Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  “Hey.” Pete had to step very carefully: he wasn’t wearing shoes, and the floor was still littered with glass. “Deep breath, okay? You’re just scared.”

  “What if—what if Calliope did something to them—” She choked on the words, on the very idea of it, and Pete put his arms around her, as if he knew it was the only way to keep her on her feet.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s all right. Home stretch. You’re exhausted.”

  “You’re not listening to me.” Gemma pulled away and saw reality for a moment like a fabric sail, blowing away from its mast, straining in invisible currents. “She asked me what would happen if they never came back.”

  “She’s never been outside, Gemma,” Pete said. “She has no idea what to think.”

  Gemma shook her head. Her mouth tasted like vomit. She was dizzy with confusion and fear. “Where are they then? You said yourself—it’s not like they went on a road trip.”

  Pete’s hair was wet: when he pushed a hand through it, water sprayed through his fingers. “Maybe they walked into town.”

  “What town?” Gemma no longer cared that she was shouting. “I haven’t seen a town, have you, Pete? In fact, I think the whole reason we’re here is that there is no fucking town.”

  He threw up his hands and let them fall hard, a clapping sound that made Gemma flinch. “So maybe they went to a picnic. Or a ukulele bonfire. Or to make soap out of lye or something. How should I know?” Pete was doing his best to be nice, but she could tell he was losing patience. His irritation kept showing, like the nub of something sharp rubbing up beneath a sweater, distorting the fabric. “I mean, shit. She doesn’t even know what a barn is. What could she possibly have done?”

  “She knows what a barn is,” Gemma said: a stupid response, but she was on the verge of tears again. “She called it by name. She’s smarter than you know.”

  Pete frowned. She was worried he would tell her she was being crazy again, and that she would start to cry, but he just shook his head.

  “Look. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you—” He broke off, shaking his head. “I mean, being with her. Seeing your face . . .” He smiled but only barely. “It’s weird even for me. When you’re standing next to each other . . .” He reached out and knuckled the counter, like there was an insect there he needed to crush. “I’d be freaking out too.”

  Gemma felt a chill go through her. She was a cold mist, barely hanging together. “You think I’m freaking out,” she said.

  He looked at her. Pale eyelashes. Freckles, lips, the coral inside of his nose. She’d studied his face so often—thinking it beautiful, thinking it hers. But the face was just collision, random physical accumulation that meant nothing.

  “Anyone would freak out.” He tried to take her hand but she balled her fist, and weirdly enough her other hand, the injured one, pulsed with sudden pain, as if she’d balled that instead. “She’s not you. She’s nothing like you. You shouldn’t be afraid.”

  “I don’t think she’s like me,” Gemma said. “I don’t think she’s anything like me.”

  But she realized, even as she said it, that this wasn’t exactly true. Wasn’t that the whole point? She could have been Calliope, and Calliope could have been her. People became different bodies by chance or accident or God, depending on what you believed; but if you had the same body, the same voice, the same hair and fingers and eyes and nails, then how did you know the difference? She would have to separate from Calliope, cleave her like some horrible head in a fairy tale, and even then she would have that doubleness inside her.

  “Go rinse off,” Pete said, in a voice she hated: it was a tone her father used, hooking onto an I know best kind of thing. “It will make you feel better. I promise. By the time you get out, what do you want to bet we’ll be hitching a ride back to the twenty-first century in a buggy?”

  Gemma couldn’t smile, even though she knew he was only trying to help. She wouldn’t let him help her to the washroom, either, even though she was hobbling on her swollen ankle and had to lean on the furniture for support.

  The bathtub was old and spotted with rust. Pete had left blood behind, too, a faint ring of it where the water had turned color, and more funneling toward the drain. She pumped for water and was shocked by how cold it was. But at the same time she liked it, and liked the smell, too, like spring soil, and dirt newly turned over.

  She stripped out of the clothes she’d been issued at the holding center and maneuvered into the tub, trying not to put weight on her ankle and careful, too, not to use her left hand. The shock of cold water even at her ankles made her gasp, and instinctively she went for a knob that wasn’t there. Then she wanted to cry again, not for the lack but for all the things she had always used, for how lucky she was and for her life, pure and simple, for the ability to stand naked and hurt ankle deep in cold water. She was alive: she’d made it out. Goose pimples raised the hair on her thighs and forearms. The water took blood from her skin and swirled it into pink. She was ugly and damaged, and for an instant, she didn’t care: she was alive. Her ribs held her, her heart held her, the world held her. It bound her like a promise.

  Pete was right: she did feel better, infinitely better, once she’d watched a film of soot and dirt and blood wash away, as if it was carrying the memory of what had happened. Still, she was uneasy. She hadn’t heard anyone come back. The house was still silent, still wound up, like a coiled spring.

  There were towels pegged to the wall, and she took one. In an adjacent room she found a closet full of dresses like the one Calliope had chosen, and she rooted around in a drawer until she found pants, a white shirt, and a dark vest, all of them obviously meant for a guy. But a pair of sandals wedged beneath the simple bed fit her pretty well, and she almost laughed when, feeling something crunch in the pocket of the vest, she fished out a half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights and a Bic lighter decorated with a peeling Steelers logo.

  So. There were rule breakers here, too.

  Pete wasn’t in the kitchen, although he’d swept up the glass. Calliope wasn’t back, either. In an instant, all her good feeling was swept away; she stood drowning in the air, in the emptiness. She was alone.

  She was suddenly terrified. She launched herself to the door, ignoring the pain in her ankle, crying out: there was something behind her, something too terrible to look at; the weight of her fear had transformed into a monster.

  She was outside, and the light was blinding. The cows moving across the pasture calmed her only slightly. She was alone and lost. She was shouting Pete’s name without even meaning to, and when she saw movement inside the barn, the shift of color and shadow, she went toward it with her arms outstretched.

  “Don’t. Don’t.” His voice stopped her. She’d never heard anyone sound like that, and in that moment, though she was still standing in the sun, the shadow of the monster behind her reached out and swallowed them. “Don’t come in here. Don’t.”

  For a moment he was still invisible. He was corners of himself, an arm and a leg, trying to move out of sticky darkness. And she was drawn toward him, to reach him, to pull him away, and so even as he plunged outside, like someone diving in reverse, she saw behind him the shoes attached to the ankles, and an arm—a small arm, a young arm—held motionless in a slant of light. Even if she hadn’t, she would have known by Pete’s face: it was as if all the skin had come off, as if the fear had come down and planed away everything else.

  The barn is where the animals go to die.

  He grabbed her, and this time Gemma felt that he was the one in danger of falling. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here. We have to get out now.” There was blood on his shoes.

  She couldn’t move. Her thoughts had frozen: they were rattling together like cubes in a tray. “What happened?” she asked, even though she knew. But she couldn’t quite make sense of it—that pale child’s arm reaching into a triangle of sun, and a man’s feet fanned apart. Bodies.

  “Je
sus.” Pete was crying. He turned away from her and bent to put his hands on his knees, trying to breathe, retching a little. “Jesus Christ.” He just kept saying it, over and over, Jesus, Jesus, and Gemma felt the clean brightness of the sky above them, felt all the emptiness of that endless hurtle into space.

  “She killed them,” she said. The words didn’t sound real. Pete just nodded. He was still doubled over. She wanted to put a hand on his back, but she couldn’t make her arm obey the command.

  The barn is where the animals go to die.

  Where was she now? Where had she gone? Gemma was freezing, gripped by fear. In the distance, the woods rippled as a breeze passed through the trees. Was someone shouting? She couldn’t think. She thought she heard voices crying out.

  “We can’t stay here,” she said, as Pete had. But neither of them moved. It was like a nightmare. Too bright, too warm, too empty.

  Voices. She definitely heard voices now, not the phantoms but real people. In the distance a long trail of orange dust unfurled, and then she saw horse carts, three of them, and a cluster of people. They were coming fast, and for a moment she felt nothing but relief. They were saved.

  Pete had her shoulders. He shook her, and her teeth jumped together. “You need to run. Don’t you understand? We can’t be here. They can’t find you here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Her thoughts were still frozen into uselessness. The wagons were closer now. The ground shivered under the vibration of so many hooves. She could make out the men inside them, all men, all dressed in black, all shouting. There was a boy, too, maybe thirteen or fourteen. He was standing, balancing like a sailor on a rolling sea deck, scouting for sure. He was pointing.

  “Listen to me, Gemma.” Pete was shouting, but she couldn’t hear him properly.

  “Run, Gemma. Listen to me. You gotta move.”

  She’d already lifted a hand to wave back, to hail the people in the wagon, because they were waving too, because the boy in front, the one who reminded her of a sailor, was pointing at her.

  Pointing, shouting. Angry.

  And suddenly she remembered what Calliope had said:

  There was a male. He ran off when he saw me.

  The cooled coffee with milk congealing into a pale skin on its surface. Half-eaten toast.

  You can be my replica.

  The men were pouring down off the wagons now, shouting, as the boy still stood with a finger raised, trembling and white-faced with fury, and finally Gemma heard him over the rattling of her heart, over the fear that had her in its grip.

  “That’s her,” he was saying. He had the beginnings of a beard, dark and patchy, and a long, narrow face, but it was his eyes that struck her. They were large and terrible, like holes that had been gouged into his face. “That’s her. That one. That’s her.”

  Pete shoved her. The shock of pain when she stepped on her ankle jolted her into her body, into understanding: Calliope had killed people and Calliope had disappeared and Gemma, her replica, would be her substitute. “Run.”

  They were swarming toward her, jackets flapping in the wind like capes, so she was reminded of insects, of biblical locusts coming down to bring punishment.

  Finally, Gemma ran.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 20 of Lyra’s story.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SHE LOST SIGHT OF PETE almost immediately.

  Pain darkened her vision every time she put weight on her left ankle, and her ankle kept folding, rolling her down to her hands and knees. She lost one sandal. She fell, got up, fell, got up. She could hear the men shouting behind her, tunneling toward her like a wave, but she was too afraid to look and see how close they were.

  She was choking on her own spit, blind with pain and panic. Down, up again. In the fields the cows watched her lazily, flicking their tails. The woods were impossibly far. She kept running anyway, up and down the swells of land, falling and climbing again to her feet, swallowing her snot.

  Then she had crossed the expanse of green and hit the fence, running into it with hardly a break in her step, simply plunging over it, toppling, rolling on her shoulder and then hauling herself again to her feet, sheltered in the sudden shadows, ping-ponging from tree to tree, using her good hand. She tripped and slid down a steep embankment, through a mulch of rotting tree bark: at the bottom of the slope, an enormous felled tree wheeled its roots to the sky. An overhanging lip of earth made a kind of tunnel, and she saw at once this was her only chance: to hide, to wait, to hope that the men missed her. She scuttled backward into the soft rot of this long, damp space. The air smelled like moisture, pulped leaves, and decay.

  She waited, shivering, her arms around her knees, listening to the distant shouting of her pursuers. At one point they seemed to be almost directly on top of her, and fear turned her stomach to liquid. But then they passed on.

  She lost track of time. Her terror turned every second into a swampy hour, a long agony of waiting. Finally, she realized the woods were quiet. She couldn’t hear anyone shouting.

  She hadn’t heard anyone shout in a long time.

  Carefully, she shimmied out of her hiding place, still pausing every few breaths to listen for footsteps or the sound of voices. Nothing. Now that her panic had eased up, the pain in her ankle had redoubled. It took her twenty minutes to work her way up the slope she’d tumbled down in seconds.

  At the top of the embankment she stood, trying to catch her breath, waving away a cloud of gnats that rose in a swarm. Afternoon sunlight made elegant angles through the trees. That meant hours had passed. She hoped the men who were after her had given up.

  She wondered what had happened to Calliope—whether she, too, had made her escape through the woods.

  She thought she remembered which direction she’d come from. She would have to go the opposite way, or risk ending up right where she started. If this was farmland, she comforted herself with the idea that she would have to reach another farm eventually—preferably one wired for the twenty-first century, where no one believed that she was a murderer. Even better, she might find a road full of traffic, full of normal people, soccer moms and dentists and teenage drivers with both hands on the wheel.

  She swore then that if she ever made it home she would never complain, ever, about being bored. She wanted to be bored every day of her natural life. She wanted to die of boredom, literally.

  So she went on, hobbling, limping, leaning heavily on a stick she fished out from the underbrush. She had to stop and rewrap her ankle twice, clumsily because she had only one hand, because she was shaking so hard, and the skin was so enormously puffy it frightened her. Miles of land, tight-knit woods of oak and maple and birch, dappled sun and the sky held at bay by the canopy of branches, the occasional flash of a deer bounding off in the distance, broken stone foundations that might have existed since the days of Paul Revere. She kept telling herself there had to be a road soon, soon, soon.

  The afternoon lengthened. The shadows turned the color of a bruise. More than once, she imagined she heard the noise of traffic—there, over that ridge, just behind that stand of trees, she could swear she heard a horn blowing. She was desperately thirsty, and her head hurt. She’d been crying for an hour without realizing it, and squinting hard to try to make treetops into rooftops or telephone poles. In the thickening shadows, she could almost believe it. She’d lost her second sandal too, without realizing it.

  And now it was getting dark.

  She began to shout for help, no longer caring who found her, wishing, now, she’d never run in the first place. She shouted until her voice broke and she couldn’t bear it anymore. No one came, anyway.

  And then she saw, in the distance, deliverance: a stone house, a roof overgrown with green moss, but a house. No—more than one house. Three houses lumped next to one another, like faerie houses dropped by some miracle in the middle of the woods.

  If she’d been less desperate, she would have noticed the shattere
d windows, the doors angled off their hinges, the wood rot, and seen it for a settlement no one had entered in years, possibly decades.

  If she’d been less tired, she would have noticed the low circle of stones indicating an old sunken well, with only a flimsy covering of ancient wood to keep animals from falling in.

  But she was desperate, and tired, and the woods were dark.

  She tripped on the edge of the sunken well and saw, briefly, the small covering of ancient wood, like a trapdoor set in the ground. Then she crashed through it and tumbled down into the long, sleek mouth of a thirty-foot hole.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 21 of Lyra’s story.

  PART III

  TWENTY-TWO

  AT ALMOST THE SAME TIME Gemma fell, Kristina and Geoffrey Ives arrived at a Bruinsville, Pennsylvania, police station, not ten miles from the old stone well in the middle of the Sequoia Falls Nature Preserve where their daughter now lay unconscious.

  They had arrived in Lancaster County the night before, after one of Geoff’s many military contacts, Captain Agrawal, had signaled that Saperstein might have mistaken Gemma and Pete for the replicas they were pursuing, only to discover a calamity: an explosion at the private facility where Saperstein had been licking his wounds and trying, without success, to rally new financial support. Kristina refused to consider the possibility that Gemma might be among the dead bodies excavated from the wreckage. She wouldn’t even think it.

  They were ushered by Captain Agrawal down a narrow hallway to the locked and windowless evidence room in the back. Kristina had to reach out a hand to steady herself against the file cabinets.

  How had she ended up in a police station with her daughter missing and children turned to ashes? There seemed to be a gigantic hole in her life that she couldn’t bridge. She couldn’t remember her way across it.