Banished

by Sophie Littlefield

  After Kaz microwaved me some lunch, we all walked to the park, Kaz carrying a couple of lacrosse sticks and a duffel bag. He tried to teach me how to throw and catch, and we lost a few balls in the hedges circling the park. We pushed Chub on the swings and fed stale bread to some ducks, and by the time night was starting to fall, I’d managed to forget for a while, which was what I suspected Anna and Prairie had intended.

  On our way to a pizza place that Anna and Kaz raved about, Prairie caught up with me.

  “I’m going up to the lab tomorrow, early. There’s only one guard on duty on Sundays. I’m thinking I can wait until he goes to the bathroom or something and get past him. Then I have the prox card to get in the lab.”

  She didn’t look all that confident. I figured there was more to the plan, but that she didn’t want me to worry. “Do you want me to come along?”

  “No … I think it’s best if I do it alone.”

  I didn’t argue. Maybe I should have, but it had been so nice to not think about it for a few hours, and I wasn’t ready to give that up. Instead, I tried to put it out of my mind, telling myself there would be plenty of time to worry later, but when we returned home and got Chub bathed and put to bed, I was exhausted. I hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep in days, and it hit me hard. I crawled into Kaz’s bed, Chub on his nest of blankets on the floor, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  I woke to someone shaking my arm.

  “Hailey, wake up.” It was Kaz, whispering, his face hard to see in the moonlight. “There’s a problem. I’ll get Prairie. Meet me in the kitchen.”

  I got up quietly so as not to wake Chub. I splashed water on my face and went to the kitchen. When Prairie and Kaz came in a minute later, she looked completely awake, as though she’d never gone to sleep.

  “You’ve been through so much already,” she said when she saw me. “Kaz, I wish you’d let her sleep.”

  “She has a right to hear this.”

  “What?” I demanded as a door opened down the hall and Anna came into the kitchen.

  “What are you all—”

  “I had a vision, Mom,” Kaz said. “They need to know.”

  Anna tensed up, and I remembered that Kaz said his visions always signaled something bad. “What is it?” she whispered, her face going pale.

  “Bryce … he’s medium height? Brown hair, going gray here?” Kaz gestured along his hairline.

  “Yes.”

  “I saw him, in a room … looked like a motel room? Or a dorm room? There were people in the beds … hurt people. Hurt bad, Prairie, they weren’t even conscious.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “It wasn’t what he was doing. He was just sitting there, taking notes or something on his laptop—”

  “What was it?” Prairie demanded, her voice going high and thin. “What did you see?”

  “I’m sorry, Prairie … he’s got another Healer.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, another Healer?”

  “I couldn’t see her all that clearly. She had long hair, and she was leaning over them, chanting or talking. I couldn’t hear. I don’t hear anything with the visions.”

  “What made you think she was healing them?”

  “Well, first of all, it was so obvious they were … dying.” Kaz hesitated. “I mean, they were unconscious, and one of them had his head shaved and what looked like a recent scar. And the other one had a breathing tube and a body cast. Young guys.”

  “Military,” Prairie said. “Had to be. Only question is whose.”

  “And the Healer, this woman, she put her hands on them, on their faces.” Kaz demonstrated, cupping the sides of his face with his hands. “And after … it was hard to tell because the visions jump around, but, after, they, ah, woke up.”

  “Woke up?” Prairie repeated sharply.

  “Yes, they moved, you know, opened their eyes, sat up. That was about it, all I saw.”

  Prairie was silent, but I could tell she was thinking hard.

  “Who could it be?” Anna asked after a moment. “There was no one else in your village? You are sure?”

  “No one.” Prairie was vehement. “Clover’s dead. Hailey’s here. Alice is broken. Mary’s dead. There’s no one else. I don’t see where he could have found one.”

  “One of ours, then,” Anna said. “The Healers must have made it out of Poland after all.”

  “We have to go now.” It was me speaking, to my amazement. “Prairie, we have to stop him. You have to destroy the research. We can’t let him find her, we can’t let her make zombies.”

  “But we can’t—”

  “There isn’t much time,” I insisted. “Isn’t that right, Kaz? How much time between your visions and what happens?”

  Kaz looked from me to Prairie. “I don’t know. Maybe a day or two. Maybe … less.”

  “There still might be time,” I pleaded.

  “I’ll help,” Kaz said, pushing his chair back from the table. “The three of us will go. Mom can take care of Chub. You will, won’t you, Mom?”

  “What do you mean to do?”

  “Whatever needs to be done to stop that bastard.”

  “Kaz,” Anna snapped. “There is no need for that.”

  “No need for what, Mom? No need to call Prairie’s boss what he is? She’s right—he has to be stopped. We have to destroy everything.”

  “What is this we?” Anna demanded sharply. “There is no we—”

  “I’m going with her,” Kaz said. “She can’t do it alone.”

  “Do not talk crazy.” Anna was shaking with fear or anger or some combination of the two emotions.

  “I’m not crazy,” Kaz said. “Prairie is right. We have to destroy the research and stop this guy.”

  “This man is dangerous, Kazimierz. He hired people to kidnap Hailey. They kill all those others.”

  “Papa went to war,” Kaz said. “There was killing there, but you didn’t stop him.”

  I saw that he wouldn’t back down, and I had a feeling no one was going to be able to tell him what to do. I could relate: no one was ever going to tell me what to do again either.

  “Anna,” Prairie said softly. “I understand. I’ll go alone.”

  “You can’t!” I protested. “You can’t go alone. Bryce will kill you.”

  “Not if I plan,” Prairie said, but I could tell she was grasping at straws. “Not if I come up with a strategy—”

  “Strategy is not enough,” Kaz interrupted, his voice hard as steel. “You need help. I can see things. Especially if I’m there, if I’m close. It might make a difference.”

  “I can’t ask you that,” Prairie said. She raised her shoulders and let them fall. Her arm, I saw, moved easily, bandage or no bandage. “It’s my fault all this happened, and—”

  “I’m not letting you go alone,” I said.

  “We’re going with you,” Kaz said. He turned to Anna. “Mom, you didn’t raise me to be afraid. My father was brave, you tell me that every single day of my life. You can’t deny that.”

  “Your father is gone, Kaz. I can’t lose you, too … I can’t.”

  Anna’s face reflected a mother’s agony. Prairie, too, looked uncertain.

  But I knew. I knew that Kaz would not be stopped.

  “If something happens, if Kaz gets hurt, we’ll be there too,” I said urgently to Prairie, praying she would understand. We could heal him—he’d be safe with us there.

  Anna looked at me carefully, her eyes narrowed. Then she looked at Prairie again. “What do you think?” she asked softly.

  “I cannot ask anything more of you,” Prairie said. “Even this, even taking me and Hailey in, this is so dangerous.”

  She was right. Bryce didn’t care about the innocent people who got in the way.

  He wouldn’t stop. He didn’t care how many people died for his research, for the chance to study Prairie and me and learn how to use our gifts to turn people into killing machines. Everything this ma
n touched seemed to be about killing.

  He wanted to use me as a tool, a way to make him stronger and richer and more powerful while other people died.

  There was silence in the room. Kaz went to the picture window and stared out into the dark streets with his arms folded across his chest, tense and ready.

  After a long moment, Anna nodded slowly. I could tell the decision had been made.

  We’d won this round, Kaz and me.

  We were going with Prairie.

  “I’ll guard him like my own,” Prairie said softly. “Hailey too. I will do everything I can to bring us back from this unharmed.”

  Anna nodded. And then we were gone.

  Kaz drove. Prairie sat up front with him, not saying much. She had slicked her hair back into a ponytail and was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, with an old pair of Anna’s sneakers. Dressed that way, she looked more like a college student than the elegant woman who had first appeared in Gram’s kitchen.

  Kaz drove smoothly along Lake Shore Drive, the way we’d come only last night. Tonight the moon—nearly full—hung over the water near the horizon, its reflection shimmering beneath it. When we got to Evanston, I suddenly wished the drive had been longer. I didn’t feel ready.

  Prairie murmured instructions. She took us through a neighborhood of stately old homes that got smaller as we drove farther from the lake, until they were mostly squat little bungalows. We crossed the commuter train tracks and I could see Evanston’s downtown ahead.

  On the next block there was a cluster of low-slung modern office buildings. “Pull in,” Prairie said. “Park over here, by the Dumpsters.”

  Kaz did as she directed.

  We were shielded by a row of trees, the Civic nosed in under low-hanging branches. There were plenty of cars in the lot, customers of the Thai restaurant and the Laundromat across the street.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Prairie said. “The data is on computers in the secure lab. The prox card will get us in the main part of the lab—”

  “Do you think Bryce could be in there?” I asked.

  “Possibly … but what’s more likely is he’s got extra security guarding the place, with instructions to bring me in if I come poking around. By force, if necessary. Although I doubt there would be anyone here in the middle of the night.”

  “Let me go,” Kaz said. “Alone. They won’t be expecting a man.”

  Prairie shook her head. “No. I have to go with you.”

  “What about me?” I demanded.

  Prairie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were clouded with doubt. “There will be a guard in the lobby,” she said. “A night guard. Unless they’ve hired someone new, it will be an older man who likes to nap on the job. Still, he’s a danger. He can trip an alarm that will shut the whole place down and bring security running from off-site. And Bryce may have paid the guard to contact him first.”

  “You want me to distract him?” I asked.

  Prairie looked uncomfortable. “I don’t see any other way. I thought maybe you could pretend to have some emergency, I don’t know, like maybe you’re hurt or something. As soon as we’re in, you get out. Figure out any excuse, tell the guard you were mistaken, whatever you need to do. And then you come back and wait where you can see the car.”

  She dug into her pocket and handed me a cell phone. “This is Anna’s. Kaz’s number is on it. Press and hold the three key and it will dial him direct. Call if you see anyone coming in the building after us—anyone at all. Or if there’s any kind of trouble.”

  I didn’t like being left behind, but I didn’t see an alternative. “What are you going to do to the computers?”

  “I have full administrative access to all the servers. Paul gave it to me, along with the master keys. We’ve got to hope that Bryce never found out. I’m sure he locked me out, but he might not have changed the admin log-in. I just need to get in and start the wipe-disk program.”

  “How much data is there, anyway?” Kaz demanded. “Because it takes hours to wipe a big disk.”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Kaz said, his voice edgy and low. “It’s going to be fire.”

  We both looked at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw it. A vision … Tonight will end in fire.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “YOU HAD A VISION?” I demanded, but Prairie interrupted.

  “Fire? Oh my God … I should have thought of that.”

  “What?”

  “The walls … all around the inner offices. They’ll burn.”

  “I brought some stuff from the garage,” Kaz said. “To use as an accelerant. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mom—she would have lost it if she knew—but it should help spread the fire—”

  “No, what I mean is, the walls are flammable. Bryce had us working with volunteer subjects who claimed to have predictive powers. We had a few who kept hitting it off the charts. Seers, you know? I was sure of it. And Bryce was researching ways to block their visions.”

  “For the military application,” Kaz broke in.

  “For the what?” I was lost, but the two of them were practically running over each other’s words.

  “Like if the other side had Seers? You’d want to block them, right? You wouldn’t want them to be able to sense your next move.”

  “Only, it’s very hard to do,” Prairie said. “The only thing we found that seemed to impair the subjects was iron. But it wasn’t like Bryce could put up iron walls in the lab, so he found this guy who came up with a way to embed iron filings in polyurethane foam. The kind you spray? You know, that expands? Only, it’s like a hundred times more flammable than wood, so he hired these guys off the books to spray it in all the drywall one weekend last fall.”

  “That’s perfect,” Kaz said.

  Perfect for destroying the building, I thought—but not for getting out alive.

  “What sort of accelerant did you bring?” Prairie asked.

  “I got a couple of cans of lighter fluid and some paint thinner. And matches.”

  “Okay, good.” Prairie sighed. “You’ve got this all figured out, haven’t you?”

  “Uh … yeah. But don’t tell Mom. She’d ground me for the rest of my life.”

  We got out of the car, Kaz carrying his backpack filled with supplies. I stayed back, leaning against the car while they slipped off toward the building. They kept to the edge of the parking lot, as though they were strolling along the street toward downtown. When they got to the building, they cut over and edged along the front wall, barely visible in the shadows.

  It was time. I took a deep breath and touched my fingers to my necklace. The red stone felt warm to my touch. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to empty my mind of everything other than what I had to do.

  Then I sprinted across the parking lot and slammed into the glass doors at a flat-out run, smacking my palms against them and shoving. I didn’t take a chance on looking for Prairie and Kaz in the shadows. The doors swung open and I was into the building’s lobby. To the left was a bank of elevators, and to the right was a curved desk where an older man with a brown uniform sat reading a folded newspaper.

  He looked up, his eyes wide with surprise, as I ran through the lobby to his desk. I leaned on it, panting.

  “I need help!” I yelled. “A car—it was driving by—it hit someone. It ran up on the sidewalk by the parking lot. I think they’re hurt bad.”

  The man lowered the newspaper more slowly than I figured the situation called for. “You’re saying there’s some kinda accident out there?”

  “Yes, please, can you come out? I need—”

  “They got procedures,” the man said gruffly. I read the name on the gold rectangle that was pinned to his shirt. Maynard. “I got to call—”

  “There’s no time!” I was shouting now, fear making me loud and careless. If he called for help, it would ruin everything; the police would com
e and Prairie and Kaz would never be able to get into the lab. “Please!”

  “Just as soon as I—”

  But that was as far as he got. Because when my hand shot out over the desk and came down gently on the side of his neck, his eyes went very wide for a second and his body tensed up as though he’d touched a power line.

  Then he slumped over on his desk.

  I’d had no idea that I was about to do what I did.

  And at the same time, I had somehow known exactly how to do it.

  Powerful. The word thrummed in my mind as I backed away from the desk. The gift that I had doubted, that I had resisted, that I had finally used and claimed for my own—it was more powerful than I’d allowed myself to realize.

  I knew the guard wasn’t dead or even hurt. What I’d done was like a surge of calming energy that overrode the circuits of his brain and shut him down temporarily. Like sleep—really deep sleep. I knew it in my blood, in the understanding that flowed somewhere inside me where it had lived since I was born. Since I was conceived, even, in the violent union of my mother and father, the source of my gifts descended from the first families.

  Behind me I heard the whoosh of the doors being pushed open.

  “I saw that,” Prairie said.

  I just nodded. Then I remembered.

  “We can’t leave him here, not if there’s going to be fire—”

  Kaz jogged around behind the desk, picked up the guard and slung him over his shoulders as though he weighed nothing. Prairie hesitated only a moment before pointing down the corridor.

  “We’ll put him out the back door. He’ll be hidden there—and safe.”

  Then she turned to me.

  “You’re done for now, Hailey. Go back out. Wait for us.”

  I watched them head down the corridor, the guard’s head bumping gently against Kaz’s back.

  Prairie had only just come into my life, and I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.