“We’ll tell you what we know, and what the orderlies and techs tell us, but I got an idea that most of it’s lies. George feels the same. Iris, now…” Kalisha laughed. “She’s like Agent Mulder on that X-Files show. She wants to believe.”
“Believe what?”
The look she gave him—both wise and sad—again made her look more like a grownup than a kid. “That this is just a little detour on the great highway of life, and everything’s going to come out all right in the end, like on Scooby-Doo.”
“Where are your folks? How did you get here?”
The adult look disappeared. “Don’t want to talk about that stuff now.”
“Okay.” Maybe he didn’t want to, either. At least not quite yet.
“And when you meet Nicky, don’t worry if he goes off on a rant. It’s how he blows off steam, and some of his rants are…” She considered. “Entertaining.”
“If you say so. Will you do me a favor?”
“Sure, if I can.”
“Stop calling me smart kid. My name is Luke. Use it, okay?”
“I can do that.”
He reached for the door, but she put her hand on his wrist.
“One more thing before we go out. Turn around, Luke.”
He did. She was maybe an inch taller. He didn’t know she was going to kiss him until she did it, a full-on lip-lock. She even put her tongue between his lips for a second or two, and that produced not just a tingle but a full-on jolt, like sticking a finger in a live socket. His first real kiss, and a wildersmooch for sure. Rolf, he thought (so far as he could think in the immediate aftermath), would be so jealous.
She pulled away, looking satisfied. “It’s not true love or anything, don’t get that idea. I’m not sure it’s even a favor, but it might be. I was in quarantine the first week I was here. No shots for dots.”
She pointed to a poster on the wall next to the candy machine. It showed a boy in a chair, pointing joyously at a bunch of colored dots on a white wall. A smiling doctor (white coat, stethoscope around his neck) was standing with a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Above the picture it said SHOTS FOR DOTS! And below: THE QUICKER YOU SEE EM, THE QUICKER YOU’RE BACK HOME!
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Never mind right now. My folks were full-on anti-vaxxers, and two days after I landed in Front Half, I came down with chicken pox. Cough, high fever, big ugly red spots, the whole nine yards. I guess I’m over it, since I’m out and about and they’re testing me again, but maybe I’m still a little bit contagious. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the pox and spend a couple of weeks drinking juice and watching TV instead of getting needles and MRIs.”
The girl spotted them and waved. Kalisha waved back, and before Luke could say anything else, she pushed open the door. “Come on. Wipe that dopey look off your face and meet the Fockers.”
SHOTS FOR DOTS
1
Outside the door of the Institute’s canteen and TV lounge area, Kalisha put an arm around Luke’s shoulders and pulled him close to her. He thought—hoped, really—she meant to kiss him again, but she whispered in his ear instead. Her lips tickled his skin and gave him goosebumps. “Talk about anything you want, only don’t say anything about Maureen, okay? We think they only listen sometimes, but it’s better to be careful. I don’t want to get her in trouble.”
Maureen, okay, the housekeeping lady, but who were they? Luke had never felt so lost, not even as a four-year-old, when he had gotten separated from his mother for fifteen endless minutes in the Mall of America.
Meanwhile, just as Kalisha had predicted, the bugs found him. Little black ones that circled his head in clouds.
Most of the playground was surfaced in fine gravel. The hoop area, where the kid named George continued to shoot baskets, was hot-topped, and the trampoline was surrounded with some kind of spongy stuff to cushion the fall if someone jumped wrong and went boinking off the side. There was a shuffleboard court, a badminton set-up, a ropes course, and a cluster of brightly colored cylinders that little kids could assemble into a tunnel—not that there were any kids here little enough to use it. There were also swings, teeter-totters, and a slide. A long green cabinet flanked by picnic tables was marked with signs reading GAMES AND EQUIPMENT and PLEASE RETURN WHAT YOU TOOK OUT.
The playground was surrounded by a chainlink fence at least ten feet high, and Luke saw cameras peering down at two of the corners. They were dusty, as if they hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Beyond the fence there was nothing but forest, mostly pines. Judging by their thickness, Luke put their age at eighty years, give or take. The formula—given in Trees of North America, which he had read one Saturday afternoon when he was ten or so—was pretty simple. There was no need to read the rings. You just estimated the circumference of one of the trees, divided by pi to get the diameter, then multiplied by the average growth factor for North American pines, which was 4.5. Easy enough to figure, and so was the corollary deduction: these trees hadn’t been logged for quite a long time, maybe a couple of generations. Whatever the Institute was, it was in the middle of an old-growth forest, which meant in the middle of nowhere. As for the playground itself, his first thought was that if there was ever a prison exercise yard for kids between the ages of six and sixteen, it would look exactly like this.
The girl—Iris—saw them and waved. She double-bounced on the trampoline, her ponytail flying, then took a final leap off the side and landed on the springy stuff with her legs spread and her knees flexed. “Sha! Who you got there?”
“This is Luke Ellis,” Kalisha said. “New this morning.”
“Hey, Luke.” Iris walked over and offered her hand. She was a skinny girl, taller than Kalisha by a couple of inches. She had a pleasant, pretty face, her cheeks and forehead shiny with what Luke supposed was a mixture of sweat and bug-dope. “Iris Stanhope.”
Luke shook with her, aware that the bugs—minges were what they were called in Minnesota, he had no idea what they were called here—had begun to sample him. “Not pleased to be here, but I guess pleased to meet you.”
“I’m from Abilene, Texas. What about you?”
“Minneapolis. That’s in—”
“I know where it is,” Iris said. “Land of a billion lakes, or some shit like that.”
“George!” Kalisha shouted. “Where’s your manners, young man? Come on over here!”
“Sure, but wait. This is important.” George toed the foul line at the edge of the blacktop, held the basketball to his chest, and began speaking in a low, tension-filled voice. “Okay, folks, after seven hard-fought games, this is what it comes down to. Double overtime, Wizards trail the Celtics by one point, and George Iles, just in off the bench, has a chance to win this thing from the foul line. If he makes one, the Wizards tie it up yet again. If he makes both, he’ll go down in history, probably get his picture in the Basketball Hall of Fame, maybe win a Tesla convertible—”
“That would have to be a custom job,” Luke said. “Tesla doesn’t make a convertible, at least not yet.”
George paid no attention. “Nobody ever expected Iles to be in this position, least of all Iles. An eerie silence has fallen over the Capital One Arena…”
“And then somebody farts!” Iris shouted. She put her tongue between her lips and blew a long, bubbly honk. “A real trumpet blast! Smelly, too!”
“Iles takes a deep breath… he bounces the ball twice, which is his trademark…”