KAZ HAD TOLD THE TRUTH: the car was only a slight improvement over his rusted-out Civic. It was a dented brown Bonneville with a creased bumper. The one splurge his friend had made was to upgrade the sound system with a set of good speakers.
The last time I’d made this drive, traveling in the opposite direction, was the first time I had ever left Missouri. Now the hours passed more swiftly. I was well rested, and music filled the car. We didn’t talk much, but occasionally Kaz reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze.
Whenever my thoughts turned to Chub, I forced myself to take deep breaths and remember only good things: the way he laughed with his mouth wide open, showing all his baby teeth; the sound of his voice when he said my name, the one word he sometimes pronounced the way he always had, “Hayee.”
I knew that Kaz had to be desperately worried about leaving his mother in Chicago, but he didn’t say anything about it. When he caught me looking at him, he smiled as though nothing was wrong. But after we’d been in the car a few hours, his expression changed.
It was a subtle change at first, a tightening of his jaw, a clenching of his hands on the wheel. I watched him carefully and saw that his skin had gone pale and a faint sheen of sweat stood out on his brow.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Much. It’s just…” He glanced at me, his expression troubled. “I’m getting flashes. Little ones.”
“Visions?”
“Not a full vision, not yet. But… I probably will. When this happens, it’s usually a sign of one coming, a new one. Not the ones I already had, not Quadrillon or Rattler. This one is darker.”
He winced, and I could tell it hurt. “What do you see?”
Kaz shook his head. “Nothing specific. It’s that damn flicker, the way I get just the pieces. It’s water. I think. It’s all wavery and shimmering and there’s-there’s something-someone…”
I said nothing. It could be anything. A sink, an ocean, a pan boiling on a stove.
The only thing I felt sure of was that it wouldn’t be good.
“Are you okay to drive?” I asked. Prairie had begun teaching me to drive, but so far I’d only got as far as lurching from one end of the apartment-complex parking lot to the other.
“Oh yeah, I’ll be fine. Maybe… why don’t we get some lunch?”
We stopped at a Pizza Hut outside Springfield. I wasn’t hungry, but I forced myself to eat; one of the things I’d learned in recent months was that you could never count on your next meal or place to sleep when you were Banished and on the run.
In the car again, Kaz seemed better. The afternoon wore on, clouds lazily drifting in and obscuring the April sun. We drove around Saint Louis, the skyline visible in the distance, the arch beautiful against the darkening sky. I knew that from Saint Louis it was another three and a half or four hours. I passed the time by trying to remember all the good times I’d had with Chub, and then, when that stopped working and my mind pitched and rolled with fears I couldn’t contain, I forced myself to think about math, the subject I’d struggled with the most. I imagined the textbook pages, the numbers and equations running into each other, taunting me.
I was so intent on keeping my mind occupied that when Kaz cleared his throat, I was startled see that he was even paler than before, with one hand pressed to his forehead as though he was trying to keep the pain inside.
“Are you okay?” I demanded.
“I think I’d better pull over. Sometimes… I think I might be getting a bigger one. Once or twice I’ve…” He swallowed and blinked hard. “Once I passed out, but don’t worry. That won’t happen. Yet. I just need to get someplace where I can shut my eyes and rest.”
A tall Exxon sign lit up the darkening purple sky at the next exit. A Wendy’s and a Long John Silver’s shared a parking lot with the gas station, and the lot was nearly full with travelers stopping for dinner.
Kaz bypassed the parking lot, continuing down the road, which narrowed as it wound into the farmland beyond. In the distance the lights of a couple of houses winked on as the last of the sun’s glow faded from the horizon. Kaz drove until he found a farm lane with a gated cattle guard, then pulled over and parked in the weeds.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just need to be away from the lights. Hailey, I’ll be okay, really, just give me ten minutes.”
I nodded, but already Kaz had reclined his seat and covered his eyes with his hand. I watched him breathe, his chest rising and falling regularly. I wasn’t sure, but his color seemed to be a little better already. Maybe if he just let the vision come; maybe he’d been suffering because he’d been resisting it. I knew the feeling. When I had first felt the urge to heal-when a girl had got hurt in gym class-it had been nearly impossible to resist. As I waited to put my hands on the girl’s broken skull, to say the ancient words, an urgency that was almost… painful overtook me. But was it pain? No, it was just a wrongness, a deep and unmet need that grew sharper and more demanding until I gave in to it.
Maybe Kaz’s visions were the same way.
I sat as still as I could and watched him. Five minutes turned into ten, the time passing achingly slowly. I wondered if he had fallen asleep, and decided that might be for the best. It grew harder to see him in the dark, but I knew he was there next to me and that was good enough.
Down the road, the cars came and went from the parking lot: hungry travelers, weary families, people trying to get to their next destination. Nothing sinister, nothing out of the ordinary.
There was really no reason for the anxiety that had been gnawing away at me ever since we’d left Chicago, a raw and seething layer underneath all my other fears.
Kaz rested. I waited.