shots,” George said.

“They test us until we see dots, but you don’t know why.”

“Right,” Kalisha said.

“Then they put us in this other place, Back Half, but you don’t know what goes on there.”

“Yup,” Nicky said. “Can you play chess, or just knock over the pieces?”

She ignored him. “And when they’re done with us, we get some sci-fi memory wipe and live happily ever after.”

“That’s the story,” Luke said.

She considered, then said, “It sounds like hell.”

“Well,” Kalisha said, “I guess that’s why God gave us wine coolers and Hi Boy Brownies.”

Luke had had enough. He was going to cry again pretty soon; he could feel it coming on like a thunderstorm. Doing that in company might be okay for Iris, who was a girl, but he had an idea (surely outdated but all the same powerful) about how boys were supposed to behave. In a word, like Nicky.

He went back to his room, closed the door, and lay down on his bed with an arm over his eyes. Then, for no reason, he thought of Richie Rocket in his silver space suit, dancing as enthusiastically as Nicky Wilholm had before dinner, and how the little kids danced with him, laughing like crazy and singing along to “Mambo Number 5.” As though nothing could go wrong, as if their lives would always be filled with innocent fun.

The tears came, because he was afraid and angry, but mostly because he was homesick. He had never understood what that word meant until now. This wasn’t summer camp, and it wasn’t a field trip. This was a nightmare, and all he wanted was for it to be over. He wanted to wake up. And because he couldn’t, he fell asleep with his narrow chest still hitching with a few final sobs.

3

More bad dreams.

He awoke with a start from one in which a headless black dog had been chasing him down Wildersmoot Drive. For a single wonderful moment he thought the whole thing had been a dream, and he was back in his real room. Then he looked at the pajamas that weren’t his pajamas and at the wall where there should have been a window. He used the bathroom, and then, because he was no longer sleepy, powered up the laptop. He thought he might need another token to make it work, but he didn’t. Maybe it was on a twenty-four-hour cycle, or—if he was lucky—forty-eight. According to the strip at the top, it was quarter past three in the morning. A long time until dawn, then, and what he got for first taking a nap and then falling asleep so early in the evening.

He thought about going to YouTube and watching some of the vintage cartoons, stuff like Popeye that had always had him and Rolf rolling around on the floor, yelling “Where’s me spinach?” and “Uck-uck-uck!” But he had an idea they would only bring the homesickness back, and raving. So what did that leave? Going back to bed, where he’d lie awake until daylight? Wandering the empty halls? A visit to the playground? He could do that, he remembered Kalisha saying the playground was never locked, but it would be too spooky.

“Then why don’t you think, asshole?”

He spoke in a low voice, but jumped at the sound anyway, even half-raised a hand as if to cover his mouth. He got up and walked around the room, bare feet slapping and pajama bottoms flapping. It was a good question. Why didn’t he think? Wasn’t that what he was supposed to be good at? Lucas Ellis, the smart kid. The boy genius. Loves Popeye the Sailor Man, loves Call of Duty, loves shooting hoops in the backyard, but also has a working grasp of written French, although he still needs subtitles when he looks at French movies on Netflix, because they all talk so fast, and the idioms are crazy. Boire comme un trou, for instance. Why drink like a hole when drink like a fish makes much more sense? He can fill a blackboard with math equations, he can reel off all the elements in the periodic table, he can list every vice president going back to George Washington’s, he can give you a reasonable explanation of why attaining light speed is never going to happen outside of the movies.

So why is he just sitting here and feeling sorry for himself?

What else can I do?

Luke decided to take that as a real question instead of an expression of despair. Escape was probably impossible, but what about learning?

He tried googling the New York Times, and wasn’t surprised to get HAL 9000; no news for Institute kids. The question was, could he find a way around the prohibition? A back door? Maybe.

Let’s see, he thought. Let’s just see. He opened Firefox and typed in #!cloakofGriffin!#.

Griffin was H. G. Wells’s invisible man, and this site, which Luke had learned about a year ago, was a way to get around parental controls—not the dark web, exactly, but next door to it. Luke had used it, not because he wanted to visit porn sites on the Brod’s computers (although he and Rolf had done just that on a couple of occasions), or watch ISIS beheadings, but simply because the concept was cool and simple and he wanted to find out if it worked. It had at home and at school, but would it here? There was only one way to find out, so he banged the return key.

The Institue’s Wi-Fi munched awhile—it was slow—and then, just when Luke was starting to think it was a lost cause, took him to Griffin. At the top of the screen was Wells’s invisible man, head wrapped in bandages, badass goggles covering his eyes. Below this was a question that was also an invitation: WHICH LANGUAGE DO YOU WANT TRANSLATED? The list was a long one, from Assyrian to Zulu. The beauty of the site was it didn’t matter which language you picked; the important thing was what got recorded in the search history. Once upon a time, a secret passage beneath parental controls had been available on Google, but the sages of Mountain View had shut it down. Hence, the Cloak of Griffin.

Luke picked German at random, and got ENTER PASSWORD. Calling on what his dad sometimes called his weird memory, Luke typed in #x49ger194GbL4. The computer munched a little more, then announced PASSWORD ACCEPTED.

He typed in New York Times and hit enter. This time the computer thought even longer, but eventually the Times came up. Today’s issue, and in English, but from this point forward, the computer’s search history would note nothing but a series of German words and English translations. Maybe a small victory, maybe a large one. For the moment, Luke didn’t even care. It was a win, and that was enough.

How soon would his captors realize what he was doing? Camouflaging the computer’s search history would mean nothing if they could do live look-ins. They’d see the newspaper and shut him down. Never mind the Times with its headline about Trump and North Korea; he ought to check the Star Trib before that could happen, see if there was anything about his parents. But before he could do that, the screaming started out in the hall.

“Help! Help! Help! Somebody help me! SOMEBODY HELP ME, I’M LOST!”

4

The screamer was a little boy in Star Wars pajamas, hammering on doors with small fists that went up and down like pistons. Ten? Avery Dixon looked six, seven at most. The crotch and one leg of his pajama pants were wet and sticking to him.

“Help me, I WANT TO GO HOME!”

Luke glanced around, expecting to see someone—maybe several someones—coming on the run, but the hall remained empty. Later, he would realize that in the Institute, a kid screaming to go home was par for the course. For the moment, Luke just wanted to shut the kid up. He was freaked out, and he was freaking Luke out.

He went to him, knelt down, and took the boy by the shoulders. “Hey. Hey. Take it easy, kid.”

The kid in question stared at Luke with white-ringed eyes, but Luke wasn’t entirely sure the kid was seeing him. His hair was sweaty and sticking up. His face was wet with tears, and his upper lip gleamed with fresh snot.

“Where’s Mumma? Where’s Daddy?”

Only it wasn’t Daddy but DAAAAAADY, like the whoop of an air raid siren. The kid began to stomp his feet. He brought his fists down on Luke’s shoulders. Luke let him go, got up, and stepped back, watching with amazement as the kid fell to the floor and began to thrash.

Across from the poster proclaiming this JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, a door opened and Kalisha emerged, wearing a tie-dyed tee-shirt and gigantic basketball shorts. She walked to Luke and stood looking down at the newcomer, her hands on her mostly nonexistent hips. Then she looked at Luke. “I’ve seen tantrums before, but this one takes the prize.”

Another door opened and Helen Simms appeared, clad—sort of—in what Luke believed were called babydoll pajamas. She had hips, plus other interesting equipment.

“Put your eyes back in their sockets, Lukey,” Kalisha said, “and help me out a little. Kid’s buggin my head like to give me a migraine.” She knelt, reached out for the dervish—whose words had now devolved into wordless howls—and pulled back when one of his fists struck her forearm. “Jesus, work with me here. Grab his hands.”

Luke also knelt, made a tentative move to grab the new kid’s hands, pulled back, then decided he didn’t want to look like a wuss in front of the lately arrived vision in pink. He grabbed the little boy at the elbows and pressed his arms to the sides of his chest. He could actually feel the kid’s heart, racing along at triple time.

Kalisha bent over him, put her hands on the sides of his face, and looked into his eyes. The kid stopped yelling. Now there was only the sound of his rapid breathing. He looked at Kalisha, fascinated, and Luke suddenly understood what she’d meant when she said the kid was bugging her head.

“He’s TP, isn’t he? Like you.”

Kalisha nodded. “Only he’s a lot stronger than me, or any of the other TPs that have been through here during my time. Come on, let’s take him down to my room.”

“Can I come?” Helen asked.

“Suit yourself, hon,” Kalisha said. “I’m sure Lukey here appreciates the view.”

Helen flushed. “Maybe I’ll change first.”

“Do what you want,” Kalisha said, then to the kid: “What’s your name?”

“Avery.” His voice was hoarse from crying and yelling. “Avery Dixon.”

“I’m Kalisha. You can call me Sha, if you want.”

“Just don’t call her Sport,” Luke said.

5

Kalisha’s room was more girly than Luke would have expected, given her tough talk. There was a pink spread on the bed, and frou-frou flounces on the pillows. A framed picture of Martin Luther King stared at them from the bureau.

She saw Luke looking at it, and laughed. “They try to make things the same as at home, but I guess someone thought the picture I used to have there was taking it a little too far, so they changed it.”

“Who did it used to be?”

“Eldridge Cleaver. Ever heard of him?”

“Sure. Soul on Ice. I haven’t read it, but I’ve been meaning to get around to it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Man, you are wasted here.”

Still sniffling, Avery started to get up on her bed, but she grabbed him and pulled him back, gently but firmly.

“Nuh-uh, not in those wet pants.” She made as if to take them off and Avery stepped back, hands crossed protectively over his crotch.

Kalisha looked at Luke and shrugged. He shrugged back, then squatted in front of Avery. “Which room are you in?”

Avery only shook his head.

“Did you leave the door open?”

This time the kid nodded.

“I’ll get you some dry clothes,” Luke said. “You stay here with Kalisha, okay?”

No shake and no nod this time. The boy only stared at him, exhausted and confused, but at least not doing his air raid imitation anymore.

“Go on,” Kalisha said. “I think I can soothe him down.”

Helen appeared at the door, now wearing jeans and buttoning up a sweater. “Is he any better?”

“A little,” Luke said. He saw a patter of drops tending in the direction he and Maureen had gone to change the sheets.

“No sign of those other two boys,” Helen said. “They must sleep like the dead.”

“They do,” Kalisha said. “You go on with Luke, New Girl. Avery and I are having a meeting of the minds here.”

6

“The kid’s name is Avery Dixon,” Luke said as he and Helen Simms stood in an open door just past the ice machine, which was clattering away to itself. “He’s ten. Doesn’t look it, does he?”

She stared at him, eyes wide. “What are you, TP after all?”

“No.” Surveying the poster of Tommy Pickles, and the G.I. Joes on the bureau. “I was here with Maureen. She’s one of the housekeepers. I helped her change the bed. Other than that, the room was all ready for him.”

Helen smirked. “So that’s what you are—teacher’s pet.”

Luke thought of Tony slapping him across the face, and wondered if Helen would soon be getting the same treatment. “No, but Maureen’s not like some of the others. Treat her right and she’ll treat you right.”

“How long have you been here, Luke?”

“I got here just before you.”

“So how do you know who’s nice and who isn’t?”

“Maureen’s okay, that’s all I’m saying. Help me get him some clothes.”

Helen grabbed some pants and underwear out of the dresser (not neglecting to snoop her way through the rest of the drawers), and they walked back to Kalisha’s room. On the way, Helen asked if Luke had had any of the tests George had told her about. He said he hadn’t, but showed her the chip in his ear.

“Don’t fight it. I did, and got whacked.”

She stopped dead. “Shut up!”

He turned his head to show her his cheek, where two of Tony’s fingers had left faint bruises.

“No one’s whacking me,” Helen said.

“That’s a theory you don’t want to test.”

She tossed her two-tone hair. “My ears are pierced already, so no big deal.”

Kalisha was sitting on her bed with Avery beside her, his butt on a folded towel. She was stroking his sweaty hair. He was looking up at her dreamily, as if she were Princess Tiana. Helen tossed Luke the clothes. He wasn’t expecting it and dropped the underpants, which were imprinted with pictures of Spider-Man in various dynamic poses.

“I have no interest in seeing that kid’s teeny peenie. I’m going back to bed. Maybe when I wake up I’ll be in my room, my real room, and all of this will just have been a dream.”

“Good luck with that,” Kalisha said.

Helen strode away. Luke picked up Avery’s underwear just in time to mark the swing of her hips in the faded jeans.

“Yummy, huh?” Kalisha’s voice was flat.

Luke brought her the clothes, feeling his cheeks heat. “I guess so, but she leaves something to be desired in the personality department.”

He thought that might make her laugh—he liked her laugh—but she looked sad. “This place will knock the bitch out of her. Pretty soon she’ll be scurrying and flinching every time she sees a guy in a blue top. Just like the rest of us. Avery, you need to get dressed in these things. Me and Lukey will turn our backs.”

They did so, staring out Kalisha’s open door at the poster proclaiming this was paradise. From behind them came sniffling and rustling clothes. At last Avery said, “I’m dressed. You can turn around.”

They did. Kalisha said, “Now take those wet pj pants into the bathroom and hang em over the side of the tub.”

He went without argument, then shuffled back. “I did it, Sha.” The fury was gone from his voice. Now he sounded timid and tired.

“Good f’you. Go on and get back on the bed. Lie down, it’s okay.”

Kalisha sat, dropped Avery’s feet on her lap, then patted the bed next to her. Luke sat down and asked Avery if he was feeling better.

“I guess so.”

“You know so,” Kalisha said, and began to stroke the little boy’s hair again. Luke had a sense—maybe bullshit, maybe not—that a lot was going on between them. Inside traffic.

“Go on, then,” Kalisha said. “Tell him your joke if you have to, then go to fuckin sleep.”

“You said a bad word.”

“I guess I did. Tell him the joke.”

Avery looked at Luke. “Okay. The big moron and the little moron were standing on a bridge, see? And the big moron fell off. Why didn’t the little one?”

Luke considered telling Avery that people no longer talked about morons in polite society, but since it was clear that polite society did not exist here, he just said, “I give up.”

“Because he was a little more on. Get it?”

“Sure. Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side?”

“No, because she was a dumb cluck. Now go to sleep.”

Avery started to say something else—maybe another joke had come to mind—but Kalisha hushed him. She went on stroking his hair. Her lips were moving. Avery’s eyes grew heavy. The lids went down, slowly rose, went down again, and rose even more slowly. Next time they stayed down.

“Were you just doing something?” Luke asked.

“Singing him a lullabye my mom used to sing me.” She spoke barely above a whisper, but there was no mistaking the amazement and pleasure in her voice. “I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but when it’s mind to mind, the melody doesn’t seem to matter.”

“I have an idea he’s not exactly too intelligent,” Luke said.

She gave him a long look that made his face heat up, as it had when she caught him staring at Helen’s legs and busted him on it. “For you, the whole world must not seem exactly too intelligent.”

“No, I’m not that way,” Luke protested. “I just meant—”

“Ease up. I know what you meant, but it’s not brains he’s lacking. Not exactly. TP as strong as he’s got might not be a good thing. When you don’t know what people are thinking, you have to start early when it comes to… mmm…”

“Picking up cues?”

“Yeah, that. Ordinary people have to survive by looking at faces, and judging the tone of voice they’re hearing as well as the words. It’s like growing teeth, so you can chew something tough. This poor little shit is like Thumper in that Disney cartoon. Any teeth he’s got aren’t good for much more than grass. Does that make sense?”

Luke said it did.

Kalisha sighed. “The Institute’s a bad place for a Thumper, but maybe it doesn’t matter, since we all go to Back Half eventually.”

“How much TP has he got—compared, say, to you?”

“A ton more. They have this thing they measure—BDNF. I saw it on Dr. Hendricks’s laptop one time, and I think it’s a big deal, maybe the biggest. You’re the brainiac, do you know what that is?”

Luke didn’t, but intended to find out. If they didn’t take his computer away first, that was.

“Whatever it is, this kid’s must be over the moon. I talked to him! It was real telepathy!”

“But you must have been around other TPs, even if it’s rarer than TK. Maybe not in the outside world, but here, for sure.”

“You don’t get it. Maybe you can’t. That’s like listening to a stereo with the sound turned way down, or listening to people talk out on the patio while you’re in the kitchen with the dishwasher running. Sometimes it’s not there at all, just falls completely out of the mix. This was the real deal, like in a science fiction movie. You have to take care of him after I’m gone, Luke. He’s a goddam Thumper, and it’s no surprise he doesn’t act his age. He’s had an easy cruise up to now.”

What resonated with Luke was after I’m gone. “You… has anyone said anything to you about going to Back Half? Maureen, maybe?”

“No one needs to. I didn’t get a single one of their bullshit tests yesterday. No shots, either. That’s a sure sign. Nick’s going, too. George and Iris may be here a little longer.”

She gently gripped the back of Luke’s neck, producing another of those tingles.

“I’m gonna be your sister for a minute, Luke, your soul sister, so listen to me. If the only thing you like about Punk Rock Girl is how she wiggles when she walks, keep it that way. It’s bad to get too involved with people here. It fucks you up when they go away, and they all do. But you need to take care of this one for as long as you can. When I think of Tony or Zeke or that bitch Winona hitting Avery, it makes me want to cry.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Luke said, “but I hope you’ll be here a lot longer. I’d miss you.”

“Thanks, but that’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

They sat quiet for awhile. Luke supposed he would have to go soon, but he didn’t want to yet. He wasn’t ready to be alone.

“I think I can help Maureen.” He spoke in a low voice, hardly moving his lips. “With those credit card bills. But I’d have to talk to her.”

Her eyes opened wide at that and she smiled. “Really? That would be great.” Now she put her lips to his ear, causing fresh shivers. He was afraid to look at his arms, in case they had broken out in goosebumps. “Make it soon. She’s got her week off coming up in a day or two.” Now she placed her hand, oh God, high up on his leg, territory Luke’s mother did not even visit these days. “After she comes back, she’s somewhere else for three weeks. You might see her in the halls, or in the break room, but that’s all. She won’t talk about it even where it’s safe to talk, so it just about has to be Back Half.”

She removed her lips from his ear and her hand from his thigh, leaving Luke to wish fervently that she had other secrets to impart.

“Go on back to your room,” she said, and the little gleam in her eye made him think she was not unaware of the effect she’d had on him. “Try to catch some winks.”

7

He awoke from deep and dreamless sleep to loud knocking on his door. He sat up, looking around wildly, wondering if he had overslept on a school day.

The door opened, and a smiling face peered in at him. It was Gladys, the woman who’d taken him to get chipped. The one who had told him he was here to serve. “Peekaboo!” she trilled. “Rise and shine! You missed breakfast, but I brought you orange juice. You can drink it while we walk. It’s fresh squeezed!”

Luke saw the green power light on his new laptop. It had gone to sleep, but if Gladys came in and pushed one of the keys to check on what he’d been surfing (he wouldn’t put it past her), she would see H. G. Wells’s invisible man with his wrapped head and dark glasses. She wouldn’t know what it was, might think it was just some kind of sci-fi or mystery site, but she probably made reports. If so, they’d go to someone above her pay grade. Someone who was supposed to be curious.

“Can I have a minute to put on some pants?”

“Thirty seconds. Don’t let this oj get warm, now.” She gave him a roguish wink and closed the door.

Luke leaped from bed, put on his jeans, grabbed a tee-shirt, and woke up the laptop to check the time. He was amazed to see it was nine o’clock. He never slept that late. For a moment he wondered if they’d put something in his food, but if that was the case, he wouldn’t have awakened in the middle of the night.

It’s shock, he thought. I’m still trying to process this thing—get my head around it.

He killed the computer, knowing any efforts he made to hide Mr. Griffin would mean nothing if they were monitoring his searches. And if they were mirroring his computer, they’d already know he’d found a way to access the New York Times. Of course if you started thinking that way, everything was futile. Which was probably exactly how the Minions of Sigsby wanted him to think—him and every other kid kept prisoner in here.

If they knew, they’d already have taken the computer away, he told himself. And if they were mirroring my box, wouldn’t they know the wrong name is on the welcome screen?

That seemed to make sense, but maybe they were just giving him more rope. That was paranoid, but the situation was paranoid.

When Gladys opened the door again, he was sitting on the bed and putting on his sneakers. “Good job!” she cried, as if Luke were a three-year-old who had just managed to dress himself for the first time. Luke was liking her less and less, but when she gave him the juice, he gulped it down.

8

This time when she waved her card, she told the elevator to take them to C-Level. “Gosh, what a pretty day!” she exclaimed as the car began to descend. This seemed to be her standard conversation opener.

Luke glanced at her hands. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring. Do you have kids, Gladys?”

Her smile became cautious. “That’s between me, myself, and I.”

“I just wondered if you did, how you’d like them locked up in a place like this.”

“C,” said the soft female voice. “This is C.”

No smile on Gladys’s face as she escorted him out, holding his arm a little tighter than absolutely necessary.

“I also wondered how you live with yourself. Guess that’s a little personal, huh?”

“Enough, Luke. I brought you juice. I didn’t have to do that.”

“And what would you say to your kids, if anyone found out what’s going on here? If it got, you know, on the news. How would you explain it to them?”

She walked faster, almost hauling him along, but there was no anger on her face; if there had been, he would at least have had the dubious comfort of knowing he’d gotten through to her. But no. There was only blankness. It was a doll’s face.

They stopped at C-17. The shelves were loaded with medical and computer equipment. There was a padded chair that looked like a movie theater seat, and behind it, mounted on a steel post, was something that looked like a projector. At least there were no straps on the arms of the chair.

A tech was waiting for them—ZEKE, according to the nametag on his blue top. Luke knew the name. Maureen had said he was one of the mean ones.

“Hey there, Luke,” Zeke said. “Are you feeling serene?”

Unsure of how to reply, Luke shrugged.

“Not going to make trouble? That’s what I’m getting at, sport.”

“No. No trouble.”

“Good to hear.”

Zeke opened a bottle filled with blue liquid. There was a sharp whiff of alcohol, and Zeke produced a thermometer that looked at least a foot long. Surely not, but—

“Drop trou and bend over that chair, Luke. Forearms on the seat.”

“Not with…”

Not with Gladys here, he meant to say, but the door to C-17 was closed. Gladys was gone. Maybe to preserve my modesty, Luke thought, but probably because she had enough of my shit. Which would have cheered him up if not for the glass rod which would soon, he felt sure, be exploring previously unplumbed depths of his anatomy. It looked like the kind of thermometer a vet might use to take a horse’s temperature.

“Not with what?” He wagged the thermometer back and forth like a majorette’s baton. “Not with this? Sorry, sport, gotta be. Orders from headquarters, you know.”

“Wouldn’t a fever strip be easier?” Luke said. “I bet you could get one at CVS for a buck and a half. Even less with your discount car—”

“Save your wise mouth for your friends. Drop trou and bend over the chair, or I’ll do it for you. And you won’t like it.”

Luke walked slowly to the chair, unbuttoned his pants, slid them down, bent over.

“Oh yay, there’s that full moon!” Zeke stood in front of him. He had the thermometer in one hand and a jar of Vaseline in the other. He dipped the thermometer into the jar and brought it out. A glob of jelly dangled from the end. To Luke it looked like the punchline of a dirty joke. “See? Plenty of lube. Won’t hurt a bit. Just relax your cheeks, and remind yourself that as long as you don’t feel both of my hands on you, your backside virginity remains intact.”

He circled behind Luke, who stood bent over with his forearms on the seat of the chair and his butt pushed out. He could smell his sweat, strong and rank. He tried to remind himself that he wasn’t the first kid to get this treatment in the Institute. It helped a little… but really, not all that much. The room was loaded with high-tech equipment, and this man was preparing to take his temperature in the lowest-tech way imaginable. Why?

To break me down, Luke thought. To make sure I understand that I’m a guinea pig, and when you have guinea pigs, you can get the data you want any old way you want. And maybe they don’t even want this particular piece of data. Maybe it’s just a way of saying If we can stick this up your ass, what else can we stick up there? Answer: Anything we feel like.

“Suspense is killing you, isn’t it?” Zeke said from behind him, and the son of a bitch was laughing.

9

After the indignity of the thermometer, which seemed to go on for a long time, Zeke took his blood pressure, put an O2 monitor on his finger, and checked his height and weight. He looked down Luke’s throat and up his nose. He noted down the results, humming as he did it. By then Gladys was back in the room, drinking from a coffee mug with daisies on it and smiling her fake smile.

“Time for a shot, Lukey-boy,” Zeke said. “Not going to give me any trouble, are you?”

Luke shook his head. The only thing he wanted right now was to go back to his room and wipe the Vaseline out of his butt. He had nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt ashamed, anyway. Demeaned.

Zeke gave him an injection. There was no heat this time. This time there was nothing but a little pain, there and gone.

Zeke looked at his watch, lips moving as he counted off seconds. Luke did the same, only without moving his lips. He’d gotten to thirty when Zeke lowered his arm. “Any nausea?”

Luke shook his head.

“Got a metallic taste in your mouth?”

The only thing Luke could taste was the residue of the orange juice. “No.”

“Okay, good. Now look at the wall. See any dots? Or maybe they look bigger, like circles.”

Luke shook his head.

“You’re telling the truth, sport, right?”

“Right. No dots. No circles.”

Zeke looked into his eyes for several seconds (Luke thought of asking him if he saw any dots in there, and restrained himself ). Then he straightened up, made a show of dusting his palms together, and turned to Gladys. “Go on, get him out of here. Dr. Evans will want him this afternoon for the eye thing.” He gestured at the projector gadget. “Four PM.”

Luke thought about asking what the eye thing was, but he didn’t really care. He was hungry, that didn’t seem to change no matter what they did to him (at least so far), but what he wanted more than food was to clean himself up. He felt—only the British word adequately described it—buggered.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Gladys asked him as they rode up in the elevator. “A lot of fuss about nothing.” Luke thought of asking her if she would have felt it was a lot of fuss about nothing if it had been her ass. Nicky might have said it, but he wasn’t Nicky.

She gave him the fake smile he was finding ever more horrible. “You’re learning to behave, and that’s wonderful. Here’s a token. In fact, take two. I’m feeling generous today.”

He took them.

Later, standing in the shower with his head bent and water running through his hair, he cried some more. He was like Helen in at least one way; he wanted all this to be a dream. He would have given anything, maybe his very soul, if he could wake up to sunlight lying across his bed like a second coverlet and smell frying bacon downstairs. The tears finally dried up, and he began to feel something other than sorrow and loss—something harder. A kind of bedrock, previously unknown to him. It was a relief to know it was there.

This was no dream, it was really happening, and to get out of here no longer seemed enough. That hard thing wanted more. It wanted to expose the whole kidnapping, child-torturing bunch of them, from Mrs. Sigsby all the way down to Gladys with her plastic smiles and Zeke with his slimy rectal thermometer. To bring the Institute down on their heads, as Samson had brought the temple of Dagon down on the Philistines. He knew this was no more than the resentful, impotent fantasy of a twelve-year-old kid, but he wanted it, just the same, and if there was any way he could do it, he would.

As his father liked to say, it was good to have goals. They could bring you through tough times.

10

By the time he got to the caff, it was empty except for a janitor (FRED, his nametag said) mopping the floor. It was still too early for lunch, but there was a bowl of fruit—oranges, apples, grapes, and a couple of bananas—on a table at the front. Luke took an apple, then went out to the vending machines and used one of his tokens to get a bag of popcorn. Breakfast of champions, he thought. Mom would have a cow.

He took his food into the lounge area and looked out at the playground. George and Iris were sitting at one of the picnic tables, playing checkers. Avery was on the trampoline, taking mildly cautious bounces. There was no sign of Nicky or Helen.

“I think that’s the worst food combo I ever saw,” Kalisha said.

He jumped, spilling some of his popcorn out of the bag and onto the floor. “Jeepers, scare a person, why don’t you?”

“Sorry.” She squatted, picked up the few spilled pieces of popcorn, and tossed them into her mouth.

“Off the floor?” Luke asked. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Five-second rule.”

“According to the National Health Service—that’s in England—the five-second rule is a myth. Total bullshit.”

“Does being a genius mean you have a mission to spoil everyone’s illusions?”

“No, I just—”

She smiled and stood up. “Yankin your chain, Luke. The Chicken Pox Chick is just yankin your chain. You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get the rectal?”

“Yes. Let’s not talk about it.”

“Heard that. Want to play cribbage until lunch? If you don’t know how to play, I can teach you.”

“I know how, but I don’t want to. Think I’ll go back to my room for awhile.”

“Consider your situation?”

“Something like that. See you at lunch.”

“When the ding-dong goes,” she said. “It’s a date. Cheer up, little hero, and gimme five.”

She raised her hand, and Luke saw something pinched between her thumb and index finger. He pressed his white palm to her brown one, and the folded scrap of paper passed from her hand to his.

“Seeya, boy.” She headed for the playground.

Back in his room, Luke lay down on his bed, turned on his side to face the wall, and unfolded the square of paper. Kalisha’s printing was tiny and very neat.

Meet Maureen by the ice machine near Avery’s room ASAP. Flush this.

He crumpled the paper, went into the bathroom, and dropped the note into the bowl as he lowered his pants. He felt ridiculous doing this, like a kid playing spy; at the same time he didn’t feel ridiculous at all. He would have loved to believe there was at least no surveillance in la maison du chier, but he didn’t quite believe it.

The ice machine. Where Maureen had spoken to him yesterday. That was sort of interesting. According to Kalisha, there were several places in Front Half where the audio surveillance worked poorly or not at all, but Maureen seemed to favor that one. Maybe because there was no video surveillance there. Maybe it was where she felt safest, possibly because the ice machine was so noisy. And maybe he was judging on too little evidence.

He thought about going to the Star Tribune before meeting Maureen, and sat down at his computer. He even went as far as Mr. Griffin, but there he stopped. Did he really want to know? To perhaps find out these bastards, these monsters, were lying, and his parents were dead? Going to the Trib to check would be a little like a guy wagering his life’s savings on one spin of the roulette wheel.

Not now, he decided. Maybe after the humiliation of the thermometer was a bit further behind him, but not now. If that made him a chickenshit, so be it. He turned off the computer and took a walk to the other wing. Maureen wasn’t near the ice machine, but her laundry cart was parked halfway down what Luke now thought of as Avery’s hallway, and he could hear her singing something about raindrops. He went to the sound of her voice and saw her putting on fresh sheets in a room decorated with WWF posters of hulking beefcakes in spandex shorts. They all looked mean enough to chew nails and spit out staples.

“Hey, Maureen, how are you?”

“Fine,” she said. “Back aches a little, but I’ve got my Motrin.”

“Want some help?”

“Thanks, but this is the last room, and I’m almost finished. Two girls, one boy. Expected soon. This is the boy’s room.” She gestured at the posters and laughed. “As if you didn’t know.”

“Well, I thought I’d get some ice, but there’s no bucket in my room.”

“They’re stacked in a cubby next to the bin.” She straightened up, put her hands in the small of her back, and grimaced. Luke heard her spine crackle. “Oh, that’s lots better. I’ll show you.”

“Only if it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Come on. You can push my cart, if you want to.”

As they went down the hall, Luke thought about his researches into Maureen’s problem. One horrifying statistic in particular stuck out: Americans owed over twelve trillion dollars. Money spent but not earned, just promised. A paradox only an accountant could love. While much of that debt had to do with mortgages on homes and businesses, an appreciable amount led back to those little plastic rectangles everyone kept in their purses and wallets: the oxycodone of American consumers.

Maureen opened a little cabinet to the right of the ice machine. “Can you get one, and save me stooping down? Some inconsiderate somebody pushed every damned bucket all the way to the back.”

Luke reached. As he did, he spoke in a low voice. “Kalisha told me about your problem with the credit cards. I think I know how to fix it, but a lot of it depends on your declared residence.”

“My declared—”

“What state do you live in?”

“I…” She took a quick, furtive look around. “We’re not supposed to tell any personal stuff to the residents. It would mean my job if anyone found out. More than my job. Can I trust you, Luke?”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“I live over in Vermont. Burlington. That’s where I’m going on my outside week.” Telling him that seemed to release something inside her, and although she kept the volume down, the words came spilling out. “The first thing I have to do when I get off work is delete a bunch of dunning calls from my phone. And when I get home, from the answering machine on that phone. You know, the landline. When the answer-machine is full, they leave letters—warnings, threats—in the mailbox or under the door. My car, they can repo that any time they want, it’s a beater, but now they’re talking about my house! It’s paid off, and no thanks to him. I killed the mortgage with my signing bonus when I came to work here, that’s why I came to work here, but they’ll take it, and the what-do-you-call-it will be gone—”

“The equity,” Luke said, whispering it.

“Right, that.” Color had bloomed in her sallow cheeks, whether of shame or anger Luke didn’t know. “And once they have the house, they’ll want what’s put away, and that money’s not for me! Not for me, but they’ll take it just the same. They say so.”

“He ran up that much?” Luke was astonished. The guy must have been a spending machine.

“Yes!”

“Keep it down.” He held the plastic bucket in one hand and opened the ice machine with the other. “Vermont is good. It’s not a community property state.”

“What’s that mean?”

Something they don’t want you to know about, Luke thought. There’s so much they don’t want you to know about. Once you’re stuck on the flypaper, that’s where they want you to stay. He grabbed the plastic scoop inside the door of the ice machine and pretended to be breaking up chunks of ice. “The cards he used, were they in his name or yours?”

“His, of course, but they’re still dunning me because we’re still legally married, and the account numbers are the same!”

Luke began filling the plastic ice bucket… very slowly. “They say they can do that, and it sounds plausible, but they can’t. Not legally, not in Vermont. Not in most states. If he was using his cards and his signature was on the slips, that’s his debt.”

“They say it’s ours! Both of ours!”

“They lie,” Luke said grimly. “As for the calls you mentioned—do any of them come after eight o’clock at night?”

Her voice dropped to a fierce whisper. “Are you kidding? Sometimes they call at midnight! ‘Pay up or the bank’s going to take your house next week! You’ll come back to find the locks changed and your furniture out on the lawn!’ ”

Luke had read about this, and worse. Debt collectors threatening to turn aged parents out of their nursing homes. Threatening to go after young adult children still trying to get some financial traction. Anything to get their percentage of the cash grab. “It’s good you’re away most of the time and those calls go to voicemail. They don’t let you have your cell here?”

“No! God, no! It’s locked in my car, in… well, not here. I changed my number once, and they got the new one. How could they do that?”

Easily, Luke thought. “Don’t delete those calls. Save them. They’ll be time-stamped. It’s illegal for collection agencies to call clients—that’s what they call people like you, clients—after eight o’clock at night.”

He dumped the bucket and began to fill it again, even more slowly. Maureen was looking at him with amazement and dawning hope, but Luke hardly noticed. He was deep in the problem, tracing the lines back to the central point where those lines could be cut.

“You need a lawyer. Don’t even think about going to one of the quick-buck companies that advertise on cable, they’ll take you for everything they can and then put you into Chapter 7. You’ll never get your credit rating back. You want a straight-arrow Vermont lawyer who specializes in debt relief, knows all about the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and hates those bloodsuckers. I’ll do some research and get you a name.”

“You can do that?”

“I’m pretty sure.” If they didn’t take his computer away first, that was. “The lawyer needs to find out which collection agencies are in charge of trying to get the money. The ones that are scaring you and calling in the middle of the night. The banks and credit card companies don’t like to give the names of the stooges they use, but unless Fair Debt’s repealed—and there are powerful people in Washington trying to do that—a good lawyer can force them to do it. The people phoning you step over the line all the time. They’re a bunch of scumbags working in boiler rooms.”

Not all that different from the scumbags working here, Luke thought.

“What are boiler—”

“Never mind.” This was going on too long. “A good debt relief lawyer will go to the banks with your answering machine tapes and tell them they have two choices: forgive the debts or go to court, charged with illegal business practices. Banks hate going to court and having people find out they’re hiring guys just one step away from leg-breakers in a Scorsese movie.”

“You don’t think I have to pay?” Maureen looked dazed.

He looked straight into her tired, too-pale face. “Did you do anything wrong?”

She shook her head. “But it’s so much. He was furnishing his own place in Albany, buying stereos and computers and flatscreen TVs, he’s got a dolly and he’s buying her things, he likes casinos, and it’s been going on for years. Stupid trusting me didn’t know until it was too late.”

“It’s not too late, that’s what—”

“Hi, Luke.”

Luke jumped, turned, and saw Avery Dixon. “Hi. How was the trampoline?”

“Good. Then boring. Guess what? I had a shot, and I didn’t even cry.”

“Good for you.”

“Want to watch TV up in the lounge until lunch? They have Nickelodeon, Iris said so. SpongeBob and Rusty Rivets and The Loud House.”

“Not now,” Luke said, “but you knock yourself out.”

Avery studied the two of them a moment longer, then headed up the hall.

Once he was gone, Luke turned back to Maureen. “It’s not too late, that’s what I’m saying. But you have to move fast. Meet me here tomorrow. I’ll have a name for you. Somebody good. Somebody with a track record. I promise.”

“This… son, this is too good to be true.”

He liked her calling him son. It gave him a warm feeling. Stupid, maybe, but still true.

“It’s not, though. What they’re trying to do to you is too bad to be true. I really have to go. It’s almost lunchtime.”

“I won’t forget this,” she said, and squeezed his hand. “If you can—”

The doors banged open at the far end of the hall. Luke was suddenly sure he was going to see a couple of caretakers, a couple of the mean ones—Tony and Zeke, maybe—coming for him. They’d take him somewhere and question him about what he and Maureen had been talking about, and if he didn’t tell right away, they’d use “enhanced interrogation techniques” until he spilled everything. He’d be in trouble, but Maureen’s trouble might be even worse.

“Take it easy, Luke,” she said. “It’s just the new residents.”

Three pink-clad caretakers came through the doors. They were pulling a train of gurneys. There were sleeping girls on the first two, both blond. On the third was a hulk of a red-haired boy. Presumably the WWF fan. All were asleep. As they rolled closer, Luke said, “Holy crow, I think those girls are twins! Identicals!”

“You’re right. Their names are Gerda and Greta. Now go on and get something to eat. I need to help those fellas get the new ones situated.”

11

Avery was sitting in one of the lounge chairs, swinging his feet and eating a Slim Jim as he watched the goings-ons in Bikini Bottom. “I got two tokens for not crying when I got my shot.”

“Good.”

“You can have the other one, if you want it.”

“No, thanks. You keep it for later.”

“Okay. SpongeBob is good, but I wish I could go home.” Avery didn’t sob or bawl or anything, but tears began to leak from the corners of his eyes.

“Yeah, me too. Squish over.”

Avery squished over and Luke sat down next to him. It was a tight fit, but that was okay. Luke put an arm around Avery’s shoulders and gave him a little hug. Avery responded by putting his head on Luke’s shoulder, which touched him in a way he couldn’t define and made him feel a little like crying himself.

“Guess what, Maureen has a kid,” Avery said.

“Yeah? You think?”

“Sure. He was little but now he’s big. Older even than Nicky.”

“Uh-huh, okay.”

“It’s a secret.” Avery didn’t take his eyes from the screen, where Patrick was having an argument with Mr. Krabs. “She’s saving money for him.”

“Really? And you know this how?”

Avery looked at him. “I just do. Like I know your best friend is Rolf and you lived on Wildersmoochy Drive.”

Luke gaped at him. “Jesus, Avery.”

“Good, ain’t I?”

And although there were still tears on his cheeks, Avery giggled.

12

After lunch, George proposed a game of three-on-three badminton: he, Nicky, and Helen against Luke, Kalisha, and Iris. George said Nicky’s team could even have Avery as a bonus.

“He’s not a bonus, he’s a liability,” Helen said, and waved at a cloud of minges surrounding her.

“What’s a liability?” Avery asked.

“If you want to know, read my mind,” Helen said. “Besides, badminton’s for pussies who can’t play tennis.”

“Aren’t you cheerful company,” Kalisha said.

Helen, walking toward the picnic tables and games cabinet, hoisted a middle finger over her shoulder without looking back. And pumped it. Iris said it could be Nicky and George against Luke and Kalisha; she, Iris, would ump the sidelines. Avery said he would help. All finding this agreeable, the game began. The score was ten-all when the door to the lounge banged open and the new boy walked out, almost managing a straight line. He looked dazed from whatever drug had been in his system. He also looked pissed off. Luke put him at six feet and maybe sixteen years of age. He was carrying a considerable belly in front—a food gut that might become a beer gut in adulthood—but his sunburned arms were slabbed with muscle, and he had an awesome set of traps, maybe from lifting. His cheeks were spattered with freckles and acne. His eyes looked pink and irritated. His red hair was standing up in sleep-scruffy patches. They all stopped what they were doing to check him out.

Whispering without moving her lips, like a con in a prison yard, Kalisha said, “It’s the Incredible Bulk.”

The new kid stopped by the trampoline and surveyed the others. He spoke slowly, in spaced bursts, as if suspecting those he addressed were primitives with little grasp of English. His accent was southern. “What… the fuck… is this?”

Avery trotted over. “It’s the Institute. Hi, I’m Avery. What’s your n—”

The new kid put the heel of his hand against Avery’s chin and shoved. It wasn’t particularly hard, almost absent-minded, but Avery went sprawling on one of the cushions surrounding the trampoline, staring up at the new kid with an expression of shocked surprise. The new kid took no notice of him, or the badminton players, or Iris, or Helen, who had paused in the act of dealing herself a hand of solitaire. He seemed to be talking to himself.

“What… the fuck… is this?” He waved irritably at the bugs. Like Luke on his first visit to the playground, New Kid hadn’t slathered on any repellent. The minges weren’t just swarming; they were lighting on him and sampling his sweat.

“Aw, man,” Nicky said. “You shouldn’t have knocked the Avester over like that. He was trying to be nice.”

New Kid at last paid some attention. He turned to Nick. “Who… the fuck… are you?”

“Nick Wilholm. Help Avery up.”

“What?”

Nick looked patient. “You knocked him over, you help him up.”

“I’ll do it,” Kalisha said, and hurried to the trampoline. She bent to take Avery’s arm, and New Kid pushed her. She missed the springy stuff and sprawled on the gravel, scraping one knee.

Nick dropped his badminton racquet and walked over to New Kid. He put his hands on his hips. “Now you can help them both up. I’m sure you’re disoriented as hell, but that’s no excuse.”

“What if I don’t?”

Nicky smiled. “Then I’ll fuck you up, fat boy.”

Helen Simms was looking on with interest from the picnic table. George apparently decided to head for safer territory. He strolled toward the door to the lounge, giving New Kid a wide berth as he did so.

“Don’t bother with him if he wants to be an asshole,” Kalisha said to Nicky. “We’re okay, Avery, aren’t we?” She helped him to his feet and started backing away.

“Sure we are,” Avery said, but tears were once more spilling down his chubby cheeks.

“Who you callin a asshole, bitch?”

Nick said, “Must be you, since you’re the only asshole here.” He took a step closer to New Kid. Luke was fascinated by the contrast. New Kid was a mallet; Nicky was a blade. “You need to apologize.”

“Fuck you and fuck your apology,” New Kid said. “I don’t know what this place is, but I know I’m not staying. Now get out my face.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Nicky said. “You’re here for the long haul, just like the rest of us.” He smiled without showing his teeth.

“Stop it, both of you,” Kalisha said. She had her arm around Avery’s shoulders, and Luke didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what she was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing: New Kid outweighed Nicky by sixty pounds at least, probably more like eighty, and although New Kid was carrying plenty of table muscle in front, those arms were slabs.

“Last warning,” New Kid said. “Move or I’ll lay you t’fuck out.”

George seemed to have changed his mind about going inside. Now he was strolling back toward New Kid, not behind him but to one side. It was Helen who was coming up behind him, not fast but with that nice little hip-sway Luke so admired. And a small smile of her own.

George’s face contracted in a frown of concentration, lips pressing together and forehead furrowing. The minges that had been circling both boys suddenly drew together and gusted at New Kid’s face as if on an invisible breath of wind. He raised a hand to his eyes, waving at them. Helen dropped to her knees behind him, and Nicky gave the redhead a shove. New Kid went sprawling, half on gravel and half on asphalt.

Helen leaped to her feet and pranced away, laughing and pointing. “Nookies on you, big boy, nookies on you, nookies all over you!”

With a roar of fury, New Kid began getting up. Before he could accomplish that, Nick stepped forward and kicked him in the thigh. Hard. New Kid screamed, clutched at his leg, and pulled his knees up to his chest.

“Jesus, stop it!” Iris cried. “Haven’t we got enough trouble without this?”

The old Luke might have agreed; the new Luke—the Institute Luke—did not. “He started it. And maybe he needed it.”

“I’ll get you!” New Kid sobbed. “I’ll get all of you fucking dirty fighters!” His face had gone an alarming red-purple. Luke found himself wondering if an overweight sixteen-year-old could have a stroke, and found—appalling but true—that he did not care.

Nicky dropped to one knee. “You won’t get shit,” he said. “Right now you need to listen to me, fatso. We’re not your problem. They’re your problem.”

Luke looked around and saw three caretakers standing shoulder to shoulder just outside the door of the lounge: Joe, Hadad, and Gladys. Hadad no longer looked friendly, and Gladys’s plastic smile was gone. All three were holding black gadgets with wires sticking out of them. They weren’t moving in yet, but they were ready to. Because you don’t let the test animals hurt each other, Luke thought. That’s one thing you don’t do. The test animals are valuable.

Nicky said, “Help me with this bastard, Luke.”

Luke took one of New Kid’s arms and got it around his neck. Nick did the same with the other. The kid’s skin was hot and oily with sweat. He was gasping for breath between clenched teeth. Together, Luke and Nicky hauled him to his feet.

“Nicky?” Joe called. “Everything all right? Shit-storm over?”

“All over,” Nicky said.

“It better be,” Hadad said. He and Gladys went back inside. Joe stood where he was, still holding his black gadget.

“We’re totally okay,” Kalisha said. “It wasn’t a real shit-storm, just a little…”

“Disagreement,” Helen said. “Call it a fart skirmish.”

“He didn’t mean anything bad,” Iris said, “he was just upset.” There was genuine kindness in her voice, which made Luke a little ashamed about feeling so happy when Nicky put his foot to the new kid’s leg.

“I’m going to puke,” New Kid announced.

“Not on the trampoline, you’re not,” Nicky said. “We use that thing. Come on, Luke. Help me get him over by the fence.”

New Kid began to make urk-urk noises, his considerable belly heaving. Luke and Nicky walked him toward the fence between the playground and the woods. They got there just in time. New Kid put his head against the chainlink diamonds and spewed through them, giving up the last remains of whatever he’d eaten on the outside, when he had been Free Kid instead of New Kid.

“Eww,” Helen said. “Somebody had creamed corn, how gross is that?”

“Any better?” Nicky asked.

New Kid nodded.

“Finished?”

New Kid shook his head and upchucked again, this time with less strength. “I think…” He cleared his throat, and more goo sprayed.

“Jesus,” Nicky said, wiping his cheek. “Do you serve towels with your showers?”

“I think I’m gonna pass out.”

“You’re not,” Luke said. He actually wasn’t sure of this, but thought it best to stay positive. “Come over here in the shade.”

They got him to the picnic table. Kalisha sat down beside him and told him to lower his head. He did so without argument.

“What’s your name?” Nicky asked.

“Harry Cross.” The fight had gone out of him. He sounded tired and humbled. “I’m from Selma. That’s in Alabama. I don’t know how I got here or what’s happening nor nuthin.”

“We can tell you some stuff,” Luke said, “but you need to cut the shit. You need to get right. This place is bad enough without fighting among ourselves.”

“And you need to apologize to Avery,” George said. There was none of the class clown in him now. “That’s how the getting right starts.”

“That’s okay,” Avery said. “He didn’t hurt me.”

Kalisha took no notice. “Apologize.”

Harry Cross looked up. He swabbed a hand across his flushed and homely face. “Sorry I knocked you over, kid.” He looked around at the others. “Okay?”

“Half okay.” Luke pointed at Kalisha. “Her, too.”

Harry heaved a sigh. “Sorry, whatever your name is.”

“It’s Kalisha. If we get on more friendly terms, which don’t seem too likely as of this moment, you can call me Sha.”

“Just don’t call her Sport,” Luke said. George laughed and clapped him on the back.

“Whatever,” Harry muttered. He wiped something else from his chin.

Nicky said, “Now that the excitement’s over, why don’t we finish the goddam badminton ga—”

“Hello, girls,” Iris said. “Do you want to come over here?”

Luke looked around. Joe was gone. There were two little blond girls standing where he had been. They were holding hands and wearing identical expressions of dazed terror. Everything about them was identical except for their tee-shirts, one green and one red. Luke thought of Dr. Seuss: Thing One and Thing Two.

“Come on,” Kalisha said. “It’s all right. The trouble’s over.”

If only that were true, Luke thought.

13

At quarter of four that afternoon, Luke was in his room reading more about Vermont lawyers who specialized in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. So far, no one had asked him why he was so interested in this particular subject. Nobody had asked him about H. G. Wells’s invisible man, either. Luke supposed he could devise some sort of test to discover if they were monitoring him—googling ways to commit suicide would probably work—and then decided doing that would be nuts. Why kick a sleeping dog? And since it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to life as he was now living it, it was probably better not to know.

There came a brisk rap on the door. It opened before he could call come in. It was a caretaker. She was tall and dark haired, the nametag on her pink top proclaiming her PRISCILLA.

“The eye thing, right?” Luke asked, turning off his laptop.

“Right. Let’s go.” No smile, no chirpy good cheer. After Gladys, Luke found this a relief.

They went back to the elevator, then down to C-Level.

“How deep does this place go?” Luke asked.

Priscilla glanced at him. “None of your business.”

“I was only making con—”

“Well, don’t. Just shut up.”

Luke shut up.

Back in good old Room C-17, Zeke had been replaced by a tech whose nametag said BRANDON. There were also two men in suits present, one with an iPad and one with a clipboard. No nametags for them, so Luke guessed they were doctors. One was extremely tall, with a gut that put Harry Cross’s to shame. He stepped forward and held out his hand.

“Hello, Luke. I’m Dr. Hendricks, Chief of Medical Operations.”

Luke simply looked at the outstretched hand, feeling no urge at all to take it. He was learning all sorts of new behaviors. It was interesting, in a rather horrible way.

Dr. Hendricks gave an odd sort of hee-hawing laugh, half exhaled and half inhaled. “That’s all right, perfectly all right. This is Dr. Evans, in charge of Ophthalmology Operations.” He did the exhale/inhale hee-haw again, so Luke surmised Ophthalmology Operations was doctor humor of some sort.

Dr. Evans, a small man with a fussy mustache, did not laugh at the joke, or even smile. Nor did he offer to shake hands. “So you’re one of our new recruits. Welcome. Have a seat, please.”

Luke did as he was told. Sitting in the chair was certainly better than being bent over it with his bare butt sticking out. Besides, he was pretty sure what this was. He’d had his eyes examined before. In films, the nerdy kid genius always wore thick glasses, but Luke’s vision was 20/20, at least so far. He felt more or less at ease until Hendricks approached him with another hypo. His heart sank at the sight of it.

“Don’t worry, just another quick prick.” Hendricks hee-hawed again, showing buck teeth. “Lots of shots, just like in the Army.”

“Sure, because I’m a conscript,” Luke said.

“Correct, absolutely correct. Hold still.”

Luke took the injection without protesting. There was no flash of heat, but then something else began happening. Something bad. As Priscilla bent to put on one of those Clear Spots, he started to choke. “I can’t…” Swallow, was what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t. His throat locked shut.

“You’re okay,” Hendricks said. “It will pass.” That sounded good, but the other doctor was approaching with a tube, which he apparently meant to jam down Luke’s throat if it became necessary. Hendricks put a hand on his shoulder. “Give him a few seconds.”

Luke stared at them desperately, spit running down his chin, sure they would be the last faces he would see… and then his throat unlocked. He whooped in a great gasp of air.

“See?” Hendricks said. “All fine. Jim, no need to intubate.”

“What… what did you do to me?”

“Nothing at all. You’re fine.”

Dr. Evans handed the plastic tube to Brandon and took Hendricks’s place. He shone a light into Luke’s eyes, then took a small ruler and measured the distance between them. “No corrective lenses?”

“I want to know what that was! I couldn’t breathe! I couldn’t swallow!”

“You’re fine,” Evans said. “Swallowing like a champ. Color going back to normal. Now do you or don’t you wear corrective lenses?”

“I don’t,” Luke said.

“Good. Good for you. Look straight ahead, please.”

Luke looked at the wall. The sensation of having forgotten how to breathe was gone. Brandon pulled down a white screen, then dimmed the lights.

“Keep looking straight ahead,” Dr. Evans said. “If you look away once, Brandon is going to slap you. If you look away a second time, he’ll shock you—low voltage but very painful. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Luke said. He swallowed. It was okay, his throat felt normal, but his heart was still double-timing. “Does the AMA know about this?”

“You need to shut up,” Brandon said.

Shut up seems to be the default position around here, Luke thought. He told himself the worst was over, now it was just an eye test, other kids had been through this and they were fine, but he kept swallowing, verifying that yes, he could do it. They would project the eye chart, he would read it, and this would be over.

“Straight ahead,” Evans almost crooned. “Eyes on the screen and nowhere else.”

Music started—violins playing classical stuff. Meant to be soothing, Luke supposed.

“Priss, turn on the projector,” Evans said.

Instead of an eye chart, a blue spot appeared in the middle of the screen, pulsing slightly, as if it had a heartbeat. A red spot showed up below it, making him think of HAL—“I’m sorry, Dave.” Next came a green spot. The red and green spots pulsed in sync with the blue one, then all three began to flash off and on. Others began to appear, first one by one, then two by two, then by the dozens. Soon the screen was crowded with hundreds of flashing colored dots.

“At the screen,” Evans crooned. “The screeeen. Nowhere else.”

“So if I don’t see them on my own, you project them? Kind of like priming the pump, or something? That doesn’t—”

“Shut up.” Priscilla this time.

Now the dots began to swirl. They chased each other madly, some seeming to spiral, some to flock, some forming circles that rose and fell and crisscrossed. The violins were speeding up, the light classical tune turning into something like hoedown music. The dots weren’t just moving now, they had become a Times Square electronic billboard with its circuits fried and having a consequent nervous breakdown. Luke started to feel like he was having a breakdown. He thought of Harry Cross puking through the chainlink fence and knew he was going to do the same thing if he kept looking at those madly racing colored dots, and he didn’t want to puke, it would end up in his lap, it—

Brandon slapped him, good and hard. The noise was like a small firecracker going off both close and far away. “Look at the screen, sport.”

Something warm was running over his upper lip. Son of a bitch got my nose as well as my cheek, Luke thought, but it didn’t seem important. Those swirling dots were getting into his head, invading his brain like encephalitis or meningitis. Some kind of itis, anyway.

“Okay, Priss, switch off,” Evans said, but she must not have heard him, because the dots didn’t go away. They bloomed and shriveled, each bloom bigger than the last: bwoosh out and zip back in, bwoosh and zip. They were going 3-D, coming off the screen, rushing toward him, rushing back, rushing forward, rushing—

He thought Brandon was saying something about Priscilla, but that had to be in his head, right? And was someone really screaming? If so, could it be him?

“Good boy, Luke, that’s good, you’re doing fine.” Evans’s voice, droning from far away. From a drone high in the stratosphere. Maybe from the other side of the moon.

More colored dots. They weren’t just on the screen now, they were on the walls, swirling on the ceiling, all around him, inside him. It came to Luke, in the last few seconds before he passed out, that they were replacing his brain. He saw his hands fly up among the dots of light, saw them jigging and racing on his skin, became aware that he was thrashing from side to side in the chair.

He tried to say I’m having a seizure, you’re killing me, but all that came out of his mouth was a wretched gargling sound. Then the dots were gone, he was falling out of the chair, he was falling into darkness, and that was a relief. Oh God, what a relief.

14

He was slapped out of unconsciousness. They weren’t hard slaps, not like the one that had made his nose bleed (if that had indeed happened), but they weren’t love-taps, either. He opened his eyes and found himself on the floor. It was a different room. Priscilla was down on one knee beside him. She was the one administering the slaps. Brandon and the two doctors stood by, watching. Hendricks still had his iPad, Evans his clipboard.

“He’s awake,” Priscilla said. “Can you stand up, Luke?”

Luke didn’t know if he could or not. Four or five years ago, he’d come down with strep throat and run a high fever. He felt now as he had then, as if half of him had slipped out of his body and into the atmosphere. His mouth tasted foul, and the latest injection site itched like crazy. He could still feel his throat swelling shut, how horrible that had been.

Brandon didn’t give Luke a chance to test his legs, simply grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet. Luke stood there, swaying.

“What’s your name?” Hendricks asked.

“Luke… Lucas… Ellis.” The words seemed to come not from his mouth but from the detached half of him floating over his head. He was tired. His face throbbed from the repeated slaps, and his nose hurt. He raised a hand (it drifted up slowly, as if through water), rubbed the skin above his lip, and looked without surprise at the flakes of dried blood on his finger. “How long was I out?”

“Sit him down,” Hendricks said.

Brandon took one of his arms, Priscilla the other. They led him to a chair (a plain kitchen chair with no straps, thank God). It was placed in front of a table. Evans was sitting behind it on another kitchen chair. He had a stack of cards in front of him. They were as big as paperback books and had plain blue backs.

“I want to go back to my room,” Luke said. His voice still didn’t seem to be coming from his mouth, but it was a little closer. Maybe. “I want to lie down. I’m sick.”

“Your disorientation will pass,” Hendricks said, “although it might be wise to skip supper. For now, I want you to pay attention to Dr. Evans. We have a little test for you. Once it’s finished, you can go back to your room and… er… decompress.”

Evans picked up the first card and looked at it. “What is it?”

“A card,” Luke said.

“Save the jokes for your YouTube site,” Priscilla said, and slapped him. It was a much harder slap than the ones she’d used to bring him around.

Luke’s ear began to ring, but at least his head felt a little clearer. He looked at Priscilla and saw no hesitation. No regret. Zero empathy. Nothing. Luke realized he wasn’t a child at all to her. She had made some crucial separation in her mind. He was a test subject. You made it do what you wanted, and if it didn’t, you administered what the psychologists called negative reinforcement. And when the tests were over? You went down to the break room for coffee and Danish and talked about your own kids (who were real kids) or bitched about politics, sports, whatever.

But hadn’t he known that already? He supposed so, only knowing a thing and having the truth of it redden your skin were two different things. Luke could see a time coming—and it wouldn’t be long—when he would cringe every time someone raised an open hand to him, even if it was only to shake or give a high five.

Evans laid the card carefully aside, and took another from the stack. “How about this one, Luke?”

“I told you, I don’t know! How can I know what—”

Priscilla slapped him again. The ringing was stronger now, and Luke began to cry. He couldn’t help it. He had thought the Institute was a nightmare, but this was the real nightmare, being half out of his body and asked to say what was on cards he couldn’t see and getting slapped when he said he didn’t know.

“Try, Luke,” Hendricks said into the ear that wasn’t ringing.

“I want to go back to my room. I’m tired. And I feel sick.”

Evans set the second card aside and picked up a third one. “What is it?”

“You’ve made a mistake,” Luke said. “I’m TK, not TP. Maybe Kalisha could tell you what’s on those cards, and I’m sure Avery could, but I’m not TP!”

Evans picked up a fourth. “What is it? No more slaps. Tell me, or this time Brandon will shock you with his zap-stick, and it will hurt. You probably won’t have another seizure, but you might, so tell me, Luke, what is it?”

“The Brooklyn Bridge!” he shouted. “The Eiffel Tower! Brad Pitt in a tuxedo, a dog taking a shit, the Indy 500, I don’t know!”

He waited for the zap-stick—some kind of Taser, he supposed. Maybe it would crackle, or maybe it would make a humming sound. Maybe it would make no sound at all and he’d just jerk and fall on the floor, twitching and drooling. Instead, Evans set the card aside and motioned Brandon to step away. Luke felt no relief.

He thought, I wish I was dead. Dead and out of this.

“Priscilla,” Hendricks said, “take Luke back to his room.”

“Yes, Doctor. Bran, help me with him as far as the elevator.”

By the time they got him there, Luke felt reintegrated again, his mind slipping back into gear. Had they really turned off the projector? And he still kept seeing the dots?

“You made a mistake.” Luke’s mouth and throat were very dry. “I’m not what you people call a TP. You know that, right?”

“Whatever,” Priscilla said indifferently. She turned to Brandon and with a real smile became a new person. “I’ll see you later, right?”

Brandon grinned. “You bet.” He turned to Luke, suddenly made a fist, and drove it at Luke’s face. He stopped an inch short of Luke’s nose, but Luke cringed and cried out. Brandon laughed heartily, and Priscilla gave him an indulgent boys-will-be-boys smile.

“Shake her easy, Luke,” Brandon said, and headed off down the C-Level hall in a modified swagger, his holstered zap-stick bumping against his hip.

Back in the main corridor—what Luke now understood to be the residents’ wing—the little girls, Gerda and Greta, were standing and watching with wide, frightened eyes. They were holding hands and clutching dolls as identical as they were. They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie.

Priscilla accompanied him to his door and walked away without saying anything. Luke went in, saw that no one had come to take away his laptop, and collapsed on his bed without even taking off his shoes. There he slept for the next five hours.

15

Mrs. Sigsby was waiting when Dr. Hendricks, aka Donkey Kong, entered the private suite adjacent to her office. She was perched on the small sofa. He handed her a file. “I know you worship hard copy, so here you are. Much good it will do you.”

She didn’t open it. “It can’t do me good or harm, Dan. These are your tests, your secondary experiments, and they don’t seem to be panning out.”

He set his jaw stubbornly. “Agnes Jordan. William Gortsen. Veena Patel. Two or three others whose names now escape me. Donna something. We had positive results with all of them.”

She sighed and primped at her thinning hair. Hendricks thought Siggers had a bird’s face: a sharp nose instead of a beak, but the same avid little eyes. A bird’s face with a bureaucrat’s brain behind it. Hopeless, really. “And dozens of pinks with whom you had no results at all.”

“Perhaps that’s true, but think about it,” he said, because what he wanted to say—How can you be so stupid?—would get him in a world of trouble. “If telepathy and telekinesis are linked, as my experiments suggest they are, there may be other psychic abilities, as well, latent and just waiting to be brought to the fore. What these kids can do, even the most talented ones, may only be the tip of the iceberg. Suppose psychic healing is a real possibility? Suppose a glioblastoma tumor like the one that killed John McCain could be cured simply by the power of thought? Suppose these abilities could be channeled to lengthen life, perhaps to a hundred and fifty years, even longer? What we’re using them for doesn’t have to be the end; it might only be the beginning!”

“I’ve heard all this before,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “And read it in what you’re pleased to call your mission statement.”

But you don’t understand, he thought. Neither does Stackhouse. Evans does, sort of, but not even he sees the vast potential. “It’s not as though the Ellis boy or Iris Stanhope are especially valuable. We don’t call them pinks for nothing.” He made a pish sound, and waved his hand.

“That was truer twenty years ago than it is today,” Mrs. Sigsby replied. “Even ten.”

“But—”

“Enough, Dan. Did the Ellis boy show indications of TP, or didn’t he?”

“No, but he continued to see the lights after the projector was turned off, which we believe is an indicator. A strong indicator. Then, unfortunately, he had a seizure. Which isn’t uncommon, as you know.”

She sighed. “I have no objection to you continuing your tests with the Stasi Lights, Dan, but you need to keep perspective here. Our main purpose is to prepare the residents for Back Half. That’s the important thing, the main objective. Any side-effects are not of great concern. The management isn’t interested in the psychic equivalent of Rogaine.”

Hendricks recoiled as if she had struck at him. “A hypertension medicine that also proved able to grow hair on the skulls of bald suburbanites is hardly in the same league as a procedure that could change the course of human existence!”

“Perhaps not, and perhaps if your tests had caused more frequent results, I—and the people who pay our salaries—might be more excited. But all you have now are a few random hits.”

He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again when she gave him her most forbidding look.

“You can continue your tests for the time being, be content with that. You should be, considering that we have lost several children as a result of them.”

“Pinks,” he said, and made that dismissive pish sound again.

“You act as though they were a dime a dozen,” she said. “Maybe once they were, but no more, Dan. No more. In the meantime, here’s a file for you.”

It was a red file. Stamped across it was RELOCATION.

16

When Luke walked into the lounge that evening, he found Kalisha sitting on the floor with her back against one of the big windows looking out on the playground. She was sipping from one of the small bottles of alcohol available for purchase in the snack machine.

“You drink that stuff?” he asked, sitting down beside her. In the playground, Avery and Helen were on the trampoline. She was apparently teaching him how to do a forward roll. Soon it would be too dark and they’d have to come in. Although never closed, the playground had no lights, and that discouraged most nighttime visits.

“First time. Used all my tokens. It’s pretty horrible. Want some?” She held out the bottle, which contained a beverage called Twisted Tea.

“I’ll pass. Sha, why didn’t you tell me that light test was so bad?”

“Call me Kalisha. You’re the only one who does, and I like it.” Her voice was the tiniest bit slurred. She couldn’t have drunk more than a few ounces of the alcoholic tea, but he supposed she wasn’t used to it.

“All right. Kalisha. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged. “They make you look at dancing colored lights until you get a little woozy. What’s so bad about that?” That came out tha.

“Really? Is that all that happened to you?”

“Yes. Why? What happened to you?”

“They gave me a shot first, and I had a reaction. My throat closed up. I thought for a minute I was going to die.”

“Huh. They gave me a shot before I had the test, but nothing happened. That does sound bad. I’m sorry, Lukey.”

“That was only the first bad part. I passed out while I was looking at the lights. Had a seizure, I think.” He had also wet his pants a little, but that was information he’d keep to himself. “When I woke up…” He paused, getting himself under control. He had no urge to cry in front of this pretty girl with her pretty brown eyes and curly black hair. “When I woke up, they slapped me around.”

She sat up straight. “Say what?”

He nodded. “Then one of the docs… Evans, do you know him?”

“The one with the little ’stash.” She wrinkled her nose and had another sip.

“Yeah, him. He had some cards and tried to get me to say what was on them. They were ESP cards. Pretty much had to be. You talked about them, remember?”

“Sure. They’ve tested those on me a dozen times. Two dozen. But they didn’t after the lights. They just took me back to my room.” She took another tiny sip. “They must have confused their paperwork, thought you were TP instead of TK.”

“That’s what I thought at first, and I told them, but they kept slapping me. Like they thought I was faking.”

“Craziest thing I ever heard,” she said. Hurr instead of heard.

“I think it happened because I’m not what you guys call a pos. I’m just ordinary. They call us ordinary kids pinks.”

“Yeah. Pinks. That’s right.”

“What about the other kids? Did any of that stuff happen to them?”

“Never asked them. Sure you don’t want some of this?”

Luke took the bottle and had a swallow, mostly so she wouldn’t drink all of it. In his estimation, she’d had enough. It was just as horrible as he’d expected. He handed it back.

“Don’t you want to know what I’m celebrating?”

“What?”

“Iris. Her memory. She’s like you, nothing special, just a little TK. They came and took her an hour ago. And as George would say, we will see her no more.”

She began to cry. Luke put his arms around her. He couldn’t think what else to do. She put her head on his shoulder.

17

That night he went to the Mr. Griffin site again, typed in the Star Trib web address, and stared at it for almost three minutes before backing out without hitting enter. Coward, he thought. I’m a coward. If they’re dead, I should find out. Only he didn’t know how he could face that news without breaking down completely. Besides, what good would it do?

He typed in Vermont debt lawyers instead. He had already researched this, but told himself that double-checking his work was always a good idea. And it would pass the time.

Twenty minutes later he shut down and was debating whether to take a walk and see who was around (Kalisha would be his first choice, if she wasn’t sleeping it off ), when the colored spots came back. They swirled in front of his eyes and the world started to go away. To pull away, like a train leaving the station while he watched from the platform.

He put his head down on the closed laptop and took big slow breaths, telling himself to hold on, hold on, just hold on. Telling himself it would pass, not allowing himself to wonder what would happen if it didn’t. At least he could swallow. Swallowing was fine, and eventually that sense of drifting away from himself—drifting into a universe of swirling lights—did pass. He didn’t know how long it took, maybe only a minute or two, but it felt much longer.

He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, looking at himself in the mirror as he did it. They could know about the dots, probably did know about the dots, but not about the other. He had no idea what had been on the first card, or on the third one, but the second had been a boy on a bike and the fourth had been a small dog with a ball in its mouth. Black dog, red ball. It seemed he was TP after all.

Or was now.

He rinsed his mouth, turned off the lights, undressed in the dark, and laid down on his bed. Those lights had changed him. They knew that might happen, but weren’t sure. He didn’t know how he could be positive of that, but—

He was a test subject, maybe they all were, but low-level TPs and TKs—pinks—got extra tests. Why? Because they were less valuable? More expendable if things went wrong? There was no way to be sure, but Luke thought it was likely. The doctors believed the experiment with the cards had been a failure. That was good. These were bad people, and keeping secrets from bad people had to be good, right? But he had an idea the lights might have some purpose beyond growing the talents of the pinks, because stronger TPs and TKs, like Kalisha and George, also got them. What might that other purpose be?

He didn’t know. He only knew that the dots were gone, and Iris was gone, and the dots might come back but Iris wouldn’t. Iris had gone to Back Half and they would see her no more.

18

There were nine children at breakfast the following morning, but with Iris gone, there was little talk and no laughter. George Iles cracked no jokes. Helen Simms breakfasted on candy cigarettes. Harry Cross got a mountain of scrambled eggs from the buffet, and shoveled them in (along with bacon and home fries) without looking up from his plate, like a man doing work. The little girls, Greta and Gerda Wilcox, ate nothing until Gladys appeared, sunny smile and all, and coaxed a few bites into them. The twins seemed to cheer up at her attentions, even laughed a little. Luke thought of taking them aside later and telling them not to trust that smile, but it would frighten them, and what good would that do?

What good would that do had become another mantra, and he recognized it was a bad way to think, a step down the path to acceptance of this place. He didn’t want to go there, no way did he want to go there, but logic was logic. If the little Gs were comforted by the attentions of the big G, maybe that was for the best, but when he thought about those girls getting the rectal thermometer… and the lights…

“What’s up with you?” Nicky asked. “You look like you bit into a lemon.”

“Nothing. Thinking about Iris.”

“She’s history, man.”

Luke looked at him. “That’s cold.”

Nicky shrugged. “The truth often is. Want to go out and play HORSE?”

“No.”

“Come on. I’ll spot you the H and even let you have your ride at the end.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Chicken?” Nicky asked it without rancor.

Luke shook his head. “It would just make me feel bad. I used to play it with my dad.” He heard that used to and hated it.

“Okay, I hear that.” He looked at Luke with an expression Luke could barely stand, especially coming from Nicky Wilholm. “Listen, man…”

“What?”

Nicky sighed. “Just I’ll be out there if you change your mind.”

Luke left the caff and wandered up his corridor—the JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE corridor—and then up the next one, which he now thought of as the Ice Machine Hallway. No sign of Maureen, so he kept going. He passed more motivational posters and more rooms, nine on each side. All the doors stood open, displaying unmade beds and walls that were bare of posters. This made them look like what they really were: jail cells for kids. He passed the elevator annex and kept walking past more rooms. Certain conclusions seemed inescapable. One was that once upon a time there had been a lot more “guests” in the Institute. Unless those in charge had been overly optimistic.

Luke eventually came to another lounge, where the janitor named Fred was running a buffer in big, lackadaisical sweeps. There were snack and drink machines here, but they were empty and unplugged. There was no playground outside, only a swatch of gravel, more chainlink with some benches beyond (presumably for staff members who wanted to take their breaks outside), and the low green admin building seventy yards or so further on. The lair of Mrs. Sigsby, who had told him he was here to serve.

“What are you doing?” Fred the janitor asked.

“Just walking around,” Luke said. “Seeing the sights.”

“There are no sights. Go back where you came from. Play with the other kids.”

“What if I don’t want to?” That sounded pathetic rather than defiant, and Luke wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

Fred was wearing a walkie-talkie on one hip and a zap-stick on the other. He touched the latter. “Go back. Won’t tell you again.”

“Okay. Have a nice day, Fred.”

“Fuck your nice day.” The buffer started up again.

Luke retreated, marveling at how quickly all his unquestioned assumptions about adults—that they were nice to you if you were nice to them, just for starters—had been blown up. He tried not to look into all those empty rooms as he passed them. They were spooky. How many kids had lived in them? What happened to them when they went to Back Half? And where were they now? Home?

“The fuck they are,” he murmured, and wished his mom was around to hear him use that word and reprimand him for it. That he didn’t have his father was bad. That he didn’t have his mother was like a pulled tooth.

When he got to the Ice Machine Hallway, he saw Maureen’s Dandux basket parked outside Avery’s room. He poked his head in, and she gave him a smile as she smoothed down the coverlet on the Avester’s bed. “All okay, Luke?”

A stupid question, but he knew she meant it well; just how he knew might have something or nothing to do with yesterday’s light-show. Maureen’s face looked paler today, the lines around her mouth deeper. Luke thought, This woman is not okay.

“Sure. How about you?”

“I’m fine.” She was lying. This didn’t feel like a hunch or an insight; it felt like a rock-solid fact. “Except this one—Avery—wet the bed last night.” She sighed. “He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. Thankfully it didn’t go through the mattress pad. You take care now, Luke. Have a fine day.” She was looking directly at him, her eyes hopeful. Except it was what was behind them that was hopeful. He thought again, They changed me. I don’t know how and I don’t know how much, but yes, they changed me. Something new has been added. He was very glad he’d lied about the cards. And very glad they believed his lie. At least for now.

He made as if to leave the doorway, then turned back. “Think I’ll get some more ice. They slapped me around some yesterday, and my face is sore.”

“You do that, son. You do that.”

Again, that son warmed him. Made him want to smile.

He got the bucket that was still in his room, dumped the meltwater into the bathroom basin, and took it back to the ice machine. Maureen was there, bent over with her bottom against the cinderblock wall, hands on her shins almost all the way down to her ankles. Luke hurried to her, but she waved him off. “Just stretching my back. Getting the kinks out.”

Luke opened the door of the ice machine and got the scoop. He couldn’t pass her a note, as Kalisha had passed one to him, because although he had a laptop, he had no paper and no pen. Not even a stub of a pencil. Maybe that was good. Notes were dangerous in here.

“Leah Fink, in Burlington,” he murmured as he scooped ice. “Rudolph Davis, in Montpelier. Both have five stars on Legal Eagle. That’s a consumer website. Can you remember the names?”

“Leah Fink, Rudolph Davis. Bless you, Luke.”

Luke knew he should leave it at that, but he was curious. He had always been curious. So instead of going, he pounded at the ice, as if to break it up. It didn’t need any breaking, but it made a nice loud sound. “Avery said the money you’ve got saved is for a kid. I know it’s not any of my business—”

“The little Dixon boy’s one of the mind-readers, isn’t he? And he must be a powerful one, bed-wetter or not. No pink dot on his intake.”

“Yeah, he is.” Luke went on stirring with the ice scoop.

“Well, he’s right. It was a church adoption, right after my boy was born. I wanted to keep him, but pastor and my mother talked me out of it. The dog I married never wanted kids, so it was just the one I gave away. Do you really care about this, Luke?”

“Yeah.” He did, but talking too long might be a bad idea. They might not be able to hear, but they could watch.

“When I started getting my back pains, it came to me that I had to know what became of him, and I found out. State says they’re not supposed to tell where the babies go, but the church keeps adoption records going all the way back to 1950, and I got the computer password. Pastor keeps it right underneath the keyboard in the parsonage. My boy’s just two towns over from where I live in Vermont. A senior in high school. He wants to go to college. I found that out, too. My son wants to go to college. That’s what the money’s for, not to pay off that dirty dog’s bills.”

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, a quick and almost furtive gesture.

He closed the ice chest and straightened up. “Take care of your back, Maureen.”

“I will.”

But what if it was cancer? That was what she thought it was, he knew it.

She touched his shoulder as he turned away and leaned close. Her breath was bad. It was a sick person’s breath. “He doesn’t ever have to know where the money came from, my boy. But he needs to have it. And Luke? Do what they say, now. Everything they say.” She hesitated. “And if you want to talk to anybody about anything… do it here.”

“I thought there were some other places where—”

“Do it here,” she repeated, and rolled her basket back the way she had come.

19

When he returned to the playground, Luke was surprised to see Nicky playing HORSE with Harry Cross. They were laughing and bumping and ranking on each other as if they had been friends since first grade. Helen was sitting at the picnic table, playing double-deck War with Avery. Luke sat down beside her and asked who was winning.

“Hard to tell,” Helen said. “Avery beat me last time, but this one’s a nail-biter.”

“She thinks it’s boring as shit, but she’s being nice,” Avery said. “Isn’t that right, Helen?”

“Indeed it is, Little Kreskin, indeed it is. And after this, we’re moving on to Slap Jack. You won’t like that one because I slap hard.”

Luke looked around, and felt a sudden stab of concern. It bloomed a squadron of ghostly dots in front of his eyes, there and then gone. “Where’s Kalisha? They didn’t—”

“No, no, they didn’t take her anywhere. She’s just having a shower.”

“Luke likes her,” Avery announced. “He likes her a lot.”

“Avery?”

“What, Helen?”

“Some things are better not discussed.”

“Why?”

“Because Y’s a crooked letter and can’t be made straight.” She looked away suddenly. She ran a hand through her tu-tone hair, perhaps to hide her trembling mouth. If so, it didn’t work.

“What’s wrong?” Luke asked.

“Why don’t you just ask Little Kreskin? He sees all, he knows all.”

“She got a thermometer jammed up her butt,” Avery said.

“Oh,” Luke said.

“Right,” Helen said. “How fucking degrading is that?”

“Demeaning,” Luke said.

“But also delightful and delicious,” Helen said, and then they were both laughing. Helen did it with tears standing in her eyes, but laughing was laughing, and being able to do it in here was a treasure.

“I don’t get it,” Avery said. “How is getting a thermometer up your butt delightful and delicious?”

“It’s delicious if you lick it when it comes out,” Luke said, and then they were all howling.

Helen whacked the table, sending the cards flying. “Oh God I’m peeing myself, gross, don’t look!” And she went running, almost knocking George over as he came outside, noshing a peanut butter cup.

“What’s her deal?” George asked.

“Peed herself,” Avery said matter-of-factly. “I peed my bed last night, so I can relate.”

“Thank you for sharing that,” Luke said, smiling. “Go over and play HORSE with Nicky and New Kid.”

“Are you crazy? They’re too big, and Harry already pushed me down once.”

“Then go jump on the trampoline.”

“I’m bored of it.”

“Go jump on it, anyway. I want to talk to George.”

“About the lights? What lights?”

The kid, Luke thought, was fucking eerie. “Go jump, Avester. Show me a couple of forward rolls.”

“And try not to break your neck,” George said. “But if you do, I’ll sing ‘You Are So Beautiful’ at your funeral.”

Avery looked at George fixedly for a moment or two, then said, “But you hate that song.”

“Yes,” George said. “Yes, I do. Saying what I did is called satire. Or maybe irony. I always get those two things mixed up. Go on, now. Put an egg in your shoe and beat it.”

They watched him trudge to the trampoline.

“That kid is ten and except for the ESP shit acts like he’s six,” George said. “How fucked up is that?”

“Pretty fucked up. How old are you, George?”

“Thirteen,” George said, sounding morose. “But these days I feel a hundred. Listen, Luke, they say our parents are okay. Do you believe that?”

It was a delicate question. At last Luke said, “Not… exactly.”

“If you could find out for sure, would you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not me,” George said. “I’ve got enough on my plate already. Finding out they were… you know… that would break me. But I can’t help wondering. Like all the time.”

I could find out for you, Luke thought. I could find out for both of us. He almost leaned forward and whispered it in George’s ear. Then he thought of George saying he had enough on his plate already. “Listen, that eye thing—you had it?”

“Sure. Everyone has it. Just like everyone gets the thermometer up the ass, and the EEG and the EKG and the MRI and the XYZ and the blood tests and the reflex tests and all the other wonderful things you have in store, Lukey.”

Luke thought about asking if George had gone on seeing the dots after the projector was off and decided not to. “Did you have a seizure? Because I did.”

“Nah. They did sit me down at a table, and the asshole doc with the mustache did some card tricks.”

“You mean asking you what was on them.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I thought they were Rhine cards, pretty much had to be. I got tested on those a couple of years before I wound up in this charming hole of hell. This was after my parents figured out I really could move things around sometimes if I looked at them. Once they decided I wasn’t faking it just to freak them out, or as one of my little jokes, they wanted to find out what else was going on with me, so they took me to Princeton, where there’s this thing called Anomalies Research. Or was. I think they closed it down.”

“Anomalies… are you serious?”

“Yeah. Sounds more scientific than Psychic Research, I guess. It was actually part of the Princeton engineering department, if you can believe that. A couple of grad students ran the Rhine cards on me, but I pretty much zeroed out. I wasn’t even able to move much stuff around that day. Sometimes it’s just like that.” He shrugged. “They probably thought I was a faker, which was okey-doke with me. I mean, on a good day I can knock over a pile of blocks, just thinking about them, but that’ll never get me chicks. You agree?”

As someone whose big trick was knocking a pizza pan off a restaurant table without touching it, Luke did. “So did they slap you around?”

“I did get one, and it was a real hummer,” George said. “It was because I tried to make a joke. This bitch named Priscilla laid it on me.”

“I met her. She’s a bitch, all right.”

A word his mother hated even more than fuck, and using it made Luke miss her all over again.

“And you didn’t know what was on the cards.”

George gave him an odd look. “I’m TK, not TP. The same as you. How could I?”

“I guess you couldn’t.”

“Since I’d had the Rhine cards at Princeton, I guessed cross, then star, then wavy lines. Priscilla told me to stop lying, so when Evans looked at the next one, I told him it was a photo of Priscilla’s tits. That’s when she slapped me. Then they let me go back to my room. Tell you the truth, they didn’t seem all that interested. More like they were crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”

“Maybe they didn’t really expect anything,” Luke said. “Maybe you were just a control subject.”

George laughed. “Man, I can’t control jackshit in here. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Did they come back? The lights, I mean? Those colored dots?”

“No.” George looked curious now. “Did they with you?”

“No.” Luke was suddenly glad that Avery wasn’t here, and could only hope the little kid’s brain radio was short-range. “Just… I did have a seizure… or thought I did… and I was afraid they might come back.”

“I don’t get the point of this place,” George said, sounding more morose than ever. “It almost has to be a government installation, but… my mother bought this book, okay? Not long before they took me to Princeton. Psychic Histories and Hoaxes, it was called. I read it when she was done. There was a chapter on government experiments about the stuff we can do. The CIA ran some back in the nineteen-fifties. For telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, even levitation and teleportation. LSD was involved. They got some results, but nothing much.” He leaned forward, blue eyes on Luke’s green ones. “And that’s us, man—nothing much. Are we supposed to achieve world domination for the United States by moving Saltine boxes—and only if they’re empty—or flipping the pages of a book?”

“They could send Avery to Russia,” Luke said. “He could tell them what Putin had for breakfast, and if he was wearing boxers or briefs.”

That made George smile.

“About our parents—” Luke began, but then Kalisha came running out, asking who wanted to play dodgeball.

It turned out they all did.

20

There were no tests for Luke that day, except of his own intestinal fortitude, and that one he flunked again. Twice more he went to the Star Tribune, and twice more he backed out, although the second time he did peep at the headline, something about a guy running over a bunch of people with a truck to prove how religious he was. That was a terrible thing, but at least it was something that was going on beyond the Institute. The outside world was still there, and at least one thing had changed in here: the laptop’s welcome screen now had his name instead of the departed Donna’s.

He would have to look for information about his parents sooner or later. He knew that, and now understood perfectly that old saying about no news being good news.

The following day he was taken back down to C-Level, where a tech named Carlos took three ampules of blood, gave him a shot (no reaction), then had him go into a toilet cubicle and pee in a cup. After that, Carlos and a scowling orderly named Winona escorted him down to D-Level. Winona was reputed to be one of the mean ones, and Luke made no attempt to talk to her. They took him to a large room containing an MRI tube that must have cost megabucks.

It almost has to be a government installation, George had said. If so, what would John and Josie Q. Public think about how their tax dollars were being spent? Luke guessed that in a country where people squalled about Big Brother even if faced with some piddling requirement like having to wear a motorcycle helmet or get a license to carry a concealed weapon, the answer would be “not much.”

A new tech was waiting for them, but before he and Carlos could insert Luke in the tube, Dr. Evans darted in, checked Luke’s arm around the site of his latest shot, and pronounced him “fine as paint.” Whatever that meant. He asked if Luke had experienced any more seizures or fainting spells.

“No.”

“What about the colored lights? Any recurrence of those? Perhaps while exercising, perhaps while looking at your laptop computer, perhaps while straining at stool? That means—”

“I know what it means. No.”

“Don’t lie to me, Luke.”

“I’m not.” Wondering if the MRI would detect some change in his brain activity and prove him a liar.

“Okay, good.” Not good, Luke thought. You’re disappointed. Which makes me happy.

Evans scribbled something on his clipboard. “Carry on, lady and gentlemen, carry on!” And he darted out again, like a white rabbit late for a very important date.

The MRI tech—DAVE, his tag said—asked Luke if he was claustrophobic. “You probably know what that means, too.”

“I’m not,” Luke said. “The only thing I’m phobic about is being locked up.”

Dave was an earnest-looking fellow, middle-aged, bespectacled, mostly bald. He looked like an accountant. Of course, so had Adolf Eichmann. “Just if you are… claustrophobic, I mean… I can give you a Valium. It’s allowed.”

“That’s all right.”

“You should have one, anyway,” Carlos said. “You’re gonna be in there a long time, on and off, and it makes the experience more pleasant. You might even sleep, although it’s pretty loud. Bumps and bangs, you know.”

Luke knew. He’d never actually been in an MRI tube, but he’d seen plenty of doctor shows. “I’ll pass.”

But after lunch (brought in by Gladys), he took the Valium, partly out of curiosity, mostly out of boredom. He’d had three stints in the MRI, and according to Dave, had three more to go. Luke didn’t bother asking what they were testing for, looking for, or hoping to find. The answer would have been some form of none of your beeswax. He wasn’t sure they knew themselves.

The Valium gave him a floaty, dreamy feeling, and during the last stint in the tube, he fell into a light doze in spite of the loud banging the machine made when it took its pictures. By the time Winona appeared to take him back to the residence level, the Valium had worn off and he just felt spaced out.

She reached into her pocket and brought out a handful of tokens. When she handed them to him, one fell to the floor and rolled.

“Pick that up, butterfingers.”

He picked it up.

“You’ve had a long day,” she said, and actually smiled. “Why don’t you go get yourself something to drink? Kick back. Relax. I recommend the Harveys Bristol Cream.”

She was middle-aged, plenty old enough to have a kid Luke’s age. Maybe two. Would she have made a similar recommendation to them? Gee, you had a tough day at school, why not kick back and have a wine cooler before tackling your homework? He thought of saying that, the worst she’d probably do was slap him, but…

“What good would it do?”

“Huh?” She was frowning at him. “What good would what do?”

“Anything,” he said. “Anything at all, Winnie.” He didn’t want Harveys Bristol Cream, or Twisted Tea, or even Stump Jump Grenache, a name John Keats might have been thinking of when he said something or other was “call’d as romantic as that westwards moon in yon waning ribbon of the night.”

“You want to watch that wise mouth, Luke.”

“I’ll work on that.”

He put the tokens in his pocket. He believed there were nine of them. He would give three to Avery, and three to each of the Wilcox twins. Enough for snacks, not enough for any of the other stuff. All he wanted for himself at the present moment was a big load of protein and carbs. He didn’t care what was on tonight’s menu for supper as long as there was a lot of it.

21

The next morning Joe and Hadad took him back down to C-Level, where he was told to drink a barium solution. Tony stood by with his zap-stick, ready to administer a jolt if Luke voiced any disagreement. Once he’d drained every drop, he was led to a cubicle the size of a bathroom stall in a turnpike rest area and X-rayed. That part went all right, but as he left the cubicle, he cramped up and doubled over.

“Don’t you hurl on this floor,” Tony said. “If you’re going to do it, use the sink in the corner.”

Too late. Luke’s half-digested breakfast came up in a barium puree.

“Ah, shit. You are now going to mop that up, and when you’re done, I want the floor to be so clean I can eat off it.”

“I’ll do it,” Hadad said.

“The fuck you will.” Tony didn’t look at him or raise his voice, but Hadad flinched just the same. “You can get the mop and the bucket. The rest is Luke’s job.”

Hadad got the cleaning stuff. Luke managed to fill the bucket at the sink in the corner of the room, but he was still having stomach cramps, and his arms were trembling too badly to lower it again without spilling the soapy water everywhere. Joe did that for him, whispering “Hang in there, kid” into Luke’s ear.

“Just give him the mop,” Tony said, and Luke understood—in the new way he had of understanding things—that old Tones was enjoying himself.

Luke swabbed and rinsed. Tony surveyed his work, pronounced it unacceptable, and told him to do it again. The cramps had let up, and this time he was able to lift and lower the bucket by himself. Hadad and Joe were sitting down and discussing the chances of the Yankees and the San Diego Padres, apparently their teams of choice. On the way back to the elevator, Hadad clapped him on the back and said, “You done good, Luke. Got some tokens for him, Joey? I’m all out.”

Joe gave him four.

“What are these tests for?” Luke asked.

“Plenty of things,” Hadad said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Which was, Luke thought, perhaps the stupidest piece of advice he’d ever been given. “Am I ever getting out of here?”

“Absolutely,” Joe said. “You won’t remember a thing about it, though.”

He was lying. Again, it wasn’t mind-reading, at least as Luke had always imagined it—hearing words in his mind (or seeing them, like on the crawl at the bottom of a cable news broadcast); it was just knowing, as undeniable as gravity or the irrationality of the square root of two.

“How many more tests will there be?”

“Oh, we’ll keep you busy,” Joe said.

“Just don’t puke on a floor Tony Fizzale has to walk on,” Hadad said, and laughed heartily.

22

A new housekeeper was vacuuming the floor of his room when Luke arrived. This woman—JOLENE, according to her nametag—was plump and in her twenties.

“Where’s Maureen?” Luke asked, although he knew perfectly well. This was Maureen’s off week, and when she came back, it might not be to his part of the Institute, at least not for awhile. He hoped she was in Vermont, getting her runaway husband’s crap sorted out, but he would miss her… although he supposed he might see her in Back Half when it was his turn to go there.

“Mo-Mo’s off making a movie with Johnny Depp,” Jolene said. “One of those pirate things all the kids like. She’s playing the Jolly Roger.” She laughed, then said, “Why don’t you get out of here while I finish up?”

“Because I want to lie down. I don’t feel good.”

“Oh, wah-wah-wah,” Jolene said. “You kids are spoiled rotten. Have someone to clean your room, cook your meals, you got your own TV… you think I had a TV in my room when I was a kid? Or my own bathroom? I had three sisters and two brothers and we all fought over it.”

“We also get to swallow barium and then puke it up. You think you’d like to try some?”

I sound more like Nicky every day, Luke thought, and hey, what’s wrong with that? It’s good to have positive role models.

Jolene turned to him and brandished the vacuum cleaner attachment. “You want to see how getting hit upside the head with this feels?”

Luke left. He walked slowly along the connecting residence corridors, pausing twice to lean against the wall when the cramps hit. At least they were lessening in frequency and intensity. Just before he got to the deserted lounge with its view of the administration building, he went into one of the empty rooms, laid down on the mattress, and went to sleep. He woke up for the first time not expecting to see Rolf Destin’s house outside his bedroom window.

In Luke’s opinion, that was a step in exactly the wrong direction.

23

The next morning he was given a shot, then hooked up to heart and blood pressure monitors, and made to run on a treadmill, monitored by Carlos and Dave. They sped the treadmill up until he was gasping for breath and in danger of tumbling off the end. The readings were mirrored on the little dashboard, and just before Carlos slowed him down, Luke saw the BPM readout was 170.

While he was sipping at a glass of orange juice and getting his breath back, a big bald guy came in and leaned against the wall, arms crossed. He was wearing a brown suit that looked expensive and a white shirt with no tie. His dark eyes surveyed Luke, all the way down from his red and sweaty face to his new sneakers. He said, “I’m told you show signs of slow adjustment, young man. Perhaps Nick Wilholm has something to do with that. He’s not someone you should emulate. You know the meaning of that word, don’t you? Emulate?”

“Yes.”

“He is insolent and unpleasant to men and women who are only trying to do their jobs.”

Luke said nothing. Always safest.

“Don’t let his attitude rub off on you, that would be my advice. My strong advice. And keep your interactions with the service staff to a minimum.”

Luke felt a stab of alarm at that, then realized the bald guy wasn’t talking about Maureen. It was Fred the janitor he was talking about. Luke knew that perfectly well, although he had only talked to Fred once and had talked to Maureen several times.

“Also, stay out of the West Lounge and the empty rooms. If you want to sleep, do it in your own room. Make your stay as pleasant as possible.”

“There’s nothing pleasant about this place,” Luke said.

“You’re welcome to your opinion,” the bald man said. “As I’m sure you’ve heard, they’re like assholes, everybody’s got one. But I think you’re smart enough to know there’s a big difference between nothing pleasant and something unpleasant. Keep it in mind.”

He left.

“Who was that?” Luke asked.

“Stackhouse,” Carlos said. “The Institute’s security officer. You want to stay off his bad side.”

Dave came at him with a needle. “Need to take a little more blood. Won’t take a minute. Be a good sport about it, okay?”

24

After the treadmill and the latest blood draw, there were a couple of days of no tests, at least for Luke. He got a couple of shots—one of which made his whole arm itch fiercely for an hour—but that was all. The Wilcox twins began to adjust, especially after Harry Cross befriended them. He was a TK, and boasted that he could move lots of stuff, but Avery said that was a crock of shit. “He’s got even less than you do, Luke.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “Don’t be too diplomatic, Avery, you’ll strain yourself.”

“What’s diplomatic mean?”

“Spend a token and look it up on your computer.”

“I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that,” Avery said in a surprisingly good imitation of HAL 9000’s softly sinister voice, and began to giggle.

Harry was good to Greta and Gerda, that was undeniable. Every time he saw them, a big goofy grin spread over his face. He would squat down, spread his arms wide, and they would run to him.

“Don’t suppose he’s fiddling with them, do you?” Nicky asked one morning on the playground, watching as Harry monitored the Gs on the trampoline.

“Eww, gross,” Helen said. “You’ve been watching too many Lifetime movies.”

“Nope,” Avery said. He was eating a Choco Pop and had grown a brown mustache. “He doesn’t want to…” He put his small hands on his backside and bumped his hips. Watching this, Luke thought it was a good example of how telepathy was all wrong. You knew way too much, and way too soon.

“Eww,” Helen said again, and covered her eyes. “Don’t make me wish I was blind, Avester.”

“He had cocker spaniels,” Avery said. “Back home. Those girls are like his, you know, there’s a word.”

“Substitute,” Luke said.

“Right, that.”

“I don’t know how Harry was with his dogs,” Nicky said to Luke at lunch later that day, “but those little girls pretty much run him. It’s like someone gave them a new doll. One with red hair and a big gut. Look at that.”

The twins were sitting on either side of Harry and feeding him bites of meatloaf from their plates.

“I think it’s sort of cute,” Kalisha said.

Nicky smiled at her—the one that lit up his whole face (which today included a black eye some staff member had gifted him with). “You would, Sha.”

She smiled back, and Luke felt a twinge of jealousy. Pretty stupid, under the circumstances… yet there it was.

25

The following day, Priscilla and Hadad escorted Luke down to the previously unvisited E-Level. There he was hooked up to an IV that Priscilla said would relax him a little. What it did was knock him cold. When he awoke, shivering and naked, his abdomen, right leg, and right side had been bandaged. Another doctor—RICHARDSON, according to the nametag on her white coat—was leaning over him. “How do you feel, Luke?”

“What did you do to me?” He tried to scream this but could only manage a choked growl. They had put something down his throat, as well. Probably some kind of breathing tube. Belatedly, he cupped his hands over his crotch.

“Just took a few samples.” Dr. Richardson whipped off her paisley surgical cap, releasing a flood of dark hair. “We didn’t take out one of your kidneys to sell on the black market, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’ll have a little pain, especially between your ribs, but it will pass. In the meantime, take these.” She handed him an unmarked brown bottle with a few pills inside.

She left. Zeke came in with his clothes. “Dress when you feel like you can do it without falling down.” Zeke, always considerate, dropped the clothes on the floor.

Eventually Luke was able to pick them up and dress. Priscilla—this time with Gladys—escorted him back to the residence level. It had been daylight when they took him down, but it was dark now. Maybe late at night, he couldn’t tell, his time sense was totally fucked.

“Can you walk down to your room by yourself?” Gladys asked. No big smile; maybe it didn’t work the night shift.

“Yeah.”

“Then go on. Take one of those pills. They’re Oxycontin. They work for the pain, and they also make you feel good. A bonus. You’ll be fine in the morning.”

He walked down the hall, reached for the doorknob of his room, then stopped. Someone was crying. The sound came from the vicinity of that stupid JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE poster, which meant it was probably coming from Kalisha’s room. He debated for a moment, not wanting to know what the crying was about, definitely not feeling up to comforting anyone. Still, it was her, so he went down and knocked softly on the door. There was no answer, so he turned the knob and poked his head in. “Kalisha?”

She was lying on her back with one hand over her eyes. “Go away, Luke. I don’t want you to see me like this.”

He almost did as she asked, but it wasn’t what she wanted. Instead of leaving, he went in and sat down beside her. “What’s wrong?”

But he knew that, too. Just not the details.

26

The kids had been outside in the playground—all of them except Luke, who was down on E-Level, lying unconscious while Dr. Richardson cored out her samples. Two men emerged from the lounge. They were in red scrubs rather than the pink and blue ones the Front Half caretakers and techs wore, and there were no nametags on their shirts. The three old-timers—Kalisha, Nicky, and George—knew what that meant.

“I was sure they were coming for me,” Kalisha told Luke. “I’ve been here the longest, and I haven’t had any tests for at least ten days, even though I’m over the chicken pox. I haven’t even had bloodwork, and you know how those fucking vampires like to take blood. But it was Nicky they came for. Nicky!”

The break in her voice as she said this made Luke sad, because he was pretty crazy about Kalisha, but it didn’t surprise him. Helen turned to him like a compass needle pointing to magnetic north whenever he came in sight; Iris had done the same; even the little Gs looked at him with open mouths and shining eyes when he passed. But Kalisha had been with him the longest, they were Institute vets, and roughly the same age. As a couple they were at least possible.

“He fought them,” Kalisha said. “He fought them hard.” She sat up so suddenly she almost knocked Luke off the bed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth and her fists were clenched on her chest above her slight bosom.

“I should have fought them! We all should have!”

“But it happened too fast, didn’t it?”

“He punched one of them high up—in the throat—and the other one zapped him in the hip. It must have numbed his leg, but he held onto one of the ropes on the ropes course to keep from falling down, and he kicked at that one with his good leg before the bastard could use his zap-stick again.”

“Knocked it out of his hand,” Luke said. He could see it, but saying so was a mistake, it suggested something he didn’t want her to know, but Kalisha didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s right. But then the other one, the one he punched in the throat, he zapped Nicky in the side, and the goddam thing must have been turned all the way up, because I could hear the crackle, even though I was all the way over by the shuffleboard court. Nicky fell down, and they bent over him and zapped him some more, and he jumped, even though he was lying there unconscious he jumped, and Helen ran over, she was shouting ‘You’re killing him, you’re killing him,’ and one of them kicked her high up in the leg, and went hai, like some half-assed karate guy, and he laughed, and she fell down crying, and they picked Nicky up, and they carried him away. But before they got him through the lounge doors…”

She stopped. Luke waited. He knew what came next, it was one of his new hunches that was more than a hunch, but he had to let her say it. Because she couldn’t know what he was now, none of them could know.

“He came around a little,” she said. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “Enough to see us. He smiled, and he waved. He waved. That’s how brave he was.”

“Yeah,” Luke said, hearing was and not is. Thinking: And we’ll see him no more.

She grabbed his neck and brought his face down to hers so unexpectedly and so hard that their foreheads bonked together. “Don’t you say that!”

“I’m sorry,” Luke said, wondering what else she might have seen in his mind. He hoped it wasn’t much. He hoped she was too upset over the red-shirt guys taking Nicky away to Back Half. What she said next eased his mind on that score considerably.

“Did they take samples? They did, didn’t they? You’ve got bandages.”

“Yes.”

“That black-haired bitch, right? Richardson. How many?”

“Three. One from my leg, one from my stomach, one between my ribs. That’s the one that hurts the most.”

She nodded. “They took one from my boob, like a biopsy. That really hurt. Only what if they’re not taking out? What if they’re putting in? They say they’re taking samples, but they lie about everything!”

“You mean more trackers? Why would they, when they’ve got these?” He fingered the chip in his earlobe. It no longer hurt; now it was just a part of him.

“I don’t know,” she said miserably.

Luke reached into his pocket and brought out the bottle of pills. “They gave me these. Maybe you should take one. I think it would mellow you out. Help you to sleep.”

“Oxys?”

He nodded.

She reached for the bottle, then drew her hand back. “Problem is, I don’t want one, I don’t even want two. I want all of them. But I think I should feel what I’m feeling. I think that’s the right thing, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said, which was the truth. These were deep waters, and no matter how smart he was, he was only twelve.

“Go away, Luke. I need to be sad on my own now.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be better tomorrow. And if they take me next…”

“They won’t.” Knowing that was a stupid thing to say, maximo retardo. She was due. Overdue, really.

“If they do, be a friend to Avery. He needs a friend.” She looked at him fixedly. “And so do you.”

“Okay.”

She tried on a smile. “You’re a peach. C’mere.” He leaned over, and she kissed him first on the cheek, then on the corner of his mouth. Her lips were salty. Luke didn’t mind.

As he opened the door, she said, “It should have been me. Or George. Not Nicky. He was the one who never gave in to their bullshit. The one who never gave up.” She raised her voice. “Are you there? Are you listening? I hope you are, because I hate you and I want you to know it! I HATE YOU!”

She fell back on her bed and began to sob. Luke thought about going back to her, but didn’t. He had given all the comfort he could, and he was hurting himself, not just about Nicky but in the places where Dr. Richardson had stuck him. It didn’t matter if the woman with the dark hair had taken tissue samples, or put something into his body (trackers made no sense, but he supposed it could have been some sort of experimental enzyme or vaccine), because none of their tests and injections seemed to make sense. He thought again of the concentration camps, and the horrible, nonsensical experiments that had been conducted there. Freezing people, burning people, giving them diseases.

He went back to his room, considered taking one or even two of the Oxy pills, didn’t.

Thought about using Mr. Griffin to go to the Star Tribune, and didn’t do that, either.

He thought about Nicky, the heartthrob of all the girls. Nicky, who had first put Harry Cross in his place and then made friends with him, which was far bolder than beating him up. Nicky, who had fought their tests, and fought the men from Back Half when they came to get him, the one who never gave up.

27

The next day Joe and Hadad took Luke and George Iles down to C-11, where they were left alone for awhile. When the two caretakers came back, now equipped with cups of coffee, Zeke was with them. He looked red-eyed and hungover. He fitted the two boys with rubber electrode caps, cinching the straps tight under their chins. After Zeke checked the readouts, the two boys took turns in a driving simulator. Dr. Evans came in and stood by with his trusty clipboard, making notes as Zeke called out various numbers that might (or might not) have had to do with reaction time. Luke drove through several traffic signals and caused a fair amount of carnage before he got the hang of it, but after that, the test was actually sort of fun—an Institute first.

When it was over, Dr. Richardson joined Dr. Evans. Today she was dressed in a three-piece skirt suit and heels. She looked ready for a high-powered business meeting. “On a scale of one to ten, how is your pain this morning, Luke?”

“A two,” he said. “On a scale of one to ten, my desire to get the hell out of here is an eleven.”

She chuckled as if he had made a mild joke, said goodbye to Dr. Evans (calling him Jim), and then left.

“So who won?” George asked Dr. Evans.

He smiled indulgently. “It’s not that kind of test, George.”

“Yeah, but who won?”

“You were both quite fast, once you got used to the simulator, which is what we expect with TKs. No more tests today, boys, isn’t that nice? Hadad, Joe, please take these young men upstairs.”

On the way to the elevator, George said, “I ran over I think six pedestrians before I got the knack. How many did you run over?”

“Only three, but I hit a schoolbus. There might have been casualties there.”

“You wank. I totally missed the bus.” The elevator came, and the four of them stepped on. “Actually, I hit seven pedestrians. The last one was on purpose. I was pretending it was Zeke.”

Joe and Hadad looked at each other and laughed. Luke liked them a little for that. He didn’t want to, but he did.

When the two caretakers got back into the elevator, presumably headed down to the break room, Luke said, “After the dots, they tried you on the cards. A telepathy test.”

“Right, I told you that.”

“Have they ever tested you for TK? Asked you to turn on a lamp or maybe knock over a line of dominoes?”

George scratched his head. “Now that you mention it, no. But why would they, when they already know I can do stuff like that? On a good day, at least. What about you?”

“Nope. And I hear what you’re saying, but it’s still funny that they don’t seem to care about testing the limits of what we’ve got.”

“None of it makes any sense, Lukey-Loo. Starting with being here. Let’s get some chow.”

Most of the kids were eating lunch in the caff, but Kalisha and Avery were in the playground. They were sitting on the gravel with their backs against the chainlink fence, looking at each other. Luke told George to go on to lunch and went outside. The pretty black girl and the little white boy weren’t talking… and yet they were. Luke knew that much, but not what the conversation was about.

He flashed back to the SATs, and the girl who’d asked him about the math equation having to do with some guy named Aaron and how much he would have to pay for a hotel room. That seemed to be in another life, but Luke clearly remembered not being able to understand how a problem so simple for him could be so hard for her. He understood it now. Whatever was going on between Kalisha and Avery over there by the fence was far beyond him.

Kalisha looked around and waved him away. “I’ll talk to you later, Luke. Go on and eat.”

“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t talk to her at lunch, because she skipped it. Later, after a heavy nap (he finally broke down and took one of the pain pills), he walked down the hallway toward the lounge and the playground and stopped at her door, which was standing open. The pink bedspread and the pillows with the frou-frou flounces were gone. So was the framed photo of Martin Luther King. Luke stood there, hand over his mouth, eyes wide, letting it sink in.

If she’d fought, as Nicky had, Luke thought the noise would have awakened him in spite of the pill. The other alternative, that she had gone with them willingly, was less palatable but—he had to admit this—more likely. Either way, the girl who had kissed him twice was gone.

He went back to his room and put his face in his pillow.

28

That night, Luke flashed one of his tokens at the laptop’s camera to wake it up, then went to Mr. Griffin. That he still could go there was hopeful. Of course the shitheads running this place might know all about his back door, but what would be the point of that? This led to a conclusion that seemed sturdy enough, at least to him: the Minions of Sigsby might catch him peering into the outside world eventually, in fact that was likely, but so far they hadn’t. They weren’t mirroring his computer. They’re lax about some things, he thought. Maybe about a lot of things, and why wouldn’t they be? They’re not dealing with military prisoners, just a bunch of scared, disoriented kids.

Staging from the Mr. Griffin site, he accessed the Star Tribune. Today’s headline had to do with the continuing fight over health care, which had been going on for years now. The familiar terror of what he might find beyond the front page set in, and he almost exited to the desktop screen. Then he could erase his recent history, shut down, go to bed. Maybe take another pill. What you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt you, that was another saying, and hadn’t he been hurt enough for one day?

Then he thought of Nick. Would Nicky Wilholm have backed out, had he known about a back door like Mr. Griffin? Probably not, almost certainly not, only he wasn’t brave like Nicky.

He remembered Winona handing him that bunch of tokens and how, when he dropped one, she called him butterfingers and told him to pick it up. He had, without so much as a peep of protest. Nicky wouldn’t have done that, either. Luke could almost hear him saying Pick it up yourself, Winnie, and taking the hit that would follow. Maybe even hitting back.

But Luke Ellis wasn’t that guy. Luke Ellis was your basic good boy, doing what he was told, whether it was chores at home or going out for band at school. He hated his goddam trumpet, every third note was a sourball, but he stuck with it because Mr. Greer said he needed at least one extracurricular activity that wasn’t intramural sports. Luke Ellis was the guy who went out of his way to be social so people wouldn’t think he was a weirdo as well as a brainiac. He checked all the correct interaction boxes and then went back to his books. Because there was an abyss, and books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there: all the great mysteries. For Luke, those mysteries mattered. Someday, in the future, he might write books of his own.

But here, the only future was Back Half. Here, the truth of existence was What good would it do?

“Fuck that,” he whispered, and went to the Star Trib’s Local section with his heartbeat thudding in his ears and pulsing in the small wounds, already closing, beneath the bandages.

There was no need to hunt; as soon as he saw his own school photograph from last year, he knew everything there was to know. The headline was unnecessary, but he read it anyway:

The colored lights came back, swirling and pulsing. Luke squinted through them, turned off the laptop, got up on legs that didn’t feel like his legs, and went to his bed in two trembling strides. There he lay in the mild glow of the bedside lamp, staring up at the ceiling. At last those nasty pop-art dots began to fade.

Slain Falcon Heights couple.

He felt as if a previously unsuspected trapdoor had opened in the middle of his mind, and only one thought—clear, hard, and strong—kept him from falling through it: they might be watching. He didn’t believe they knew about the Mr. Griffin site, and his ability to use it to access the outside world. He didn’t believe they knew the lights had caused some fundamental change in his brain, either; they thought the experiment had been a failure. So far, at least. Those were the things he had, and they might be valuable.

The Minions of Sigsby weren’t omnipotent. His continuing ability to access Mr. Griffin proved it. The only kind of rebellion they expected from the residents was the kind that was right out front. Once that was scared or beaten or zapped out of them, they could even be left alone for short periods, the way Joe and Hadad had left him and George alone in C-11 while they got their coffee.

Slain.

That word was the trapdoor, and it would be so easy to fall in. From the very start Luke had been almost sure he was being lied to, but the almost part kept the trapdoor closed. It allowed some small hope. That bald headline ended hope. And since they were dead—slain—who would the most likely suspect be? The MISSING SON, of course. The police investigating the crime would know by now that he was a special child, a genius, and weren’t geniuses supposed to be fragile? Apt to go off the rails?

Kalisha had screamed her defiance, but Luke wouldn’t, no matter how much he wanted to. In his heart he could scream all he wanted, but not out loud. He didn’t know if his secrets could do him any good, but he did know that there were cracks in the walls of what George Iles had so rightly called this hole of hell. If he could use his secrets—and his supposedly superior intelligence—as a crowbar, he might be able to widen one of those cracks. He didn’t know if escape was possible, but should he find a way to do it, escape would only be the first step to a greater goal.

Bring it down on them, he thought. Like Samson after Delilah coaxed him into getting a haircut. Bring it down and crush them. Crush them all.

At some point he dropped into a thin sleep. He dreamed that he was home, and his mother and father were alive. This was a good dream. His father told him not to forget to take out the trashcans. His mother made pancakes and Luke drenched his in blackberry syrup. His dad ate one with peanut butter while watching the morning news on CBS—Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell, who was foxy—and then went to work after kissing Luke on the cheek and Eileen on the mouth. A good dream. Rolf’s mother was taking the boys to school, and when she honked out front, Luke grabbed his backpack and ran to the door. “Hey, don’t forget your lunch money!” his mom called, and handed it to him, only it wasn’t money, it was tokens, and that was when he woke up and realized someone was in his room.

29

Luke couldn’t see who it was, because at some point he must have turned off the bedside lamp, although he couldn’t remember doing it. He could hear a soft shuffle of feet from near his desk, and his first thought was that one of the caretakers had come to take his laptop, because they had been monitoring him all along, and he’d been stupid to believe otherwise. Maximo retardo.

Rage filled him like poison. He did not get out of bed so much as spring from it, meaning to tackle whoever it was that had come into his room. Let the intruder slap, punch, or use his goddam zap-stick. Luke would get in at least a few good blows. They might not understand the real reason he was hitting, but that was all right; Luke would know.

Only it wasn’t an adult. He collided with a small body and knocked it sprawling.

“Ow, Lukey, don’t! Don’t hurt me!”

Avery Dixon. The Avester.

Luke groped, picked him up, and led him over to the bed, where he turned on the lamp. Avery looked terrified.

“Jesus, what are you doing here?”

“I woke up and was scared. I can’t go in with Sha, because they took her away. So I came here. Can I stay? Please?”

All of that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Luke understood this with a clarity that made the other “knowings” he’d had seem dim and tentative. Because Avery was a strong TP, much stronger than Kalisha, and right now Avery was… well… broadcasting.

“You can stay.” But when Avery started to get into bed: “Nuh-uh, you need to go to the bathroom first. You’re not peeing in my bed.”

Avery didn’t argue, and Luke soon heard urine splattering in the bowl. Quite a lot of it. When Avery came back, Luke turned off the light. Avery snuggled up. It was nice not to be alone. Wonderful, in fact.

In his ear, Avery whispered, “I’m sorry about your mumma and your daddy, Luke.”

For a few moments Luke couldn’t speak. When he could, he whispered back, “Were you and Kalisha talking about me yesterday on the playground?”

“Yes. She told me to come. She said she would send you letters, and I would be the mailman. You can tell George and Helen, if you think it’s safe.”

But he wouldn’t, because nothing here was safe. Not even thinking was safe. He replayed what he’d said when Kalisha was telling him about Nicky fighting the red caretakers from Back Half: Knocked it out of his hand. Meaning one of the zap-sticks. She hadn’t asked Luke how he knew that, because she almost certainly knew already. Had he thought he could keep his new TP ability a secret from her? Maybe from the others, but not from Kalisha. And not from Avery.

“Look!” Avery whispered.

Luke could look at nothing, with the lamp off and no window to admit ambient light from outside, the room was completely dark, but he looked anyway, and thought he saw Kalisha.

“Is she all right?” Luke whispered.

“Yes. For now.”

“Is Nicky there? Is he all right?”

“Yes,” Avery whispered. “Iris, too. Only she gets headaches. Other kids do, too. Sha thinks they get them from the movies. And the dots.”

“What movies?”

“I don’t know, Sha hasn’t seen any yet, but Nicky has. Iris, too. Kalisha says she thinks there are other kids—like maybe in the back half of Back Half—but only a few in the place where they are right now. Jimmy and Len. Also Donna.”

I got Donna’s computer, Luke thought. Inherited it.

“Bobby Washington was there at first, but now he’s gone. Iris told Kalisha she saw him.”

“I don’t know those kids.”

“Kalisha says Donna went to Back Half just a couple of days before you came. That’s why you got her computer.”

“You’re eerie,” Luke said.

Avery, who probably knew he was eerie, ignored this. “They get hurty shots. Shots and dots, dots and shots. Sha says she thinks bad things happen in Back Half. She says maybe you can do something. She says…”

He didn’t finish, and didn’t have to. Luke had a brief but blindingly clear image, surely sent from Kalisha Benson by way of Avery Dixon: a canary in a cage. The door swung open and the canary flew out.

“She says you’re the only one who’s smart enough.”

“I will if I can,” Luke said. “What else did she tell you?”

To this there was no answer. Avery had gone to sleep.