“Whoa a second!” Sheriff John said. “Hands where I can see them!”

Neither of them paused. Michelle Robertson’s hand came out of her purse holding not her driver’s license but the Sig Sauer Nightmare Micro she had been issued. Denny Williams had reached behind him for the Glock in his belt rather than his wallet. Both the sheriff and Deputy Faraday were reaching for their service weapons, but they were slow, slow.

Tim was not. He pulled Wendy’s gun from her holster and pointed it with both hands. “Drop the weapons, drop them!”

They did not. Robertson aimed at Luke, and Tim shot her a single time, driving her backward against one of the station’s big double doors hard enough to crack the frosted glass.

Williams dropped to one knee and aimed at Tim, who had just time to think, This guy’s a pro and I’m dead. But the man’s gun jerked upward, as if pulled by an invisible cord, and the bullet meant for Tim went into the ceiling. Sheriff John Ashworth punted the blond man in the side of the head, sending him sprawling. Billy Wicklow stomped on his wrist.

“Give it up, motherfucker, just give it—”

That was when Mrs. Sigsby, realizing things had gone wrong, told Louis Grant and Tom Jones to open up with the big guns. Williams and Robertson weren’t important.

The boy was.

33

The two HK37s filled DuPray’s formerly peaceful twilight with thunder. Grant and Jones raked the brick front of the sheriff’s station, raising puffs of pinkish-red dust, blowing the windows and the glass door panels inward. They were on the sidewalk; the rest of Gold team was standing spread out behind them in the street. The only exception was Dr. Evans, standing off to one side, his hands over his ears.

“Yeah!” Winona Briggs shouted. She was dancing from foot to foot, as if she needed to go to the bathroom. “Kill their asses!”

“Go!” Mrs. Sigsby shouted. “All of you go now! Take the boy or kill him! Take him or—”

Then, from behind them: “You’re not going anywhere, ma’am. I swear by the Savior a bunch of you goan be dead if you try. You two fellas up front, put down those grease guns this minute.”

Louis Grant and Tom Jones turned, but did not put down the HKs.

“Do it fast,” Annie said, “or you’re dead. This isn’t playin, boys. You’re in the south now.”

They looked at each other, then put the autos carefully down on the pavement.

Mrs. Sigsby saw two unlikely ambushers standing beneath the Gem’s sagging marquee: a fat bald man in a pajama top and a wild-haired woman in what looked like a Mexican serape. The man had a rifle. The woman in the serape had an automatic in one hand and a revolver in the other.

“Now the rest of you folks do the same,” Drummer Denton said. “You’re covered.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked at the two yokels standing in front of the abandoned theater, and her thought was both simple and weary: Would this never end?

A gunshot from inside the sheriff’s station, a brief pause, then another. When the yokels glanced that way, Grant and Jones bent to pick up their weapons.

“Don’t you do it!” the woman in the serape shouted.

Robin Lecks, who not so long ago had shot Luke’s father through a pillow, took that small window of opportunity to draw her Sig Micro. The other members of Gold team dropped, to give Grant and Jones a clear field of fire. This was how they had been taught to react. Mrs. Sigsby stood where she was, as if her anger at this unexpected problem would protect her.

34

As the confrontation in South Carolina began, Kalisha and her friends were sitting in slumped postures of disconsolation near the access door to Front Half. The door they couldn’t open because Iris was right: the lock was dead.

Nicky: Maybe we can still do something. Get the staff in Front Half the way we got the red caretakers.

Avery was shaking his head. He looked less like a little boy and more like a weary old man. I tried. Reached out to Gladys, because I hate her. Her and her fake smile. She said she wasn’t listening and pushed me away.

Kalisha looked at the Ward A kids, who were once more wandering off, as if there were anywhere to go. A girl was doing cartwheels; a boy wearing filthy board shorts and a torn tee-shirt was knocking his head lightly against the wall; Pete Littlejohn was still getting his ya-ya’s out. But they would come if called, and there was plenty of power there. She took Avery’s hand. “All of us together—”

“No,” Avery said. We might be able to make them feel a little weird, dizzy and sick to their stomachs . . . “. . . but that’s all.”

Kalisha: But why? Why? If we could kill that bomb-making guy way over in Afghanistan—

Avery: Because the bomb-making guy didn’t know. The preacher, that Westin guy, he doesn’t know. When they know . . .

George: They can keep us out.

Avery nodded.

“Then what can we do?” Helen asked. “Anything?”

Avery shook his head. I don’t know.

“There’s one thing,” Kalisha said. “We’re stuck here, but we know someone who isn’t. But we’ll need everybody.” She tilted her head toward the wandering exiles from Ward A. “Let’s call them.”

“I don’t know, Sha,” Avery said. “I’m pretty tired.”

“Just this one more thing,” she coaxed.

Avery sighed and held out his hands. Kalisha, Nicky, George, Helen, and Katie linked up. After a moment, Iris did, too. Once again, the others drifted to them. They made the capsule shape, and the hum rose. In Front Half, caretakers and techs and janitors felt it and feared it, but it wasn’t directed at them. Fourteen hundred miles away, Tim had just put a bullet between Michelle Robertson’s breasts; Grant and Jones were just raising their automatic rifles to rake the front of the sheriff’s station; Billy Wicklow was standing on Denny Williams’s hand with Sheriff John beside him.

The children of the Institute called out to Luke.

35

Luke didn’t think about reaching out with his mind to knock the blond man’s gun up; he just did it. The Stasi Lights came back, momentarily blotting out everything. When they began to fade, he saw one of the cops standing on the blond man’s wrist, trying to make him let go of the gun in his hand. The blond man’s lips were stretched in a snarl of pain, and blood was pouring down the side of his face, but he was holding on. The sheriff brought his foot back, apparently meaning to kick the blond man in the head again.

Luke saw this much, but then the Stasi Lights returned, brighter than ever, and the voices of his friends hit him like a hammer blow in the middle of his head. He stumbled backward through the doorway to the holding area, raising his hands as if to ward off a punch, and tripped over his own feet. He landed on his butt just as Grant and Jones opened up with their automatic rifles.

He saw Tim tackle Wendy and bring her to the floor, shielding her body with his own. He saw bullets tear into the sheriff and the deputy standing on the blond man’s hand. They both went down. Glass flew. Somebody was screaming. Luke thought it was Wendy. Outside, Luke heard the woman who sounded weirdly like Mrs. Sigsby shout something that sounded like all of you now.

For Luke, dazed from a double dose of the Stasi Lights and the combined voices of his friends, the world seemed to slow down. He saw one of the other deputies—wounded, there was blood running down his arm—pivot toward the broken main doors, probably to see who had been shooting. He seemed to be moving very slowly. The blond man was getting to his knees, and he also seemed to be moving slowly. It was like watching an underwater ballet. He shot the deputy in the back, then began turning toward Luke. Faster now, the world speeding up again. Before the blond man could fire, the redheaded deputy bent down, almost bowing, and shot him in the temple. The blond man flew sideways and landed on top of the woman who had claimed to be his wife.

A woman outside—not the one who sounded like Mrs. Sigsby, another one with a southern accent—shouted, “Don’t you do it!”

More gunfire followed, and then the first woman yelled, “The boy! We have to get the boy!”

It is her, Luke thought. I don’t know how it can be, but it is. That’s Mrs. Sigsby out there.

36