There was a moment of silence. Jonathan heard someone gulp. Colin realized he was still touching the dead Admiral and yanked his hand back and stood up straight.

“Are they all dead?” Tony asked.

“Check ’em, Colin,” Sebastian demanded.

“No way, Thebathtian. I did mine. Thomebody elth’th turn.” Colin hopped out from between the bodies and rejoined the group.

Sebastian grunted in frustration.

“Fine. Tony, you check those two,” he said, pointing at Mr. Warwick and another body. “Benny, those two. And … you, Johnny or whatever, you do those ones.” He pointed at Jonathan and then at Mr. Mongley and the man who’d bellowed out their names during Muster.

“It’s Jonathan, and I—”

“Whatever. Just do it. Now.”

Jonathan could tell that arguing wasn’t going to work. He wiped his hands on his pant legs and stepped forward.

He checked the roll caller first. The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was open. Steam was rising off his jacket. Jonathan pressed two fingers against the man’s neck. His fingers were half-numb from the cold. He pressed them in harder. It felt like touching a warm steak.

He felt nothing. He waited, quietly. Nothing.

He looked up. “Dead,” he said, and stepped over to Mr. Mongley. He heard Tony and Benny reporting the same thing from their dead grown-ups.

Without thinking or pausing, he shoved his fingers into Mr. Mongley’s throat. He remembered the man’s raspy, haunting breath. Raindrops were running down the old man’s bald, flaky scalp. His head was to the side, his eyes both open, staring at the distant gray wall. They were actually kind of a beautiful shade of blue. Jonathan gritted his teeth and tried not to throw up.

The man’s neck was still and pulseless.

“Mr. Mongley’s dead, too.”

He remembered the night before and his whispered conversation with Walter, before the bucket. Mongley hears everything, Walter had said. He looked up at Walter.

“Well,” Jonathan said hoarsely. “He’s not hearing anything now.”

Walter’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a dry swallow.

“Maybe he’th hearing the choirth of angelth thinging,” Colin offered.

Walter’s eyes were still on the dead man. He shook his head and frowned. “I seriously doubt that, man.”

Jonathan straightened up and stepped back into the quiet, watching circle.

“All the grown-ups are dead,” Tony said in a hollow, wondering voice.

“Is this all of them?” Jonathan asked, his voice rising. “There’s no one else inside? A janitor, or a guard, or something?”

Walter shook his head. “It was Morning Muster. This is all the grown-ups, man. The whole Slabhenge staff.”

“Why’d they all die?” Miguel asked.

“The Admiral was holding that sword,” Jonathan said.

“And they were all touching,” Sebastian added.

“Thtanding in that puddle,” Colin finished.

Tony sniffed and looked back at the stone blocks they’d been balancing on when the lightning struck.

“We were on the blocks, up out of the puddles,” he said in a trembling voice. “We’d all be dead, too, if we’d-a been standing on the ground.”

Jonathan looked at Mr. Warwick’s one glassy, dead eye staring sightlessly up at the storm clouds. “Which we weren’t, thank the devil,” he whispered.

There was a sudden, gusting blast of wind that whipped their hair and clothes around. Thunder cracked and the somber scene of wet children looking at a pile of dead bodies was lit by a long flash of lightning. The rain doubled in strength, rolling up to a real downpour. Suddenly, they each seemed to realize that they themselves were now standing together in a puddle, with the lightning still flashing. One by one, and then all at once, without anyone saying anything, they scurried over to the cover of the big gated doorway that led out to the boat landing. It was cold in the shadows of the stone archway, but it was out of the wind and rain and, most important, the bolts of lightning that darted across the sky.

They huddled together in the near-darkness, looking out at the corpses getting soggy in the courtyard. A couple of the smaller kids were crying. Not because they were sad, Jonathan thought, just scared.

“We’re in so much trouble,” Benny said.

“What?” Sebastian’s voice was harsh and scornful. “What for? We didn’t do anything!”

“Still,” Miguel said. “Here we are. You know, us … the ‘scabs’ and all that. And all the grown-ups end up dead? I mean, my folks sent me here just for skipping school a few times, you know? I’m definitely gonna get grounded for at least a week for this when I get home.”

His last word hung in the air between them. The wind couldn’t blow it away. Home. It dawned on them at the same time.

“We get to go home,” Walter said quietly.

“We get to go home,” another kid echoed.

“We get to go home!” two or three kids cried. Someone cheered. A few kids clapped. Jonathan bit his bottom lip and frowned. Sebastian cracked his knuckles and furrowed his brow.

“When do we go?” Tony asked. “Can we call now? The police?”

“There’s no telephone, idiot,” Sebastian said under his breath. He turned his head so that everyone could hear him. “There’s no telephone, remember? No one’s going home yet.” He looked out at the bodies, his eyes narrowed, and he said it again more quietly. “No one’s going home yet.”

“Well … when can we go?” Tony asked again. “When’s the next boat coming?”

They all looked at Benny.

“You worked in his office, Benny. You know the schedule best,” a tall, skinny kid with red hair said. Jonathan remembered from Morning Muster that his name was Gerald.

Benny still had his eyes glued to his boss’s body. He shook his head.

“Uh, well, today’s Tuesday, right? There’s no food drop-off or garbage pickup ’til Thursday. No new students are registered to come that I know of. So today would just be Patrick coming on the mail run.”

“When’s that?”

“Just before lunch, usually. Like ten thirty.”

“All right,” Walter said. “A couple hours. That’s it. Then we tell that mail guy what happened and he sends a bigger boat out and then we’re all outta here.” A couple boys clapped again.

There were a few seconds of nothing but the sound of rain. One kid leaned against the stone wall. Another coughed.

“So, like … what should we do?” Miguel asked.

“Thould we get them out of the rain?” Colin asked.

Jonathan’s brain was working. He was looking at all the dead grown-ups and frowning and thinking of home and family and everything that had happened to bring him here to the island of Slabhenge. A small, ugly, beautiful idea was wiggling in his mind. His stomach rumbled, wanting more than a meager bowl of oatmeal. It was hard to hatch a dark and dastardly scheme on an empty stomach.

“I think we should eat,” he said, just loud enough for everyone to hear. “I’m starving.”

Sebastian’s brow was still creased with dark, thoughtful lines.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m with the new kid. Let’s go eat.” Then his face smoothed into a grinning smile and he cocked an eyebrow back at the huddled boys. “Whatever we want.”

One kid clapped. But just one. Most of the boys had probably lost their appetites when they watched all the adults get struck and killed by lightning.

But Sebastian started off across the rain-drenched courtyard toward the kitchen door.

Jonathan stepped out after him.

All the rest slowly followed close behind.

The straggly line of somber, soaked boys snaked right past the lifeless bodies staring up at the storm.

The kitchen was noisy with cooking, but there was not much talking. Mouths were too full for talking most of the time.

Tony stirred a pan of ten scrambled eggs. Jonathan didn’t think he planned on sharing. Benny was eating jelly out of the jar with a spoon. Sebastian was shoving a banana in his mouth while frying up six pieces of bacon. The two big brutes—Gregory and Roger, Jonathan remembered—were eating pepperoni slices by the handful, greasy grins on their faces. The little black-haired kid named Jason sat on the floor in the walk-in fridge and gnawed on a brick-size block of cheddar cheese.

Most of the boys just stood around, eating in the kitchen, but some got what they wanted and picked a spot at a table. No one sat at the Admiral’s table. Jonathan made himself two gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and joined them, sitting across from Colin and Walter. Another kid sat down next to him, a little taller than him, with glasses and short, curly brown hair.

“Francis, right?” Jonathan asked through a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly.

“Yes. And you’re Jonathan. Our newest arrival.” Francis held out his hand and Jonathan blinked at him for a second before reaching out and shaking it. Francis had a slight accent, but not a foreign one. He pronounced all of his syllables very precisely. To Jonathan, he sounded like the rich people on TV. “Looks like your stay here has been cut quite short.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said, chewing. “Guess so.”

“And what terrible wrong did you commit to deserve being sent here?” Francis asked. He was being sarcastic, Jonathan could tell, but he still flinched. He swallowed his bite.

“What did you do?” he asked back. Across the table, Colin frowned and took another bite of his apple.

“Oh, hardly anything, really,” Francis answered in a bored voice. “I pushed our gardener off the ladder. Honestly, if he hadn’t broken his hip, there wouldn’t even have been charges.”

“Was it an accident?”

Francis shrugged. “No.”

“Why did you do it?”

Francis rolled his eyes. “Does it really matter?”

“I guess not.”

Francis sighed. “Yes. Well, my father got a top-notch attorney, really quite expensive, but the whole thing happened at our summer house and all the local townspeople were quite up in arms about it. Really screaming for blood. Tried to make it all into some ridiculous wealth-class issue. So … here I am. Eating white bread. The damned country judge sent me here.”

“That’th a terrible thing to do,” Colin said.

“Yes, well, the judge’s hands were really quite tied, I’m afraid. It’s an elected office. He had to give the people what they wanted.”

“I meant it wath a terrible thing to do to the gardener.”

“Oh,” Francis sniffed. “Well. It didn’t end well for me, either, as you see.”

They all chewed in silence for a while.

“How does the refrigerator work?” Jonathan asked. Everyone stopped chewing and looked at him. “I mean, there doesn’t seem to be electricity here. It’s all torches and candles. What’s running the fridge and freezer?”

Walter scraped a piece of jelly bean out from between his teeth and looked at it stuck to his finger.

“Oh, there’s electricity. There’s a coal generator downstairs that we all get to take turns shoveling coal into. Makes just enough juice to run the fridge, freezer, and the Admiral’s TV.”

“Oh.” Jonathan swallowed the last bite of his second sandwich and considered going to make another one. “And the freezer’s big, too, like the fridge?”

Walter nodded. “Yeah. A little smaller, I guess, but still a walk-in. Why, man?”

Jonathan shook his head. “No reason. Just wondering.”

But Jonathan’s head was still buzzing with dark dreams. And he did have a reason for asking about the freezer.

Eight reasons, in fact.

The sixteen students of the Slabhenge Reformatory School for Troubled Boys stood at the gate, looking out at the white-capped waves of the ocean. Somewhere out there across the sea was the mainland and home. Home. With meals, parents, beds. A happy place. For most of them.

Sebastian had crept up and unclipped the key ring from Mr. Vander’s belt, and they’d opened the heavy wooden door to the outside. They stood in the shadow of the stone arch, looking out at the water and waiting for the boat. The eight bodies still lay in the drizzling rain behind them.

They leaned with their hands holding the rusty iron bars. Some of them still chewed on crusty bread or chunks of cheese.

“How much longer?” a kid asked.

“I told you, any minute,” Benny answered.

“What should we say?”

“What do you mean, what should we say? All the grown-ups got killed by lightning and we want to go home. Dummy.”

The rain was just a constant gentle tapping now. The thunder and lightning were gone, but the clouds were still night-black and the world was dim and dark.

Then, thin and lost somewhere beneath the sound of the waves smacking the stone walls, there came a low buzzing sound. Like a fly caught between the window and the screen.

“There!” Miguel called out, his voice excited. “There! I see it!” He pointed. Other fingers joined.

“Yeah! I see it!”

“There it is!”

The boat was a dot, still far distant, fighting its way through the wind and the waves. To bring them back to the real world. Jonathan chewed on the inside of his cheek. He looked at Sebastian, leaning in the corner where the gate met the stone wall. Sebastian was the only one besides him who wasn’t smiling. His scowl was as grim as the deadly clouds, his eyes as full of dark thoughts as Jonathan’s. Their eyes met. Jonathan thought he saw a wet glimmer of tears in Sebastian’s eyes before they looked away from his.

All the boys’ voices fell silent as they watched the little boat make its way toward their gloomy island.

Jonathan took one deep breath and then spoke his voice into the silence.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

Heads snapped his way. Sebastian’s sour face turned sharply toward him.

“What?” Walter asked.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” Jonathan repeated. “Maybe we shouldn’t tell what happened. Yet.” Sebastian’s eyes stayed locked on his. His jaw clenched. Jonathan cocked a questioning eyebrow at him. And then Sebastian nodded.

“What are you talking about?” a kid asked.

Jonathan raised his voice and put some strength into it.

“I’m talking about staying. Without the grown-ups. Without any grown-ups. I’m talking about all of us staying here at Slabhenge. Alone.”