Ringer

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Gemma’s story.

  SEVENTEEN

  AFTER A DINNER OF SALTY soup and crackers that dissolved in the broth, Lyra worked up the courage to tell Dr. O’Donnell what she had come for: she wanted to live.

  Dr. O’Donnell listened in silence, resting one hand lightly on Lyra’s knee. Lyra should have felt happy, because Dr. O’Donnell was obviously so happy to see her.

  But a shadow had attached itself to her thinking; everything dimmed beneath it. Why hadn’t Dr. O’Donnell come to help? Why did she allow the doctors to make all the replicas sick? What was CASECS, that there were no hospital beds but only sofas and armchairs and corkboards, where the doctors wore jeans and sneakers and music played at midnight?

  She was reassured, however, when after a long pause, Dr. O’Donnell stood up. “Wait here,” she said, and slipped out the door. When she reappeared, she was holding a small, unmarked bottle of fluid, along with one of the long-snouted syringes Lyra had despised back at Haven, for their cruel curiosity. Now, she was relieved to see it.

  “What is it?” Lyra asked. Dr. O’Donnell found a pair of medical gloves at the bottom of a desk drawer and cinched them carefully on her fingers.

  “A new medicine,” Dr. O’Donnell said. She drew the liquid carefully into the syringe, keeping her back to Lyra. “Very rare. Very expensive.”

  “Will it cure me?” Lyra asked. Hope buoyed her, swelled her with air, and made her feel as if she might lift off toward the ceiling. “Will it make all the prions go away?”

  “With any luck,” Dr. O’Donnell said. Then: “Hold out your arm for me.”

  Dr. O’Donnell offered Caelum a couch in the office next to hers, which belonged to a beautiful woman named Anju Patel. But in the end, since Caelum insisted on sleeping next to Lyra, Dr. O’Donnell and Anju maneuvered a second couch into Dr. O’Donnell’s office instead.

  “Sorry if there are any crumbs in the cushions,” Anju said. She had appeared suddenly, practically careening through the door, wearing sweatpants and an inside-out T-shirt, as if she’d dressed in a hurry. Lyra had overheard Anju tell Dr. O’Donnell she’d been in bed when someone had rung her up to share the news of Lyra and Caelum’s arrival.

  The medicine had filled Lyra with a kind of happy warmth: already, she could picture the prions breaking apart, like mist by the sun.

  “Cupcakes are my coffee. I need at least one a day just to keep moving.” Anju turned to Dr. O’Donnell. “Sorry, I don’t—I mean, do they understand me?”

  “We understand you,” Caelum said. “You like to eat cupcakes?”

  For some reason his voice made Anju startle. Then she began to laugh.

  “Oh God,” she said. She had tears in her eyes, soon, from laughing, though Lyra didn’t know what was funny. “Yeah, I do. I really do.”

  After Dr. O’Donnell had cleaned and bandaged the cut on Caelum’s cheek and set him up with an ice pack to help reduce the swelling around his eye, she left in search of Advil and something to help Caelum sleep. Anju Patel stayed, staring. Her eyes, dark as the nicotine candies Rick had sucked sometimes, were enormous, and Lyra had a sudden fear she would be spiraled down inside them, like water down a drain.

  “Are you a doctor too?” Lyra asked, both because she was curious and because she was slowly learning to dislike silence. At Haven, silence, her silence, had not been a choice but simply a condition.

  Anju Patel laughed again. “God, no,” she said. “I can’t even get my blood drawn. I’m a baby for things like that.” Lyra didn’t know what she meant, or why anyone would be unable to have blood drawn—for a second she thought Anju meant there was something physically wrong with her, that she couldn’t. “I’m in sales. Licensing, really.”

  “What’s licensing?” Caelum asked. Lyra, too, had never heard the word.

  Anju Patel’s face changed. “Do you like to ask questions?” she asked, instead of answering. “Are you very curious?”

  Caelum shrugged. Again the shadow swept across Lyra’s mind, like a dark-winged bird brushing her with its feather.

  “When we don’t know something,” Lyra said, “we ask to know it.”

  Anju nodded thoughtfully, as if there were something surprising about that. Maybe Anju was just very stupid. She took a long time to answer.

  “Licensing is about rights,” she said finally, very slowly. “It’s about who has the right to do what. It’s about who has the right to own what.”

  A chill moved down Lyra’s body and raised the hair on her arms. It always came back to ownership.

  “Let’s say you have an idea, a good idea, and you want to share it. To make sure other people can use it. But it was your idea, so you should get rewarded.” Anju was talking very slowly, like the nurses at Haven always had when they were forced to address the replicas directly. Maybe because they had known all along of the holes that would eventually make shrapnel of their brains; maybe they had already zoomed forward in time and seen the replicas idiotic, unable to control their bodies, paralyzed and silenced and then dead.

  But didn’t Anju know that Dr. O’Donnell had given Lyra special medicine? Didn’t she understand that Lyra’s brain would be saved?

  “You mean paid,” Caelum said, and Anju nodded.

  “Exactly. So licensing takes care of that. We license a thing so that we can then replicate it all over”—she caught her use of the word, and smiled at them as if they were all sharing a joke—“and make sure that no one uses it illegally, for free.”

  In the outside that was the most important rule: that nothing was free, and everything would be paid for, one way or another.

  Then something occurred to her. “Were the replicas licensed?”

  Anju barely moved, but nonetheless Lyra was aware that everything, even her skin, had suddenly tightened. “What do you mean?”

  She was stupid. She must be. “Were the replicas licensed?” she repeated. “Is that why the Gods”—an old habit, to think of them that way—“I mean, why Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein were allowed to make so many of them?”

  Anju seemed to relax, and Lyra wondered why the first question had bothered her. “No, no,” Anju said. “You can’t license human beings. Licensing is for . . . well, for ideas. Techniques. Methods. Let’s say I invented a new way to manufacture a chair, for example. I might patent that, and then sell it through a licensing agreement, so other people could use my method when they made their own chairs. Do you understand?”

  Lyra did understand, at least in general terms. Licensing was a way to make money off replicating ideas, as far as she could tell. But she couldn’t understand why CASECS needed a person like Anju Patel. Haven had never had a licensing department. She would have heard about it.

  “Can you license a medicine?” Lyra asked, trying to puzzle out why CASECS, with its nest of cluttered offices and the smell not of antiseptic but of old carpet, made her uneasy.

  “Oh, sure,” Anju said, and Lyra felt instantly better. That was all right, then. CASECS made cures and licensed them because in the outside world money was everything. “You can patent a medical technique, too. About a hundred medical patents are issued per month—”

  Anju broke off suddenly, and glancing up, Lyra saw that Dr. O’Donnell had returned. In the split second before she knew Lyra’s eyes had landed on her, she appeared baldly angry: it was like a raw, hard flush had ruined her complexion, even though Lyra didn’t think her color had actually changed. The stain was invisible, and as soon as she saw Lyra she smiled and her face smoothed over.

  “You must be so tired,” she said. “All the way from Tennessee, all by yourselves.”

  “I can have Sonja round up some blankets,” Anju said.

  “Already did.” Dr. O’Donnell didn’t look at Anju, and her tone swept a thin band of cold through the room. She was obviously angry at Anju for speaking with the replicas, but Lyra didn’t know why.

  Anju left without
another word. A moment later another woman appeared, this one even younger than Anju and with the stoop-shouldered look of someone who got tall very young, carrying an armful of blankets.

  She also seemed as if she wanted to speak to Lyra and Caelum, but Dr. O’Donnell intercepted her before she could even step foot in the room.

  “Thank you, Sonja,” she said, in the same tone she’d used before on Anju. Lyra didn’t remember this tone of voice. It reminded her of someone she knew, someone not from Haven but from outside, but she couldn’t think who. More holes, maybe, or she was simply tired. Her whole body ached. Her mind felt like a bruise, throbbing with a single message of pain and tenderness.

  Dr. O’Donnell had small white pills for Caelum that Lyra recognized as Sleepers. She felt a rush of sudden affection: the Sleepers were everyone’s favorites, those small soldiers that herded you off into a mist of dreaming. But when Lyra reached out for her dosage, Dr. O’Donnell shook her head.

  “It isn’t safe,” she said. “Not when you cracked your head. I’ll have to wake you every few hours. Sorry,” she said, but any regret Lyra felt was outweighed by the sudden pleasure of Dr. O’Donnell’s expression, which softened into the one she remembered so well. Instead Lyra got reddish Advil pills, slick and sugared on her tongue.

  Caelum settled on the couch next to Lyra’s. He hadn’t said much since Anju had first appeared, except to say he wouldn’t leave Lyra, and when Dr. O’Donnell tried to place a blanket over him he caught her wrist, and for a moment they were frozen there, staring at each other.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. But already Lyra saw him relaxing, as the Sleepers did their work.

  “I’ll be here all night,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “Just shout if you need something.” She smiled at Lyra, and momentarily the changes to her face, the new wrinkles and the slightly thinner skin, were erased. “And I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  She turned off the lights. It was surprisingly dark. The window was covered by thin slat-blinds but must have been facing away from the parking lot, toward the fence and beyond it, the woods. The only light at all came from a tissue-thin crevice around the door, which appeared as a result like a faint, glowing silhouette. But Lyra could still hear the muffled rhythm of music, although after only a minute, it cut off abruptly. Then: footsteps ran like water, and whispered voices outside their door soon flowed away.

  “Caelum?” Lyra whispered. Then, a little louder: “Are you awake?”

  He didn’t answer for so long she thought he wouldn’t. When he did speak, the edges of his words were round and soft, as if they were melting on his tongue. “I don’t trust her,” was all he said.

  Lyra wanted to be angry with him. CASECS and its unfamiliar sounds, its dizzying arrangement of cubicles and ceiling tiles and cluttered desks and new names, had exhausted her. “You don’t know her like I do,” she said. “That’s all.”

  Caelum didn’t respond. After a minute, she heard his breathing slow and realized he was asleep. She closed her eyes, expecting to drop quickly into a dream, but instead she found her mind cycling, insect-like, landing quickly on old memories, on visions of Haven, on quick-splice images she’d thought she had forgotten.

  She was still awake when the door opened again. She thought at first it was because Dr. O’Donnell was coming to check on her. A band of light fell sharply across her eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut, and was about to ask for water when she heard an unfamiliar voice and froze.

  “Are you sure they’re sleeping?” It was a boy’s voice, totally unknown to her.

  “Positive. O’Donnell was hunting around for Ambien.”

  Because of the lightening of the colors behind her eyelids, Lyra knew they were standing there in the doorway, staring.

  “It’s weirder in person,” the boy said, after a minute. “They look so . . . normal. Don’t they?”

  “What did you think? They’d have three heads or something?”

  “Shut up. You know what I mean.” Then: “Do you think . . . do you think they dream and everything?”

  “I don’t see why not. Dr. O’Donnell says they . . . like we do,” the girl whispered, so softly that even the rustle of Caelum’s blankets when he turned blew some of her words away. “She never had proof before. So many of the others were morons. She told me some of them couldn’t even use the toilet. But these . . .”

  Caelum rolled over again, and so the boy’s response was lost. When he finally settled down, the girl was already speaking.

  “. . . depending on what you use them for.” There was a long stretch of quiet, and Lyra feared, though she knew it was impossible, the girl would hear the knocking of her heart and know she was awake and listening. “Everyone always thought AI would come from computers. But we did it first. Biology did it.”

  For a long time, they didn’t speak again.

  “It’s kind of sad, in a way,” the boy said at last.

  “You can’t think of it like that,” the girl responded. “You have to remember there’s a purpose.”

  “Cha-ching,” the boy responded. Lyra didn’t know what it meant.

  “Sure,” the girl said. She sounded annoyed. “But that isn’t the only reason. We can save hundreds of thousands of lives. Maybe we’ll even cure death.”

  “Who knew,” the boy said, “eternal life would spring from a cooler in Allentown, Pennsylvania?”

  He closed the door, sealing out the light. Lyra’s heart was beating fast. She rolled over to face Caelum, trying to slow the frantic drumming of her pulse, listening to the sound of their intermingled breathing. She thought about what she had overheard: the talk of AI, which she didn’t understand; licensing, the key to eternal life. She had misunderstood many things, but she had understood that: the key was here, somewhere in CASECS, locked in a cooler. Perhaps the key was in the medicine that Dr. O’Donnell had given her. Or perhaps it was a real key, or a kind of medical equipment.

  Though it should have been an electrifying idea, instead it made her uncomfortable. At Haven, they had tried to be gods by making life: and so the replicas had suffered for their miracle.

  She wondered what it would look like to cure death, and who would have to suffer for it.

  As her mind wandered through strange corridors that bordered on dream, she thought for some reason of a bird they’d found on one of the courtyard pathways when she was a child: a scrawny brown thing, smaller than her palm, it must have mistaken the reflection in one of the windows for an aerial pathway and flown straight into the glass.

  She remembered the way it had tried to hop to safety as the replicas had crowded around it, and her sudden lurching awareness of death all around them, not just in the clean white folds of the Box, not contained or containable. And then Calliope, who was then only called number 7, had stepped forward and driven her foot down on top of it, so hard they all heard the crunch.

  It was broken, Calliope had said. It’s better to kill it. It’s the right thing.

  But Lyra had suspected, had known, that she had just wanted to know what would happen. She was curious to know what it would feel like, that small fragile second when a life snapped beneath her shoe with the sharp crack of a flame leaping to life from the head of a match but in reverse: the sound of darkness, not light.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Gemma’s story.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN SHE FINALLY SLEPT, SHE had a dream of standing in the middle of a large metal chamber that vibrated like the interior chamber of Mr. I, while Anju spoke over the roar, explaining how to license chairs.

  Leaning forward over the railing, Lyra saw hundreds and hundreds of chairs lined up along the tongue of a conveyor belt, and for some reason she was repulsed by them, by their jointed design and the crooked look of their spindly legs—until, looking closer, she saw they weren’t made out of wood or plastic, but out of human arms and legs, human feet, thousands of bodies hacked up and rearranged and made available, Anju was
saying, for sale on a large scale.

  She woke up sweating. The morning, which should have been filled with a buzz of activity and voices, was instead profoundly quiet. Caelum had opened the blinds, and his face was cut into horizontal stripes of light.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked her, without turning away from the window.

  She sat up, shaking off the sticky remnants of her dream. Her whole body was sore and her legs were purpling with enormous, flower-shaped bruises. But her head was clearer. Maybe the medicine was working already.

  “Better,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  He turned to face her. “The windows are barred. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing but telephones and office rooms and computers. So why bar the windows and put up the fence? Why security?”

  “They want to keep people from getting in,” Lyra said.

  “Why? If they’re making medicines, if they’re curing diseases, why all the secrecy?” He shook his head. “They’re hiding something.”

  Lyra was annoyed. Caelum saw danger in everything and everybody. But it was easy for him to doubt. He wasn’t the one who needed a cure.

  And what bothered her most, deep down, was that she knew he was right.

  “Maybe they don’t want anyone stealing from them,” she said. She was about to tell him what she had overheard in the night—about the key to eternal life, about the magic cooler—when the door opened and a girl came in with a paper bag that said Dunkin’ Donuts. Her face was shaped exactly like a circle, her eyes like two exclamation points of surprise.

  “Dr. O’Donnell said you might want breakfast.” She looked nervous, Lyra thought—as if she were the one who felt out of place.

  “Where is Dr. O’Donnell?” Lyra asked.

  The girl looked startled, as if she hadn’t expected questions. “Putting out fires,” she said, and Lyra frowned. “I don’t mean real fires,” the girl added, seeing that Lyra didn’t understand, and she giggled a little. “It’s just an expression.”