“Because it’s power,” Nicky said. “Their power, until we took it back.”
“A carrier wave,” George said. “And now it’s constant. Just waiting for a broadcast.”
Hello, do you hear me? Kalisha thought, and the shiver that shook her was not entirely unpleasant.
Several of the Ward As linked hands. Iris and Len joined them. The hum cycled up. So did the pulse in the overhead fluorescents. Then they let go and the hum dropped back to its previous low level.
“He’s in the air,” Kalisha said. None of them needed to ask who she meant.
“I’d love to fly again,” Helen said wistfully. “I would love that.”
“Will they wait for him, Sha?” Nicky asked. “Or just turn on the gas? What’s your thinking?”
“Who made me Professor Xavier?” She threw an elbow into Avery’s side . . . but gently. “Wake up, Avester. Smell the coffee.”
“I’m awake,” Avery said. Not quite truthfully; he had still been drowsing, enjoying the hum. Thinking of telephones that got bigger, the way Bartholomew Cubbins’s hats had grown bigger and fancier. “They’ll wait. They have to, because if anything happens to us, Luke would know. And we’ll wait until he gets here.”
“And when he does?” Kalisha asked.
“We use the phone,” Avery said. “The big phone. All of us together.”
“How big is it?” George sounded uneasy. “Because the last one I saw was very fuckin large. Almost as big as me.”
Avery only shook his head. His eyelids drooped. At bottom he was still a little kid, and up long past his bedtime.
The Ward A kids—it was hard not to think of them as the gorks, even for Kalisha—were still holding hands. The overheads brightened; one of the tubes actually shorted out. The hum deepened and strengthened. They felt it in Front Half, Kalisha was sure of that—Joe and Hadad, Chad and Dave, Priscilla and that mean one, Zeke. The rest of them, too. Were they frightened by it? Maybe a little, but—
But they believe we’re trapped, she thought. They believe they’re still safe. They believe the revolt has been contained. Let them go on believing that.
Somewhere there was a big phone—the biggest phone, one with extensions in many rooms. If they called on that phone (when they called on it, because there was no other choice), the power in this tunnel where they were trapped would go beyond any bomb ever exploded on the earth or below it. That hum, now just a carrier wave, might grow to a vibration that could topple buildings, maybe destroy whole cities. She didn’t know that for sure, but thought it might be true. How many kids, their heads now empty of everything but the powers for which they had been taken, were waiting for a call on the big phone? A hundred? Five hundred? Maybe even more, if there were Institutes all over the world.
“Nicky?”
“What?” He had also been drowsing, and he sounded irritated.
“Maybe we can turn it on,” she said, and there was no need to be specific about what it was. “But if we do . . . can we turn it off again?”
He considered this, then smiled. “I don’t know. But after what they did to us . . . frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
9
Quarter past eleven.
Stackhouse was back in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, with the Zero Phone—still silent—on the desk. Forty-five minutes from now, the last day of the Institute’s normal operation would be over. Tomorrow this place would be abandoned, no matter how the business with Luke Ellis turned out. Containment of the program as a whole was possible in spite of the Wendy person Luke and his friend Tim were leaving down south, but this facility was blown. The important things tonight were obtaining the flash drive and making sure Luke Ellis was dead. Rescuing Mrs. Sigsby would be nice, but it was strictly optional.
In point of fact, the Institute was being abandoned already. From where he sat, he had an angle on the road that led away from the Institute, first to Dennison River Bend, then to the rest of the lower forty-eight . . . not to mention Canada and Mexico, for those with passports. Stackhouse had called in Zeke, Chad, Chef Doug (twenty years with Halliburton), and Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had come to them from the Hawk Security Group. They were people he trusted.
As for the others . . . he had seen their departing headlights flickering through the trees. He