The Institute

1

As Train 4297 was leaving the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, yard, bound for Sturbridge, Mrs. Sigsby was studying the files and BDNF levels of two children who would shortly be residing at the Institute. One was male, one female. Ruby Red team would be bringing them in later that evening. The boy, a ten-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, was just 80 on the BDNF scale. The girl, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was an 86. According to the file, she was autistic. That would make her difficult, both for staff and the other residents. If she had been below 80, they might have passed on her. But 86 was an outstanding score.

BDNF stood for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Mrs. Sigsby understood very little of its chemical underpinnings, that was Dr. Hendricks’s bailiwick, but she understood the basics. Like BMR, basal metabolic rate, BDNF was a scale. What it measured was the growth and survival rate of neurons throughout the body, and especially in the brain.

Those few with high BDNF readings, not even .5 per cent of the population, were the luckiest people in the world; Hendricks said they were what God had intended when He made human beings. They were rarely affected by memory loss, depression, or neuropathic pain. They rarely suffered from obesity or the extreme malnutrition that afflicted anorexics and bulimics. They socialized well with others (the incoming girl being a rare exception), were apt to stop trouble rather than start it (Nick Wilholm being another rare exception), they had low susceptibility to such neuroses as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they had high verbal skills. They got few headaches and almost never suffered from migraines. Their cholesterol stayed low no matter what they ate. They did tend to have below average or poor sleep cycles but compensated for this by napping rather than taking sleeping aids.

While not fragile, BDNF could be damaged, sometimes catastrophically. The most common cause was what Hendricks called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE for short. As far as Mrs. Sigsby could tell, that came down to plain old head-banging concussion. Average BDNF was 60 units per milliliter; football players who’d been in the game ten years or more usually measured in the mid-30s, sometimes in the 20s. BDNF declined slowly with normal ageing, much faster with those suffering from Alzheimer’s. None of this mattered to Mrs. Sigsby, who was tasked only with getting results, and over her years at the Institute, results had been good.

What mattered to her, to the Institute, and to those who funded the Institute and had kept it a hard secret since 1955, was that children with high BDNF levels came with certain psychic abilities as part of the package: TK, TP, or (in rare cases) a combination of the two. The children themselves sometimes didn’t know about these abilities, because the talents were usually latent. Those who did know—usually high-functioning TPs like Avery Dixon—were sometimes able to use their talents when it seemed useful to do so, but ignored them the rest of the time.

Almost all newborns were tested for BDNF. Children such as the two whose files Mrs. Sigsby was now reading were flagged, followed, and eventually taken. Their low-level psychic abilities were refined and enhanced. According to Dr. Hendricks, those talents could also be expanded, TK added to TP and vice-versa, although such expansion did not affect the Institute’s mission—its raison d’etre—in the slightest. The occasional success he’d had with the pinks he was given as guinea pigs would never be written up. She was sure Donkey Kong mourned that, even though he had to know that publication in any medical journal would land him in a maximum security prison instead of winning him a Nobel Prize.

There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Rosalind stuck her head in, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but it’s Fred Clark, asking to see you. He seems—”

“Refresh me. Who is Fred Clark?” Mrs. Sigsby took off her reading glasses and rubbed the sides of her nose.

“One of the janitors.”

“Find out what he wants and tell me later. If we’ve got mice chewing the wiring again, it can wait. I’m busy.”

“He says it’s important, and he seems extremely upset.”

Mrs. Sigsby sighed, closed the folder, and put it in a drawer. “All right, send him in. But this better be good.”

It wasn’t. It was bad. Very.

2

Mrs. Sigsby recognized Clark, she’d seen him in the halls many times, pushing a broom or swishing a mop, but she had never seen him like this. He was dead pale, his graying hair was in a tangle, as if he had been rubbing or yanking at it, and his mouth was twitching infirmly.

“What’s the problem, Clark? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You have to come, Mrs. Sigsby. You have to see.”

“See what?”

He shook his head and repeated, “You have to come.”

She went with him along the walkway between the administration building and the West Wing of the residence building. She asked Clark twice more exactly what the problem was, but he would only shake his head and repeat that she had to see it for herself. Mrs. Sigsby’s irritation at being interrupted began to be supplanted by a feeling of unease. One of the kids? A test gone bad, as with the Cross boy? Surely not. If there was a problem with one of them, a caretaker, a tech, or one of the doctors would have been more likely to discover it than a janitor.

Halfway down the mostly deserted West Wing corridor, a boy with a big belly pooching out his sloppily untucked shirt was peering at a piece of paper hanging from the knob of a closed door. He saw Mrs. Sigsby coming and immediately looked alarmed. Which was just the way he should look, in Mrs. Sigsby’s opinion.

“Whipple, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you say to me?”

Stevie chewed his lower lip as he considered this. “Yes, Mrs. Sigsby.”

“Better. Now get out of here. If you’re not being tested, find something to do.”

“Okay. I mean yes, Mrs. Sigsby.”

Stevie headed off, casting one glance back over his shoulder. Mrs. Sigsby didn’t see it. She was looking at the sheet of paper that had been pushed over the doorknob. DO NOT ENTER was written on it, probably by the pen clipped to one of Clark’s shirt pockets.

“I would have locked it if I had a key,” Fred said.

The janitors had keys to the various supply closets on A-Level, also to the vending machines so they could resupply them, but not to the exam or residence rooms. The latter were rarely locked, anyway, except when some bad actor got up to nonsense and had to be restricted for a day as punishment. Nor did the janitors have elevator key cards. If they needed to go to one of the lower levels, they had to find a caretaker or a tech and ride down with them.

Clark said, “If that fat kid had gone in there, he would have gotten the shock of his young life.”

Mrs. Sigsby opened the door without replying and beheld an empty room—no pictures or posters on the wall, nothing on the bed but a bare mattress. No different from any number of rooms in the residence wing these last dozen or so years, when the once strong inflow of high-BDNF children had slowed to a trickle. It was Dr. Hendricks’s theory that high BDNF was being bred out of the human genome, as were certain other human characteristics, like keen vision and hearing. Or, according to him, the ability to wiggle one’s ears. Which might or might not have been a joke. With Donkey Kong, you could never be sure.

She turned to look at Fred.

“It’s in the bathroom. I closed the door, just in case.”

Mrs. Sigsby opened it and stood frozen for a space of seconds. She had seen a great deal during her tenure as Institute head, including the suicide of one resident and the attempted suicide of two others, but she had never seen the suicide of an employee.

The housekeeper (there was no mistaking the brown uniform) had hung herself from the shower head, which would have broken under the weight of someone heavier—the Whipple boy she’d just shooed away, for instance. The dead face glaring back at Mrs. Sigsby was black and swollen. Her tongue protruded from between her lips, almost as if she were giving them a final raspberry. Written on the tile wall in straggling letters was a final message.

“It’s Maureen,” Fred said in a low voice. He took a wad of handkerchief from the back pocket of his work pants and wiped his lips with it. “Maureen Alvorson. She—”

Mrs. Sigsby broke through the ice of shock and looked over her shoulder. The door to the hall was standing open. “Close that.”

“She—”

“Close that door!”

The janitor did as he was told. Mrs. Sigsby felt in the right pocket of her suit jacket, but it was flat. Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit. Careless to have forgotten to bring her walkie, but who knew something like this was in store?

“Go back to my office. Tell Rosalind to give you my walkie-talkie. Bring it to me.”

“You—”

“Shut up.” She turned to him. Her mouth had thinned to a slit, and the way her eyes were bulging from her narrow face made Fred retreat a step. She looked crazy. “Do it, do it fast, and not a word to anyone about this.”

“Okay, you bet.”

He went out, closing the door behind him. Mrs. Sigsby sat down on the bare mattress and looked at the woman hanging from the shower head. And at the message she had written with the lipstick Mrs. Sigsby now observed lying in front of the toilet.

3

Stackhouse was in the Institute’s village, and when he answered her call, he sounded groggy. She assumed he had been living it up at Outlaw Country the night before, possibly in his brown suit, but didn’t bother asking. She just told him to come to the West Wing at once. He’d know which room; a janitor would be standing outside the door.

Hendricks and Evans were on C-Level, conducting tests. Mrs. Sigsby told them to drop what they were doing and send their subjects back to residence. Both doctors were needed in the West Wing. Hendricks, who could be extremely irritating even at the best of times, wanted to know why. Mrs. Sigsby told him to shut up and come.

Stackhouse arrived first. The doctors were right behind him.

“Jim,” Stackhouse said to Evans, after he had taken in the situation. “Lift her. Get me some slack in that rope.”

Evans put his arms around the dead woman’s waist—for a moment it almost looked as if they were dancing—and lifted her. Stackhouse began picking at the knot under her jaw.

“Hurry up,” Evans said. “She’s got a load in her drawers.”

“I’m sure you’ve smelled worse,” Stackhouse said. “Almost got it… wait… okay, here we go.”

He lifted the noose over the dead woman’s head (swearing under his breath when one of her arms flopped chummily down on the nape of his neck) and carried her to the mattress. The noose had left a blackish-purple brand on her neck. The four of them regarded her without speaking. At six-three, Trevor Stackhouse was tall, but Hendricks overtopped him by at least four inches. Standing between them, Mrs. Sigsby looked elfin.

Stackhouse looked at Mrs. Sigsby, eyebrows raised. She looked back without speaking.

On the table beside the bed was a brown pill bottle. Dr. Hendricks picked it up and rattled it. “Oxy. Forty milligrams. Not the highest dosage, but very high, just the same. The ’scrip is for ninety tablets, and there are only three left. I’m assuming we won’t do an autopsy—”

You got that right, Stackhouse thought.

“—but if one were to be performed, I believe we’d find she took most of them before putting the rope around her neck.”

“Which would have been enough to kill her in any case,” Evans said. “This woman can’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. It’s obvious that sciatica wasn’t her primary problem, whatever she may have said. She couldn’t have kept up with her duties for much longer no matter what, so just…”

“Just decided to end it,” Hendricks finished.

Stackhouse was looking at the message on the wall. “Hell is waiting,” he mused. “Considering what we’re doing here, some might call that a reasonable assumption.”

Not prone for vulgarity as a general rule, Mrs. Sigsby said, “Bullshit.”

Stackhouse shrugged. His bald head gleamed beneath the light fixture as if Turtle Waxed. “Outsiders is what I meant, people who don’t know the score. Doesn’t matter. What we’re seeing here is simple enough. A woman with a terminal disease decided to pull the plug.” He pointed at the wall. “After declaring her guilt. And ours.”

It made sense, but Mrs. Sigsby didn’t like it. Alvorson’s final communication to the world might have expressed guilt, but there was also something triumphant about it.

“She had a week off not very long ago,” Fred the janitor volunteered. Mrs. Sigsby hadn’t realized he was still in the room. Somebody should have dismissed him. She should have dismissed him. “She went back home to Vermont. That’s prob’ly where she got the pills.”

“Thanks,” Stackhouse said. “That’s very Sherlockian. Now don’t you have floors to buff?”

“And clean those camera housings,” Mrs. Sigsby snapped. “I asked for that to be done last week. I won’t ask again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Not a word about this, Mr. Clark.”

“No, ma’am. Course not.”

“Cremation?” Stackhouse asked when the janitor was gone.

“Yes. We’ll have a couple of the caretakers take her to the elevator while the residents are at lunch. Which will be”—Mrs. Sigsby checked her watch—“in less than an hour.”

“Is there a problem?” Stackhouse asked. “Other than keeping this from the residents, I mean? I ask because you look like there’s a problem.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked from the words printed on the bathroom tiles to the dead woman’s black face, the tongue protruding. She turned from that final raspberry to the two doctors. “I’d like you to both step out. I need to speak to Mr. Stackhouse privately.”

Hendricks and Evans exchanged a look, then left.

4

“She was your snitch. That’s your problem?”

“Our snitch, Trevor, but yes, that’s the problem. Or might be.”

A year ago—no, more like sixteen months, there had still been snow on the ground—Maureen Alvorson had requested an appointment with Mrs. Sigsby and asked for any job that might provide extra income. Mrs. Sigsby, who’d had a pet project in mind for almost a year but no clear idea of how to implement it, asked if Alvorson would have a problem bringing any information she gleaned from the children. Alvorson agreed, and had even demonstrated a certain level of low cunning by suggesting the story about various supposed dead zones, where the microphones worked poorly or not at all.

Stackhouse shrugged. “What she brought us rarely rose above the level of gossip. Which boy was spending the night with which girl, who wrote TONY SUCKS on a table in the caff, that sort of thing.” He paused. “Although snitching might have added to her guilt, I suppose.”

“She was married,” Mrs. Sigsby said, “but you’ll notice she’s no longer wearing her wedding ring. How much do we know about her life in Vermont?”

“I don’t recall offhand, but it will be in her file, and I’m happy to look it up.”

Mrs. Sigsby considered this, and realized how little she herself knew about Maureen Alvorson. Yes, she had known Alvorson was married, because she had seen the ring. Yes, she was retired military, as were many on the Institute’s staff. Yes, she knew that Alvorson’s home was in Vermont. But she knew little else, and how could that be, when she had hired the woman to spy on the residents? It might not matter now, not with Alvorson dead, but it made Mrs. Sigsby think of how she had left her walkie-talkie behind, assuming that the janitor had his knickers in a twist about nothing. It also made her think about the dusty camera housings, the slow computers and the small and inefficient staff in charge of them, the frequent food spoilage in the caff, the mouse-chewed wires, and the slipshod surveillance reports, especially on the night shift that ran from 11 PM to 7 AM, when the residents were asleep.

It made her think about carelessness.

“Julia? I said I’d—”

“I heard you. I’m not deaf. Who is on surveillance right now?”

Stackhouse looked at his watch. “Probably no one. It’s the middle of the day. The kids will either be in their rooms or doing the usual kid things.”

So you assume, she thought, and what is the mother of carelessness if not assumption? The Institute had been in operation for over sixty years, well over, and there had never been a leak. Never a reason (not on her watch, anyway) to use the special phone, the one they called the Zero Phone, for anything other than routine updates. Nothing, in short, they hadn’t been able to handle in-house.

There were rumors in the Bend, of course. The most common among the citizens being that the compound out in the woods was some kind of nuclear missile base. Or that it had to do with germ or chemical warfare. Another, and this was closer to the truth, was that it was a government experimental station. Rumors were okay. Rumors were self-generated disinformation.

Everything is okay, she told herself. Everything is as it should be. The suicide of a disease-riddled housekeeper is just a bump in the road, and a minor one at that. Still, it was suggestive, of larger… well, not problems, it would be alarmist to call them that, but concerns, for sure. And some of it was her own fault. In the early days of Mrs. Sigsby’s tour, the camera housings never would have been dusty, and she never would have left her office without her walkie. In those days she would have known a lot more about the woman she was paying to snitch on the residents.

She thought about entropy. The tendency to coast when things were going well.

To assume.

“Mrs. Sigsby? Julia? Do you have orders for me?”

She came back to the here and now. “Yes. I want to know everything about her, and if there’s nobody in the surveillance room, I want someone there ASAP. Jerry, I think.” Jerry Symonds was one of their two computer techs, and the best they had when it came to nursing the old equipment along.

“Jerry’s on furlough,” Stackhouse said. “Fishing in Nassau.”

“Andy, then.”

Stackhouse shook his head. “Fellowes is in the village. I saw him coming out of the commissary.”

“Goddammit, he should be here. Zeke, then. Zeke the Greek. He’s worked surveillance before, hasn’t he?”

“I think so,” Stackhouse said, and there it was again. Vagueness. Supposition. Assumption.

Dusty camera housings. Dirty baseboards. Careless talk on B-Level. The surveillance room standing empty.

Mrs. Sigsby decided on the spur of the moment that some big changes were going to be made, and before the leaves started to turn color and fall off the trees. If the Alvorson woman’s suicide served no other purpose, it was a wake-up call. She didn’t like speaking to the man on the other end of the Zero Phone, always felt a slight chill when she heard the faint lisp in his greeting (never Sigsby, always Thigby), but it had to be done. A written report wouldn’t do. They had stringers all over the country. They had a private jet on call. The staff was well paid, and their various jobs came with all the bennies. Yet this facility more and more resembled a Dollar Store in a strip mall on the verge of abandonment. It was mad. Things had to change. Things would change.

She said, “Tell Zeke to run a check on the locater buttons. Let’s make sure all of our charges are present and accounted for. I’m especially interested in Luke Ellis and Avery Dixon. She was talking to them a lot.”

“We know what they’ve been talking about, and it doesn’t come to much.”

“Just do it.”

“Happy to. In the meantime, you need to relax.” He pointed to the corpse with her blackened face and impudently protruding tongue. “And get some perspective. This was a very sick woman who saw the end approaching and high-sided it.”

“Run a check on the residents, Trevor. If they’re all in their places—bright shiny faces optional—then I’ll relax.”

Only she wouldn’t. There had been too much relaxation already.

5

Back in her office, she told Rosalind she didn’t want to be disturbed unless it was Stackhouse or Zeke Ionidis, who was currently running a surveillance check on D-Level. She sat behind her desk, looking at the screen saver on her computer. It showed a white sand beach on Siesta Key, where she told people she planned to retire. She had given up telling herself that. Mrs. Sigsby fully expected to die here in the woods, possibly in her little house in the village, more likely behind this very desk. Two of her favorite writers, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, had died at their desks; why not her? The Institute had become her life, and she was okay with that.

Most of the staff was the same. Once they had been soldiers, or security personnel at hard-edged companies like Blackwater and Tomahawk Global, or law enforcement. Denny Williams and Michelle Robertson of the Ruby Red team had been FBI. If the Institute wasn’t their lives when they were recruited and came on-station, it became their lives. It wasn’t the pay. It wasn’t the bennies or the retirement options. Part of it had to do with a manner of living that was so familiar to them it was a kind of sleep. The Institute was like a small military base; the adjacent village even had a PX where they could buy a wide range of goods at cheap prices and gas up their cars and trucks, paying ninety cents a gallon for regular and a dollar-five for hi-test. Mrs. Sigsby had spent time at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and the town of Dennison River Bend reminded her—on a much smaller scale, granted—of Kaiserslautern, where she and her friends sometimes went to blow off steam. Ramstein had everything, even a twinplex theater and a Johnny Rockets, but sometimes you just wanted to get away. The same was true here.

But they always come back, she thought, looking at a sand beach she sometimes visited but where she would never live. They always come back and no matter how sloppy some things have become around here, they don’t talk. That’s one thing they are never sloppy about. Because if people found out what we’re doing, the hundreds of children we have destroyed, we’d be tried and executed by the dozens. Given the needle like Timothy McVeigh.

That was the dark side of the coin. The bright side was simple: the entire staff, from the often annoying but undoubtedly competent Dr. Dan “Donkey Kong” Hendricks and Drs. Heckle and Jeckle in Back Half, right down to the lowliest janitor, understood that nothing less than the fate of the world was in their hands, as it had been in the hands of those who had come before them. Not just the survival of the human race, but the survival of the planet. They understood there was no limit to what they could and would do in pursuit of those ends. No one who fully grasped the Institute’s work could regard it as monstrous.

Life here was good—good enough, anyway, especially for men and women who’d eaten sand in the Mideast and seen fellow soldiers lying in shitty villages with their legs blown off or their guts hanging out. You got the occasional furlough; you could go home and spend time with your family, assuming you had one (many Institute employees did not). Of course you couldn’t talk to them about what you did, and after awhile they—the wives, the husbands, the children—would realize that it was the job that mattered, not them. Because it took you over. Your life became, in descending order, the Institute, the village, and the town of Dennison River Bend, with its three bars, one featuring live country music. And once the realization set in, the wedding ring would more often than not come off, as Alvorson’s had done.

Mrs. Sigsby unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and took out a phone that looked similar to the ones the extraction teams carried: big and blocky, like a refugee from a time when cassette tapes were giving way to CDs and portable phones were just starting to show up in electronics stores. It was sometimes called the Green Phone, because of its color, and more often the Zero Phone, because there was no screen and no numbers, just three small white circles.

I will call, she thought. Maybe they’ll applaud my forward thinking and congratulate me on my initiative. Maybe they’ll decide I’m jumping at shadows and it’s time to think of a replacement. Either way it has to be done. Duty calls, and it should have called sooner.

“But not today,” she murmured.

No, not today, not while there was Alvorson to take care of (and dispose of ). Maybe not tomorrow or even this week. What she was thinking of doing was no small thing. She would want to make notes, so that when she did call, she could be as on-point as possible. If she really meant to use the Zero, it was imperative that she be ready to reply concisely when she heard the man at the other end say Hello, Mithith Thigby, how can I help?

It’s not the same as procrastinating, she told herself. Not at all. And I don’t necessarily want to get anyone in trouble, but—

Her intercom gave a soft tone. “I have Zeke for you, Mrs. Sigsby. Line three.”

Mrs. Sigsby picked up. “What have you got for me, Ionidis?”

“Perfect attendance,” he said. “Twenty-eight locater blips in Back Half. In Front Half there’s two kids in the lounge, six in the playground, five in their rooms.”

“Very good. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.”

Mrs. Sigsby got up feeling a little better, although she couldn’t have said precisely why. Of course the residents were all accounted for. What had she been thinking, that some of them had gone off to Disney World?

Meanwhile, on to the next chore.

6

Once all the residents were at lunch, Fred the janitor pushed a trolley borrowed from the cafeteria kitchen to the door of the room where Maureen Alvorson had ended her life. Fred and Stackhouse wrapped her in a swatch of green canvas and rolled her up the corridor, double-time. From further on came the sound of the animals at feeding time, but here all was deserted, although someone had left a teddy bear lying on the floor in front of the elevator annex. It stared at the ceiling with its glassy shoebutton eyes. Fred gave it an irritated kick.

Stackhouse looked at him reproachfully. “Bad luck, pal. That’s some child’s comfort-stuffy.”

“I don’t care,” Fred said. “They’re always leaving their shit around for us to pick up.”

When the elevator doors opened, Fred started to pull the trolley in. Stackhouse pushed him back, and not gently. “Your services are not required beyond this point. Pick up that teddy and put it in the lounge or in the canteen, where its owner will see it when he or she comes out. And then start dusting those fucking bulbs.” He pointed up at one of the overhead camera housings, rolled the trolley in, and held his card up to the reader.

Fred Clark waited until the doors were shut before giving him the finger. But orders were orders, and he’d clean the housings. Eventually.

7

Mrs. Sigsby was waiting for Stackhouse on F-Level. It was cold down here, and she was wearing a sweater over her suit jacket. She nodded to him. Stackhouse nodded back and rolled the trolley into the tunnel between Front Half and Back Half. It was the very definition of utilitarian, with its concrete floor, curved tile walls, and overhead fluorescents. A few of these were stuttering, giving the tunnel a horror movie feel, and a few others were dead out. Someone had pasted a New England Patriots bumper sticker on one wall.

More carelessness, she thought. More drift.

The door at the Back Half end of the corridor bore a sign reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Mrs. Sigsby used her card and pushed it open. Beyond was another elevator lobby. A short upward journey brought them to a lounge only slightly less utilitarian than the service tunnel they had taken to get to Back Half. Heckle—real name Dr. Everett Hallas—was waiting for them. He was wearing a big grin and constantly touching the corner of his mouth. It reminded Mrs. Sigsby of the Dixon boy’s obsessive nose-pulling. Except Dixon was only a kid, and Hallas was in his fifties. Working in Back Half took a toll, the way working in an environment polluted with low-level radiation would take a toll.

“Hello, Mrs. Sigsby! Hello, Security Director Stackhouse! How wonderful to see you! We should get together more often! I’m sorry about the circumstances that have brought you here today, however!” He bent and patted the canvas bundle containing Maureen Alvorson. Then touched the corner of his mouth, as if patting at a cold sore only he could see or feel. “In the midst of life, cetra-cetra.”

“We need to make this quick,” Stackhouse said. Meaning, Mrs. Sigsby supposed, we have to get out of here. She quite concurred. This was where the real work was done, and Drs. Heckle and Jeckle (real name Joanne James) were heroes for doing it, but that didn’t make it any easier to be here. She could already feel the atmosphere of the place. It was like being in a low-level electrical field.

“Yes, of course you do, the work never ends, wheels within wheels, big fleas with little fleas to bite em, don’t I know, right this way.”

From the lounge, with its ugly chairs, equally ugly sofa, and elderly flatscreen, they entered a hall with a thick blue carpet on the floor—in Back Half, the children sometimes fell down and bumped their valuable little heads. The trolley’s wheels left tracks in the nap. This looked much like a corridor on the residence level of Front Half, except for the locks on the doors, which were all shut. From behind one of them, Mrs. Sigsby heard pounding and muffled cries of “Let me out!” and “At least give me a fucking aspirin!”

“Iris Stanhope,” Heckle said. “She’s not feeling well today, I’m afraid. On the upside, several of our other recent arrivals are holding up remarkably well. We’re having a movie this evening, you know. And fireworks tomorrow.” He giggled and touched the corner of his mouth, reminding Mrs. Sigsby—grotesquely—of Shirley Temple.

She brushed at her hair to make sure it was still in place. It was, of course. What she was feeling—that low buzz along her exposed skin, the sense that her eyeballs were vibrating in their sockets—wasn’t electricity.

They passed the screening room with its dozen or so plush seats. Sitting in the front row were Kalisha Benson, Nick Wilholm, and George Iles. They were wearing their red and blue singlets. The Benson girl was sucking on a candy cigarette; Wilholm was smoking a real one, the air around his head wreathed with gray smoke. Iles was rubbing lightly at his temples. Benson and Iles turned to look at them as they rolled past with their canvas-wrapped burden; Wilholm just went on staring at the blank movie screen. A lot of steam has been taken out of that hotdog, Mrs. Sigsby thought with satisfaction.

The cafeteria was beyond the screening room, on the other side of the corridor. It was much smaller than the one in Front Half. There were always more children here, but the longer they stayed in Back Half, the less they ate. Mrs. Sigsby supposed an English major might call that irony. Three kids were currently present, two slurping up what looked like oatmeal, the other—a girl of about twelve—simply sitting with a full bowl in front of her. But when she saw them passing with the trolley, she brightened.

“Hi! What you got there? Is it a dead person? It is, isn’t it? Was her name Morris? That’s a funny name for a girl. Maybe it’s Morin. Can I see? Are her eyes open?”

“That’s Donna,” Heckle said. “Ignore her. She’ll be at the movie tonight, but pretty soon I expect she’ll be moving on. Maybe later this week. Greener pastures, cetra-cetra. You know.”

Mrs. Sigsby did know. There was Front Half, there was Back Half… and there was the back half of Back Half. The end of the line. She put her hand to her hair again. Still in place. Of course it was. She thought of a tricycle she’d had as a very young child, the warm squirt of urine in her pants as she rode it up and down the driveway. She thought of broken shoelaces. She thought of her first car, a—

“It was a Valium!” the girl named Donna screamed. She leaped up, knocking her chair over. The other two children looked at her dully, one with oatmeal dripping from his chin. “A Plymouth Valium, I know that! Oh God I want to go home! Oh God stop my head !”

Two caretakers in red scrubs appeared from… from Mrs. Sigsby didn’t know where. Nor did she care. They grabbed the girl by her arms.

“That’s right, take her back to her room,” Heckle said. “No pills, though. We need her tonight.”

Donna Gibson, who had once shared girl-secrets with Kalisha when they were both still in Front Half, began to scream and struggle. The caretakers led her away with the toes of her sneakers brushing the carpet. The broken thoughts in Mrs. Sigsby’s mind first dimmed, then faded. The buzz along her skin, even in the fillings of her teeth, remained, however. Over here it was constant, like the buzz of the fluorescent lights in the corridor.

“All right?” Stackhouse asked Mrs. Sigsby.

“Yes.” Just get me out of here.

“I feel it, too. If it’s any comfort.”

It wasn’t. “Trevor, can you explain to me why bodies bound for the crematorium have to be rolled right through these children’s living quarters?”

“There are tons of beans in Beantown,” Stackhouse replied.

“What?” Mrs. Sigsby asked. “What did you say?”

Stackhouse shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. That came into my head—”

“Yes, yes,” Hallas said. “There are a lot of… uh, shall we say loose transmissions in the air today.”

“I know what it was,” Stackhouse said. “I had to get it out, that’s all. It felt like…”

“Choking on food,” Dr. Hallas said matter-of-factly. “The answer to your question, Mrs. Sigsby is… nobody knows.” He tittered and touched the corner of his mouth.

Just get me out of here, she thought again. “Where is Dr. James, Dr. Hallas?”

“In her quarters. Not feeling well today, I’m afraid. But she sends her regards. Hopes you’re well, fit as a fiddle, in the pink, cetra-cetra.” He smiled and did the Shirley Temple thing again—ain’t I cute?

8

In the screening room, Kalisha plucked the cigarette from Nicky’s fingers, took a final puff from the filterless stub, dropped it to the floor, stepped on it. Then she put an arm around his shoulders. “Bad?”

“I’ve had worse.”

“The movie will make it better.”

“Yeah. But there’s always tomorrow. Now I know why my dad was so butt-ugly when he had a hangover. How about you, Sha?”

“Doing okay.” And she was. Just a low throb over her left eye. Tonight it would be gone. Tomorrow it would be back, and not low. Tomorrow it would be pain that would make the hangovers suffered by Nicky’s dad (and her own parents, from time to time) look like fun in the sun: a steady pounding thud, as if some demonic elf were imprisoned in her head, hammering at her skull in an effort to get out. Even that, she knew, wasn’t as bad as it could be. Nicky’s headaches were worse, Iris’s worse still, and it took longer and longer for the pain to go away.

George was the lucky one; in spite of his strong TK, he had so far felt almost no pain at all. An ache in his temples, he said, and at the back of his skull. But it would get worse. It always did, at least until it was finally over. And then? Ward A. The drone. The hum. The back half of Back Half. Kalisha didn’t look forward to it yet, the idea of being erased as a person still horrified her, but that would change. For Iris, it already had; most of the time she looked like a zombie on The Walking Dead. Helen Simms had pretty much articulated Kalisha’s feelings about Ward A when she said anything was better than the Stasi Lights and a screaming headache that never stopped.

George leaned forward, looking at her across Nick with bright eyes that were still relatively pain-free. “He got out,” he whispered. “Concentrate on that. And hold on.”

“We will,” Kalisha said. “Won’t we, Nick?”

“We’ll try,” Nick said, and managed a smile. “Although the idea of a guy as horrible at HORSE as Lukey Ellis bringing the cavalry is pretty farfetched.”

“He may be bad at HORSE but he’s good at chess,” George said. “Don’t count him out.”

One of the red caretakers appeared in the open doors of the screening room. The caretakers in Front Half wore nametags, but down here no one did. Down here the caretakers were interchangeable. There were no techs, either, only the two Back Half doctors and sometimes Dr. Hendricks: Heckle, Jeckle, and Donkey Kong. The Terrible Trio. “Free time is over. If you’re not going to eat, go back to your rooms.”

The old Nicky might have told this over-muscled lowbrow to go fuck himself. The new version just got to his feet, staggering and grabbing a seatback to keep his balance. It broke Kalisha’s heart to see him this way. What had been taken from Nicky was in some ways worse than murder. In many ways.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll go together. Right, George?”

“Well,” George said, “I was planning to catch a matinee of Jersey Boys this afternoon, but since you insist.”

Here we are, the three fucked-up musketeers, Kalisha thought.

Out in the hall, the drone was much stronger. Yes, she knew Luke was out, Avery had told her, and that was good. The complacent assholes didn’t even know he was gone yet, which was better. But the headaches made hope seem less hopeful. Even when they let up, you were waiting for them to come back, which was its own special brand of hell. And the drone coming from Ward A made hope seem irrelevant, which was awful. She had never felt so lonely, so cornered.

But I have to hold on for as long as I can, she thought. No matter what they do to us with those lights and those goddam movies, I have to hold on. I have to hold on to my mind.

They walked slowly down the hall under the eye of the caretaker, not like children but like invalids. Or old people, whiling away their final weeks in an unpleasant hospice.

9

Led by Dr. Everett Hallas, Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse walked past the closed doors marked Ward A, Stackhouse rolling the trolley. There were no shouts or screams coming from behind those closed doors, but that sense of being in an electrical field was even stronger; it raced over her skin like invisible mouse feet. Stackhouse felt it, too. The hand not busy pushing Maureen Alvorson’s makeshift bier was rubbing his smooth bald dome.

“To me it always feels like cobwebs,” he said. Then, to Heckle, “You don’t feel it?”

“I’m used to it,” he said, and touched the corner of his mouth. “It’s a process of assimilation.” He stopped. “No, that’s not the right word. Acclimation, I think. Or is it acclimatization? Could be either.”

Mrs. Sigsby was struck by a curiosity that was almost whimsical. “Dr. Hallas, when’s your birthday? Do you remember?”

“September ninth. And I know what you’re thinking.” He looked back over his shoulder at the doors with Ward A on them in red, then at Mrs. Sigsby. “I’m fine, howsomever.”

“September ninth,” she said. “That would make you… what? A Libra?”

“Aquarius,” Heckle said, giving her a roguish look that seemed to say You do not fool me so easily, my lady. “When the moon is in the seventh house and Mercury aligns with Mars. Cetra-cetra. Duck, Mr. Stackhouse. Low bridge here.”

They passed along a short, dim hallway, descended a flight of stairs with Stackhouse braking the trolley in front and Mrs Sigsby controlling it from behind, and came to another closed door. Heckle used his key card and they entered a circular room that was uncomfortably warm. There was no furniture, but on one wall was a framed sign: REMEMBER THESE WERE HEROES. It was under dirty smeared glass that badly needed a dose of Windex. On the far side of the room, halfway up a rough cement wall, was a steel hatch, as if for an industrial meat locker. To the left of this was a small readout screen, currently blank. To the right was a pair of buttons, one red and one green.

In here, the broken thoughts and fragments of memory that had troubled Mrs. Sigsby ceased, and the fugitive headache which had been hovering at her temples lifted a bit. That was good, but she couldn’t wait to be out. She seldom visited Back Half, because her presence was unnecessary; the commander of an army rarely needed to visit the front lines as long as the war was going well. And even though she felt better, being in this bare round room was still flat-out horrible.

Hallas also seemed better, no longer Heckle but the man who had spent twenty-five years as an Army doctor and won a Bronze Star. He had straightened, and he had stopped touching his finger to the side of his mouth. His eyes were clear, his questions concise.

“Is she wearing jewelry?”

“No,” Mrs. Sigsby said, thinking of Alvorson’s missing wedding ring.

“I may assume she’s dressed?”

“Of course.” Mrs. Sigsby felt obscurely offended by the question.

“Have you checked her pockets?”

She looked at Stackhouse. He shook his head.

“Do you want to? This is your only chance, if you do.”

Mrs. Sigsby considered the idea and dismissed it. The woman had left her suicide note on the bathroom wall, and her purse would be in her locker. That would need checking, just as a matter of routine, but she wasn’t going to unwrap the housekeeper’s body and expose that protruding impudent tongue again just to find a ChapStick, a roll of Tums, and a few wadded-up Kleenex.

“Not me. What about you, Trevor?”

Stackhouse shook his head again. He had a year-round tan, but today he looked pale beneath it. The Back Half walk-through had taken a toll on him, too. Maybe we should do it more often, she thought. Stay in touch with the process. Then she thought of Dr. Hallas proclaiming himself an Aquarian and Stackhouse saying there were tons of beans in Beantown. She decided that staying in touch with the process was a really bad idea. And by the way, did September 9th really make Hallas a Libra? That didn’t seem quite right. Wasn’t it Virgo?

“Let’s do this,” she said.

“All righty, then,” Dr. Hallas said, and flashed an ear-to-ear smile that was all Heckle. He yanked the handle of the stainless steel door and swung it open. Beyond was blackness, a smell of cooked meat, and a sooty conveyer belt that angled down into darkness.

That sign needs to be cleaned off, Mrs. Sigsby thought. And that belt needs to be scrubbed before it gets clogged and breaks down. More carelessness.

“I hope you don’t need help lifting her,” Heckle said, still wearing his game-show host smile. “I’m afraid I’m feeling rather weakly today. Didn’t eat my Wheaties this morning.”

Stackhouse lifted the wrapped body and placed it on the belt. The bottom fold of the canvas dropped open, revealing one shoe. Mrs. Sigsby felt an urge to turn away from that scuffed sole and quelled it.

“Any final words?” Hallas asked. “Hail and farewell? Jenny we hardly knew ye?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

Dr. Hallas closed the door and pushed the green button. Mrs. Sigsby heard a trundle and squeak as the dirty conveyer belt began to move. When that stopped, Hallas pushed the red button. The readout came to life, quickly jumping from 200 to 400 to 800 to 1600 and finally to 3200.

“Much hotter than your average crematory,” Hallas said. “Also much faster, but it still takes awhile. You’re welcome to stick around; I could give you the full tour.” Still smiling the big smile.

“Not today,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Far too busy.”

“That’s what I thought. Another time, perhaps. We see you so seldom, and we’re always open for business.”

10

As Maureen Alvorson was starting her final slide, Stevie Whipple was eating mac and cheese in the Front Half cafeteria. Avery Dixon grabbed him by one meaty, freckled arm. “Come out to the playground with me.”

“I ain’t done eating, Avery.”

“I don’t care.” He lowered his voice. “It’s important.”

Stevie took a final enormous bite, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and followed Avery. The playground was deserted except for Frieda Brown, who was sitting on the asphalt surrounding the basketball hoop and drawing cartoon figures in chalk. Rather good ones. All smiling. She didn’t look up as the boys passed.

When they arrived at the chainlink fence, Avery pointed at a trench in the dirt and gravel. Stevie stared at it with big eyes. “What did that? Woodchuck or sumpin?” He looked around as if he expected to see a woodchuck—possibly rabid—hiding under the trampoline or crouching beneath the picnic table.

“Wasn’t a woodchuck, nope,” Avery said.

“I bet you could squiggle right through there, Aves. Make an excape.”

Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind, Avery thought, but I’d get lost in the woods. Even if I didn’t, the boat is gone. “Never mind. You have to help me fill it in.”

“Why?”

“Just because. And don’t say excape, it sounds ignorant. Ess, Stevie. Esscape.” Which is just what his friend had done, God love and bless him. Where was he now? Avery had no idea. He’d lost touch.

“Esscape,” Stevie said. “Got it.”

“Terrific. Now help me.”

The boys got down on their knees and began to fill in the depression under the fence, scooping with their hands and raising a cloud of dust. It was hot work, and they were both soon sweating. Stevie’s face was bright red.

“What are you boys doing?”

They looked around. It was Gladys, her usual big smile nowhere in sight.

“Nothing,” Avery said.

“Nothing,” Stevie agreed. “Just playin in the dirt. You know, the dirty ole dirt.”

“Let me see. Move.” And when neither of them did, she kicked Avery in the side.

“Ow!” he cried, and curled up. “Ow, that hurt!”

Stevie said, “What are you, on the rag or some—” Then he got his own kick, high up on the shoulder.

Gladys looked at the trench, only partially filled in, then at Frieda, still absorbed in her artistic endeavors. “Did you do this?”

Frieda shook her head without looking up.

Gladys pulled her walkie from the pocket of her white pants and keyed it. “Mr. Stackhouse? This is Gladys for Mr. Stackhouse.”

There was a pause, then: “This is Stackhouse, go.”

“I think you need to come out to the playground as soon as possible. There’s something you need to see. Maybe it’s nothing, but I don’t like it.”

11

After notifying the security chief, Gladys called Winona to take the two boys back to their rooms. They were to stay there until further notice.

“I don’t know nothing about that hole,” Stevie said sulkily. “I thought a woodchuck done it.”

Winona told him to shut up and herded the boys back inside.

Stackhouse arrived with Mrs. Sigsby. She bent and he squatted, first looking at the dip under the chainlink, then at the fence itself.

“Nobody could crawl under there,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Well, maybe Dixon, he’s not much bigger than those Wilcox twins were, but no one else.”

Stackhouse scooped away the loose mix of rocks and dirt the two boys had put back in, deepening the dip to a trench. “Are you sure of that?”

Mrs. Sigsby realized she was biting at her lip, and made herself stop. The idea is ridiculous, she thought. We have cameras, we have microphones, we have the caretakers and the janitors and the housekeepers, we have security. All to take care of a bunch of kids so terrified they wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

Of course there was Wilholm, who definitely would say boo to a goose, and there had been a few others like him over the years. But still…

“Julia.” Very low.

“What?”

“Get down here with me.”

She started to do it, then saw the Brown girl staring at them. “Get inside,” she snapped. “This second.”

Frieda went in a hurry, dusting off her chalky hands, leaving her smiling cartoon people behind. As the girl entered the lounge, Mrs. Sigsby saw a small cluster of children gawking out. Where were the caretakers when you needed them? In the break room, swapping stories with one of the extraction teams? Telling dirty jo—

“Julia!”

She dropped to one knee, wincing when a sharp piece of gravel bit into her.

“There’s blood on this fence. See it?”

She didn’t want to, but she did. Yes, that was blood. Dried to maroon, but definitely blood.

“Now look over there.”

He poked a finger through one of the chainlink diamonds, pointing at a partially uprooted bush. There was blood on that, too. As Mrs. Sigsby looked at those few spots, spots that were outside, her stomach dropped and for one alarming moment she thought she was going to wet her pants, as she had on that long-ago trike. She thought of the Zero Phone and saw her life as head of the Institute—because that was what it was, not her job but her life—disappearing into it. What would the lisping man on the other end say if she had to call and tell him that, in what was supposed to be the most secret and secure facility in the country—not to mention the most vital facility in the country—a child had escaped by going under a fence?

They would say she was done, of course. Done and dusted.

“The residents are all here,” she said in a hoarse whisper. She grasped Stackhouse’s wrist, her fingernails biting into his skin. He didn’t seem to notice. He was still staring at the partially uprooted bush as if hypnotized. This was as bad for him as for her. Not worse, there was no worse, but just as bad. “Trevor, they are all here. I checked.”

“I think you better check again. Don’t you?”

She had her walkie this time (thoughts of locking the barn door after the livestock was stolen flashed through her mind), and she keyed it. “Zeke. This is Mrs. Sigsby for Zeke.” You better be there, Ionidis. You just better.

He was. “This is Zeke, Mrs. Sigsby. I’ve been checking up on Alvorson, Mr. Stackhouse told me to since Jerry’s off and Andy’s not here, and I reached her next-door neigh—”

“Never mind that now. Look at the locater blips again for me.”

“Okay.” He sounded suddenly cautious. Must have heard the strain in my voice, she thought. “Hold on, everything’s running slow this morning… couple more seconds…”

She felt as if she would scream. Stackhouse was still peering through the fence, as if expecting a magic fucking hobbit to appear and explain the whole thing.

“Okay,” Zeke said. “Forty-one residents, still perfect attendance.”

Relief cooled her face like a breeze. “All right, that’s good. That’s very—”

Stackhouse took the walkie from her. “Where are they currently?”

“Uh… still twenty-eight in Back Half, now four in the East Wing lounge… three in the caff… two in their rooms… three in the hall…”

Those three would be Dixon, Whipple, and the artist-girl, Mrs. Sigsby thought.

“Plus one in the playground,” Zeke finished. “Forty-one. Like I said.”

“Wait one, Zeke.” Stackhouse looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Do you see a kid in the playground?”

She didn’t answer him. She didn’t need to.

Stackhouse raised the walkie again. “Zeke?”

“Go, Mr. Stackhouse. Right here.”

“Can you pinpoint the exact location of the kid in the playground?”

“Uh… let me zoom… there’s a button for that…”

“Don’t bother,” Mrs. Sigsby said. She had spotted an object glittering in the early afternoon sun. She walked onto the basketball court, stooped at the foul line, and picked it up. She returned to her security chief and held out her hand. In her palm was most of an earlobe with the tracker button still embedded in it.

12

The Front Half residents were told to return to their rooms and stay there. If any were caught in the hall, they would be severely punished. The Institute’s security force totaled just four, counting Stackhouse himself. Two of these men were in the Institute village and came quickly, using the golf-cart track Maureen had expected Luke to find, and which he had missed by less than a hundred feet. The third member of Stackhouse’s team was in Dennison River Bend. Stackhouse had no intention of waiting for her to turn up. Denny Williams and Robin Lecks of the Ruby Red team were on-site, though, waiting for their next assignment, and perfectly willing to be drafted. They were joined by two widebodies—Joe Brinks and Chad Greenlee.

“The Minnesota boy,” Denny said, once this makeshift search party was assembled and the tale was told. “The one we brought in last month.”

“That’s right,” Stackhouse agreed, “the Minnesota boy.”

“And you say he ripped the tracker right out of his ear?” Robin asked.

“The cut’s a little smoother than that. Used a knife, I think.”

“Took balls, either way,” Denny said.

“I’ll have his balls when we catch up to him,” Joe said. “He doesn’t fight like Wilholm did, but he’s got a fuck-you look in his eyes.”

“He’ll be wandering around in the woods, so lost he’ll probably hug us when we find him,” Chad said. He paused. “If we find him. Lot of trees out there.”

“He was bleeding from his ear and probably all down his back from going under the fence,” Stackhouse said. “Must have got it on his hands, too. We’ll follow the blood as far as we can.”

“It’d be good if we had a dog,” Denny Williams said. “A bloodhound or a good old bluetick.”

“It would be good if he’d never gotten out in the first place,” Robin said. “Under the fence, huh?” She almost laughed, then saw Stackhouse’s drawn face and furious eyes and reconsidered.

Rafe Pullman and John Walsh, the two security guys from the village, arrived just then.

Stackhouse said, “We are not going to kill him, understand that, but we are going to zap the living shit out of the little son of a bitch when we find him.”

“If we find him,” Chad the caretaker repeated.

“We’ll find him,” Stackhouse said. Because if we don’t, he thought, I’m toast. This whole place might be toast.

“I’m going back to my office,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

Stackhouse caught her by the elbow. “And do what?”

“Think.”

“That’s good. Think all you want, but no calls. Are we agreed on that?”

Mrs. Sigsby looked at him with contempt, but the way she was biting her lips suggested she might also be afraid. If so, that made two of them. “Of course.”

But when she got to her office—the blessed air-conditioned silence of her office—she found thinking was hard. Her eyes kept straying to the locked drawer of her desk. As if it wasn’t a phone inside, but a hand grenade.

13

Three o’clock in the afternoon.

No news from the men hunting for Luke Ellis in the woods. Plenty of communications, yes, but no news. Every member of the Institute staff had been notified of the escape; it was all hands on deck. Some had joined the searchers. Others were combing the Institute village, searching all empty quarters, looking for the boy or at least some sign that he’d been there. All personal vehicles were accounted for. The golf carts the employees sometimes used to get around were all where they belonged. Their stringers in Dennison River Bend—including two members of the town’s small police force—had been alerted and given Ellis’s description, but there had been no sightings.

With Alvorson there was news.

Ionidis had shown initiative and guile of which Jerry Symonds and Andy Fellowes, their IT techs, would have been incapable. First using Google Earth and then a phone locater app, Zeke had gotten in touch with Alvorson’s next-door neighbor in the little Vermont town where Alvorson still maintained a residence. He represented himself to this neighbor as an IRS agent, and she bought it without a single question. Showing no signs of the reticence Yankees were supposedly famous for, she told him that Maureen had asked her to witness several documents the last time Mo had been home. A woman lawyer had been present. The documents were addressed to several collection agencies. The lawyer called the documents C-and-D orders, which the neighbor rightly took to mean cease and desist.

“Those letters were all about her husband’s credit cards,” the neighbor lady told Zeke. “Mo didn’t explain, but she didn’t need to. I wasn’t born yesterday. Handling that deadbeat’s bills is what she was doing. If the IRS can sue her for that, you better move fast. She looked sick as hell.”

Mrs. Sigsby thought the Vermont neighbor had it right. The question was why Alvorson would do it that way; it was carrying coals to Newcastle. All Institute employees knew that if they got into any kind of financial jam (gambling was the most common), they could count on loans that were next door to interest-free. That part of the benefits package was explained at every new employee’s intake orientation. It really wasn’t a benefit at all, but a protection. People who were in debt could be tempted to sell secrets.

The easy explanation for such behavior was pride, maybe combined with shame at having been taken advantage of by her runaway husband, but Mrs. Sigsby didn’t like it. The woman had been nearing the end of her life and must have known that for some time. She had decided to clean her hands, and taking money from the organization that had dirtied them was not the way to start. That felt right—or close to right, anyway. It fit with Alvorson’s reference to hell.

That bitch helped him escape, Mrs. Sigsby thought. Of course she did, it was her idea of atonement. But I can’t question her about it, she made sure of that. Of course she did—she knows our methods. So what do I do? What will I do if that too-smart-for-his-own-good boy isn’t back here before dark?

She knew the answer, and was sure Trevor did, too. She would have to take the Zero Phone out of its locked drawer and hit all three of the white buttons. The lisping man would answer. When she told him that a resident had escaped for the first time in the Institute’s history—had dug his way out in the middle of the night under the fence—what would that person say? Gosh, I’m thorry? Thath’s too bad? Don’t worry about it?

Like hell.

Think, she told herself. Think, think, think. Who might the troublesome housekeeper have told? For that matter, who might Ellis have t—

“Fuck. Fuck!”

It was right in front of her, and had been ever since discovering the hole under the fence. She sat up straight in her chair, eyes wide, the Zero Phone out of her mind for the first time since Stackhouse had called in to report the blood-trail had disappeared just fifty yards into the woods.

She powered up her computer and found the file she wanted. She clicked, and a video began to play. Alvorson, Ellis, and Dixon, standing by the snack machines.

We can talk here. There’s a mic, but it hasn’t worked for years.

Luke Ellis did most of the talking. He voiced concern about those twins and the Cross boy. Alvorson soothed him. Dixon stood by, saying little, just scratching his arms and yanking at his nose.

Jesus Christ, Stackhouse had said. If you have to pick it, go on and pick it. Only now, looking at this video with new eyes, Mrs. Sigsby saw what had really been going on.

She closed her laptop and thumbed her intercom. “Rosalind, I want to see the Dixon boy. Have Tony and Winona bring him. Right away.”

14

Avery Dixon, dressed in a Batman tee-shirt and dirty shorts that displayed his scabby knees, stood in front of Mrs. Sigsby’s desk, looking at her with frightened eyes. Small to begin with and now flanked by Winona and Tony, he didn’t look ten; he looked barely old enough for first grade.

Mrs. Sigsby offered him a thin smile. “I should have gotten to you much sooner, Mr. Dixon. I must be slipping.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Avery whispered.

“So you agree? You think I’m slipping?”

“No, ma’am!” Avery’s tongue flicked out and wet his lips. No nose-pulling, though, not today.

Mrs. Sigsby leaned forward, hands clasped. “If I have been, the slippage is over now. Changes will be made. But first it’s important… imperative… that we bring Luke back home.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nodded. “We agree, and that’s good. A good start. So where did he go?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“I think you do. You and Steven Whipple were filling in the hole he escaped through. Which was stupid. You should have left it alone.”

“We thought a woodchuck made it, ma’am.”

“Nonsense. You know exactly who made it. Your friend Luke. Now.” She spread her hands on her desk and smiled at him. “He’s a smart boy and smart boys don’t just plunge off into the woods. Going under the fence might have been his idea, but he needed Alvorson to give him the lay of the land on the other side of it. She gave you the directions piece by piece, every time you yanked on your nose. Beamed it right into your talented little head, didn’t she? Later on, you gave it to Ellis. There’s no point in denying it, Mr. Dixon, I’ve seen the video of your conversation. It is—if you don’t mind a silly old lady making a joke—as plain as the nose on your face. I should have realized it sooner.”

And Trevor, she thought. He saw it, too, and also should have seen what was going on. If there’s a comprehensive debriefing when this is over, how blind we will look.

“Now tell me where he went.”

“I really don’t know.”

“You’re shifting your eyes around, Mr. Dixon. That’s what liars do. Look straight at me. Otherwise, Tony is going to twist your arm behind your back, and that will hurt.”

She nodded at Tony. He grabbed one of Avery’s thin wrists.

Avery looked straight at her. It was hard, because her face was thin and scary, a mean teacher’s face that said tell me everything, but he did it. Tears began to well up and roll down his cheeks. He had always been a crier; his two older sisters had called him Little Crybaby Cry, and in the schoolyard at recess he had been anybody’s punching bag. The playground here was better. He missed his mother and father, missed them bad, but at least he had friends. Harry had pushed him down, but then had been a friend. At least until he died. Until they killed him with one of their stupid tests. Sha and Helen were gone, but the new girl, Frieda, was nice to him, and had let him win at HORSE. Only once, but still. And Luke. He was the best of all. The best friend Avery had ever had.

“Where did Alvorson tell him to go, Mr. Dixon? What was the plan?”

“I don’t know.”

Mrs. Sigsby nodded to Tony, who twisted Avery’s arm behind his back and hoisted his wrist almost to his shoulderblade. The pain was incredible. Avery screamed.

“Where did he go? What was the plan?”

“I don’t know!”

“Let him go, Tony.”

Tony did so, and Avery collapsed to his knees, sobbing. “That really hurt, don’t hurt me anymore, please don’t.” He thought of adding it’s not fair, but what did these people care about what was fair? Nothing, that was what.

“I don’t want to,” Mrs. Sigsby said. This was a thin truth, at best. The thicker one was that years spent in this office had inured her to the pain of children. And while the sign in the crematorium was right—they were heroes, no matter how reluctant their heroism might be—some of them could try one’s patience. Sometimes until one’s patience snapped.

“I don’t know where he went, honest.”

“When people have to say they’re being honest, that means they’re not. I’ve been around the block a few times, and I know that. So tell me: Where did he go, and what was the plan?”

“I don’t know!”

“Tony, lift up his shirt. Winona, your Taser. Medium power.”

“No!” Avery screamed, trying to pull away. “No zap-stick! Please, no zap-stick!”

Tony caught him around the middle and lifted his shirt. Winona positioned her zap-stick just above Avery’s belly button and triggered it. Avery shrieked. His legs jerked and piss watered the carpet.

“Where did he go, Mr. Dixon?” The boy’s face was blotchy and snotty, there were dark circles beneath his eyes, he had wet his pants, and still the little runt was holding out. Mrs. Sigsby could hardly believe it. “Where did he go and what was the plan?”

“I don’t know!”

“Winona? Again. Medium power.”

“Ma’am, are you s—”

“A little higher this time, if you please. Just below the solar plexus.”

Avery’s arms were greased with sweat and he wriggled out of Tony’s grip, almost making a rotten situation even worse—he’d have gone flying around her office like a bird trapped in a garage, knocking things over and bouncing off the walls—but Winona tripped him and pulled him to his feet by his arms. So it was Tony who used the Taser. Avery screamed and went limp.

“Is he out?” Mrs. Sigsby asked. “If he is, get Dr. Evans in here to give him a shot. We need answers fast.”

Tony grabbed one of Avery’s cheeks (plump when he’d come here; much thinner now) and twisted it. Avery’s eyes flew open. “He’s not out.”

Mrs. Sigsby said, “Mr. Dixon, this pain is stupid and unnecessary. Tell me what I want to know and it will stop. Where did he go? What was the plan?”

“I don’t know,” Avery whispered. “I really really really don’t kn—”

“Winona? Please remove Mr. Avery’s pants and apply your Taser to his testes. Full power.”

Although Winona was as apt to slap a sassbox resident as look at him, she was clearly unhappy with this command. Nevertheless, she reached for the waistband of his pants. That was when Avery broke.

“Okay! Okay! I’ll tell! Just don’t hurt me anymore!”

“That is a relief for both of us.”

“Maureen told him to go through the woods. She said he might find a track for golf carts but to keep going straight even if he didn’t. She said he’d see lights, especially a bright yellow one. She said when he got to the houses, he should follow the fence until he saw a scarf tied to a bush or a tree, I don’t remember which. She said there was a path behind it… or a road… I don’t remember that, either. But she said it would take him to the river. She said there was a boat.”

He stopped. Mrs. Sigsby gave him a nod and a benign smile, but inside, her heart was beating triple-time. This was both good news and bad. Stackhouse’s search party could stop floundering around in the woods, but a boat? Ellis had gotten to the river? And he was hours ahead of them.

“Then what, Mr. Dixon? Where did she tell him to get off the river? The Bend, am I right? Dennison River Bend?”

Avery shook his head and made himself look directly at her, all wide eyes and terrified honesty. “No, she said that was too close, she said to keep on the river as far as Presque Isle.”

“Very good, Mr. Dixon, you can go back to your room. But if I should find out that you’ve lied…”

“I’ll be in trouble,” Avery said, wiping at the tears on his cheeks with trembling hands.

At that, Mrs. Sigsby actually laughed. “You read my mind,” she said.

15

Five o’clock in the afternoon.

Ellis gone at least eighteen hours, maybe longer. The playground cams didn’t record, so it was impossible to tell for sure. Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse were in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, monitoring developments and listening for reports from their stringers. They had these all over the country. For the most part, the Institute’s stringers did no more than groundwork: keeping an eye on children with high BDNF scores and compiling information on their friends, family, neighborhoods, school situations. And their homes, of course. Everything about their homes, especially alarm systems. All that background was useful to the extraction teams when the time came. They also kept an eye out for special children not already on the Institute’s radar. These did show up from time to time. BDNF testing, along with the heel-stick PKU and the Apgar score, was routine for infants born in American hospitals, but of course not all babies were born in hospitals, and plenty of parents, such as the ever more vocal anti-vaxxer contingent, forewent the tests.

These stringers had no idea to whom they were reporting, or to what purpose; many assumed (incorrectly) that it was some kind of US government Big Brother thing. Most simply banked the extra income of five hundred dollars a month, made their reports when reports had to be made, and asked no questions. Of course every now and then one would ask questions, and that one would discover that as well as killing cats, curiosity killed their monthly dividend.

The thickest concentration of stringers, almost fifty, was in the area surrounding the Institute, and tracking talented children was not their major concern. The chief job of these stringers was to listen for people asking the wrong questions. They were tripwires, an early warning system.

Stackhouse was careful to alert half a dozen in Dennison River Bend, just in case the Dixon boy was mistaken or lying (“He wasn’t lying, I would have known,” Mrs. Sigsby insisted), but most he sent to the Presque Isle area. One of these was tasked with contacting the PI police and telling them that he was quite sure he’d seen a boy who had been in a news story on CNN. This boy, according to the news, was wanted for questioning in the murders of his parents. His name was Luke Ellis. The stringer told the police he wasn’t positive it was that kid, but it sure did look like him, and he’d asked for money in a threatening, disjointed way. Both Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse knew that having the police pick up their wandering boy wasn’t the ideal solution to their problems, but police could be handled. Besides, anything Ellis told them would be dismissed as the ravings of an unbalanced child.

Cell phones didn’t work in the Institute or in the village—indeed, not for a two-mile radius—so the searchers used walkies. And there were landlines. Now the one on Mrs. Sigsby’s desk rang. Stackhouse grabbed it. “What? Who am I talking to?”

It was Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had spelled Zeke in the comm room. She had been eager to do it. Her ass was also on the line, a fact she fully grasped. “I’ve got one of our stringers on hold. Guy named Jean Levesque. He says he found the boat Ellis used. Want me to transfer him to you?”

“Immediately!”

Mrs. Sigsby was standing in front of Stackhouse now, hands raised, lips forming the word What?

Stackhouse ignored her. There was a click, and Levesque came on the line. He had a St. John Valley accent thick enough to cut pulpwood. Stackhouse had never seen him, but pictured a tanned old guy under a hat with a bunch of fishing lures stuck in the brim.

“Found dat boat, me.”

“So I’m told. Where?”

“She come aground on a bank about five miles upriver from Presque Isle. Ship quite a bit of water she did, but the handle of the oar—just one oar—was prop on the seat. Left it right where it was. Didn’t call nobody. Dere’s blood on the oar. Tell you what, dere’s a l’il bit of a rapids a little further up. If dat boy you lookin for wasn’t used to boats, specially a l’il one like that—”

“It might have spilled him out,” Stackhouse finished. “Stay where you are, I’m going to send a couple of guys. And thank you.”

“What you pay me for,” Levesque said. “Don’t suppose you can tell me what he do.”

Stackhouse killed the call, which answered that particular foolish question, and filled in Mrs. Sigsby. “With any luck, the little bastard drowned and someone will find his body tonight or tomorrow, but we can’t count on being that lucky. I want to get Rafe and John—all I’ve got for security, and that’s going to change when this is over—to downtown Presque Isle, ASAP. If Ellis is on foot, that’s where he’ll go first. If he hitches a ride, either the State Police or some townie cop will pick him up and hold him. He’s the crazy kid who killed his parents, after all, then ran all the way to Maine.”

“Are you as hopeful as you sound?” She was honestly curious.

“No.”

16

The residents were allowed out of their rooms for dinner. It was, by and large, an outwardly silent meal. There were several caretakers and techs present, circling like sharks. They were clearly on edge, more than ready to strike or zap anyone who gave them lip. Yet in that quiet, running secretly behind it, was a nervous elation so strong that it made Frieda Brown feel slightly drunk. There had been an escape. All of the kids were glad and none of them wanted to show it. Was she glad? Frieda wasn’t so sure. Part of her was, but…

Avery was sitting beside her, burying his two hotdogs in baked beans, then digging them up. Interring them and exhuming them. Frieda wasn’t as bright as Luke Ellis, but she was plenty smart, and knew what interring and exhuming meant. What she didn’t know was what would happen if Luke tattled about what was going on here to someone who believed him. Specifically, what would happen to them. Would they be freed? Sent home to their parents? She was sure it was what these kids wanted to believe—hence that secret current—but Frieda had her doubts. She was only fourteen, but she was already a hardened cynic. Her cartoon people smiled; she rarely did. Also, she knew something the rest of them didn’t. Avery had been taken to Mrs. Sigsby’s office, and there he had undoubtedly spilled his guts.

Which meant Luke wasn’t going to get away.

“Are you going to eat that shizzle, or just play with it?”

Avery pushed the plate away and stood up. Ever since coming back from Mrs. Sigsby’s office, he had looked like a boy who had seen a ghost.

“There’s apple pie à la mode and chocolate pudding for dessert on the menu,” Frieda said. “And it’s not like home—mine, anyway—where you have to eat everything on your plate to get it.”

“Not hungry,” Avery said, and left the cafeteria.

But two hours later, after the kids had been sent back to their rooms (the lounge and canteen had both been declared off-limits this evening, and the door to the playground was locked), he padded down to Frieda’s room in his jammies, said he was hungry, and asked if she had any tokens.

“Are you kidding?” Frieda asked. “I just barely got here.” She actually had three, but she wasn’t giving them to Avery. She liked him, but not that much.

“Oh. Okay.”

“Go to bed. You won’t be hungry while you’re asleep, and when you wake up it’ll be breakfast.”

“Can I sleep with you, Frieda? Since Luke’s gone?”

“You should be in your room. You could get us in trouble.”

“I don’t want to sleep alone. They hurt me. They gave me lectric shocks. What if they come back and hurt me some more? They might, if they find out—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She considered. She considered many things, actually. An ace considerer was Frieda Brown of Springfield, Missouri. “Well… okay. Get into bed. I’m going to stay up awhile longer. There’s a show on TV about wild animals I want to see. Did you know some wild animals eat their babies?”

“Do they?” Avery looked stricken. “That’s awful sad.”

She patted his shoulder. “Mostly they don’t.”

“Oh. Oh, good.”

“Yes. Now get into bed, and don’t talk. I hate people talking when I’m trying to watch a show.”

Avery got into bed. Frieda watched the wild animal show. An alligator fought with a lion. Or maybe it was a crocodile. Either way, it was interesting. And Avery was interesting. Because Avery had a secret. If she had been a TP as strong as he was, she would have known it already. As it was, she only knew it was there.

When she was sure he was asleep (he snored—polite little-boy snores), she turned out the lights, got into bed with him, and shook him. “Avery.”

He grunted and tried to turn away from her. She wouldn’t let him.

“Avery, where did Luke go?”

“Prekile,” he muttered.

She had no idea what Prekile was, and didn’t care, because it wasn’t the truth.

“Come on, where did he go? I won’t tell.”

“Up the red steps,” Avery said. He was still mostly asleep. Probably thought he was dreaming this.

“What red steps?” She whispered it in his ear.

He didn’t answer, and when he tried to turn away from her this time, Frieda let him. Because she had what she needed. Unlike Avery (and Kalisha, at least on good days), she could not exactly read thoughts. What she had were intuitions that were probably based on thoughts, and sometimes, if a person were unusually open (like a little boy who was mostly asleep), she got brief, brilliant pictures.

She lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling of her room, thinking.

17

Ten o’clock. The Institute was quiet.

Sophie Turner, one of the night caretakers, was sitting at the picnic table in the playground, smoking an illicit cigarette and tapping her ashes into the cap of a Vitaminwater bottle. Dr. Evans was beside her, with a hand on her thigh. He leaned over and kissed her neck.

“Don’t do that, Jimmy,” she said. “Not tonight, with the whole place on red alert. You don’t know who’s watching.”

“You’re an Institute employee smoking a cigarette while the whole place is on red alert,” he said. “If you’re going to be a bad girl, why not be a bad girl?”

He slid his hand higher, and she was debating whether or not to leave it there, when she looked around and saw a little girl—one of the new ones—standing at the lounge doors. Her palms were on the glass, and she was looking out at them.

“Goddammit!” Sophie said. She removed Evans’s hand and squashed her cigarette out. She strode to the door and unlocked it and jerked it open and grabbed Peeping Thomasina by the neck. “What are you doing up? No walking around tonight, didn’t you get the message? The lounge and canteen are off-limits! So if you don’t want your ass slapped good and hard, get back to your—”

“I want to talk to Mrs. Sigsby,” Frieda said. “Right away.”

“Are you out of your mind? For the last time, get back—”

Dr. Evans pushed past Sophie, and without apology. There would be no more touchie-feelie for him tonight, Sophie decided.

“Frieda? You’re Frieda, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

“I can only talk to her. Because she’s the boss.”

“That’s right, and the boss has had a busy day. Why don’t you tell me, and I’ll decide if it’s important enough to tell her.”

“Oh, please,” Sophie said. “Can’t you see when one of these brats is scamming you?”

“I know where Luke went,” Frieda said. “I won’t tell you, but I’ll tell her.”

“She’s lying,” Sophie said.

Frieda never looked at her. She kept her eyes on Dr. Evans. “Not.”

Evans’s interior debate was short. Luke Ellis would soon have been gone for a full twenty-four hours, he could be anywhere and telling anything to anyone—a cop, or please God no, a reporter. It wasn’t Evans’s job to pass judgement on the girl’s claim, farfetched as it was. That was Mrs. Sigsby’s job. His job was not to make a mistake that ended him up shit creek without a paddle.

“You better be telling the truth, Frieda, or you’re going to be in a world of hurt. You know that, don’t you?”

She only looked at him.

18

Ten-twenty.

The Southway Express box, in which Luke slept behind the rototillers, lawn tractors, and boxed outboard motors, was now leaving New York State for Pennsylvania and entering an enhanced speed corridor along which it would travel for the next three hours. Its speed rose to 79 miles an hour, and woe to anyone stalled on a crossing or asleep on the tracks.

In Mrs. Sigsby’s office, Frieda Brown was standing in front of the desk. She was wearing pink footie pajamas nicer than any she had at home. Her hair was in daytime pigtails and her hands were clasped behind her back.

Stackhouse was in the small private quarters adjacent to the office, cat-napping on the couch. Mrs. Sigsby saw no reason to wake him. At least not yet. She examined the girl and saw nothing remarkable. She was as brown as her name: brown eyes, mouse-brown hair, skin tanned a summer café au lait. According to her file, her BDNF was likewise unremarkable, at least by Institute standards; useful but hardly amazing. Yet there was something in those brown eyes, something. It could have been the look of a bridge or whist player who has a hand filled with high trumps.

“Dr. Evans says you think you know where our missing child is,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me where this brainwave came from.”

“Avery,” Frieda said. “He came down to my room. He’s sleeping there.”

Mrs. Sigsby smiled. “I’m afraid you’re a little late, dear. Mr. Dixon has already told us everything he knows.”

“He lied to you.” Still with her hands clasped behind her back, and still maintaining a surface calm, but Mrs. Sigsby had dealt with many, many children, and knew this girl was scared to be here. She understood the risk. Yet the certainty in those brown eyes remained. It was fascinating.

Stackhouse came into the room, tucking in his shirt. “Who’s this?”

“Frieda Brown. A little girl who’s confabulating. I bet you don’t know what that means, dear.”

“Yes I do,” Frieda said. “It means lying, and I’m not.”

“Neither was Avery Dixon. I told Mr. Stackhouse, and now I tell you: I know when a child is lying.”

“Oh, he probably told the truth about most of it. That’s why you believed him. But he didn’t tell the truth about Prekile.”

A frown creased her brow. “What’s—”

“Presque Isle?” Stackhouse came to her and took her by the arm. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s what Avery said. But that was a lie.”

“How did you—” Mrs. Sigsby began, but Stackhouse held up a hand to stop her.

“If he lied about Presque Isle, what’s the truth?”

She gave him a cunning smile. “What do I get if I tell?”

“What you won’t get is electricity,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Within an inch of your life.”

“If you zap me, I’ll tell you something, but it might not be the truth. Like Avery didn’t tell you the truth when you zapped him.”

Mrs. Sigsby slammed a hand down on her desk. “Don’t try that with me, missy! If you’ve got something to say—”

Stackhouse held his hand up again. He knelt in front of Frieda. Tall as he was, they still weren’t eye to eye, but close. “What do you want, Frieda? To go home? I’m telling you straight out, that can’t happen.”

Frieda almost laughed. Want to go home? To her el dopo mother, with her succession of el dopo boyfriends? The last one had wanted her to show him her breasts, so he could see “how fast she was developing.”

“I don’t want that.”

“Okay then, what?”

“I want to stay here.”

“That’s a rather unusual request.”

“But I don’t want the needle sticks, and I don’t want any more tests, and I don’t want to go to Back Half. Ever. I want to stay here and grow up to be a caretaker like Gladys or Winona. Or a tech like Tony and Evan. Or I could even learn to cook and be a chef like Chef Doug.”

Stackhouse looked over the girl’s shoulder to see if Mrs. Sigsby was as amazed by this as he was. She appeared to be.

“Let’s say that… um… permanent residency could be arranged,” he said. “Let’s say it will be arranged, if your information is good and we catch him.”

“Catching him can’t be part of the deal, because it’s not fair. Catching him is your job. Just if my information is good. And it is.”

He looked over Frieda’s shoulder again at Mrs. Sigsby. Who nodded slightly.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal. Now spill it.”

She gave him a sly smile, and he thought about slapping it off her face. Only for a moment, but it was a serious thought. “And I want fifty tokens.”

“No.”

“Forty, then.”

“Twenty,” Mrs. Sigsby said from behind her. “And only if your information is good.”

Frieda considered it. “All right. Only how do I know if you’ll keep your promises?”

“You’ll have to trust us,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

Frieda sighed. “I guess so.”

Stackhouse: “No more dickering. If you have something to say, then say it.”

“He got off the river before Prekile. He got off at some red steps.” She hesitated, then gave up the rest. The important part. “There was a train station at the top of the steps. That’s where he went. The train station.”

19

After Frieda was sent back to her room with her tokens (and with a threat that all promises would be off if she spoke a single word about what had transpired in Mrs. Sigsby’s office to anyone), Stackhouse called down to the computer room. Andy Fellowes had come in from the village and spelled Felicia Richardson. Stackhouse told Fellowes what he wanted, and asked if he could get it without alerting anyone. Fellowes said he could, but would need a few minutes.

“Make it a very few,” Stackhouse said. He hung up and used his box phone to call Rafe Pullman and John Walsh, his two security men who were standing by.

“Shouldn’t you get one of our pet cops to go down there to the trainyard instead?” Mrs. Sigsby asked when he finished the call. Two members of the Dennison River Bend Police were stringers for the Institute, which amounted to twenty per cent of the entire force. “Wouldn’t that be quicker?”

“Quicker but maybe not safer. I don’t want knowledge of this shit-show to go any further than it already has unless and until it becomes absolutely necessary.”

“But if he got on a train, he could be anywhere!”

“We don’t know that he was even there. The girl could have been bullshitting.”

“I don’t think she was.”

“You didn’t think Dixon was.”

It was true—and embarrassing—but she stayed on message. The situation was far too serious to do anything else. “Point taken, Trevor. But if he’d stayed in a town that small, he’d have been spotted hours ago!”

“Maybe not. He’s one smart kid. He might have gone to ground somewhere.”

“But a train is the most likely, and you know it.”

The phone rang again. They both went for it. Stackhouse won.

“Yes, Andy. You did? Good, give it to me.” He grabbed a notepad and jotted on it rapidly. She leaned over his shoulder to read.

He circled 4297 at 10 AM, asked for its destination, then jotted Port, Ports, Stur. “What time was that train due into Sturbridge?”

He jotted 4–5 PM on the pad. Mrs. Sigsby looked at it with dismay. She knew what Trevor was thinking: the boy would have wanted to get as far away as possible before leaving the train—assuming he had been on it. That would be Sturbridge, and even if the train had pulled in late, it would have arrived at least five hours ago.

“Thanks, Andy,” Stackhouse said. “Sturbridge is in Western Mass, right?”

He listened, nodding.

“Okay, so it’s on the turnpike, but it’s still got to be a pretty small port of call. Maybe it’s a switching point. Can you find out if that train, or any part of it, goes on from there? Maybe with a different engine, or something?”

He listened.

“No, just a hunch. If he stowed away on that train, Sturbridge might not be far enough for him to feel comfortable. He might want to keep running. It’s what I’d do in his place. Check it out and get back to me ASAP.”

He hung up. “Andy got the info off the station website,” he said. “No problem. Isn’t that amazing? Everything’s on the Internet these days.”

“Not us,” she said.

“Not yet,” he countered.

“What now?”

“We wait for Rafe and John.”

They did so. The witching hour came and went. At just past twelve-thirty, the phone on her desk rang. Mrs. Sigsby beat him to it this time, barked her name, then listened, nodding along.

“All right. All understood. Now go on up to the train station… depot… yard… whatever they call it… and see if anyone is still… oh. All right. Thank you.”

She hung up and turned to Stackhouse.

“That was your security force.” This was delivered with some sarcasm, since Stackhouse’s security force tonight consisted of just two men in their fifties and neither in wonderful physical shape. “The Brown girl had it right. They found the stairs, they found shoe prints, they even found a couple of bloody fingermarks, about halfway up the stairs. Rafe theorizes that Ellis either stopped there to rest, or maybe to re-tie his shoes. They’re using flashlights, but John says they could probably find more signs once it’s daylight.” She paused. “And they checked the station. No one there, not even a night watchman.”

Although the room was air conditioned to a pleasant seventy-two degrees, Stackhouse armed sweat from his forehead. “This is bad, Julia, but we still might be able to contain it without using that.” He pointed to the bottom drawer of her desk, where the Zero Phone was waiting. “Of course if he went to the cops in Sturbridge, our situation becomes a lot shakier. And he’s had five hours to do it.”

“Even if he did get off there he might not’ve,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t he? He doesn’t know he’s on the hook for killing his parents. How could he, when he doesn’t know they’re dead?”

“Even if he doesn’t know, he suspects. He’s very bright, Trevor, it won’t do for you to forget that. If I were him, you know the first thing I’d do if I did get off a train in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, at…” She looked at the pad. “… at four or five in the afternoon? I’d beat feet to the library and get on the Internet. Get current with events back home.”

This time they both looked at the locked drawer.

Stackhouse said, “Okay, we need to take this wider. I don’t like it, but there’s really no choice. Let’s find out who we’ve got in the vicinity of Sturbridge. See if he’s shown up there.”

Mrs. Sigsby sat down at her desk to put that in motion, but the phone rang even as she reached for it. She listened briefly, then handed it to Stackhouse.

It was Andy Fellowes. He had been busy. There was a night-crew at Sturbridge, it seemed, and when Fellowes represented himself as an inventory manager for Downeast Freight, checking on a shipment of live lobsters that might have gone astray, the graveyard shift stationmaster was happy to help out. No, no live lobsters offloaded at Sturbridge. And yes, most of 4297 went on from there, only with a much more powerful engine pulling it. It became Train 9956, running south to Richmond, Wilmington, DuPray, Brunswick, Tampa, and finally Miami.

Stackhouse jotted all this down, then asked about the two towns he didn’t know.

“DuPray’s in South Carolina,” Fellowes told him. “Just a whistlestop—you know, six sticks and nine hicks—but it’s a connecting point for trains coming in from the west. They have a bunch of warehouses there. Probably why the town even exists. Brunswick’s in Georgia. It’s quite a bit bigger. I imagine they load in a fair amount of produce and seafood there.”

Stackhouse hung up and looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Let’s assume—”

“Assume,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “A word that makes an ass out of you and—”

“Stow it.”

No one else could have spoken to Mrs. Sigsby in such an abrupt way (not to mention so rudely), but no one else was allowed to call her by her first name, either. Stackhouse began to pace, his bald head gleaming under the lights. Sometimes she wondered if he really did wax it.

“What do we have in this facility?” he asked. “I’ll tell you. Forty or so employees in Front Half and another two dozen in Back Half, not counting Heckle and Jeckle. Because we keep our wagons in a tight circle. We have to, but that doesn’t help us tonight. There’s a phone in that drawer that would get us all kinds of high-powered help, but if we use it, our lives will change, and not for the better.”

“If we have to use that phone, we might not have lives,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

He ignored this. “We have stringers nationwide, a good information network that includes low-level cops and medical people, hotel employees, news reporters on small-town weeklies, and retirees who have lots of time to spend scanning Internet sites. We also have two extraction teams at our disposal and a Challenger aircraft that can get them to practically anywhere fast. And we have our brains, Julia, our brains. He’s a chess player, the caretakers used to see him out there playing with Wilholm all the time, but this is real-world chess, and that’s a game he’s never played before. So let’s assume.”

“All right.”

“We’ll get a stringer to check with the police in Sturbridge. Same story we floated in Presque Isle—our guy says he thinks he saw a kid who might have been Ellis. We better do the same check in Portland and Portsmouth, although I don’t believe for a minute he would have gotten off so soon. Sturbridge is much more likely, but I think our guy will draw a blank there, too.”

“Are you sure that’s not just wishful thinking?”

“Oh, I’m wishing my ass off. But if he’s thinking as well as running, it makes sense.”

“When Train 4297 became Train 9956, he stayed on. That’s your assumption.”

“Yes. 9956 stops in Richmond at approximately 2 AM. We need someone, preferably several someones, watching that train. Same with Wilmington, where it stops between 5 AM and 6. But you know what? I don’t think he’ll get off at either place.”

“You think he’s going to ride it to the end of the line.” Trevor, she thought, you keep climbing higher and higher on the assumption tree, and each branch is thinner than the last.

But what else was there, now that the kid was gone? If she had to use the Zero Phone, she would be told they should have been prepared for something like this. It was easy to say, but how could anyone have foreseen a twelve-year-old child desperate enough to saw off his own earlobe to get rid of the tracker? Or a housekeeper willing to aid and abet him? Next she would be told the Institute staff had gotten lazy and complacent… and what would she say to that?

“—the line.”

She came back to the here and now, and asked him to repeat.

“I said he won’t necessarily ride it to the end of the line. A kid as smart as this one will know we’d put people there, if we figured out the train part. I don’t think he’ll want to get off in any metro area, either. Especially not in Richmond, a strange city in the middle of the night. Wilmington’s possible—it’s smaller, and it’ll be daylight when 9956 gets there—but I’m leaning toward one of the whistlestops. I think either DuPray, South Carolina, or Brunswick, Georgia. Assuming he’s on that train at all.”

“He might not even know where it was going once it left Sturbridge. In which case he might ride it all the way.”

“If he’s in with a bunch of tagged freight, he knows.”

Mrs. Sigsby realized it had been years since she had been this afraid. Maybe she had never been this afraid. Were they assuming or just guessing? And if the latter, was it likely they could make this many good ones in a row? But it was all they had, so she nodded. “If he gets off at one of the smaller stops, we could send an extraction team to take him back. God, Trevor, that would be ideal.”

“Two teams. Opal and Ruby Red. Ruby’s the same team that brought him in. That would have a nice roundness, don’t you think?”

Mrs. Sigsby sighed. “I wish we could be positive he got on that train.”

“I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure, and that’ll have to do.” Stackhouse gave her a smile. “Get on the phone. Wake some people up. Start with Richmond. Nationwide we must pay these guys and gals what, a million a year? Let’s make some of them earn their money.”

Thirty minutes later, Mrs. Sigsby set the phone back into its cradle. “If he’s in Sturbridge, he must be hiding in a culvert or an abandoned house or something—the police don’t have him, there’d be something about it on their scanners if they did. We’ll have people in both Richmond and Wilmington with eyes on that train when it’s there, and they’ve got a good cover story.”

“I heard. Nicely done, Julia.”

She lifted a weary hand to acknowledge this. “Sighting earns a substantial bonus, and there will be an even more substantial bonus—more like a windfall—if our people should see a chance to grab the boy and take him to a safe house for pickup. Not likely in Richmond, both of our people there are just John Q. Citizens, but one of the guys in Wilmington is a cop. Pray that it happens there.”

“What about DuPray and Brunswick?”

“We’ll have two people watching in Brunswick, the pastor of a nearby Methodist church and his wife. Only one in DuPray, but the guy actually lives there. He owns the town’s only motel.”

20

Luke was in the immersion tank again. Zeke was holding him down, and the Stasi Lights were swirling in front of him. They were also inside his head, which was ten times worse. He was going to drown looking at them.

At first he thought the screaming he heard when he flailed his way back to consciousness was coming from him, and wondered how he could possibly make such an ungodly racket underwater. Then he remembered that he was in a boxcar, the boxcar was part of a moving train, and it was slowing down fast. The screeching was steel wheels on steel rails.

The colored dots remained for a moment or two, then faded. The boxcar was pitch black. He tried to stretch his cramped muscles and discovered he was hemmed in. Three or four of the outboard motor cartons had fallen over. He wanted to believe he’d done that thrashing around in his nightmare, but he thought he might have done it with his mind, while in the grip of those damned lights. Once upon a time the limit of his mind-power was pushing pizza pans off restaurant tables or fluttering the pages of a book, but times had changed. He had changed. Just how much he didn’t know, and didn’t want to.

The train slowed more and began rumbling over switching points. Luke was aware that he was in a fair amount of distress. His body wasn’t on red alert, not yet, but it had definitely reached Code Yellow. He was hungry, and that was bad, but his thirst made his empty belly seem minor in comparison. He remembered sliding down the riverbank to where the S.S. Pokey had been tethered, and how he had splashed the cold water over his face and scooped it into his mouth. He would give anything for a drink of that river water now. He ran his tongue over his lips, but it wasn’t much help; his tongue was also pretty dry.

The train came to a stop, and Luke stacked the boxes again, working by feel. They were heavy, but he managed. He had no idea where he was, because in Sturbridge the door of the Southway Express box had been shut all the way. He went back to his hidey-hole behind the boxes and small engine equipment and waited, feeling miserable.

He was dozing again in spite of his hunger, thirst, full bladder, and throbbing ear, when the door of the boxcar rattled open, letting in a flood of moonlight. At least it seemed like a flood to Luke after the pure dark he’d found himself in when he woke. A truck was backing up to the door, and a guy was hollering.

“Come on… little more… easy… little more… ho!”

The truck’s engine switched off. There was the sound of its cargo door rattling up, and then a man jumped into the boxcar. Luke could smell coffee, and his belly rumbled, surely loud enough for the man to hear. But no—when he peeked out between a lawn tractor and a riding lawnmower, he saw the guy, dressed in work fatigues, was wearing earbuds.

Another man joined him and set down a square battery light which was—thankfully—aimed at the door and not in Luke’s direction. They laid down a steel ramp and began to dolly crates from the truck to the boxcar. Each was stamped KOHLER, THIS SIDE UP, and USE CAUTION. So wherever this was, it wasn’t the end of the line.

The men paused after loading ten or twelve of the crates and ate doughnuts from a paper sack. It took everything Luke had—thoughts of Zeke holding him down in the tank, thoughts of the Wilcox twins, thoughts of Kalisha and Nicky and God knew how many others depending on him—to keep from breaking cover and begging those men for a bite, just one bite. He might have done it anyway, had one of them not said something that froze him in place.

“Hey, you didn’t see a kid running around, did you?”

“What?” Through a mouthful of doughnut.

“A kid, a kid. When you went up to take the engineer that Thermos.”

“What would a kid be doing out here? It’s two-thirty in the morning.”

“Aw, some guy asked me when I went to get the doughnuts. Said his brother-in-law called him from up in Massachusetts, woke him out of a sound sleep and asked him to check the train station. The Massachusetts guy’s kid ran away. Said he was always talking about hopping a freight out to California.”

“That’s on the other side of the country.”

“I know that. You know that. Would a kid know that?”

“If he’s any good in school, he’d know Richmond is a fuck of a long way from Los Angeles.”

“Yeah, but it’s also a junction point. The guy said he might be on this train, then get off and try to hop one going west.”

“Well, I didn’t see any kid.”

“The guy said his brother-in-law would pay a reward.”

“It could be a million dollars, Billy, and I still couldn’t see any kid unless a kid was there to see.”

If my belly rumbles again, I’m finished, Luke thought. Deep-fried. Nuked.

From outside, someone shouted: “Billy! Duane! Twenty minutes, boys, finish up!”

Billy and Duane loaded a few more Kohler crates into the boxcar, then rolled their ramp back into the truck and drove away. Luke had time to catch a glimpse of a city skyline—what city he didn’t know—and then a man in overalls and a railroad cap came along and ran the Southway door shut… but this time not all the way. Luke guessed there was a sticky place in the track. Another five minutes passed before the train jerked into motion again, slowly at first, clicking over points and crossings, then picking up speed.

Some guy calling himself some other guy’s brother-in-law.

Said he was always talking about hopping a freight.

They knew he was gone, and even if they found the Pokey downstream from Dennison River Bend, they hadn’t been fooled. They must have made Maureen talk. Or Avery. The thought of them torturing the information out of the Avester was too horrible to contemplate, and Luke pushed it away. If they had people watching for him to get off here, they’d have people waiting at the next stop, too, and by then it might be daylight. They might not want to cause trouble, might just observe and report, but it was possible they’d try to take him prisoner. Depending on how many people were around, of course. And how desperate they were. That, too.

I might have outsmarted myself by taking the train, Luke thought, but what else could I do? They weren’t supposed to find out so fast.

In the meantime, there was one discomfort of which he could rid himself. Holding to the seat of a riding lawnmower to keep his balance, he unscrewed the fuel cap of a John Deere rototiller, opened his fly, and pissed what felt like two gallons into the empty gas tank. Not a nice thing to do, an extremely mean trick on whoever ended up with the rototiller, but these were extraordinary circumstances. He put the gas cap back on and screwed it tight. Then he sat down on the seat of the riding lawnmower, put his hands over his empty belly, and closed his eyes.

Think about your ear, he told himself. Think about the scratches on your back, too. Think about how bad those things hurt and you’ll forget all about being hungry and thirsty.

It worked until it didn’t. What crept in were images of kids leaving their rooms and going down to the caff for breakfast a few hours from now. Luke was helpless to dispel images of pitchers filled with orange juice, and the bubbler filled with red Hawaiian Punch. He wished he was there right now. He’d drink a glass of each, then load up his plate with scrambled eggs and bacon from the steam table.

You don’t wish you were there. Wishing that would be crazy.

Nevertheless, part of him did.

He opened his eyes to get rid of the images. The one of the orange juice pitchers was stubborn, it didn’t want to go… and then he saw something in the empty space between the new crates and the small engine gizmos. At first he thought it was a trick of the moonlight coming through the partly opened boxcar door, or an outright hallucination, but when he blinked his eyes twice and it was still there, he got off the seat of the mower and crawled to it. To his right, moon-washed fields flashed past the boxcar door. Leaving Dennison River Bend, Luke had drunk in all that he saw with wonder and fascination, but he had no eyes for the outside world now. He could only look at what was on the floor of the boxcar: doughnut crumbs.

And one piece that was bigger than a crumb.

He picked that one up first. To get the smaller ones, he wet a thumb and picked them up that way. Afraid of losing the smallest into the cracks in the boxcar floor, he bent over, stuck out his tongue, and licked them up.

21

It was Mrs. Sigsby’s turn to catch some sleep on the couch in the inner room, and Stackhouse had closed the door so neither phone—the landline or his box phone—would disturb her. Fellowes called from the computer room at ten to three.

“9956 has left Richmond,” he said. “No sign of the boy.”

Stackhouse sighed and rubbed at his chin, feeling the rasp of stubble there. “Okay.”

“Shame we can’t just have that train pulled over on a siding and searched. Settle the question of whether or not he’s on there once and for all.”

“It’s a shame everyone in the world isn’t in a big circle, singing ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ What time does it get to Wilmington?”

“Should be there by six. Earlier, if they make up some time.”

“How many guys have we got there?”

“Two now, another on his way from Goldsboro.”

“They know better than to get intense, right? Intense people rouse suspicions.”

“I think they’ll be fine. It’s a good story. Runaway boy, concerned folks.”

“You better hope they’re fine. Tell me how it goes.”

Dr. Hendricks came into the office without bothering to knock. There were circles under his eyes, his clothes were wrinkled, and his hair was standing up in a steel-gray ruff. “Any word?”

“Not yet.”

“Where’s Mrs. Sigsby?”

“Getting some badly needed rest.” Stackhouse leaned back in her chair and stretched. “The Dixon boy hasn’t had the tank, has he?”

“Of course not.” Donkey Kong looked vaguely offended at the very idea. “He’s not a pink. Farthest thing from one. To risk damaging a BDNF as high as his would be insane. Or to risk extending his abilities. Which would be unlikely but not impossible. Sigsby would have my head.”

“She won’t and he goes in it today,” Stackhouse said. “Dunk that little motherfucker until he thinks he’s dead, then dunk him some more.”

“Are you serious? He’s valuable property! One of the highest TP-positives we’ve had in years!”

“I don’t care if he can walk on water and shoot electricity out of his asshole when he farts. He helped Ellis get away. Have the Greek do it as soon as he comes back on duty. He loves putting them in the tank. Tell Zeke not to kill him, I do understand his value, but I want him to have an experience he’ll remember for as long as he can remember. Then take him to Back Half.”

“But Mrs. Sigsby—”

“Mrs. Sigsby agrees completely.”

Both men swung around. She was standing in the door between the office and her private quarters. Stackhouse’s first thought was that she looked as if she had seen a ghost, but that wasn’t quite right. She looked as if she were a ghost.

“Do it just the way he told you, Dan. If it damages his BDNF, so be it. He needs to pay.”

22

The train jerked into motion again, and Luke thought of some other song his grandma used to sing. Was it the one about the Midnight Special? He couldn’t remember. The doughnut crumbs had done nothing but sharpen his hunger and increase his thirst. His mouth was a desert, his tongue a sand dune within. He dozed, but couldn’t sleep. Time passed, he had no idea how much, but eventually pre-dawn light began to filter into the car.

Luke crawled over the swaying floor to the partially open door of the boxcar and peered out. There were trees, mostly straggly, second-growth pines, small towns, fields, then more trees. The train charged across a trestle, and he looked down at the river below with longing eyes. This time it wasn’t a song that came to mind but Coleridge. Water, water everywhere, Luke thought, the boxcar boards did shrink. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Probably polluted anyway, he told himself, and knew he would drink from it even if it was. Until his belly was bulging. Puking it up would be a pleasure because then he could drink more.

Just before the sun came up, red and hot, he began to smell salt in the air. Instead of farms, the buildings sliding past were now mostly warehouses and old brick factories with their windows boarded up. Cranes reared against the brightening sky. Planes were taking off not far away. For awhile the train ran beside a four-lane road. Luke saw people in cars with nothing to worry about but a day’s work. Now he could smell mudflats, dead fish, or both.

I would eat a dead fish if it wasn’t all maggoty, he thought. Maybe even if it was. According to National Geographic, maggots are a good source of organic protein.

The train began slowing, and Luke retreated to his hiding place. There were more thumps and bumps as his car went over points and crossings. At last it came to a stop.

It was an early hour, but this was a busy place, even so. Luke heard trucks. He heard men laughing and talking. A boombox or truck radio was playing Kanye, bass like a heartbeat first swelling, then fading. An engine went by on some other track, leaving behind a stink of diesel. There were several tremendous jerks as cars were coupled or uncoupled from Luke’s train. Men shouted in Spanish, and Luke picked out some of the profanities: puta mierda, hijo de puta, chupapollas.

More time went by. It felt like an hour, but might only have been fifteen minutes. At last another truck backed up to the Southway Express box. A guy in overalls rolled the door all the way open. Luke peered out from between a rototiller and a lawn tractor. The guy jumped into the boxcar, and another steel ramp was laid between the truck and the box. This time there were four men in the crew, two black, two white, all big and tatted out. They were laughing and talking in deep southern accents, which made them sound to Luke like the country singers on BUZ’N 102 back home in Minneapolis.

One of the white guys said he’d gone dancing last night with the wife of one of the black guys. The black guy pretended to hit him, and the white guy pretended to stagger backward, sitting down on the pile of outboard motor cartons Luke had recently re-stacked.

“Come on, come on,” said the other white guy. “I want my breffus.”

So do I, Luke thought. Oh man, so do I.

When they began loading the Kohler crates into the truck, Luke thought it was like a movie of the last stop, only run in reverse. That made him think of the movies Avery said the kids had to watch in Back Half, and that made the dots start to come back again—big juicy ones. The boxcar door jerked on its track, as if it meant to shut itself.

“Whoa!” the second black guy said. “Who’s out there?” He looked. “Huh. Nobody.”

“Boogeyman,” said the black guy who had pretended to smack the white guy. “Come on, come on, let’s get it done. Stationmaster say this bitch is runnin late.”

Still not the end of the line, Luke thought. I won’t be in here until I starve to death, there’s that, but only because I’ll die of thirst first. He knew from his reading that a person could go for at least three days without water before lapsing into the unconsciousness that preceded death, but it didn’t seem that way to him now.

The four-man crew loaded all but two of the big crates into their truck. Luke waited for them to start on the small engine stuff, which was when they would discover him, but instead of doing that, they ran their ramp back into the truck and yanked its pull-down door shut.

“You guys go on,” one of the white guys said. He was the one who’d joked about going dancing with the black guy’s wife. “I gotta visit the caboose shithouse. See a man about a dog.”

“Come on, Mattie, squeeze it a little.”

“Can’t,” the white guy said. “This one’s so big I’m gonna have to climb down off’n it.”

The truck started up and drove away. There were a few moments of quiet, and then the white guy, Mattie, climbed back into the boxcar, biceps flexing in his sleeveless tee. Luke’s once-upon-a-time best friend Rolf Destin would have said the guns are fully loaded.

“Okay, outlaw. I seen you when I sat down on those boxes. You can come out now.”

23

For a moment Luke stayed where he was, thinking that if he remained perfectly still and perfectly silent, the man would decide he’d been mistaken and go away. But that was childish thinking, and he was no longer a child. Not even close. So he crept out and tried to stand, but his legs were stiff and his head was light. He would have fallen over if the white guy hadn’t grabbed him.

“Holy shit, kid, who tore your ear off?”

Luke tried to speak. At first nothing came out but a croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I had some trouble. Sir, do you have anything to eat? Or drink? I’m awfully hungry and thirsty.”

Still not taking his eyes from Luke’s mutilated ear, the white guy—Mattie—reached into his pocket and brought out half a roll of Life Savers. Luke grabbed it, tore away the paper, and tossed four into his mouth. He would have said all his saliva was gone, re-absorbed by his thirsty body, but more squirted, as if from invisible jets, and the sugar hit his head like a bomb. The dots flared briefly into existence, racing across the white guy’s face. Mattie looked around, as if he had sensed someone coming up behind him, then redirected his attention to Luke.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

“Don’t know,” Luke said. “Can’t exactly remember.”

“How long you been on the train?”

“About a day.” That had to be right, but it seemed much longer.

“All the way from Yankeeland, right?”

“Yes.” Maine was about as Yankeeland as you could get, Luke thought.

Mattie pointed at Luke’s ear. “Who done that? Was it your dad? Stepdad?”

Luke stared at him, alarmed. “Who… how did you get that idea?” But even in his current state, the answer was obvious. “Someone’s looking for me. It was the same at the last place the train stopped. How many are there? What did they say? That I ran away from home?”

“That’s it. Your uncle. He brought a couple of friends, and one’s a cop from Wrightsville Beach. They didn’t say why, but yeah, they said you ran away from up in Massachusetts. And if someone done that, I get it.”

That one of the waiting men was a cop scared Luke badly. “I got on in Maine, not Massachusetts, and my dad is dead. My mom, too. Everything they say is a lie.”

The white guy considered this. “So who done that to your ear, outlaw? Some foster home asshole?”

That was not so far from the truth, Luke thought. Yes, he had been in a kind of foster home, and yes, it had been run by assholes. “It’s complicated. Just… sir… if those men see me, they’ll take me away. Maybe they couldn’t do that if they didn’t have a cop with them, but they do. They’ll take me back to where this happened.” He pointed to his ear. “Please don’t tell. Please just let me stay on the train.”

Mattie scratched his head. “I don’t know about that. You’re a kid, and you’re a mess.”

“I’ll look a whole lot worse if those men take me.”

Believe that, he thought with all his force. Believe that, believe that.

“Well, I don’t know,” Mattie repeated. “Although I didn’t much care for the look of those three, tell you the God’s honest. They seemed kinda nervy, even the cop. Also, you’re lookin at a guy who run from home three times before I finally made it. First time I was about your age.”

Luke said nothing. Mattie was headed in the right direction, at least.

“Where you going? Do you even know?”

“Someplace where I can get some food and some water and think,” Luke said. “I need to think, because nobody’s going to want to believe the story I’ve got to tell. Especially not coming from a kid.”

“Mattie!” someone shouted. “Come on, man! Unless you want a free trip to South Carolina!”

“Kid, were you kidnapped?”

“Yes,” Luke said, and began to cry. “And those men… the one who says he’s my uncle, and the cop…”

“MATTIE! Wipe your ass and come ON!”

“I’m telling the truth,” Luke said simply. “If you want to help me, let me go.”

“Well, shit.” Mattie spat over the side of the boxcar. “Seems wrong, but that ear of yours… those men, you’re sure they’re bad guys?”

“The worst,” Luke said. He was actually ahead of the worst ones, but whether or not he was able to stay there depended on what this man decided to do.

“Do you even know where you are now?”

Luke shook his head.

“This is Wilmington. Train’s gonna stop in Georgia, then at Tampa, and finish up its run in Miami. If people are looking for you, APB or AMBER Alert or whatever they call it, they’ll be looking in all those places. But the next place it stops is just a shit-splat on the map. You might—”

“Mattie, where the fuck are you?” Much closer now. “Stop fuckin around. We gotta sign out.”

Mattie gave Luke another dubious look.

“Please,” Luke said. “They put me in a tank. Almost drowned me. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true.”

Footsteps crunched on gravel, approaching. Mattie jumped down and trundled the boxcar door three-quarters of the way closed. Luke crawled back into his nest behind the small engine gear.

“Thought you said you were gonna take a shit. What were you doing in there?”

Luke waited for Mattie to say There’s a kid stowed away in that box, gave me some crazy story about being kidnapped up in Maine and stuck in a water-tank so he don’t have to go with his uncle.

“I did my bi’ness then wanted a look at those Kubota walk-behinds,” Mattie said. “My Lawn-Boy’s just about to drop dead.”

“Well, come on, train can’t wait. Hey, you didn’t see any kid running around, did you? Like maybe he hopped onboard up north and decided Wimmington would be a nice place to visit?”

There was a pause. Then Mattie said, “No.”

Luke had been sitting forward. At that single word, he put his head back against the boxcar wall and closed his eyes.

Ten minutes or so later, Train 9956 gave a hard jerk that ran through the cars—there were now an even one hundred—like a shudder. The trainyard began to roll past, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The shadow of a signal tower ran across the floor of the boxcar, and then another shadow appeared. A man-shadow. A grease-spotted paper bag flew into the car and landed on the floor.

He didn’t see Mattie, only heard him: “Good luck, outlaw.” Then the shadow was gone.

Luke crawled out of his hiding place so fast he cracked the good-ear side of his head on the housing of a riding lawnmower. He didn’t even notice. Heaven was in that bag. He could smell it.

Heaven turned out to be a cheese-and-sausage biscuit, a Hostess Fruit Pie, and a bottle of Carolina Sweetheart Spring Water. Luke had to use all his willpower to keep from drinking the whole sixteen-ounce bottle of water at a single go. He left a quarter of it, set it down, then snatched it up again and screwed on the cap. He thought if the train took a sudden yaw and it spilled, he would go insane. He gobbled the sausage biscuit in five snatching bites and chased it with another big swallow of water. He licked the grease from his palm, then took the water and the Hostess pie and crept back into his nest. For the first time since riding down the river in the S.S. Pokey and looking up at the stars, he felt that his life might be worth living. And although he did not exactly believe in God, having found the evidence against just slightly stronger than the evidence for, he prayed anyway, but not for himself. He prayed for the highly hypothetical higher power to bless the man who had called him outlaw and thrown that brown bag into the boxcar.

24

With his belly full, he felt like dozing again, but forced himself to stay awake.

Train’s gonna stop in Georgia, then at Tampa, and finish up its run in Miami, Mattie had said. If people are looking for you, they’ll be looking in all those places. But the next place it stops is just a shit-splat on the map.

There might be people watching for him even in a little town, but Luke had no intention of going on to Tampa and Miami. Getting lost in a large population had its attractions, but there were too many cops in big cities, and by now all of them probably had a photo of the boy suspected of killing his parents. Besides, logic told him he could only run so long. That Mattie hadn’t turned him in had been a fantastic stroke of good fortune; to count on another would be idiotic.

Luke thought he might have one high card in his hand. The paring knife Maureen had left under his mattress had disappeared somewhere along the way, but he still had the flash drive. He had no idea what was on it, for all he knew nothing but a rambling, guilt-ridden confession that would sound like gibberish, stuff about the baby she’d given away, maybe. On the other hand, it might be proof. Documents.

At last the train began to slow again. Luke went to the door, held it to keep his balance, and leaned out. He saw a lot of trees, a two-lane blacktop road, then the backs of houses and buildings. The train passed a signal: yellow. This might be the approach to the shit-splat Mattie had told him about; it might just be a slowdown while his train waited for another to clear the tracks somewhere up ahead. That might actually be better for him, because if there was a concerned uncle waiting for him at the next stop, he’d be at the depot. Up ahead he could see warehouses with glittering metal roofs. Beyond the warehouses was the two-lane road, and beyond the road were more trees.

Your mission, he told himself, is to get off this train and into those trees as fast as you can. And remember to hit the ground running so you don’t face-plant in the cinders.

He began to sway back and forth, still holding the door, lips pressed together in a thin stress-line of concentration. It was the stop Mattie had told him about, because now he could see a station-house up ahead. On the roof, DUPRAY SOUTHERN & WESTERN had been painted on faded green shingles.

Got to get off now, Luke thought. Absolutely do not want to meet any uncles.

“One…”

He swayed forward.

“Two…”

He swayed back.

“Three!”

Luke jumped. He started running in midair, but hit the cinders beside the track with his body going at train speed, which was still a bit faster than his legs could carry him. His upper body tilted forward, and with his arms extended behind him in an effort to maintain his balance, he looked like a speed-skater approaching the finish line.

Just as he began to think he might catch up with himself before he went sprawling, someone shouted “Hey, look out!”

He snapped his head up and saw a man on a forklift halfway between the warehouses and the depot. Another man was rising from a rocker in the shade of the station’s roof, the magazine he’d been reading still in his hand. This one shouted “Ware that post!”

Luke saw the second signal-post, this one flashing red, too late to slow down. He instinctively turned his head and tried to raise his arm, but hit the steel post at full running speed before he could get it all the way up. The right side of his face collided with the post, his bad ear taking the brunt of the blow. He rebounded, hit the cinders, and rolled away from the tracks. He didn’t lose consciousness, but he lost the immediacy of consciousness as the sky swung away, swung back, then swung away again. He felt warmth cascading down his cheek and knew his ear had opened up again—his poor abused ear. An interior voice was screaming at him to get up, to beat feet into the woods, but hearing and heeding were two different things. When he tried scrambling to his feet, it didn’t work.

My scrambler’s broke, he thought. Shit. What a fuckup.

Then the man from the forklift was standing over him. From where Luke lay, he looked about sixteen feet tall. The lenses of his glasses caught the sun, making it impossible to see his eyes. “Jesus, kid, what in the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Trying to get away.” Luke wasn’t sure he was actually speaking, but thought he probably was. “I can’t let them get me, please don’t let them get me.”

The man bent down. “Stop trying to talk, I can’t understand you anyway. You took a hell of a whack on that post, and you’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Move your legs for me.”

Luke did.

“Now move your arms.”

Luke held them up.

Rocking Chair Man joined Forklift Man. Luke tried to use his newly acquired TP to read one or both of them, find out what they knew. He got nothing; when it came to thought-reading, the tide was currently out. For all he knew, the whack he’d taken had knocked the TP clean out of his head.

“He all right, Tim?”

“I think so. I hope so. First aid protocol says not to move a head injury, but I’m going to take a chance.”

“Which of you is supposed to be my uncle?” Luke asked. “Or is it both of you?”

Rocking Chair Man frowned. “Can you understand what he’s saying?”

“No. I’m going to put him in Mr. Jackson’s back room.”

“I’ll take his legs.”

Luke was coming back now. His ear was actually helping in that regard. It felt as if it wanted to drill right into his head. And maybe hide there.

“No, I got him,” Forklift Man said. “He’s not heavy. I want you to call Doc Roper, and ask him to make a house call.”

“More of a warehouse call,” Rocking Chair Man said, and laughed, exposing the yellowed pegs of his teeth.

“Whatever. Go and do it. Use the station phone.”

“Yessir.” Rocking Chair Man gave Forklift Man a half-assed salute, and set off. Forklift Man picked Luke up.

“Put me down,” Luke said. “I can walk.”

“You think so? Let’s see you do it.”

Luke swayed on his feet for a moment, then steadied.

“What’s your name, son?”

Luke considered, not sure he wanted to give it when he didn’t know if this man was an uncle. He looked okay… but then, so did Zeke back at the Institute, when he was in one of his rare good moods.

“What’s yours?” he countered.

“Tim Jamieson. Come on, let’s at least get you out of the sun.”

25

Norbert Hollister, owner of a decrepit motel which only kept operating thanks to his monthly stipend as an Institute stringer, used the station-house phone to call Doc Roper, but first he used his cell to call a number he had gotten in the early hours of the morning. Then, he had been pissed off at being awakened. Now, however, he was delighted.

“That kid,” he said. “He’s here.”

“Just a second,” Andy Fellowes said. “I’m transferring you.”

There was a brief silence and then another voice said, “Are you Hollister? In DuPray, South Carolina?”

“Yeah. That kid you’re looking for just jumped off a freight. Ear’s all tore up. Is there still a reward for him?”

“Yes. And it will be bigger if you make sure he stays in town.”

Norbert laughed. “Oh, I think he’ll be stayin. He banged into a signal-post and it conked him silly.”

“Don’t lose track of him,” Stackhouse said. “I want a call every hour. Understood?”

“Like an update.”

“Yes, like that. We’ll take care of the rest.”