said they were what God had intended when He made human beings. They were rarely affected by memory loss, depression, or neuropathic pain. They rarely suffered from obesity or the extreme malnutrition that afflicted anorexics and bulimics. They socialized well with others (the incoming girl being a rare exception), were apt to stop trouble rather than start it (Nick Wilholm being another rare exception), they had low susceptibility to such neuroses as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they had high verbal skills. They got few headaches and almost never suffered from migraines. Their cholesterol stayed low no matter what they ate. They did tend to have below average or poor sleep cycles but compensated for this by napping rather than taking sleeping aids.
While not fragile, BDNF could be damaged, sometimes catastrophically. The most common cause was what Hendricks called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE for short. As far as Mrs. Sigsby could tell, that came down to plain old head-banging concussion. Average BDNF was 60 units per milliliter; football players who’d been in the game ten years or more usually measured in the mid-30s, sometimes in the 20s. BDNF declined slowly with normal ageing, much faster with those suffering from Alzheimer’s. None of this mattered to Mrs. Sigsby, who was tasked only with getting results, and over her years at the Institute, results had been good.
What mattered to her, to the Institute, and to those who funded the Institute and had kept it a hard secret since 1955, was that children with high BDNF levels came with certain psychic abilities as part of the package: TK, TP, or (in rare cases) a combination of the two. The children themselves sometimes didn’t know about these abilities, because the talents were usually latent. Those who did know—usually high-functioning TPs like Avery Dixon—were sometimes able to use their talents when it seemed useful to do so, but ignored them the rest of the time.
Almost all newborns were tested for BDNF. Children such as the two whose files Mrs. Sigsby was now reading were flagged, followed, and eventually taken. Their low-level psychic abilities were refined and enhanced. According to Dr. Hendricks, those talents could also be expanded, TK added to TP and vice-versa, although such expansion did not affect the Institute’s mission—its raison d’etre—in the slightest. The occasional success he’d had with the pinks he was given as guinea pigs would never be written up. She was sure Donkey Kong mourned that, even though he had to know that publication in any medical journal would land him in a maximum security prison instead of winning him a Nobel Prize.
There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Rosalind stuck her head in, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but it’s Fred Clark, asking to see you. He seems—”
“Refresh me. Who is Fred Clark?” Mrs. Sigsby took off her reading glasses and rubbed the sides of her nose.
“One of the janitors.”
“Find out what he wants and tell me later. If we’ve got mice chewing the wiring again, it can wait. I’m busy.”
“He says it’s important, and he seems extremely upset.”
Mrs. Sigsby sighed, closed the folder, and put it in a drawer. “All right, send him in. But this better be good.”
It wasn’t. It was bad. Very.
2
Mrs. Sigsby recognized Clark, she’d seen him in the halls many times, pushing a broom or swishing a mop, but she had never seen him like this. He was dead pale, his graying hair was in a tangle, as if he had been rubbing or yanking at it, and his mouth was twitching infirmly.
“What’s the problem, Clark? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“You have to come, Mrs. Sigsby. You have to see.”
“See what?”
He shook his head and repeated, “You have to come.”
She went with him along the walkway between the administration building and the West Wing of the residence building. She asked Clark twice more exactly what the problem was, but he would only shake his head and repeat that she had to see it for herself. Mrs. Sigsby’s irritation at being interrupted began to be supplanted by a feeling of unease. One of the kids? A test gone bad, as with the Cross boy? Surely not. If there was a problem with one of them, a caretaker, a tech, or one of the doctors would have been more likely to discover it than a janitor.
Halfway down the mostly deserted West Wing corridor, a boy with a big belly pooching out his sloppily untucked shirt was peering at a