“Did you see anything else?” he asked patiently.
“Well, a bunch of numbers,” I said again. “And a tall, kind of greenish building.”
“We should just walk all the way down Thirty-first Street,” said Nudge. “The whole way, looking for that building. Right? I mean, if that’s the building you saw, maybe it was for a good reason. Or did you see a whole lot of buildings, or a whole city, or what?”
“Just that building,” I said.
Nudge’s brown eyes widened. Angel looked solemn. We all felt the same: twitchy with nervous anticipation and also overwhelmed with dread. On the one hand, the Institute might very well hold the key to everything—the answer to every question we’d ever had about ourselves, our past, our parents. We might even find out about the mysterious director the whitecoats had mentioned. On the other hand, it felt like we were voluntarily going up to the School and ringing the doorbell. Like we were delivering ourselves to evil. And those two feelings were pulling us all in half.
You never know until you know, my Voice chimed in.
100
“So do we have money? I hope?” the Gasman asked as we passed a street vendor selling Polish sausage.
“Maybe,” I said, pulling out the bank card. “What do you think?” I asked Fang. “Should we try this?”
“Well, we need money, for sure,” he said. “But it might be a trap, a way for them to track where we are and what we’re doing.”
“Yeah.” I frowned.
It’s okay, Max. You can use it, said my Voice. Once you get the password.
Thank you, Voice, I thought sourly. Any hopes of you just telling me the freaking password? Of course not. God forbid anything should come easily to us.
We had to have money. We could try begging, but we’d probably get the cops called on us ASAP. Runaways and all that. Getting jobs was out of the question also. Stealing? It was a last resort. We weren’t to that point yet.
This bank card would work at any number of different banks. Taking a deep breath, I swerved over to an ATM. I swiped the card and punched in “maxride.”
No dice.
Next I tried our ages: 14, 11, 8, 6.
Wrong.
I tried typing in “password.”
Wrong. The machine shut down and told me to call customer service.
We kept walking. In a way, it was like we were deliberately slowing ourselves down, to give us time to buck up for the Institute. Or at least, that’s what my inner Dr. Laura thought.
“What about, like, the first initial of all of our names?” the Gasman suggested.
“Maybe it’s something like ‘givememoney,’” Nudge said.
I smiled at her. “It has to be shorter than that.”
Beside me, Angel was walking with her head down, her little feet dragging.
If I had money, I could get her another Celeste.
In the next block, at a different ATM, I tried the first initials of all our names: “MFINGA.” Nope.
I tried “School” and “Maximum.”
It told me to call customer service.
Farther on, I keyed in “Fang,” “Iggy,” and “Gasman.”