Sophie Littlefield - Unforsaken

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s me who heals him.”

“You! But why? Why would you-”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But it’s me. I… just know it.”

What I didn’t say was that ever since I’d seen Bryce on the monitors, I had felt it stirring inside, the desire-the need-to heal. The words were a whispered chorus under my thoughts, and my fingers tingled and twitched with the longing to touch his ravaged body.

“But if you heal him, Prentiss’ll have everything he needs to re-create the lab, and-”

“No, I think I need to heal him so that he can help us destroy the backups,” I said. “Did you see anything that would help us find where in the complex they’re keeping him? Or how we might be able to bust him out?”

Kaz was silent for a moment, concentrating. “I don’t know. I mean, it was just Bryce, and he was fading away. He had… like, this expression, sort of… manic, you know? Kind of crazed. What about what you saw on the monitor? Anything about the room that would tell you where it was?”

I closed my eyes and concentrated, remembering. All that equipment… the wires and tubes snaking from his destroyed body, the screens blipping and blinking. But most of all I remembered the pure agony on what was left of his face.

“Nothing,” I whispered.

“It’s okay… I might have an idea. Remember when we went to Bryce’s lab? You went first, to create a distraction?”

“Yeah, and then you and Prairie took off down the hall and-”

“Yeah, but before that. The guard. What was his name?… Maynard.”

“Maynard,” I repeated, remembering.

He had been a heavyset guy in his late fifties, sitting behind a desk, sleepily reading a newspaper. I’d pretended to be upset, told him there’d been an accident, begged him to come outside and see-so Kaz and Prairie could sneak past him into the lab-but he wouldn’t listen. He had wanted to make some calls. I remembered his soft-palmed hand reaching for the phone, remembered my panic as I’d seen our entire scheme going down the drain, and then I’d reached across the desk, almost without thinking, and my hand had settled on the soft warm skin of his neck and I’d-“I remember.”

“Good. Because you have to do it one more time.”

He looked troubled, his eyes avoiding my gaze. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me.

“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me. I need to know. I can’t do this unless I know everything.”

“There was… That wasn’t the only vision I had.”

My throat went dry with fear. The vision of Bryce had been bad enough. What more could he have seen? “What was it?”

“Well, it was a place. A little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, full of run-down houses. There were two streets that crossed in the middle of the neighborhood; there were dogs lying in the street, kids fighting over nothing. Old cars up on blocks, boarded-up windows.”

“That’s Trashtown,” I murmured.

“Rattler was there. And he had Prairie with him.”

RATTLER HUNG HIS HEAD with shame, because the worn old dress was no thing worthy of Prairie. But with all her pretty new clothes burned up at the Pollitt house, this dress was all he had to offer, his dead mama’s Sunday dress that she wore until she quit getting dressed at all. He should have got shut of it. Should have burnt up all his mama’s things when she died. Instead he’d scrubbed the house down to raw wood-floors, walls, ceilings-he’d scrubbed away the coughing and moaning of her last months and he’d scrubbed away the memories of her face swoll up from his daddy’s fist and he’d scrubbed away every long-ago morning she turned him out to run wild through Trashtown so she could take her cure.

The box of her things stayed sealed up neat in the closet upstairs. Rattler would drive it to the dump. He would get new clothes for Prairie; her new clothes would hang in the closet just so. Prairie would do woman things to the house, curtains and fancy soap and such. That was not a job for Rattler, but he’d scrubbed until the skin rubbed off his knuckles and he’d split and stacked the wood and beat the rugs and caned the chairs and rubbed the dust from the lamps.

The shirt Prairie wore was too hot for June and she didn’t have nothing else with her. Prairie had come to him with nothing and that was as it should be. Before long, Prairie would shed the city like a king snake sheds its skin; her hair would get long and her green eyes would grow bright again for him.

“Put it on, girl,” Rattler said roughly, holding the worn dress out to her. He hated to see her standing so straight and still in his kitchen in the warm evening, sweat on her brow, her shirt buttoned up to her neck. He would buy a fan. He would buy a fan for every window. “Ain’t much but it’ll keep you cool. We’ll go to town soon and git you things.”

“I don’t need anything,” she said, not looking at him. Crazy talk. This was her home now; she should be looking at her new cups and plates and her new silver chest that had been his mama’s. She should be thinking where did she want the chairs, the dish drainer, the broom. She didn’t look at any of her new things. Didn’t notice the flowers in the jar on the table, the cloth from so long ago Rattler didn’t know who had stitched it, which he took out of the hutch just for her.

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.

SO 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.”