The Institute

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
guessed only a dozen so far, but there would be more. Soon Front Half would be deserted
except for the children currently in residence there. Maybe it was already. But Zeke, Chad,
Doug, and Dr. Richardson would stick; they were loyalists. And Gladys Hickson. She would
stick as well, maybe after all the others were gone. Gladys wasn’t just a scrapper; Stackhouse was
becoming more and more certain that she was an out-and-out psycho.
I’m psycho myself for staying, Stackhouse thought. But the brat’s right—they’d hunt me
down. And he’s walking right into it. Unless . . .
“Unless he’s playing me,” Stackhouse murmured.
Rosalind, Mrs. Sigsby’s assistant, stuck her head in. Her usually perfect makeup had eroded
over the course of the last difficult twelve hours, and her usually perfect graying hair was
sticking up on the sides.
“Mr. Stackhouse?”
“Yes, Rosalind.”
Rosalind looked troubled. “I believe Dr. Hendricks may have left. I believe I saw his car
about ten minutes ago.”

---

“I’m not surprised. You should go yourself, Rosalind. Head home.” He smiled. It felt
strange to be smiling on a night like this, but it was a good strange. “I just realized that I’ve
known you since I came here—many moons—and I don’t know where home is for you.”
“Missoula,” Rosalind said. She looked surprised herself. “That’s in Montana. At least I
suppose it’s still home. I own a house in Mizzou, but I haven’t been there in I guess five years. I
just pay the taxes when they come due. When I have time off, I stay in the village. For vacation,
I go down to Boston. I like the Red Sox and the Bruins, and the art cinema in Cambridge. But
I’m always ready to come back.”
Stackhouse realized it was the most Rosalind had said to him in those many moons, which
stretched back over fifteen years. She had been here, Mrs. Sigsby’s faithful dogsbody, when
Stackhouse had retired from his service as an investigator for the US Army (JAG), and here she
still was, and looking about the same. She could have been sixty-five, or a well-preserved
seventy.
“Sir, do you hear that humming noise?”
“I do.”
“Is it a transformer or something? I never heard it before.”
“A transformer. Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”
“It’s very annoying.” She rubbed at her ears, further disarranging her hair. “I suppose the
children are doing it. Is Julia—Mrs. Sigsby—coming back? She is, isn’t she?”
Stackhouse realized (with amusement rather than irritation) that Rosalind, always so proper
and so unobtrusive, had been keeping her ears peeled, hum or no hum.
“I expect so, yes.”
“Then I’d like to stay. I can shoot, you know. I go to the range in the Bend once a month,
sometimes twice. I have the shooting club equivalent of a DM badge, and I won the small
handgun competition last year.”
Julia’s quiet assistant not only took excellent shorthand, she had a Distinguished Marksman
badge . . . or, as she said, the equivalent of. Wonders never ceased.
“What do you shoot, Rosalind?”
“Smith & Wesson M&P .45.”
“Recoil doesn’t bother you?”
“With the help of a wrist support, I manage the recoil very well. Sir, if it’s your intention to
free Mrs. Sigsby from the kidnappers holding her, I would much desire to be a part of that
operation.”

---

“All right,” Stackhouse said, “you’re in. I can use all the help I can get.” But he would have
to be careful how he used her, because saving Julia might not be possible. She had become
expendable now. The important thing was the flash drive. And that fucking too-smart-for-his-
own-good boy.
“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”
“I’m sure you won’t, Rosalind. I’ll tell you how I expect this will play out, but first I have a
question.”
“Yes?”
“I know a gentleman is never supposed to ask, and a lady is never supposed to tell, but how
old are you?”
“Seventy-eight, sir.” She answered promptly enough, and while maintaining eye contact, but
this was a lie. Rosalind Dawson was actually eighty-one.

---

10
Quarter of twelve.
The Challenger aircraft with 940NF on the tail and MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the
side droned north toward Maine at 39,000 feet. With a helping push from the jet stream, its
speed was fluctuating gently between 520 and 550 miles an hour.
Their arrival at Alcolu and subsequent takeoff had gone without incident, mostly because
Mrs. Sigsby had a VIP entry pass from the Regal Air FBO, and she had been more than willing
to use it to open the gate. She smelled a chance—still slim, but there—of getting out of this
alive. The Challenger stood in solitary splendor with its air-stairs down. Tim had raised the
stairs himself, secured the door, and then hammered on the closed cockpit door with the butt of
the dead deputy’s Glock.
“I think we’re all tight back here. If you’ve got a green board, let’s roll.”
There was no answer from the other side of the door, but the engines began to cycle up.
Two minutes later they went airborne. Now they were somewhere over West Virginia,
according to the monitor on the bulkhead, and DuPray was in the rearview. Tim hadn’t
expected to leave so suddenly, and certainly not under such cataclysmic circumstances.
Evans was dozing, and Luke was dead to the world. Only Mrs. Sigsby was still awake, sitting
upright, her gaze fixed on Tim’s face. There was something reptilian about those wide
expressionless eyes. The last of Doc Roper’s pain pills might have put her out, but she had
refused in spite of what must have been fairly bad pain. She had been spared a serious gunshot
wound, but even a groove hurt plenty.
“You have law enforcement experience, I believe,” she said. “It’s in the way you carry
yourself, and in the way you reacted—quickly and well.”
Tim said nothing, only looked at her. He had put the Glock beside him on the seat. Firing a
gun at 39,000 feet would be a very bad idea, and really, why would he, even if they’d been at a
much lower altitude? He was taking this bitch exactly where she wanted to go.
“I don’t understand why you’re going along with this plan.” She nodded at Luke, who—
with his dirty face and bandaged ear—looked much younger than twelve. “We both know he
wants to save his friends, and I think we both know the plan is silly. Idiotic, really. Yet you
agreed. Why was that, Tim?”
Tim said nothing.
“Why you’d get involved in the first place is a mystery to me. Help me understand.”

---

He had no intention of doing that. One of the first things his mentor officer had taught him
during the four months of his rookie probationary tour was you question perps. You never
allow perps to question you.
Even if he had been disposed to talk, he didn’t know what he could say that would sound
even marginally sane. Could he tell her that his presence on this state-of-the-art airplane, the
sort of craft only rich men and women usually saw the inside of, was an accident? That once
upon a time a man bound for New York City had suddenly stood up on a much more ordinary
plane, agreeing to give up his seat for a cash payment and a hotel voucher? That everything—
the hitchhike north, the traffic tie-up on I-95, the walk to DuPray, the night knocker job—had
followed from that single impulsive act? Or could he say that it was fate? That he had been
moved to DuPray by the hand of some cosmic chess player, to save the sleeping boy from the
people who had kidnapped him and wanted to use his extraordinary mind until it was used up?
And if that were the case, what did it make Sheriff John, Tag Faraday, George Burkett, Frank
Potter, and Bill Wicklow? Just pawns to be sacrificed in the great game? And what piece was he?
It would be nice to believe himself a knight, but more likely, he was just another pawn.
“Sure you don’t want that pill?” he asked.
“You don’t intend to answer my question, do you?”
“No, ma’am, I do not.” Tim turned his head and looked out at the leagues of darkness and
the few lights down there, like fireflies at the bottom of a well.

---

11
Midnight.
The box phone gave its hoarse cry. Stackhouse answered. The voice on the other end
belonged to one of the off-duty caretakers, a man named Ron Church. The requested van was
in place at the airport, Church said. Denise Allgood, an off-duty tech (although they were all
supposedly on duty now), had driven behind Church in an Institute sedan. The idea was that,
after leaving the vehicle on the tarmac, Ron would ride back here with Denise. But those two
had a thing going on, which Stackhouse knew about. It was his business to know things, after
all. He felt sure that with the boy’s ride in place, Ron and Denise would be heading for
anywhere that 
wasn’t
here. That was okay. Although the multiple desertions were sad, maybe
they were for the best. It was time to draw a line under this operation. Enough of his people
would stay for the final act, which was all that mattered.
Luke and his friend Tim were going down, there was no question in his mind about that.
Either it would be good enough for the lisping man on the other end of the Zero Phone or it
wouldn’t. That was out of Stackhouse’s hands, and it was a relief. He supposed he had carried
this streak of fatalism like a dormant virus since his days in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just
hadn’t recognized it for what it was until now. He would do what he could, which was all any
man or woman could do. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.
There was a tap at the door and Rosalind looked in. She had done something with her hair,
which was an improvement. He was less sure about the shoulder holster she was now wearing.
It was a bit surreal, like a dog wearing a party hat.
“Gladys is here, Mr. Stackhouse.”
“Send her in.”
Gladys entered. There was an air mask dangling below her chin. Her eyes were red.
Stackhouse doubted if she had been crying, so the irritation was probably from whatever bad
medicine she’d been mixing up. “It’s ready. All I need to do is add the toilet bowl cleaner. You
say the word, Mr. Stackhouse, and we’ll gas them.” She gave her head a quick, hard shake. “That
hum is driving me crazy.”
From the look of you, you don’t have far to go, Stackhouse thought, but she was right about
the hum. The thing was, you couldn’t get used to it. Just when you thought you might, it
would rise in volume—not in your ears, exactly, but inside your head. Then, all at once, it
would drop back to its former and slightly more bearable level.

---

“I was talking to Felicia,” Gladys said. “Dr. Richardson, I mean. She’s been watching them
on her monitor. She says the hum gets stronger when they link up and drops when they let go of
each other.”
Stackhouse had already figured that out for himself. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist,
as the saying went.
“Will it be soon, sir?”
He looked at his watch. “I think about three hours, give or take. The HVAC units are on the
roof, correct?”
“Yes.”
“I may be able to call you when it’s time, Gladys, but I may not. Things will probably
happen fast. If you hear shooting from the front of the admin building, start the chlorine gas
whether you hear from me or not. Then come. Don’t go back inside, just run along the roof to
the East Wing of Front Half. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!” She gave him a brilliant smile. It was the one all the kids hated.

---

12
Twelve-thirty.
Kalisha was watching the Ward A kids and thinking about the Ohio State Marching Band.
Her dad loved Buckeyes football, and she had always watched with him—for the closeness—
but the only part she really cared about was halftime show, when the band (