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.

HELL IS WAITING. I’LL BE HERE TO MEET YOU.

3