“What do you want to do now?” 72 was being extra nice, which made Lyra feel worse. She knew he thought they’d failed. She knew he knew how sick she was. Without answering him, she stood up. She’d just seen someone moving behind the glass doors, and she went forward as if drawn by the pull of something magnetic. “Lyra!” 72 shouted after her. But she didn’t stop. It didn’t take him long to catch up with her, but by then she was already standing in front of Wallace and a woman had emerged, carrying a stack of folders.
“Can I help you?” the woman said, and Lyra realized she’d been standing there staring.
“We’re looking for Emily Huang,” Lyra said quickly, before she could lose her nerve. Remembering what the girl had said, Lyra added, “We think—she may go to Wallace.” She wasn’t sure what that meant, either, and she held her breath, hoping the woman did.
The woman slid on a pair of glasses, which she was wearing on a chain. Blinking up at Lyra, she resembled a turtle, down to the looseness of the skin around her neck.
“Emily Huang,” the woman said, shaking her head. “No, no. She never went here.” Lyra’s heart dropped. Another no. Another dead end. But then the woman said, “But she came every career day to talk to the kids about the work she did. Terrible some of the stuff they said about her later. She was a good girl. I liked her very much.”
“So you know her?” Lyra said. She was dizzy with sudden joy. Nurse Em. She would help. She would protect them. “You know where we can find her?”
The woman gave her a look Lyra couldn’t quite read. “Knew her,” she said slowly. “She lived right over on Willis Street, just behind the school. Can’t miss it. A sweet yellow house, and all those flower beds. Woman who lives there now has let it go to seed.”
And just like that, the happiness was gone. Evaporated. “She’s gone?” Lyra said. “Do you know where she went?”
The woman shook her head again, and then Lyra did know how to name her expression: pity. “Not gone, honey,” she said. “Never left, some say. Hung herself right there in her living room, must be three, four years ago now. Emily Huang’s dead.”
Lyra didn’t know what made her want to see the place where Emily Huang had lived. When she asked for directions to Willis Street, 72 didn’t question her, and she was glad. She wouldn’t have known how to explain.
Behind the school they found quiet residential streets running like spokes away from the downtown, and houses at last, these concealed not behind walls but standing there pleasantly right on their lawns, with flowers waving from flower boxes and vivid toys scattered in the grass. It was pretty here, and she couldn’t imagine why Emily Huang would have been so unhappy, why she would have killed herself like poor Pepper had. Then again, she remembered how Nurse Em had sobbed and Dr. O’Donnell had held her by the shoulders. I know you, she’d said. You’re a good person. I know you were just in over your head. So maybe she was unhappy even then.
Nurse Em’s old house had once, the old woman had told them, been the yellow of sunshine and thus easy to spot. Now it was a faded color that reminded Lyra of mustard. The flower beds looked scraggly, and there were four bikes dumped on the front lawn and so many toys it looked as if these were coming up from the ground. Loud music came to them across the lawn.
She closed her eyes and arranged all her memories of Nurse Em in a row: Nurse Em bathing Lyra and a dozen other replicas when they were too young to do it themselves, plunging them into the bathwater and hauling them like slippery, wriggling puppies onto the cold tile floor afterward. Nurse Em standing with Dr. Saperstein in the courtyard, speaking in a low voice, and the way he said, “It’s nothing. They don’t understand,” after Nurse Em turned around and caught Lyra staring; the time in the janitor’s closet with Dr. O’Donnell.
“I’m sorry,” 72 said, and Lyra opened her eyes. Maybe he wasn’t angry at her anymore. His eyes were softened with color.
It was the first time anyone had ever apologized to her. “For what?”
“I know you were hoping she would help,” 72 said.
“Now we have no one,” Lyra said. She pressed a hand to her eyes. She didn’t want 72 to see how upset she was. “Nowhere to go, either.”
72 hesitated. He touched the back of her hand. “You have me,” he said very quietly. She looked up at him, surprised. Her skin tingled where he touched her.
“I do?” she said. She felt hot in her head and chest, but it was a good feeling, like standing in the sun after being too long in the air-conditioning.
He nodded. “You have me,” he said. “I have you.”
He looked as if he might say more, but just then in the house next to Emily Huang’s the garage door rattled open, revealing an enormously fat woman in a tracksuit. She waddled out dragging a trash bin, keeping her eyes on 72 and Lyra. Lyra stepped from him. She felt as if they’d been caught in the middle of something, even though they’d just been standing there. She waited for the woman to turn around and return inside, but instead she just stood there at the end of the driveway, one hand on the trash bin, breathing hard and staring.
“You need something?” she called out to them, when she had caught her breath. She pulled her T-shirt away from her skin. A large sweat stain had darkened between her breasts.
“No,” 72 said quickly.
But the woman kept staring at them, and so Lyra added, “We came looking for Emily Huang. We were . . . friends.” She enjoyed the way the word sounded and felt like repeating it, but bit her tongue so she wouldn’t.
The woman’s face changed, became narrower, as if she were speaking to them through a half-open door. “You knew Emily?”
Lyra had never had to lie so much in her life. She wondered if lying, too, was a human trait. She fumbled for an excuse, and for a second her brain turned up nothing but white noise. What was the word again? “Parents,” she said finally. It came to her like a match striking. “She was friends with my—our—parents.”
Even 72 turned to look at her. Her cheeks were hot. This lie felt different, heavier. The word, parents, had left a thick feeling in her throat, as if it had slugged its way up from her stomach. She was sure that the woman would know that she was lying. But instead she just made a desperate flapping motion. It wasn’t until 72 moved that Lyra realized the woman was gesturing them forward.
“In.” She had a funny, duck-like walk. She kept turning around to see that they were following her. “Come on. Come on.” Lyra didn’t have enough experience to wonder whether it was safe to follow a stranger into her house, and soon they were standing in the coolness of the garage and the door was grinding closed behind them, like an eyelid squeezing shut and wedging out all the light. The garage smelled faintly of fertilizer and chemicals.
“Sorry for being a push,” the woman said, moving to a door that must, Lyra knew, connect with the house. “You never know who’s watching around here. Nosy Nellies, that’s what everyone is. That was Em’s problem, you ask me. Trusted all the wrong people.” She opened the door. “I’m Sheri, by the way. Sheri Hayes. Come on in and have a chat with me. You kids look like you could use a lemonade or a bite to eat.”
Lyra and 72 didn’t look at each other, but she knew what he was thinking: these real-humans were not like the ones at Haven. They were nice. Helpful. Then again, they didn’t know what Lyra and 72 really were. Lyra had a feeling that they wouldn’t be quite so helpful then. She imagined the inside of her body rotted, filled with disease, and wondered if soon it would begin to show on her outside, in the look of her face.
“Well, come on. Don’t just stand there gawping. I’m sweating buckets.”
They followed the woman—Sheri—into the house. Lyra was startled by a cat that streaked across the hall directly in front of her, and jumped back.
“Oh, you’re not allergic, are you? I’ve got three of ’em. Tabby, Tammy, Tommy. All littermates. Little terrors, every last one. But don’t worry, they won’t bite you.”
Lyra saw another two cats perched on a sofa in
a darkened living room, their eyes moon-bright and yellow. Her heart was still hammering. She wasn’t used to animals roaming free like that. At Haven the animals were kept in cages. She was glad they went instead into the kitchen.
Sheri sat them down at a wooden table and brought them two glasses of lemonade in tall glasses filled to the rim with ice cubes. It was delicious. She laid out cookies, too, a whole plate of them.
“So where do you kids come from?” Sheri asked, and Lyra froze, caught off guard again. 72 moved his thumb over a knot in the table. But Sheri just made a kind of clucking noise. “I see,” she said. “Let me guess. Emily helped place you with your parents, didn’t she? You went through the Home Foundation?”
Lyra didn’t know what she was talking about so she stayed quiet, and Sheri seemed to take that for a yes.
“’Course she did. You two don’t look a lick alike.” She sighed. “Poor Emily. You knew her well, then?”
“In a way,” Lyra said carefully. She knew Nurse Em had never hit the replicas, or cursed them for being demons. She knew that Dr. O’Donnell thought she was a good person who wanted to make things right. She knew she’d been younger than many of the other nurses, because she’d overheard Dr. O’Donnell say that, too. You’re young. You didn’t know what you were doing. No one will blame you.
“She was a good girl. All that work she did for other people. I could have killed them for what they said about her in the papers after she died. It came as a shock to me, you know, a real shock. We’d been talking about a barbecue that very weekend. She called me the day it happened, asked if I wanted macaroni salad or potato.” Sheri shook her head. “Now what kind of person about to hang herself is worried about macaroni or potato salad?”
Lyra knew she wasn’t expected to answer. Sheri went on. “Too sad. She was still young, too. Thirty-four, thirty-five. I think there must have been a man involved. Maybe more than one. Well, I suppose there were signs. You know, after they found her body I did a little bit of Googling. Found out some of the warning signs. Of course, I didn’t see them before. But she did give away some of her things the week before she died, and that’s right up there to look for. Giving away prized possessions. Of course at the time I thought she was just being nice.”
“What do you mean, there was a man involved?” 72 asked, and Lyra was surprised, as ever, to hear him speak. She realized he hardly spoke unless they were alone. Somehow, this made her feel special. Her glass was empty but still cold, and she pressed it to her neck.
“Well, isn’t there always?” She raised her eyebrows. “Besides, it would’ve been hard not to notice those men in and out. Just once or twice, of course, as far as I could tell. Suited-up types. Like in finance or something. But mean-looking.” Lyra thought of the Suits who’d come to inspect Haven sometimes and felt a curious prickling down the back of her spine. Those men. Like the nurses had always called them. Sheri shook her head. “But there’s no accounting for taste, I always say.”
Lyra grasped for some idea of what to ask next, of what any of this meant or whether it mattered. “You said she was giving away her things,” she said, suddenly struck by what this might mean. “She gave you something, didn’t she?” Lyra asked. Maybe, she thought, Nurse Em had left Sheri something important—maybe she’d left her something that related to Haven and to the work they were doing there. To the prions.
To a cure.
Sheri had taken a seat. Now she placed both palms on the table to stand up. “Never been able to find a place for them. But can’t bring myself to throw ’em out, either. Oh, she told me I could. Told me I could take the damn things apart and sell the frames, if I wanted. But of course I never would.” She moved off into another room. 72 gave Lyra a questioning look and she shrugged. She didn’t know what she was waiting for or looking for anymore. Only that out there, in the real world, there were no answers—nothing but vastness and things she’d never seen in real life and experiences she couldn’t understand and strangers who didn’t know what she was and would hate her if they did. Nothing but the disease. Nothing but being nothing and then dying nothing.
At Haven she’d never wanted anything, not in any way that counted. She’d been hungry, tired, bored, and sick. She’d wanted more food, cold water, more sleep, for the pain to end, to go outside. But she’d never had a want that moved her, where the goal felt not like an end but a beginning. She’d never had a purpose. But now she did. She wanted to understand.
And this single fact made her feel more human, more worthy, than she ever had before.
She was shocked to feel 72’s hand in hers. She looked up at him and felt the same strange thing happen to her body, as if she was transformed to air. He pulled away when Sheri returned to the room, carrying three framed photographs. She plunked them down on the table.
“Well, you see, they’re not exactly my taste,” Sheri said. The pictures were all illustrations. Lyra guessed they came from the same anatomy textbook. She’d seen many similar pictures in the medical textbooks at Haven. “I like my kittens and my watercolors and oils here and there. Never been much for drawing.”
Lyra thought the drawings were beautiful—she loved the sinewy look of the muscles, the precision of the bones, and even the faded lettering too small to make out, labeling different physical features. But even so, she was horribly disappointed. There was nothing here, no secret message or miracle cure.
Somewhere in the house, a phone rang. Sheri stood up again. “It never ends, does it?” she said. “Give me just a minute.” As soon as she left, another cat, this one gray, leapt onto the table, and Lyra instinctively grabbed one of the framed illustrations to keep the cat from stepping on it.
“Why have cats in a house?” 72 whispered to her. But she couldn’t answer, even though she’d been wondering the same thing. She’d felt an irregularity in the canvas backing, and she flipped the frame over, her chest suddenly cavernous with hope.
The canvas had at one time been stapled to the wooden frame. On two sides of the rectangular canvas, the staples were in place. But on two sides they were missing, and instead had been replaced with gobs of glue at inch-long intervals, some of which had seeped out and hardened onto the wood. Lyra and the other replicas had spent too long at Haven searching for places to hide their limited belongings not to suspect that the picture Nurse Em had given Sheri was in fact concealing something else behind it.
Nurse Em had told Sheri she could take the damn things apart. What if she had meant that Sheri should take the damn things apart?
The phone had stopped ringing, and Sheri’s voice, muffled by the walls, was now nothing more than tones. She must have closed a door. Before she could lose her nerve, Lyra pried a corner of the canvas from the frame and ripped.
“What are you doing?” 72 reached out and seized Lyra’s wrist as if to stop her.
“Nurse Em gave these pictures away before she died,” Lyra whispered. “Maybe she was hiding something.” Fearing both that she would find something and that she wouldn’t, she slipped a hand behind the canvas. Almost immediately, her fingers landed on several loose items, glossy-slick. Photographs.
72 stared as she laid them out on the table. There were three of them, each showing Nurse Em with a tall, dark-haired man who had a beard and a sour expression. In one photograph, Nurse Em was sitting on his lap and he was turning away from the camera. In another, she was kissing him on the cheek and he was lifting a hand as if to block them from the lens. But in the last one she’d caught him square on, or someone else had. They were standing in front of a nondescript stretch of highway. There was a scruffy range of blue hills in the distance. She was holding on to a straw hat and looked happy. Lyra felt sick for reasons she couldn’t say.
“Dr. Saperstein,” 72 said, naming him first. Lyra could only nod. The man in the pictures was unmistakably Dr. Saperstein, whom Lyra had always thought of a little like the humans thought about their God: someone remote and all-powerful, someone through whom the whole world was order
ed.
Lyra could no longer hear Sheri talking. But after a minute, there was a quick burst of laughter from the other room and she knew they still had a little time.
“Quick,” she said. “Help me check the other frames.”
She flipped over the second picture. Like the first, its backing had been pulled away from the frame and then reglued. But this one had been done more carefully and was difficult to detach. 72 leaned across her, knife in hand, and neatly sliced the canvas, barely missing her fingers.
“It’s faster,” he said, and leaned across her to slit open the back of the third picture.
They found, behind the second picture, a folded sheet of paper that looked at first glance to be a list of names and a typed document, although Lyra didn’t have time to try and read it. She didn’t have time to check the third picture frame, either. At that moment she heard a door open, and Sheri’s voice, suddenly amplified.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she was saying. “I’m being rude . . .”
Sheri would only have to glance at the frames to know what they had done and to guess, probably, that something had been removed from behind the pictures. Without speaking, she and 72 stood up from the table and moved as quietly as they could to the back door, which opened out onto a little patio. Sheri was still trying to get off the phone. Lyra saw her pass momentarily into view and froze, one hand on the door handle.
“I have guests,” Sheri was saying. “But I was listening, I promise . . .”
Then Sheri, who was pacing, passed out of view again without looking up.
Lyra eased open the screen door, wincing when it squeaked on its hinges. 72 ducked outside onto the stone patio. One of the cats was still staring at her, unblinkingly, and for a terrifying second Lyra thought it might open its mouth and let out a wail of alarm.
But it made not a sound, and so Lyra slipped after 72, closing the door behind her.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 12 of Gemma’s story.
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