Ringer

  Farmland meant farms meant people. And people meant they were saved.

  “See?” Calliope said. “I told you I could find my way back.”

  Despite everything, Gemma could have kissed her. She laughed, and a group of birds startled, as if they, too, were shocked by the sound. “You’re brilliant,” she said, and couldn’t help it: she put her arms around Calliope, as she would have with April. Calliope tensed, and in her arms she felt so small, trembling slightly, a fine wire coiled and coiled almost to breaking, and Gemma felt terrible and guilty. Calliope just stood there, arms pinned to her sides, and Gemma realized she had likely never been hugged, not once in her life.

  It wasn’t her fault she had been made this way, forced to observe and imitate, strange and kind and cruel by turns. Maybe she could be taught. She could learn.

  Maybe Gemma could teach her.

  As she pulled away, Calliope smiled—a real smile this time, that lit her face all the way to her eyes. And looking at her, Gemma’s vision doubled again, but this time she saw not herself but the face of that lost sister, the original daughter, Emma. An echo seemed to reach her from a lost world, and she knew then that Calliope was her chance to sew the past and the present together. She could love Calliope, and by loving Calliope she could make up for what her father had done, for the fact that she was alive in Emma’s place.

  Calliope seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. She put her hand on Gemma’s heart. She pressed, and Gemma realized she was reading her pulse, trying to get the measure of her heartbeat: the only way she knew to care for someone else.

  “You can be mine,” Calliope said. “You can be my replica.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 18 of Lyra’s story.

  NINETEEN

  IT WAS LIKE WALKING INTO a portrait: the red barn, its weathered doors partially open; a tidy white house with faded curtains sitting in a dip of land, an old stone well and a bucket lying next to it on the grass, all bound together in the middle of so many rolling fields Gemma thought of a ship moored to an ocean of green.

  Gemma couldn’t shake the idea that no one had been home in a hundred years. There were no cars in the driveway. She saw no wires, no satellite braced to the roof, nothing but old-fashioned rakes and shovels, neatly cleaned, as if polished by invisible hands after the original owners had departed. The cows in the pasture stared at them with deep and mournful eyes, and they, too, could have been ancient, could have been standing there for ten decades. Gemma’s relief gave way again to anxiety. It was wrong. It was like a photo with a too-obvious filter: somehow, beneath the brightness, you could see a truth that wasn’t nearly so pretty.

  Pete veered toward the barn doors, maybe thinking he might find someone at work. But Calliope grabbed his wrist and shook her head.

  “Don’t,” she whispered. For the first time, she looked really afraid. “The barn is where the animals go to die.” It was funny, what she knew and didn’t know.

  “The barn is where the animals go to sleep,” Pete corrected her. But he let Calliope pull him toward the house.

  Only when they came around the house and saw a buggy did Gemma understand.

  “Amish,” Pete said.

  “There won’t be a telephone,” Gemma said, fighting down a fear that she couldn’t exactly justify. Where was the family who lived here? They hadn’t driven off, obviously. They weren’t out catching a movie. The fields glimmered in the sun and yet there was no one turning them, raking, planting—Gemma didn’t know exactly what, but she knew on farms there was always work to be done.

  Calliope was already at the front door. She turned back to gesture them inside. “Come, Gemma-Pete,” she said, as if their names were a single thing. “Come see.” In her dress, she looked as if she truly belonged. It was as if she learned by absorption, and had, like a chameleon, changed her skin to match her new surroundings.

  “Well, whoever lives here will have to come back eventually,” Pete said. “We can rest. Have something to eat. Wait it out.” He managed a small smile. “At least we know they aren’t on a road trip.”

  He was right. Besides, Gemma knew she couldn’t have gone much farther on foot anyway. Her ankle was so swollen it no longer even looked like an ankle. It wasn’t even a cankle—more like a purplish skin-bandage rolled and strapped around where her ankle should be.

  The house was unlocked. Inside, it was very neat and full of sunlight. There was a gas stove and, Gemma saw, a small refrigerator cabled neatly to a battery. But no microwave, no digital clocks, no phones or iPads left casually on the counter, no mail, even. The lights were wall-mounted gas lanterns. Again she was struck by the weighty stillness, as if time had turned heavy and dropped like a hand over the whole place.

  There was a plate on the table, toast half-eaten, along with a mug of unfinished coffee. This bothered her for some reason—why leave the house so neat but not clear your breakfast?

  Calliope caught her staring. “There was a male,” she said. “He ran off when he saw me.”

  “Why?” Gemma asked, and Calliope shrugged. It seemed weird to her that a boy in his own house would run at the sight of a girl on his land, but then again, she didn’t know much about Amish culture. Maybe he’d run for help, and even now there were people on the way who could take them to a town, or point them in the right direction, at least. “He didn’t say anything? He didn’t speak to you at all?”

  “He just ran,” Calliope said.

  They drank water from a sink that worked with a hand pump and came out cold and tasting deliciously of deep earth. Instantly, Gemma felt better. They ate bread and fried eggs with yolks the orange of a setting sun, and Gemma nearly cried: she’d never been hungry before, truly hungry, in a way that torqued your insides. She couldn’t even feel bad about the food they were stealing. They would pay it all back, anyway, she would make sure they did, once she got home.

  In a cellar, Pete found an old-fashioned icebox, and in a closet, coarse linen hand towels that he used to make a pack for her ankle.

  “We need to wrap your hand again,” he said, and Gemma didn’t want to but knew he was right.

  He crouched in front of her and began to unwind the T-shirt they’d used to stop the bleeding. When it came away, Gemma was shocked by the sight of her missing finger: she couldn’t understand, for a moment, where it had gone, still felt it buzzing and tingling.

  She bit her lip as tears broke up her vision. Pete said nothing. He didn’t look disgusted. He didn’t try and make her feel better. He just dampened a clean towel and slowly wiped the blood off the back of her hand, off her fingers. She bit the insides of her cheeks when he touched the wound itself, so hard her mouth flooded with a metal taste. Pain came down on her like a shutter, and then it passed.

  “We have to keep it clean,” he said, rebandaging it, and she knew that was his way of saying I’m sorry.

  How could they ever survive what they had seen together? They would be like tumors to each other: a nest of dark things, terrible memories, questions they wanted to forget.

  They could never go back to how things had been. If they wanted to go forward, she feared, they would have to cut those tumors out. They would leave all their pain in the past. They would bury it so deep that even their heartbreaks couldn’t hurt them.

  Still, no one came. It hadn’t been long, but Gemma grew anxious and increasingly restless. She desperately wanted to move on, to reach an end point, to hear her mom’s voice, to see gas stations and telephone poles and parking lots and all the ugliness of life that now seemed beautiful: maps, grids, roads, wires. She craved fluorescent lights and boring TV and normalcy. But she also knew it would be risky to leave. They might be ten miles from another settlement, maybe more.

  Pete was right: it was better to wait.

  He left Calliope and Gemma alone when he went to clean off in the old-fashioned tub, which also functioned with a pump and drew no hot water. She wondered if he felt the sa
me way she did, like they’d been slicked all over with death, like it would never wash off.

  In the kitchen she watched the sun turn dust motes in the air, wishing she could shake the feeling of terrible intrusion—a sense that had less to do with being in a strange house and, like Goldilocks, eating and drinking and consuming, and more to do with a feeling that they’d stumbled on a sleepy mystery best not to awaken. She was almost afraid to breathe too hard.

  Calliope, on the other hand, moved from room to room, opening drawers, touching everything, marveling at soup spoons and wooden tongs, can openers and mason jars, salad bowls and flower vases, needlepoint pillows and woven place mats. She disappeared and reappeared wearing a second dress on top of the first one, a knit sweater that hit her at mid-thigh, and a wide-brimmed hat. Gemma wanted to say something, to tell her not to, but the words kept swelling in her throat like a sponge. She kept having the crazy thought that Calliope wasn’t wearing different clothes, but different skins; that the clothes were like the discarded shells of long-dead cicadas.

  Calliope wasn’t sick: it was an obvious realization but one that came late. Calliope was thin, way too thin, and her head was shaven, and she had crooked teeth. But she wasn’t like Lyra. Lyra was sick in a way that showed itself even when she was desperately trying to hide it. Gemma knew that the replicas had been given different variants of prion disease, some of them much faster-working than others. There would have been control groups, too.

  The idea of Lyra being selected and Calliope being spared made her sick, even though she couldn’t say why she cared so much. When it came down to it, she hardly knew Lyra. When it came down to it, she was here because of Lyra. And Lyra had thanked her only once, and probably wouldn’t care whether Gemma lived or died.

  “You shouldn’t touch everything,” Gemma said at last, when Calliope crouched, letting her dress pool on the floor, to examine a fat-bristled broom next to the stove.

  Calliope threaded a finger through its bristles, then tugged, so some of them came away in her hand. She let them scatter. “Why not?”

  Exhaustion now felt to Gemma like a weight, like pressure bearing down on her from outside. “Because these things don’t belong to you,” she said. “This isn’t your house.”

  A shadow moved across Calliope’s face. “Why not?”

  Gemma stared at her. She realized she had no idea how to begin answering. We can live here, Calliope had said. Did she not understand what belonging meant?

  “Because . . . people live here. They’re coming back. They use those spoons and cups and hats and . . . and everything.”

  Calliope removed the hat and turned it over in her hands. “But we used them too,” she said after a moment. “So doesn’t that mean we own them now?”

  “No.” Gemma reminded herself that Calliope didn’t understand, and that it wasn’t her fault. “It’s not about who uses what. They just—the house is theirs. They own it.”

  Calliope frowned. “Why?”

  “Just because,” Gemma said. “Because the house is theirs, it was always theirs. They probably built it—”

  “So if you build something, it automatically belongs to you?” Calliope’s voice had turned sharp, and Gemma realized she’d said the wrong thing.

  “No,” Gemma said carefully. “Not always.” Calliope looked down. Her knuckles were very white on the brim of the hat. “You don’t belong to Haven, Calliope. You never belonged to them.”

  Calliope said nothing for a while. “It’s just I’ve never seen so many things before,” she said, so quietly the words touched Gemma like a wind. She immediately felt terrible. “I always wanted, for my own. All of us wanted things. Only people could own anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gemma said. She really was. How would she ever be able to fix Calliope? How could she even start? “It isn’t the owning that makes a person, you know. It has nothing to do with that.”

  “Then what?” Calliope said. “What is it?”

  Gemma couldn’t answer that either. Calliope looked down at the hat, turning it again in her hands.

  “At Haven the nurses left things without meaning to. Clips to put in your hair, except we didn’t have hair, we weren’t allowed. Number forty liked pens. She liked to suck on them. Her tongue was always black with ink. Maybe that’s why she was an idiot. I found a whole package of gum, once, and Cassiopeia got a bracelet and I wanted it bad, but she hid it so them wouldn’t take it.” Calliope shook her head. “But I got even better than she did, in the end. It was because of watching. Most of the other thems never paid attention. But I always paid attention. I saw how the people talked and how they did things.”

  Wind briefly stirred the curtains, and made phantom shapes: faces appeared in the cloth, rippled, and were gone.

  “The nurses hid in the bathrooms to use their cell phones.” She said cell phones the way someone else might say church: as if the words carried special power. “They weren’t supposed to, but they did anyway. I found a cell phone of my own one day. It was just sitting there. I kept it hid. I was very, very careful. When they turned up Ursa Major with Nurse Maxine’s wallet, all of us got searched. Ursa Major got hit so bad her face swole up and she had to go to the Box.”

  A terrible taste soured Gemma’s mouth.

  “The first day I was so happy. I hid far on the other side of the island and missed Stew Pot and all my testing, and I got in trouble from nurses afterward. But it was worth it. Sometimes the cell phone did nothing, and other times it lit and played music. Once I saw lots of numbers and I pressed all the buttons and I must have pressed at the right time and somebody spoke to me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hello.’ I was too scared to talk back. I liked to listen, though.” Calliope scowled. “And then the phone made music too loud and the nurses took it away from me. Nurse Maxine said she would cut my fingers off if she ever caught me stealing again. I was happy when Haven burned,” she added abruptly, and her voice sharpened. “I was happy when the roof exploded. I hoped she was inside, I hoped all her skin was burning, her and all the other nurses.”

  Gemma took a deep breath, fighting the hard tug of nausea. “But think of how many people died,” she said. “And—and all those babies, the infants in Postnatal, the ones you liked to visit? Remember, you told me that?” Calliope’s face didn’t change. “They’re dead.”

  Calliope shrugged. “Things die,” she said. “At Haven, things died all the time. The Pinks and the Yellows, mostly all of them died. Browns too. They got sick early and started walking into things. Forgetting where their cots were and being stupid clumsy.”

  “So that’s it?” Gemma’s voice was inching into a scream, and Calliope looked up, frowning, as if the tone bothered her. But Gemma couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t calm down. “You don’t feel bad? You don’t feel sorry?”

  It was like watching a shutter latched tight against a storm: all the expression went out of Calliope’s eyes. For a long time, she stood there, staring at Gemma in silence, still holding the hat she’d found in one of the closets, her long white fingers knuckle-tight on its brim.

  “If it isn’t the owning that makes humans,” Calliope said finally, and her voice was all knit together, interlaced with tension, “and it isn’t the making, either, then maybe it’s the unmaking?”

  Before Gemma could stop her, Calliope had ripped the ribbon from the crown of the hat. She tossed it on the ground and began to stomp it with a heel. Her face flattened, like a reptile’s, into an expression of cold anger.

  “Stop it.” Gemma struggled to get to her feet. Calliope swept a hand over the kitchen shelves, crashing mugs, bowls, and plates to the ground. “Calliope, stop.”

  She didn’t stop. She turned and darted into the living room. With two hands, she yanked the mirror from the wall and threw it. Gemma had to duck out of the way, folding her ankle again and barely catching herself on the counter. When the mirror hit the wall, the glass slid out of the frame and shattered.

  A curse, was the first thing
Gemma thought. A curse of bad luck.

  “There,” Calliope said. Glass crunched beneath her shoes. “Now it’s ugly. Now it’s ruined. Now no one can have it.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Gemma said, tasting blood and tears in her mouth—she’d bit down on her tongue. Calliope lunged for her and Gemma screamed. But Calliope just gripped her by the wrist, squeezing so tight Gemma could feel the individual impressions of Calliope’s nails.

  “What if they never come back?” Calliope asked, so quietly Gemma nearly missed it. Terror swept down her spine, like the touch of an alien hand.

  “What?” she whispered.

  Calliope was careful not to look at her. “You said the people who live here will come back,” Calliope said. “But what if they don’t? What if they stay away forever?”

  Dimly, over the thunder of her heartbeat, Gemma heard Pete creaking down the hall. Calliope released her quickly—but not quickly enough.

  “What the hell?” Pete had changed into a pair of loose drawstring pants and a clean shirt, and there was color in his face again, although his eyes were still too bright, as if he had a fever. Gemma was shocked by how intensely relieved she was to see him.

  For a second Calliope just stood there, breathing hard. Then she shoved past Gemma and hurtled out the door, letting it slam behind her.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 19 of Lyra’s story.

  TWENTY

  “SOMETHING’S WRONG,” GEMMA SAID. SHE thought of the way Calliope had flown at her, her sharp-fisted hands, the sour heat of her breath.

  What if they never come back?

  “That’s an understatement,” Pete said. He smiled, but only halfway, as if he couldn’t quite remember how to do it.

  “No.” He didn’t see. He hadn’t seen how Calliope looked, and hadn’t heard what she’d said. “I mean, whoever lives here should have come back by now. They should have come home. Why haven’t they?”