“So as long as you get to study whatever it is you want to study, that makes all of this”-I gestured at the rows of zombies-“okay?”
“I’d like to secure the lab now,” Dr. Grace said before turning away from me and muttering an order into a small handheld device.
“Answer her question,” Kaz said. “We deserve to know.”
Dr. Grace frowned, considering. Finally she gave us a brisk nod. “I don’t think you want to be here when the cleanup team’s working, so let’s go. We can talk on the way.”
29
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?”