Ringer

  There was another short silence. When the man spoke again, his voice was harder, and Lyra felt the impact of the words like little metal hammer blows to the base of her spine.

  “You violated parole. You were caught with an illegal handgun. You assaulted a police officer. You jumped bail.”

  “I didn’t jump bail,” Harliss said. “They let me go.”

  “Our records say you jumped bail. That makes you a fug-i-tive.” He drew out the syllables, stretching them taffylike between his teeth and his tongue.

  Rick froze with his cigarette halfway to his mouth. Then, to her surprise, he started to laugh. But the noise was awful, and reminded Lyra of the way Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It used to cough up phlegm when her allergies were bad.

  “Shit. He turned on me, didn’t he? Fucking Ives. Piece of shit. Well. It’s my fault for trusting him.”

  “We need the kids, Mr. Harliss. Where are they?”

  “Fucked if I know.” He took another long drag and spoke with smoke ribboning out from the corners of his mouth. “You don’t believe me?”

  “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Neither do I. But it sure as shit seems to find me.” He shook his head. The light was a lurid yellow, and in its glow he looked exhausted, washed out, like an old photograph. “I don’t know where they are, I’m telling you. The boy took off sometime last night. Stole a thousand dollars out of a lockbox from the impound lot and made off with it. As far as I know, he hopped a plane to Mexico.”

  “With no ID?”

  “You can buy IDs, same as you can buy anything else. Ain’t nothing and no one in this world isn’t for sale. But you know all about that, don’t you?” He smiled narrowly, through another mouthful of smoke.

  “Careful,” the woman said. But Lyra could no longer follow their conversation, or the shifting currents of insult and threat that eddied around their spoken words. Caelum was gone. Caelum had stolen money and run off. She knew both that it was impossible—he would never leave her—and that it was true. It explained why he had consented to the job in the first place, and the bed he hadn’t disturbed last night, and why he still wasn’t home.

  He had done what he did at Haven: he’d split.

  “And the girl?” the woman said. But at that moment, Tank, the fluffy white dog Angie Finch kept in lot 34, started to yap, and Angie Finch’s voice, thick with sleep, hushed him sharply. Something thinned on the air; Lyra had the impression of a drawstring cinched suddenly tight, squeezing out the possibility of escape.

  “Look, why don’t you come with us, get in the car, come on and talk about it,” the man said—in that fake lullaby voice, the kind Dr. Good Morning used when he was knuckling new bruises until the pain sharpened to a kind of obliteration.

  “I ain’t going nowhere with you,” Rick said. His voice had changed too, and Lyra heard the warning in it. He took a last drag of his cigarette, fanning his fingers, making a show of it. “Not unless you make me. And I can kick up a pretty big scene.”

  He flicked the butt. Lyra watched it flash the distance between them, spinning through the web of old shrubbery—by bad luck it landed on her foot, a half inch from the sandal strap that would have protected her.

  She swallowed a short cry, shuffling backward and disturbing a rustle of old leaves. Both strangers whipped around—and for a second, before she retreated farther into the shadows, she could swear that Rick’s eyes landed on her. Or maybe he only sensed her presence.

  She sat there, sweating in the darkness, stomach cramping from an agony of fear.

  The woman took a step in her direction. “You hear that? Something moved back there.”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you.” Rick’s voice was louder now, and froze the woman before she could come any closer. Lyra could see, now, the woman’s heavy jaw and penciled-in eyebrows, her hair showing its real color at the roots. “Not if you like your fingers. Had a lot of problems with coons these last few weeks. Had to shoot one myself. Rabid.”

  Now she was sure he’d seen her. It was a lie. They’d had no trouble with raccoons, other than catching one rooting around in the garbage can one time they forgot to put the lid on overnight. Caelum had chased it off by shouting.

  Angie Finch’s dog was barking again. Angie’s voice was muffled by the trailer walls. “Shut up, you filthy animal!”

  “Look,” Rick said. “I don’t know where they went. Like I told you, they could be halfway to Mexico. If you want to find them, you’re wasting your time talking to me.”

  The woman seized on this. “You think they’re together?”

  Rick scowled. “I’m done talking,” he said, as if they’d caught him out in some kind of lie. She understood it was all an act. A show, so they would leave, so Lyra would have a chance to escape.

  The strangers exchanged a look. The man cleared his throat. “You know what I think?” He didn’t wait for Rick to answer. “I think you’re hiding something.”

  Rick said nothing. Lyra searched his face for the resemblance or the history he’d promised her was there, the story where she was a baby, loved, swaddled, wanted. But she couldn’t find it.

  Still, for the first time ever, she had the urge to call him father. She wanted to tell him to run.

  “We can help you,” the woman said. “Get those charges in Florida dropped once and for all. Clear your record, even.”

  Rick appeared to be thinking about it. He gnawed the inside of his cheek.

  “She isn’t your baby girl anymore,” the woman said softly. “It was a terrible thing that happened to her. Terrible. But all those kids raised out there on that island . . . they’re all screwed up in the head. They’re made all wrong. They’re dangerous. You understand that, don’t you? They’re putting good people in danger.”

  “She would never hurt anybody,” Rick said—but weakly, as if he wasn’t totally convinced.

  And he was wrong, anyway. Several times in the past few weeks, Rick had walked her out behind lot 40, where someone had pinned paper targets to a rotting fence, and shown her how to shoot his gun. She had seen the guards aiming at waterbirds for target practice back at Haven, and had even heard some of the other replicas boast about trying it out for themselves—some of the male guards would let them do that, hold and fire guns, for exchanges Lyra understood only distantly. Haven was, in a way, like a large-scale replica of the minds it had grown: things needed to be neatly locked away, certain areas inaccessible, the whole place kept clean and bright and orderly so it could function at all.

  Rick told her she was a good shot. She liked to imagine Dr. Good Morning’s smile wrapped around the aluminum of a beer can. She tried to picture God pinned to her targets, but whenever she did, her hand faltered. He was cruel and he had filled her with disease. He had done terrible things.

  But he was still her God.

  “She doesn’t have to want to. She’s sick. She’s got a bad sickness inside her. If word gets out . . .” The woman shook her head. “Can you imagine the panic? Can you imagine the protests, the violence?”

  Rick stood there some more, acting out his uncertainty. Finally, he said, “All right. All right. I’ll come with you. But you gotta help me out, okay? I’m talking clean slate.”

  “That’s a promise,” the woman said, and the lie was like a long metal tongue, something smooth and slick and easy. When, Lyra wondered, did people learn to lie, so often and so well?

  She wanted to scream, Don’t go. But it was too late. He was getting into their car already.

  The woman got behind the wheel, and the man took the passenger seat. Just a few seconds, and they might as well never have been there at all. Headlights dazzled Lyra as the car reversed. She was seized by the sudden memory of lying flat on an observation table, disembodied voices and hands touching her. She could see her father’s face, framed briefly in the car window, and the sweep his eyes made as they looked for her again in the darkness.

  A sudden panic overwhelmed her: wrong, wrong, wrong.
It was like the alarm that had gone off during the Code Black, except this time the sound was inside her, in her chest, shaking her lungs. She had barely thought about Jake Witz and how she and Caelum had found him hanging from a door with a belt around his throat, but now she did; she saw Rick’s face in place of Jake’s, his skin a mottled purple and his eyes enormous with fluid. She had seen many corpses in her life, had watched countless replicas bundled and packaged onto the freight barge for disposal, but Jake’s was different. Rick would die too, she knew that. That was what Power was—to decide who lived and who didn’t.

  Dad. The word rose in her chest, and pushed the breath from her lungs with its weight. Dad. She thought of running after the car, rocketing out from the shadows, and offering herself in his place.

  But she stayed where she was.‎ The taillights dimmed and then disappeared, and the growl of the engine quieted to a purr, and finally became the soft tutting of the crickets, singing endlessly from ten thousand hidden places.

  Inside the trailer, everything looked the same way it always did. The warped mirror and the framed needlepoint Home Is Where the Heart Is were in place. The TV was still on. An open can of soda had left rings on the old wood coffee table, and next to the sofa the makeshift curtains were still drawn around Caelum’s mattress.

  He might have been sleeping. He might have been only moments from strolling through the door, wearing a salvaged T-shirt and jeans that hung below his hipbones, showing off the muscles, like wings, above his waistband.

  She had traced those muscles with her fingers. She had licked them to know the taste.

  She wanted to scream, to break something. Now she understood the replicas who spent hours knocking their heads against the walls, or who picked all the skin off their arms.

  Rick was gone. He was as good as dead, and it was her fault.

  Caelum had left her.

  Was she still the same person without him? Who was she? Brandy-Nicole? Lyra? 24? Someone or something else entirely? She touched her face, her breasts, her thighs. She didn’t seem to have cracked anywhere. Nothing had broken off. And yet she felt that something had broken, that there was a big gaping hole somewhere inside her, and air blowing through it.

  She knelt on his sheets and put her face to his pillow. It smelled like him. She took the shoe box and carefully laid out the belongings he’d collected, placing them side by side on the mattress, as if they were runes and by some magic she might call him back. The brochure from the Nashville Elvis Festival. Bus schedule. A receipt. The plastic wrapper that had enclosed a utility knife. Several miniature Snickers, uneaten. Old batteries.

  And then she blinked and the objects blinked too and became something else, something meaningful: not trash but a sentence written earnestly and urgently, just for her.

  She smoothed out the receipt and read the list of things he had purchased from Able Hardware: one utility knife, one pocketknife, one flashlight and four packs of AA batteries, a butane lighter, a can opener. The bus schedule was from something called the Knoxville Transit Center. Her heart jumped. Someone had circled all the buses running between Knoxville and Nashville for Caelum.

  Caelum had left her. That was true. Probably, like he’d said, he thought she didn’t want him around. He thought she’d be better off without him. But he’d also left her clues, just in case, and they all pointed to Nashville, where another God named Elvis had made hundreds of replicas.

  Caelum had gone home, and she was going home with him.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Gemma’s story.

  FIVE

  IT DIDN’T TAKE HER LONG to pack. There wasn’t much she owned, and almost all of it had been owned by others first and would, she assumed, be owned by new people later: a bright-pink sweatshirt, a pair of sneakers and one pair of flip-flops, three T-shirts. Even the backpack Rick had purchased for her, red nylon and blotchy with old stains, was doodled over with someone else’s notes and pictures, like a skin covered with faded tattoos. But she was careful to pack all the belongings she’d found, all the things she’d salvaged from the dirt: pens, metal soda tabs, loose coins.

  She debated whether to bring Rick’s gun with her, in case the man and woman—Suits, even if they had been dressed casually—caught up. But after weighing it in her hand, the metal oily like a slick of pollution, she put it back. She was afraid not that she wouldn’t be able to use it, but that she would. That she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Maybe, she thought, the strangers who’d taken Rick away were right. Maybe all the replicas were broken. Maybe they didn’t have souls, like the nurses had always said. Maybe they were like the shells that Cassiopeia had sometimes collected, abandoned by whatever had once lived inside of them, full of nothing but a hollow rushing.

  But if Caelum was broken, then she was broken in the same way. And she didn’t know much, but she knew that had to count for something.

  She was eager to set out as soon as possible, but her body was heavy with exhaustion and waves of dizziness kept tumbling her. She meant to close her eyes just for a minute, to catch her breath, to get her strength back, but woke up hours later in a panic, just as the sun was poking through the sagging blinds. Dawn already.

  She shouldered her backpack and slipped outside, fiddling with the door handle, which was loose, to lock it. It gave her a brief pain to think of what would happen to the trailer with no one there to care for it: soon, she knew, it would be reclaimed by squatters, and the other residents of Winston-Able would strip it of its good furniture and sheets and dishware. Or they would gray the walls with cigarette smoke and carpet the floor with a surface of broken bottles, like in lot 48, where people went to get drunk and worse.

  But she let this worry slip away from her, like a kind of smoke. She had learned long ago to let things go, to let them pass, to allow all her worry and hurt and need to simply drift, cloudlike, until it had left her behind.

  Tank was barking, as usual, as if he knew where she was heading and wanted to be sure she didn’t get there. She turned in the direction of the highway. She would cross through the truck weigh station again and have to pass Eagle Tire. She hoped she wouldn’t see Raina but had no idea how long parties lasted. One time she had woken up at dawn after the Haven Christmas party to the sound of laughter and the crack of gunfire: a few doctors and some of the guards were taking turns hurling bottles and trying to shoot them in midair.

  She heard a familiar voice call her name, but knew she must be imagining it: sometimes, in her dreams, she heard Dr. O’Donnell call her voice in just that way. Only the second time did she notice a sharpness to the voice that didn’t sound like dream or memory—and didn’t sound like Dr. O’Donnell, either.

  She turned and saw Gemma and Pete. Gemma, flushed and pretty, was wearing clothes that struck her as exotic and reminded her of some of the birds that landed, occasionally, on Spruce Island: elaborately colored, sleek, showy.

  “What are you doing here?” Lyra asked them. She thought Gemma’s house was far away, but she couldn’t be sure. The journey from Florida to North Carolina, the meeting between Rick Harliss and Gemma’s parents—seeing parents up close, even—was a hole all of its own. She felt if she got too close to the edge, she might fall into a place that had no bottom.

  “You’re in danger,” Pete said. “The people who killed Jake Witz are tracking you and Caelum. They’re probably on their way now.”

  “I know,” Lyra said. She thought of Rick, and the way his eyes had swept the dark for her, trying to latch on. She thought of his pink scalp and his blunt fingers and his slow, shy smile, all of it soon to be reduced to nothing but skin cells and decomposition. A long rope of hatred coiled around her throat. “They were here already.”

  Gemma was sweating. “Is Caelum . . . ?”

  “Gone.” Lyra hated to hear the word out loud. It was like something rattling inside an empty tin can.

  Gemma closed her eyes and opened them slowly, as if sh
e was trying to pry herself out of a dream. “They—they got him?”

  “He was already gone.” She thought of telling Gemma and Pete where he had gone—that there might be others like them, free, and living happily in Nashville—but she was afraid that they would discourage her and that saying the words out loud would burst them like small bubbles, and make her see how silly she was to hope.

  “I saw them come, and I hid until they left.”

  “They’ll be back. They’ll be back any second. You have to come with us.”

  “I can’t,” Lyra said. “Thank you. I’ll be careful.” She knew they were trying to help. Rick had taught her to say thank you, like he’d taught her to say please, to look people directly in the eyes and say hello, too.

  She turned and started off again, but before she had gone four feet, Gemma called her back.

  “Wait.” Gemma’s face looked unexpectedly altered, her eyes startlingly bright, as if they’d grown. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “And where’s Caelum?” Pete’s whole face was pinched with exhaustion, as if someone had sewn his skin on too tight. “Where did he go?”

  “Home,” Lyra said, and ignored the way Gemma and Pete looked at each other. She knew they couldn’t understand. The world had grown too big. She had to shrink it back to manageable size, back to the slender weight of the secrets that she and Caelum could carry together. “I’m going after him.”

  “I don’t think you understand.” Gemma was trying to be nice. Lyra knew that. But her voice was razor sharp, as if at any second it would fall off an edge into hard anger. “The people who came here won’t just quit. They’ll look until they find you, wherever you are.”

  “They’re looking for Caelum and me,” she said. “They won’t expect us to split up. And they won’t expect us to get far. They don’t think we’re smart enough.” She thought of the way the nurses and doctors had always spoken over their heads, had avoided their eyes, had joked and laughed about things in the outside world—never understanding that Lyra had been listening, learning, absorbing. And it struck her as funny, now: they hadn’t thought to watch what they said because they believed they had complete power over her. But as a result, their power had become hers. She’d eaten just enough to survive. “Besides, what other choice do we have?”