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home early tonight.”
    I felt tears well up in my eyes. She was always like this—so patient with me, so understanding. Sometimes I thought it made things worse. “Aren’t you mad?”
    She gave me a smile tinged with sadness. She was still as beautiful as the first time I’d seen her, but now she lookedtired most of the time. I knew she wasn’t sleeping very well. “How could I be mad? You helped that girl, maybe saved her life. That’s what the gift is for. You can’t turn your back on it—neither of us can.”
    That might have been true, but it seemed like I was the only one who had been forced to heal lately. Prairie had healed Chub when he’d been hit by a stray bullet the night Gram was killed, but that was before I understood what I could do. Since then, it had been me, always me , who’d healed, who’d laid on hands and said the ancient words.
    If Prairie had made her peace with the gift, why wasn’t she the one who was called to use it? It didn’t seem fair. I was the one who was in high school, the one who was under constant scrutiny, the one who had to find a way to fit in. Prairie was in her element in the lab, doing the work she loved, and I doubted that any of the geeks she worked with would notice if she had to step out of the office now and then to help the occasional accident victim or whatever.
    Now wasn’t the time to worry about it, though. I topped off Prairie’s coffee for the road, and she and Chub left for the day. I’d been so caught up in my apology that I’d forgotten to mention Chub’s problem at school, and I hoped the teacher would bring it up herself. If not, I’d tell Prairie tonight when she and Chub got home. Still, after I kissed Chub goodbye and gave Prairie a hug, I felt guilty and restless and frustrated all at once.
*    *    *
    But it was Wednesday, the best day of the week—because on Wednesdays, I got to talk to Kaz.
    This was another thing I kept from Prairie. And though I felt guilty about it, I didn’t feel guilty enough to stop. I guess Kaz felt the same way, because his mom didn’t know about our calls either.
    Kaz was my boyfriend. Sort of. His mom, Anna, and Prairie had been friends for years, since he was a baby. Anna and Kaz had helped us a few months earlier, taking us in when we were on the run, and standing by us as things got more and more dangerous.
    Somewhere along the way, Kaz and I had become more than friends. When Prairie and Chub and I left Chicago, Prairie and Anna told me and Kaz that they were sorry that we wouldn’t be able to stay in touch, but we had to leave everything behind, including everyone we had ever known. No one from our old lives could know where we were.
    Kaz and I had obeyed part of the rule: I’d never told him where we’d moved, and he hadn’t asked. For all he knew, we were living in California or in Canada or even at the North Pole. But before I left, we’d figured out a way to talk so no one would know.
    I couldn’t call him at home. We had learned to plan for the worst at all times—which meant we had to assume that his house was being watched, that the phone lines were tapped. We couldn’t even use cell phones, because they could be tracked.
    We could have used our emergency phones, the prepaid cell phones each of us—me, Prairie, Anna, and Kaz—carried with us, the ones that were to be used only if the unthinkable happened. But Prairie checked the phones once a week and replaced them once a month. If I used mine, she’d know.
    So that was out.
    But Kaz had a summer job at the public library branch near their house, and on Wednesday afternoons, his task was to prepare the new children’s books to go into circulation. That meant he had to enter them into the system and cover them with special protective bindings. It usually took a couple of hours, and he worked in the office that belonged to one of the reference librarians, because she didn’t come in on Wednesdays.
    And every Wednesday, I called