Ringer

  “It means there’s been an emergency,” Caelum said. Lyra looked at him, surprised. “I heard Rick say it.”

  Thinking of Rick and the people who had taken him made Lyra feel nauseous again. She wondered whether they were still out there, searching for her and Caelum. She wondered whether she really had seen the man at UPenn or only imagined it; she wondered if they could track her to CASECS. But Dr. O’Donnell would protect her.

  She’d promised.

  “What emergency?”

  Now the girl definitely looked nervous. “Dr. O’Donnell says you have to eat something,” she said, avoiding the question entirely. “I have some water for you, too.”

  She deposited the bag on top of the mini fridge and, as she went to root around inside it, toppled the small vial of special medicine that Dr. O’Donnell had left, stoppered, for Lyra’s morning dosage. Lyra shouted and Caelum made a dive for it.

  But it was too late. It hit the ground and opened, liquid seeping out into the carpet. For a second, Caelum stayed there, his hand outstretched. Then he drew back, and Lyra felt a sharp pain: as if something hot had gone straight through her lungs. Unexpectedly, tears came to her eyes.

  The blond girl stared from Lyra to Caelum and back. “What?” she said. “What is it?” She followed the direction of Lyra’s gaze then, and gave a quick laugh. “Oh,” she said. Carelessly, she snatched up the now-empty vial and tossed it once, catching it in her palm. “Don’t worry. It won’t stain.” Lyra could only stare at her.

  “I mean”—the girl sighed and slipped the vial into her pocket—“it’s just saline, anyway. Salt and water never hurt anybody.”

  “She lied to me.”

  They were alone again. The girl had left them, promising to get Dr. O’Donnell, frightened perhaps by Lyra’s stillness. This hole was worse than any yet, because she was conscious, she was aware, she was remembering. But she felt that enormous walls of darkness had grown to enclose her. She was shivering at the very bottom of a pit. Caelum was speaking to her from somewhere very far away.

  “We have to go. Lyra, listen to me. We have to find a way out of here, now.”

  “Why did she lie to me?” She was so cold. Her hands and lips were frozen. Corpses grew cold, she knew; she had touched one before, the day that she had found number 236 dead, her wrists cabled to her bedposts. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Of course it does.” Caelum grabbed her shoulders. “They’re all liars, Lyra. Didn’t I tell you? Each and every one of them is the same.”

  She didn’t want to believe it. But when she closed her eyes, she saw memories revolving, taking on new dimensions. She had overheard Dr. O’Donnell fight with Dr. Saperstein, and had always believed it meant that Dr. O’Donnell loved them. But if she’d really loved them, why hadn’t she tried to end the experiment? She had once tried to convince Emily Huang to stand up to God. But she hadn’t stood up herself. She hadn’t exposed Haven.

  She had just left.

  She had left to do her own experiments, to do whatever it was they really did at CASECS. To license. All the times that Dr. O’Donnell had read to Lyra and the others, had taught them about the stars—was that simply its own experiment?

  Maybe all people were the same—they all wanted different things. But they all demanded the right to want whatever it was they wanted. They all thought of it as their birthright.

  Caelum let Lyra go. He turned back to the door and tried the handle: locked, from the outside. He aimed a kick for the door and Lyra didn’t even startle at the noise. Dr. O’Donnell had lied to her.

  All people were the same.

  There was nowhere to go, nowhere for them to run, no time left for her. What did it matter whether she died here or somewhere else?

  “We shouldn’t have come here.” Caelum’s voice cracked, and Lyra wanted to tell him it was okay, that it didn’t matter anymore.

  “What choice did we have?” Everywhere Lyra turned she hit walls and more walls. “I’m running out of options, Caelum. I’m dying.” It was the first time she’d ever admitted it to Caelum.

  When had she become so afraid of dying? For most of her life, she’d seen death as deeply ordinary, almost mechanical, like the difference between having a light on or off. She was afraid that death would be like falling into one of the holes, except that this one would never end, that she would never reach the bottom of it.

  She couldn’t stand to look at him, at the angular planes of his cheekbones, at his beautiful eyelashes and lips, all of it undamaged, pristine, beautiful. She was unreasonably angry at him—for being so healthy, for being so beautiful.

  Because she knew, of course, that Caelum was the reason she was afraid. She’d never had a reason to care about whether she lived or not. Caelum had given her the reason. Now he would continue, while she would end.

  “Don’t,” she said, when he tried to touch her. But he got her wrist before she could turn away from him.

  “Hey,” he said, and put a hand on her face, resting his thumb on her cheekbone, forcing her to look at him. “Hey.”

  They were chest to chest, breathing together. His eyes, so dark from a distance, were up close layered with filaments of color. She felt, looking at them now, the way she did when looking up at the dark sky, at the stars wheeling in all that blackness.

  “I would trade places with you if I could,” he said. He moved his hand to her chest, and her heartbeat jumped to meet his fingers. “I would trade in a second.”

  “I know,” she said. She was calmer now. He had that effect—he softened her fears, blunted them, the way that when night fell it softened corners and edges.

  “I’ll stay with you, always,” he said. “I want you to know that. I’ll never leave you again. I’ll go with you anywhere. Anywhere,” he repeated, and then smiled. “You tamed me, remember? Like the little prince tamed the fox in the desert. And you named me and made me real.”

  She wanted to tell him she loved him. She wanted to tell him she was afraid. But she couldn’t get the words out. Her throat was too tight.

  Luckily, he said it first. “I love you, Lyra,” he said.

  “Me too,” she managed to say.

  He kissed her. “I love your lips,” he said. “And your nose.” He kissed her nose, then her eyebrows, then her eyelids and cheeks. “I love your eyebrows. Your cheeks.” He took her hand and gently brought her pinkie finger into his mouth, kissing, sucking gently, and now the distinction between her body and his began to erode. She was his mouth and her finger, his breath and her heartbeat, his tongue and her skin, all at once. “I love your hands,” he whispered, moving finger to finger.

  “Me too,” she said, and closed her eyes as he knelt to kiss her stomach, explored her hipbones with his tongue, naming all the places he loved, all the inches of skin, the seashell parts spiraled deep inside of her, filled with tides of wanting.

  But her wanting wasn’t a right. It was a gift. It was a blessing. She came to it on her knees, holding out her arms.

  “Me too,” she said, and every place he kissed her, her skin came alive, and told her she had to live.

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

  NINETEEN

  THE LOCKS AT CASECS HADN’T been made to keep people prisoner—especially people like Lyra and Caelum, who were only half-people, raised in a place where a thousand different locks controlled the motion of their daily lives. Lyra and Caelum knew locks that beeped and locks that spun, locks that clicked and locks that jammed. Each of them had its own language, its own clucking tongue.

  They rooted in Dr. O’Donnell’s desk. Gemma turned up a business card like the kind the Suits had carried into Haven, dropping occasionally like scattered jewels for the replicas to collect: this one carried the name Allen Fortner. She knew this must mean that Dr. O’Donnell had business with the Suits, or wanted to, even before she turned up a to-do list that included the item: Call Geoffrey Ives.

&nbs
p; Rifling through a notepad, she found many to-do lists, and many calls to Gemma’s father.

  She wondered whether he was already on his way. More likely, he had simply sent someone to take care of Lyra and Caelum; he was the kind of person who spoke through his money.

  She stuffed her pockets with paper, with Post-it notes, with business cards and scrawled reminders. Evidence, although she still wasn’t sure what it proved. But every piece of paper, every scrap, hardened a sense of rage and injustice.

  If she had any time left, any time at all, she would take the words and light them on fire so they would explode everywhere; they would drift like a cloud and blacken Dr. O’Donnell’s name, and CASECS’s name, and Geoffrey Ives’s name too. Even if she died, she would find a way to make the words live.

  In the bottom drawer, behind a rubble of loose pens, they found a handful of bobby pins. Caelum straightened out one of the bobby pins and inserted it into the keyhole, wiggling until he heard it click. In less than five seconds, they were free.

  The hallway was empty, and branched in both directions. Lyra saw no exit signs and couldn’t remember which way to go. The night before, she’d been too overwhelmed to pay attention. Caelum had been brought in by security and was distracted by a small cluster of people who had gathered to watch, but he thought they should turn left, and so they did.

  Caelum was right about the rest of CASECS: it was all carpeted hallways and offices marked with unfamiliar names, conference rooms and cubicles. Lyra saw signs of the previous night’s celebration: a bottle of wine, uncorked, and plastic cups that had pooled liquid onto a conference table. There were coffee mugs still exhaling steam at empty desks, and abandoned jackets, purses, and cell phones everywhere, suggesting their owners had, indeed, come to work only to be spirited away.

  Fear moved like a film of sweat across Lyra’s body. The hallway seemed to keep unrolling extra feet, stretching endlessly past the same bleak workstations, as if it were expanding. She kept spinning around, thinking she heard footsteps on the carpet, expecting to see Dr. O’Donnell bearing down on them. But they saw no one but a guy wedged into a cubicle, fiddling with a grid of numbers on his computer, ears obscured beneath palm-sized headphones. He didn’t see them.

  Finally, the hallway dead-ended and they turned right, startling a girl holding a bakery box. She nearly dropped it, yelped, and turned to hurry away—as if she had reason to be afraid of them.

  “We have to hurry,” Caelum said, as if Lyra didn’t know. But she spotted a set of double doors where the girl had whipped out of sight around another turn, and she and Caelum grabbed hands and ran.

  Lyra’s heart was gasping. As they got close she thought it might burst; she saw a keypad like the kind they had used at Haven, which required an ID to swipe. But the doors had been propped open with an old paperback book, and beyond them was a stairwell and a sign pointing the way to further levels.

  The stairs went down, and twisted them around several landings, past a level called Sub-One, which was unlit. Through a set of swinging doors, Lyra saw a vast room filled with nothing but old machines, abandoned workstations, and freight containers. The double doors opened at her touch.

  “In here?” she whispered to Caelum. But just then, a patter of footsteps passed overhead, and he shook his head and pulled her on.

  As they descended, the air got noticeably cooler. Lyra remembered what the boy had said about a refrigerator. She pictured an enormous, chilled space, like a dead heart, filled with endless chambers.

  The stairs bottomed out at a heavy metal gate; this one was closed and required a digitized code to open. Beyond it was a plain white windowless door, fitted with yet another keypad and marked with a small sign that simply said: Secure Area—Live Samples. Lyra’s blood rushed a frantic rhythm to her head, and in its rhythm she heard the certainty of dark secrets. Whatever CASECS made, whatever Dr. O’Donnell built with all her wanting, it was here.

  They had no choice but to backtrack. The climb left Lyra winded and she had to rest on the landing, leaning heavily against Caelum, before they slipped once again through the propped-open doors at the top of the stairs. Maybe, Lyra thought, there was no exit. Maybe Dr. O’Donnell had trapped them, the way in the early days Haven had placed rats in mazes that didn’t lead anywhere, to test how long it took for the sick ones to learn all the dead ends.

  They turned again, and this time Lyra’s heart leapt: an exit sign pointed through a set of doors only twenty feet away. She was so happy she failed to register the sudden swell of voices. She slipped easily away from Caelum even as he tried to grab her.

  “Lyra, wait.”

  But she had started toward the sign already, hooked on the glowing comfort of its syllables. Exit. A funny word, and one she had only lately come to love. At Haven, she had always thought the exit signs were taunting her.

  She was halfway there when the wave of voices finally broke across her consciousness; as if the sound was a physical substance and she had mindlessly stepped into its current. Forty or fifty people were gathered in a conference room to crowd around a wall-mounted TV. Had they been turned to face the hallway instead, Lyra would have been visible. She was rooted directly in the middle of the doorway, frozen with sudden terror.

  Dr. Saperstein was staring directly at her.

  For a confused and terrified second, she mistook the image for the real thing and thought he was really there, staring bleakly over all the CASECS employees, pinning her with his eyes. But of course he wasn’t. It was just an old picture, an image made huge by the television. Almost immediately, Dr. Saperstein vanished, and a female newscaster with stiff black hair and an even stiffer smile took over the screen.

  The rush of blood in Lyra’s ears quieted. But just for a minute.

  “. . . confirmed that Dr. Mark Saperstein was indeed found dead this morning at an undisclosed location . . .”

  A microwave beeped. No one bothered with it. They were all still. Lyra felt as if the air was being pressed out of her lungs.

  “Though Dr. Saperstein had just undergone a spectacularly public fall from grace, culminating in this week’s protests at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, the police have denied reports that his death was a suicide. . . .”

  Dead. Dead. Dead. The word kept drilling in Lyra’s mind. Dr. Saperstein was dead. God was dead. She should have been happy, but strangely, she was just frightened. It had never occurred to her that God would die, or that it was even possible.

  She was less than fifteen feet from the exit. No one had seen her. And yet she couldn’t move, and even Caelum hesitated, teetering on the edge of the doorway as if it were a river he was worried about crossing.

  Eight seconds, maybe ten. Twelve at a stretch.

  God had died, and with him, the replicas’ only reason for being.

  Was a terrible reason better than no reason at all?

  “There they are. Get them. Get them.”

  Lyra turned and saw Dr. O’Donnell charging them and trailing a small crowd of people behind her; among them were three guards and the girl who’d dropped the bakery box.

  And at the same time, in response to her shout, everyone in the conference room turned and spotted Lyra.

  She ran. Caelum was shouting over the sudden chaos, and though she couldn’t hear him, she could feel him a step behind her. They had a small advantage, but it was enough. They were steps from the door, inches, they could get outside, they would be free—

  But even as Lyra reached for the door, it opened forcefully from the other side. Caelum managed to pull up, but Lyra was thrown backward by the blunt collision, as with a hard and hollow smack the door caught her in the side of her jaw. She landed on her back, breathless and dizzy. Through a fuzz of dark shapes she saw a whip-thin man, soaked with toppled coffee, gaping at her.

  Caelum tried to get her to her feet but by then Dr. O’Donnell had caught up, and the guards drove him to his knees, and Lyra saw a thicket grow above her: a nest of mouths and
unfamiliar faces, long arms that looked like weapons. Cold fingers locked her wrists in place. Someone sat on her ankles.

  They look so real, somebody said.

  You’d never know.

  Be careful how you handle them, please. That was Dr. O’Donnell. It looks like they may be the last ones.

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

  TWENTY

  THIS TIME THEY WERE PLACED in an unused office whose only furniture was a set of metal filing cabinets and two chairs brought in for Caelum and Lyra to sit on, although Caelum remained standing. The door required a key. Dr. O’Donnell had locked them in herself.

  “Give me a minute,” she’d told them, almost apologetically. She couldn’t stop pretending that she was on their side. She probably didn’t know the difference.

  Standing with her ear to the door, Lyra could hear Dr. O’Donnell speaking to someone in the hall.

  “She says they came here on their own, with no help. I doubt she knows a thing.”

  There was only silence in response, and Lyra realized that Dr. O’Donnell was talking on the phone. Her skin tightened into a shiver. Dr. O’Donnell knew the Suits. How long would it be before they arrived?

  “She hasn’t mentioned Gemma at all, but I can ask.” Another silence. “You think she ended up there by mistake?”

  Lyra leaned so hard against the door, sweat gathered in the space behind her ear. For a long time, Dr. O’Donnell said nothing, and Lyra worried she might have hung up.

  But then she spoke again. “I’m sure she’s okay, Geoff. I’m sure she made it out.” Then: “No, I understand that. But she’s a smart girl. You’ve said so yourself.”

  Lyra put a hand on the door and pressed, imagining she could squeeze her rage out through her fingertips, harden it into blades that would slice them free. Geoff meant Geoffrey Ives. Though she didn’t understand much of the conversation, she understood that something bad had happened to Gemma.