Max opened her eyes.
The ceiling was white. Night had fallen, and the lights had gone out. The air was stale, barely circulating, and she could feel eyes on her. There were always eyes on her. They may have replaced the cameras with ones that didn’t have those tell-tale red dots, but Max wasn’t stupid, and neither were any of the other kids in this place.
Idly, she ran her hand over the soft fuzz of her scalp. They’d shaved her hair off again a few weeks ago, like some sort of military camp; it was still growing back. Max didn’t like it, but it was one of the things that she hated the least about the Institute. Why bother about the condition of her hair when she could seethe at the sheer inhumanity of it all?

“Max?”

Max shifted to lie on her right side. Edie was awake, the contours of her expressive face visible to Max’s sensitive eyes. She still wasn’t sure if she was happy or sad that Edie also had powers. Happy, because at least she wasn’t alone. Sad, because… well… they were here. “Yeah?”

“Can’t sleep?”
“Yeah.”

Someone coughed.

“You excited for Taco Tuesday?”

The canteen had recently started serving Mexican food on Tuesday. The running joke was that it was because they wanted to collect samples of their shit.

“Not really,” Max whispered. “I’d kill for some good pho, though.”
“I just want something fried,” Edie murmured wistfully. “Fish and chips. Fries from McDonald’s, the saltier the better.”
“Coke that doesn’t taste like off-brand cough syrup.”
“God, who do they think they’re fooling?”
“I miss going to Waffle House with the others,” Max muttered. “Watching Hailey flirt with the cashiers. Faith and her weird obsession with maple syrup.”

“She’ll never convince me that she’s not Canadian.” Would they ever see the others again? Hell, could they even expect to see the outside world again? Max doubted it. She’d been furious in the first few weeks after their capture, but the experiments had broken her spirit. It simply wasn’t worth it to resist. She’d seen what they did to those kids who kept mouthing off.

The conversation had stalled, and Max was sorry for drifting off. Edie wiped at her eyes. “Good night, Max.”

Max opened her mouth, and that was when a loud noise echoed throughout the room.

People immediately started sitting up, Max among them. A short, shifty kid with big ears was the first one to hop out of bed, and he approached the door cautiously, head tilted to the side. He placed his weight against the door, heaving, and almost fell forwards as it swung open, a shaft of cold, white light spilling into the room. A roar reached their ears, previously muffled to nothing by the solid cast-iron material of the door. It was a sound unlike anything Max had heard in all of her time at the Institute.

They didn’t need to be told twice.

Barefoot, clad in their plain, white uniforms, they spilled out into the corridor, Max among them, Edie a warm presence at her side. Hand in hand, the two girls followed the throng as it scattered throughout the facility. It was chaos. There were a few orderlies, but they seemed to have been taken care of, and if they weren’t, the sheer flood of angry, desperate teenagers rushing at them seemed to be enough to take them off-guard. Max caught a glimpse of James Shuffleberg standing over the prone body of another Institute kid, an expression of fierce joy on his face as a shadowed figure materialized at his back, and ran faster.

At some point, a crack had opened in her mind. Whatever they were doing to dampen her powers was failing, and she could feel a dozen foreign thoughts squirming into the echoing emptiness of her head. Concentrating a little further, she slid into the minds of a few of the other kids in her dorm, slowing down as she absorbed the sheer scope of the Institute. It was the first time that she’d used her powers on her own since her kidnapping.

“Max?”
“We’re going in the right direction,” Max said hoarsely. “Take a left.”

They took a left. Max continued to navigate for them, following the tantalizing scent of real, breathable air, and at some point, Edie, being taller and stronger, simply hoisted Max into her arms and kept right on running. There was a noticeable difference between the filtered, recycled air in the Institute and the smell of real air, air from the outside world, and Max didn’t realize how much she’d missed the latter. It felt alive in a way that the Institute wasn’t. It felt like freedom.

“Hey!”

Disentangling herself from Edie's long arms, Max made a beeline for the only other Vietnamese kid in the entire facility (as far as she knew, at least). “Happy,” she gasped, disengaging from their brief, fierce hug, “do you know who did this?” She’d didn’t need to specify.

“No,” Happy responded, glancing distractedly over their shoulder, “and I don’t care.” They were speaking very fast. “Listen, Max. We’ll probably never see each other again, but good luck. And you should know that, coming from me, that means a hell of a lot. If I’m ever in the neighbourhood, you’ll know, right?”

“I guess.” Max smiled. “Going to dye your hair green, then?” Happy had spoken at length about the life that they’d lead after escaping the Institute; it had gotten them in trouble more than once.

“For the last time, it’s turquoise.”

Max didn’t realize that she was crying until Edie skidded to a stop, hissing under her breath as she checked the ragged soles of her bare feet. They were standing on a lonely country road, out in the middle of nowhere, and if she squinted, and wiped away her tears, she could see the looming silhouette of the Institute in the distance. Having woken up already inside, she’d never seen the Institute from the outside. And if she had anything to say about it, she’d never see it ever again. 

Committing that brief glimpse to memory, Max turned her back on the Institute and looked up at the moon for the first time in months.