“Hear what?” Fang asked.
“That voice?” I said. My head ached, but the pain was better, and it looked as if I might avoid barfing. I rubbed my temples again, my gaze fixed on the kid’s Mac.
“What’s the deal?” the kid asked, sounding a lot less belligerent and much more weirded out. “Who’s Max? How are you doing this?”
“We’re not doing anything,” Fang said.
A new pain crashed into my brain, and once again the computer screen started flashing disconnected images, gibberish, plans, drawings, all chaotic and garbled.
Peering at the screen, wincing and still rubbing my temples, I spotted four words: Institute for Higher Living.
I looked at Fang, and he gave the slightest nod: He’d seen them too.
Then the screen went blank once more.
87
The kid quickly started typing in commands, muttering, “I’m gonna track this down. . . .”
Fang and I watched, but a couple minutes later the geek stopped, flicking his computer in frustration. He looked at us with narrowed eyes, taking in everything: the drying blood on my chin, the other kids sleeping near us.
“I don’t know how you’re doing it,” he said, sounding resigned and irritated. “Where’s your gear?”
“We don’t have any gear,” Fang said. “Spooky, isn’t it?”
“You guys on the run? You in trouble?”
Jeb had drilled it into us that we shouldn’t ever trust anyone. (We now knew that included him.) The geek was starting to make me extremely nervous.
“Why would you think that?” Fang asked calmly.
The kid rolled his eyes. “Let me see. Maybe because you’re a bunch of kids sleepin’ in a subway tunnel. Kind of clues me in, you know?”
Okay, he had a point.
“What about you?” I asked. “You’re a kid sleeping in a subway tunnel. Don’t you have school?”
The kid coughed out a laugh. “MIT kicked me out.”
MIT was a university for brainiacs—I’d heard of it. This kid wasn’t old enough.
“Uh-huh.” I made myself sound incredibly bored.
“No, really,” he said, sounding almost sheepish. “I got early admission. Was gonna major in computer technology. But I spun out, and they told me to take a hike.”
“
What do you mean, spun out?” asked Fang.
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t take my Thorazine. They said, no Thorazine, no school.”
Okay, I’d been around wack-job scientists enough to pick up on some stuff. Like the fact that Thorazine is what they give schizophrenics.
“So you didn’t like Thorazine,” I said.
“No.” His face turned hard. “Or Haldol, or Melleril, or Zyprexa. They all suck. People just want me to be quiet, do what I’m told, don’t make trouble.”
It was weird—he reminded me a little bit of us: He’d chosen to live a hard, dirty life, being free, instead of a taken-care-of life where he was like a prisoner.