Sophie Littlefield - Banished

“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 shoved things out of the way, pushing desks aside to reach the walls. The acrid smell of chemicals filled the air, stinging my eyes and making me cough, and adrenaline pumped through my veins.

I thought I heard something-a slam, a muffled cry-from the corridor Prairie had entered. Kaz heard it too, and we both went still, looking at each other and trying to listen over the hum of the equipment. Then we were both running toward the source of the sounds.

We were barely into the hallway when there was a crashing of metal on wood and a heavy door rebounded off the walls a few feet in front of us.

Prairie stumbled into the hallway, followed by someone else.

Bryce Safian-it had to be. A well-built man with close-cut brown hair and a starched button-down shirt was holding a gun jammed against Prairie’s back. Kaz reacted before I could absorb the scene-he rushed forward and slammed between Bryce and Prairie, knocking her to the floor. He grabbed for the gun and it went off, and a split second later he grabbed one hand with the other, wincing, blood dripping between his fingers. He’d been shot in the hand, and now Bryce had the gun aimed straight at his heart. Kaz backed up slowly as Prairie crawled out of the way and got to her feet.

The man’s eyes met mine, narrowed, and then relaxed. He smiled, a cruel and calculating expression that wasn’t all that different from the way Gram used to look when she thought Dun or one of her other customers had said something funny.

“You must be Hailey. I’m Bryce Safian. Please call me Bryce.” His smile grew wider. “It’s a good thing I decided to come check on things in the lab when I heard that my employees had managed to let you slip away yet again. You should be congratulated on your ingenuity. Remarkable, really.”

“Your hand…,” I choked out, watching Kaz bleed onto the floor.

“Don’t worry about him,” Bryce said dismissively. “He’s not worth your time. You know, Hailey, if things had gone differently, I might have been your Uncle Bryce.”

I looked from him to Prairie. I had never seen her look so angry.

Bryce followed the direction of my gaze. “Yes, that’s right. I had been thinking of proposing to your aunt. That is, until she made it clear that we had profound, ah, you might say, fundamental character differences.”

“You have no character,” Prairie spat. “You have no shame. You’re-you’re inhuman.”

Bryce laughed, a rich and cultured sound. “That’s pretty funny, coming from you, darling. Seems like it might be you that deserves that title. Did you know,” he said conversationally, tipping his head to me, “that your aunt has chromosomal abnormalities so severe that technically she shouldn’t even be alive in any condition known to science?

“Oh dear,” he added, creasing his forehead and pretending to be sorry. “I shouldn’t have said that, seeing as you-and your young friend here too, I take it-have the same… deficiencies.”

Kaz raised his bloody hands as though he was going to go after Bryce again, but Bryce swung the gun between me and Prairie and back at Kaz. His gun hand was steady.

“Don’t get any bright ideas,” he said to me. “You all bleed regular blood-and I should know, considering all the testing we’ve done here. Presumably, losing enough of it will kill you just like it would any normal human. And I know you can’t heal this one without touching him.”

I could feel the rushing that signaled the need to heal. I couldn’t take my eyes off Kaz’s shredded hand. My fingertips pulsed with the compulsion to touch him, to find the wound and let my energy flow to it. But I couldn’t reach him. Bryce would never let me get to him. And without touching, I couldn’t heal. Milla, Rascal, Chub… I’d had to lay my hands on them to feel the energy from my fingers go into their bodies.