The little Gs began shrieking. As Gladys ran in from the hall and Norma from around the steam table, one of the twins knelt and tried to hug Harry. His big right hand rose, swung out, came whistling back. It struck her on the side of her face with terrible force, and sent her flying. Her head struck the wall with a thud. The other twin ran to her sister, screaming.
The cafeteria was in an uproar. Luke and Helen stayed seated, Helen with her arm around Avery’s shoulders (more to comfort herself than the little boy, it seemed; Avery appeared unmoved), but many of the other kids were gathering around the seizing boy. Gladys shoved a couple of them away and snarled, “Get back, you idiots!” No big fake smile tonight for the big G.
Now more Institute personnel were appearing: Joe and Hadad, Chad, Carlos, a couple Luke didn’t know, including one still in his civvies who must have just come on duty. Harry’s body was rising and falling in galvanic leaps, as if the floor had been electrified. Chad and Carlos pinned his arms. Hadad zapped him in the solar plexus, and when that didn’t stop the seizures, Joe hit him in the neck, the crackle of a zap-stick set on high audible even in the babble of confused voices. Harry went limp. His eyes bulged beneath half-closed lids. Foam drizzled from the corners of his mouth. The tip of his tongue protruded.
“He’s all right, situation under control!” Hadad bellowed. “Go back to your tables! He’s fine!”
The kids drew away, silent now, watching. Luke leaned over to Helen and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t think he’s breathing.”
“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,” Helen said, “but look at that one.” She pointed to the twin who had been driven to the wall. Luke saw that the little girl’s eyes were glazed and her head looked all crooked on her neck. Blood was running down one of her cheeks and dripping onto the shoulder of her dress.
“Wake up!” the other twin was shouting, and began to shake her. Silverware flew from the tables in a storm; kids and caretakers ducked. “Wake up, Harry didn’t mean to hurt you, wake up, WAKE UP!”
“Which one is which?” Luke asked Helen, but it was Avery who replied, and in that same eerily calm voice.
“The screamy one throwing the silverware is Gerda. The dead one is Greta.”
“She’s not dead,” Helen said in a shocked voice. “She can’t be.”
Knives, forks, and spoons rose to the ceiling (I could never do anything like that, Luke thought) and then fell with a clatter.
“She is, though,” Avery said matter-of-factly. “So is Harry.” He stood up, holding one of Helen’s hands and one of Luke’s. “I liked Harry even if he did push me down. I’m not hungry anymore.” He looked from one to the other. “And neither are you guys.”
The three of them left unnoticed, giving the screaming twin and her dead sister a wide berth. Dr. Evans came striding up the hall from the elevator, looking harried and put out. Probably he was eating his dinner, Luke thought.
Behind them, Carlos was calling, “Everyone’s fine, you guys! Settle down and finish your dinner, everyone’s just fine!”
“The dots killed him,” Avery said. “Dr. Hendricks and Dr. Evans never should have showed him the dots even if he was a pink. Maybe his BDNF was still too high. Or maybe it was something else, like a allergy.”
“What’s BDNF?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know. I only know that if kids have a really high one, they shouldn’t get the big shots until Back Half.”
“What about you?” Helen asked, turning to Luke.
Luke shook his head. Kalisha mentioned it once, and he had heard the initials bandied about on a couple of his wandering expeditions. He’d thought about googling BDNF, but was wary it might set off an alarm.
“You’ve never had them, have you?” Luke asked Avery. “The big shots? The special tests?”
“No. But I will. In Back Half.” He looked at Luke solemnly. “Dr. Evans might get in trouble for what he did to Harry. I hope he does. I’m scared to death of the lights. And the big shots. The powerful shots.”
“Me too,” Helen said. “The shots I’ve gotten already are bad enough.”
Luke thought of telling Helen and Avery about the shot that had made his throat close up, or the two that had made him vomit (seeing those goddamned dots each time he heaved), but it seemed like pretty small beans compared to what had just happened to Harry.
“Make way, you guys,” Joe said.
They stood against the wall near the poster saying I CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY. Joe and Hadad passed them with Harry Cross’s body. Carlos had the little girl with the broken neck. It lolled back and forth over his arm, her hair hanging down. Luke, Helen, and Avery watched them until they got into the elevator, and Luke found himself wondering if the morgue was on E-Level or F.
“She looked like a doll,” Luke heard himself say. “She looked like her own doll.”
Avery, whose eerie, sybilline calm had actually been shock, began to cry.
“I’m going to my room,” Helen said. She patted Luke on the shoulder and kissed Avery on the cheek. “See you guys tomorrow.”
Only they didn’t. The blue caretakers came for her in the night and they saw her no more.
6
Avery urinated, brushed his teeth, dressed in the pj’s he now kept in Luke’s room, and got into Luke’s bed. Luke did his own bathroom business, got in with the Avester, and turned out the light. He put his forehead against Avery’s and whispered, “I have to get out of here.”
How?
Not a spoken word but one that briefly lit up in his mind and then faded away. Luke was getting a little better at catching these thoughts now, but he could only do it when Avery was close, and sometimes still couldn’t do it at all. The dots—what Avery said were the Stasi Lights—had given him some TP, but not much. Just like his TK had never been much. His IQ might be over the moon, but in terms of psychic ability, he was a dope. I could use some more, he thought, and one of his grandfather’s old sayings occurred to him: wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.
“I don’t know,” Luke said. What he did know was that he had been here a long time—longer than Helen, and she was gone. They would come for him soon.
7
In the middle of the night, Avery shook Luke out of a dream about Greta Wilcox—Greta lying against the wall with her head all wrong on her neck. This was not a dream he was sorry to leave. The Avester was huddled up against him, all knees and sharp elbows, shivering like a dog caught in a thunderstorm. Luke turned on the bedside lamp. Avery’s eyes were swimming with tears.
“What’s wrong?” Luke asked. “Bad dream?”
“No. They woke me up.”
“Who?” Luke looked around, but the room was empty and the door was shut.
“Sha. And Iris.”
“You can hear Iris as well as Kalisha?” This was new.
“I couldn’t before, but… they had the movies, then they had the dots, then they had the sparkler, then they had their group hug with their heads together, I told you about that—”
“Yes.”
“Usually it’s better afterward, the headaches go away for awhile, but Iris’s came back as soon as the hug was over and it was so bad she started screaming and wouldn’t stop.” Avery’s voice rose beyond its usual treble, wavering in a way that made Luke feel cold all over. “ ‘My head, my head, it’s splitting open, oh my poor head, make it stop, somebody make it st—’ ”