The Shimmers in the Night

One

It was a Sunday in late October, the week before Halloween. Long drifts of red and yellow leaves covered the front yard of the Sykes's rambling house next to Cape Cod Bay. A couple of days ago it had been crisp outside, an average fall day-just chilly enough so you could breathe in the cold air and notice it had its own clean taste-but today it was warm. Cara wore nothing but a cotton shirt, and even so she was sweating as she raked. This must be what her dad called Indian summer.

But still, it was strangely warm.

She tramped through the piles of leaves around to the side of the house, where a rusty thermometer stuck out of the gray wooden shingles. The red line of mercury hovered at seventy-four.

It was Jax's job to rake and bag the leaves; he got paid a big five bucks, which their dad seemed to think was a windfall. "When I was ten years old," he said sternly, "I mowed the lawn for a nickel. And I was happy to do it." But Jax was in Cambridge for two weeks at some kind of genius-kid camp run by an institute her older brother, Max, called "a think tank."

Max said he wouldn't trust those think-tank people as far as he could throw them. He said "think tank" basically meant place full of evil smart people, because a place full of harmless smart people was called "a university."

Max (being a rebel, or at least liking to look like one) thought there were conspiracies all around them. The night before Jax left, Max had spun out a few paranoid scenarios for their baby brother's benefit as the three of them sat in Max's chaotic bedroom, littered with dirty vintage T-shirts, Ramones and Clash posters pinned messily to the walls. It was entirely possible, he'd told Jax, that the people who worked at the think tank only pretended they were going to teach him how to "optimize the skills associated with his eidetic memory" as they'd said in their letter. Whatever that meant.

In fact, said Max, they were planning to mold Jax into a brainiac supersoldier.

It was nothing new; they'd practically made a habit of it in the previous century, according to Max-for example with mind-altering drugs in the Vietnam War.

"Come on," Cara had said. "Get serious. Jax the Terminator? His biceps are smaller than mine!"

"They are not," Jax had squeaked, and lifted his arm up to make a muscle.

It looked pale and flimsy, not unlike a frog's leg.

Max patted him on the head.

"It's OK, small dude," he said. "These days the wars are mostly fought by geeks like you, on computers."

"I'll definitely take a pass on the supersoldier option," said Jax.

"But maybe you won't be able to," said Max. "You feel me? Mind control. Electric wires into your eyeballs. Stuff like that. Did you ever see Clockwork Orange?"

Jax shook his head.

"It's not exactly PG," conceded Max. "Word to the wise: once they've got you cornered in their high-tech facility, all bets are off. You might come back to us with a chip in your head that communicates with NORAD Central Command."

"What's norad?" asked Cara.

Jax rolled his eyes at Max's dire warnings and went off the next morning anyway, though Cara heard him asking their dad a few faintly anxious questions as they packed his bags into the back of their new used Subaru.

The people at the Advancement Institute couldn't know that Jax could read minds (ping them, as he and Cara called it; Max preferred not to discuss it). The Sykes kids kept that one to themselves, although their mother understood. It was even a secret from their father. All that the Institute people knew-Jax claimed and Cara hoped-was that he had a photographic memory and "accelerated learning skills."