He walks into the pines. He gets closer to WICKED’s headquarters and looks at them from afar: “they looked like structures that would exist there forever, unyielding to whatever man or weather threw at it. It called to mind a barely held memory of something from storybooks—some sort of haunted asylum” (249). As he gets closer, he wonders why the guards have not come out to greet him.

“And now, after all he’d been through, he stood at WICKED’s threshold, there by his own choice. He reached out and knocked on the cold, dark glass in front of him. He could see nothing on the other side” (251). The door opens, and the Rat Man greets him and invites him inside.

The Rat Man leads Thomas through a lobby and says they should talk in his office. Thomas asks to use the bathroom, thinking about the device hidden in his backpack. After he hides the device in a cabinet and meets the Rat Man outside the bathroom, he asks why WICKED thinks they need him to complete the cure. The Rat Man leads him to a room where a man and a woman greet Thomas—Dr. Christensen and Dr.