Ringer

  There were words on the page, but she had to blink several times to make them come into focus.

  Smile! You’re on candid camera.

  Thieves will be photographed, shamed, and prosecuted. Just like this one!

  She didn’t know what prosecuted meant. But she knew what a thief was. Had Caelum stolen something? Was he in trouble?

  Suddenly, on the other side of the window, a man’s face appeared: an ancient face, tufted with hair in strange places, and eyebrows that ran to meet each other above the nose. She took a quick step backward before remembering there was glass that separated them.

  “In or out?” he said. His breath misted the window, and his voice was faintly muffled. “Or you just going to stand there gaping?”

  “I . . .” Before Lyra could think of an answer, he’d turned, shaking his head, and stumped back toward the cash register. She followed him. Inside, the air smelled like a shoe box. Several customers stood at the counter, waiting to have items scanned. She detached Caelum’s photograph from the window where it had been hung. The old man scowled when she approached him with it.

  “Hello,” Lyra said.

  A guy so skinny his head looked inflated blinked at her. “There’s a line,” he said.

  Lyra ignored him and spoke directly to the man behind the counter. “I know him,” she said, and placed the picture of Caelum down on the counter.

  The man just kept running items past the scanner. “That boy is a thief, young lady,” he said. “Tried to lift a package of jerky and a Coca-Cola, right from under my nose. I been in this business a long time. I know a bad seed when I see one.” He glared at Lyra as if to say that he was looking at one right that very second.

  “Sorry,” she said—a default word of hers, a word that had always helped at Haven with the nurses and doctors. Sorry I made too much noise. Sorry I’m in the way. Sorry I breathe, that I’m here, sorry I have eyes, sorry I exist. “I’m looking for him. That’s what I mean. I need to find him.”

  “You should stay far away from him, is what I think,” the old man said. He’d finished ringing up the skinny guy and gestured the next customer forward.

  “Please,” Lyra said. Her palms were sweating. The overhead lights were very bright. Remembering the lie Rick had coached her on, she added, “He’s my cousin.”

  The old man shook his head again. But this time, his voice was a little softer. “I’m not in the business of giving handouts, young lady,” he said. “It’s a store. Not a church. Besides, if I’d let him get away with it, who’s to say someone else couldn’t just waltz on in here and strip the place?”

  “Do you know where he went?” she asked. Fortunately, her voice didn’t shake. She had gotten very good at that, at hiding, at burying things deep inside of her.

  The old man blinked at her as if she’d just appeared. “Where do you think he went?” he said, scowling again. “The cops took him down to the station. And if I were you, young lady, I wouldn’t hurry to bail him out.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 7 of Gemma’s story.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS EASY ENOUGH, IT turned out, to find a police station, even if you had no idea where you were going. All you had to do, Lyra discovered, was start walking—and eventually, when it started to get dark, the police would find you.

  She walked down a long street empty of cars. Lyra couldn’t exactly be considered lost, since she did not know where she was going: still, she very definitely did not know where she was.

  At some point, it had begun to rain. She crossed an empty playground darkened by shattered floodlights. Next to the swings, several guys paused to watch her, the happy rhythm of their conversation abruptly silenced. A woman with a big metal cart piled with plastic bags wheeled slowly down the sidewalk, her feet swollen with rags instead of shoes. Lyra saw a rat picking at trash bags piled on the street, and the gutters were knotty with empty bottles and old sandwich wrappers and cigarette packs.

  She had been walking for at least an hour, wondering whether she would recognize a police station if she saw it, and if so, whether she would have the courage to go inside it, when a dark sedan pulled up beside her.

  “Are you all right?” A man leaned over to squint through the passenger-side window. His skin was very dark, and his hair was threaded with gray. He was wearing a dark suit.

  Lyra’s immediate thought was to run. She knew sedans, knew the look of the Suits who drove them, knew that they carried smiles along with their guns. But she was trapped: he could easily follow her if she took off running down the block, and there was nowhere to hide, and no possibility of cutting across a nearby park that was hemmed in by a tall chain-link fence.

  “This isn’t a good place for you to be walking this late,” the man said. Lyra backed up, shivering, until the fence punched her between the shoulder blades. She wondered if she should scream. But who would help?

  “Hey.” The man’s voice got softer. “It’s all right. I only want to make sure you’re safe out here.” Then: “It’s okay. You’re not in any trouble.”

  Lyra was confused by the tone of his voice—none of the Suits had ever spoken to her like that, or looked at her the way he was, as if his eyes were something warm he wanted to give her. And he hadn’t come at her with a gun or tried to force her into the car.

  Maybe, then, he wasn’t a Suit.

  Still, Lyra was frozen. The man didn’t move, or get out of the car. He just sat there, looking at her, his face touched with light from a streetlamp on the corner.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked. And then: “¿Habla español?” Then: “My name is Detective Reinhardt. I work with the Nashville Police Department.”

  Finally, Lyra eased her weight off the fence. She was positive, now, that he hadn’t been sent to find her. And she had to be brave, if she was going to find Caelum, which meant she had to believe him.

  She hesitated. “I was looking for a police station,” she said finally.

  He stared at her a second longer. “Get in,” he said, and opened the door.

  His car was very clean, which relaxed her. A picture of three girls was mounted to the dashboard, and when they passed beneath a streetlamp, she saw two of them were identical and felt a kind of ecstatic relief: twins, she knew, not replicas, but still it seemed like a sign. The other girl looked older, and she had the policeman’s long nose and the same enormous eyes. She wore a bright-red headband and had her arms looped around the twins. Her eyes were closed and she was laughing.

  He saw her looking. “The twins are my nieces, my sister’s kids. Jamie and Madison. And that’s my daughter, Alyssia,” he said, thumbing the girl in the middle of the photograph. “An old photo. She’s in college now.”

  “She’s pretty,” Lyra said.

  He smiled. “Don’t I know it,” he said. He had a little bit of an accent, like Nurse Curly, who’d come from a place named Georgia. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Gemma Ives,” she lied quickly. Before leaving Haven she hadn’t been a good liar, but this was a skill, she’d rapidly learned, that most humans had perfected; it was necessary to lie, living in the human world.

  “Nice to meet you, Gemma Ives,” he said. His eyes were big enough to root her in place: as if he wasn’t just seeing her, but absorbing everything about her, her past and even her future. “You can call me Kevin.”

  “Detective Kevin Reinhardt,” she recited, and he laughed.

  “Just Kevin is fine, like I said.”

  Lyra was glad that his suit was rumpled, and smelled like soft old wool. Not sharp, like the suits the military men and women wore when they came. “Why don’t you wear a uniform?” she blurted out.

  He smiled. “I’m a detective,” he said. “We travel under the radar.”

  Lyra nodded, though she didn’t know what a detective did, exactly. But she was glad he wasn’t in uniform. Uniforms made her think of Haven and its guards, of the soldiers who’d pursued
them out on the marshes. You know how expensive these things are to make?

  “Now,” Detective Kevin Reinhardt said, “why don’t you tell me what you need a police station for?”

  She wasn’t used to being spoken to in that tone, as if she might have something valuable to say. She told him her cousin had been picked up for stealing.

  “You know what precinct got him?” he asked.

  She shook her head, and repeated what the man at the 7-Eleven had said: “He tried to lift a package of beef jerky and a can of Coca-Cola. They took him down to the station.”

  They were stopped at a red light. The policeman turned to look at her again. She felt the way his eyes moved from her hair, still shorter than most of the boys’ she had seen since leaving Haven, to her bare arms, to the flimsy backpack with someone else’s name written on it in marker.

  “You know if you’re in trouble, you can tell me,” he said, still in that same low and gentle voice, as if he was singing instead of speaking. He wasn’t like other police officers she had seen on TV, or even the few she’d encountered since leaving Haven. His face looked as if it had been dimpled permanently into an expression of understanding. “If someone’s hurting you, you can just let me know right now, right here, and I’ll help you out, and make sure you’re safe and no one hurts you again. That’s my job.”

  The darkened city outside their windows was a wash of blue tones and hazy cones of color from the streetlamps; then she realized, to her shock, that her eyes were leaking. That’s what they’d called it at Haven. Never crying. Tear duct inflammation, leaking eyes, overactive lachrymal production. Crying meant feelings, and the replicas didn’t feel, or at least the humans pretended they didn’t. Probably that made it easier for them not to feel, either. That way they could do their jobs, draw their paychecks, and sleep soundly.

  For a second she fantasized about telling Detective Kevin Reinhardt everything: about all the pills and medications and lies, the harvesting procedures and the testing and the MRIs, the small prions, deformed like bits of melted plastic, whirring through her blood and bone marrow. In the end, what came out was half-truth.

  “I’m sick,” she said. “I’m dying. My cousin takes care of me. He’s the only person in the world who does.”

  “What about your parents?” the policeman asked. “Where are they?”

  She thought of Rick and the dry skin around his mouth, the way he squinted through his cigarette smoke when they were target shooting. The smell of hot dogs and frozen soup. She thought of Dr. O’Donnell, her blond hair like a vaporous haze barely clinging to her head. She thought of Cassiopeia bleeding out in the marshes, of the Yellow crop bundled up for disposal, of Jake Witz hanging by his own belt.

  “My parents are dead,” she answered. “Everyone’s dead. We came all the way from Florida on our own.”

  “Florida,” he repeated. “Must have been a long trip.”

  “It was.” Suddenly, she couldn’t stop talking. Words skittered off her tongue like insects trying to beat a path home before they were trampled. “We lived on a small island and saw all the same people every day. There was water everywhere, in all directions. And alligators that lived in the marshes. There was a fence—” She sucked in a quick breath. She’d nearly revealed too much. “There was a fence to keep them out.” She looked down at her hands, surprised at how badly she actually missed Haven. “There were birds there. Lots of birds. More birds than people.”

  “It sounds like a beautiful place,” Detective Kevin Reinhardt said, and turned off the car engine. They had arrived somewhere she assumed was a police station: a one-story brick building, and big windows through which more police in uniform were visible. “How old are you?”

  This lie came easily, too. “Twenty-one,” she said, because she had learned from Raina that this was a magic age, even if she didn’t quite understand why. Raina had complained about not being twenty-one yet, about all the bars and concerts and parties that were twenty-one and over, about getting kicked out of someplace for not being twenty-one, so Lyra figured that once you turned twenty-one you got special rights to exist.

  “My niece had brain cancer,” he said finally. “Jamie, the one in the picture. Took her when she was fourteen years old. Cancer’s what you’re sick with, isn’t it? But there are clinics. Treatments. You should be under the care of a doctor.”

  “I am,” Lyra said. “That’s where I’m heading. To UPenn in Philadelphia. To see my doctor.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was exactly what they had to do.

  Lyra and Caelum had been wrong about Nashville. There was no God here. Which meant they had only one option left: they had to find their original God.

  They would ask him to help. They would demand it.

  Detective Reinhardt’s relief was obvious. She could almost smell it coming off him, like a particular odor of sweat. “My daughter almost went to UPenn. Opted for Columbia instead. Philadelphia’s a great city. I know a guy at UPenn Hospital.” He looked at her sideways. “Who’s your doctor up there?”

  This time, Lyra couldn’t think fast enough to lie. She said, “Dr. Saperstein,” hoping he wouldn’t recognize the name. Luckily, he didn’t appear to.

  He just gave her a quick pat on the knee. “I’ll take care of your cousin, don’t you worry. No one’s going to jail for wanting a soda, all right? You just leave it to me.”

  They got out of the car. A rush of black overtook Lyra when she stood up. The rain had turned to a heavy, hot vapor that hung in the air. Who knew what would happen to her once she followed Detective Kevin Reinhardt inside? He seemed okay, but the doctors and nurses at Haven had seemed okay, and all the time they’d been filling her up with disease, tending not her but the disease inside that would eventually sweep away her memories and her words, seize her arms and legs, numb her throat until she couldn’t swallow.

  Still, she followed Detective Reinhardt inside, shy in the sudden brightness. Police officers wove between a jigsaw puzzle of wooden desks. The room stank of old coffee and new ink. A phone seemed to ring every five seconds.

  “Don’t be shy, now.” Detective Reinhardt put a hand on her shoulder when she hesitated in the doorway. “You go on and get comfortable and I’ll be back in a hurry. Now, what did you say your cousin’s name was again?”

  Lyra froze. She pictured her mind as a series of computer monitors, all of them darkened at once by a power surge. There was no way Caelum would have given his real name. But she couldn’t think of the name he would have invented.

  But she was lucky. Finally, she was lucky. Because even as she hesitated, she heard someone shout.

  Turning, she saw Caelum rising from a plastic chair to greet her, trying as hard as he could not to smile, not to grin, and failing totally, so they stood together twenty-five feet apart in a police station in Nashville, Tennessee, at nine p.m. on a Sunday, and laughed.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 8 of Gemma’s story.

  NINE

  DETECTIVE KEVIN REINHARDT KEPT HIS word and made sure that no charges were filed against Caelum. By the time he announced that Caelum was free to go, it was nearly midnight, and Lyra had fallen asleep in one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room with her head on Caelum’s shoulder, directly beneath a large framed poster of the singer named Elvis she had originally mistaken for another Dr. Saperstein.

  Detective Reinhardt volunteered to drive them back to the Greyhound bus station, although he warned them it was likely the buses to Philadelphia wouldn’t run until morning and that the neighborhood was a bad place to go wandering. Lyra told him they planned to wait inside the station, that they didn’t mind spending the night on the floor.

  “You got somewhere to stay once you get up to Philly?” he asked them, once they arrived at the station. “You got friends up there? People you know?”

  “Oh, sure,” Lyra said. “Lots of people. It’ll be just like home to us.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. L
yra had told Caelum that they would find God there, at a place called UPenn.

  It was a slim hope—Dr. Saperstein might simply put them in a cage, as he had done back in Haven—but their only one. He had filled Lyra with sickness. He might, she thought, be able to remove it.

  “You need help or run into trouble, you just give me a call,” he said, and gave her a small white card with his name printed on it, and more numbers she now knew must connect to his telephone. “I want you to study that number. Memorize it, okay? Promise me.”

  Lyra nodded, overwhelmed. Other than Gemma, Detective Reinhardt was the first person to give her a number, his number, to call. She felt, holding the card, as if she were holding something fragile, something sacred and beautiful.

  She blinked to clear her eyes of tears and watched the numbers sharpen and flow into a pattern, make a sentence in her mind. “I promise,” she said.

  Climbing out of the car, however, she felt a strong pull of dread. She thought again of Jake Witz; of finding him swinging from a doorjamb, his face swollen and discolored, and the cleanup crew who’d come afterward to make sure that no one would ask questions. He, too, had offered help. Rick had helped, and she was sure that by now the people who’d taken him in their car had murdered him.

  She hoped this man, Detective Kevin Reinhardt, wouldn’t end up hanging from a rope.

  It was by then after midnight, and no buses would run for hours. Several people lumped on the benches to sleep might have been distant rock formations. It was quiet, and still, except for an old man pacing and muttering darkly to himself.

  She wanted to ask Caelum why he had gone off without her, but she was worried about what his answer would be. Besides, she felt sick again. A seesaw was starting in the bottom of her stomach, back and forth, back and forth, slowly tossing acid up in the back of her throat.

  They went in search of ginger ale: the vending machine at the station was out of everything but Coke. At Haven, she had had ginger ale regularly, because along with the antinausea drugs that got delivered orally or piped in through an IV, the nurses distributed warm ginger ale in small paper cups. The taste of ginger ale reminded her in equal measure of Dr. O’Donnell and of the Box, and so she loved and hated it, also in equal measure.