He thought about going to YouTube and watching some of the vintage cartoons, stuff like Popeye that had always had him and Rolf rolling around on the floor, yelling “Where’s me spinach?” and “Uck-uck-uck!” But he had an idea they would only bring the homesickness back, and raving. So what did that leave? Going back to bed, where he’d lie awake until daylight? Wandering the empty halls? A visit to the playground? He could do that, he remembered Kalisha saying the playground was never locked, but it would be too spooky.
“Then why don’t you think, asshole?”
He spoke in a low voice, but jumped at the sound anyway, even half-raised a hand as if to cover his mouth. He got up and walked around the room, bare feet slapping and pajama bottoms flapping. It was a good question. Why didn’t he think? Wasn’t that what he was supposed to be good at? Lucas Ellis, the smart kid. The boy genius. Loves Popeye the Sailor Man, loves Call of Duty, loves shooting hoops in the backyard, but also has a working grasp of written French, although he still needs subtitles when he looks at French movies on Netflix, because they all talk so fast, and the idioms are crazy. Boire comme un trou, for instance. Why drink like a hole when drink like a fish makes much more sense? He can fill a blackboard with math equations, he can reel off all the elements in the periodic table, he can list every vice president going back to George Washington’s, he can give you a reasonable explanation of why attaining light speed is never going to happen outside of the movies.
So why is he just sitting here and feeling sorry for himself?
What else can I do?
Luke decided to take that as a real question instead of an expression of despair. Escape was probably impossible, but what about learning?
He tried googling the New York Times, and wasn’t surprised to get HAL 9000; no news for Institute kids. The question was, could he find a way around the prohibition? A back door? Maybe.
Let’s see, he thought. Let’s just see. He opened Firefox and typed in #!cloakofGriffin!#.
Griffin was H. G. Wells’s invisible man, and this site, which Luke had learned about a year ago, was a way to get around parental controls—not the dark web, exactly, but next door to it. Luke had used it, not because he wanted to visit porn sites on the Brod’s computers (although he and Rolf had done just that on a couple of occasions), or watch ISIS beheadings, but simply because the concept was cool and simple and he wanted to find out if it worked. It had at home and at school, but would it here? There was only one way to find out, so he banged the return key.
The Institue’s Wi-Fi munched awhile—it was slow—and then, just when Luke was starting to think it was a lost cause, took him to Griffin. At the top of the screen was Wells’s invisible man, head wrapped in bandages, badass goggles covering his eyes. Below this was a question that was also an invitation: WHICH LANGUAGE DO YOU WANT TRANSLATED? The list was a long one, from Assyrian to Zulu. The beauty of the site was it didn’t matter which language you picked; the important thing was what got recorded in the search history. Once upon a time, a secret passage beneath parental controls had been available on Google, but the sages of Mountain View had shut it down. Hence, the Cloak of Griffin.
Luke picked German at random, and got ENTER PASSWORD. Calling on what his dad sometimes called his weird memory, Luke typed in #x49ger194GbL4. The computer munched a little more, then announced PASSWORD ACCEPTED.
He typed in New York Times and hit enter. This time the computer thought even longer, but eventually the Times came up. Today’s issue, and in English, but from this point forward, the computer’s search history would note nothing but a series of German words and English translations. Maybe a small victory, maybe a large one. For the moment, Luke didn’t even care. It was a win, and that was enough.
How soon would his captors realize what he was doing? Camouflaging the computer’s search history would mean nothing if they could do live look-ins. They’d see the newspaper and shut him down. Never mind the Times with its headline about Trump and North Korea; he ought to check the Star Trib before that could happen, see if there was anything about his parents. But before he could do that, the screaming started out in the hall.
“Help! Help! Help! Somebody help me! SOMEBODY HELP ME, I’M LOST!”
4
The screamer was a little boy in Star Wars pajamas, hammering on doors with small fists that went up and down like pistons. Ten? Avery Dixon looked six, seven at most. The crotch and one leg of his pajama pants were wet and sticking to him.
“Help me, I WANT TO GO HOME!”
Luke glanced around, expecting to see someone—maybe several someones—coming on the run, but the hall remained empty. Later, he would realize that in the Institute, a kid screaming to go home was par for the course. For the moment, Luke just wanted to shut the kid up. He was freaked out, and he was freaking Luke out.
He went to him, knelt down, and took the boy by the shoulders. “Hey. Hey. Take it easy, kid.”
The kid in question stared at Luke with white-ringed eyes, but Luke wasn’t entirely sure the kid was seeing him. His hair was sweaty and sticking up. His face was wet with tears, and his upper lip gleamed with fresh snot.
“Where’s Mumma? Where’s Daddy?”
Only it wasn’t Daddy but DAAAAAADY, like the whoop of an air raid siren. The kid began to stomp his feet. He brought his fists down on Luke’s shoulders. Luke let him go, got up, and stepped back, watching with amazement as the kid fell to the floor and began to thrash.
Across from the poster proclaiming this JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, a door opened and Kalisha emerged, wearing a tie-dyed tee-shirt and gigantic basketball shorts. She walked to Luke and stood looking down at the newcomer, her hands on her mostly nonexistent hips. Then she looked at Luke. “I’ve seen tantrums before, but this one takes the prize.”
Another door opened and Helen Simms appeared, clad—sort of—in what Luke believed were called babydoll pajamas. She had hips, plus other interesting equipment.
“Put your eyes back in their sockets, Lukey,” Kalisha said, “and help me out a little. Kid’s buggin my head like to give me a migraine.” She knelt, reached out for the dervish—whose words had now devolved into wordless howls—and pulled back when one of his fists struck her forearm. “Jesus, work with me here. Grab his hands.”
Luke also knelt, made a tentative move to grab the new kid’s hands, pulled back, then decided he didn’t want to look like a wuss in front of the lately arrived vision in pink. He grabbed the little boy at the elbows and pressed his arms to the sides of his chest. He could actually feel the kid’s heart, racing along at triple time.
Kalisha bent over him, put her hands on the sides of his face, and looked into his eyes. The kid stopped yelling. Now there was only the sound of his rapid breathing. He looked at Kalisha, fascinated, and Luke suddenly understood what she’d meant when she said the kid was bugging her head.
“He’s TP, isn’t he? Like you.”
Kalisha nodded. “Only he’s a lot stronger than me, or any of the other TPs that have been through here during my time. Come on, let’s take him down to my room.”