“You’ve made a mistake,” Luke said. “I’m TK, not TP. Maybe Kalisha could tell you what’s on those cards, and I’m sure Avery could, but I’m not TP!”
Evans picked up a fourth. “What is it? No more slaps. Tell me, or this time Brandon will shock you with his zap-stick, and it will hurt. You probably won’t have another seizure, but you might, so tell me, Luke, what is it?”
“The Brooklyn Bridge!” he shouted. “The Eiffel Tower! Brad Pitt in a tuxedo, a dog taking a shit, the Indy 500, I don’t know!”
He waited for the zap-stick—some kind of Taser, he supposed. Maybe it would crackle, or maybe it would make a humming sound. Maybe it would make no sound at all and he’d just jerk and fall on the floor, twitching and drooling. Instead, Evans set the card aside and motioned Brandon to step away. Luke felt no relief.
He thought, I wish I was dead. Dead and out of this.
“Priscilla,” Hendricks said, “take Luke back to his room.”
“Yes, Doctor. Bran, help me with him as far as the elevator.”
By the time they got him there, Luke felt reintegrated again, his mind slipping back into gear. Had they really turned off the projector? And he still kept seeing the dots?
“You made a mistake.” Luke’s mouth and throat were very dry. “I’m not what you people call a TP. You know that, right?”
“Whatever,” Priscilla said indifferently. She turned to Brandon and with a real smile became a new person. “I’ll see you later, right?”
Brandon grinned. “You bet.” He turned to Luke, suddenly made a fist, and drove it at Luke’s face. He stopped an inch short of Luke’s nose, but Luke cringed and cried out. Brandon laughed heartily, and Priscilla gave him an indulgent boys-will-be-boys smile.
“Shake her easy, Luke,” Brandon said, and headed off down the C-Level hall in a modified swagger, his holstered zap-stick bumping against his hip.
Back in the main corridor—what Luke now understood to be the residents’ wing—the little girls, Gerda and Greta, were standing and watching with wide, frightened eyes. They were holding hands and clutching dolls as identical as they were. They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie.
Priscilla accompanied him to his door and walked away without saying anything. Luke went in, saw that no one had come to take away his laptop, and collapsed on his bed without even taking off his shoes. There he slept for the next five hours.
15
Mrs. Sigsby was waiting when Dr. Hendricks, aka Donkey Kong, entered the private suite adjacent to her office. She was perched on the small sofa. He handed her a file. “I know you worship hard copy, so here you are. Much good it will do you.”
She didn’t open it. “It can’t do me good or harm, Dan. These are your tests, your secondary experiments, and they don’t seem to be panning out.”
He set his jaw stubbornly. “Agnes Jordan. William Gortsen. Veena Patel. Two or three others whose names now escape me. Donna something. We had positive results with all of them.”
She sighed and primped at her thinning hair. Hendricks thought Siggers had a bird’s face: a sharp nose instead of a beak, but the same avid little eyes. A bird’s face with a bureaucrat’s brain behind it. Hopeless, really. “And dozens of pinks with whom you had no results at all.”
“Perhaps that’s true, but think about it,” he said, because what he wanted to say—How can you be so stupid?—would get him in a world of trouble. “If telepathy and telekinesis are linked, as my experiments suggest they are, there may be other psychic abilities, as well, latent and just waiting to be brought to the fore. What these kids can do, even the most talented ones, may only be the tip of the iceberg. Suppose psychic healing is a real possibility? Suppose a glioblastoma tumor like the one that killed John McCain could be cured simply by the power of thought? Suppose these abilities could be channeled to lengthen life, perhaps to a hundred and fifty years, even longer? What we’re using them for doesn’t have to be the end; it might only be the beginning!”
“I’ve heard all this before,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “And read it in what you’re pleased to call your mission statement.”
But you don’t understand, he thought. Neither does Stackhouse. Evans does, sort of, but not even he sees the vast potential. “It’s not as though the Ellis boy or Iris Stanhope