THIRTEEN
LYRA HALF EXPECTED SHERI TO come running after them, and they were several blocks away before she thought that they were probably safe. They found another park, with several dirty sandboxes and a rusted swing set at its center. But there were trees here, and shade, and they were alone.
She examined the pictures again, one by one. She’d seen romance on the nurses’ televisions, of course, and heard the staff at Haven talk about boyfriends and girlfriends and wives and husbands. She knew about it. But knowing about what humans did, the kinds of relationships they had on TV, was different from seeing and holding proof of this. Dr. Saperstein had struck her not so much as human but as some bloodless stone deity come to life. She had never once seen him smile. True, he wasn’t smiling in these pictures, either, but he was dressed in T-shirts and striped shorts and a baseball hat, like he could have been anybody. This made him more frightening to her, not less. She thought of the snakes at Haven that left their long, golden skins on the ground, brittle and husk-like.
Nurse Em was hardly recognizable. She looked so happy. Lyra thought again of the last time she’d seen her—sobbing into Dr. O’Donnell’s arms. And she had killed herself, using a rope instead of a knife, as Pepper had.
What had happened?
Sheri had mentioned men in suits visiting Nurse Em before she died. Was Dr. Saperstein one of them? Before looking at the photographs, Lyra had never seen him in anything but a lab coat.
She unfolded the list. 72 leaned over her. He smelled sweet, as if he was sweating soap. “What does it say?” he asked impatiently, and she had the sudden, ridiculous urge to take his hand, to tuck herself into the space between his arm and shoulder, as Nurse Em and Dr. Saperstein were doing in the picture.
She read instead thirty-four names—all names she didn’t know, nobody she recognized from Haven—in alphabetical order. Donald Bartlett. Caroline Ciao. Brandy-Nicole Harliss. She stopped. That name seemed somehow familiar, and yet she couldn’t think why. But rereading it gave her the weirdest sensation, like when the doctors used to bang her on the knee to test her reflexes and she would see her body jerk. Like something inside of her was stirring.
The second piece of paper, Lyra had trouble deciphering at first. It wasn’t a list, but a full page of writing, and it picked up in the middle of a sentence. As Lyra began to read, she had the impression that Nurse Em was talking to her, to an invisible other body that existed beyond the page.
. . . eggs on my car, it began. Lyra read the phrase several times, trying to make sense of it, before she decided there must have been a first sheet that had gotten lost. She kept reading, and both because it was easier for her to spell the words out and 72 was getting impatient, she read slowly, out loud.
“‘Mark tells me not to worry so much. I know they’re kooks’”—Lyra stumbled a little over the word, since she’d never heard it—“‘but they aren’t that far off. Someone stopped me the other day after I caught the ferry. They’re raising zombies, aren’t they? she said. A normal woman. Someone you’d see at the grocery store.” She continued reading.
It gave me chills, Ellen. I felt for a second as if she knew. Is it really so different, after all?
I tell you, I never thought I’d miss Philadelphia. I don’t miss the winters, that’s for sure. But I miss you, Elbow, and I miss how simple things felt back then. I even miss that shitty apartment we found through Drexel—remember?—and that stupid ex-boyfriend of yours who used to throw cans at your window. Ben? Sometimes I even miss our coursework (!!). At least I felt like we were on the right path.
I know what you’ll say. It’s the same thing Mark says. And I believe in the science, I do. If a parent loses a child . . . well, to have that child back . . . Who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t try? When I think of people like Geoffrey Ives . . . All the money in the world and a dead baby that he couldn’t save and all he wants is to make it better. To undo it.
But is it right? Mark thinks so. But I don’t know. I can’t decide. Dr. Haven wants to keep the NIH out of our hair, so he stays clear of dealing with the clinics, even though they’ve got fetal tissue they’ll sell off for just the transportation fee. But already the funds are running thin. I don’t think there’s any way we’ll last unless we get federal support, but if good old George W. outlaws spending on the research. . . .
Then there’s the question of Dr. Haven. Ever since he went into AA, he’s been changing. Mark worries he’ll shut down the program, shut down the whole institution. He doesn’t seem to be sure, at least not anymore, and if the donors’ money dries up, we’ll have to go in a totally new direction. Mark thinks there might be other ways, military research, cures—
The writing stopped. Lyra flipped over the page, but there was nothing more. She’d either been interrupted or the rest of what she’d said had been lost. Lyra also assumed from the reference to an Ellen, a name, that Nurse Em must have been intending the message for someone specific. She had never passed it on. But she’d felt it was important enough to hide—to hide well—and to deliver to someone before she died.
Was she hoping Sheri would find it?
What was Nurse Em hoping she’d see?
It was a puzzle. It was data. It was a code, like DNA was.
All codes could be read, if you only knew the key.
For a long minute, she and 72 stood there in silence, in the shadow of a construction of wood and rope and plastic whose purpose she didn’t know. Codes everywhere. That was the problem with the outside world, the human world. The whole thing was made up of puzzles, of a language she didn’t quite speak.
“What does it mean?” 72 asked finally, and she realized that that was the question: about standing in the park, about him and his moods and the way he sometimes rubbed the back of his neck as if something was bothering him there, about their escape and the fact that they were dying anyway but she didn’t feel like she was dying. She didn’t feel like dying.
What does it mean?
She had never asked that question.
She forced herself to reread, squinting, as if she could squeeze more meaning from the letters that way. She knew that Haven made replicas from human tissue, and she knew, of course, that it must have come from humans, people. She knew there were hospitals and clinics that did business with Haven, although she didn’t know how she knew this, exactly. It was just a fact of life, like the cots and the Stew Pot and failure to thrive.
And she knew what zombies were. The nurses had talked about them, about several zombie movies and how scary they were. Lyra explained what they were to 72 but he, too, had heard of them. The human world—or at least some of it—had penetrated Haven.
“Read it out loud again,” he said, and she did, conscious all the time of the sun on the back of her neck and 72 and his smell and that question—what does it mean?—all of it shimmering momentarily and so present and also so insubstantial, like something on fire, hot and at the same time burning into nonexistence.
She took her time with the sentences she thought were most important.
. . . he stays clear of dealing with the clinics, even though they’ve got fetal tissue they’ll sell off for just the transportation fee . . .
When I think of people like Geoffrey Ives . . .
All the money in the world and a dead baby that he couldn’t save . . .
And finally she understood.
“Dead children,” Lyra said. Zombies. Is it so different? “They were making replicas from dead children.” Was that how she’d been made? From the tissue of a child who’d been loved, grieved over, and lost? It shouldn’t have made a difference and yet it did, somehow. It wasn’t even the fact that the children had died as much as the fact that at one time they’d been cared for.
And yet the process of making their doubles—the science of it—had turned Lyra and the other replicas into something different. She remembered how sometimes the voices of the protesters had carried over on the wind, across the miles of snaggletooth
ed marshes. Monsters, they’d shouted.
But for the first time Lyra felt not shame, but anger. She hadn’t asked to be made. She’d been brought into the world a monster and then hated for it, and it wasn’t her fault, and there was no meaning behind that.
None at all.
“It doesn’t make sense,” 72 said. “Why kill us, then?”
“Something changed,” Lyra said. She could hardly remember Dr. Haven. She may have seen him once or twice. She could vividly recall his face, but then again she’d seen pictures of him her whole life: Dr. Haven in oils staring down at them from the framed painting at the end of the mess hall, Dr. Haven in black and white, pictured squinting into the sun in front of G-Wing.
They stood there again in silence. Had Lyra been intended originally for the human parents of a child who had died? But if so, why had they never come for her? Maybe they had, but found the substitute terrible.
Maybe they hadn’t been able to stomach looking at her—the flimsy substitute for the girl they’d loved and had to grieve.
“She mentions a cure,” 72 said quietly. “Maybe you were right. Maybe she did know something that could help us.”
“Well, she’s dead now,” Lyra said. Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking into a cup.
“Lyra.” 72 touched her elbow, and she pulled away from him. His touch burned, physically burned, although she knew that was impossible. His skin was no hotter than anyone else’s. She turned away from him, blinking hard, and for a second, looking out across the park and to the houses in the distance—all those parents, families, moms and dads—she transformed the afternoon sun striking the windows into white flame, and imagined burning the whole world down, just like they’d burned down Haven.
“On the bus you asked me why the cuts,” 72 said. This surprised her, and she momentarily forgot her anger and turned back to look at him. His skin in the light looked like something edible, coffee and milk. “When I was younger I didn’t understand what I was. If I was.”
Lyra didn’t have to say anything to show she understood. She had wondered the same thing. She had confused it for I, had pinched number 25 to see if she herself would feel it, because she didn’t understand where she ended and the herd began.
“I started thinking maybe I wasn’t real. And then I started worrying that I wasn’t, that I was disappearing. I used to . . .” He swallowed and rubbed his forehead, and Lyra realized with a sudden thrill she knew what he was feeling: he was scared. She had read him.
“It’s okay,” she said automatically.
“I got hold of one of the doctor’s scalpels once,” he said, in a sudden rush. “I kept it in my mattress, took out some of the stuffing so that no one would find it.” Lyra thought of the hole in Ursa Major’s mattress, and all the things they’d found stashed inside of it. She thought, too, of how Ursa had just stood there and screamed while her mattress was emptied—one high, shrill note, like the cresting of an alarm. “I used to have to check. I felt better when I saw the blood. I knew I was still alive, then.” He raised his eyes to hers, and in her chest she had a lifting, swooping sensation, as if something heavy had come loose. “You wanted to know. So I’m telling you.”
She didn’t know what to say. So she said, “Thank you.” She reached out and moved her finger from his elbow all the way to his wrist, over the ridge of his scars, to show him it was okay, and that she understood. She could feel him watching her. She could feel him, everywhere he was, as if he was distorting the air, making it heavier.
She had never felt so much in her life.
“We’ll go back,” 72 said, so quietly she nearly missed it.
“Back?” she repeated. He was standing so close she was suddenly afraid and took a step away from him.
“The girl, Gemma. And Jake.” He hesitated. “You were right all along. They might be able to help. They know about Haven. Maybe they’ll know about a cure, too.”
“But . . .” She shook her head. “You said you didn’t trust them.”
“I don’t,” he said simply. “But I don’t trust anyone.”
“Even me?” Lyra asked.
Something changed in his eyes. “You’re different,” he said, in a softer voice.
“Why?” She was aware of how close they were, and of the stillness of the afternoon, all the trees bound and silent.
He almost smiled. He reached up. He pressed a thumb to her lower lip. His skin tasted like salt. “Because we’re the same.”
Lyra knew they’d never be able to backtrack. They’d left the house in the middle of the night and they’d hardly been paying attention—they’d been thinking of nothing but escape—and she could remember no special feature of the house to which they’d been taken, nothing to distinguish it from its neighbors.
Fortunately, 72 remembered that Jake had written down his address and phone number. They couldn’t call—72 had stolen Jake’s phone, and besides, Lyra had never made a call before and, though she had often seen the nurses talking on their cell phones, wasn’t sure she knew how to do it—and so they started the process again of asking strangers how to get to 1211 Route 12, Little Waller, Florida.
A woman with hair frosted a vague orange color directed them to a car rental agency, but almost as soon as they entered, the man behind the counter began asking for licenses and credit cards and other things neither one of them had. Lyra got flustered again, upsetting a small display of maps with her elbow so the maps went fanning out across the counter. 72 got angry. He accused the man of shouting.
“I barely raised my voice,” the man said. “You some kinda freak or something?”
Quickly, 72 reached for his pocket, and Lyra was worried he was going for his knife. The man must have been worried, too, because he stumbled backward, toppling his chair. But instead 72 just put the paper with Jake’s address onto the desk.
“You have a map,” he said. His voice was low and tight, as if the words were bound together with wire. “Show us how to get here. Please.”
The man reached for a map slowly, keeping his eyes on 72. A TV in the corner reeled off the sound of an audience laughing, but otherwise it was so quiet that Lyra could hear the man’s lungs, like something wet caught in his chest as he took a red pen, pointed out the different bus routes they could take to reach Little Waller, less than an hour away. Lyra noticed his hand was shaking ever so slightly—and for the first time the idea of being a freak, of being a monster, made her feel not ashamed but powerful.
There were only two other passengers on the bus, including a man wearing several different layers of clothing who smelled like sweat and urine. Lyra and 72 took a seat at the very back. They sat so close their thighs and knees touched, and Lyra felt the warmth coming through the window like the gentle pressure of a hand. As the bus passed the water park, Lyra pressed her nose to the window, eager again for the sight of all those real human families. But the sun was hard in her eyes and she could see nothing but blurred, indistinct figures.
Then they were on the highway again, passing long stretches of vivid green space where there were no towns or houses, just trees crowning the roads, just growth and dark spaces.
72 was quiet for so long, leaning back with his eyes closed, she thought he’d fallen asleep. But then he turned to face her. The sunlight fell across his skin and made it seem to glow. When he spoke, she felt his breath on her ear and in her hair. “Can I ask you a question about your story?” he said. “About the little prince, and the rose?”
“Okay.” Lyra took a breath. She again had a sense of his whole body extended there in space, the miracle of all those interwoven molecules that kept him together.
His eyes were dark, and she could see herself inside of them. “You said the Little Prince lived on Planet B-612,” he said. “You pointed it out to me.” He bit his lip and she had the strangest desire to bite it too, to feel his lips with her mouth. “But all the stars look the same. So how do you know?”
“Not if you look closely,” she
said. Her body was bright hot, burning. It was his breath on her shoulder and the feel of him next to her in the afternoon sun. “That’s what the Little Prince found too, on his travels. He thought his rose was the only rose in the whole universe at first. But then he came down to earth and found a garden of them.”
72 shifted and their knees touched again. The sun made his eyes dazzle, and the rest of the world was disappearing. “What happened then?”
She tried to remember the rest of the story. It was hard to concentrate with him so close. She kept imagining his skin under his clothing, and beneath his skin, his organs and ribs and the blood alive in his veins, kept thinking of this miracle, that he should exist, that they both should, instead of just being empty space. But what came to her was Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, and the way she’d leaned forward to read this part of the book, her dirty-blond hair falling out from where it was tucked behind her ears.
“He was very sad,” Lyra said slowly. “He thought the rose had tricked him. She wasn’t special. She was just like thousands of other roses. Identical to them,” she added.
“A replica,” 72 said.
“Exactly,” Lyra said, although it was the first time she’d made the connection, and understood, truly understood, why Dr. O’Donnell had given her that particular book. “Just like a replica. Only . . .”
“What?”
“Only the Little Prince realized his rose was special. She was the only one in the universe. Because he’d cared for her, and talked with her, and protected her from caterpillars. She was his rose. And that made her more special than all the other roses in the universe combined.” Lyra found the sun was painful and blinked. She was crying. She turned away and brought a hand to her face quickly, hoping 72 wouldn’t see.
But he caught her hand. And before she could ask what he was doing, before she could even be afraid, her body responded. It knew what to do. It sensed a question and answered for her, so she found herself turning to face him, placing her hand against his face so the warmth of him spread through her fingers. They sat there, looking at each other, on a bus suspended in space. She knew it was impossible, but she thought her heart stopped beating completely.