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.
15
RATTLER SHIFTED ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLY on the wood shelf that served as a seat. Next to him, Derek startled, caught napping. Derek was no good at waiting. He had no patience. Rattler bit down hard on his disgust: the Banished blood was weak indeed in Derek, but he was all Rattler had for now.
But the future-ten years from now, there’d be new blood all around town. Young, strong boys and girls with at least one full-blood parent-and a few with two. When Rattler grew old, his many children would make him proud, and there would be grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all Banished, all strong and determined, and they would live well here. They would take their rightful place as the leaders of Gypsum; they would drive fancy cars and live in big-ass houses, and the biggest one of all would be the one he would build for him and Prairie.
He and his Prairie, they would grow old together; they would look out their front door and see what was theirs… their land, their town, just like the village of their ancestors. If something displeased Prairie, Rattler would blast it sky-high; if someone made her unhappy, he would remind them by force who was the leader of the Banished, who had returned them to their rightful glory. No one would make Prairie unhappy twice. If they did, Rattler would make them taste their own blood as they died.
They would see. They would all see. So far, they hadn’t understood, and maybe, just maybe, some of that was his fault. He had failed with Prairie once, but she had been under the influence of that other one, of Mr. Chicago, with his slick ways-he saw that now. He hadn’t seen that then, when Mr. Chicago had offered Rattler money to turn Prairie and Hailey over. But that was then and this was now.
Rattler worked up a gobbet of spit and let fly, narrowly missing Derek’s boot. Derek was wise enough not to say anything; he just moved his foot out of the way.
The memory disgusted Rattler: Mr. Chicago with his stack of hundreds, peeling, peeling, peeling, waiting for Rattler to signal when it was enough. Well, he’d taken the man’s money-why shouldn’t he?-but it was never enough. It would never be enough! And see what had happened to Mr. Chicago, who had thought he could buy Rattler? Charred and dead, burnt up in his own squalor, a fitting end.
Not that there was anything wrong with making a little money from the gifts. No, nothing wrong at all. He needed cash. He needed capital. Others had stepped up to take Mr. Chicago’s place, and Rattler had showed them, hadn’t he? He had taught them a blood lesson they would not forget. Now they would respect him. He would set a high price for their services… his and Hailey’s and Prairie’s. And he would bring the others, the Trashtown riffraff who possessed only a shadow of the gifts, let them experiment on his lesser brethren, let them play their games with the piss-weak stock, even as Rattler was beginning to rebuild the clan.
He would be like a broker; he would be the businessman he’d always known he could be. His sons would take up the yoke someday. He would teach them, train them. And in his home, Prairie would raise the girls, and they would be strong and beautiful, like her. It would be as it should be.
Next to him, Derek cleared his throat. “We been out here-”
“Shut up,” Rattler said automatically. “Drink.”
Rattler knew that Derek had a flask in his pocket; there was rarely a time when Derek didn’t have a flask in his pocket, topped off with cheap whiskey. That was okay, though; what he needed Derek for didn’t require quick reflexes. Rattler just needed an extra hand in case the boy gave him any trouble. The boy was expendable; Rattler had armed himself with the Ruger just in case, but he hoped not to use it. Just put the boy on the road and send him back, that was all that was called for.
But he needed the girl. Because the girl was the next step to Prairie. And she was his firstborn, a Healer like her mother, so she was rightfully his as well.