Banished

smooth out as the seconds passed.

“I healed him,” I said in wonder.

“Yes.” There was something like awe in Prairie’s voice. “You are a true Healer, Hailey, a natural. Even your mother had to work hard at it, and she was twice the Healer I’ll ever be. But you… you’re something even more rare.”

Through the haze of my focus on Chub, I heard the black car sparking and sputtering in what I could now see was a dry creek bed. The land behind the barn led to the creek bank and stopped abruptly. The banks had been carved by the rushing waters of years of spring floods, leaving behind craggy dirt walls that dropped several feet in places.

“We have to go,” Prairie said, taking my arm and pulling me away from the Volvo and the barn and the wreck of the black car. “Tell Rascal to come.”

Only then did I notice him sitting by the car. He didn’t look frightened or even particularly interested in the commotion.

“Come on, boy,” I said, and he got to his feet without hesitation and trotted to catch up with us. I looked past him at the wreck and wondered if the men inside had survived. “Shouldn’t we see if-I mean, what if they need help?”

“They were trying to run us off the road, Hailey. Do you really want to give them a chance to catch up with us?”

“No.” I quickened my pace to keep up with her, glancing back to see if our pursuers were clambering out of the car.

“Someone’s bound to call this in soon,” Prairie added. “The smoke’s got to be visible for miles.”

She was right; the smoke pouring from the wreck was an ugly cloud spreading across the pristine, starry sky. I forced myself to look at the ground in front of us; it wouldn’t do to trip over something and drop Chub. He’d already been hurt and healed twice in one evening; I figured that was plenty.

“Where are we going?”

We were on a faint path, a trail of flattened weeds running parallel to the creek bed. Far off to the left, up a hill and past a neat vegetable patch surrounded by chicken wire, was a square farmhouse. The trail was narrow enough that we went single file, Prairie leading, then me and Chub, with Rascal taking up the rear.

“We’re nearly to Tipton,” Prairie said softly. “This is the Burnetts’ place.”

“Old Man Burnett?”

“Well, he wasn’t that old, back when I knew him. I knew his youngest. Claude.”

I recognized that name. Claude Burnett was a man in his late thirties, and people said he wasn’t quite right. He came to Gypsum some Saturdays in a clean shirt tucked into pants pulled up too high, his father leaning on him and leading him at the same time.

With a flash of regret I remembered I’d once teased Claude. I’d offered him half of a Milky Way bar I’d been saving. He was waiting in the shade outside the drugstore while his dad picked up a prescription or something. I showed him the candy bar, and when he put out his thick hand for it, I whipped it around behind my back.

“You didn’t say please,” I’d said, relishing the feel of my heart pounding under my T-shirt. I was eight or so, and it was such a novelty to see someone who made people even more uncomfortable than I did.

“I know him,” I said now.

“He was your mom’s friend. She was always nice to him. She taught him to talk.”

“What do you mean?”

Prairie shrugged. “He didn’t talk much, only a couple of words. Clover got him saying whole sentences. Just another kind of healing, I guess. I played here too, when I was little. Mary used to bring us. There’s a shortcut-just a little ways,” Prairie said. “Or at least there used to be. Here, I think this is it.”

She led the way off the path, down to a series of flat stones set into the creek bed, barely visible in the moonlight. We didn’t need them to cross, since the creek was dry, but I stepped carefully so I wouldn’t twist an ankle as we eased down the bank.

I was thinking about Claude… and about Chub, who was also not a talker. Could Chub be… healed? That way?

Prairie led us up the other bank. “This comes up on Ellis land. You know the Ellises?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Their kids went to school with me and your mom… but here… yes, I think this is it…”

The path continued on the other side, a tramped-down, narrow trail that led up over the bank and toward a cluster of lights far ahead. As we drew nearer I saw it was another farmhouse with a barn and some sheds set back a few hundred yards.

“How did you know to do that?” I demanded. “How did you crash into the right part of the barn and all? How did you know the car would break through and not, like, hit a beam or something?”

“Luck,” Prairie said, and I could almost hear a faint smile in her voice. “Don’t you think we were due for some luck? Besides, barn doors, Hailey, they’re just big pieces of wood.”

“But how could you see the doors? I could hardly even see the barn. But you had to have hit it just exactly right, or-”

Or we’d be dead.

Prairie slowed, turned on the path in front of me.

“I just remembered,” she said simply. “I thought about Clover… and how she and Claude liked to play cowboys here, and I shut my eyes and tried to picture it in my mind, where the doors were-”

“You shut your eyes?” I was dumbfounded.

She flashed me a grin, and it only lasted a fraction of a second in the weak moonlight. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The thought of Prairie flying across the field with her eyes closed was terrifying… and maybe just a little bit thrilling. At least, that was what I figured the zip of sensation was that snaked up my spine.

Prairie continued on the path, striding confidently, and for a crazy moment I wondered if she had her eyes shut now. If she was leading us away from trouble with nothing but a feeling to guide her.

I don’t know why I didn’t feel more frightened. Weirdly, the thought almost made me feel a little safer. Chub was so heavy in my arms that everything from my wrist down had gone numb, but at least he had quieted, his sweat-damp forehead radiating heat against my face.

I reached out and touched Prairie’s pretty tailored jacket, and then I gripped it tightly and closed my eyes and willed my feet to walk in her footsteps, Rascal staying right behind me. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. She never stumbled, and neither did I, as we approached the cluster of buildings.

The Ellises’ barn was in better shape than the Burnetts’ barn, with hay stacked high in the loft and a couple of tractors parked neatly, gleaming in the moonlight, when Prairie and I opened the door.

“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll try not to be too long.”

I didn’t even ask her where she was going. I sat on the seat of the smaller tractor-really more like a big riding mower-and it felt good to relax my arms, aching from the effort of holding Chub. Rascal lay down next to the tractor, ignoring the scrabbling and scratching of creatures in the barn.

I used to be scared of things like that, mice and rats and bats. Now I was happy for the company.

I closed my eyes and tried to sort through the emotions swirling in my head. I felt as though my defenses were starting to fall apart at the edges. The past few days were like some sort of horror movie, and I couldn’t quite believe that I was a part of it, that any of it had even happened.

But I had blood on my clothes to prove it. Gram was dead. A lot of people were wounded in our kitchen and in the wreck of a car less than a mile away. And the life I had led before-the one I had hated so much-was in the past.

I wondered how I’d stayed calm enough to get through the past few hours. Maybe I was in a state of shock, or maybe I had just gotten so used to dealing with the challenges of life with Gram that I’d built up more defenses than an ordinary person would have in a situation like this.

But I wasn’t sure how long I could maintain my calm. What would happen if I started letting things bother me again, if I let myself start feeling things? The thought was terrifying. At least as terrifying, I realized as I sat shivering in the dark barn, as being shot.