Unforsaken (19 page)

It had happened to me once before, and I would never forget the feel of their bony, cold fingers on my flesh, the sickening sponginess of their rotting bodies as I fought them.

“Prentiss isn’t going to like this,” Kaz said.

Uncertainty flashed briefly across Biceps’s face, but he forced a laugh. I remembered the way he’d acted with the other guard—full of swagger, itching for a fight. He was a guy with something to prove. “Prentiss’s got bigger things to worry about. Besides, as soon as he calls in, you can come out of there. This is just a little … activity to keep you busy.”

And a chance for him to prove himself among the staff left behind, I thought.

“Ta-ta,” Biceps said, giving us a limp little wave before letting himself out of the room.

We watched him go, but the zombies didn’t. Their eyes stayed fixed on us.

When the door shut, I wrapped my arms even tighter around Kaz and forced myself to stay calm. I’d survived being afraid before.

I will get through this
. I said the words in my mind, making myself believe them. I’d survived being shot at and hunted and kidnapped, and I would survive this, too.

“Piece of cake,” I said shakily. “We just have to wait around a little while.”

“Yeah,” Kaz agreed, but I could tell he was worried. “Hailey, I think we should sit down and rest, but … we have to be careful.”

That was an understatement. He was taller than the square was wide. And there would be no exceptions. All it would take was a hand or a foot—even a lock of my hair—crossing the lines and the zombies would be on us, going for blood.

They didn’t know any other way.

We sat down gingerly, steering clear of the edges of our cell. Kaz sat cross-legged and I leaned back against him, his arms around me. That was when I realized that his hands were still bleeding from the broken glass.

“Let me,” I said softly, and I held his hands in mine and lost myself in the healing. It was a good place to go; it calmed me and chased my fears away, if only for a moment. When I released Kaz’s hands, there was no mark on them, and I knew that I had done well.

“That one looks like he’s going to expire at any minute,” Kaz said. The most decomposed zombie was barely standing,
swaying on legs that were hardly able to hold up its rotting body. Its head lolled on its neck, and its empty socket stared, but it stayed in its spot.

For a moment, anyway. Then a convulsion shuddered through its body, and it collapsed.

Into our square.

It landed in a heap, body fluids spattering, flesh tearing loose from the bones, its crablike skeletal elbow inches away. I screamed and felt Kaz tightening his arms around me, forcing me to stay in place, but I fought him. I had to get away from it, and I wrestled against Kaz, trying to crawl away from the motionless thing, the seeping puddle in which it lay.

“Stop fighting me!” Kaz yelled into my ear, and I finally went slack against him. He was right. We had to stay in our square, even if it meant sharing it with the zombie. “Hailey, shut your eyes, just let me hold you, stop …”

He kept up like that, rocking me in his arms, whispering in my ear, for what felt like hours, until I finally stopped shaking. It took a long time. I kept my eyes closed, and Kaz talked, and I listened. He told me about his childhood, about the first time he’d had a vision. About missing his dad, about helping his mom in the salon. About his best friend, who moved to Kansas in middle school. About the first girl he kissed. About his dreams of learning to fly, of joining the air force.

I listened, and we rocked, and I tried to pretend we were back in the park. After a very long time, I felt a little better, and I told him about me. Things I had never told another
soul. About wishing I had known my mother, wondering who my father was. About the imaginary friend I’d had who played with me in the woods behind the house.

We talked and talked until our voices were hoarse, the night passing slowly, and when there was a sound at the door, my eyes flew open and the sight of the zombies—still standing guard, motionless and ready—sent a fresh shock through me. I had almost managed to forget they were there.

Dr. Grace opened the door and her eyes widened.

“What the hell is going on!”

She shut the door behind her and leaned on it, her hand over her heart. “What on earth—Never mind. All of you—back off. Go sit in your chairs.”

The zombies shuffled away from their posts around the square, back to their chairs—all except for the one next to us. A trickle of black fluid leaked from its mouth, and a fly buzzed around its crusted, ruined flesh.

“What happened?” Dr. Grace demanded.

“The guard—he told us to stay in here,” Kaz said.

“In where?”

“This square.” He traced the floor tiles to show her. “Or else he told them to, uh …”

I knew he didn’t want to say it, so I said it for him: “To kill us.”

Dr. Grace’s expression hardened. “That’s—Oh, for Pete’s sake. There’s little danger with the specimens, as long as everyone follows procedure. We aren’t supposed to issue any
orders at all that aren’t clearly outlined on the test plan. All of you—stay where you are. You are to leave these two alone.”

She directed the command at the zombies, but they gave no indication that they had heard.

“What about next time?” I demanded. “I mean, how many people can just walk in here and—and—tell them to do anything they want?”

Dr. Grace shook her head impatiently, a line etched between her eyebrows. “It’s not like that. It’s only the research team and security. And Prentiss, of course. Look, I’m not saying it’s perfect, but this is all—I mean, nobody expected what happened today. Anyway, you’re safe now. You can get up.”

I stood and brushed grit off my clothes. I forced myself to back out of the square, holding Kaz’s hand tightly.

“What about that one?” Kaz asked, pointing at the broken body on the floor. It was finally at peace, its rotting flesh no longer able to sustain life after death.

Dr. Grace sighed. “I’ll call for cleanup. The tissues are sterile, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Kaz laughed shortly. “You think I’d worry about
that
? When I practically got ripped to shreds by those … things?”

“How can you stand it?” I asked. “How can you stand to work here, knowing what they’re going to do with them?”

Dr. Grace blinked behind her glasses and frowned at me. “My area of expertise is precognition and psychokinesis,” she said, hedging. “I’m head of psychic research, but my contact with the … specimens … is really quite limited. I work with
our psychic subjects, who are, I assure you, all very much alive.”

“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.”

D
R
. G
RACE 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.