32
IT WAS NOT DR. GRACE who came to my room at dinnertime, but a tall bald man in white scrubs that barely covered the holster on his belt. I asked him if Prentiss had returned yet, and I could tell by the way he avoided the question that he hadn’t.
That made me feel a little better, because I knew it meant they hadn’t caught up with Prairie yet. Even if she was with Rattler, I felt like her odds were better than if she ended up here, trapped with the rest of us.
When we arrived in the dining room, I was relieved to see Kaz sitting alone with a full plate of food in front of him, pushing pasta around with a fork.
“Can I sit with him?” I asked.
“You can sit anywhere you want,” my escort said. “Dr. Grace will be here for you sometime in the next half hour, so eat up.”
I went through the line quickly, taking the first things I saw and piling them on a tray. When Kaz saw me sliding into the chair across from him, some of the tension eased from his face.
“You look… tired,” I said. His skin was pale and he had dark circles under his eyes. I had slept fitfully after Dr. Grace escorted us back to our rooms, my thoughts swirling and nagging at me. It looked like Kaz hadn’t fared any better.
He covered my hand with his own, his touch warm and enveloping.
“I had a vision, Hailey.”
I wanted to tell him about Bryce-about what I’d seen on the monitor, about what it meant-but that would have to wait.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know,” he said, crumpling a napkin in his fist, clearly frustrated. “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure it out.”
“Describe it step by step,” I suggested. “Maybe with both of us…”
Kaz rubbed his forehead in frustration, pushing back the hair that always fell in his eyes. “It was Bryce. He was… disappearing. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like he was fading away from the bottom up. He didn’t have any hair, but there wasn’t a scratch on him. I swear, though-I swear it was him.”
My heart thrummed with excitement and fear. “That’s because he’s alive.”
“What!”
I explained what I’d seen earlier on the monitors. The body in the bed, the machines keeping him alive. His burnt-off fingers and ears, the lips that had melted away from his gums.
“They saved him somehow, Kaz,” I concluded. “I don’t know how. And I don’t know how long he can survive in that condition. But he’s here.”
“But in the vision-Hailey, he wasn’t burned. I don’t know… maybe, I mean, what if the vision was really from the past, you know?”
“That doesn’t make sense. Your visions are never about the past.”
“But there’s no other way to-”
“No. You saw that vision,” I interrupted, suddenly sure of what it meant. “That’s because he gets healed. It has to be.”
Kaz slowly closed his mouth, and I could see him putting it all together. “So we have to find a way to stop them. They must be planning to use the Healer they have here and-”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s me who heals him.”
“You! But why? Why would you-”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But it’s me. I… just know it.”
What I didn’t say was that ever since I’d seen Bryce on the monitors, I had felt it stirring inside, the desire-the need-to heal. The words were a whispered chorus under my thoughts, and my fingers tingled and twitched with the longing to touch his ravaged body.
“But if you heal him, Prentiss’ll have everything he needs to re-create the lab, and-”
“No, I think I need to heal him so that he can help us destroy the backups,” I said. “Did you see anything that would help us find where in the complex they’re keeping him? Or how we might be able to bust him out?”
Kaz was silent for a moment, concentrating. “I don’t know. I mean, it was just Bryce, and he was fading away. He had… like, this expression, sort of… manic, you know? Kind of crazed. What about what you saw on the monitor? Anything about the room that would tell you where it was?”
I closed my eyes and concentrated, remembering. All that equipment… the wires and tubes snaking from his destroyed body, the screens blipping and blinking. But most of all I remembered the pure agony on what was left of his face.
“Nothing,” I whispered.
“It’s okay… I might have an idea. Remember when we went to Bryce’s lab? You went first, to create a distraction?”
“Yeah, and then you and Prairie took off down the hall and-”
“Yeah, but before that. The guard. What was his name?… Maynard.”
“Maynard,” I repeated, remembering.
He had been a heavyset guy in his late fifties, sitting behind a desk, sleepily reading a newspaper. I’d pretended to be upset, told him there’d been an accident, begged him to come outside and see-so Kaz and Prairie could sneak past him into the lab-but he wouldn’t listen. He had wanted to make some calls. I remembered his soft-palmed hand reaching for the phone, remembered my panic as I’d seen our entire scheme going down the drain, and then I’d reached across the desk, almost without thinking, and my hand had settled on the soft warm skin of his neck and I’d-“I remember.”
“Good. Because you have to do it one more time.”
He looked troubled, his eyes avoiding my gaze. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me. I need to know. I can’t do this unless I know everything.”
“There was… That wasn’t the only vision I had.”
My throat went dry with fear. The vision of Bryce had been bad enough. What more could he have seen? “What was it?”
“Well, it was a place. A little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, full of run-down houses. There were two streets that crossed in the middle of the neighborhood; there were dogs lying in the street, kids fighting over nothing. Old cars up on blocks, boarded-up windows.”
“That’s Trashtown,” I murmured.
“Rattler was there. And he had Prairie with him.”
33
RATTLER HUNG HIS HEAD with shame, because the worn old dress was no thing worthy of Prairie. But with all her pretty new clothes burned up at the Pollitt house, this dress was all he had to offer, his dead mama’s Sunday dress that she wore until she quit getting dressed at all. He should have got shut of it. Should have burnt up all his mama’s things when she died. Instead he’d scrubbed the house down to raw wood-floors, walls, ceilings-he’d scrubbed away the coughing and moaning of her last months and he’d scrubbed away the memories of her face swoll up from his daddy’s fist and he’d scrubbed away every long-ago morning she turned him out to run wild through Trashtown so she could take her cure.
The box of her things stayed sealed up neat in the closet upstairs. Rattler would drive it to the dump. He would get new clothes for Prairie; her new clothes would hang in the closet just so. Prairie would do woman things to the house, curtains and fancy soap and such. That was not a job for Rattler, but he’d scrubbed until the skin rubbed off his knuckles and he’d split and stacked the wood and beat the rugs and caned the chairs and rubbed the dust from the lamps.
The shirt Prairie wore was too hot for June and she didn’t have nothing else with her. Prairie had come to him with nothing and that was as it should be. Before long, Prairie would shed the city like a king snake sheds its skin; her hair would get long and her green eyes would grow bright again for him.
“Put it on, girl,” Rattler said roughly, holding the worn dress out to her. He hated to see her standing so straight and still in his kitchen in the warm evening, sweat on her brow, her shirt buttoned up to her neck. He would buy a fan. He would buy a fan for every window. “Ain’t much but it’ll keep you cool. We’ll go to town soon and git you things.”