DR. GRACE KEPT UP a fast pace through the halls. It was early morning, the sun streaming through windows set high in the walls. We hadn’t slept at all, and it was a struggle to keep up with her.
“You don’t understand how hard it is to find funding for what most people consider a pseudoscience,” she said. “You, of all people, should be sympathetic to that, Hailey.”
“Me?” I demanded. “Why?”
“Because you yourself have a gift that society doesn’t understand. How many people would believe you if you went out into the world and announced you were a Healer?” There was a bitter edge to her voice that told me she was speaking from experience. “Even when you can prove-when you have evidence of-naturally occurring psychic phenomena, the scientific community is so inbred and resistant-”
She paused and bit her lip in frustration. “I’ve known since I started my doctoral thesis that precognition is real, and I could back it up. But when I left the university, do you know how many job offers I had? Zero. No one would touch me with a ten-foot pole.”
“So… let me guess. When you met Prentiss, he was your dream come true. Right?”
Dr. Grace glanced at me suspiciously. “If you are implying-”
“I’m not implying anything,” I said. “I’m just saying that if he was the only guy around willing to pay you to do the work you wanted, I guess that made it awfully hard to be judgmental when he told you that they were breeding zombies in here. Only, I can’t help thinking that even then, you would have a problem with what they do with the zombies, who they’re selling them to.”
She gave me a patronizing look. “Hailey, just because something’s illegal doesn’t make it immoral or unnecessary. The specimens are used in settings where it’s simply too dangerous to send a living human, like when they have to do repairs on an oil rig or defuse explosives, things like that-”
“What?” I demanded. “Is that what they told you?”
“Prentiss’s selling them to foreign militaries,” Kaz added. “For war applications.”
Dr. Grace’s face darkened. “Don’t be ridiculous. Just because Prentiss’s background is military doesn’t mean…”
But she didn’t finish her sentence. I could see her thinking it through, coming to the inevitable conclusion that she’d been lied to.
“There’s no time for this,” she finally sputtered. “Look, if you do as I say, I’ll let you talk to the boy.”
“You’ll let us see Chub?” I asked, the zombies temporarily forgotten. “Now?”
“Yes, but there is one condition-you must tell him to cooperate with me.”
“Cooperate… how?” I was immediately suspicious.
She waved her hand impatiently. “Nothing you need to worry about, nothing that will harm him. Just simple tests.”
“What kind of tests?”
She sighed and walked faster. “Chub shows remarkable psychic ability. My work here is to find ways to identify high psychics more readily, and train them to exercise greater control over their skills. He is a perfect subject, but he’s been… reluctant.”
I wondered if Dr. Grace knew about the Banished, the Seers. What exactly had Prentiss told his staff after the first lab had been destroyed? It was coming together in my mind: as long as his employees didn’t understand the applications for the work they were doing, they weren’t likely to balk at helping him build his war machines.
It was how Bryce had convinced Prairie to work for him, telling her that their work would benefit people, then used her for her talents.
“I’ll tell him to cooperate,” I said.
“Good. Because he’s been remarkably resistant, almost selectively mute. I can count on two hands the number of words he’s spoken since arriving here.”
Arriving-as though he’d come some other way than having been kidnapped and thrown in the back of a car. I bit back a sharp retort.
Dr. Grace stopped in front of an unremarkable door, opening it with a key from her pocket.
Chub was kneeling on the floor of a small carpeted room, playing with a toy made from stiff colored wire strung with beads. He looked up, frowning with concentration, at the sound of the door.
And then he burst into a smile that nearly broke my heart.
“Hayee! Kaz!” he shouted, and raced over to us, wrapping his arms around my legs, the way he had since he’d first come to live with us two years earlier. After giving me a noisy kiss, he went for Kaz, who pretended to stumble backward from the impact, making Chub squeal with laughter. Kaz picked him up and swung him in a circle before handing him gently to me, and I took him in my arms and hugged him hard, tears in my eyes.
“I’ve missed you,” I whispered. I set him down but kept my body between him and Dr. Grace, holding his hand tightly.
Chub’s room was a smaller version of mine, with the same subtly colored walls, the soft drapes, the bathroom off to the side. There were bookshelves filled with board books and toys, a bed, a dresser. A mobile of planets hung out of reach from the ceiling. A rocking horse stood in the corner.
There was one big difference, though. Whereas my room had a broad window with a view of the fields stretching out into the distance, Chub’s window was fake. I could see the painted wall between the slats of the blinds that filled the false frame.
Kaz had noticed too. He went to the wall and jerked the blinds’ cord, pulling them up to reveal the square of wall underneath. “You couldn’t even let the poor kid see the sun?”
Dr. Grace shrugged. “We are keeping distractions to a minimum during the testing.”
“You mean, because he wouldn’t talk to you,” I said accusingly. “You’re punishing him.”
“Not so. All of our subjects in the psychic evaluation program are kept in a distraction-free environment.”
“Who else have you got?” I asked. But I knew something that she didn’t-the “subjects” Prentiss meant to bring into the lab would all be Banished. That was why he’d contacted Rattler. It was what they had been arguing about on the phone the day before. Prentiss probably figured he could convince Seers to cooperate with or without Rattler-but he had enough doubt that he’d been trying hard to force Rattler to be his middleman.
And that was why Prentiss had taken Prairie.
Which meant that he knew how Rattler felt about Prairie. I had to hand it to Prentiss-his intelligence was remarkable.
Dr. Grace shrugged. “There are other subjects who I’ve studied at length,” she said.
“In Chicago?”
“That’s not something we need to discuss. Now, I suggest you make the most of your time together.” She looked at her watch. “You have fifteen minutes.”
Fifteen minutes, I thought with a sinking heart. Not a lot of time. “Can you at least leave us alone?”
Dr. Grace shook her head. “I’m afraid not, but I’ll stay out of the way. You won’t even notice me.”
But it was hard not to notice the way she watched us, sitting in a straight-backed chair in the corner. I turned my back on her, but I could still feel her eyes on me.
The fifteen minutes passed more quickly than I’d imagined possible. Kaz and Chub rolled on the floor in a tickle fight; Chub crawled into my lap and pretended to read a book about birds, pointing at each page and telling me what he saw. “This a red bird. It has a worm, see?”
I was proud of my little adopted brother; he’d continued to learn and develop even here. His preschool teachers in Chicago had told Prairie during his first week that he was catching up with the other kids; as I held him and listened to him chatter, I was so full of hope for his future that I thought my heart would burst. He chattered on about ducks and monsters and numbers, about games he had played with Dr. Grace. He told me about playing hide-and-seek with numbers, and good monsters and bad monsters, and I was relieved that being cooped up in the room hadn’t dampened his spirits or taken his imagination away.
“Time’s up,” Dr. Grace said, rising from her chair. “Chub, tell Hailey and Kaz goodbye. You did very well today. If you can talk to me the way you talk to them, tomorrow when we do our games together, maybe you can see them again.”
Chub pressed against me, holding on to my arm with his hands. “I don’t like her games,” he mumbled.
Dr. Grace blinked. “They’re fun,” she said unconvincingly.
Prairie was a scientist too, but she was nothing like Dr. Grace; she was lively and intuitive and interested in the world around her. And she loved me, of that I was certain; watching Dr. Grace, I wasn’t convinced that she loved anyone or anything other than her work.
She was a zealot. That was the key that Prentiss had figured out. Zealots were devoted, but they were also dangerous: because they were so focused on a single passion, they ignored everything else, allowing terrible things to happen.
In her own way, Dr. Grace was as dangerous as Prentiss.
I glanced around the room, looking for a camera; there it was, up in the corner over the door. I caught Kaz’s eye and he gave me a tiny nod to show he’d seen it. But what could we do? I’d be surprised if someone wasn’t monitoring Chub at all times. And the rest of us too, for that matter; somewhere there was undoubtedly a bank of monitors showing all the rooms, including mine and Kaz’s. There was no way we would be able to make a move without being observed.
At least I had seen for myself that Chub was all right.
Dr. Grace led us back into the hall. My last glimpse of Chub was of him standing in the middle of the room, watching us without blinking, a sad pout on his face. It nearly broke my heart.
“I can’t wait until tomorrow to see him again,” I said. “Let me stay with him. I can sleep on the floor.”
Dr. Grace shook her head. “That is not possible.”
I felt my frustration escalate. I was tired, to the point of breaking. “Who the hell are you to say what’s possible? You let Prentiss order you around, you let him tell you what to study and how, and you think you’re really doing the work you were trained to do?”
“Now wait just-”
“My aunt was just like you,” I continued. “She believed Bryce. She did everything he told her to. Right up until the day he tried to have her killed. You saw how they were downstairs, how they were ready to let us kill you. Is that really what you want?”
“Prentiss doesn’t-”
“Prentiss only cares about one thing,” Kaz interrupted. “And it’s not you. Look, we’ll help you with your research, we’ll get Chub to cooperate with you, but you have to do something for us.”
“Like what?”
“Let Hailey stay in the room with Chub.” Kaz looked at me as he said it, his gray eyes gentle. He knew how badly I needed to be with Chub.
“I can’t do that,” Dr. Grace protested. “There’s a video feed. There’s no way I could get away with it. There’s someone watching the monitor twenty-four hours…”
Then she paused, looking thoughtful.
“What?” I demanded.
“There is something. A small favor that I can do for you. But only if you promise that you’ll do everything you can to help me with Chub.”
Kaz and I exchanged looks. “Depends on what it is.”
Dr. Grace gave him a small smile. “I can let you see your mother.”
“She’s here?” Kaz demanded. My heart sank-had they kidnapped her, too?
She shook her head. “No, but they’ve put surveillance cameras in your house.” She looked embarrassed and didn’t meet Kaz’s eye. “I can take you to the viewing room and you can watch the live feed. You’ll be able to see her on-screen, real time. The resolution is quite good.”
Kaz and I looked at each other, and I could see that he was trying to contain his fury. But it was nothing that we hadn’t expected; we both knew they would be keeping close tabs on Anna.
“All right,” he said quietly. It was the best deal we were going to get, and we both knew it. “But how can you justify bringing us there? Won’t Prentiss mind?”
Dr. Grace shrugged dismissively. “Prentiss isn’t here. And besides, I outrank everyone in security.”
So it all came down to her position within the organization, I thought as we followed her back toward the center of the complex. She was intimidated by Prentiss, and there was little trust among her and the other senior staff-but she didn’t care about those whose rank was below hers.
That was the arrogance that had contributed to Bryce’s downfall, the belief in ruling with intimidation. He had thought that as long as he was in charge, he was invulnerable. Dr. Grace was making the same dangerous mistake, and I wondered how we could use it against her.