all swooshing dark and globes of power. If he and Mom went, they could ride comets, he thought.
And when morning came with a smooth lemony color on his lids, he lay there, clamp-eyed. Because he didn’t want to open his eyes. Because he didn’t want morning.
Nights were better. They made the world feel huge, fat with surprise, full of doors to be opened. Morning made everything too bright. You could see too much. You could see the water stains on the ceiling, or the way the stuffing poked through the stitching in the couch pillows. You could look in Mom’s eyes and see sadness in them.
He clenched his eyelids, trying to hold in the private night. He’d been Indiana Jones, running from—
—running from a soldier—
—balloon—
Michael shuddered, and his eyes flew wide.
Light, hard white spears of it, pierced his vision. For a moment, he was so shocked that even blinks wouldn’t come.
Balloon.
Patrick.
He sat up, heart jackknifing in his ribs, and shouted as a pain like a frozen rod pierced through his skull at the temples. Michael sucked air, clasping his head, his brain pulsing like a black bladder.
The light was like hot, white bulbs held to his irises: the same sort of blinding, buzzy light that seems almost supernaturally bright in emergency rooms at night. Michael—do you go by Mike or Michael? he remembered a doctor saying. So Michael, I’m a doctor here. Your father—stepfather, excuse me—asked me to talk to you. We understand that Patrick began screaming a couple hours ago. And this was for no reason? (Say what Mom told you to say. Yes, he was screaming for no reason. No, Ron never touched Mom.) Well, listen . . . you know we’re here to help your brother. He doesn’t know that. And so our thinking, pal, is we know how close you two are, and it would absolutely help us if you could hold him while we give him a shot. Just to sedate him for a few hours. We could strap him down, but we’ve found that it’s better if— Hey. Calm down. Michael, I will say this with absolute clarity: your brother is a danger to himself. This is just who he is, and pretending he’s not won’t change that. He is back there shrieking and hitting himself. I believe he broke his hand. We see these things all the time with special-needs children and— Hey, Mike, you’re a big boy, but if you’re going to use that kind of language, keep it down. Now are you going to help your brother or not?
Michael got his feet under him. And he felt something he hadn’t expected, something that stopped him: something soft.
Carpet.
There was a cot behind him. He’d been lying on it.
He was . . . inside.
The shock seemed to short-circuit his brain. His fingertips went numb; for a moment, he felt like he might tilt over. He told himself it was another dream.
Because even if it actually existed, the room he was in was unbelievable.
It was as if he had awakened in both a courtroom and library. Small wooden desks were arranged in concentric horseshoes, row within row facing a center where there stood two podiums and something like a judge’s seat. The room was cupped under a dome, ribbed and decorated by two scenes: one of men smiling in a sparkling city, the other of grimly determined miners and machines. The grand vault made him feel no larger than an ant.
But it made him feel like a giant, too: he’d been a lot smaller, last time he was here. Back then, he’d been in a line of other sixth graders, probably wearing the Quidditch shirt with gold writing Mom only let him wear on “special days.” That was the day C. R. Rohrbough threw up out the window on the bus ten seconds before it could pull over to the side of the road. That was the day of the West Virginia history field trip.
He was in the Senate chambers of the state Capitol.
He would have thought, after three weeks’ imagining, that anything would be an anticlimax. But this was greater and more weird than he could have predicted. It was still easy to picture governors striding over the deep-blue-and-marigold carpet, but the stately space had been transformed. It was jammed with cots, dozens of them, rumpled with thin brown blankets. Here and there among them were red plastic meal trays. Here and there were mugs.
Here were wallets, backpacks, toy trucks, an old-school iPod