office. He spoke to her briefly. She nodded and left the room, taking her phone from her pocket as she went. Tim came back. “I think we better take you to the station.”
At first Luke thought he was talking about the train station. Putting him on another freight, so he and his girlfriend didn’t have to deal with the runaway kid and his crazy story. Then he realized that wasn’t the kind of station Tim meant.
Oh, so what? Luke thought. I always knew I’d end up in a police station somewhere. And maybe a small one is better than a big one, where they’d have a hundred different people—perps—to deal with.
Only they thought he was just being paranoid about that guy Hollister, and that wasn’t good. For now he’d have to hope they were right, and Hollister was nobody special. They probably were right. After all, the Institute couldn’t have guys everywhere, could they?
“Okay, but first I need to tell you something and show you something.”
“Go for it,” Tim said. He leaned forward, looking intently into Luke’s face. Maybe he was just humoring the crazy kid, but at least he was listening, and Luke supposed that was the best he could expect for now.
“If they know I’m here, they’ll come for me. Probably with guns. Because they’re scared to death someone might believe me.”
“Duly noted,” Tim said, “but we’ve got a pretty good little police force here, Luke. I think you’ll be safe.”
You have no idea what you might be up against, Luke thought, but he couldn’t try to convince this guy anymore just now. He was just too worn out. Wendy came back and gave Tim a nod. Luke was too beat to care about that, either.
“The woman who helped me escape from the Institute gave me two things. One was the knife I used to cut off the part of my ear that had the tracker in it. The other was this.” From his pocket he drew out the flash drive. “I don’t know what’s on it, but I think you should look at it before you do anything else.”
He handed it to Tim.
12
The residents of Back Half—the front half of Back Half, that was; the eighteen currently in Gorky Park remained behind their locked door, humming away—were given twenty minutes of free time before the movie started. Jimmy Cullum zombie-walked his aching head to his room; Hal, Donna, and Len sat in the cafeteria, the two boys staring at their half-eaten desserts (chocolate pudding tonight), Donna regarding a smoldering cigarette she seemed to have forgotten how to smoke.
Kalisha, Nick, George, Avery, and Helen went down to the lounge with its ugly thrift-store furniture and the old flatscreen, which showed only prehistoric sitcoms like Bewitched and Happy Days. Katie Givens was there. She didn’t look around at them, only at the currently blank TV. To Kalisha’s surprise, they were joined by Iris, who looked better than she had in days. Brighter.
Kalisha was thinking hard, and she could think, because she felt better than she had in days. What they had done to Helen’s headache—Avery, mostly, but they had all pitched in—had helped her own. The same was true of Nicky and George. She could see it.
Take the place over.
A bold and delicious idea, but questions immediately arose. The most obvious was how they were supposed to do it, when there were at least twelve caretakers on duty—there were always more on movie days. The second was why they had never thought of this before.
I did, Nicky told her . . . and was his mental voice stronger? She thought it was, and she thought Avery might have also played a part in that. Because he was stronger now. I thought about it when they first brought me here.
That was as much as Nicky could manage to tell her mind to mind, so he put his mouth to her ear and whispered the rest. “I was the one who always fought, remember?”
It was true. Nicky with his black eyes. Nicky with his bruised mouth.
“We’re not strong enough,” he murmured. “Even in here, even after the lights, we only have little powers.”
Avery, meanwhile, was looking at Kalisha with desperate hope. He was thinking into her head, but hardly needed to. His eyes said it all. Here are the pieces, Sha. I’m pretty sure all of them are here. Help me put them together. Help me build a castle where we can be safe, at least for awhile.