hot day. He felt a surge of affection for his team. The ones who had stuck with him. They would be rewarded no matter what, if he had anything to say about it. This was hard duty, and they had stayed behind to do it. The man behind the wheel of the Suburban was misguided, all right. What he didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, was that the lives of everyone he had ever loved depended on what they had done here, but that was over now. All the misguided hero could do was die.
Stackhouse approached the schoolbus parked by the flagpole and spoke to his troops for the last time. “Shooters, I want you to concentrate on the driver, all right? The one wearing his hat backward. Then rake the whole damn thing, front to back. Aim high, for the windows, knock out that dark glass, get head shots. Acknowledge.”
They did.
“Start firing when I raise my hand. Repeat, when I raise my hand.”
Stackhouse stood in front of the bus. He put his right hand on its chilly, dew-jeweled surface. With his left he grasped the flagpole. Then he waited.
19
“Drive,” Tim said. He was on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Luke was beneath him.
“Please don’t make me do this,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “If you’d just let me tell you why this place is so important—”
“Drive.”
She drove. The lights drew closer. Now she could see the bus, and the flagpole, and Trevor standing between them.
20
It’s time, Avery said.
He had expected to be afraid, he had been afraid ever since waking up in a room that looked like his room but wasn’t, and then Harry Cross had knocked him down and he had been more afraid than ever. But he wasn’t afraid now. He was exhilarated. There was a song his mom played on the stereo all the time when she was cleaning, and now a line of it recurred to him: I shall be released.
He walked to the Ward A kids, who were already circling. Kalisha, Nicky, George, and Helen followed. Avery held out his hands. Kalisha took one and Iris—poor Iris, who might have been saved if this had happened even a day earlier—took the other.
The woman standing guard outside the door shouted something, a question, but it was lost in the rising hum. The dots came, not dim now but bright and getting brighter. The Stasi Lights filled the center of the circle, spinning and rising like the stripe on a barber pole, coming from some deep seat of power, going back there, then returning, refreshed and stronger than ever.
CLOSE YOUR EYES.
No longer a thought but a THOUGHT, riding the hum.
Avery watched to make sure they were doing it, then closed his. He expected to see his own room at home, or maybe their backyard with the swing set and the aboveground pool his dad inflated every Memorial Day, but he didn’t. What he saw behind his closed eyes—what all of them saw—was the Institute playground. And maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was true that he had been knocked down there and made to cry, which was a bad beginning to these last weeks of his life, but then he had made friends, good ones. He hadn’t had friends back home. In his school back home they thought he was a weirdo, they even made fun of his name, running up to him and yelling “Hey Avery, do me a favory” in his face. There had been none of that here, because here they’d all been in it together. Here his friends had taken care of him, treated him like a normal person, and now he would take care of them. Kalisha, Nicky, George, and Helen: he would take care of them.
Luke most of all. If he could.
With his eyes closed, he saw the big phone.
It was sitting next to the trampoline, in front of the shallow ditch Luke had squirmed through to get under the fence, an old-fashioned telephone at least fifteen feet high and as black as death. Avery and his friends and the kids from Ward A stood around it in their circle. The Stasi Lights swirled, brighter than ever, now over the phone’s dial, now skating giddily over its gigantic Bakelite handset.
Kalisha, GO. Playground!
There was no protest. Her hand left Avery’s, but before the break in the circle could interrupt the power and destroy the vision, George grasped Avery’s hand. The hum was everywhere now, surely they must hear it in all those