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the way he saw it, and that was to build the Banished line back up the way it was meant to be. And he was meant to do it with Prairie. It made him near upon insane that she couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand how it was meant to be between them—but he’d make her see. This time he’d make her see.
    But first he had to get her back. And he couldn’t do it alone. The failure in Chicago—his dead eye, which his daughter had stabbed before she and Prairie escaped, throbbed in fury at the thought—that failure filled him with shame and determination, but it also served him notice that Prairie and the girl had more backbone than he’d expected. More power.
    The thought excited him even as it angered him.
    “I said git up,” Rattler said a bit louder, giving Derek’s shoulder a good shove. Derek coughed, his breath foul with whiskey and cigarette smoke and rot.
    “Wha … what? What do—Oh. Rattler.” Derek put a hand to his face, squeezing the bridge of his nose with grimy fingers. He squinted and moaned faintly, then dragged himself up to a sitting position and raked his hands through hishair, body odor wafting from his undershirt as the bedclothes fell away. “What you want, anyhow?”
    Rattler fingered the card in his pocket, the card he’d fished out of the wallet of one of the men who’d died in the ambush on his house. It had a name —Prentiss —and a phone number, written in blue ink. “Got a job.”
    Rattler saw Derek’s jeans lying in a heap next to battered work boots on the floor. He picked them up and tossed them to Derek, letting the heavy metal buckle strike him in his soft gut.
    “What kinda job?”
    “The kind where you might could make some serious cash.”
    “How much?” Derek asked automatically as he kicked the sheets away so he could pull on his jeans.
    “Five hunnert,” Rattler said without thinking. It was what was left of the money he’d had in his pocket for most of a month, the money Mr. Chicago had given him for information. Too bad he hadn’t held out for more; now Mr. Chicago was burnt up dead and a lot of that cash had gone to the doctor—he’d said he was a doctor, anyway—who had swabbed and cleaned and stitched Rattler’s stabbed eye in a filthy South Side apartment.
    Damn irony: Prairie could have fixed him faster, and for free.
    Only this way, with his eye dead to the outside world, it seemed to have developed an inner life of its own. And Rattler wasn’t sure but what it might be better like this.
    He caught Derek staring while he pulled on a wadded-up work shirt. “That hurtin’ you still?”
    “No.”
    “Figure you can still drive an’ all, with just the one eye?”
    “Got here, didn’t I?” Rattler put a little extra menace in his voice and that shut Derek up.
    While he waited for Derek to piss and brush his teeth and gather up his guns, Rattler swiped a slingshot off a bookshelf, climbed the basement stairs and let himself out the front door of Mrs. Pollitt’s house, ignoring her baleful glare as she lurked in a doorway in her flowery housedress. He picked rocks out of the gravel and winged them at a row of mailboxes across the drive. When a red bird swooped out from the branches of a tall oak, he remembered how his mama used to call them Mr. Robin Red Breast, even as his stone found its mark and the bird fell dead out of the sky without a sound and hit the ground in a burst of crimson feathers.

“H OW DID YOU GET AWAY ?”
    Kaz and I sat on a high-backed wooden bench that gave us a little privacy in the middle of all the early-evening commuters, and he put his arm around me and pulled me close. It felt so good to be with him again, his chin resting on my forehead, my face pressed against his neck as I inhaled his scent of soap and cotton.
    He let me go reluctantly. “There wasn’t a whole lot they could do. I mean, we were in Crystal’s office, there were people passing by.… They, uh, had a gun on me at first, but honestly they seemed a