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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. No!”

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

18

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

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

“Zeke?”

“I’m here, boss. With the lady doc.”

“Doug? Chad?”

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

“Right. Gladys?”

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

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

“Roger that.”

“Rosalind?”

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

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

“Will you come with me, sir?”

“Only if I can cheer for the Yankees.”

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

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

They did.

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

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

19

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

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

“Drive.”

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

20

It’s time, Avery said.

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

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

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

CLOSE YOUR EYES.

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

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

Luke most of all. If he could.

With his eyes closed, he saw the big phone.

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

Kalisha, GO. Playground!

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

George, GO. Playground!

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

Nicky, GO. Playground!

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

Helen, GO. Playground!

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

Outside, faint gunfire.

Please don’t let it be too late!

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

It was time to make a long-distance call.

21

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