The One Safe Place (8 page)

Seven

THE COURTYARD AND THE
tower were in the center of the Home. Around them, pathways led in all directions toward a variety of attractions. Kit and Devin followed Luke around the back of the dining room and saw a playground with swings and a slide. A little way off, a fountain in the shape of an elephant blew bubbles out of its trunk. The bubbles drifted away toward a circular track with wooden cars arranged in a row.

“Go-carts,” Luke said.

Around the corner, Devin saw a huge, brightly colored shape, soft around the edges and curiously pudgy, with fat, leaning towers and a large inner area, the size of twenty beds.

“Bouncy castle,” Luke said, as if reading from a list. “There’s also tennis and basketball courts farther down, next to the large meadow. On the other side of the meadow there’s a climbing wall and tree houses with zip lines.”

“What are zip lines?” Devin wanted to know.

“Devin doesn’t know what any of this stuff is,” Kit said. “I know about it. I mean, I’ve heard about it, but he just knows stuff about farms.” Her eyes were shining.

She was right, Devin thought. He had never owned toys. The farm had been his playground. The barn had been his castle, Glancer had been his steed, and a piece of whittled wood had been his sword.

They continued to walk. Although it was hot, there was shade under the trees, and a gentle breeze followed them as if, like all the other things in the Home, it had been expressly provided for their comfort and ease.

“Here’s something you can relate to, Devin,” Luke said.

They had stopped by a small farmyard. Devin could tell at once that it was just for show, not a working farm, but he couldn’t help admiring the large pigsty and the pair of goats in the enclosure beyond. He sniffed deeply, inhaling the familiar scent of hay and manure. The breeze ruffled the grasses in the meadow, and he smiled to himself, wondering how such a soft, whispery noise could be colored so very red . . .

“Look at that!” Kit cried. Devin turned and saw horses. Not living ones, but brightly painted wooden creatures that rose and fell, galloping fixed and stately around a glittering platform roofed with gold.

“I want a ride on that!” Kit declared.

“If you want a ride, you can ride a car too,” Luke said. “They’re copies of old ones—real low-tech classics, except they’re sized for kids. There’s about ten of them in the garage.

“They can get up to twenty-five miles per hour, sometimes thirty,” he added without excitement.

A little later, he led them past a group of kennels. Kit stopped, transfixed.

“Are those . . . puppies?” she asked. “Can we play with them?” She ran over to their enclosure and fell to her knees, her hands groping among the tumbling creatures.

“You can probably have one if you want,” Luke said, uninterested.

Devin was puzzled. He knew that Luke had been at the Home for a while, but surely not long enough to get bored with everything in the place. Kit picked up one of the puppies, a mottled scrap of brown and white patches, all tongue and wagging tail. She pressed her face against it.

“I’m going to call him Frisker!”

“Whatever,” Luke said.

As they walked, Devin observed several adults, dressed in dark green. Some were tending to the flower beds; others passed by pushing carts or carrying supplies of one sort or another. They were staff members, he thought. He remembered the way his clothes had been silently removed and the huge amount of food that had appeared in the dining room. There must be dozens and dozens of staff at the Home, working behind the scenes, keeping everything orderly. He smiled hesitantly at a man walking down the path toward him with a pile of towels. But the man didn’t smile back.

Devin also saw plenty of children; some seemed odd to him. One boy was walking along clutching a teddy bear to his chest although he was at least fourteen years old. A girl was crouched beside a bush, completely still, her arms wrapped around herself. That was the other odd thing about the kids. Apart from one or two, the majority of them were just sitting or standing around.

Despite all the marvels surrounding them, very few children were actually playing.

A great stillness hung over the place. From somewhere far away came the sound of music, tinkling and repetitive, the notes pink and apple green, as pale as fingerprints on a window.

Da dumdee dumdee, dum dum dum . . .

“And now . . . big drum roll, please . . . the swimming area!” Luke announced.

The swimming pool was a complicated arrangement consisting of one main pool and several smaller ones leading into it. Waterfalls cascaded down piles of rocks, and there were water toys everywhere. But only one boy was enjoying the place. He was about twelve or thirteen, broad shouldered, with a square, strong-looking face. He stood waist deep, holding a red plastic pistol in one hand. As Devin watched, he suddenly squirted himself in the face, laughed loudly, and then, seeming not to notice that he had an audience, did exactly the same thing over again.

“Who’s that?” Devin asked.

“That’s Ansel,” Luke said, without looking.

“Why’s he doing that?”

“I don’t know. Don’t look.”

“Why not?”

Luke turned away abruptly. “Just don’t, okay?”

Ansel squirted himself in the face for a third time. “Come on,” Luke said roughly and hurried them away.

A girl sat under the shade of a large cedar tree. She was sucking the tips of her long hair and staring blankly at the ground.

“Hi, Missie,” Luke said.

Missie frowned. “Hi, yourself, rich kid. How come you get to show the new kids around? It’s not fair.”

Luke’s eyes twitched rapidly. “You want to do it?”

“No. I’m just saying, Genius.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Luke told the others. “Missie’s always crabby.”

“I’m not crabby,” Missie argued, tossing her saliva-wet hair. “It’s everyone else that’s so stupid and cheerful.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “Missie’s the sort of person who could be driving a car down a one-way street and if she saw twenty other cars all going the opposite way, she’d think they were the ones going in the wrong direction.”

“Of course I would,” Missie retorted. “If they were.”

“Why’d she call you ‘rich kid’?” Kit asked, after they had walked on a little way. “Malloy called you that too.”

Luke stopped abruptly. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get it over with. I come from The Meadows. My parents were billionaires.”

Kit’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

“The money wasn’t theirs. They stole it. The plan was sheer genius. They got millions and millions from rich people who were hoping to get even richer. Greed makes idiots out of people, that’s what my dad always said.”

He looked down at the ground, scuffling the dirt with his shoe. “The trouble is, they got caught. The judge gave them ten sentences of fifty years each. That’s a total of five hundred years in jail for each of them.”

“But won’t they be . . . dead before that’s done?” Devin asked, bewildered.

Luke rolled his eyes. “ ’Course they will. The judge was making an example of them. If you steal money from the rich, nothing can save you. Don’t you know anything?”

Kit shook her head. “He doesn’t. It’s not his fault.”

“So what happened to you?” Devin asked Luke.

“I ran away, spent some time on the street. I was trying to figure out a way to bust Mom and Pop out of jail. Might have done it too, only I met Roman.”

“You met him like we did?”

“Oh yes,” Luke’s voice went low. “We all met Roman.”

There was a confused silence. Devin reached out instinctively and touched Luke’s arm. It was tense, tight as a stretched rope. Devin tasted burned rubber and peppermint—a fleeting sensation, half bitter, half sharply sweet.

“What about the genius bit?” he said. “Why did Missie call you that?”

Luke made a laughing sound. “My IQ is off the charts. Apparently. Truth is, I just figured out a way to ace the test. It’s all a matter of probability, and once you’ve factored in the psychology of the questions it’s totally predictable and you can calculate to within a percentage point what the correct answer is. Doesn’t make me a genius.”

Kit stared at him. “You found a way to cheat the IQ test?”

“Not cheat. Decode. Slight difference, although it amounts to the same thing.”

It was late afternoon. Shadows striped the green lawns and collected in pools under the trees.

Kit stopped at a narrow path that wound between low trees. Their trunks were curled and knotted like clumps of writhing snakes. “Where does this go to?”

Luke hesitated. His twitching face was suddenly quite still. “We don’t need to go down there,” he said quickly. “I have to take you to the Recreation Hall.” And he nudged them away, down another path.

They entered a gym with a high roof. A bunch of ropes with harnesses attached hung from the ceiling. They were there so kids could swoop from one end of the gym to the other, although none of the five or six kids in the gym was doing that. They simply stood around aimlessly. Luke hurried Kit and Devin on to farther rooms, all stuffed with toys. There were dress-up chests bursting with costumes, a small mountain of musical instruments, thousands of tiny plastic blocks in all colors of the rainbow spilling out of tubs, and stuffed animals that looked like mice dressed in clothes. One room contained three trampolines; another had something Luke called paintball and a gigantic doll house, five stories high, fully furnished down to the last tiny detail.

“Oh!” Kit cried, running forward. “It has everything.”

“We don’t have time to stop,” Luke said. “It’s getting late.”

As they turned to leave, Devin halted suddenly. He had the strangest sensation of being watched. He looked around—the room was empty. There was a window set high in the far wall. It didn’t face the outside and he could see nothing through it, but he had the briefest impression of a shadow behind the glass. The shadow moved and was gone.

Devin hurried after the others, who were now back in the gym. He noticed that there was a walkway around the upper portion of the gym, level with the tops of the ropes. The feeling of being watched grew to a certainty. There were people up there. Not children but adults, five or six of them, keeping so still you might not know they were there unless you were looking.

“Who are they?” he asked Luke. “What are they doing?”

The reason they were all so still, he now realized, was because they were all extremely old, older than he imagined it was possible to be. They looked like scraps held together by cobwebs and spit. Only their eyes, glittering slightly, showed that there was life inside their brittle husks. One or two stood leaning on sticks. The rest were sitting in wheeled chairs, their shrunken faces surrounded by pillows. On each face was a look of utter concentration.

Devin suddenly noticed another thing. Just a few moments ago, when they’d passed through the gym, none of the children there were moving very much. But now they appeared in a fever of animation. They were running to climb up the ropes; a few had already managed to get into the harnesses and they were swooping to and fro, screaming and whooping. The eyes of the old people passed slowly, very slowly, from one child to another.