He looked away. A muscle pulsed in and out in his jaw. “When?” he said finally.
“Tomorrow.” Still he wouldn’t look at her. She followed his gaze and saw that he was staring at Calliope in the mirror. But she wasn’t looking back at him. She was standing, motionless, staring up at the ceiling with the strangest smile on her face, as if she was listening to a favorite song played far away. “I don’t know when. I think Dr. Saperstein’s scared. He’ll have to . . .” Negotiate, she nearly said, but stopped. The word wouldn’t make it out beyond a sudden tightness, a feeling of burning.
“I won’t go,” Pete said. “I can’t.” And she heard the crack of the fault line beneath their feet. She saw that they were already falling.
“You can’t save them,” she said, but she felt a rising panic as the dark rose up to reach them. She heard her own voice faintly and heard, too, the echo of Dr. Saperstein. “It’s already done.”
“I can’t just walk out of here.” He turned back to her but now she hardly recognized him. His eyes didn’t seem brown so much as gray. Smoke-gray. “I can’t just forget.”
“I’m not asking you to forget,” she said. She realized she was going to cry and had to swallow fast. “But there’s no other choice.”
“There is,” he said sharply. “There always is. There has to be.”
“Would you rather stay here?” She was cold and hot all at once. She was losing him. “What about your parents? What about how worried they must be?”
Pete stepped away from her. “So that’s it, we leave, and your dad’s the big hero.” He looked so different when he frowned, older and harder, somehow. She’d nearly always seen him smiling, had even begun to believe it was his natural state, like having blond hair or freckles like a scattering of brown sugar. “And then what? We go back to school? We hold hands after chem and I drive you home and feel you up in your driveway and that’s it, that’s all we have, that’s all—”
He broke off, as if the words had driven the air from his lungs on the way out. “Sorry,” he said, in a different tone of voice, and, turning back, tried to put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Don’t,” she said. If he touched her, her skin would burn away, she would disappear into smoke. All along she’d been wrong. All along he had been ashamed of her—ashamed and disappointed, and trying to hide it only because she was the best he could do right now.
“Gemma, please. That came out all wrong.” He looked truly upset but she didn’t care, didn’t feel sorry for him at all. “You know I didn’t mean . . .” When again she stepped away from him, he let his hand hover there for a second. “What I meant was I can’t go back. I can’t just rewind. Do you understand?” His voice was climbing registers, clawing up toward a point of panic. She saw him bloated by misery, choking on its fumes. “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen, I can’t unknow what I know. I can’t.”
“Keep your voice down,” she said. Something really was burning. She wasn’t imagining it. She could smell smoke now, for sure. Confusedly she thought Calliope must be smoking. But that was crazy—Calliope was still smiling her secret smile, still absorbed in her own invisible kingdom—and besides, the smell was too strong for that.
Pete hadn’t heard or didn’t care. He was talking louder than ever, as if he weren’t so much speaking the words as letting them rattle through him. “I can’t walk out of here and know that these people—people, Gemma, not experiments, not test subjects, human beings—are going to die. I—”
But then he broke off again, and she knew that he, too, had felt the change: the approach of danger that, like a storm, sent invisible messages ahead.
Just as suddenly as clouds might vault from the horizon, Gemma found the source of tension, grabbed it, and tracked it to its source. Calliope was laughing.
Gemma remembered going with her parents to their house in the Outer Banks one summer and hearing coyotes shrieking in the night. They laughed when they killed, her father told her later, but she would have known anyway. It was cruelty set to music: it wasn’t even the pleasure of the kill. It was the pleasure of pain, the pleasure of watching small things die slowly.
And now, here, in this bathroom in an old airport that might as well have been hell on earth, Calliope laughed just like that.
“You’re wrong,” Calliope said, and her words still carried the echo of something old and predatory and hungry. “You mixed it all up. You got it backward.” She was still standing there with her head tilted, still staring vaguely at the ceiling. But by then, of course, Gemma knew. She wasn’t staring. She was listening. And by then Gemma was listening, too: the shouts, the sharp punctuated cries, and footsteps vibrated the floor.
The stinging in Gemma’s throat had been real. Smoke was texturing the air, giving it the appearance of a solid, and somewhere solid matter burned, and transformed to smoke.
“What are you talking about?” Pete asked, and Gemma could hear that he, too, was afraid.
“You said we would die. You said you don’t want to leave us.” She shook her head. She was smiling in a way that Gemma had never seen before. It was as if her smile was actually consuming her face backward, trying to reveal her skull. “But you said it backward. The us won’t die.” She bit her lip, and Gemma tripped over the image of her own habit, her own nervous way of correcting herself. “We won’t die.”
In Gemma’s head, she saw smoke trails plumed over Haven, saw men with rifles, working in the rubble; she saw fireworks leave tentacle trails of smoke across a bloody dawn sky. Crack. Crack. Crack. But these weren’t fireworks. They were bullets that cracked sound in two when they leapt, explosively, from their long slick barrels. They were bullets that made a lot of noise and then killed silently.
People were screaming.
“What’s happening?” Gemma asked. Her voice sounded like it was coming to her from the other side of a tunnel.
Calliope finally looked at Gemma. She was radiant. And in that split second, Gemma saw that both Pete and Dr. Saperstein were wrong. Calliope wasn’t an animal, and she wasn’t a human, either. She was something darker and older and far more dangerous, she was something deeper—a compression of matter and space, a possibility collapsed into the narrowest, narrowest place. Being, urge, energy—emotionless, unthinking, unfeeling—funneled so deep, for so long, that it became an explosion. She was a black hole that could take a planet apart forever, in endless slow motion.
“It’s starting,” she said, and reached up to touch Gemma’s face. Her fingers smelled like metal.
Her fingers smelled like blood.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 15 of Lyra’s story.
SIXTEEN
THEN A BULLET BLASTED THROUGH the bathroom door, ricocheted off the counter, and blew the pinkie finger off Gemma’s left hand.
It was the craziest thing. One second she had five fingers, and the next, her pinkie was missing and blood had patterned the linoleum. And yet at first she knew it had happened only because of how Pete began to shout. For a long, watery second she floated somewhere outside her body, and observed the blood and the missing finger and the raw exposed muscle of her hand with a kind of detached curiosity.
And then the pain came, like a gigantic rubber band that snapped her back into the bathroom, into her body. It was pain like nothing she’d ever known, like the kind of high vibration that could shatter glass, like a full-body flu that burned even in your bones. She couldn’t even scream. She couldn’t try and stop the bleeding, couldn’t move, could only stand there, staring like an idiot, as the blood kept pooling at her feet.
Somehow she ended up on the floor. She wasn’t sure whether time had leapt forward or she’d simply, for a half second, lost consciousness. She no longer had the strength to stand up.
All this happened in three seconds, maybe quicker. When she did finally speak, she could only say, “My finger,” over and over. By then Pete had found a roll of toile
t paper—from God knows where, the girls’ room never had any—and he was frantically unwinding it, half the roll at one go, and packing it against the wound. The pressure triggered a new surge of pain and brought her stomach into her mouth.
He wrapped a fist around her hand to stanch the bleeding. It hurt so much she wanted to pull away, to yell at him to stop, but the pain had her in a chokehold now, and she couldn’t.
“It’s okay, Gem, you’re going to be okay,” Pete kept saying. He looked as if he was going to cry. “Deep breaths, you’re going to be fine, I know it hurts, but you’re going to be okay. . . .”
Another bullet blasted through the door, this time punching out one of the overhead lights. Calliope ducked and scuttled beneath the sinks as a spray of plastic and glass sifted down on them like a snow. Still keeping her injured hand wound tightly in his fist, Pete put an arm around Gemma, herding them inside one of the bathroom stalls. She leaned against the hollow of his chest, and he whispered it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, so many times the word and his heartbeat became confused in her head, until she heard in its rhythm that same exact message.
The initial shock had passed and already her body was working to absorb the pain, accept its reality, to find equilibrium inside it: a process she knew intimately after so many hospital visits, so many surgeries and scars. She missed her mom with a sudden sharpness even worse than the physical pain—how she sat next to Gemma’s hospital bed, whispering it’s gonna be okay, I’m here, just like Pete was doing now; how she’d climb into bed next to Gemma, making a seashell-curve of her body, and the two of them would fall asleep. She missed her mom and wished, more than anything, that she could say she was sorry. She’d been so angry with Kristina that they had barely spoken in weeks, and Gemma could see the way it was killing her mom, coiling her down around an internal misery like a winch.
And now it was too late. They would die here. She closed her eyes and tried to hang on to an impression of her mom’s voice, soothing her to sleep.
“Hush, hush.” It was Calliope’s voice she heard instead. During a break in the rhythm of gunshots, Calliope came toward her. She moved quickly, propelling herself with her palms and sliding belly-down on the floor with the sinuous grace of an eel. Gemma, still half-blind from pain and shock, was repulsed. The gunshots started again, and Gemma found herself briefly fantasizing about a bullet cleaving Calliope’s head in two, or just evaporating her, as her finger had been evaporated.
Calliope crowded into the stall with them and began touching Gemma, stroking her arms, her wrist, her thighs. “Hush, hush, there’s no reason to cry,” she said. “It’s a finger, just a little finger.”
“We need to get out of here,” Pete said. He hadn’t let go of her injured hand, not for a single second, but already the toilet paper was nearly useless, soggy with blood. “She needs a doctor.”
Calliope looked briefly annoyed. “She doesn’t need a doctor,” she said. “I’ll take care of Gemma, don’t worry. Just as soon as it’s over.”
“This isn’t one of your fucking games.” Pete’s voice edged toward a shout. “She’s hurt, can’t you see that? She needs help.” Gemma wanted to tell him to be quiet—they would be heard, they would be found, they would be killed—but she couldn’t. She didn’t even know who to be afraid of. She was as terrified of Calliope, of her strange little smiles and the light touch of her fingers, as she was of the guards who were shooting, still shooting. She heard screaming and pictured hundreds of replicas simply mowed down where they were sleeping, a surf of blood rising, coming to drown them all.
“It’s not a game,” Calliope said, and she drew away from Gemma, looking hurt. “It was never a game. But you can’t leave now, anyway, not until it’s sure.”
“Not until what’s sure?” Gemma said. Her voice sounded as if it had been punched through with holes. Calliope chewed the inside of her cheek and didn’t answer. She was angry, Gemma knew, because Pete had yelled at her. “Please, Calliope.”
“It’s like Pinocchio, like I told you,” Calliope said, sounding almost bored. “He got swallowed up, so he started a fire to get out.” She held up her left hand, turning it, admiring it from several different angles. Then she began to touch her pinkie finger, bend it and flex it, as if to see whether it, too, would evaporate now that Gemma’s was gone. And yet each time she moved or stroked her finger, Gemma felt a phantom stirring in her own hand, and a new wave of triggered pain.
“You started a fire?” Gemma said, trying to hang on to the thread, to stay focused, to make sense of the nightmare. They’d been so close to being released.
“I didn’t,” Calliope said, still sulking. “Some of the other thems did.”
Gemma remembered feeling, earlier tonight, as she and Calliope wove through a slum of bodies and filthy mattresses, that the replicas weren’t sleeping, only pretending to. She felt suddenly dizzy. How many replicas were there in the airport? Five hundred? Six? More?
And maybe three dozen, four dozen guards, a handful of doctors and nurses.
“Wayne thought he taught me something about fire because of his friend Pinocchio,” Calliope said, with new scorn in her voice that made her seem older. “But I knew about fire forever. When I was little, there was a kitchen fire, and we didn’t use the Stew Pot for days.”
“This . . . this was your idea?” Gemma asked. She remembered what Dr. Saperstein had said. The replicas can’t feel loss, or love, or empathy. To them there is surviving and not surviving, and that’s it.
Calliope ignored that question. “The people always think we don’t remember,” she said. “They think we don’t pay attention, that we don’t listen, that we’re all soft in the head. But I’ve been listening. I know plenty. I know how to use a gun.”
Immediately, as if in direct response to that statement, another quick-fire burst of rifle fire just outside the bathroom sent terrible echoes through Gemma’s head and the back of her teeth. She heard a man’s voice shout—a plea, a call for help, she wasn’t sure—and then another gunshot. But the voice was enough. She had recognized it, and her stomach pooled all the way down in her feet, a terrible, sick helplessness, like having to sprint for the bathroom.
It was Wayne’s voice, Wayne on the ground, Wayne crying for help. And though Gemma couldn’t feel sorry for him, she knew what that must mean: the replicas had taken control.
They were taking revenge.
“It’s always fire, isn’t it?” Calliope said then. “In all the stories, there’s always a fire. Does it hurt to burn, do you think?” And she turned back to Gemma, eyes bright and big and curious, and not unhappy at all.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Lyra’s story.
SEVENTEEN
THEY HAD TO MOVE. THE smoke had sniffed out the corners and ceiling, and it rolled down now in heavy waves, turning the air gritty. Gemma didn’t know where she’d read that during fires most people don’t die from the fire itself, but from inhaling too much smoke. Even now her lungs felt heavy, wet, like a towel soaked through with rain.
“It’s okay now,” Calliope said, and the words were so absurd that they came to Gemma like sounds in a language she didn’t know. It’s okay now. The pain in her hand was a rhythmic throbbing, and she thought it must be her pulse, beating out her blood. When they stood up she saw a butterfly pattern of blood, absurdly red, soaking the toilet paper, and so much of it: it was insane that it should all have come from her, that she would have so much to begin with.
She was freezing. She remembered, then, a bath when she was little, maybe eight or nine, and hearing her parents begin to argue. She’d stayed there, motionless, until the water was freezing: she didn’t know why, in retrospect, she hadn’t just drained the tub. But it hadn’t occurred to her. If she didn’t move, she’d thought, she wouldn’t exist, and if she didn’t exist, she could stop hearing them.
“You’re okay, Gemma.” Pete kept his arm around her, even when he bent to coug
h. His eyes were tearing up. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.” He was using the same sounds as Calliope, and none of them made sense, and she couldn’t stop laughing, laughing and shivering. “She needs a doctor,” he said—shouted it, actually, his throat raw from smoke, as if he expected someone to hear.
Calliope was at the bathroom door. She touched the handle lightly with a finger, to feel if it was hot. “There are no doctors,” she said.
Only then did Gemma realize that there were no more shots, no more sounds of gunfire. Just the noise of fire getting fat on drywall and ceiling panels and support beams, gobbling up filthy rugs and mattresses, swelling itself with sound. They never told you that about fire, how loud it was, as if everything it touched started to scream.
Outside the bathroom, Gemma was relieved to find no fire. She could hear it close, though: the pop and boom of things changing form suddenly, exploded from solid to gas, a noise that sounded just like terror. But the smoke was even worse, so bad she could hardly see, and a single breath made her choke.
“Get down,” Pete said. He had to repeat it before she understood. In a crouch, he took off his shirt and wound it tight against her fist, since the toilet paper had begun to come apart. They went, crawling, Calliope in the lead. Gemma wanted to leave Calliope—she wanted Calliope to vanish, to disappear into the smoke like a mirage—but she was also terrified of losing her. She would never be able to find the exit. She couldn’t think at all, didn’t know which way the stairs were, thought that everything had burned already, the doors and windows and the way out, that they might be crawling their way to an exit that no longer existed.
In the stories, there is always a fire.
The floor was slicked with blood, and there were bodies everywhere. Gemma wondered whether one of them was Wayne’s. She had the urge to shout for everyone to wake up, to run, to get out, although she knew they were all dead, replicas and soldiers, humans born by chance and by design, all of them sleeping together under a veil of smoke. She was glad that the darkness softened dead bodies into shapes: already, they were losing reality.