The Institute

conspiring.
”
Stackhouse was sure they were, but wouldn’t be for long. They would be too busy choking.
“Hold steady, Rosalind. You’ll be back at Fenway watching the Sox before you know it.”
“Will you come with me, sir?”
“Only if I can cheer for the Yankees.”
He went outside. The night air was pleasantly cool after a 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