Banished

“I saw it. A vision… Tonight will end in fire.”

CHAPTER 24

“YOU HAD A VISION?” I demanded, but Prairie interrupted.

“Fire? Oh my God… I should have thought of that.”

“What?”

“The walls… all around the inner offices. They’ll burn.”

“I brought some stuff from the garage,” Kaz said. “To use as an accelerant. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mom-she would have lost it if she knew-but it should help spread the fire-”

“No, what I mean is, the walls are flammable. Bryce had us working with volunteer subjects who claimed to have predictive powers. We had a few who kept hitting it off the charts. Seers, you know? I was sure of it. And Bryce was researching ways to block their visions.”

“For the military application,” Kaz broke in.

“For the what?” I was lost, but the two of them were practically running over each other’s words.

“Like if the other side had Seers? You’d want to block them, right? You wouldn’t want them to be able to sense your next move.”

“Only, it’s very hard to do,” Prairie said. “The only thing we found that seemed to impair the subjects was iron. But it wasn’t like Bryce could put up iron walls in the lab, so he found this guy who came up with a way to embed iron filings in polyurethane foam. The kind you spray? You know, that expands? Only, it’s like a hundred times more flammable than wood, so he hired these guys off the books to spray it in all the drywall one weekend last fall.”

“That’s perfect,” Kaz said.

Perfect for destroying the building, I thought-but not for getting out alive.

“What sort of accelerant did you bring?” Prairie asked.

“I got a couple of cans of lighter fluid and some paint thinner. And matches.”

“Okay, good.” Prairie sighed. “You’ve got this all figured out, haven’t you?”

“Uh… yeah. But don’t tell Mom. She’d ground me for the rest of my life.”

We got out of the car, Kaz carrying his backpack filled with supplies. I stayed back, leaning against the car while they slipped off toward the building. They kept to the edge of the parking lot, as though they were strolling along the street toward downtown. When they got to the building, they cut over and edged along the front wall, barely visible in the shadows.

It was time. I took a deep breath and touched my fingers to my necklace. The red stone felt warm to my touch. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to empty my mind of everything other than what I had to do.

Then I sprinted across the parking lot and slammed into the glass doors at a flat-out run, smacking my palms against them and shoving. I didn’t take a chance on looking for Prairie and Kaz in the shadows. The doors swung open and I was into the building’s lobby. To the left was a bank of elevators, and to the right was a curved desk where an older man with a brown uniform sat reading a folded newspaper.

He looked up, his eyes wide with surprise, as I ran through the lobby to his desk. I leaned on it, panting.

“I need help!” I yelled. “A car-it was driving by-it hit someone. It ran up on the sidewalk by the parking lot. I think they’re hurt bad.”

The man lowered the newspaper more slowly than I figured the situation called for. “You’re saying there’s some kinda accident out there?”

“Yes, please, can you come out? I need-”

“They got procedures,” the man said gruffly. I read the name on the gold rectangle that was pinned to his shirt. Maynard. “I got to call-”

“There’s no time!” I was shouting now, fear making me loud and careless. If he called for help, it would ruin everything; the police would come and Prairie and Kaz would never be able to get into the lab. “Please!”

“Just as soon as I-”

But that was as far as he got. Because when my hand shot out over the desk and came down gently on the side of his neck, his eyes went very wide for a second and his body tensed up as though he’d touched a power line.

Then he slumped over on his desk.

I’d had no idea that I was about to do what I did.

And at the same time, I had somehow known exactly how to do it.

Powerful. The word thrummed in my mind as I backed away from the desk. The gift that I had doubted, that I had resisted, that I had finally used and claimed for my own-it was more powerful than I’d allowed myself to realize.

I knew the guard wasn’t dead or even hurt. What I’d done was like a surge of calming energy that overrode the circuits of his brain and shut him down temporarily. Like sleep-really deep sleep. I knew it in my blood, in the understanding that flowed somewhere inside me where it had lived since I was born. Since I was conceived, even, in the violent union of my mother and father, the source of my gifts descended from the first families.

Behind me I heard the whoosh of the doors being pushed open.

“I saw that,” Prairie said.

I just nodded. Then I remembered.

“We can’t leave him here, not if there’s going to be fire-”

Kaz jogged around behind the desk, picked up the guard and slung him over his shoulders as though he weighed nothing. Prairie hesitated only a moment before pointing down the corridor.

“We’ll put him out the back door. He’ll be hidden there-and safe.”

Then she turned to me.

“You’re done for now, Hailey. Go back out. Wait for us.”

I watched them head down the corridor, the guard’s head bumping gently against Kaz’s back.

Prairie had only just come into my life, and I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.

But we would always be in danger unless we finished this. Bryce would keep chasing us as long as he thought we were useful to his work.

I followed.

Around a couple of corners in the hallway was a reinforced door with no identifying sign. Prairie held up the little plastic prox card, and when the lock clicked, she pushed the door open. I ran to catch up. When Kaz saw me he hesitated only for a second before holding the door for me.

“Hailey, no!” Prairie hissed.

“She deserves to be here,” Kaz said as I pushed past him.

I grabbed Prairie’s hand and squeezed hard. “I’m not going back.”

She stared into my eyes for a moment and then nodded once. “All right. All right. You two start dousing the edges of the room, along the walls. I’m going to start the wipe-disk program. I doubt I can get in the server room- that requires a retinal scan and I’m sure I’ve been blocked-but I can do it from my workstation. And take this, just in case.” She pressed the prox card into my hand and I pocketed it.

Prairie snapped on a bank of lights and I saw that we were in a huge lab, with workstations and sleek monitors and equipment I couldn’t begin to name. There were robotic-looking devices in various states of assembly on platforms, and banks of blinking boxes with cables running in and out in loops. More cables snaked along the floor.

The one thing that was missing was a human presence. Other than stacks of papers and coffee cups and a sweater or two left over a chair, it was as if the people who worked here brought nothing of themselves with them. There were no photos, no kids’ drawings tacked to cubicle walls, no plants or paperweights or figurines.

Prairie disappeared down a corridor at the other end of the room, and Kaz dug in his backpack, then handed me a can of lighter fluid.

“Shouldn’t take much,” he said. “Just concentrate it along the drywall.”

We set to work, stepping around the equipment. At first I was cautious, but then I followed Kaz’s example and