Luke shook his head. “But I need you to sleep in your own room. I’d like to get a full eight hours for once.”

Avery slid off the trampoline and looked at Luke solemnly. “Don’t tell me what isn’t true because you think someone will see me looking sad and wonder why. I don’t have to look sad.” And he stretched his lips in a hopelessly counterfeit grin.

Okay. Just don’t fuck up my chance, Avester.

Come back for me if you can. Please.

I will.

The dots were returning, bringing a vivid memory of the immersion tank. Luke thought it was the effort it took to consciously send his thoughts.

Avery looked at him a moment longer, then ran to the basketball hoop. “Want to play HORSE, Frieda?”

She looked down on him and gave him a smile. “Kid, I’d beat you like a drum.”

“Spot me an H and an O, and we’ll see about that.”

They played as the light began to drain out of the day. Luke crossed the playground and looked back once as Avery—who Harry Cross had once called Luke’s “little bitty buddy”—attempted a hook shot that missed everything. He thought Avery would come down to his room that night at least long enough to retrieve his toothbrush, but he didn’t.

20

Luke played a few games of Slap Dash and 100 Balls on his laptop, then brushed his own teeth, undressed to his shorts, and got into bed. He turned off the lamp and reached under his mattress. He might have cut his fingers on the knife Maureen had left him (unlike the plastic ones they got in the caff, this felt like a paring knife with a real blade) if she hadn’t wrapped it in a washcloth. There was something else as well, something he could identify by touch. God knew he’d used plenty of them before coming here. A flash drive. He leaned over in the dark and slipped both items into the pocket of his pants.

Then came waiting. For awhile kids ran up and down the corridor, maybe playing tag, maybe just grab-assing around. This happened every night now that there were more kids. There were whoops and laughter, followed by exaggerated hushing sounds, followed by more laughter. They were blowing off steam. Blowing off fear. One of tonight’s loudest whoopers was Stevie Whipple, and Luke deduced that Stevie had been into the wine or hard lemonade. There were no stern adults demanding silence; those in charge weren’t interested in enforcing noise-abatement rules or imposing curfews.

Finally Luke’s part of the residence floor settled down. Now there was just the sound of his own steadily beating heart and the turn of his thoughts as he went over Maureen’s list for the final time.

Back to the trampoline once you’re out, he reminded himself. Use the knife if you have to. Then a slight turn to the right.

If he got out.

He was relieved to find himself eighty per cent determined and only twenty per cent afraid. Even that much fear made no real sense, but Luke supposed it was natural. What drove the determination—what he absolutely knew—was simple and stark: this was his chance, the only one he’d have, and he intended to make the most of it.

When the corridor outside had been silent for what he judged to be half an hour, Luke got out of bed and grabbed his plastic ice bucket from on top of his TV. He had made up a story for the watchers—if, that was, anyone was actually watching the monitors at this hour, and not just sitting in some lower level surveillance room and playing solitaire.

This story was about a kid who goes to bed early, then awakens for some reason, maybe a need to pee, maybe because of a nightmare. Anyway, the kid is still more asleep than awake, so he walks down the hall in his underwear. Cameras in dusty bulbs watch him as he goes to the ice machine for a refill. And when he returns with not just a bucket of ice but the scoop as well, they assume the kid’s just too dozey to realize he still has it in his hand. He’ll see it in the morning, lying on his desk or in the bathroom sink, and wonder how it got there.

In his room again, Luke put some ice in a glass, filled it from the bathroom tap, and drank half of it down. It was good. His mouth and throat were very dry. He left the scoop on the toilet tank and went back to bed. He tossed and turned. He muttered to himself. Maybe the kid in the story he was making up is missing his little bitty buddy. Maybe that’s why he can’t get back to sleep. And maybe nobody’s watching or listening, but maybe somebody is, and that’s the way he has to play it.

Finally he turned on the lamp again and got dressed. He went into the bathroom, where there was no surveillance (probably no surveillance) and stuck the scoop down the front of his pants, dropping his Twins tee-shirt over it. If there was video in here, and if someone was monitoring it, he was probably cooked already. There was nothing he could do about that but push on to the next part of his story.

He left the room and went down the hall to the lounge. Stevie Whipple and some other kid, one of the newbies, were there, lying on the floor fast asleep. Half a dozen Fireball nips, all empty, were scattered around them. Those little bottles represented a lot of tokens. Stevie and his new friend would wake up with hangovers and empty pockets.

Luke stepped over Stevie and went into the caff. With only the salad bar fluorescents lit, the place was gloomy and a little spooky. He grabbed an apple from the never-empty bowl of fruit and took a bite as he wandered back into the lounge, hoping no one was watching, hoping that if someone was, they would understand the pantomime he was acting out, and buy it. The kid woke up. The kid got ice from the machine and had a nice cold glass of water, but after that he’s more awake than ever, so he goes up to the caff for something to eat. Then the kid thinks, Hey, why not go out to the playground for awhile, get some fresh air. He wouldn’t be the first one to do that; Kalisha said that she and Iris had gone out several times to look at the stars—they were incredibly bright out here with no light pollution to obscure them. Or sometimes, she said, kids used the playground at night to make out. He just hoped no one was out here stargazing or necking tonight.

There wasn’t, and with no moon the playground was fairly dark, the various pieces of equipment only angular shadows. Without a buddy or two for company, little kids had a tendency to be afraid of the dark. Bigger kids, too, although most wouldn’t admit it.

Luke strolled across the playground, waiting for one of the less familiar night caretakers to appear and ask him what he was doing out here with that scoop hidden under his shirt. Surely he wasn’t thinking about escape, was he? Because that would be pretty darn wacky!

“Wacky,” Luke murmured, and sat down with his back to the chainlink fence. “That’s me, a real whackjob.”

He waited to see if someone would come. No one did. There was only the sound of crickets and the hoot of an owl. There was a camera, but was anybody really monitoring it? There was security, he knew that, but it was sloppy security. He knew that, too. Just how sloppy he would now find out.

He lifted his shirt and removed the scoop. In his imaginings of this part, he scooped behind his back with his right hand, maybe shifting over to his left when his arm got tired. In reality, this didn’t work very well. He scraped the scoop against the bottom of the chainlink repeatedly, making a noise that sounded very loud in the stillness, and he couldn’t see if he was making any progress.

This is crazy, he thought.

Throwing worry about the camera aside, Luke got on his knees and began to dig under the fence, flinging gravel to the right and the left. Time seemed to stretch out. He felt that hours were passing. Was anyone in that surveillance room he’d never seen (but could imagine vividly) starting to wonder why the kid with insomnia hadn’t come back from the playground? Would he or she send someone to check? And say, what if that camera has a night-vision feature, Lukey? What about that?

He dug. He could feel sweat starting to oil his face, and the bugs working the night shift were homing in on it. He dug. He could smell his armpits. His heart had sped up to a gallop. He felt someone standing behind him, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw only the gantry of the basketball post standing against the stars.

Now he had a trench under the bottom of the fence. Shallow, but he had come to the Institute skinny and had lost more weight since then. Maybe—

But when he lay down and tried to slide under, the fence stopped him. It wasn’t even close.

Go back in. Go back in and get into bed before they find you and do something horrible to you for trying to get out of here.

But that wasn’t an option, only cowardice. They were going to do something horrible to him: the movies, the headaches, the Stasi Lights . . . and finally, the drone.