Beneath it, Cassiopeia was lying on her back, her face screwed up in pain. Her left leg was twisted at the knee and a gash on her thigh had soaked her pants through with blood. But she was alive. Lyra knelt and touched Cassiopeia’s face. Cassiopeia opened her eyes.
“Lyra,” she said, or appeared to say. Her voice was so faint Lyra couldn’t hear it.
“Leave it,” 72 said.
“She needs a doctor,” Lyra said, bringing a hand to Cassiopeia’s back and helping her sit up. Her hand came away wet and dark with blood. It wasn’t just her leg that was injured.
“There are no more doctors. There’s no more Haven. It’s done,” 72 said. Lyra felt a liquid panic, as if her lungs were slowly filling with water, like in dreams where she was in the ocean and couldn’t find her way to the surface.
There was no world without Haven. Haven was the world.
And now the world was burning: the flames had spread to C-Wing and waves of heat reached them even from a distance. The guards were still shouting—doctors were crawling on their hands and knees in the dirt—there were replicas in a line, kneeling, hands behind their heads, pinned in place by the guards with their guns—Lyra couldn’t understand any of it.
She helped Cassiopeia to her feet. Cassiopeia was sweating and smelled terrible. She had to lean on Lyra heavily and go half shuffling, half hopping across the yard. In the middle of it all Lyra thought how strange it was to be so physically close to someone. She and Cassiopeia had never touched except by accident, when they were washing up at the same sink, and even when they played with the newest crops, to touch and tickle them, it was because they had to. Nurse Em had put an arm around Lyra once, but Lyra couldn’t remember why, only that for days afterward she had touched her own shoulder, trying to make it tingle. Even Dr. O’Donnell had never done more than touch Lyra’s forehead when she had a fever. This felt like being with Squeezeme, but more, bigger. She wanted to cry.
The guard tower was empty, the post abandoned. The smell of rotten fish and sea kelp was almost overwhelming, as if the smoke had underscored and sharpened it. Lyra at last saw where they were heading: almost directly below the guard tower was an area where the fence had been damaged, yanked out of the ground by winds or by one of the wild hogs that still roamed the island at night.
Seeing that 72 meant to go beneath it, she stopped again, dizzy with the heat and the noise and the harsh animal sounds of screaming. Cassiopeia’s breath sounded as if it was being sucked in and out of an air pump, and Lyra could feel Cassiopeia’s heart beating hard through her back and ribs, blood racing around to all those fragile veins. But there was a hole somewhere, a puncture. Her shirt was heavy and warm with blood.
Help. She thought the word to no one and to everyone. She knew that people believed in a God who would help them, but God hated the replicas and didn’t care whether they lived or died because he hadn’t made them. Dr. Saperstein had made them. He was their God. Help. She wanted nothing but to return to D-Wing, to lie down in the coolness of the dormitory and pretend nothing had happened.
“If you stay here, you’ll die,” 72 said, as if he knew what she was thinking. But he’d released her and no longer seemed to care whether she followed him or not. He went first, sliding on his back feetfirst underneath the gap.
A smell reached her—something sweet and hot she recognized from the Funeral Home as the smell of blood. She looked back at the institute, steadying Cassiopeia on her feet. The dormitories were gone. The peaked roof of A-Wing, normally visible, was gone. In its place were nothing but rolling storm clouds of smoke, and spitting angry fire.
It took forever to get Cassiopeia beneath the gap. Her eyes were closed and even though her skin was hot, she was shivering so badly Lyra could barely keep ahold of her. Lyra had to repeat her name several times, and then her number, before she responded. She was passing in and out of sleep. Finally 72 had to bend down and take her by the arms, dragging her roughly free of the fence, her damaged leg twisted awkwardly behind her. She cried out in pain. This, at least, woke her up.
“What’s happening?” she kept repeating, shaking. “What’s happening?”
Lyra was next. But before she could get through the fence, she heard a shout behind her. She’d been spotted. One of the guards, face invisible behind his helmet, was sprinting toward her, and she was temporarily mesmerized by the look of his gun, the enormity of it, all levers and scopes. She’d only seen the guns from a distance and didn’t know why this one should be aimed at her, but for a split second she imagined the bullets screaming almost instantaneously across the distance that separated them, imagined bullets passing through layers of skin.
“Stop!” Now she could hear him. “Stop where you are.”
Instead she dropped to her stomach and slid beneath the gap, shimmying her hips free when for a moment the bottom of the fence snagged on her pants. The guard was still shouting at her to stop but she was out, out and free and once again helping Cassiopeia to her feet. She didn’t know why she was so afraid, but she was. At any second she expected to hear the chitter of bullets on the fence, feel her heart explode sideways, cleaved in two by a bullet.
But the shots didn’t come, although the guard was still shouting, still coming toward them. At that second there was another rocketing blast (the fire had found its way to the storerooms in the basement of B-Wing, stocked with old chemical samples, medications, solutions marked flammable and dangerous), a final explosion that shot a plume of green flame fifty feet into the air and made the ground shudder. Cassiopeia slipped and fell backward in the mud. Lyra stumbled, and 72 caught her. For a few seconds they were inches apart, and she could smell him again, and see the fine dark line around his irises, light contracting his pupils, narrowing them to pinpoints.
From above came hailstones of granite and cement, several of them lobbing over the fence and thudding only a few feet from where they were standing. The guard had dropped to his knees and covered his head, and Lyra saw their chance. Together, she and 72 hauled Cassiopeia to her feet and went with her into the marsh. Lyra wasn’t sure what they were going to do about Cassiopeia. Already she regretted taking her along. But Cassiopeia was number 6. Like Lyra, she was Gen-3, the first successful crop. Lyra had known her for as long as she could remember.
The water was warmer than she had expected, and cloudy with dirt. Banks of waist-high grass grew between stretches of thick mud and tidal pools scummy with dead insects, all of it new and strange to her, words and feelings she didn’t know, sensations that tasted like blood in her mouth and panic reaching up to throttle her. Several years ago, the replicas had been woken by screaming: a man a half-mile from Spruce Island had his leg ripped off at the hip by an alligator before the guards scared it by firing into the air. He was airlifted to a nearby hospital. The nurses had for once allowed them out of their beds to watch the helicopter land with a noise like the giant whirring of insect wings, white grasses flattened by the artificial wind. Once, when she was a child, she’d even seen an alligator sunning itself on the rocky beach on the southernmost tip of the island, not four feet from the fences. She had been amazed by its knobby hide, its elongated snout, the teeth protruding jaggedly from its mouth, and she remembered standing there flooded with sudden shame: God had made that creature, that monster with a taste for blood, and loved it. But he had not made her.
She felt as if they were walking through endless tunnels bound entirely by mud and grass, and couldn’t imagine that 72 knew where he was going, or where he was leading them. Cassiopeia was crying, and only the smoke still lodged in Lyra’s chest, still turning the sun to a dull red ember and smudging away the sky, kept Lyra from crying, too. Haven, gone. They were outside the fence. They were in thin, unbound air, in a world of alligators and humans who hated and despised them. They were running away from safety and Lyra didn’t know why. Only that the guard had come at her with a gun, looking as if he wanted to shoot.
Why had he drawn his gun? The guards were there for thei
r own protection. To keep the outside world out. To keep the replicas safe.
The mosquitoes, at least, had been chased off by the smoke, although no-see-ums were still hovering in swarms over the water, and Lyra got some in her nose and mouth and even beneath her eyelids. From here, the sound of the fire was strangely musical and sounded like the steady roar of a heavy rain. But the sky was green-tinged and terrible, and the ash floated down on them.
Her arms were shaking from trying to keep Cassiopeia on her feet. Even the pillowcase felt impossibly heavy. Cassiopeia was clinging so tightly to her neck, Lyra could hardly breathe. Cassiopeia was passing in and out of consciousness, and Lyra imagined her mind like a series of ever-branching tunnels, like the marshland crisscrossed by fine veins of water, going dark and then light again.
“How much farther?” Speaking hurt.
72 just shook his head. She knew that human men were in general stronger than women and wondered whether the same thing was true of replicas. He looked strong—the muscles of his back and shoulders stood out—though he couldn’t have been eating well since he escaped. She wondered where he’d gotten his food. She wondered why he’d been so desperate to get out, and whether he knew something she didn’t. Or maybe he was just crazy—plenty of replicas had lost their minds before, like how Lilac Springs had lost her mind during her examinations, had forgotten all the numbers she was supposed to remember. There was Pepper, who’d used a knife to open her wrists, and number 220, who’d simply stopped eating, and number 35, who’d started believing she was one of the rats and would only crawl on all fours. Maybe 72 was like that. Maybe he believed he was an animal and should roam free.
She couldn’t go on anymore. Cassiopeia was too heavy. Every breath felt like it was hitching on a giant hook in her chest. She tried to call out to 72 but realized she didn’t have the energy even for that. Instead she struggled with Cassiopeia into the reeds, finding footing on the muddy banks that stretched like fingers through the water, until the ground solidified and she could sit. 72 had to double back when he realized she was no longer behind him.
“We aren’t safe here,” 72 said. He didn’t sound like he’d lost his mind. She noticed how dark his eyes were, so they appeared to absorb light instead of reflecting it. “I should leave you,” he said after a minute.
“So leave,” she said.
But he didn’t. He began forcing his way through the reeds, snapping them in half with his hands when they resisted too strongly. The grass was so high and thick here it cut the sky into pieces. “Lie down,” he instructed her, and she did. Cassiopeia was already stretched out in the mud, lips blue, eyes closed, and that sick animal smell coming off her, like the smell in the Funeral Home that no amount of detergent and bleach could conceal. Lyra could see now the glint of something metal wedged in her back, lodged deep. The muscle was visible, raw and pulsing with blood. Instinctively she brought a hand to the wound, but Cassiopeia cried out as if she’d been scalded and Lyra pulled away, her hand wet with Cassiopeia’s blood. She didn’t know how to make the bleeding stop. She realized she didn’t know how to do anything here, in this unbound outside world. She’d never eaten except in the mess hall. She’d never slept without a nurse ordering lights out. She would never survive—why had she followed the male? But someone would come for her. Someone must. One of the doctors would find her and they would be saved. This was all a mistake, a terrible mistake.
Lyra squeezed her eyes shut and saw tiny explosions, silhouettes of flame drifting above Haven. She opened her eyes again. Cassiopeia moaned, and Lyra touched her forehead, as Dr. O’Donnell had once done for her. Thinking of Dr. O’Donnell made her breath hitch in her chest. There was no explanation for that feeling either—none that she knew of, anyway.
Cassiopeia moaned again.
“Shhh,” Lyra said. “It’s all right.”
“It’s going to die,” 72 said flatly. Luckily, Cassiopeia didn’t hear, or if she did, she was too sick to react.
“It’s a she,” Lyra said.
“She’s going to die, then.”
“Someone will come for us.”
“She’ll die that way, too. But slower.”
“Stop,” she told him, and he shrugged and turned away. She moved a little closer to Cassiopeia. “Want to hear a story?” she whispered. Cassiopeia didn’t answer, but Lyra charged on anyway. “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Matilda. She was really smart. Smarter than either of her parents, who were awful.” Matilda was one of the first long books that Dr. O’Donnell had ever read to her. She closed her eyes again and made herself focus. Once again she saw fire, but she forced the smoke into the shape of different letters, into words floating in the sky. Extraordinary. In the distance she heard a mechanical whirring, the sound of the air being threshed into waves: helicopters. “Her dad was a used-car salesman. He liked to cheat people. Her mom just watched TV.” Safe, she thought, picturing the word pinned to clouds. “Matilda liked to read.”
“What is that?” 72 asked, in a low voice, as if he was scared of being overheard. But he sounded angry again.
“It’s a story,” she said.
“But . . .” He shook his head. She could see sand stuck to his lower lip, and dust patterning his cheekbones. “What is it?”
“It’s a book,” she said. “It’s called Matilda.” And then, though she had never admitted it to anyone: “One of the doctors read it to me.”
72 frowned again. “You’re lying,” he said, but uncertainly, as if he wasn’t sure.
“I’m not,” she said. 72, she’d decided, was very ugly. His forehead was too large and his eyebrows too thick. They looked like dark caterpillars. His mouth, on the other hand, looked like a girl’s. “I have a book here. Dr. O’Donnell gave it to me. . . .” But all the breath went out of her lungs. She had reached into the pillowcase and found nothing, nothing but the file folder and the pen. The book was gone.
“I don’t believe you,” 72 said. “You don’t know how to read. And the doctors would never—” He broke off suddenly, angling his head to the sky.
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” she said. The book was gone. She was suddenly freezing. She wondered whether she should go back for it. “I had it right here, it was here—”
“Quiet,” he said, holding up a hand.
“I need that book.” She felt like screaming. “Dr. O’Donnell gave it to me so I could practice—”
But this time he brought a hand to her mouth and pulled her into him as she kicked out and shouted into his palm. She felt his warm breath against her ear.
“Please,” he whispered. The fact that he said please stilled her. No one said please, not to the replicas. “Be quiet.”
Even when she stopped struggling, he kept her pinned to him, breathing hard into her ear. She could feel his heart through her back. His hand tasted like the mud of the marshes, like salt. Sweat collected between their bodies. Insects whined.
Now the air was being segmented, cut into pulsing rhythms as if mimicking a heartbeat. The helicopters were getting closer. The sound became so loud she wanted to cover her ears. Now a wind was sweeping across the marshes, flattening the grass, driving up mud that splattered her legs and face, and just as the sound reached an unbearable crescendo she thought 72 shouted something. He leaned into her. He was on top of her, shielding her from a roar of noise and wind. And then he relaxed his hold and she saw a dozen helicopters sweep away across the marshes toward the ruins of Haven. Inside them and hanging from the open helicopter doors were helmeted men wearing drab brown-and-gray camouflage. She recognized them as soldiers. All of them had guns.
Lyra, Cassiopeia, and 72 lay in tense silence. Several helicopters went and returned. Lyra wondered whether they were bearing away the injured like they’d done for the man who’d lost his leg to an alligator, who lay screaming in the darkness while the guards lit up the water with bullets. Every time one of the helicopters passed overhead she was tempted to reveal herself, to throw
up an arm or stand up out of the long grass and the knotted trees and wave. But every time, she was stopped as though by an enormous, invisible hand, frozen on the ground where she was. It was the way they churned the air to sound that made her teeth ache. It was the memory of the guard with his gun drawn, shouting at her. It was 72, lying next to her.
For a long time in the lulls they could still hear men shouting and the roar and crackle of the fire blazing on the island. Voices hung in the ashy haze, were carried by it like a bad smell. After a while, however, Lyra thought the fire must have stopped, because she could no longer hear people yelling. At the same time she realized that she could hardly see. The sky, which for hours had been the textured gray of pencil lead, was now dark. The sun was setting, and the wind when it hissed into life carried a heavy chill. The rain swept in next, the thunderstorms that always came in the early evening, quick and ferocious, punching down on them. By the time it had passed, the sun was gone.
Cassiopeia was completely still. Lyra was afraid to touch her and find she was dead, but when she did she felt a pulse. Periodically the sky was lit up with helicopters passing back and forth, and every so often, a shout carried over the water. Lyra thought of her small clean bed under the third window in the dorm and had to swallow back the urge to cry again. She wouldn’t have thought she could be so cold, and so afraid, and also have to fight so hard against sleep. At some point she must have drifted off because she woke from a nightmare of monsters with long metal snouts, and felt 72 put a hand against her mouth again, and lean his weight against her to speak into her ear.
“They’re searching the marshes,” 72 whispered. “Stay quiet. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.”
Her heart was still racing from the nightmare. It was so dark, she could hardly make out Cassiopeia lying even a few feet away. But after a second she saw light flashing through the tall grass, tiny suns blazing and being drowned. She heard voices, too—not the panicked and indistinct shouting of earlier but individual voices and words.