the bathroom, where there was no surveillance (probably no surveillance) and stuck the scoop down the front of his pants, dropping his Twins tee-shirt over it. If there was video in here, and if someone was monitoring it, he was probably cooked already. There was nothing he could do about that but push on to the next part of his story.
He left the room and went down the hall to the lounge. Stevie Whipple and some other kid, one of the newbies, were there, lying on the floor fast asleep. Half a dozen Fireball nips, all empty, were scattered around them. Those little bottles represented a lot of tokens. Stevie and his new friend would wake up with hangovers and empty pockets.
Luke stepped over Stevie and went into the caff. With only the salad bar fluorescents lit, the place was gloomy and a little spooky. He grabbed an apple from the never-empty bowl of fruit and took a bite as he wandered back into the lounge, hoping no one was watching, hoping that if someone was, they would understand the pantomime he was acting out, and buy it. The kid woke up. The kid got ice from the machine and had a nice cold glass of water, but after that he’s more awake than ever, so he goes up to the caff for something to eat. Then the kid thinks, Hey, why not go out to the playground for awhile, get some fresh air. He wouldn’t be the first one to do that; Kalisha said that she and Iris had gone out several times to look at the stars—they were incredibly bright out here with no light pollution to obscure them. Or sometimes, she said, kids used the playground at night to make out. He just hoped no one was out here stargazing or necking tonight.
There wasn’t, and with no moon the playground was fairly dark, the various pieces of equipment only angular shadows. Without a buddy or two for company, little kids had a tendency to be afraid of the dark. Bigger kids, too, although most wouldn’t admit it.
Luke strolled across the playground, waiting for one of the less familiar night caretakers to appear and ask him what he was doing out here with that scoop hidden under his shirt. Surely he wasn’t thinking about escape, was he? Because that would be pretty darn wacky!
“Wacky,” Luke murmured, and sat down with his back to the chainlink fence. “That’s me, a real whackjob.”
He waited to see if someone would come. No one did. There was only the sound of crickets and the hoot of an owl. There was a camera, but was anybody really monitoring it? There was security, he knew that, but it was sloppy security. He knew that, too. Just how sloppy he would now find out.
He lifted his shirt and removed the scoop. In his imaginings of this part, he scooped behind his back with his right hand, maybe shifting over to his left when his arm got tired. In reality, this didn’t work very well. He scraped the scoop against the bottom of the chainlink repeatedly, making a noise that sounded very loud in the stillness, and he couldn’t see if he was making any progress.
This is crazy, he thought.
Throwing worry about the camera aside, Luke got on his knees and began to dig under the fence, flinging gravel to the right and the left. Time seemed to stretch out. He felt that hours were passing. Was anyone in that surveillance room he’d never seen (but could imagine vividly) starting to wonder why the kid with insomnia hadn’t come back from the playground? Would he or she send someone to check? And say, what if that camera has a night-vision feature, Lukey? What about that?
He dug. He could feel sweat starting to oil his face, and the bugs working the night shift were homing in on it. He dug. He could smell his armpits. His heart had sped up to a gallop. He felt someone standing behind him, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw only the gantry of the basketball post standing against the stars.
Now he had a trench under the bottom of the fence. Shallow, but he had come to the Institute skinny and had lost more weight since then. Maybe—
But when he lay down and tried to slide under, the fence stopped him. It wasn’t even close.
Go back in. Go back in and get into bed before they find you and