Banished (14 page)

“How, um, accurate is he?” she whispered. “With these predictions?”

“These
what?
I mean, he only just started talking. He never even went to the potty by himself until yesterday.”

If Prairie was surprised, she didn’t show it.

“Get that,” Prairie whispered, pointing at the last of her purchases, a pale pink backpack with the tags still attached. “Pack up.”

I jammed our things into it, our dirty clothes and the Walmart purchases. Prairie grabbed her plastic bags and stuffed them into her oversized purse.

“I’m really tired,” she said in a loud voice. “I think I might lie down for a bit. Hailey, could you get my purse? I left it in the bathroom.”

She was shaking her head as she talked, gesturing at the opposite side of the door. I grabbed Chub’s hand and pulled him with me. When Prairie crouched down across from me, I did the same. Prairie felt around frantically on the wall until her hand found the outlet, never taking her eyes off the door. She yanked out the electric cords, plunging the room into semidarkness, and then grabbed the table lamp, holding it by the narrow top of the base. She held a finger to her lips. I could feel my heart pounding under my new shirt.

C
HAPTER
16

W
HEN THE DOOR BURST
open, I jumped. Splinters of wood flew toward me and Chub. There was a crash and a man lurched into the room, landing on the floor.

“Go!” Prairie screamed.

She gave the desk a shove and it slammed down on the man’s head. I didn’t wait to see if he was hurt. I picked up Chub and hurled myself out the door, Prairie right behind. A skunky smell followed us. I could feel my throat seizing and I started to cough. When we were outside, I sucked down fresh air. The sun was so bright I was blinded for a moment, but Prairie pushed me, hard, toward the car.

“Rascal!” I screamed. “Come here, boy!”

He trotted out of the room, looking unconcerned. Prairie had the keys in her hand, and the locks clicked open as I reached for the handle. I didn’t bother trying to get Chub settled, just pushed him and Rascal into the backseat and jumped in front as Prairie backed up.

The tires screeched as she twisted the wheel and aimed for the parking lot exit. A couple walking across the lot jumped out of the way, the man yelling and giving us the finger, but Prairie paid no attention. She pulled into traffic, wedging the Buick between a fast-moving compact car and a dawdling truck full of lawn mowers, and then shot across a couple of lanes, making a U-turn on a yellow light.

Then we were racing back toward the on-ramp and onto the highway.

I’d only inhaled a little of the pepper spray or whatever it was, and I managed to get my throat cleared and my breathing back to normal.

I leaned over the seat and helped Chub get buckled in.

“Car seat,” he said. On top of everything else, he was adding new words faster than I could keep track of.

“That’s right, this is your special seat,” I said. “You did good, Chub. Good boy.”

“They found us,” Prairie repeated. She switched lanes again, pulling to the right and cutting off a slow-moving sedan. She veered onto an exit that led to an oasis of fast-food restaurants and gas stations.

“What are you doing?”
Keep moving!
—I felt the urgency in my gut to put as much distance as possible between us and the guy in our motel room.

“Bryce’s men tracked us down,” Prairie said, “and it wasn’t the car. It couldn’t have been. Come on. Bring the backpack.”

She pulled in to the first restaurant, a Wendy’s, and parked crookedly in a spot near the entrance. I grabbed Chub and the pack, leaving Rascal in the car, and followed Prairie in. She went straight for the ladies’ room and tried the door.

“Good,” she said. “It’s a one-person. Come on in.”

I felt strange following her, and checked around, but no one was paying attention. There were a few customers in line, knots of two and three people at the tables, a hum of late-afternoon conversation.

Prairie locked the door behind us.

“My turn,” Prairie said, digging into her purse for a Walmart bag. She stripped off her top, pulled a sweater from the bag and put it on. It was an ugly thing, brown, with leaves and pumpkins embroidered on it. It was too big, and it disguised her slim body.

“Here,” she said, handing me a small plastic bag of jewelry and makeup. “Put this on, the earrings and all, and do your makeup. Lots of eyeliner, really thick.”

I did as she said, starting with concealing the purplish bruise on my cheek, watching her out of the corner of my eye as I worked. She took a wide headband out of the bag and slid it into her hair so that all the layers were pulled away from her face. Then she added lipstick, exaggerating her mouth’s natural shape.

I focused on my own makeup, doing my best to apply it the way I’d practiced a few times at home for fun. Purple eye shadow, dark liner, several coats of mascara—I stepped back and looked at myself in the mirror.

“Wow,” Prairie said. I hardly looked like myself at all. I guessed that was the point.

Prairie had swept on blush and some eye makeup. With the sweater and headband, she looked like a soccer mom.

“Wow yourself,” I said back. “Um, not your best look.”

Prairie arched an eyebrow at me and then we both burst out laughing.

We were in so much trouble, but laughing felt good. Chub looked at each of us in turn and then he surprised me by pounding his little fist against my leg.

He wasn’t laughing.

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.”