Kalisha was lost in a very large house, and she had no idea how to get out, because she didn’t know how she’d gotten in. She was in a hall that looked like the residence corridor in Front Half, where she had lived for awhile before being taken away to have her brains plundered. Only this hall was furnished with bureaus and mirrors and coat racks and something that looked like an elephant foot filled with umbrellas. There was an endtable with a phone on it, one that looked just like the phone in their kitchen back home, and it was ringing. She picked it up, and since she couldn’t say what she had been taught to say since the age of four (“Benson residence”), she just said hello.
“Hola? Me escuchas?” It was a girl’s voice, faint and broken up by static, just barely audible.
Kalisha knew hola because she’d had a year of Spanish in middle school, but her scant vocabulary didn’t include escuchas. Nevertheless, she knew what the girl was saying, and realized this was a dream.
“Yes, uh-huh, I can hear you. Where are you? Who are you?”
But the girl was gone.
Kalisha put the phone down and kept walking along the hall. She peered into what looked like a drawing room in an old-time movie, then into a ballroom. It had a floor made of black-and-white squares that made her think of Luke and Nick, playing chess out in the playground.
Another phone began to ring. She hurried faster and entered a nice modern kitchen. The fridge was plastered with pictures and magnets and a bumper sticker that said BERKOWITZ FOR PRESIDENT! She didn’t know Berkowitz from a hole in the wall, yet she knew it was his kitchen. The phone was on the wall. It was bigger than the one on the endtable, certainly bigger than the one in the Benson kitchen, almost like a joke phone. But it was ringing, so she picked it up.
“Hello? Hola? My name is—me llamo—Kalisha.”
But it wasn’t the Spanish girl. It was a boy. “Bonjour, vous m’entendez?” French. Bonjour was French. Different language, same question, and this time the connection was better. Not much, but a little.
“Yes, wee-wee, I hear you! Where are—”
But the boy was gone, and another phone was ringing. She dashed through a pantry and into a room with straw walls and a packed dirt floor mostly covered by a colorful woven mat. It had been the final stop for a fugitive African warlord named Badu Bokassa, who had been stabbed in the throat by one of his mistresses. Except he’d really been killed by a bunch of kids thousands of miles away. Dr. Hendricks had waved his magic wand—which just happened to be a cheap Fourth of July sparkler—and down Mr. Bokassa went. The phone on the mat was bigger still, almost the size of a table lamp. The receiver was heavy in her hand when she picked it up.
Another girl, and this time clear as a bell. As the phones got bigger, the voices got clearer, it seemed. “Zdravo, cujes li me?”
“Yes, I hear you fine, what is this place?”
The voice was gone, and another phone was ringing. It was in a bedroom with a chandelier, and this phone was the size of a footstool. She had to pick up the receiver with both hands.
“Hallo, hoor je me?”
“Yes! Sure! Absolutely! Talk to me!”
He didn’t. No dial tone. Just gone.
The next phone was in a sunroom with a great glass roof, and it was as big as the table it sat on. The ringing hurt her ears. It was like listening to a phone channeled through an amplifier at a rock-and-roll gig. Kalisha ran at it, hands outstretched, palms tilted upward, and knocked the receiver off the phone’s base, not because she expected enlightenment but to shut it up before it burst her eardrums.
“Ciao!” boomed a boy’s voice. “Mi senti? MI SENTI?”
And that woke her up.
5
She was with her buds—Avery, Nicky, George, and Helen. The others were still sleeping, but not easily. George and Helen were moaning. Nicky was muttering something and holding out his hands, making her think of how she’d run at the big phone to make it stop. Avery was twisting around and gasping something that she had already heard: Hoor je me? Hoor je me?
They were dreaming what she had been dreaming, and considering what they were now—what the Institute had made them—the idea made perfect sense. They were generating some kind of group power, telepathy as well as telekinesis, so why wouldn’t they share the same dream? The only question was which one of them had started it. She was guessing Avery, because he was the strongest.
Hive of bees, she thought. That’s what we are now. Hive of psychic bees.
Kalisha got to her feet and looked around. Still trapped in the access tunnel, that hadn’t changed, but she thought the level of that group power had. Maybe it was why the Ward A kids hadn’t gone to sleep, although it had to be fairly late; Kalisha’s time-sense had always been good, and she thought it was at least nine-thirty, maybe a bit later.
The hum was louder than ever, and had picked up a kind of cycling beat: mmm-MMM-mmm-MMM. She saw with interest (but no real surprise) that the overhead fluorescents were cycling with the hum, going bright, fading a little, then going bright again.
TK you can actually see, she thought. For all the good it does us.
Pete Littlejohn, the boy who had been beating on his head and going ya-ya-ya-ya, came loping toward her. In Front Half, Pete had been kind of cute and kind of annoying, like a little brother that tags after you everywhere and tries to listen in while you and your girlfriends are telling secrets. Now he was hard to look at with his wet, drooping mouth and empty eyes.
“Me escuchas?” he said. “Hörst du mich?”
“You dreamed it, too,” Kalisha said.
Pete paid no attention, just turned back toward his wandering mates, now saying something that sounded like styzez minny. God only knew what the language was, but Kalisha was sure it meant the same as all the others.
“I hear you,” Kalisha told no one. “But what do you want?”
About halfway down the tunnel toward the locked door into Back Half, something had been written on the wall in crayon. Kalisha walked down to look at it, dodging past several wandering Ward A kids to get there. Written in big purple letters was CALL THE BIG FONE. ANSER THE BIG FONE. So the gorks were dreaming it, too, only while awake. With their brains mostly wiped, maybe they were dreaming all the time. What a horrible idea, to dream and dream and dream and never be able to find the real world.
“You too, huh?”
It was Nick, eyes puffy with sleep, hair standing up in stalks and spears. It was sort of endearing. She raised her eyebrows.
“The dream. Big house, increasingly big phones? Sort of like in The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?”
“Bartholomew who?”
“A Dr. Seuss book. Bartholomew kept trying to take off his hat for the king, and every time he took one off, there was a bigger and fancier one underneath.”
“Never read it, but the dream, yeah. I think it came from Avery.” She pointed to the boy, who was still sleeping the sleep of the totally exhausted. “Or started with him, at least.”
“I don’t know if he started it, or if he’s receiving it and amplifying it and passing it on. Not sure it matters.” Nick studied the message on the wall, then looked around. “The gorks are restless tonight.”
Kalisha frowned at him. “Don’t call them that. It’s a slave word. Like calling me a nigger.”