Banished

by Sophie Littlefield

  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.”

  PART THREE: CHICAGO

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS TWILIGHT by the time we reached the outskirts of Chicago, the skyline a sparkling row of towers off in the distance, stretching out impossibly far in both directions. We left the highway on a looping cloverleaf crowded with speeding traffic.

  Despite the brief nap in the motel, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I must have drifted off, because when Prairie gently shook my arm to wake me, we were parked behind another motel, this one huge and new and anonymous, backing up to a wide avenue across from a car dealership. I didn’t even ask where we were. I went through the motions of getting Chub, who was fast asleep, as Prairie took care of Rascal. In the room, I collapsed with Chub and didn’t wake up until late the next morning, when the sun was streaming in the windows.

  I sat up, disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings. The room was almost a copy of the one from the day before, but reversed, the television on the opposite wall. Chub sat on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs, watching TV with the sound turned low. He was already dressed, and his hair was sticking straight up.

  Prairie stood at the window, clutching the fabric of the drapes in her hand, staring out into the parking lot, Rascal sitting at her side, staring at nothing. When I said her name, she jumped.

  “Good morning, Hailey,” she said. “Are you feeling better today?”

  To my surprise, I was. I felt rested and strong, and the events of the past few days had faded in my mind, like a movie I’d watched but would someday forget. Not that I would ever lose the images of the wrecked kitchen, of Gram on the floor, but as I washed up and packed, I felt like it was all in the past, like that phase of my life was over.

  I felt the faint stirrings of hope.

  It was almost one in the afternoon by the time we walked Rascal and put our things in the car. We went to a diner next to the motel for lunch. My appetite was back, and I ordered a burger and fries and a big glass of milk. Even Prairie ate most of her chicken salad, and the worry lines around her eyes had smoothed.

  “So,” I said as I finished the last of my fries, “I guess it worked, huh? The … thing you did. So he wouldn’t be able to find us.”

  I didn’t say his name, could barely stand to think it. Rattler. The image of him plunging the knife into the man in the gray jacket flashed through my mind and was gone, leaving only a shadowy outline of the terror of that night.

  Prairie nodded thoughtfully and sipped at her coffee. “If he was going to be able to track us …”

  She didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what she was thinking. He would have found us by now, if his visions were able to lead him to us. I wondered if Prairie had slept, or if she’d stayed by the window worrying all night, waiting for his old truck to roll up in front of the motel, waiting for him to come crashing through the door the way Bryce’s men had the day before.

  I felt guilty because I’d collapsed and slept like a rock, leaving all the guarding and worrying to her. I almost apologized, but I couldn’t quite find the words.

  “So he probably stayed in Gypsum,” I said hopefully.

  Prairie nodded. “Mmm. With any luck I can finish … what I need to do tonight, and we can move on.”

  She was looking not at me, but out the window. I had so many questions. She said we, but did she mean all three of us? And I had no idea what she meant by “move on,” or where we would go next, how we would live.

  “What do you have to do tonight?” I asked.

  She looked at me directly and chose her words carefully. “I need to destroy Bryce’s research.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I have some ideas. First thing is to get into the lab. And for that I’ll need my key. It’s too dangerous to go back to my house, but I keep spare keys at my neighbor’s.”

  “Don’t you have a key with you?”

  Prairie pushed her salad around on her plate without looking at me. “This is a special key, Hailey. It’s a prox card for an electronic lock, and I’m pretty sure that by now Bryce has changed the code so I can’t get in. But I have a master key at my friend’s place.”

  “Does she know you’re coming?”

  “No …” Prairie hesitated and bit her lip. I could tell she was trying to figure out how much to tell me. “I thought it was best that I didn’t call or do anything that might tip someone off. I do have a key to her house, so I can let myself in. The quicker I get in and out, the better.”

  I … She said I. Not we. Panic stirred in my gut—panic at being left alone, left to defend Chub against any threat that came along.

  “I’m going with you,” I said quickly, my tone harsher than I intended. “We’re going together.”

  “I don’t think that—”

  “Please. We can wait in the car, it’ll be better this way, we can watch for … for …”

  I didn’t finish my sentence, but I figured Prairie knew what I meant. I could watch for the men Bryce had sent or for Rattler or for any of the other threats I’d never thought to worry about, threats that until a few days ago hadn’t existed for me, but that had changed the course of my life.

  I’d argue with Prairie if I needed to. I wasn’t going to let this drop. She had saved me from Bryce and Gram and Rattler, and I was grateful. But she couldn’t leave us now. I wouldn’t let her.

  I didn’t have any other choice.

  “All right,” she finally said, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You can come with me to Penny’s. But after that, when we get to the lab, I go in alone.”

  I wasn’t going to argue that—yet. One step at a time.

  She wanted to wait until dark to make the trip to her neighbor’s house, so we spent the afternoon in a park. Chub played on the swings and the slides and dug holes and tunnels in a sandbox with a plastic shovel someone had left behind. I tried to interest Rascal in chasing a stick, but he just walked beside me and sat whenever I stood still. Late in the afternoon Prairie drove us north of the city to Evanston, the suburb where her apartment and the lab were. She parked near the lake and we walked out on a strip of land from which we could see Chicago to the south, the setting sun glancing off the windows of all the high-rise buildings, making it look like a city made from gold and mirrors. Chub was more interested in throwing rocks off the pier than at looking at the city, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the skyline and the sun sinking toward the inky blue of the lake.

  At last it was nearly dark. Prairie drove around for a while before choosing a parking spot on a quiet side street, near an alley. Cars were jammed in tight on both sides of the street, bu
t a red Acura pulled out just as we were cruising past. It took several minutes of careful maneuvering to get the Ellises’ big car into the spot, but when Prairie finally shut off the ignition, she seemed satisfied.

  “I wish we had a leash for Rascal,” Prairie said.

  “He’ll stay close. He won’t run off.”

  “Yes, but there are leash laws here. Well, we’ll just make do. When we get to Penny’s house he can come inside. She loves dogs.”

  We started walking and entered a residential area. Prairie set a quick pace, cutting across a wide street and into an alley that ran behind a row of houses. We made our way down a few blocks, hurrying across when we came to an intersection. I tripped over a hose that had been left coiled behind a garage. We had to hush Chub several times; he was tired from skipping his nap and stumbled along half awake, rubbing his eyes and mumbling.

  Prairie put her hand on my arm and pointed at a small, shingled coach house set back from a bigger house that fronted the street. I squeezed Chub’s hand and he leaned against me, his face pressed into my legs. He was so exhausted that he started to cry silently, small sobs muffled by my jeans. We had stopped under the low-hanging branches of an elm that was leafing out for spring, and I hoped we were hidden from anyone who happened to look out their bedroom window.

  “Is this Penny’s place?” I whispered.

  “Yes. I don’t want to knock because she’ll turn on the porch light, but she won’t mind me letting myself in. We have an arrangement. We water each other’s plants when we travel, that kind of thing.”

  Prairie didn’t look as confident as she sounded. She dug for the keys she’d pocketed in the Wendy’s bathroom.

  I picked Chub up as she turned the key in the lock. He stiffened in my arms and I hushed him, holding his body tighter. I realized only after I heard the gentle click of the door opening that I had been holding my breath, waiting for—what? A gunshot?

  Back in Gypsum, I was always on edge—I never knew what I’d come home to, who I’d find slumped at the kitchen table. But this was different. The things I worried about in Gypsum all seemed kind of stupid now—kids making fun of me, or Gram being in a bad mood, or Dun Acey trying to grab my butt when I walked past him.