where they’re trapped.”
“Not yet,” Luke said. “But I think they will.”
“Why? How?”
“You got me thinking when you said Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse must have their own bosses. I should have figured that out for myself, but I never looked that far. Probably because parents and teachers are the only bosses kids have. If there are more bosses, why wouldn’t there be more Institutes?”
A car came into the lot, passed them, and disappeared in a wink of red taillights. When it was gone, Luke continued.
“Maybe the one in Maine is the only one in America, or maybe there’s one on the West Coast. You know, like bookends. But there might be one in the UK . . . and in Russia . . . India . . . China . . . Germany . . . Korea. It stands to reason, when you think of it.”
“A mind race instead of an arms race,” Tim said. “That’s what you’re saying?”
“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