Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  “Hey,” he said, pulling away to take her face in one hand. He wiped her tears with a thumb. “Hey, now. It’s all right.”

  “Are you okay?” She couldn’t stop crying. Both Calliope and the male replica were watching them, truly curious, and Gemma could almost see Calliope calculating, trying to understand the way she and Pete were holding each other, what it meant, and what kind of examining this was. “Did they hurt you?”

  “I’m okay, Gem. I promise. I swear.” He ducked a little to look in her eyes, keeping one hand beneath her chin. “The food sucks and this whole place could really use some body spray, but I’m fine.”

  It was unbelievable that he could make her laugh, but he did. And then she choked again, and he held her, and she heard his heartbeat through his chest, and tasted her own breath on his T-shirt, and she lost track then of exactly who was who and where she ended and he began. It was like losing yourself in the softening of a warm bed you’ve been looking forward to all day.

  Then Gemma felt Calliope’s fingers on her arm—cold fingers, needy.

  Only when Pete sucked in a breath did she realize how strange it must be for him to see both of them together, and when he took a quick step backward, something dark and heavy opened in the bottom of her stomach.

  “We have to go now,” Calliope said. “We had our turn.” But Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope had merely wanted to interrupt. She didn’t like how Calliope looked at Pete. Like someone starving who just wants to eat and eat and eat until she pukes.

  “Christ.” Pete exhaled and put a hand through his hair, tufting it like a bird’s. They hadn’t shaved it. That was one good thing, at least, that they were giving him that. He managed another smile. “Sorry,” he said to Gemma. He reached out and took her hand, but his palm was sweating now. “It’s just . . .” He shook his head.

  “I know,” she said. “You don’t have to say it.” That cold, dark thing was still writhing at the bottom of her stomach, and Calliope breathed next to her, clinging to her like a film. She kept his hand in hers and pretended not to notice he was sweating. “You’ll meet me here again tomorrow night?”

  “Every night,” he said. His eyes moved to Calliope and back again. Gemma pretended not to see that, either.

  She took a step closer to him. “They’re not going to let us out, Pete,” she said, in a low voice, though there was no point in trying to keep it a secret. Calliope could hear everything. Maybe she could even hear inside of Gemma’s head. “We know too much.”

  “We’ll find a way,” he said, and his eyes softened.

  Then Calliope took Gemma’s hand, and Gemma wondered whether she had just learned that kind of touch from watching Pete. How many of the other things she did and said were just imitation?

  Simulacrum. A slight, unreal, or superficial likeness. Calliope’s fingers were long and very bony.

  “We had our turn,” she repeated. “More of them get to go.”

  “I didn’t get my second observation,” the boy said.

  Calliope turned back to him. “Next time you’ll have stethoscope, then,” she said, as if it hardly concerned her.

  “Tomorrow,” Gemma said to Pete, even as Calliope drew her toward the door.

  “I promise.” But he was looking at Calliope, not at her, and she felt a sudden dread. Now it was Pete doubling, splitting in two, and becoming a twin version of himself who looked the same, who talked the same, but was, deep down, a stranger.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 12 of Lyra’s story.

  THIRTEEN

  SHE WOKE TO THE DEEP navy light of a predawn sky.

  Already, the holding center was full of voices and movement, the scuffle of rubber sneakers, the tooth-chatter of heavy equipment scraped along the ground.

  She sat up, edging away from Calliope, who had insisted on sharing the twin mattress. When she stood she was dizzied by a sharp, sudden hunger. She’d received a minuscule ration of spongy baked pasta for dinner, spooned from a tinfoil-covered catering tray of the kind Gemma associated with school fund-raisers.

  Gemma knew that meant there must be civilization nearby—a restaurant, a deli, something. She’d even found a receipt for a Joe’s Donuts in Windsor Falls, Pennsylvania, coasting on a surf of overflowing trash outside the bathroom.

  But Pennsylvania or Pakistan, what did it matter? No one knew where they were.

  The sleeping replicas, motionless in the half dark, were so closely fitted together that they took on the quality of a single landscape: mounds of soft earth, ridged spines and shoulders.

  A sudden light dazzled her and she turned to the window to see a van wheeling away, its headlights briefly revealing funnels of rain. More vans were arriving.

  She saw soldiers jogging with rain slickers pulled down to protect their faces. Someone was using orange light sticks, like a real airport ramp handler, to indicate where the vans should park. And out of the airport came a constant flow of equipment: staff members passed in and out hauling plastic bins and waste containers, paperwork lashed into waterproof boxes, medical equipment, stacks of unused linens, snowy piles of plastic-wrapped Hanes T-shirts, hundreds of them, of the kind that were given to the replicas.

  Gemma felt as if the rain had found its way inside. She was suddenly very awake and very cold.

  They were closing up shop.

  She picked her way between the replicas to the central corridor, full of a deep and driving panic, half expecting to find that she was alone, that the walls had been dismantled and the rug pulled up, that she had been left behind. Several nurses, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, pushed past her wheeling IV carts. The atmosphere was tense, almost desperate.

  “What’s happening?” Gemma asked, without expecting anyone to answer, and no one did. “What’s going on?”

  A patrolling soldier frowned briefly at Gemma before turning her attention back to several staff members trying to work a medical cart through a door down to the loading dock. “Careful,” she said. “Stairs are wet.” Gemma noticed her fingernails were painted pink.

  She kept walking, feeling as if she were in the beginning of a nightmare. Even before anything bad has happened, you know, you’re sure, that bad things will come. When guards in no-man’s-land prevented her from going any farther, she went again to the window, mesmerized by the look of all the headlights through the rapidly ebbing dark. How quickly would it take them to clean the place out, to erase all the evidence that Haven had ever existed?

  And what would they do with the replicas?

  Why the sudden urgency? Why now?

  But the last question, at least, was answered even as she stood at the window, squinting through a mist of condensation.

  Because a new vehicle was arriving, not a van but a regular sedan, like the kind of shitty rental a budget travel agency might give you. From the driver’s seat came a tall man with a dark beard and glasses. He stood for a second, squinting up at the airport, his glasses, in the glow of the exterior lamps, so bright it looked like they themselves were glowing.

  He grimaced a little as the rain hit him. Then he ducked and began to jog through a slosh of puddles toward the door, and Gemma saw a flurry of movement, flapping raincoats and umbrellas, as he was enfolded by staff members and hustled inside.

  Dr. Saperstein was back.

  A woman in a tailored pantsuit came for Gemma midafternoon. It was the same woman Gemma had pegged for a government slug when she had first arrived. As far as Gemma could tell, it was the same suit, too.

  They went through a door marked with a sign that unnecessarily stated Authorized Personnel Only, guarded by two soldiers with long-range rifles. Down a set of stairs, the same ones they’d climbed Sunday night. Gemma knew they must be level with the tarmac, imagined phantom travelers hurrying with rolling suitcases and duffels toward waiting short-haul jets.

  Through another door for Authorized Personnel, they reached what must once have been the airport
’s administrative hub, an inner funnel of connected rooms still showing the ghost-marks of old desks. The overhead lights were out, and a few standing lamps left whole areas oily with shadow. There were tubs of plastic containers full of shrink-wrapped sterilized needles and miniature urine collection vials. Two fridges were marked with handwritten signs: Live specimens, do not open.

  Hidden generators bled thick cables across the floor, and Gemma thought of bits of dark hair clinging to the damp floor of a gym. Stacked messily on a folding table were cardboard boxes full of translucent medical gloves and antibacterial cloths, cotton swabs and rubber thermometer tips, laptops wired to a single power strip, and three-ring binders. Here, she knew, must be the remains of Haven’s record keeping, the experiential evidence it had accumulated over decades and had not yet had a chance to move elsewhere or destroy.

  Another woman, this one a stranger, leaned knuckles-down on a desk, in the posture of a gorilla, peering over the shoulder of a red-haired guy at a computer. She immediately straightened up.

  “Ah, shit.” The woman had to step over the fluid ropes of electrical cable to get close. Her hair was cut short. She reminded Gemma of one of her favorite nannies, Laverne, a soft-spoken Haitian woman who’d come up from Louisiana and gave hugs that felt like being wrapped in a blanket. But the impression was over the moment she spoke. “What a mess.”

  “Hi yourself,” said Gemma’s escort.

  “Not what you thought?” The red-haired guy was still lit faintly by the computer screen, and the glare in his glasses had the weird effect of erasing his eyes beneath them. There was something wrong with the skin on the left side of his face, and his chin beneath his lips. It looked weirdly shiny, as if it were covered with a layer of Vaseline. He’d been badly burned, Gemma realized, and her stomach yanked: he’d been at Haven.

  Laverne-not-Laverne took two sudden steps forward and snatched up Gemma’s chin, as if it were a fish that might otherwise dart away. She angled her face left and right before Gemma managed to pull away.

  “I don’t know where she came from.” Her eyes on Gemma’s face felt like mosquitoes, circling and circling without landing anywhere. “She’s not one of ours.”

  “I told you,” Gemma said, though it was obvious the woman wasn’t speaking to her. She let her hatred narrow like a knife inside her. “You guys fucked up, big-time.”

  Not-Laverne was still staring. “Werner, pull up Sources, will you?” She pivoted, finally, and moved behind the computer again, leaning over to point. “D-101,” she said. “See here? Some of our first donor tissue. And these are the genotypes that took. Numbers six through ten.”

  “Number six is Disposed,” the man, Werner, said.

  The woman in the suit was sweating. “You told us a boy and a girl. This one and her boyfriend fit the description.”

  “They aren’t ours.” Not-Laverne looked green. Werner was chewing on an unlit cigarette. Then: “Dr. Saperstein will nail you to the wall for this.”

  Gemma was sick of being spoken about as if she wasn’t in the room. “My name is Gemma Ives. Ives,” she repeated, and saw Not-Laverne register the name, saw it pass through her like a current.

  “Ives.” Werner nearly choked. He wet his lower lip with his tongue. “Is that like . . . ?”

  But he trailed off nervously as behind Gemma another door opened and then closed firmly with a click. The sudden silence filled the room by emptying it of pressure. She felt a pop in her ears, as if they’d just dropped altitude on a plane.

  She turned, knowing already what she would see: Dr. Saperstein, smiling, holding his glasses in one hand, shaking his head, like some kindly guidance counselor who’d discovered a mistake in her first-period schedule.

  “The last time I saw you, you were six months old,” he said. He looked shorter and older than she’d been picturing him—of course, the photographs she had were outdated, and she’d been a baby when her father had severed his connection to Haven.

  She felt a surge of hatred so strong it scared her: it was a hand from the dark side of the universe that reached up to turn her inside out. “You’ve seen plenty of me,” she said, but heard her voice as if it was a stranger’s. “Four, by my count.”

  “Looks can be deceiving, believe me. There is only one Gemma Ives.” He smiled again at this. Patient, indulgent, very slightly embarrassed. Sorry about the confusion. These little mix-ups do happen. “Your parents, I’m sure, would agree.”

  “Dr. Saperstein—” The woman in the suit began to speak, but he cut her off.

  “Later.” For a split second she saw, from beneath the surface of his expression, something sharp and mean solidify: it was like the sudden vision of a very sharp tooth. But almost instantly, it was gone. He smiled at Gemma again and opened a door that led to a small and very ordinary-looking office. “Why don’t you have a seat inside? I’m going to grab a soda. You want a soda? Or something to eat?”

  Gemma shook her head, although she was desperately thirsty, and weak with hunger, too. But she didn’t want to take anything Dr. Saperstein offered.

  “Go on. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right with you.” When she didn’t move, he hitched his smile a little wider—she could actually see the effort, watch individual muscles straining to achieve the right look. “Go on. It’s all right.”

  “No,” she said. She wanted to scream. She wished she could open her mouth and let her rage come up like a sickness. “It’s not. It’s definitely not all right.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re going to try and sort out.” He spread his hands. As if she were the one who’d screwed up and now refused to admit it. “Look, I highly doubt you want to stay here. Right? So go on and have a seat, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can scare up some caffeine.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 13 of Lyra’s story.

  FOURTEEN

  DR. SAPERSTEIN RETURNED WITH TWO cans of warm Diet Coke, even though she’d said she didn’t want one. She didn’t want to sit and planned to say no, but at the last minute she was worried about her legs, which had begun to shake. So she sat, tucking her ankles together, pressing her hands between her thighs, hoping he wouldn’t see how afraid she was.

  He poured his soda into a plastic cup, took a sip, and made a face. “Why does the diet stuff always taste like the back of a spoon?” He shook his head. “The real stuff always goes first around here.”

  Gemma felt more confused than ever. Dr. Saperstein didn’t look evil. She tried to paste what she knew about him onto his face, to make the images align. Emily Huang, those photographs of the two of them together. Jake Witz and his father. Those hundreds and hundreds of starved and broken people he treated like possessions, disposed of by burning them in the middle of the ocean after drilling their bones or opening their skulls for marrow and tissue and cell samples.

  But she couldn’t make it hang there. She couldn’t make it fit.

  He leaned forward. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you’re here,” he said. Shockingly, she believed him. “I’ve been in Washington, DC, crawling around on my knees trying to save this place. . . .”

  “What—what is it?” She had to swallow hard against the feeling that she would begin to cry. “What are you doing with all of them here?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing, now,” he said. “I drove straight from DC this morning. Our funding’s been cut.” This time, his smile never traveled up past his lips. “Twenty years of research. Twenty years of effort, incremental gains, mistakes and corrections. All of it . . .” He gestured as if to scatter something into a passing wind.

  “And what happens to them?” Gemma said, through a hard fist in her throat. She was still too afraid to ask what she really wanted to know: What would happen to her? And to Pete?

  Dr. Saperstein took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “How much did your father tell you about Haven?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Gemma said. Dr. Saperstein lo
oked surprised. “But I know that you’ve been using the replicas to grow prions.”

  “To study prions,” he corrected her. “You make them sound like petri dishes.”

  “Isn’t that what they are?” The pressure in Gemma’s chest was so great she felt as though she was speaking around a concrete block. “It was all for the military, wasn’t it? It was all to make weapons.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I won’t ask you how you know that,” he said. She could tell she’d impressed him and, weirdly, felt happy about it. Then she hated herself. Why did she care about impressing him? “Look, you obviously know quite a bit about Haven. But there’s a lot you don’t understand. The US military gave us one of our biggest contracts, yes. But it wasn’t our only one.” Then: “You know the word prion wasn’t even coined until I was in college? It’s been more than thirty years since then, but until I took over the Institute, we’d discovered almost nothing more about the way prions work, or how they progressed, or how fast.” The overhead light grayed the look of his skin. “Prion disorders share traits with some of the most crippling brain diseases we know—diseases like Alzheimer’s, which affects millions of people per year. Diseases we can’t cure or even help.”

  “I don’t need a lecture,” Gemma said. “I asked what happens to the replicas now.”

  “There are protocols,” he said gently. “I’m sure you understand that. Haven deals with—dealt with—deadly biomaterials. We’re talking about a major health hazard.”

  Deadly biomaterials. Otherwise known as: replicas. Gemma recognized the technique: every so often her father hid behind words too, not big words but acronyms, military slang, a patter she could never understand. But she knew what Saperstein was saying, and no amount of fancy vocabulary could make it any less horrible.

  “You’re going to kill them,” she said. Though it was what she’d been expecting, it was terrible to say the words out loud. The room seemed suddenly to be filling with fog. Or maybe it was her head that was filling up. She couldn’t make his face come into focus. “What about me? Are you going to kill me, too?”