Banished

without even trying? I’d healed three times: Milla, Rascal and Chub, all in the past few days. Maybe it was now such a part of me that I couldn’t turn it off.

It didn’t seem possible… but so much of what had happened was unbelievable.

I handed Prairie the paper sack with her biscuit and hash browns. I fixed the coffee cup’s lid so she could drink, folding back the little plastic tab, just like I’d learned to do twenty minutes earlier when I’d drunk my first cup of coffee.

Prairie nibbled at the food while she drove slowly out of the parking lot and back onto the interstate. She consulted her phone now and then, and I realized she was following downloaded directions.

“Where are we going?” I asked as she turned onto a multi-lane road lined with strip malls.

“Well, that’s a little complicated,” she said. “Keep your eyes out for a-Oh, there it is.”

She turned into a parking lot in front of a row of low-slung buildings and passed a dry cleaner, a Thai restaurant, a bakery. She parked in front of a Hertz car rental agency, then turned to face me with a serious expression.

“This is going to sound a little strange,” she said, “but we have to make it look like we’re renting a car.”

“Make it look like? But we’re not really renting it?”

“Yes. How can I… Okay. Remember when I told you that Banished men used to have visions? That they could see the future?”

“Yes…” A prickly feeling had started at the base of my spine. I sensed that what was coming was more bad news, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear more. But what choice did I have?

“Purebloods can still do it. Some of them, anyway. Well, a few.” She bit her lip and stared at her hands, which were clasped tightly. “Rattler can.”

“Rattler Sikes?” As if there was any other Rattler. Just saying his name dialed up the prickling to full-scale fear.

Prairie nodded. “Rattler and I have a… history. When we were kids, he used to like to follow me around. Even then he had visions, and they just got stronger over time.”

“But that means he knows exactly where we are!” The thought made me want to jump out of the car and run.

“It doesn’t work quite like that. He can’t see all of the future, or even choose what parts to see. He just… opens his mind, and he gets flashes. Pictures, pieces of the future. Sometimes he has visions of things happening at the same time but in a different place.”

I remembered his unfocused gaze in the kitchen, the way he went very still, as though he was focusing in on something no one else could see. Something’s not right. A car… men. It’s men in it.

He’d had a vision of Safian’s men.

“But what are we going to do?” I demanded, panicked.

Prairie laid a hand on my arm. “Stay calm, Hailey. That’s why we’re here. We’re going to create a few scenarios, throw him off. We’ll make it look like we’re renting a car. We’ll drive to the bus station. I’ll take a few different routes, make it look like we could be going south or west. We just need to confuse him so he doesn’t know which way to come after us.”

“But eventually he’s going to-”

“Stop,” Prairie said gently but firmly. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Rattler can only see me when we’re connected, when there’s some energy between us. Right now we’re scared and we’re bound by what happened at Alice’s, but we will get past that. We’ll put it behind us and the connection will be broken and he won’t be able to find us.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean, you’re connected?”

“The Banished… we’re drawn to each other, like I told you before. And there’s an energy around that. But if you were to leave, that energy would slowly fade. Your mind and your heart would focus on other things and the attraction would die down. The connection would be broken. Not forever, but you’d be functioning on your own, outside the influence of the other Banished. That’s what I did, when I went to Chicago. The energy faded for me, and Rattler was a part of my past, and he couldn’t see me anymore.”

“But when you came back to Gypsum-”

“It opened it all up again. The connection, the energy. But we can fight it. I’ve fought it before. I’ve gotten away from Rattler before.” There was strong conviction in her voice, but edged with something I didn’t like at all, something dark and terrifying.

It almost sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

But it wasn’t like we had any other options. “What can I do?”

“You and Chub take Rascal for a walk. There’s bottled water in the trunk and a plastic bowl. Give me five or ten minutes.”

I did as she directed, glancing in the plate-glass window as I took care of Rascal. She was having a conversation with the man behind the desk, who was consulting his computer monitor. Chub was happy to be out of the car, and he walked along beside me, picking up rocks and sticks that caught his eye.

In the bright light I could see that Rascal had blood along his neck and back, and I realized that Chub must have bled on him in the Volvo. I wiped him off with some of the bottled water and a handful of tissues from the box the Ellises kept in their car. He didn’t mind, didn’t even seem to notice. I put my hand in front of his face to lick, but he just stared at the lanes of traffic whizzing by. I wondered if he was thinking about chasing cars, but he didn’t seem interested. He hadn’t wagged his tail or perked up his ears at all, and I wondered again if he was having some sort of reaction to his accident, if something inside him was broken.

But when I said, “Rascal, come,” he trotted along right away and jumped back in the car. If there was something wrong with him, it wasn’t brain damage.

When Prairie came back out she seemed a little calmer. “One down,” she said. After consulting her phone again, she pulled out of the parking lot. “Next stop, the bus station.”

“Prairie,” I asked after we’d driven for a few minutes, “what happened to Rattler? At the house?”

“Oh, that…,” Prairie said. A ghost of a smile flickered across her face. “I, uh, take kickboxing. That was a roundhouse kick. We’re not supposed to use it in class. Well, anyway, I always wanted to try it.”

“I guess it worked.”

“Yeah-I guess so.”

Rattler wasn’t dead. He’d sold us out and nearly gotten me kidnapped, and as far as I knew, his only injury was from being kicked by Prairie. I wished he was dead-and then I wondered if he was “seeing” us even now. It made me shiver with fear and revulsion.

I barely paid attention as Prairie took smaller and less crowded streets, driving through a series of neighborhoods that grew shabbier and dirtier, before she turned into the parking lot of a bus station.

“This time we’ll all go,” she said.

We left Rascal in the car with an opened can of dog food that Prairie had bought at Walmart. We were gone for about a half hour, pretending to buy tickets. What really happened was Prairie asked a lot of questions about when buses were leaving for various places, and at the end she took a couple of folded paper timetables and tucked them into her purse. We sat in uncomfortable chairs for a while. I read an old magazine that someone had left behind, and Prairie got Chub a lemonade from a vending machine.

It didn’t take long to get boring. That surprised me. I figured I’d never be able to relax, but when Prairie murmured that it was time to move on, I was relieved.

Next was the airport. That was a little more interesting, though Springfield’s airport was tiny and didn’t look anything like the ones in the movies. Still, there were people milling around, carrying bags, dragging suitcases-it made me wish I was flying somewhere. I’d never really thought I’d have a chance to, but now it seemed possible. Now that I was with Prairie. It wasn’t just that she had money and experience, either; she made me feel like I could do things I’d never considered doing.

After the airport, Prairie took us into Springfield’s downtown. There were enough tall buildings to make it seem like a real city. We circled for a while, sometimes barely moving in traffic, and by the time Prairie headed back out of town it was late in the afternoon.

The final place Prairie took us was a motel, an unremarkable place in a beaten-down neighborhood near the interstate.

“Okay,” she said as we pulled into the lot. “I have got to get some rest before we go any further. I’m going to