I woke with my head resting against the cold glass of the passenger window, the night thick and black on the ground, only Kaz’s outline visible as he slept next to me. I had been dreaming something awful, something disturbing enough to wake me: I’d been back in the locked room in the lab, fire raging behind me, the zombies rising from their chairs, staring at me with their unblinking eyes, their rotting, impassive faces and coming at me. Their feet on the floor clacked and slapped, a rhythmic sound as they came closer and closer and-
But the sound, the clacking, did not stop, even though I was awake. It was in my ear, on the glass, and I jerked away from it, too late seeing that there was something, some
“What is it?” Kaz woke instantly. “Hailey? What’s going on?”
“Outside,” I managed to croak, and then I gasped, because there was another figure on
“Open up.” It was a rasping gravel voice thick with the drawl of Trashtown. My father’s voice.
“Rattler,” I whispered, clutching Kaz’s arm harder. As if to confirm the thought, the tapping resumed, gently now, but the light shone pointedly on the barrel of a gun, the thing Rattler had been using to tap the glass. And it was pointed at me.
“Come on now, Hailey-girl,” Rattler crooned, almost a singsong. “Come on outta there. We’re goin’ for a drive.”
“He won’t shoot me,” I said. But he would shoot Kaz without a second thought.
Kaz knew it too, because I could see him hesitating, reaching for the keys dangling in the ignition, trying to figure out whether he could get the car in motion before Rattler took a shot.
The grinning figure on the other side, leering through the window, seemed to make up Kaz’s mind. Slowly, he took his hand off the keys.
Rattler had known we were coming.
He and Kaz, both Seers, were plagued with visions of the things that stirred them most, the things that they held dearest or that threatened the greatest harm. That was how it always worked. Kaz had seen the Quadrillon sign because Chub was there. Rattler, though, cared most about Prairie. I lowered the window a crack. “She’s not with us, you know.”
Rattler’s expression didn’t so much change as drive over a speed bump. For a flash of a second, it was shot through with anguish and even worry, something I’d never seen on his face before. “I know it,” he muttered. “Now get out.”
Kaz reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze, and then we both got out. My mind raced, looking for ways to fight back, to escape, but Rattler seized my arm roughly and guided me toward Kaz and the other man. Rattler was much stronger than me, and the other man held a gun loosely at the small of Kaz’s back as they headed for the road. A car drove past in a blur of headlights and spun gravel; the people inside probably didn’t even see us walking along the ditch beside the road, and even if someone stopped and inquired whether everything was all right, I was sure Rattler had a reply at the ready. Help wouldn’t come in that form.
We walked toward the lights of the gas station and fast-food restaurants ahead, not even a quarter of a mile away. I shook my head in disgust as we came within fifty yards of the giant Exxon sign: choosing to stop here in the shadow of this sign was like sending Rattler a postcard inviting him to come find us.
I’d made another rookie mistake. I kept pretending that I could stay a step ahead of all the dangers that surrounded us, and I kept failing. First I’d led the General’s men straight to us. And now Rattler. I couldn’t keep letting things like this happen. I had to be sharper, think faster.
At the edge of the Long John Silver’s parking lot was a big old sedan sagging on its wheels, and Rattler and the other man led us to it. In the parking lot’s bright lights, I got a better look at the man and realized I knew him; he had been one of Gram’s regulars. Derek Pollitt. He’d been one of the quieter ones, never putting a hand on me or even joking with me, and for that I was grateful. He opened the passenger door for Kaz and then got in the driver’s seat.
Rattler opened my door, but before he released my arm, he stood looking into my face. It was the first good look I’d had of the eye I’d stabbed, and it was a transfixing sight. The skin below the eye was rimmed with a red ragged scar. The eyeball was milky and pale, and it seemed to spin as Rattler stared at me, but surely that was an illusion.
I looked away first, and Rattler laughed, a harsh, bone-chilling sound. “Aw, don’t be that way with your daddy,” he said. “You and me, we got off on the wrong foot, after all this time. We both got a little makin’ up to do, I’d say. Now, I’m not going to hold this against you.”
He pointed at his wrecked eye. It was true-Rattler didn’t look angry, only slightly amused and… somehow very much alive, sparking with the manic energy I’d always associated with him.
“You and me, we got the same goal here,” he added as he pushed me gently into the car. “We’re gonna get your auntie back. And then we’re gonna set out to restore the good family name.”
I slammed the car door, trying to shut out the sound of his laughter.
17
I KNEW WHERE WE WERE GOING after just a few miles, when Derek took a right at the fork in the road past Sugar Creek. We were headed for his daddy’s land, mostly poor clay soil that had yielded stingy crops of alfalfa and soybeans until Mr. Pollitt died eight or nine years back. Everyone thought Derek, the Pollitts’ only son, would take over, but instead he leased off what he could and let the rest go fallow and moved in with his mama at the far edge of Trashtown. Derek’s mama hailed from the Banished; his daddy did not. Mrs. Pollitt was long divorced from her husband and was at first more than happy to house and feed her only child and wash his clothes. I guessed it had gotten old fast, as Derek never seemed to be able to hold on to a job more than a few weeks at a time.
Next to me, Kaz gave me a reassuring smile and took my hand in his. Derek, who was leaning over the seat, keeping an eye on us, guffawed. “Aw, check it out, young love.”
“Leave ’em alone,” Rattler snapped. “ ’At boy’s got pure blood in his veins, which is a damn sight more’n you can say.”
I saw a look of hurt pass across Derek’s dull face, but he shut up.
I hadn’t realized that Rattler knew Kaz was Banished, but it made sense. I was still getting used to the ability to sense other Banished, the curious magnetism that was like a stirring of the cells when they were near. Prairie had explained that it would become second nature before long; Kaz had said that for him it was like yet another layer of vision, on top of the reality that everyone else saw and the pictures that occasionally flashed through his mind.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to be open to it, and sure enough I got a faint sense from Derek, but the connection with Rattler was almost overwhelming, like an invisible thread binding our destinies. It combined fear and familiarity with something else, something inevitable and dark but also part of me.
For my first sixteen years, I had believed that my father was dead, as Gram had wanted me to believe. How many times had I wished for a father to rescue me from Gram’s run-down house, to protect me, to cherish me?
And now, bizarrely, I had what I had wished for. “He won’t hurt us,” I whispered to Kaz.
We turned onto a weed-choked gravel drive leading into a hollow, where the old Pollitt farmhouse was tucked behind a stand of poplar trees.
“Home, sweet home,” Rattler announced, but I was certain I saw Derek flinch as he looked at the old board- framed house, the sagging porch with its toppled flowerpots spilling dirt.
The padlock on the front door was brand-new, gleaming in the beam of Rattler’s flashlight as Derek fumbled in his pocket for the key. Inside, there was a smell of decay overlaid with bleach. Rattler snapped on the lights and I saw that we were standing in a plain square parlor that contained only a couple of straight-backed chairs, a threadbare sofa and a dusty braided rug. Near the door were half a dozen trash bags overflowing with junk.
