Unforsaken (22 page)

Rattler sighed and bunched the old dress in his fist. He would throw out his mother’s things. He would pour Prairie
a glass of water. He would tell her to fetch him a shined apple, rub his knotted-up shoulders, sing him one of the old songs. He would make her sit down. He would make her mind him. He would see himself in her wide green eyes.

Rattler looked at Prairie and he didn’t know what to do.

S
O HE HAD TAKEN HER HOME
.

I sat without speaking, thinking about it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that Derek’s family farm had been blown sky-high, Rattler had nowhere else to take her. It was hard to imagine that his house, the house he had grown up in, which had been his father’s before him, was much worse than the abandoned farmhouse—but I knew enough about Trashtown to know that it could be a lot worse.

“He won’t like that,” I said. “That’s going to make him all the more determined to sell the Seers out to Prentiss, so he can afford something nicer for Prairie.”

“He really … loves her?”

I frowned. “I guess you could say that. I mean, if you can call that love.”

“No, I only meant that if she asked him to help us get Chub out, maybe he’d do it.”

“Get
Rattler
to help us? After he tried to lock us up?”

“It’s just a thought, Hailey. We’re sort of running out of options here.”

“Yeah, but—”

Before I could finish the thought, Dr. Grace appeared, checking her watch and holding a sheaf of papers bound by a large clip. “All right, you two,” she said with forced cheer. “We have a couple of hours before we’re done for the night, and I’d like to use it with you, Kaz. Hailey, you can come along if you like. Who knows, maybe you’ll come in handy.”

“You want to start testing me before Prentiss gets back,” Kaz said.

Dr. Grace blinked. “That’s not—”

“Did they find Prairie?” I demanded.

She pressed her lips together and didn’t answer. “Leave your trays. Someone will clean up. Let’s go.”

“Just answer that one question, and we won’t give you any trouble,” I said. “Come on, it doesn’t make a difference. I’ll find out eventually anyway.”

She hesitated, rubbing her temples. “They reported in, and they’ll be back very soon. I’m sure they will find her soon. And her abductor.”

“ ‘Abductor’?” Kaz demanded incredulously. “Seriously? Uh, isn’t that incredibly hypocritical, since you people kidnapped her first?”

“Look,” Dr. Grace said angrily. “I am tired of being forced to defend things that are outside of my purview. I don’t know what is going on up there and I don’t really want to. I have a job to do and I would like to get started, so if you’ll kindly—”

“There’s a reason you want to start now, before they get back,” Kaz said as he and I followed her out of the dining room. Everyone else had finished eating, and the dining room was empty. “You’re afraid that Prentiss won’t let you. Why is that, Dr. Grace?”

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Dr. Grace snapped in a brittle tone that implied he’d come very close to the truth.

My guess was that she had spent the last several hours thinking about what we had told her. About what the zombies were really going to be used for. Maybe she was having a moral crisis, wondering if she could continue working for a man who committed such atrocities. I wanted to believe that.

And maybe, knowing that she wouldn’t be working here much longer, she wanted to spend as much time as possible with her most promising subjects: Chub, and now Kaz.

As we started up the ornate curving stairs to the upper floor, Kaz touched my arm, and I fell back with him. He silently pointed to the stairs that curved above us, and mouthed the word
now
.

As we neared the landing between floors, Kaz tackled Dr. Grace around the waist. Her feet swung off the floor and she made an “oof” sound as the air was knocked out of her.

“Do it, Hailey,” Kaz whispered. Before Dr. Grace could recover enough to scream, I put my hand to her neck, closed my eyes and felt the swirling dark sensation as my blood rushed and roiled, and then she went limp.

I’d done it—the same thing I had done to the security guard. I hadn’t injured her; I’d just put her into a deep sleep, my touch acting like a powerful magnet that temporarily blunted her conscious mind.

“What now?” I demanded. “They’re going to—”

“Get her keys. Fast.”

He held her under the armpits and started dragging her across the landing toward a door I’d missed earlier, a plain flat door set into the stretch of wall behind the curving staircase. I scrambled through her pockets for the ring of keys I’d seen her use earlier. I found it and then on an impulse reached for the holster attached to her belt and took her gun, too, surprised at its weight in my hand.

“Jackpot,” I whispered as I slipped the gun into my pocket and jammed one of the two keys on the heavy silver ring into the lock. It worked. I guessed it was a master key, one that would open many different rooms in the complex. One of the perks of seniority.

Kaz shouldered the door open and I slipped into the darkness behind him and pulled the door shut, plunging us into total darkness. My knees struck something sharp and hard and I went down, landing on a cold floor.

Then I was still—as still as I could be—listening to the metallic echo of my impact, and our breathing. After what
seemed like a long time, Kaz whispered, “I’m going to set her down, okay?”

“Where are we?”

“Janitor’s closet, I think. I noticed it at lunch, the way the stairway curves. They have cameras at the bottom and the top, but they missed this one spot.”

I reached blindly for the object I’d tripped on, and felt the shape of a wheeled mop bucket. I backed up on my hands and knees until I found the wall behind me. I leaned back against brooms hanging from hooks, pulling my knees up to my chest. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but there was no light, not even a slim crack coming from under the door.

“I’m going to wake her up,” I whispered.

“What? She could make all kinds of noise in here—”

“I got her gun, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“She knows we won’t kill her, since we didn’t when we had the chance. But she doesn’t know how badly we’re willing to hurt her. Let’s take advantage of her doubts.”

I was pretending a bravery I didn’t feel. If we were caught, our few tiny freedoms would be taken away. I’d be a prisoner in my cell twenty-four hours a day. There would be no more visits with Chub. No chances for Kaz to see his mom. And I’d never know if Prairie was safe—unless they found her, in which case they’d drag her here to be a prisoner, like the rest of us.

“Now let’s make her take us to Bryce,” I said.

“I thought you’d want to get Chub.”

“Kaz, we can’t. Not yet. We can’t go for him until we’re ready. Until we’re sure.” As much as I longed to free Chub right away, he would only slow us down.

And if there was a chance to end this for good, it lay with Bryce. I longed to see Chub, to hug him and kiss his soft downy cheeks, but we had to fix this first.

Or die trying
.

The thought flashed through my mind before I could stop it. We were at a point of no return, having taken a hostage. In the past the staff hadn’t shot to kill, because we were too valuable. They might still spare my life, because my healing gift was too rare for them to risk losing. But Kaz … no one knew the extent of his gift but me. There was no reason for the guards to let him live if we got into a firefight.

“This has to work,” I whispered as I reached for Kaz. We squeezed each other’s hands in the dark, and then he guided my fingers to Dr. Grace’s neck and pressed them against her skin.

The thing I did, when I closed my eyes and emptied my mind, was the opposite of what I’d done before. The swirl was the same, the rushing blood, the voices, but I reversed the power of my touch, willed the stilled soul of Dr. Grace to awaken.

I felt her stir and then struggle to sit up.

“Where—what—”

I fumbled for the gun in my pocket. It was a good fit, heavy and smooth and warm from my body. I pressed the
barrel against Dr. Grace’s neck, careful not to touch the trigger. I would not—could not—shoot her.

“This is your gun,” I whispered. “You are here with me and Kaz and in a moment we are going to open the door and you are going to take us to see Bryce.”

“Who?” Dr. Grace asked, and I realized she was thinking fast.

“Nice try, but I know you know who I mean,” I said. “Bryce Safian. I know he’s here. I saw him on the monitors.”

“I don’t—”

I jabbed a little harder against her neck with the barrel of the gun. “I don’t have a lot of patience right now.”

“Make it look natural,” Kaz said. “Lead us directly to him. Don’t stop and don’t talk to anyone. I’ll keep the gun hidden, but I won’t hesitate to shoot you this time.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Dr. Grace said. “If you shoot me, you’ll be dead in minutes.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m way too valuable to them.”

“And I’m a damn good shot,” Kaz said. Another lie, but he made it sound plausible. “I’ll take out as many as I can before I go down. Who knows? We might even get to the exit. You willing to take that chance?”

There was a silence while we waited for Dr. Grace to think it through.

“I’ll open the door now,” I said. “Remember, straight to Safian. If it makes you feel better, think about the fact that if we succeed, you’ll be free to go find some nice legitimate lab somewhere and do your little experiments in peace.”

And then I took a deep breath and felt for the doorknob, and we stood blinking in the bright sun. There was no one in sight. I handed the gun to Kaz and gave Dr. Grace a gentle shove.

The walk to Bryce’s room was uneventful. A couple of people passed us, but one was talking angrily into his phone and the other was so distracted by a printout he was carrying that he barely acknowledged us.

The longer Prentiss was gone, the more the place was falling apart.

When Dr. Grace stopped in front of a door and reached for her keys, she came up with nothing. I palmed her keys from my own pocket, resisting the urge to gloat.

But when I opened the door, one glance inside the room wiped the smirk off my face.

K
AZ HERDED US INSIDE
and pushed the door closed behind us, then took my arm and pulled me close.

I pressed my face against his chest, not wanting to go any closer to the thing in the bed. It was like the scene on the monitor, only real. In person, Bryce’s body was even more horrifying, the scabbed flesh red and black, his face a nightmare of agony.

After a moment I regained my composure and forced myself to step closer. “Can you see us?” I asked, my voice shaking.

Bryce’s eyes rolled in his head, but then they focused on me.

“Do you know who we are?” I asked, swallowing my revulsion and forcing myself to approach the edge of the bed. I was close enough that if I wanted to, I could touch his ruined skin. Instead I worked hard to focus my gaze on his eyes.

“Hehh …,” he said, a terrible, rasping moan issuing from deep in his throat. “Heeehhhlie.”

Hailey.

“That’s right. And Kaz is here too. And Dr. Grace.”

He looked at them, moving his head only the tiniest bit, his body racked with painful convulsions by the effort.

Suddenly the hatred I had stored up against him withered, and I felt only pity.

“Mr. Safian, can you help us destroy the data?”

He stared at me with a question in his eyes, a need, a hunger, and as much as I longed to shrink away from him, into Kaz’s strong arms, I forced myself to stay where I was.

“Yehhhh … ihhh you kihhhh eee.”

I glanced at Kaz, unable to understand Bryce’s words. His lips had split and peeled and burnt away and he could barely move his tongue.

Kaz shrugged, but I saw in his eyes a reflection of my own horror that anyone, even someone as evil as Bryce, was forced to remain alive in this condition. For weeks now, his every moment had been agony; I was surprised that he hadn’t gone insane.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice softening. “I don’t understand. You’ll help us … right? Just nod if you can.”