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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unsure of how to reply, Luke shrugged.

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

“No. No trouble.”

“Good to hear.”

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

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

“Not with . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

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

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

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

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

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

Luke shook his head.

“Got a metallic taste in your mouth?”

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

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

Luke shook his head.

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

“Right. No dots. No circles.”

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

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

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

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

He took them.

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

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

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

10

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Five-second rule.”

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

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

“No, I just—”

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

“Yes.”

“Did you get the rectal?”