“I don’t think it’s a race. I think all the Institutes are working together. I don’t know that for sure, but it feels right. A common goal. A good one, sort of—killing a few kids to keep the whole human race from killing itself. A trade-off. God knows how long it’s been going on, but there’s never been a mutiny until now. Avery and my other friends started it, but it could spread. It might be spreading already.”

Tim Jamieson was no historian or social scientist, but he kept up with current events, and he thought Luke could be right. Mutiny—or revolution, to use a less pejorative term—was like a virus, especially in the Information Age. It could spread.

“The power each of us has—the reason they kidnapped us and brought us to the Institute in the first place—is just little. The power of all of us together is stronger. Especially the Ward A kids. With their minds gone, the power is all that’s left. But if there are more Institutes, if they know what’s happening at ours, and if they were all to band together . . .”

Luke shook his head. He was thinking again of the phone in their front hall, only grown to enormous size.

“If that happened, it would be big, and I mean really big. That’s why we need time. If Stackhouse thinks I’m an idiot so eager to save my friends I’d make an idiotic deal, that’s good.”

Tim could still feel that phantom gust of wind that had shoved him into the fence. “We’re not exactly going there to save them, are we?”

Luke regarded him soberly. With his dirty bruised face and bandaged ear, he looked like the most harmless of children. Then he smiled, and for a moment didn’t look harmless at all.

“No. We’re going to pick up the pieces.”

8

Kalisha Benson, Avery Dixon, George Iles, Nicholas Wilholm, Helen Simms.

Five kids sitting at the end of the access tunnel, next to the locked door giving (not that it would give) on Front Half’s F-Level. Katie Givens and Hal Leonard had been with them for awhile, but now they had joined the Ward A kids, walking with them when they walked, joining hands when they decided to make one of those rings. So had Len, and Kalisha’s hopes for Iris were fading, although so far Iris was just looking on as the Ward A kids circled, broke apart, then circled again. Helen had come back, was fully with them. Iris might be too far gone. The same with Jimmy Cullum and Donna Gibson, whom Kalisha had known in Front Half—thanks to her chicken pox, she had been around much longer than the usual residents there. The Ward A kids made her sad, but Iris was worse. The possibility that she might be fucked up beyond repair . . . that idea was . . .

“Horrible,” Nicky said.

She looked at him half-scoldingly. “Are you in my head?”

“Yeah, but not looking through your mental underwear drawer,” Nicky said, and Kalisha snorted.

“We’re all in each other’s heads now,” George said. He cocked a thumb at Helen. “Do you really think I wanted to know she laughed so hard at some friend’s pajama party that she peed herself? That’s an authentic case of TMI.”

“Better than finding out you worry about psoriasis on your—” Helen began, but Kalisha told her to hush.

“What time is it, do you think?” George asked.

Kalisha consulted her bare wrist. “Skin o’clock.”

“Feels like eleven to me,” Nicky said.

“You know something funny?” Helen said. “I always hated the hum. I knew it was stripping my brains.”

“We all knew,” George said.

“Now I sort of like it.”

“Because it’s power,” Nicky said. “Their power, until we took it back.”

“A carrier wave,” George said. “And now it’s constant. Just waiting for a broadcast.”

Hello, do you hear me? Kalisha thought, and the shiver that shook her was not entirely unpleasant.

Several of the Ward As linked hands. Iris and Len joined them. The hum cycled up. So did the pulse in the overhead fluorescents. Then they let go and the hum dropped back to its previous low level.

“He’s in the air,” Kalisha said. None of them needed to ask who she meant.

“I’d love to fly again,” Helen said wistfully. “I would love that.”

“Will they wait for him, Sha?” Nicky asked. “Or just turn on the gas? What’s your thinking?”

“Who made me Professor Xavier?” She threw an elbow into Avery’s side . . . but gently. “Wake up, Avester. Smell the coffee.”

“I’m awake,” Avery said. Not quite truthfully; he had still been drowsing, enjoying the hum. Thinking of telephones that got bigger, the way Bartholomew Cubbins’s hats had grown bigger and fancier. “They’ll wait. They have to, because if anything happens to us, Luke would know. And we’ll wait until he gets here.”

“And when he does?” Kalisha asked.

“We use the phone,” Avery said. “The big phone. All of us together.”

“How big is it?” George sounded uneasy. “Because the last one I saw was very fuckin large. Almost as big as me.”

Avery only shook his head. His eyelids drooped. At bottom he was still a little kid, and up long past his bedtime.

The Ward A kids—it was hard not to think of them as the gorks, even for Kalisha—were still holding hands. The overheads brightened; one of the tubes actually shorted out. The hum deepened and strengthened. They felt it in Front Half, Kalisha was sure of that—Joe and Hadad, Chad and Dave, Priscilla and that mean one, Zeke. The rest of them, too. Were they frightened by it? Maybe a little, but—

But they believe we’re trapped, she thought. They believe they’re still safe. They believe the revolt has been contained. Let them go on believing that.

Somewhere there was a big phone—the biggest phone, one with extensions in many rooms. If they called on that phone (when they called on it, because there was no other choice), the power in this tunnel where they were trapped would go beyond any bomb ever exploded on the earth or below it. That hum, now just a carrier wave, might grow to a vibration that could topple buildings, maybe destroy whole cities. She didn’t know that for sure, but thought it might be true. How many kids, their heads now empty of everything but the powers for which they had been taken, were waiting for a call on the big phone? A hundred? Five hundred? Maybe even more, if there were Institutes all over the world.

“Nicky?”

“What?” He had also been drowsing, and he sounded irritated.

“Maybe we can turn it on,” she said, and there was no need to be specific about what it was. “But if we do . . . can we turn it off again?”

He considered this, then smiled. “I don’t know. But after what they did to us . . . frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

9

Quarter past eleven.

Stackhouse was back in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, with the Zero Phone—still silent—on the desk. Forty-five minutes from now, the last day of the Institute’s normal operation would be over. Tomorrow this place would be abandoned, no matter how the business with Luke Ellis turned out. Containment of the program as a whole was possible in spite of the Wendy person Luke and his friend Tim were leaving down south, but this facility was blown. The important things tonight were obtaining the flash drive and making sure Luke Ellis was dead. Rescuing Mrs. Sigsby would be nice, but it was strictly optional.

In point of fact, the Institute was being abandoned already. From where he sat, he had an angle on the road that led away from the Institute, first to Dennison River Bend, then to the rest of the lower forty-eight . . . not to mention Canada and Mexico, for those with passports. Stackhouse had called in Zeke, Chad, Chef Doug (twenty years with Halliburton), and Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had come to them from the Hawk Security Group. They were people he trusted.

As for the others . . . he had seen their departing headlights flickering through the trees. He guessed only a dozen so far, but there would be more. Soon Front Half would be deserted except for the children currently in residence there. Maybe it was already. But Zeke, Chad, Doug, and Dr. Richardson would stick; they were loyalists. And Gladys Hickson. She would stick as well, maybe after all the others were gone. Gladys wasn’t just a scrapper; Stackhouse was becoming more and more certain that she was an out-and-out psycho.

I’m psycho myself for staying, Stackhouse thought. But the brat’s right—they’d hunt me down. And he’s walking right into it. Unless . . .

“Unless he’s playing me,” Stackhouse murmured.

Rosalind, Mrs. Sigsby’s assistant, stuck her head in. Her usually perfect makeup had eroded over the course of the last difficult twelve hours, and her usually perfect graying hair was sticking up on the sides.

“Mr. Stackhouse?”

“Yes, Rosalind.”

Rosalind looked troubled. “I believe Dr. Hendricks may have left. I believe I saw his car about ten minutes ago.”