He went to the wall and laid his hands against it, pressing, feeling for the window underneath the wallpaper. It wasn’t there.

He asked himself if maybe he’d gone crazy, just snapped, like a kid in a scary movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Weren’t kids with high-functioning minds supposed to be prone to breakdowns? But he wasn’t crazy. He was as sane as he’d been last night when he went to sleep. In a movie, the crazy kid would think he was sane—that would be the Shyamalan twist—but according to the psychology books Luke had read, most crazy people understood they were crazy. He wasn’t.

As a little kid (five as opposed to twelve), he’d gone through a craze of collecting political buttons. His dad had been happy to help him build his collection, because most of the buttons were really cheap on eBay. Luke had been especially fascinated (for reasons he could not explain, even to himself) with the buttons of presidential candidates who had lost. The fever had eventually passed, and most of the buttons were probably stored in the attic crawlspace or in the cellar, but he had saved one as a kind of good-luck talisman. It had a blue plane on it, surrounded by the words WINGS FOR WILLKIE. Wendell Willkie ran for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 but lost badly, winning only ten states for a total of eighty-two electoral votes.

Luke had put the button in the cup of his Little League trophy. He fished for it now and came up with nothing.

Next, he went to the poster showing Tony Hawk on his Birdhouse deck. It looked right, but it wasn’t. The small rip on the lefthand side was gone.

Not his sneakers, not his poster, Willkie button gone.

Not his room.

Something began to flutter in his chest, and he took several deep breaths to try and quiet it. He went to the door and grasped the knob, sure he would find himself locked in.

He wasn’t, but the hallway beyond the door was nothing like the upstairs hallway in the house where he had lived his twelve-plus years. It was cinderblock instead of wood paneling, the blocks painted a pale industrial green. Opposite the door was a poster showing three kids about Luke’s age, running through a meadow of high grass. One was frozen in mid-leap. They were either lunatics or deliriously happy. The message at the bottom seemed to suggest the latter. JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, it read.

Luke stepped out. To his right, the corridor ended in institutional double doors, the kind with push-bars. To his left, about ten feet in front of another set of those institutional doors, a girl was sitting on the floor. She was wearing bellbottoms and a shirt with puffy sleeves. She was black. And although she looked to be Luke’s own age, give or take, she seemed to be smoking a cigarette.

8

Mrs. Sigsby sat behind her desk, looking at her computer. She was wearing a tailored DVF business suit that did not disguise her beyond-lean build. Her gray hair was perfectly groomed. Dr. Hendricks stood at her shoulder. Good morning, Scarecrow, he thought, but would never say.

“Well,” Mrs. Sigsby said, “there he is. Our newest arrival. Lucas Ellis. Got a ride on a Gulfstream for the first and only time and doesn’t even know it. By all accounts, he’s quite the prodigy.”

“He won’t be for long,” Dr. Hendricks said, and laughed his trademark laugh, first exhaled, then inhaled, a kind of hee-haw. Along with his protruding front teeth and extreme height—he was six-seven—it accounted for the techs’ nickname for him: Donkey Kong.

She turned and gave him a hard look. “These are our charges. Cheap jokes are not appreciated, Dan.”

“Sorry.” He felt like adding, But who are you kidding, Siggers?

To say such a thing would be impolitic, and really, the question was rhetorical at best. He knew she wasn’t kidding anyone, least of all herself. Siggers was like that unknown Nazi buffoon who thought it would be a terrific idea to put Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free, over the entrance to Auschwitz.

Mrs. Sigsby held up the new boy’s intake form. Hendricks had placed a circular pink sticky in the upper righthand corner. “Are you learning anything from your pinks, Dan? Anything at all?”

“You know we are. You’ve seen the results.”

“Yes, but anything of proven value?”

Before the good doctor could reply, Rosalind popped her head in. “I’ve got paperwork for you, Mrs. Sigsby. We’ve got five more coming in. I know they were on your spreadsheet, but they’re ahead of schedule.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked pleased. “All five today? I must be living correctly.”

Hendricks (aka Donkey Kong) thought, You couldn’t bear to say living right, could you? You might split a seam somewhere.

“Only two today,” Rosalind said. “Tonight, actually. From Emerald team. Three tomorrow, from Opal. Four are TK. One is TP, and he’s a catch. Ninety-three nanograms BDNF.”

“Avery Dixon, correct?” Mrs. Sigsby said. “From Salt Lake City.”

“Orem,” Rosalind corrected.

“A Mormon from Orem,” Dr. Hendricks said, and gave his hee-haw laugh.

He’s a catch, all right, Mrs. Sigsby thought. There will be no pink sticker on Dixon’s form. He’s too valuable for that. Minimal injections, no risking seizures, no near-drowning experiences. Not with a BDNF over 90.

“Excellent news. Really excellent. Bring in the files and put them on my desk. You also emailed them?”

“Of course.” Rosalind smiled. Email was the way the world wagged, but they both knew Mrs. Sigsby preferred paper to pixels; she was old-school that way. “I’ll bring them ASAP.”

“Coffee, please, and also ASAP.”

Mrs. Sigsby turned to Dr. Hendricks. All that height, and he’s still carrying a front porch, she thought. As a doctor he should know how dangerous that is, especially for a man that tall, where the vascular system has to work harder to begin with. But no one is quite as good at ignoring the medical realities as a medical man.

Neither Mrs. Sigsby nor Hendricks was TP, but at that moment they were sharing a single thought: how much easier all this would be if there was liking instead of mutual detestation.

Once they had the room to themselves again, Mrs. Sigsby leaned back to look at the doctor looming over her. “I agree that young Master Ellis’s intelligence doesn’t matter to our work at the Institute. He could just as well have an IQ of 75. It is, however, why we took him a bit early. He had been accepted at not one but two class-A schools—MIT and Emerson.”

Hendricks blinked. “At twelve?”

“Indeed. The murder of his parents and his subsequent disappearance is going to be news, but not big news outside the Twin Cities, although it may ripple the Internet for a week or so. It would have been much bigger news if he’d made an academic splash in Boston before he dropped from sight. Kids like him have a way of getting on the TV news, usually the golly-gosh segments. And what do I always say, Doctor?”

“That in our business, no news is good news.”

“Right. In a perfect world, we would have let this one go. We still get our fair share of TKs.” She tapped the pink circle on the intake form. “As this indicates, his BDNF isn’t even all that high. Only . . .”

She didn’t have to finish. Certain commodities were getting rarer. Elephant tusks. Tiger pelts. Rhino horns. Rare metals. Even oil. Now you could add these special children, whose extraordinary qualities had nothing to do with their IQs. Five more coming in this week, including the Dixon boy. A very good haul, but two years ago they might have had thirty.

“Oh, look,” Mrs. Sigsby said. On the screen of her computer, their new arrival was approaching the most senior resident of Front Half. “He’s about to meet the too-smart-for-her-own-good Benson. She’ll give him the scoop, or some version of it.”

“Still in Front Half,” Hendricks said. “We ought to make her the goddam official greeter.”

Mrs. Sigsby offered her most glacial smile. “Better her than you, Doc.”

Hendricks looked down and thought of saying, From this vantage point, I can see how fast your hair is thinning, Siggers. It’s all part of your low-level but long-running anorexia. Your scalp is as pink as an albino rabbit’s eye.

There were lots of things he thought of saying to her, the grammar-perfect no-tits chief administrator of the Institute, but he never did. It would have been unwise.

9

The cinderblock hallway was lined with doors and more posters. The girl was sitting under one showing a black boy and a white girl with their foreheads together, grinning like fools. The caption beneath said I CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!

“You like that one?” the black girl said. On closer inspection, the cigarette dangling from her mouth turned out to be of the candy variety. “I’d change it to I CHOOSE TO BE CRAPPY, but they might take away my pen. Sometimes they let shit slide, but sometimes they don’t. The problem is that you can never tell which way things are going to tip.”

“Where am I?” Luke asked. “What is this place?” He felt like crying. He guessed it was mostly the disorientation.

“Welcome to the Institute,” she said.