(Max's POV)
I gave serious thought to staying in that cathedral, hiding, sleeping there. There were choir lofts way up high, and the place was huge. Maybe we could do it. I turned to Fang.
"Should we-" I winced as a sharp pain burst in my head. The pain wasn't as bad as before, but I shut my eyes and couldn't speak for a minute.
The images came, sliding across my brain like a movie. There were architectural drawings, blueprints, which looked like subway lines. Double helixes of DNA twisted and spiralled across my screen, they were overlaid with faded, unreadable newspaper clippings, staccato chunks of sound, coloured postcards of New York. One image of a building stayed for a few seconds, a tall, greenish building. I saw its address: Thirty-first Street. Then a stream of numbers floated past me. Man, oh, man, oh, man-what did it mean?
I took a couple of deep breaths, feeling the pain ease away. My eyes opened in the dim light of the cathedral. six very concerned faces were watching me. "Can you walk?" Fang asked tersely. I nodded. We went out through the tall doors behind a group of Japanese tourists. It was too bright outside, and I shaded my eyes, feeling headachy and kind of sick.
As soon as we were away from the crowd, I stopped. "I saw Thirty-first Street, in my head," I said. "And a bunch of numbers."
"Which means…" Iggy prompted.
"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe the Institute is on Thirty-first Street?"
"That would be nice," said Fang. "East or west?"
"I don't know."
"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.