More carelessness, she thought. More drift.

The door at the Back Half end of the corridor bore a sign reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Mrs. Sigsby used her card and pushed it open. Beyond was another elevator lobby. A short upward journey brought them to a lounge only slightly less utilitarian than the service tunnel they had taken to get to Back Half. Heckle—real name Dr. Everett Hallas—was waiting for them. He was wearing a big grin and constantly touching the corner of his mouth. It reminded Mrs. Sigsby of the Dixon boy’s obsessive nose-pulling. Except Dixon was only a kid, and Hallas was in his fifties. Working in Back Half took a toll, the way working in an environment polluted with low-level radiation would take a toll.

“Hello, Mrs. Sigsby! Hello, Security Director Stackhouse! How wonderful to see you! We should get together more often! I’m sorry about the circumstances that have brought you here today, however!” He bent and patted the canvas bundle containing Maureen Alvorson. Then touched the corner of his mouth, as if patting at a cold sore only he could see or feel. “In the midst of life, cetra-cetra.”

“We need to make this quick,” Stackhouse said. Meaning, Mrs. Sigsby supposed, we have to get out of here. She quite concurred. This was where the real work was done, and Drs. Heckle and Jeckle (real name Joanne James) were heroes for doing it, but that didn’t make it any easier to be here. She could already feel the atmosphere of the place. It was like being in a low-level electrical field.

“Yes, of course you do, the work never ends, wheels within wheels, big fleas with little fleas to bite em, don’t I know, right this way.”

From the lounge, with its ugly chairs, equally ugly sofa, and elderly flatscreen, they entered a hall with a thick blue carpet on the floor—in Back Half, the children sometimes fell down and bumped their valuable little heads. The trolley’s wheels left tracks in the nap. This looked much like a corridor on the residence level of Front Half, except for the locks on the doors, which were all shut. From behind one of them, Mrs. Sigsby heard pounding and muffled cries of “Let me out!” and “At least give me a fucking aspirin!”

“Iris Stanhope,” Heckle said. “She’s not feeling well today, I’m afraid. On the upside, several of our other recent arrivals are holding up remarkably well. We’re having a movie this evening, you know. And fireworks tomorrow.” He giggled and touched the corner of his mouth, reminding Mrs. Sigsby—grotesquely—of Shirley Temple.

She brushed at her hair to make sure it was still in place. It was, of course. What she was feeling—that low buzz along her exposed skin, the sense that her eyeballs were vibrating in their sockets—wasn’t electricity.

They passed the screening room with its dozen or so plush seats. Sitting in the front row were Kalisha Benson, Nick Wilholm, and George Iles. They were wearing their red and blue singlets. The Benson girl was sucking on a candy cigarette; Wilholm was smoking a real one, the air around his head wreathed with gray smoke. Iles was rubbing lightly at his temples. Benson and Iles turned to look at them as they rolled past with their canvas-wrapped burden; Wilholm just went on staring at the blank movie screen. A lot of steam has been taken out of that hotdog, Mrs. Sigsby thought with satisfaction.

The cafeteria was beyond the screening room, on the other side of the corridor. It was much smaller than the one in Front Half. There were always more children here, but the longer they stayed in Back Half, the less they ate. Mrs. Sigsby supposed an English major might call that irony. Three kids were currently present, two slurping up what looked like oatmeal, the other—a girl of about twelve—simply sitting with a full bowl in front of her. But when she saw them passing with the trolley, she brightened.

“Hi! What you got there? Is it a dead person? It is, isn’t it? Was her name Morris? That’s a funny name for a girl. Maybe it’s Morin. Can I see? Are her eyes open?”

“That’s Donna,” Heckle said. “Ignore her. She’ll be at the movie tonight, but pretty soon I expect she’ll be moving on. Maybe later this week. Greener pastures, cetra-cetra. You know.”

Mrs. Sigsby did know. There was Front Half, there was Back Half . . . and there was the back half of Back Half. The end of the line. She put her hand to her hair again. Still in place. Of course it was. She thought of a tricycle she’d had as a very young child, the warm squirt of urine in her pants as she rode it up and down the driveway. She thought of broken shoelaces. She thought of her first car, a—

“It was a Valium!” the girl named Donna screamed. She leaped up, knocking her chair over. The other two children looked at her dully, one with oatmeal dripping from his chin. “A Plymouth Valium, I know that! Oh God I want to go home! Oh God stop my head?!”

Two caretakers in red scrubs appeared from . . . from Mrs. Sigsby didn’t know where. Nor did she care. They grabbed the girl by her arms.

“That’s right, take her back to her room,” Heckle said. “No pills, though. We need her tonight.”

Donna Gibson, who had once shared girl-secrets with Kalisha when they were both still in Front Half, began to scream and struggle. The caretakers led her away with the toes of her sneakers brushing the carpet. The broken thoughts in Mrs. Sigsby’s mind first dimmed, then faded. The buzz along her skin, even in the fillings of her teeth, remained, however. Over here it was constant, like the buzz of the fluorescent lights in the corridor.

“All right?” Stackhouse asked Mrs. Sigsby.

“Yes.” Just get me out of here.

“I feel it, too. If it’s any comfort.”

It wasn’t. “Trevor, can you explain to me why bodies bound for the crematorium have to be rolled right through these children’s living quarters?”

“There are tons of beans in Beantown,” Stackhouse replied.

“What?” Mrs. Sigsby asked. “What did you say?”

Stackhouse shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. That came into my head—”

“Yes, yes,” Hallas said. “There are a lot of . . . uh, shall we say loose transmissions in the air today.”

“I know what it was,” Stackhouse said. “I had to get it out, that’s all. It felt like . . .”

“Choking on food,” Dr. Hallas said matter-of-factly. “The answer to your question, Mrs. Sigsby is . . . nobody knows.” He tittered and touched the corner of his mouth.

Just get me out of here, she thought again. “Where is Dr. James, Dr. Hallas?”

“In her quarters. Not feeling well today, I’m afraid. But she sends her regards. Hopes you’re well, fit as a fiddle, in the pink, cetra-cetra.” He smiled and did the Shirley Temple thing again—ain’t I cute?

8

In the screening room, Kalisha plucked the cigarette from Nicky’s fingers, took a final puff from the filterless stub, dropped it to the floor, stepped on it. Then she put an arm around his shoulders. “Bad?”

“I’ve had worse.”

“The movie will make it better.”

“Yeah. But there’s always tomorrow. Now I know why my dad was so butt-ugly when he had a hangover. How about you, Sha?”

“Doing okay.” And she was. Just a low throb over her left eye. Tonight it would be gone. Tomorrow it would be back, and not low. Tomorrow it would be pain that would make the hangovers suffered by Nicky’s dad (and her own parents, from time to time) look like fun in the sun: a steady pounding thud, as if some demonic elf were imprisoned in her head, hammering at her skull in an effort to get out. Even that, she knew, wasn’t as bad as it could be. Nicky’s headaches were worse, Iris’s worse still, and it took longer and longer for the pain to go away.

George was the lucky one; in spite of his strong TK, he had so far felt almost no pain at all. An ache in his temples, he said, and at the back of his skull. But it would get worse. It always did, at least until it was finally over. And then? Ward A. The drone. The hum. The back half of Back Half. Kalisha didn’t look forward to it yet, the idea of being erased as a person still horrified her, but that would change. For Iris, it already had; most of the time she looked like a zombie on The Walking Dead. Helen Simms had pretty much articulated Kalisha’s feelings about Ward A when she said anything was better than the Stasi Lights and a screaming headache that never stopped.

George leaned forward, looking at her across Nick with bright eyes that were still relatively pain-free. “He got out,” he whispered. “Concentrate on that. And hold on.”

“We will,” Kalisha said. “Won’t we, Nick?”

“We’ll try,” Nick said, and managed a smile. “Although the idea of a guy as horrible at HORSE as Lukey Ellis bringing the cavalry is pretty farfetched.”