This can’t be real, he thought. It can’t be.
But it was.
23
Avery and the others stood in a circle around the big phone. It was hard to see because of the Stasi Lights, so bright and so beautiful.
The sparkler, Avery thought. Now we make the sparkler.
It coalesced from the lights, ten feet high and spitting brilliance in every direction. The sparkler wavered back and forth at first, then the group mind took firmer control. It swung against the phone’s gigantic receiver and knocked it from its gigantic base. The dumbbell-shape landed askew against the jungle gym. Voices in different languages spilled from the mouthpiece, all asking the same questions: Hello, do you hear me? Hello, are you there?
YES, the children of the Institute answered, and in one voice. YES, WE HEAR YOU! DO IT NOW!
A circle of children in Spain’s Sierra Nevada National Park heard. A circle of Bosnian children imprisoned in the Dinaric Alps heard. On Pampus, an island guarding the entrance to Amsterdam’s harbor, a circle of Dutch children heard. A circle of German children heard in the mountainous forests of Bavaria.
In Pietrapertosa, Italy.
In Namwon, South Korea.
Ten kilometers outside the Siberian ghost town of Chersky.
They heard, they answered, they became one.
24
Kalisha and the others reached the locked door between them and Front Half. They could hear the gunfire clearly now, because the hum had abruptly stopped, as if somewhere a plug had been pulled.
Oh, it’s still there, Kalisha thought. It’s just not for us anymore.
A groaning began in the walls, an almost human sound, and then the steel door between the access tunnel and Front Half’s F-Level blew outward, smashing Rosalind Dawson before it and killing her instantly. The door landed beyond the elevator, twisted out of shape where its heavy hinges had been. Above, the wire mesh guarding the overhead fluorescent tubes was rippling, casting crazy underwater shadows.
The groaning grew louder, coming from everywhere. It was as if the building were trying to tear itself apart. In the Suburban, Tim had thought of Bonnie and Clyde; Kalisha thought of the Poe story about the House of Usher.
Come on, she thought at the others. Fast!
They ran past the torn door with the torn woman lying beneath it in a spreading pool of blood.
George: What about the elevator? It’s back there!
Nicky: Are you crazy? I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m not getting in any goddam elevator.
Helen: Is it an earthquake?
“No,” Kalisha said.
Mindquake. I don’t know how—
“… how they’re doing it, but that’s what…” She took a breath and tasted something acrid. It made her cough. “That’s what it is.”
Helen: Something’s wrong with the air.
Nicky said, “I think it’s some kind of poison.” Those fuckers, they never stop.
Kalisha shoved open the door marked STAIRS and they began to climb, all of them coughing now. Between D- and C-Level, the stairs began to shake beneath them. Cracks zig-zagged down the walls. The fluorescents went out and the emergency lights came on, casting a flat yellow glow. Kalisha stopped, bent over, dry-retched, then started up again.
George: What about Avery and the rest of the kids still down there? They’ll strangle!
Nicky: And what about Luke? Is he here? Is he still alive?
Kalisha didn’t know. All she knew was they had to get out before they choked. Or before they were crushed, if the Institute were imploding.
A titanic shudder went through the building and the stairway tilted to the right. She thought of what their situation might be right now if they had tried the elevator, and pushed the thought away.
B-Level. Kalisha was gasping for breath, but the air was better here, and she was able to run a little faster. She was glad she hadn’t got hooked on the vending machine cigarettes, there was that, at least. The groaning in the walls had become a low scream. She could hear hollow metal crumping sounds, and guessed the piping and electrical conduits were coming apart.
Everything was coming apart. She flashed on a YouTube video she’d seen once, a horrible thing she hadn’t been able to look away from: a dentist using forceps to extract somebody’s tooth. The tooth wiggling while blood seeped out around it, trying to stay in the gum but finally pulling free with the roots dangling. This was like that.
She came to the ground level door, but it was slanted now, surreal, drunken. She pushed on it and it wouldn’t open. Nicky joined her and they pushed together. No good. The floor rose beneath them, then thudded back down. A piece of the ceiling came free, crashed to the stairs, and slid away, crumbling as it went.
“It’s going to squash us if we can’t get out!” Kalisha shouted.
Nicky: George. Helen.
He held out his hands. The stairwell was narrow, but the four of them somehow crammed together in front of the door, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. George’s hair was in Kalisha’s eyes. Helen’s breath, foul with fear, was in her face. They fumbled and joined hands. The dots came and the door screeched open, taking a section of the overhead jamb with it. Beyond was the residence corridor, now canted drunkenly to one side. Kalisha escaped the crooked doorway first, popping free like a cork from a champagne bottle. She went to her knees, cutting one hand on a light fixture that had fallen, spraying glass and metal everywhere. On one wall, askew but still hanging in there, was the poster of the three kids running through a meadow, the one that said it was just another day in paradise.
Kalisha scrambled up, looked around, and saw the other three doing the same. Together they ran for the lounge, past rooms where no stolen children would ever live again. The doors of those rooms were flying open and clapping shut, the sound like lunatics applauding. In the canteen, several of the vending machines had fallen over, spilling snacks. Broken nip bottles filled the air with the pungent aroma of alcohol. The door to the playground was twisted out of shape and jammed shut, but the glass was gone and fine fresh air came in on a late-summer breeze. Kalisha reached the door and froze. For a moment she forgot all about the building that seemed to be tearing itself apart all around them.
Her first thought was that the others had gotten out after all, maybe through the access tunnel’s other door, because there they were: Avery, Iris, Hal, Len, Jimmy, Donna, and all the rest of the Ward A kids. Then she realized she wasn’t actually seeing them at all. They were projections. Avatars. And so was the huge telephone they were circling. It should have crushed the trampoline and the badminton net, but both were still there, and she could see the chainlink fence not just behind the big phone but through it.
Then both the kids and the phone were gone. She realized the floor was rising again, and this time it wasn’t thumping back down. She could see a slowly increasing gap between the lounge and the edge of the playground. Only nine inches or so for now, but it was growing. She had to give a little jump to get outside, as if from the second step of a staircase.
“Come on!” she shouted to the others. “Hurry! While you still can!”