WE HIT THE ROAD with a squeal of tires. Prairie yanked the steering wheel and the car fishtailed back and forth before straightening out.
Something was wrong with Chub. His cries turned to hiccups and I felt a widening pool of damp along his leg, his corduroy pants warm and wet. When I closed my fingers on his shin, he shrieked in pain.
“Oh my God, Chub’s hit-”
Before I got the words out Prairie braked hard and headed for the shoulder. We had gone only a few hundred yards down the road, but she jerked the car into park and hit the dome light with the heel of her hand, twisting in her seat toward me.
“Give him to me,” she commanded. I was terrified and didn’t know what else to do. I lifted his heavy body feetfirst. He was coughing and crying at the same time, and my muscles strained with his weight, but Prairie helped me slide him onto the front seat. She straightened his leg gently, the bloodstain black in the dim light, and then she did something that stopped my breath.
She skittered her fingers up and down Chub’s leg and then stilled them. Ducking her head, she started chanting. I only had to hear a few words to know that she was saying the lines from the pages I’d found in my mother’s hiding place.
It didn’t take long-just ten or fifteen seconds-and as Prairie murmured softly, Chub snuffled and sighed and finally quieted. She took her hands off his leg and carefully rolled his pants up and ran her fingertips over his skin. Then she rolled the pants down again.
“He’s all right now,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”
She gently handed him back to me and I took him into my arms. His little hands went to my neck and he slumped against me. I could feel his long eyelashes brushing my cheek. I felt along his leg, the sticky hardening blood and the torn place in the fabric-and underneath, where his skin was smooth.
“See if you can buckle him in again,” Prairie said, and eased the car off the shoulder and onto the road, picking up speed as the tires spun gravel. We were headed east, and as I fumbled with the seat belt, we blew past the Bargain Barn, the KFC, the old Peace Angel Baptist church that they’d tried to turn into a restaurant for a while and now was nothing at all.
“What just happened?” I asked when I had Chub more or less secured. “What did you do?”
But I already knew the answer, even as I fought back my hysteria. It was what I had done to Milla. What I had done to Rascal.
Prairie was silent for a moment, the outskirts of town blowing past in a blur of mailboxes and gravel drives and leaning shacks.
Finally she took a breath and slowly let it back out, and when she spoke, she was as calm as she had been when I first saw her sitting at our kitchen table that afternoon.
“I’m a Healer,” she said. “And so are you. It’s in your blood.”
I knew it was true, yet her words still stunned me. I hadn’t yet put a name to it. “I’m… it isn’t-”
“I know you healed Rascal,” Prairie said gently.
I felt my face go hot. I thought about denying it, but there didn’t seem to be much point. Prairie already knew. And in a way, I wanted her to know. I needed someone else to understand.
“Was he your first?” Prairie asked.
“Um.” I looked out the window at the farmland flying by, the barns and outbuildings dark shadows rising from the fields.
I almost didn’t tell her.
And then I did. I told her about Rascal’s accident, about the blood and the terrible damage to his body, about the way it had felt to carry him home, to put my face to his fur. About the rushing, needful urgency of the energy inside me flowing through my fingers into his wrecked body.
I told her about Milla, about how I barely remembered running to her side, about the words in my head, about Ms. Turnbull shoving me to the floor, and the way my senses came back with a prickling abruptness. About watching Milla roll over and throw up-and how she was fine after.
“The gift is strong in you,” Prairie said, a note of awe in her voice, when I finished. “I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do it without someone guiding them. Your mom and I practiced for hours with Mary in secret, so Alice wouldn’t know, but it took us months before we could use the gift.”
“But Milla says we’re cursed,” I said, hot shame flooding my face. “That we’re freaks.”
“No,” Prairie corrected me sharply. “You have a gift, Hailey. You can do something that others can’t.”
That made me feel a little better. Just days ago I’d thought there was something wrong with me, one more difference between me and every other kid, but Prairie made it sound like something to be proud of.
But that didn’t change the fact that we were running from killers, that the kitchen floor was soaked in blood, that Gram was dead. “Who were those men at the house? Were they there because I’m a Healer?”
Was it my fault?
“Those men were… professionals.”
“What does that even mean? Like hit men?”
“More like trained… investigators, I guess you’d call them. They’re killers when they need to be, but I don’t think that was their main objective.”
She was so calm. It made me panic even more. “What did they want?”
“I’m pretty sure they wanted you, Hailey.”
“Me? Why would they want me?”
“Because you’re a Healer.”
“But how would they know that? I only just found out myself.”
Prairie sighed. “That’s a long story. I work for a man. Not a good man, though I didn’t know that until very recently. His name is Bryce Safian. We were doing research, in a lab outside Chicago. Trying to find ways to use my healing gifts, to replicate them so they could be used to fight disease.”
“What do you mean, like turn normal people into Healers?”
“Well, more or less. We analyzed my full genome and compared it with a control population to isolate the element that controls the gift. The next step would have been to figure out how to use a special process to change a person’s DNA to match mine.”
“I thought all that DNA stuff was, like…” I tried to remember what I’d learned in my science class earlier in the year, wishing I had paid more attention. “That it’s still not understood all that well. That it’s mostly a mystery.”
“Yes, that’s true to a great extent, but Bryce is very well funded. We had access to the latest research. We had a laboratory, equipment, a team of scientists. We were at the very forefront.”
“But that all sounds like a good thing.” Not like a reason to kill someone.
“Yes, but… Bryce had other plans. Other ideas about what to do with the research once we isolated the healing gene, to put it in simple terms.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“He… had figured out a way to use the healing gene in warfare. In a battle setting.”
“What, like to heal wounded soldiers? To fix up their injuries so that they could keep fighting?”
“That’s… well, something like that,” Prairie said hesitantly. “The point is that he was willing to sell the research, our results, to the highest bidder. He didn’t care who it was, as long as they paid.”
Her words sank into my mind. “You mean like… other countries?”
“Possibly,” Prairie said quietly. “Anyone who would pay.”
“But I still don’t understand why he needs me if he already discovered how to do it using all your research.”
“It’s not quite that simple. You can’t really decode the DNA without a population, which means more than one person, and Bryce was desperate to find another subject. So he investigated me, and he found out things that even I didn’t know.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “Like, for instance, that I have a niece, someone who could be predicted to share the gift.”
“So he had those guys spying on me, those men that were at Gram’s,” I said. “It had to be. They were following me around. I saw them outside the house one morning, and in town talking to people.”
“Yes, I think that’s what happened. Bryce must have hired someone in Chicago to find out everything they could about my background. Once they figured out I was using a fake identity, they tracked down who I used to be. Who I really am. And once they got to Gypsum, it was just a matter of talking to the right people. You know how it is in a small town, everyone knows everything about everyone else. And if they offered money…”
“Everyone’s broke,” I finished the thought. People in Gypsum tended to mistrust outsiders, but if money was involved, it probably wouldn’t take a whole lot of convincing before they started telling everything they knew. “But nobody knew about the healing. I mean, I never did it before-I didn’t even know about it myself.”
“I’m afraid Bryce knew that it was hereditary because I told him,” Prairie said, her voice heavy with regret. “I just never imagined that there was anyone left. I mean, besides Alice, and she can’t heal.”
“So if your boss knew that Gram was weak, that she didn’t have the gift…”
“That’s why his men didn’t think twice about shooting her. She was useless to them. All they wanted was you.”
“So they came here and… someone in Gypsum led them to us for a few bucks.” I felt the bitterness build inside me, hot and sharp.
“I doubt anyone had any idea what it would lead to. These were professionals, Hailey. They would have had some story, some compelling lie that would make people trust them. And besides, the money Bryce would have offered-it would have been hard for anyone to resist.”
“Your boss has that much money?”
“He has more than you can imagine, Hailey,” Prairie said flatly.
“So if he’s so rich and powerful and all, how did you get away from him? I mean, how did you get here without him stopping you?”
Prairie glanced at me, her expression troubled. Even in the glow of the dashboard, I could see the worry lines etched between her eyes. “A man can be… a genius in some ways, and completely dense in others. Bryce was my lover, Hailey. And even though he managed to keep me fooled for a very long time about who he really was, I guess there were ways that he didn’t really understand me either.”
“You were in love with him?” I demanded.
“I thought I was. But when I realized what he intended to do, well, let’s just say I came to my senses fast. So fast that I was able to come up with a plan that would let me get to you first. I convinced him that I thought it was a great idea to find you, to involve you in our work. I pretended I didn’t know about the worst of his plans. I told him I needed a day to buy a few things for you, for your… room… the room he had already prepared for you at the lab. And instead, this morning I drove like hell to get to Alice’s, praying the whole way I would get there before he gave the order to pick you up.”
“But I first saw those men three days ago. Why did they wait until tonight to try to take me?”
“My guess is they weren’t allowed to do anything without the go-ahead from Bryce. And that they were trying to find a way to take you without drawing too much attention, ideally without getting the law involved. Bryce wouldn’t have wanted that kind of trouble.”
“So… how did he figure out you ran away?”
Prairie sighed, a long, sad breath that seemed to weaken her. “I don’t think he did. Bryce is so… confident, I don’t think it would have ever occurred to him that I’d go against his wishes. But his men must have recognized my car and tracked me to the house. I was sloppy; I didn’t stop to think that Bryce would have given them details like that. And I bet as soon as they reported in, he gave them the go-ahead to come and get us.”
“Oh.” I thought about the two men breaking into our house. About the way a gun looked when it was pointed at you. About the way bodies looked when they were dead.
And I couldn’t believe we’d escaped. That we had been attacked and gotten away.
Gram hadn’t. Gram was dead. For all I knew, Dun was dead too. And the two attackers. I searched my mind to see if there was some delayed grief, if I was upset about Gram and it just hadn’t hit me yet.
But I came up empty. If I’d ever loved Gram, that love had died a long time ago. Now all I felt was relief. Relief, and horror at the blood that had flooded our kitchen floor, at the way her eyes stared out at nothing, at the knife sticking out of the blond man’s shoulder, his fingers struggling to close around the handle.
To keep from focusing on those images I checked on Chub. He was sleeping contentedly, and I stroked his soft hair, smoothing it over his warm forehead.
It was only because I was turned around that the sudden headlights behind us cut directly into my line of vision. They came out of nowhere-one minute it was all black behind the Volvo, the next minute twin beams lit up the road, the distance between us closing fast. The other car-big, sleek, black-had to have been trailing close behind, but I hadn’t noticed it, and I knew that Prairie hadn’t either.
“Hold on,” Prairie said. “Now.”
I did. I couldn’t see past the blinding light into the other car, but I grabbed the back of the front seat with my right hand, hard, to brace myself. Prairie jammed her foot down on the gas and we shot forward. I heard the whine of the Volvo’s engine straining under the pressure, but the lights of the other car got steadily brighter.
Prairie swung the wheel to the left, into the passing lane, and then she hit the brakes so hard the tires squealed and I could feel the rubber screeching across the pavement, trying to keep hold of the road. There was a terrible jolt as the car behind us hit our back fender.
I was thrown against the passenger seat and my forehead slammed into the headrest, connecting with the hard plastic. Then I was thrown a second time, into the door, and my seat belt pulled up hard across my collarbone as Prairie hit the gas again and steered into the spin, flooring it and coming out of the turn in the direction we had come from.
How? was going through my mind, and I even moved my lips to say it, but nothing came out. My face hurt and I could feel warm blood trickling out of my nose, and realized I had smacked it against the headrest, but I was too scared to care.
“Hang on again,” Prairie ordered, and I braced myself and checked on Chub. He was awake, and he looked surprised, his big eyes blinking slowly, one fist rubbing his mouth, but the seat belt held him in place, and he was unhurt. Behind us I could see more of the other car as it backed up into a turn, one wheel going off onto the shoulder. It lurched, then leapt forward and shot off the other side, onto the shoulder, before correcting and starting toward us.
My teeth clacked together hard as Prairie yanked the wheel again, and we headed off the road, into a field, the low-growing crop-alfalfa, maybe, or strawberries-thudding against the undercarriage. Prairie urged the car through the furrows, the wheels finding purchase between the planted rows and biting into the earth. The other car fought against the rows. I could tell the mistake they were making-trying to cut across at an angle, coming after us the shortest way. But the foliage was too tall and it smacked against the car as it was mowed under.
We had a chance. Prairie increased the distance between us and the other car as they struggled for control, plants and clumps of dirt spinning up into the car’s wheel wells and axles. I leaned forward to say something, I don’t know what exactly, and the words died on my lips as I saw that Prairie was steering us straight toward a leaning structure silhouetted against the inky night, a big, old barn with a sloped roof.
“Prairie-” I managed to get out, terrified. I reached for her-to do what, I’m not sure, push the wheel away maybe, out of the path of the collision that would kill us-but Prairie spoke first, just as a cloud scudded in front of the weak moon and everything went even darker, leaving only our headlights cutting into the field ahead:
“Trust me, Hailey.”
I GUESS I DIDN’T TRUST HER. I squeezed my eyes shut and groped for Chub’s hand. If we were going to die, I wanted to be holding on to him when it happened.
I pitched forward again as Prairie slammed on the brakes before we reached the barn.
And then we hit. The Volvo took the impact in its solid metal frame, and even though the jolt slammed me hard against the seat belt, I knew right away that the barn hadn’t stopped the car. We’d hit it going about thirty, I guessed, and the big flat-sided wood doors splintered and went flying inward. Prairie pumped the brakes a couple more times, and I had the impression of a dark tunnel, the insides of the barn full of crazy angles and hanging rafters and spinning bits of hay in the headlights’ beams. I could make out empty stalls on either side, and then we drove through the other side of the barn and it was like the first time, a thudding crash and wood flying everywhere-
I had time to scream “Prairie what are you-”
– before she yanked the steering wheel one last time, sharp to the left. The wheels bounced over ruts and rocks and spun, engine screaming, for a second, another, a third before they caught and the car jerked ahead. Suddenly everything went dark as Prairie cut the lights and ignition and the car shuddered to a stop next to the ruined barn.
“What are you-” I tried again, but Prairie clapped a hand over my mouth and twisted around in her seat to look out the back. As I did the same, I heard the roar of the black car and it came bursting through the hole we had made in the barn, faster than we had, hurtling past us, and then suddenly tilting up, its front wheels lifting off the ground. For a moment it looked as though it was going to go airborne, and then it made a sickening lurch and the back of the car rose up in the air.
It seemed to go in slow motion, the back end flipping over the front in a crazy somersault before it disappeared down, down and there was a horrible crash and a bright flash, sparks orange in the night, and then a series of smaller echoes.
“Where’d it go?” I asked, forgetting to keep my voice down. I think I might have screamed it. Chub started to wail.
But Prairie was already undoing her seat belt.
“Out of the car,” she said. “Now. Get Chub.”
I didn’t have to be told twice. But when I turned to him, I saw that he’d somehow been thrown clear of the seat belt onto the floor of the car next to Rascal. He was making short choked sounds, as though he was trying to cry but couldn’t. I grabbed for him, but when I touched his arm, my fingers brushed against sharp bone poking from the skin and he screamed.
Terrified, I carried Chub from the car as carefully as I could. In the moonlight I could see that his arm was broken above the elbow. As my heart plummeted, his cries became even sharper with pain.
“He’s hurt, he’s hurt,” I shrieked at Prairie. She ran to my side and stretched out her arms to take him, but I held him even tighter.
“I can fix him,” Prairie said.
“No. I’ll do it.”
“But you’re just starting, you’re not ready yet-”
“I need to do it,” I insisted. My fingers were already closing around the injury, carefully avoiding the protruding bone, gently finding their place on Chub’s fevered skin.
For a moment Prairie said nothing, but our eyes met and there was almost a glow around us, an energy that bound the three of us. “All right,” Prairie finally said.
I closed my eyes for a moment and willed my thoughts to slow down, my mind to empty, and soon I could feel the energy begin to flow from me to Chub.
“Tá mé mol seo…,” Prairie murmured, and I joined in, my lips forming the words that seemed as familiar as if I’d been saying them forever. Our voices blended and twined together until they were almost one. I felt Chub’s pulse go slow and steady, and then his whimpers eased and he was quiet.
The torn flesh met and closed beneath my touch, and I felt the shift of his arm bones as the broken place mended. I brushed my fingertips along his skin and found the ridge where it had split, but even that seemed to smooth out as the seconds passed.
“I healed him,” I said in wonder.
“Yes.” There was something like awe in Prairie’s voice. “You are a true Healer, Hailey, a natural. Even your mother had to work hard at it, and she was twice the Healer I’ll ever be. But you… you’re something even more rare.”
Through the haze of my focus on Chub, I heard the black car sparking and sputtering in what I could now see was a dry creek bed. The land behind the barn led to the creek bank and stopped abruptly. The banks had been carved by the rushing waters of years of spring floods, leaving behind craggy dirt walls that dropped several feet in places.
“We have to go,” Prairie said, taking my arm and pulling me away from the Volvo and the barn and the wreck of the black car. “Tell Rascal to come.”
Only then did I notice him sitting by the car. He didn’t look frightened or even particularly interested in the commotion.
“Come on, boy,” I said, and he got to his feet without hesitation and trotted to catch up with us. I looked past him at the wreck and wondered if the men inside had survived. “Shouldn’t we see if-I mean, what if they need help?”
“They were trying to run us off the road, Hailey. Do you really want to give them a chance to catch up with us?”
“No.” I quickened my pace to keep up with her, glancing back to see if our pursuers were clambering out of the car.
“Someone’s bound to call this in soon,” Prairie added. “The smoke’s got to be visible for miles.”
She was right; the smoke pouring from the wreck was an ugly cloud spreading across the pristine, starry sky. I forced myself to look at the ground in front of us; it wouldn’t do to trip over something and drop Chub. He’d already been hurt and healed twice in one evening; I figured that was plenty.
“Where are we going?”
We were on a faint path, a trail of flattened weeds running parallel to the creek bed. Far off to the left, up a hill and past a neat vegetable patch surrounded by chicken wire, was a square farmhouse. The trail was narrow enough that we went single file, Prairie leading, then me and Chub, with Rascal taking up the rear.
“We’re nearly to Tipton,” Prairie said softly. “This is the Burnetts’ place.”
“Old Man Burnett?”
“Well, he wasn’t that old, back when I knew him. I knew his youngest. Claude.”
I recognized that name. Claude Burnett was a man in his late thirties, and people said he wasn’t quite right. He came to Gypsum some Saturdays in a clean shirt tucked into pants pulled up too high, his father leaning on him and leading him at the same time.
With a flash of regret I remembered I’d once teased Claude. I’d offered him half of a Milky Way bar I’d been saving. He was waiting in the shade outside the drugstore while his dad picked up a prescription or something. I showed him the candy bar, and when he put out his thick hand for it, I whipped it around behind my back.
“You didn’t say please,” I’d said, relishing the feel of my heart pounding under my T-shirt. I was eight or so, and it was such a novelty to see someone who made people even more uncomfortable than I did.
“I know him,” I said now.
“He was your mom’s friend. She was always nice to him. She taught him to talk.”
“What do you mean?”
Prairie shrugged. “He didn’t talk much, only a couple of words. Clover got him saying whole sentences. Just another kind of healing, I guess. I played here too, when I was little. Mary used to bring us. There’s a shortcut-just a little ways,” Prairie said. “Or at least there used to be. Here, I think this is it.”
She led the way off the path, down to a series of flat stones set into the creek bed, barely visible in the moonlight. We didn’t need them to cross, since the creek was dry, but I stepped carefully so I wouldn’t twist an ankle as we eased down the bank.
I was thinking about Claude… and about Chub, who was also not a talker. Could Chub be… healed? That way?
Prairie led us up the other bank. “This comes up on Ellis land. You know the Ellises?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Their kids went to school with me and your mom… but here… yes, I think this is it…”
The path continued on the other side, a tramped-down, narrow trail that led up over the bank and toward a cluster of lights far ahead. As we drew nearer I saw it was another farmhouse with a barn and some sheds set back a few hundred yards.
“How did you know to do that?” I demanded. “How did you crash into the right part of the barn and all? How did you know the car would break through and not, like, hit a beam or something?”
“Luck,” Prairie said, and I could almost hear a faint smile in her voice. “Don’t you think we were due for some luck? Besides, barn doors, Hailey, they’re just big pieces of wood.”
“But how could you see the doors? I could hardly even see the barn. But you had to have hit it just exactly right, or-”
Or we’d be dead.
Prairie slowed, turned on the path in front of me.
“I just remembered,” she said simply. “I thought about Clover… and how she and Claude liked to play cowboys here, and I shut my eyes and tried to picture it in my mind, where the doors were-”
“You shut your eyes?” I was dumbfounded.
She flashed me a grin, and it only lasted a fraction of a second in the weak moonlight. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
The thought of Prairie flying across the field with her eyes closed was terrifying… and maybe just a little bit thrilling. At least, that was what I figured the zip of sensation was that snaked up my spine.
Prairie continued on the path, striding confidently, and for a crazy moment I wondered if she had her eyes shut now. If she was leading us away from trouble with nothing but a feeling to guide her.
I don’t know why I didn’t feel more frightened. Weirdly, the thought almost made me feel a little safer. Chub was so heavy in my arms that everything from my wrist down had gone numb, but at least he had quieted, his sweat-damp forehead radiating heat against my face.
I reached out and touched Prairie’s pretty tailored jacket, and then I gripped it tightly and closed my eyes and willed my feet to walk in her footsteps, Rascal staying right behind me. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. She never stumbled, and neither did I, as we approached the cluster of buildings.
The Ellises’ barn was in better shape than the Burnetts’ barn, with hay stacked high in the loft and a couple of tractors parked neatly, gleaming in the moonlight, when Prairie and I opened the door.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll try not to be too long.”
I didn’t even ask her where she was going. I sat on the seat of the smaller tractor-really more like a big riding mower-and it felt good to relax my arms, aching from the effort of holding Chub. Rascal lay down next to the tractor, ignoring the scrabbling and scratching of creatures in the barn.
I used to be scared of things like that, mice and rats and bats. Now I was happy for the company.
I closed my eyes and tried to sort through the emotions swirling in my head. I felt as though my defenses were starting to fall apart at the edges. The past few days were like some sort of horror movie, and I couldn’t quite believe that I was a part of it, that any of it had even happened.
But I had blood on my clothes to prove it. Gram was dead. A lot of people were wounded in our kitchen and in the wreck of a car less than a mile away. And the life I had led before-the one I had hated so much-was in the past.
I wondered how I’d stayed calm enough to get through the past few hours. Maybe I was in a state of shock, or maybe I had just gotten so used to dealing with the challenges of life with Gram that I’d built up more defenses than an ordinary person would have in a situation like this.
But I wasn’t sure how long I could maintain my calm. What would happen if I started letting things bother me again, if I let myself start feeling things? The thought was terrifying. At least as terrifying, I realized as I sat shivering in the dark barn, as being shot.
I don’t know how long I sat there, but when Prairie slipped back into the barn and said my name softly, I jumped.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice full of urgency. I lifted Chub and followed her to the front of the barn, where a gravel drive led to the road. A car idled there, exhaust billowing up white against the first pink streaks of dawn. I was surprised to see the car waiting, but Prairie did things. She got what we needed. I didn’t know exactly how, but at the moment, it didn’t matter.
“Is this the Ellises’ car?” I asked.
She frowned, her eyebrows pinching together. “Yes… yes, it is. I’m sorry we have to take it, Hailey. We won’t damage it, and they’ll get it back. But…”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. We needed the car. We needed to get away. Even if I didn’t understand exactly what we were escaping from, I understood that.
When I opened the door, Rascal jumped into the car and lay down on the floor, and I got Chub settled under the seat belt. I was getting good at strapping him in, but as Prairie drove slowly down the gravel drive toward the main road she shook her head and said, “We have got to get that boy a car seat.”
I sank down low in the passenger seat and watched the farmhouse as we rolled by. The Ellises had a carport, so it would have been easy enough for Prairie to take the car-except she would have had to unlock it and start it, unless she knew how to hot-wire it.
And if that was what she did, I didn’t want to know. Not quite yet, anyway. I wanted to think of her as someone who worried about Chub having a car seat. Because if she was thinking about Chub, he would be that much safer. As far as I knew, I was the only person who had ever cared about him, and I knew he was a hard kid to fall for. He was behind in so many ways. But Prairie cared about him, and as we pulled out onto the main road and picked up speed, I was grateful.
I was so tired, riding in the Ellises’ Buick. You wouldn’t think a person who’d been chased and shot at, who had watched people die, would be able to lie down and sleep, but that was what I wanted more than anything. Just to sleep.
Prairie didn’t look so good. Her mouth was pulled down in a thinking frown and her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly.
“We should make it in about seven hours,” she said. “Six and a half if we really push it hard.”
“Where are we going?”
Prairie was silent for so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but eventually she gave me a smile that looked like it took a lot of effort.
“Home.”
WHEN I WOKE UP, the sun was streaming through the Buick’s windows, and I had to go to the bathroom.
“We’re in Illinois, coming up on Springfield. There’s a Walmart in twenty miles or so,” Prairie said. “We need to pick up a few things. Can you wait that long?”
“Um… okay.” I was hungry, too, but decided not to mention it. Somehow, it didn’t seem like something I should admit to. After a night like we’d had, who thinks of food?
I did. Which made me wonder. On the one hand, I felt like I should feel worse. Like maybe in shock from the horror of it all, or something. I kept waiting for the guilt to sneak up on me, but it just didn’t happen. I even felt a tiny sense of anticipation. Despite everything that had happened, we were going somewhere new.
I’d never left Missouri before. I’d only been out of Gypsum a few times, on school field trips to Hannibal and St. Joseph, to see Mark Twain’s childhood home and the Pony Express Museum. But I’d never been to a city.
My stomach growled again. To cover the sound, I asked Prairie something that had been bothering me.
“How could you not have known my mom was pregnant?”
Prairie’s jaw tensed and she didn’t look at me. She hadn’t slept at all, and it showed in the faint lines under her eyes and around her mouth.
“When I left Gypsum, I moved to Chicago. I wrote to Clover almost every day,” she finally said. “I knew there would be trouble if Alice ever found out that Clover knew where I was, so I told her to make up a story that we’d had a really bad fight and that we swore we’d never speak to each other again.”
“Why would Gram care?”
“She had… plans for me. Just like I think she did for you.”
Her words filled me with dread. “What do you mean?”
“You have to think about who Alice was, when she was younger. She tried to be a Healer for a long time before she gave up. Mary told me that Alice was devastated when she finally had to accept that she didn’t have the gift. She never got over her failure, and to cope with it she turned all her misery into blame.”
“Blame? But who could she blame for that?”
“Alice decided that the reason she was damaged was that the Tarbells had mixed their blood with outsiders. That they’d married and bore children outside the families, and that had corrupted the lineage.”
“What do you mean, the families? What families?”
“Our ancestors all emigrated here together. The Morries, the Tarbells, we’re all descended from the same village in Ireland.”
“We’re Irish?”
“Yes.” Prairie smiled, but it didn’t reach her troubled eyes. “Our ancestors lived in the same village for centuries. When they came here, they started over. New names, new skills, new homes, but the plan was always that they would stay together. They were known as the Banished, and they-”
“Wait.” I cut her off. What had Milla said-Ain’t any of us Banished got any say in things. “Why were they called that?”
“No one remembers anymore. I mean, there were all these stories. When your mom and I were little, Mary would tell us bedtime stories about faeries and blessings and curses.”
“You don’t believe in them.”
“I…” Prairie hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “It’s not that I don’t believe. The blessings were real, even if I can’t explain them, even if they don’t fit neatly with what science tells us. The Banished are united by some… powerful things. Mary always told me that we Tarbells were meant to serve the Banished, to heal them when they needed us. But that wasn’t the whole story. The rest of the women had a responsibility to keep the village, the people, together after they left Ireland. That’s why we can sense each other, why we are drawn to each other.”
At last, an explanation for the way I felt when I was around the Morries, even if it sounded crazy. A part of me was relieved that I hadn’t imagined it. That it might be real, even if it was something out of a fable. “What else?”
“Well, when they left Ireland the men were all given the gift of visions. They could see into the future, or see things that were happening elsewhere. It was meant to protect them from enemies, disasters, even things like storms that could damage the crops.”
“The Morries have visions?” I thought of the boys at school, their shadowed faces angry, stubborn, bleak. All but Sawyer’s.
“Not much anymore. That gift, that power, is mostly gone.”
“What happened to it?”
Prairie sighed. “A few generations ago, everything started to fall apart. I guess it came from marrying outside the Banished, it weakened the gift. Mary said she remembered the first broken Healer, when she was a little girl: a Tarbell daughter born like Alice, sick and weak and mean. But she didn’t grow to adulthood. Mary said the strongest Healers were pure Banished. I think it broke her heart when one of her own daughters was… damaged. And Alice could never accept it. I think she always believed that if she could just go back to the source of the gift, she could somehow heal herself.”
Go back to the source… to Ireland? My pulse quickened as I thought of the airplane ticket to Dublin. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said, and explained about the folder I’d found in Gram’s room.
Hailey frowned. “So Alice really meant to go. She used to talk about it, sometimes… only, I can’t imagine it would have made a difference. I don’t know how it could change anything just to go back to the village.”
“If it did, then all the Morries-”
“-could be fixed?” Prairie said gently. “It doesn’t work that way, Hailey. The changes in the Banished, they’re deep in the foundations of who they are now. They are afraid of each other. Of what they’ve become. The men… they’ve lost their, their moral compass, I guess you’d say. A lot of them are addicts. They don’t want to work, they don’t take care of their families.”
“But not all of them,” I said, thinking of Sawyer.
“Oh, definitely not. There are still Banished men who are born with all the determination and idealism of the ones who first settled here. But in general… well, I guess that’s how it got to be called Trashtown. You know, I saw a picture once, that Mary had. It was almost a hundred years old and you wouldn’t even know it was Trashtown. Little houses all fixed up, flower beds, happy families, everyone dressed up and smiling.”
I thought about the Morries at school, their patched and dirty clothes, the sickly, malnourished way they looked. I thought of Milla, the combination of fury and fear she wore on her face.
“I don’t understand why they hate me so much now. The Morries.”
“It’s fear, Hailey. They think that after Alice was born… damaged… that the gift was turned into a curse. They don’t believe you truly have the power to heal, just like they never believed Clover or I could. They’re afraid that if you try to heal someone you’ll end up cursing them instead.”
“You never healed anyone when you lived here?”
“Alice wouldn’t let us. She made us go to school in Tipton so we wouldn’t be around the Morries. Mary taught us in secret. Alice always said she’d beat us if she ever caught us healing.”
“Why?”
“I think because she never got over being damaged. She tried to heal, you know, when she was young. Mary told me. And she couldn’t bear the thought that her daughters could do something she couldn’t.”
“And so you just… didn’t?” I tried to imagine resisting the urge, now that I knew what I could do.
“I… took care of people sometimes, but usually I didn’t even tell them. You know-a friend with a strawberry birthmark. Another one with bruises from when her stepfather beat her.”
We rode in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. “Did you ever know your dad?”
“No, and Alice never told me who he was. I never even knew if Clover had the same father.”
I couldn’t imagine Gram young. Couldn’t imagine a man falling in love with her, wanting a child with her. “What about your grandfather?”
“No. He died young, not long after Alice was born, and Mary never talked about him. All Alice ever told me about him was that he was mixed blood.”
“Was he?”
“Yes. There weren’t very many purebloods left even a generation ago, and Mary’s husband was part Cherokee and part German.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
Prairie gave me a quick, sad smile before returning her attention to the road. “I studied genetics, when I finally went to college. And then I worked in a lab. By the time Bryce hired me, I’d traced my origins pretty thoroughly.”
“You can tell all that? Just from blood?”
“You’d be surprised. The tests are a little complex, but you can track your heredity with considerable accuracy.”
I thought for a moment. “Could you… test me? I mean, could you figure out what my dad was?”
“Not the way you’re thinking, Hailey. Unless you were doing full-on DNA testing and looking for genetic paternity or something like that. And besides, if you’re wondering about the healing, it doesn’t matter. Alice was wrong. As long as a Healer’s partner is part Banished, she will pass on the gift, nine times out of ten.”
“You can tell that from your testing?” I demanded, surprised.
“No. That, I learned from Mary. It’s not exactly scientific, but I have no reason to doubt it’s true. Mary told me that some Healers are more powerful than others, depending on the blood of their fathers. And other factors too, some of which I doubt we’ll ever understand. Like Alice. I don’t know why the gift was corrupted in her. I… sometimes I can almost feel pity for her, for the way she was born, with the powers stunted along with her body. But then…”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she didn’t have to. I guessed we both had our memories, of Gram’s meanness, her cruelty. Yes, it was possible to feel compassion for her… until you remembered who she was.
“So Gram wanted to make sure you married one of the Banished,” I guessed. “So your children didn’t end up like her.”
“That’s right,” Prairie said. “But it went further than that. Alice started to feel that she was responsible for ensuring that the Tarbell line continued. She used to say that when I graduated from high school, she’d choose one of the purebloods for me.”
“And when you left-”
“There was only Clover. And I’ve always wondered…”
It took only a moment for me to figure it out. “You think Gram… chose someone for my mom. Once she realized you weren’t coming back.”
“Yes,” Prairie said softly. “I think she didn’t want to wait until Clover graduated. And I think she-Clover-didn’t have any choice in the matter, that he-whoever he was-he must have…”
As Prairie struggled to find the right words, I realized why her pain showed through whenever she talked about Clover. About my mother. Gram had sacrificed her, had handed her off to one of the Morries-someone like the cruel-eyed, shadow-fleeting boys I knew from the halls of Gypsum High-so that she could be impregnated by a pureblood. So that her child would carry on the Tarbell legacy and be a true Healer.
Horror washed over me, closing my throat so it was difficult to breathe. I was the child of a violation of someone even younger than me. When I thought of my mother, alone, having lost the one person who cared about her, who could protect her, my heart fractured.
“Did she die in childbirth?” I asked. I had to know.
“Oh, Hailey.” Prairie took a deep breath. “No. Clover killed herself.”
“She…”
But I couldn’t speak. I had always thought of my mother as a stranger, until I met Prairie. Gram had said she was mentally disabled and I had believed her, and somehow that made my mother less real to me. I felt like I had been born of nothing, in a way, like I had just appeared one day in the house I grew up in.
“You were a few weeks old when she died,” Prairie continued quietly. “Bryce’s investigators found the records at the county office, and he told me a few days ago. I was… devastated, thinking about how frightened Clover must have been.”
“How did she… you know?”
“She hanged herself, Hailey. In the bedroom closet. Bryce found the police reports.”
My closet. No wonder I had been drawn to that tiny space; no wonder I’d found the secret hiding place. It was her presence I’d felt there, her sadness. “But… why…”
“I think she felt like she was out of options. She was too ashamed to tell me she was pregnant. And I think she knew that if she had told me, I would have come back. I think she was protecting me, in her own way.”
“But what about…” I swallowed the lump in my throat. What about me? I was thinking. Didn’t she care about me? Didn’t she want to make sure her baby was all right?
“You must never think that your mother didn’t love you,” Prairie said fiercely. “Clover loved you with all her heart. But she knew that Alice would have taken you from her, like she tried to take everything. Alice saw you as the future of the Tarbells, and that was all she cared about. A last chance for her to get it right. A last chance to purify the bloodline.”
You are the future, Hailey.
“And she wouldn’t have allowed anything to interfere with that. I am sure that she would have put Clover out on the street before she let her raise you.”
I could barely absorb the full horror of what Prairie was saying. I thought of all the times Gram whispered and laughed with Dun Acey, the way he looked at me with his hungry eyes. I wondered if he was the one Gram had chosen for me, the man who would father my child, the pureblood Banished who would ensure that my baby was a Healer.
I thought I would throw up. I made a strangled sound in my throat and Prairie looked at me in alarm.
“Hailey, are you all right? The exit’s coming up in a minute-can you make it?”
“I think so,” I said, swallowing hard. “Just… tell me the rest. All of it. How did you find out my mom was dead? What did you do?”
“When she stopped answering my letters, I got worried. I had saved a little money by then, so I took a bus back to Gypsum to get her. But when I got to the house… she wasn’t there, and Alice told me she had killed herself. I was just going to leave; all I could think to do was get out of there, out of the house, away from Alice. But she stopped me. She told me that she could make people think I did it. She said Clover had been talking about the huge fight we’d had…”
“The one you told her to make up? When you wrote to her?”
“Yes. And she said I’d better not let any of the authorities find out I was in town, or they’d take me in for questioning or worse. Now I understand she was just trying to make sure that I never came back. Because if I ever found out about you, I might fight for you. And she was not about to lose you.”
That was the final piece of the puzzle. Now I had the whole story of why I’d grown up without a mother. She hadn’t abandoned me on purpose.
And if Prairie had come for me long ago, I wouldn’t have Chub. I looked over the seat at him, rosy-cheeked in sleep, his mouth a sweet little O.
Until Chub, I had grown up with no love at all. But he had given me a reason to keep going, to keep trying.
Prairie had saved me last night, I thought as we reached the exit. But maybe Chub had saved me first.
We coasted off the highway, almost directly into an enormous parking lot. I was starving, and I knew Chub would be too the minute he woke up.
“We’re going to eat here?”
“I’m afraid so. There’s a McDonald’s in the Walmart. I’ll pick up what we need while you take Chub and get breakfast for the two of you.”
“What about you?”
Prairie smiled, unexpectedly and genuinely. “If you would get me a sausage and egg biscuit, I would be very grateful. I haven’t had one of those in ages. Oh, and some hash browns, maybe. And an orange juice. And a giant coffee, all right?”
She pressed some money into my hands and I closed my fingers over it. “How do you like your coffee?”
“Black’s fine. Listen, Hailey, you’ve got some bruising. It might be better if you…” She reached out and pushed my hair across my forehead, arranging it so that it hung over the side of my face.
Prairie had taken off her jacket. At least there was no blood on her silk top. She’d combed her hair and put on lipstick, but she still looked like she’d been up all night.
“I need to walk Rascal,” I said, leaning over to check on him. He was lying on the floor of the car, head resting on his paws.
“Okay, I’ll get Chub ready.”
By the time I had taken Rascal for a quick trip to a grassy median, Prairie had Chub out of the car. He was pointing to the giant store and making excited noises. I opened the car door and Rascal jumped obediently into the backseat.
As we walked through the huge parking lot, I decided two things: first, today was the day I was going to start drinking coffee. And second, I too would drink it black. Cream and sugar were things that could slow a person down.
By now, back in Gypsum, the Ellises would have realized their car was missing, wouldn’t they? They would have gone out to get the paper, or let the cat in, and if they glanced over to the carport… although it was Saturday. Maybe they were sleeping in.
A quarter mile away, if the cops hadn’t already been called to the scene, Old Man Burnett was waking up to discover a giant hole in his barn and a car crashed in his creek. Not to mention Prairie’s car, that old brown Volvo, abandoned behind the barn.
I wondered how long it would take for someone to stumble on the carnage at our house. Gram was well known to a few people in Gypsum and the surrounding county, but they weren’t the kind to call the authorities. It would probably be someone else-someone selling aluminum siding or checking the water meter-who would end up making that awful discovery.
Inside the store, an old man with a bright blue vest shoved a shopping cart toward us. “Welcome to Walmart,” he said.
“Thanks, I… we’re just going to, uh, have breakfast,” I said, certain he would see how nervous I was and know something was wrong. But as Prairie slipped into the crowd of shoppers, he turned away from me and pushed the cart at the people who came through the door after us.
I saw a sign for the restrooms and dragged Chub toward them. Inside, there was one of those changing stations that pull down from the wall. I wondered if it would hold Chub, who weighed forty-two pounds now, according to Gram’s old peeling scale.
“In here,” I said, pulling him toward the largest stall. There were two other women at the sinks, one washing her hands, one putting on lipstick. I hoped they would just assume that Chub was using the toilet himself.
I realized I didn’t have any diapers or wipes with me. How I was going to clean him? He was bound to be soaked. I grabbed a handful of paper towels and wet them at the sink before we went into the stall.
Chub said something I didn’t understand and tugged impatiently at his elastic waistband. I helped him out of his damp diaper and then, to my amazement, he clambered up on the toilet.
A dozen times at home I had put him on the toilet, promising to read him stories or get him a cookie, anything I could think of to get him used to the idea of using it-and he always scrambled right back down and ran away.
But now he had done it on his own. He finished up, climbed back down and pulled up his pants.
I helped him wash his hands at the sink-he loved the foaming soap dispenser-and as we were drying our hands, a short woman with frizzy red hair turned to me and said, “Oh, he’s sure a sweetheart. Is he your little brother?” and before I even really thought about it, I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She gave us a big smile and as we followed her out of the restroom I thought, Well, why not? There wasn’t anyone who was going to argue. We could be related, both of us with pale freckled skin. And later, if he grew up looking totally different, if we were in the habit of thinking of each other that way-maybe it wouldn’t matter.
Maybe we had a chance to be normal after all.
At McDonald’s I ordered myself the same thing Prairie had asked for, and hotcakes and sausage for Chub. We ate quickly, and I tried not to look around at the other customers. I figured if I didn’t look at them, they wouldn’t look at me.
When Prairie wheeled up with her shopping cart full of bags, I was feeling better. We made our way back to the car, and she handed me a large box.
“Here’s a car seat,” she said. “See if you can get it figured out while I put the rest of this stuff in the trunk.”
It ended up taking both of us to set the seat up, Prairie reading from the instruction book and me fiddling around with the straps and the seat belt. Rascal didn’t seem at all interested in the process, barely looking up as we worked. Chub patted the plastic sides of the new seat with a thoughtful look on his face. I crawled back into the front seat. Prairie stuffed the instructions and the packaging back in the box and tossed it in the backseat. Then she pulled a plastic bag out of her purse.
“I thought…,” she said, and then hesitated. She reached in the bag and took out a small blue stuffed giraffe with glossy yarn forming a loopy mane down its long neck. The legs were loose and floppy, and it had a sweet face, with long eyelashes embroidered above little button eyes. She handed it to Chub, who held it close to his nose, turning it this way and that.
“Raff,” he said. “Prairie. Raff… giraffe.”
He really was talking. How was this happening? Was it because of me? Could I be healing him somehow, without even trying? I’d healed three times: Milla, Rascal and Chub, all in the past few days. Maybe it was now such a part of me that I couldn’t turn it off.
It didn’t seem possible… but so much of what had happened was unbelievable.
I handed Prairie the paper sack with her biscuit and hash browns. I fixed the coffee cup’s lid so she could drink, folding back the little plastic tab, just like I’d learned to do twenty minutes earlier when I’d drunk my first cup of coffee.
Prairie nibbled at the food while she drove slowly out of the parking lot and back onto the interstate. She consulted her phone now and then, and I realized she was following downloaded directions.
“Where are we going?” I asked as she turned onto a multi-lane road lined with strip malls.
“Well, that’s a little complicated,” she said. “Keep your eyes out for a-Oh, there it is.”
She turned into a parking lot in front of a row of low-slung buildings and passed a dry cleaner, a Thai restaurant, a bakery. She parked in front of a Hertz car rental agency, then turned to face me with a serious expression.
“This is going to sound a little strange,” she said, “but we have to make it look like we’re renting a car.”
“Make it look like? But we’re not really renting it?”
“Yes. How can I… Okay. Remember when I told you that Banished men used to have visions? That they could see the future?”
“Yes…” A prickly feeling had started at the base of my spine. I sensed that what was coming was more bad news, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear more. But what choice did I have?
“Purebloods can still do it. Some of them, anyway. Well, a few.” She bit her lip and stared at her hands, which were clasped tightly. “Rattler can.”
“Rattler Sikes?” As if there was any other Rattler. Just saying his name dialed up the prickling to full-scale fear.
Prairie nodded. “Rattler and I have a… history. When we were kids, he used to like to follow me around. Even then he had visions, and they just got stronger over time.”
“But that means he knows exactly where we are!” The thought made me want to jump out of the car and run.
“It doesn’t work quite like that. He can’t see all of the future, or even choose what parts to see. He just… opens his mind, and he gets flashes. Pictures, pieces of the future. Sometimes he has visions of things happening at the same time but in a different place.”
I remembered his unfocused gaze in the kitchen, the way he went very still, as though he was focusing in on something no one else could see. Something’s not right. A car… men. It’s men in it.
He’d had a vision of Safian’s men.
“But what are we going to do?” I demanded, panicked.
Prairie laid a hand on my arm. “Stay calm, Hailey. That’s why we’re here. We’re going to create a few scenarios, throw him off. We’ll make it look like we’re renting a car. We’ll drive to the bus station. I’ll take a few different routes, make it look like we could be going south or west. We just need to confuse him so he doesn’t know which way to come after us.”
“But eventually he’s going to-”
“Stop,” Prairie said gently but firmly. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Rattler can only see me when we’re connected, when there’s some energy between us. Right now we’re scared and we’re bound by what happened at Alice’s, but we will get past that. We’ll put it behind us and the connection will be broken and he won’t be able to find us.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean, you’re connected?”
“The Banished… we’re drawn to each other, like I told you before. And there’s an energy around that. But if you were to leave, that energy would slowly fade. Your mind and your heart would focus on other things and the attraction would die down. The connection would be broken. Not forever, but you’d be functioning on your own, outside the influence of the other Banished. That’s what I did, when I went to Chicago. The energy faded for me, and Rattler was a part of my past, and he couldn’t see me anymore.”
“But when you came back to Gypsum-”
“It opened it all up again. The connection, the energy. But we can fight it. I’ve fought it before. I’ve gotten away from Rattler before.” There was strong conviction in her voice, but edged with something I didn’t like at all, something dark and terrifying.
It almost sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
But it wasn’t like we had any other options. “What can I do?”
“You and Chub take Rascal for a walk. There’s bottled water in the trunk and a plastic bowl. Give me five or ten minutes.”
I did as she directed, glancing in the plate-glass window as I took care of Rascal. She was having a conversation with the man behind the desk, who was consulting his computer monitor. Chub was happy to be out of the car, and he walked along beside me, picking up rocks and sticks that caught his eye.
In the bright light I could see that Rascal had blood along his neck and back, and I realized that Chub must have bled on him in the Volvo. I wiped him off with some of the bottled water and a handful of tissues from the box the Ellises kept in their car. He didn’t mind, didn’t even seem to notice. I put my hand in front of his face to lick, but he just stared at the lanes of traffic whizzing by. I wondered if he was thinking about chasing cars, but he didn’t seem interested. He hadn’t wagged his tail or perked up his ears at all, and I wondered again if he was having some sort of reaction to his accident, if something inside him was broken.
But when I said, “Rascal, come,” he trotted along right away and jumped back in the car. If there was something wrong with him, it wasn’t brain damage.
When Prairie came back out she seemed a little calmer. “One down,” she said. After consulting her phone again, she pulled out of the parking lot. “Next stop, the bus station.”
“Prairie,” I asked after we’d driven for a few minutes, “what happened to Rattler? At the house?”
“Oh, that…,” Prairie said. A ghost of a smile flickered across her face. “I, uh, take kickboxing. That was a roundhouse kick. We’re not supposed to use it in class. Well, anyway, I always wanted to try it.”
“I guess it worked.”
“Yeah-I guess so.”
Rattler wasn’t dead. He’d sold us out and nearly gotten me kidnapped, and as far as I knew, his only injury was from being kicked by Prairie. I wished he was dead-and then I wondered if he was “seeing” us even now. It made me shiver with fear and revulsion.
I barely paid attention as Prairie took smaller and less crowded streets, driving through a series of neighborhoods that grew shabbier and dirtier, before she turned into the parking lot of a bus station.
“This time we’ll all go,” she said.
We left Rascal in the car with an opened can of dog food that Prairie had bought at Walmart. We were gone for about a half hour, pretending to buy tickets. What really happened was Prairie asked a lot of questions about when buses were leaving for various places, and at the end she took a couple of folded paper timetables and tucked them into her purse. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for a while. I read an old magazine that someone had left behind, and Prairie got Chub a lemonade from a vending machine.
It didn’t take long to get boring. That surprised me. I figured I’d never be able to relax, but when Prairie murmured that it was time to move on, I was relieved.
Next was the airport. That was a little more interesting, though Springfield’s airport was tiny and didn’t look anything like the ones in the movies. Still, there were people milling around, carrying bags, dragging suitcases-it made me wish I was flying somewhere. I’d never really thought I’d have a chance to, but now it seemed possible. Now that I was with Prairie. It wasn’t just that she had money and experience, either; she made me feel like I could do things I’d never considered doing.
After the airport, Prairie took us into Springfield’s downtown. There were enough tall buildings to make it seem like a real city. We circled for a while, sometimes barely moving in traffic, and by the time Prairie headed back out of town it was late in the afternoon.
The final place Prairie took us was a motel, an unremarkable place in a beaten-down neighborhood near the interstate.
“Okay,” she said as we pulled into the lot. “I have got to get some rest before we go any further. I’m going to get us a room-stay here, okay?”
I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to admit to Prairie that I had never been in a motel before. Gypsum had two-a Super 8 and a motor court called the SkyView. I’d walked past them hundreds of times, wondering what it would be like to have a room to myself, everything clean and neat.
Chub was napping, so I left him in the car and walked Rascal nearby. I watched Prairie go through the glass doors and into the lobby, where I could see her talking to a man behind a counter. After a short while she returned.
“I got us a room near the back,” she said as she drove the car around the corner of the motel to a space that was partly hidden behind a Dumpster. “I didn’t tell them about Rascal. We’ll have to sneak him in.”
“You’re worried about the cops looking for this car, aren’t you. And… the guys Bryce hired.”
She nodded. “I smeared mud on the plates this morning before we left, so the number’s hard to make out.”
I helped her get the bags out of the trunk. Chub held my hand and yawned as we followed Prairie to the last door on the first floor. Then I went back and carried Rascal in with my sweatshirt draped over him, not that anyone noticed us. Our room had a view of the end of the parking lot and a Denny’s next door. Beyond, on the other side of the fence, was the back of another restaurant, with more Dumpsters and delivery doors and trash blowing along the pavement. A man sat on an upturned bucket, smoking a cigarette.
I knew what motel rooms looked like from TV. This one had a smell, not bad but both chemical and musty. I set my backpack down on one of the beds and watched Prairie unpack the Walmart bags.
“I hope you’re up for a new look,” she said, and I could tell she was trying to sound cheerful despite her exhaustion. She laid out a box of L’Oréal Couleur Experte on the night-stand between the beds. Next came a plastic comb and a pair of scissors. She upended the two largest bags and a pile of tangled clothing fell onto the bed. The last bag contained a handful of little plastic makeup cases, plus an enormous pair of sunglasses with white frames.
“Is that all like… a disguise?” I asked.
“Yes. We need to do what we can to make ourselves invisible. So we can get back to Chicago. And then find somewhere we can be safe.”
Safe from things I never knew existed before today. From ancient magic and curses and dark secrets, things out of a twisted fairy tale. And at the other end of a spectrum, from a man who wanted to use me to experiment on.
A scientist.
I thought about the science class I’d never be attending again. Realized, to my surprise, that there were a few things I’d miss about my old life after all.
Chub was wandering around the room, touching things, exploring. He found the phone and pushed at the buttons. Prairie sank down on one of the beds, beside her purchases, and massaged her temples with her fingertips.
“Seriously, Hailey, we need to sleep, just for a couple of hours or so.” She took her cell phone out of her purse and pressed the keys. “I’m setting an alarm. I’ll get us up in plenty of time to do what we need to. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, sighing. It wasn’t worth fighting her over. And I knew she was probably right anyway. Even though I felt wired now, I was bound to crash soon enough.
“Come here,” I said to Chub. “Nap time.”
“Nap time,” he repeated, but instead of getting into the other bed he climbed up with Prairie. She must have been mostly asleep already, because she just made a sighing sound and looped an arm around Chub, who snuggled in close. Before even a minute passed I could tell by his breathing he was asleep.
I tried not to be jealous, to be glad that Chub was as comfortable around Prairie as I was. And mostly, I was glad. Except that now I was alone. And I didn’t want to be. The fears, the anxiety, were simmering inside me, and I was afraid that if I was left alone with my thoughts they’d bubble up and take over.
I looked at Rascal, who was sitting motionless next to the door. “C’mere, boy,” I said, and he got up and trotted over to me.
“Up,” I said, and he jumped up onto the bed.
I wrapped my arm around him and pulled him a little bit closer. He didn’t smell very good, a combination of wet dog and something else, something unfamiliar. But he was still better than nothing.
I was worried that he wasn’t back to normal yet, but now wasn’t the time to obsess over it. I switched off the lamp. With the heavy drapes pulled shut, the room was as dark as if it was midnight. There was a hum coming from the ceiling, a fan circulating the strange-smelling air. Prairie’s cell phone glowed on the bedside table.
I was sure I’d never get to sleep with everything I had to think about, but the next sound I heard was Prairie’s alarm.
RASCAL WAS CURLED UP against me, oblivious to the cell phone’s beeping. My mouth felt dry as a desert as I slid out from under the covers. In the other bed, Prairie sat up and turned off her phone. She rubbed her eyes and yawned.
I went to the bathroom, drank two glasses of water and splashed cold water on my face. When I came out, Prairie had gotten up and lined up her purchases on her bed.
“Well, hello, sunshine,” she said cheerfully.
“What are you so happy about?”
“Nothing much… other than I think we managed to throw off Rattler. I mean, if he hasn’t showed up yet, I guess we’re doing okay.”
“You think that worked? All that driving around?”
“He’s not here, is he? So it seems to me he must have gotten sidetracked by one of our visits. For all we know he’s on a bus to Texas.” She gathered her supplies. “I know a shower would probably feel great right now, but how about if I color your hair first? You’ll need to rinse out the color after it sets, so you might as well wait to get in the tub.”
The sleep had done Prairie good; in the light of the lamps she’d switched on, I could see that the dark shadows had nearly disappeared from under her eyes.
I ran a hand through my hair. It was almost perfectly straight, rich brown with natural highlights. I knew people paid a lot of money for color like that.
“Uh, all right,” I finally said. My hair was the one thing about me that I always knew was special. But if it meant our safety, I’d get over it. “What color?”
“I thought we’d try to match Chub’s. Make it look like you’re brother and sister.”
I glanced at Chub, who was rolling over and sighing in a tangle of covers. His hair was so pale, it was almost white, with a wash of gold. I couldn’t imagine that color on me.
“I need to cut it too,” Prairie said, apologetically. “I wouldn’t ask, if it wasn’t so important.”
While she mixed up the dye, filling the room with an acidy smell, I stripped down to the tank top I was wearing under my flannel shirt.
“Let me cut some first,” Prairie said, after she spread a sheet from her bed on the floor in the center of the room, then put the desk chair on top of it. “Just get some of the length off. Then I’ll shape it when the color’s done, okay?”
I sat in the chair and she ran her hands through my hair. She gathered it into a ponytail and twisted it. I shut my eyes and tried to relax.
The first cut left my head feeling strangely light. I didn’t want to think about my hair falling to the floor, so I asked Prairie something I’d been wondering.
“How could you not know that Bryce wasn’t who you thought? I mean, you were… you know.” Sleeping with him, I thought but didn’t say.
Prairie paused. I could feel the heat from her skin, her hands inches from my face.
“I think deep down I knew something was wrong. But it’s amazing what you can convince yourself of when you’re in denial. Here, I’m going to start with the color, okay?”
She began to dab it onto my hair, starting at the roots and working out to the ends. It smelled terrible and stung my scalp.
“What did you like about him?” I asked. “I mean, at the beginning.”
A little bit of the dye dribbled toward my eyebrow. “Well, for one thing, I thought he was hot.”
I brushed the dye away. “In what way?”
“Kind of a, I don’t know, clean-cut look. He dresses well-really well. He likes expensive clothes. And he’s always worked out a lot. He’s a little compulsive about it, I guess you could say. He’s average height, but he’s got a naturally athletic build. Broad shoulders, strong arms…”
“Light hair or dark?”
“Brown… kind of a medium brown, I guess. And brown eyes.”
He didn’t sound bad, but he also didn’t sound all that special. “What else?”
“Well, he’s incredibly smart. I think that was the biggest thing, to tell you the truth. He has a doctorate, or at least he says he does, though now I don’t know how much of what he told me was true and how much was lies.”
I thought about that. The smartest guy at Gypsum High was Mac Blair, but it would be a pretty huge stretch to call him hot. He wasn’t a geek, exactly-it was just that his mind was always on something else, usually some random fact he’d picked up online. “How did that make you like him?”
Prairie didn’t answer for a moment. Her hands on my hair were confident and efficient, distributing the dye evenly over my head.
“Part of it was, I guess, that I hadn’t known anyone like him before. Most of the guys I’d known-well, you know how it is in high school. It’s not like anyone was even all that curious about the world outside Gypsum. And I went to this little junior college and night school, anything I could do to get enough credits to graduate, and it wasn’t like I was around geniuses there, either. Even when I was working in the labs, a lot of the guys I met, they weren’t really all that happy to be there, they weren’t committed to the work. Not like Bryce.
“But it was also… I wanted so badly to do something with my gift. I wanted to matter. And Bryce seemed like he could make that happen. I guess it was a little bit of a power thing, you know?”
“You thought that if you were with Bryce, he could open doors for you? Get you a better job, more money, stuff like that?”
“No, not exactly. More like, with his background and resources, he made me think the things I dreamed about were actually possible. That they could happen in my lifetime. I mean, now I know I was only seeing what I wanted to see and believing what I wanted to believe. But it was just so easy to put my faith in Bryce, this incredibly successful guy, and I was blinded by the fact that he wanted me.”
“But what about other people? The people you worked with? Didn’t any of them get suspicious about him? If they were closer to the data, didn’t they wonder what he was researching?”
“Well, yes. About six months ago, Bryce started replacing a lot of the employees who’d been there a long time. He brought in people from all over the country, even a couple from other parts of the world. They were his inner circle, and when they weren’t meeting with Bryce, they kept to themselves. I think they knew exactly what was going on… I think they’re in on it. He can’t do this on his own, not without getting caught.”
“What about the people he fired? Weren’t they angry? Or suspicious about what he was doing?”
“Bryce gave them a lot of money, made them sign all kinds of nondisclosure documents. And most people knew about my relationship with Bryce and kept their distance, so I didn’t stay in touch with the ones who left. I did have this one friend…” She smiled at the memory. “He was hilarious. His name was Paul, and he was our tech guy, just this brilliant, geeky guy who could make you laugh. He only left a few weeks ago. I think Bryce had trouble finding someone who could do what Paul could; he was a genius at security and computers and all that.”
“Weren’t you mad when Bryce fired him?”
Prairie’s smile faltered. “Yes… I guess I was. I mean, when I think about it now, I am, since he was the only person besides Bryce who’d have lunch with me or get coffee or whatever. And I don’t think he really trusted Bryce. He made me a backup of some of the security systems without telling Bryce, said it was in case anything happened to him.”
“Maybe he had a crush on you.”
Prairie laughed. “Maybe. He was always blushing when we talked. His only hobbies were paintball and computer games, but you know, he probably would have been a better boyfriend than Bryce. Guess I need to work on that, my taste in men.”
As she finished dabbing the dye around the crown of my head, I wondered if I’d ever have a boyfriend, and if so, whether I’d pick a good one. Maybe, being Banished, we didn’t have the common sense other people did. We were attracted to people like us, and as far as I could tell, most of the men weren’t great. Although Bryce wasn’t Banished… and Prairie had still made a mistake.
“Did you ever think about dating Paul?”
“He never asked. I don’t know… if he had, maybe things would have been different. I liked him a lot. He was shorter than me, not that it matters, and he had a ponytail, so if you like that… But it’s a good thing we were friends, because he made me keep a spare prox card when they rekeyed the lab.”
The familiar anxiety stirred in my gut. “Why is that a good thing?
Prairie didn’t say anything for a minute as she wound the dye-coated strands of hair on top of my head. “It will let me get back into the lab. This won’t be over until I destroy the data. I can’t let Bryce move forward with… what he’s doing.”
“How are you going to do that?” I tried to keep the hysteria out of my voice, but all I could picture was the killers in our kitchen. “You think he’ll let you just walk in there and-”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Prairie said gently. “We need to focus on the moment, on-”
“Is that why we’re going to Chicago? Can’t we go somewhere else? Somewhere he can’t find us?”
“We will. I promise. As soon as we do this last thing, we’ll go far away and start over. But Hailey, neither one of us is going to be safe as long as Bryce is still active.”
“But couldn’t we wait a while? Let things die down? You could get your friend Paul to help you, and when it was safe, you guys could, I don’t know, sneak back in or something.”
“I’m afraid it would be even more dangerous to wait,” Prairie said. “I don’t know how far Bryce has gotten. They were close to some key breakthroughs. But Hailey, you really need to try not to worry about that right now. Just relax while the color sets.”
While Prairie cleaned up, I watched SpongeBob with Chub until it was time for me to rinse. On the sheet she had spread out, my hair lay in glossy piles, but I tried not to think about it.
I undressed in the bathroom and stepped into the shower, making the water as hot as I could stand it. I spent a long time lathering and even longer rinsing, standing under the shower with my head tipped back.
When I was finally done in the shower, I felt both worse and better. Worse because now I understood what was driving Bryce, and we were headed right back into it. Better because I was finally starting to believe that Prairie wouldn’t abandon me. I dried off and wrapped the bath towel around my body. Then I took a washcloth and wiped away the steam on the mirror.
I was shocked. My hair was a pale, pale shade of gold. Nearly all the color was gone-and it hung in a heavy, straight line below my ears.
I felt my eyes fill with tears, and swallowed hard. It was ridiculous-my appearance was the least of my problems. But I still looked away from the mirror as I got dressed.
When I came out of the bathroom, Prairie pointed to the Walmart bags. “There’s a new shirt in there. Go ahead and keep your shoes-I didn’t know your size, and people won’t be looking at those. Or your jeans. So really, it’s just the top.”
I unfolded the shirt. It was black with gray sleeves, and printed on the front was a silver skull with a leering grin, flames shooting out of its sides.
“I know, you hate it,” Prairie said. “Sorry. I thought we’d do kind of a rocker look for you.”
“It’s… not so bad,” I lied.
“I have these…” She rooted around in the bag and came up with a pair of earrings that looked like pieces of bicycle chain. She also had a black leather cuff with snaps and rivets, and a silver ring with a skull on it. “If it’s any comfort, I picked this because I thought it was the opposite of your look. I mean, you’re so pretty, like your mom…”
Her voice faltered and I turned away, partly to let her have her privacy and partly because I was kind of shy about changing in front of her. I found underwear and socks in another bag and slipped them on, then pulled my jeans back on and put on the new top. It smelled like the Walmart, clean and chemical-y, and it was tight enough that I had to tug on the sleeves to get them to sit right on my arms. I yanked off the tags and dropped them in the wastebasket.
“Very nice,” Prairie said, with a smile that looked genuine.
“Hay-ee?” Chub, who had been tucking his giraffe into a pillowcase, seemed to have just noticed me. “Hair… What happen?”
I touched my newly short hair. “It’s all right, Chub, it’s just a different color. It’s nice.”
Chub liked his new clothes, the nubby sweatshirt and corduroy pants. As he went back to playing with his giraffe, Prairie got to work on me.
There was a lot of snipping, but it went fast, bits of hair flying to the floor as Prairie worked. Finally she stepped back and checked out the results. She snipped a little more and then got the motel hair dryer out of the bathroom.
“I wish I had a little product,” she said. She ran the dryer for a few minutes, pushing my hair this way and that.
“Oh…,” she said when she was done. “I really like it, Hailey-I think it suits you. I mean, you can always grow it back but, well, I hope you like it too.”
I went in the bathroom and stared in the mirror. Dry, my hair was a shiny platinum blond. It was cut so the front curved just a little past my chin, and then it got shorter in the back, with choppy layers I could feel with my fingers. A few chunky bangs were smoothed across my forehead.
It was amazing. It was better than anything you could get in Gypsum-I knew that instantly. For a second I wished I could go back to school just long enough for everyone to see. I looked like-I caught the thought and held it for a second-like someone in a band, like someone everyone else wanted to be.
“Happy with your new look?” Prairie asked, smiling, when I came out of the bathroom.
Before I could answer her, Chub jumped up from the floor where he’d been playing with his giraffe. “Bad mans,” he mumbled, and pointed at the door. Then he pressed his face into my jeans and hugged my legs hard.
Prairie crouched down next to him. “Where are the bad men, Chub?” she whispered. “Are they close by?”
Chub nodded, his lower lip stuck out in a pout. “Outside.”
She gave him a little hug and stood up, grabbing her purse off the bed and pulling out a little black canister.
“How, um, accurate is he?” she whispered. “With these predictions?”
“These what? I mean, he only just started talking. He never even went to the potty by himself until yesterday.”
If Prairie was surprised, she didn’t show it.
“Get that,” Prairie whispered, pointing at the last of her purchases, a pale pink backpack with the tags still attached. “Pack up.”
I jammed our things into it, our dirty clothes and the Walmart purchases. Prairie grabbed her plastic bags and stuffed them into her oversized purse.
“I’m really tired,” she said in a loud voice. “I think I might lie down for a bit. Hailey, could you get my purse? I left it in the bathroom.”
She was shaking her head as she talked, gesturing at the opposite side of the door. I grabbed Chub’s hand and pulled him with me. When Prairie crouched down across from me, I did the same. Prairie felt around frantically on the wall until her hand found the outlet, never taking her eyes off the door. She yanked out the electric cords, plunging the room into semidarkness, and then grabbed the table lamp, holding it by the narrow top of the base. She held a finger to her lips. I could feel my heart pounding under my new shirt.
WHEN THE DOOR BURST open, I jumped. Splinters of wood flew toward me and Chub. There was a crash and a man lurched into the room, landing on the floor.
“Go!” Prairie screamed.
She gave the desk a shove and it slammed down on the man’s head. I didn’t wait to see if he was hurt. I picked up Chub and hurled myself out the door, Prairie right behind. A skunky smell followed us. I could feel my throat seizing and I started to cough. When we were outside, I sucked down fresh air. The sun was so bright I was blinded for a moment, but Prairie pushed me, hard, toward the car.
“Rascal!” I screamed. “Come here, boy!”
He trotted out of the room, looking unconcerned. Prairie had the keys in her hand, and the locks clicked open as I reached for the handle. I didn’t bother trying to get Chub settled, just pushed him and Rascal into the backseat and jumped in front as Prairie backed up.
The tires screeched as she twisted the wheel and aimed for the parking lot exit. A couple walking across the lot jumped out of the way, the man yelling and giving us the finger, but Prairie paid no attention. She pulled into traffic, wedging the Buick between a fast-moving compact car and a dawdling truck full of lawn mowers, and then shot across a couple of lanes, making a U-turn on a yellow light.
Then we were racing back toward the on-ramp and onto the highway.
I’d only inhaled a little of the pepper spray or whatever it was, and I managed to get my throat cleared and my breathing back to normal.
I leaned over the seat and helped Chub get buckled in.
“Car seat,” he said. On top of everything else, he was adding new words faster than I could keep track of.
“That’s right, this is your special seat,” I said. “You did good, Chub. Good boy.”
“They found us,” Prairie repeated. She switched lanes again, pulling to the right and cutting off a slow-moving sedan. She veered onto an exit that led to an oasis of fast-food restaurants and gas stations.
“What are you doing?” Keep moving!-I felt the urgency in my gut to put as much distance as possible between us and the guy in our motel room.
“Bryce’s men tracked us down,” Prairie said, “and it wasn’t the car. It couldn’t have been. Come on. Bring the backpack.”
She pulled in to the first restaurant, a Wendy’s, and parked crookedly in a spot near the entrance. I grabbed Chub and the pack, leaving Rascal in the car, and followed Prairie in. She went straight for the ladies’ room and tried the door.
“Good,” she said. “It’s a one-person. Come on in.”
I felt strange following her, and checked around, but no one was paying attention. There were a few customers in line, knots of two and three people at the tables, a hum of late-afternoon conversation.
Prairie locked the door behind us.
“My turn,” Prairie said, digging into her purse for a Walmart bag. She stripped off her top, pulled a sweater from the bag and put it on. It was an ugly thing, brown, with leaves and pumpkins embroidered on it. It was too big, and it disguised her slim body.
“Here,” she said, handing me a small plastic bag of jewelry and makeup. “Put this on, the earrings and all, and do your makeup. Lots of eyeliner, really thick.”
I did as she said, starting with concealing the purplish bruise on my cheek, watching her out of the corner of my eye as I worked. She took a wide headband out of the bag and slid it into her hair so that all the layers were pulled away from her face. Then she added lipstick, exaggerating her mouth’s natural shape.
I focused on my own makeup, doing my best to apply it the way I’d practiced a few times at home for fun. Purple eye shadow, dark liner, several coats of mascara-I stepped back and looked at myself in the mirror.
“Wow,” Prairie said. I hardly looked like myself at all. I guessed that was the point.
Prairie had swept on blush and some eye makeup. With the sweater and headband, she looked like a soccer mom.
“Wow yourself,” I said back. “Um, not your best look.”
Prairie arched an eyebrow at me and then we both burst out laughing.
We were in so much trouble, but laughing felt good. Chub looked at each of us in turn and then he surprised me by pounding his little fist against my leg.
He wasn’t laughing.
Prairie knelt down in front of him. “Chub, honey, are they here? In the restaurant? The parking lot?”
Chub shook his head, rubbing his mouth with a little fist. “Not here.”
“Okay. But back there-back at the motel?”
“Bad mans,” he said again, looking like he was going to cry. Prairie put her arms around him and he went willingly, burying his face into her shoulder. She patted his back and murmured until he calmed down.
I felt awkward watching them. Chub had always had me-only me. I wasn’t sure I was ready to share him.
But he turned from Prairie to me and hugged my legs hard. As I wet a paper towel to wipe his hot, tear-streaked face, I knew he was still mine. My little brother, if that was what it was going to be. The person who loved me for me.
As I finished patting his face clean, Prairie turned her purse upside down on the counter, the contents spilling out.
There wasn’t that much: a set of keys on a simple silver key ring. Her cell phone and a couple of pens. A square black wallet. A small black leather case, which she unzipped, taking out a lipstick and comb and a compact.
“They’re tracking us somehow,” Prairie said softly. “At least they haven’t followed us from the motel. Yet.”
“You mean just because of what Chub said?”
“He’s a Seer, Hailey.” Prairie shut me down with her words. I tried to process what she had said. Sure, Chub had done an amazing amount of growing up in the past few days. Something important was going on with him, definitely-I was pretty sure no other kids on record had learned to talk and potty-trained themselves overnight. But Prairie wanted me to believe that, on top of all this, Chub could see into the future.
The men were all given the gift of visions, she’d said when she told me about the Banished. They could see into the future… to protect them from enemies…
A thought was tickling around the edges of my brain. I shut my eyes and tried to focus. On days Gram’s customers came calling, a lot of times Chub would stop what he was doing, set aside his book or toy and come to me, putting his face against my leg and holding on tight, which was what he had always done when he was scared or upset. And then a few minutes later I would hear the sound of a truck driving up onto the lawn, the slam of car doors, the shout of some half-wasted loser.
Maybe it was true. Maybe Chub was a Seer.
“Anyway,” Prairie said, “I think we’ve got to assume the thing, whatever they’re using to track us, is here with me. Or on me.”
She unzipped the wallet, took out her credit cards and driver’s license and cash, and stuffed them into a pocket of her jeans. She slipped a couple of keys off the ring and jammed them into her other pocket. She handed me her cell phone. Then she put the key ring, as well as the rest of the things on the counter, back into the purse and dropped it into the trash.
She took her phone back and gave me a gentle push.
“Let’s move,” she said.
In the parking lot she bent next to the front wheel while I got Chub settled into his seat and took Rascal for a quick walk.
“What did you just do?” I asked as we pulled out of the lot and back onto the highway, going at a normal pace now.
“Drove over my cell phone. Anyone trying to track us on that is going to find a pile of rubble in a Wendy’s parking lot.”
She was smart. She hadn’t done anything yet that you couldn’t learn from watching TV, but I was still impressed. There were moments when I felt the panic rising in my gut and I had to force it back with all my will. But I’d managed to do what needed to be done: to keep up with Prairie, to keep looking out for Chub. I was hanging on.
I wondered if it was a result of having grown up on constant alert. I was always watching out-whether for kids playing pranks on me when I was little, or for Gram taking a swipe at me as I walked past, or-worst of all-for the customers with their roving hands and hungry eyes. I was always thinking one step ahead.
“Prairie,” I said. “Uh, thanks. You know, for the haircut and the clothes and everything.”
She smiled, not taking her eyes off the road.
“Think I’ve got a future in it? You know, like I could be a stylist to the stars or something?”
“Um, not looking like that, I don’t think so,” I said, pointing to her sweater. “You look like you’re going to a PTA meeting.”
Prairie laughed and we rode along in companionable silence.
“So,” I said after a while. “How do you know how to cut hair?”
“I worked in a salon.”
“I thought you said you were a waitress.”
“Yes, I did both. What happened was, when I’d been waitressing for a while, I went for a walk one day and found myself in a part of town I didn’t know, in front of a salon. I felt a… compulsion to go inside. I couldn’t resist, so I went in and met the woman who owned it. She was from Poland, and her name was Anna. We hit it off right away. She gave me a job. I worked there while I went to school, learned the trade. Then after I graduated I got a research job, and we… lost touch.”
I could tell there was more to the story, from the way Prairie chose her words with great care.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Prairie bit her lip, and I waited.
“You remember how I told you that I got a fake identity?”
“Yeah.”
“Anna was the one who helped me with that. She knew a guy who could get what I needed. Anna helped me become a new person.”
“Why couldn’t you just be yourself? Gram would never have come after you. You said it yourself.”
“But I never stopped worrying. After I found out about Clover, I was done with Alice, I wanted no part of Gypsum-none of that. I saw what the people there had become. I thought I could take the Healing gift with me and leave the rest behind. The men, Gram’s customers… their visions had clouded; most of them couldn’t see the future anymore, and there was so much crime and violence. I saw how they treated the women, and I knew if I ever went back I’d get sucked into that life again.”
“Why?” I demanded. “I mean, I hate Gypsum too, but you’re acting like you didn’t have free choice. Once you turned eighteen-”
“The Banished are bound together,” Prairie interrupted. “Haven’t you seen that? Felt it? The Morries-the way you feel drawn to them?”
I felt my face redden: it was as though she could see inside me.
“It’s not your fault,” Prairie said, her voice softer. “It was ordained. But I knew I had to be away from all that. So I became someone new. Only…”
For a moment she said nothing, and then she laughed softly, but there was more hurt than humor in the sound.
“Anna was Banished too.”
“What?”
“It’s not just Gypsum, Hailey. There were others, from the village in Ireland. They lived there hundreds of years before the famine came and threatened to wipe them out. One group went to Poland. Anna came to the United States years ago, after her mother died.”
“So there’s… people like me, all over the world?”
“Not exactly. There were only a few original Healer families. I don’t know exactly how many-maybe just us and the one that went to Poland, maybe a few more. But the Banished who went with them… yes, there are people like us out there.”
“Are they all like the Morries?”
“Well, Anna isn’t. Anna’s… I loved her.” She said it with a hitch in her voice and again I wondered why they’d lost touch.
“And she told you all of this?”
“Anna… filled in the gaps for me. I knew some of it from my grandmother. Anna’s pureblood. When she saw me, the day I went in the salon, she knew. She could sense it, that I was Banished. The ones who went to Poland, they kept the history alive better, they learned to recognize one another. Though now…” She shrugged. “Eventually the story gets lost.”
“But how did she know? How could she tell?”
“It’s not hard, Hailey,” Prairie said. “You’ll learn. I learned fast. You’ll see it in people sometimes. Not often, and it’s almost always weak in them. When the Banished left Ireland, they started to drift. Just like what happened in Gypsum, they married outside. The men lost the visions. Very little is left of the bloodline. But Anna showed me. Someone would come in, someone with Banished blood, and she helped me see it, or not see it exactly-it’s a, a sense, I guess you’d say. Usually they don’t even know it themselves. In a man, there might be some premonition, like sometimes things happen and they know in advance. Only, they talk themselves out of it, or chalk it up to coincidence. People can convince themselves very easily, you know, when they want to. It’s human nature.”
“Was Anna a Healer?”
“No. She says no one knows what happened to the Healer line in Poland, whether it died out or whether the Healers emigrated somewhere else.”
For a while neither of us said anything. It was so much to absorb.
“So I guess Anna did her job, then,” I finally said. For some reason I felt bleak. “She found you. A gold star for her. Two pureblood Banished in a city the size of Chicago.”
If Prairie minded my tone she didn’t mention it.
“No, Hailey. Not two. Three.”
“Three-what do you mean?”
“Anna has a son.”