Ringer (Replica)

by Lauren Oliver

  Lyra was suddenly furious. “You should have killed her,” she said, thinking of the way Detective Reinhardt had fumbled for his gun. “She would have killed you.”

  Detective Reinhardt shook his head. “She’s just a kid,” he said.

  “She’s a replica,” Lyra said, but Detective Reinhardt shook his head again.

  Lyra saw then that he really, truly didn’t understand the difference. That to him, there was no difference.

  She had been told she was supposed to love Rick Harliss because he was her father, and because he loved her. But she had never felt as if she loved him, and she had worried simply that she didn’t know how. Even the way she felt about Caelum, she thought, might not be love at all, but something different, something she had no name for. Hadn’t she heard again and again at Haven that the replicas weren’t all-the-way human, they weren’t real people, they were simulations of people, precisely because they couldn’t love? Damaged, monstrous, soulless—these were all different words for the same thing.

  But in that moment, and though she hardly knew him at all, she knew absolutely that she loved Detective Reinhardt. It was complete and undeniable, and it changed the whole world around her, like being submerged in a warm bath for the first time. If she could have chosen a father, she would have chosen him.

  The gun was cold in her hand. But its grip felt familiar.

  “Stay here,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.” He didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t sure he’d heard. His whole face was screwed tight around his pain now, as if it too had been winched around the knife.

  She’d been right: it hadn’t taken Caelum long to catch up to Calliope, and Lyra found them quickly. He had gotten her facedown in the wet leaves and pinned her arms behind her back. But she’d obviously fought him. There were deep scratch marks from his cheekbone to his jaw, and a bite mark on the back of his hand.

  When Lyra approached, Calliope tried to lift her head. But she couldn’t manage it. She thudded down into the dirt again, one cheek flat to the leaves, the other catching the drive of the rain. But her eye, swollen with rage, rolled toward Lyra, like the eye of a spooked animal.

  Except that Lyra didn’t feel sorry for Calliope, not one bit.

  “I thought you were dead,” Calliope said. Because of the way her head was angled, her voice was distorted. It was a terrible version of Gemma’s voice: it was the same 15 percent wrong as the rest of Calliope.

  Lyra ignored that. She knew Calliope likely meant that she thought Lyra had died on the marshes, but she couldn’t help but feel, too, that Calliope had seen immediately how little time she had left, that the disease was starting to show on her skin. “Where’s Gemma?” she said.

  “I don’t know any Gemma,” Calliope said, and Caelum gave her a nudge with his knee. Her tongue appeared quickly to wet her lower lip. She was nervous, and Lyra was glad. “I don’t know where she is.”

  Lyra didn’t know whether to believe her, but it didn’t matter, anyway. Calliope would never tell her the truth.

  “Why’d you do it?” she asked. “You killed that family. You left Gemma to take the blame.”

  “I didn’t know what would happen,” Calliope said. Then: “Why do you care, anyway?”

  “Gemma’s my friend,” Lyra said.

  Calliope’s pupil was so large it seemed to swallow all the color in her eye. “Friend,” she said, and the rain suddenly changed its pattern through the leaves, creating a ripple sound like laughter. “You were always one of the dumb ones. They’ll kill you. You know that, right? They’re all the same. They’ll pretend to help you and then they’ll hurt you, again and again, just like they did at Haven.”

  Lyra had always felt anger as a kind of heat burning through her. But now she was freezing cold. As if from the grip of the gun her whole body was turning to metal very slowly. Calliope had known the truth about Haven, just like Caelum had. But not Lyra.

  Was it true, then? Was she really just stupid?

  Was she being stupid now?

  “Let me go,” Calliope said. “You’re not going to kill me. So let me go.”

  “Not until you tell me why,” Lyra said. The trees chittered under the pressure of the rain. They threw the question back at her, and made it sound ridiculous.

  “Cassiopeia was dead,” she said. “Number six was dead. Numbers nine and ten, too. They never made it out of the airport. And number eight doesn’t count. Even if she did escape, she couldn’t last long.” Calliope pulled her mouth into a smile, exposing an incisor tooth, graying and sharp. “I wanted to be the only one.”

  Lyra closed her eyes. She stood and listened and thought of her whole life like a single point of rain, falling down into nothingness. Calliope was still talking, wheedling now, sounding young and afraid. But Lyra could barely hear her. Let me go, Lyra. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was so scared. It was the strangest thing, as if Calliope wasn’t talking at all, as if Lyra was just remembering something she’d said years earlier.

  She thought of Detective Reinhardt and Gemma lost forever, and those people on the farm, lying in one another’s blood. Detective Reinhardt had said that some people could wear faces, could slip them on like masks.

  Lyra opened her eyes. “Do you remember the baby bird that flew into the glass?” she asked. Funnily enough, she felt calm. “It flew into the glass and broke a wing. I thought I could nurse it.”

  Calliope frowned. “No,” she said. But Lyra could tell she was lying.

  She could see it so clearly in her mind: the way its tufted feathers fluttered with every breath, the shuttering of its tiny beak, how scared it was.

  “You stepped on its head to kill it,” Lyra said. The barrel of Detective Reinhardt’s gun was slick and wet but she felt it, slowly, warming in her hand. “You said it was the right thing to do, because of how it was broken. Because there was no hope of fixing it.”

  Calliope went very still. The whole world went still. Even the rain let up momentarily and seemed to gasp midair, deprived even of the will or energy to fall. Calliope’s fear smelled like something chemical. Lyra saw her calculating: right answer, wrong answer.

  “I don’t remember,” Calliope said finally, and all the rain unfroze, all of it at once hurtled down fast and thick to break apart, as if trying to blow itself back into elements purer than what it had become. The feeling came back to Lyra’s hand, warmed her fingers and wrist and arm as she raised the gun. It spread down through her heart, opening and closing like the wings of a bird in her chest.

  “Funny,” she said. “I never forgot.”

  She didn’t need more than one shot, but she fired three anyway, just to be sure.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 25 of Gemma’s story.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE WARMTH FLOWED AWAY FROM her as quickly as it had come. She didn’t feel sorry, or sad. She didn’t feel anything at all. The bullets had ruined Calliope’s face, and forever destroyed her resemblance to Gemma. There would be only one now: the right one. Still, she wasn’t sure whether she had done the right thing, or why she felt so little. Maybe there really was something wrong with her—with all of them.

  “What’s going to happen?” she asked suddenly. She was too afraid to meet Caelum’s eyes, so she stared instead at the leaves turning to pulp in the rain.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. Caelum was always honest. It was one of the things she loved about him.

  Suddenly she felt like crying. “I’m a replica, really, aren’t I? I’m more replica than anything else.”

  He touched her face. His fingers were cool and damp. She blinked at him through the rain webbed in her lashes.

  “You’re Lyra,” he said. He smiled, and she fell down into his love for her, touching every layer, and this kind of falling was like its opposite, like flying instead. “That’s all. That’s enough.”

  Lyra was relieved to find that Detective Reinhardt was on his feet, lean
ing heavily against a tree. When Caelum reached for him, he said, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” and even managed to smile.

  They had no choice but to give up their search for Gemma. Detective Reinhardt needed help, and it would take longer for someone to find them out here than it would for them to make it back to the car on their own.

  Slow. One foot in front of the other. Stop to rest. Lyra turned her face to the sky and whispered an apology to Gemma, for leaving her behind. For failing.

  The rain had dropped off, faded to a bare mist, and the leaves shook off their moisture, so it sounded as if high above them, in the cage of the branches, tiny feet jumped from branch to branch. Lyra smelled mulch, rot, growth, and the pure wet sweetness of new blood, of life.

  Lyra smelled her old life burning. Every day, the past was burned and you became something new from the ashes.

  Lyra smelled burning.

  No. She smelled fire.

  Detective Reinhardt must have smelled it at the same time, because he winced and grunted, ordered Caelum to stop. But Lyra had already turned. She’d already spotted a thread of smoke unwinding above the trees, back in the direction of the cabins, and she’d already started to run.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 26 of Gemma’s story.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DIMLY, LYRA WAS AWARE OF shouting: the gunshots must have drawn the attention of the searchers. She had been worried about coming across police officers in the woods; she was worried they would ask questions that Detective Reinhardt didn’t know how to answer.

  But now, she thought of nothing but Gemma, her friend.

  She saw through a break in the trees the architecture of the old cabins, and the smoke coming from somewhere beyond them. She had approached from the back and had a view of collapsed stone timbers and a ruined hearth.

  She circled around to the front, completely mindless of the way her heart was jumping arrhythmically in her chest, mindless of the little moments of dark that shuttered her vision for seconds at a time. Gemma, Gemma, Gemma was the only rhythm she could hear. The long finger of smoke was all she could see.

  The ground was smoking. Or at least, that’s what it looked like to her from a distance. But as she drew closer, she saw a blackened door laid flat over a lip of stone, and the smoke flowing out from an opening beneath it.

  She dropped to her knees, soaking her jeans. She got her fingers around the old door and pushed, recoiling as the column of smoke thickened, carried up by a surge of air. Blinking to clear tears from her vision, she spotted a mass of uniforms coming toward her through the trees—troopers, police officers, firefighters.

  “Here,” she screamed. At the bottom of a long well, Gemma was curled up next to a smoldering fire, which blew its thick smoke into the air. Lyra felt as if she were falling, and leaving her body behind. “Here. Here.”

  It seemed to take forever for her to lift her hand. She saw it waving there, tethered to the narrow cable of her wrist, and it looked like a distant balloon, like something that didn’t belong to her at all.

  “Here, here, here,” she shouted, again and again, as all the uniformed men and women came toward her through a scrim of smoke. Maybe it was a trick of the smoke, or maybe not: but funnily enough, all those strangers fractured in her vision into a kaleidoscope of different angles, and she saw them coming toward her not as a wave, not as a group, but as individual points of color, as individual hands reaching to hold her, as individual arms that caught her just before she dropped.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 27 of Gemma’s story.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  LANCASTER GENERAL LOOKED LIKE THE Haven from her dreams: full of windows that let in long afternoon sunlight, when the clouds eventually broke up; full of the reassuring squeak of footsteps, and the smell of floor polish and fresh flowers. Lyra was placed in her own room and hooked up to an IV to deliver fluids and Zofran to get rid of her nausea. Her window looked out onto an interior garden, just like the one at Haven, except there was no faceless statue here. Just flowers, and benches where visitors sat in the sun.

  The IV fluids made her feel better right away, and she began to drift, rising and falling through different dreams: in one, she and Caelum lived in a white house that looked just like the one at April’s grandparents’, and Detective Reinhardt brought them mail, but every single one of the letters he delivered turned into a white bird and flew away.

  She woke up because she thought a bird wing swept across her face; it was dark already, and she was startled to see Kristina Ives, Gemma’s mother, draw away.

  “Sorry,” she said. She looked embarrassed. “You were so still—I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  Lyra sat up in bed. For the first time in days, she wasn’t nauseous, and movement didn’t give her vertigo. A reading light was on in the corner, and Kristina Ives had obviously been sitting there: her purse was on the floor next to the chair, a magazine rolled up inside of it. “Where’s Caelum?” she asked.

  “He went to check in on Detective Reinhardt. Both of them are fine,” Kristina said, before Lyra could ask. “Detective Reinhardt was very lucky. The knife missed all his major organs.” She smiled. She looked very tired, but she was still extremely pretty. Lyra thought she was a little bit like the rose in The Little Prince. She’d been sheltered behind glass for a long time. But she was loyal. She knew what love was. “I want to thank you,” Kristina went on. “You found Gemma. I can never repay you.”

  “You don’t have to,” Lyra said. “Gemma found me once. We’re even.”

  To Lyra’s surprise, Gemma’s mother reached out and took her hand. Her skin was incredibly soft, and Lyra was shocked to recognize the scent. Lemon balm. Her expression changed, too. When she smiled, it was like light passing into a room through an open door.

  “I want you to know I’m your friend,” she said. “You can trust me to help you however I can. Do you believe me?”

  Lyra nodded. She was overwhelmed by the tightness in her throat, and by the feeling, at the same time, that paper birds were winging up through her chest.

  The door opened, and Lyra turned to see Caelum and Detective Reinhardt. The detective moved slowly, and a bulk of bandages was visible beneath his shirt, wrapping his abdomen. But he was smiling.

  “You shouldn’t be up,” Kristina said, releasing Lyra’s hand with a final squeeze.

  Detective Reinhardt waved her off. “I’m good as new. The surgeon said so himself.”

  Caelum came right to the bed. “Hey,” he said. He put a hand on Lyra’s face, and she turned so she could kiss his palm. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said. For once, it wasn’t a lie. “Much better.”

  “I’m going to go check on Gemma,” Kristina said. She picked up her purse and hugged it.

  “I want to see her,” Lyra said, sitting up a little straighter. “Can I come and see her?”

  “Of course.” Kristina smiled. “She’s just down the hall. You were the first person she asked about—you and Caelum, both.”

  After she had left, Detective Reinhardt moved to the window, parting the blinds with a finger. Lyra thought he was giving Caelum time to lean forward, quickly, and kiss her.

  “You get some sleep?” Reinhardt asked, and Lyra nodded. “Incredible how different the world looks on the other side of a nice sleep, isn’t it?”

  She wanted to tell him about her dream, but she was too embarrassed. He eased into the chair in the corner, wincing a little.

  He waved off Caelum’s help.

  “I’m okay,” he said. But he sat for a long time with his chin down, eyes closed, breathing hard. Lyra even began to think he’d fallen asleep. Then, at last, he looked up. “I’m afraid I have some news about your father.”

  Lyra knew just by looking at him what he was about to say.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” He looked her directly in
the eyes. She liked that about him. That he wouldn’t look away, even though she was sure he wanted to. “Found at home, at the trailer park, only yesterday. Looks like an overdose.”

  “That’s impossible.” Caelum’s voice leapt almost to a shout. “It’s a trick.”

  “Caelum, please.” Reinhardt sighed. “I’m on your side, remember?” Caelum wheeled away and went to stand by the window. Lyra wondered whether he was thinking about how he and Rick had fought. She knew he would be sorry he had never had the chance to apologize.

  She was surprised that she was the one who couldn’t make eye contact with Detective Reinhardt. She looked down, blinking back her tears.

  “I promise you, Lyra, I’ll make sure your father gets his justice. I’ll make sure you do. Do you believe me?”

  She nodded. For a long time, he said nothing. She liked that about him too: he wasn’t afraid of silence. He had learned to find comfort in it.

  “They’ve still got those vultures by the main entrance, waiting to pounce,” he said. There had been a crowd at the hospital when they arrived: police officers but also men and women holding phones, video equipment, cameras that went flash-flash. “I don’t imagine any of us are getting off easy.”

  The nurses had sworn that no one would be able to get to Lyra so long as she was in the hospital—she’d been worried, initially, that Geoffrey Ives or one of the other Suits would simply creep in and murder her while she was sleeping. There were even police officers monitoring every visitor to and from this portion of the hospital. But what would happen once they left?

  Detective Reinhardt seemed to know what she was thinking. “They’re going to want to ask you questions,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of nosing around. I expect a department inquiry. Well. I asked for a department inquiry.”