Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  They found a Motel 6. They had no ID, since Lyra’s wallet had been stolen, but the desk clerk just shrugged and handed over a key anyway.

  “No smoking in the rooms,” he called out after them. “I’m serious.”

  In the room was a carpet the color of vomit, and ancient wallpaper that still exhaled the smell of old cigarettes and booze, two twin beds and an old, blocky TV, a bathroom where mold inched between tiles and decals on the tub floor peeled like brittle leaves. It was the prettiest room Lyra had ever seen, except for the one in the little white house where they’d first been taken by Gemma—she couldn’t believe how big it was, how spacious, that it was all theirs for the night. How many rooms, she thought, must there be in the world: How many rooms like this one, folded across the vast space of the world, pretty and quiet and safe, with doors that locked? It was a beautiful idea.

  She showered first, taking her time, letting herself imagine that her body didn’t belong to her at all, that it was just an object, a broken-down chair or a table full of surface cracks, and that she herself was somewhere different, that she would not be affected if her body gave out entirely or was discarded. Afterward she stood in the cloudy bathroom, listening to the muffled noise of the TV from the bedroom, feeling suddenly nervous. She had been with Caelum countless times in vacant trailers and behind the supply shed, and played a game of kissing each other’s scars, and the thin, fragile skin on the inside of the elbows and the back of the knees. But that was in the dark, at Winston-Able, in a room musty with spiderwebs and the smell of bike tires. That was washing up accidentally somewhere, and clinging to each other because there was nowhere else to go.

  This was different.

  She knotted a towel around her chest. Before Caelum could even turn to look at her, she’d slipped into the bed closest to the bathroom, shivering when the cold sheets touched her bare skin. She pulled the covers to her chin.

  “Are you finished?” he asked, and she saw his eyes move down to her shape beneath the blanket, and this made her shiver, too.

  The drumming of the shower in the bathroom, the murmur of TV voices—soon she was asleep, falling off the edge of sound into quiet.

  She woke to movement, the rustle of sheets and the sudden touch of cold air. She’d fallen asleep in her towel, and she was cold. The lights were off, and the TV was off, and it was quiet except for the faint hum of an air conditioner. For one disoriented second, she didn’t know where Caelum was: she had a vague sense of his outline standing beside her, watching her sleep.

  “What are you—?” she started to say, but then Caelum was sliding in next to her in bed, naturally, as if there was no other place to be. He looped a heavy arm across her waist. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, only a thin pair of boxer shorts. She could feel his chest rising and falling, his breath on her cheek, his anklebones when he moved, and immediately she wasn’t cold anymore. She was burning hot.

  “Lyra?” he whispered, but before she could say what, he put his mouth against her neck. Then she realized that it hadn’t been a question after all. He found a gap in the towel and slid his hand to her stomach. He touched the architecture of her hips. He moved a hand, carefully, gently, between her thighs. “Lyra, Lyra, Lyra,” he said again, singsonging it, as if he were learning how to speak through saying her name.

  She wasn’t a human. She wasn’t a replica. She was a star trail, burning through the darkness, lighting up the room in invisible spectrums of color.

  “Caelum,” she said, turning over to him, and opening her mouth to his, letting him pour this new language inside of her, letting it transform them together into music.

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

  THIRTEEN

  IN THE MORNING THEY SHOWERED together, soapy, touching each other with slick-fish fingers, filled with the joy of the new. They packed their few belongings, and Lyra took a pen from the nightstand. She left behind the Bible she found there; she associated it too much with Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It, with quick and blinding sideswipes to the head.

  They had better luck than the day before. The desk clerk didn’t even blink when they asked for directions to UPenn. She just slid a paper map across the desk and charted the best route with a little ink line.

  “It’s a hike, though,” she said. “You might want to Uber.”

  Lyra just thanked her and said a quick good-bye.

  It was a hike: an hour of slogging next to a sluggish gray river and a grid of barely flowing traffic. Lyra marveled at the look of the houses on the river, enormous and colorful, in a style she had never seen before. Caelum puzzled over the map, charting their progress carefully, inching a finger along the ink pathway when Lyra read out the names of the streets they were passing.

  Finally, when his finger was almost directly above the little star indicating they had arrived, Lyra saw something that took her breath away. A group of boys and girls came toward her, singing. There were so many of them that Lyra and Caelum had to step off the sidewalk to avoid being bumped.

  “Caelum,” she said, and pointed.

  Several of them wore T-shirts marked with a logo she recognized. An electric thrill traveled her whole body. The University of Pennsylvania. Lyra knew it. Caelum knew it. Everyone at Haven knew it.

  It was a place both Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein had come from. The bust in the entryway of admin wore a blanket bearing the same logo for a cape. On certain days, certain game days, God went into his office and didn’t come out. Sometimes the staff members drank beer on those days, carted from the mainland in coolers on the boats, and sat for longer than usual in front of the TVs, watching sporting events whose rules Lyra didn’t understand.

  “UPenn,” she said out loud, and began to laugh as the group of strangers raised their fists and shouted, “Go Quakers.” Finally, she understood: UPenn meant the University of Pennsylvania, where both of the Gods of Haven had started.

  Where the second God, Dr. Saperstein, was soon due to return—and where she and Caelum would be waiting for him.

  She’d assumed that UPenn was a single place, almost like Haven, that had produced both Richard Haven and Dr. Saperstein. But once again the outside world smashed itself into a thousand different visions, into dozens of buildings, hundreds of people, noise and color and rhythms she didn’t understand.

  Kids sat cross-legged with homemade signs in front of the looming stone buildings, chanting. Others, ignoring them, lay out on blankets in the grass or played a game that involved a flat plastic disk and lots of running.

  “I don’t understand where they all come from,” Caelum said, and she knew exactly what he meant: How could all these people have been made if not on purpose?

  “Come on,” she said, and took his hand. Caelum was agitated by the crowds. She remembered, suddenly, seeing an eclipse when she was younger, how the nurses had let them file out into the garden to look. Caelum became like that when he was nervous, like something dark that swallowed the light around him.

  Lyra was anxious too. The swell of voices from every direction made her head hurt. The blur of colors reminded her of the starbursts that crowded her vision when, stretched out on the examination table, she looked too long at the ceiling lights. If Dr. Saperstein was here, did that mean that other people from Haven were here, too? Guards with guns? People like the ones who had killed Jake Witz, and had come most recently for Rick Harliss?

  To her surprise, the first person they approached didn’t hesitate when they asked whether she knew where to find Dr. Saperstein.

  “He’s not coming,” the girl said. She was wearing lots of rings, and violet eye shadow that made Lyra think of Raina, and of the strange party where people stood in the half-dark together and also somehow alone, like the individual patches of land submerged in the marshes that only from a distance looked like solid ground. “I mean, they haven’t officially announced it yet, but he won’t.”

  Lyra’s palms began to sw
eat. “What do you mean?” she said, and repeated as faithfully as possible what she had overheard. “He was supposed to be here Tuesday, for the ribbon-cutting.”

  “Yeah, but that’s probably not happening either. Have you been to the protests? There’s, like, two thousand people outside.”

  “Where?” Caelum asked.

  “Over by the Haven Center. Or whatever they’re calling it now.” The girl rolled her eyes. When she saw that Lyra and Caelum had no idea what she was talking about, she sighed. “Next to the medical school and PCAM. You know where PCAM is, right? The Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine? It’s right next to the Haven Center. You can’t miss it, it’s right on Civic Center. You students here, or incoming?”

  Lyra said nothing.

  “Well, you’ll get a real view of Penn, anyway. Protesters and crusty alums and all. Whose side are you on?” She smiled in a way that might not have been friendly.

  “No one’s side,” Lyra said, though she had no idea what the girl meant.

  At the same time, Caelum said, “Our own side,” and squeezed Lyra’s hand even tighter.

  They found PCAM and the medical school—an enormous modern complex, all steel and glass, which reminded Lyra of the real Haven—and next to it, the brand-new Richard C. Haven Center for Regenerative Research.

  “He was here,” Lyra whispered excitedly. “The first God was here.”

  It seemed impossible that God, the first God, could have existed here, so many hundreds of miles away from Spruce Island. That here, too, in this busy city, he’d put a thumb in the soft clay of reality, he’d existed, people knew his name.

  If there were a single place in the world where she would find help, it had to be here, where the Gods of Haven would be once again reunited.

  Despite the crowd gathered in front of it, the building itself had the whistling, empty look of an abandoned shell. The revolving glass doors were roped off behind a thick red ribbon, and Lyra’s heart picked up—this, then, must be the ribbon Dr. Saperstein was expected to cut. But the podium positioned directly in front of the doors stayed empty, the microphone crooked uselessly toward the open air, like a finger beckoning to no one. Police sawhorses kept the crowd a safe distance from the building.

  Hundreds of people eddied around the steps, blocking the entrance. Lyra kept hold of Caelum’s hand—she wasn’t sure she would have been able to loose herself, he was squeezing so tight—as they edged along the periphery of the crowd, puzzling over what it meant. From the fact that the girl with the violet eye shadow had asked them whether they were students, she now knew this must be a school. Maybe this was simply how schools looked, how teaching took place.

  Many of the students carried signs that said Not Our Penn, Take Haven to Hell, Penn Students for Awareness. Others waved school flags, or carried signs that said Penn Pride or Penn Students for Science.

  Between the two groups there was obvious tension. A makeshift line divided them, like the finger of an invisible current had divided the crowd in two, and as they watched, two boys began pushing each other and one of them ended up on the ground, his glasses shattered.

  Finally, she worked up the courage to ask a girl what all the shouting was about.

  The girl, red-faced and sweaty, wearing mismatching shoes and thick glasses, was resting on a stone wall with a cardboard sign tucked between her legs. Because of the way it was angled, Lyra couldn’t read what it said.

  “You go here?” She squinted at Lyra and Caelum in turn, and when they shook their heads, seemed to relax. “Oh. I was gonna say. What planet are you from?” She bent down to retrieve her sign, propping it on the wall next to her. This one said Not Our Penn.

  Lyra tried a different tack. “Do you know where to find Dr. Saperstein?” she asked. The sun was too bright. In its glow she felt as if all her holes were visible, all the defects in her brain obvious.

  “Oh, the ceremony’s off for sure. They’re just too spinecheese to tell us. You heard about what happened in Florida, right? I mean, you’re not actually from Mars?”

  “Don’t be a dick, Jo.” This came from a boy sitting next to her.

  “Florida.” Lyra swallowed. “You mean what happened at the Haven Institute?”

  The girl, Jo, nodded. “Richard Haven was a professor here, like, a million years ago. He’s been dead for, like, a whole decade.” She paused to let this settle in. “Anyway, he went off and made fuck-you money doing biotech and who knows what, and he bought his name onto this building.”

  “It wasn’t biotech,” the boy said. “It was pharmaceutical stuff.”

  “No one knows what it was, and that’s the point. No oversight. Typical one percent stuff, too big to fail. And Saperstein’s just as bad.” That she addressed to the boy, and he raised both hands. “Anyway”—she turned back to Lyra and Caelum, exhaling heavily, so her bangs moved across her sticky forehead—“the Florida meltdown is, like, the worst environmental catastrophe ever.”

  “Since the BP spill, at least,” the boy chimed in.

  “Since the BP spill, for sure.” Jo glared at him. “There are clouds of pollution, like seriously chemical clouds, practically poisoning everyone within eighty miles—”

  “Not eighty miles,” the boy put in mildly. “You’re exaggerating.”

  The girl didn’t seem to hear him. She was getting worked up now. Her glasses kept slipping. Every few seconds, she thumbed them higher on her nose. “They’re saying there might be generational damage, plus it turns out Saperstein was completely skirting federal regulations, they’re saying he was cloning people. . . .”

  “One person is saying that,” the boy interrupted her again, and nudged her. “Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to believe everything you read on the internet?”

  Finally, she turned on him. “Whose side are you on, anyway?” He shrugged and went quiet, picking at a pimple on his chin. “The point is”—she said, rolling her eyes—“I’m premed, and I don’t want this guy’s name on our buildings. How about Marie Curie? How about a woman? Richard Haven doesn’t represent me. Not my Penn.” She pointed to her sign.

  “But where is Dr. Saperstein?” Lyra felt increasingly panicked. In the distance, she spotted a man uniformed in dark blue, wearing mirrored sunglasses: a guard, sent to collect her. Then he was gone, dissipated in the sweeping motions of the crowd, and afterward she wasn’t sure whether she’d imagined him.

  Jo blinked at her. “I told you. He’s not coming. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up in jail.”

  “Thank you.” Lyra remembered, just barely, to say it. Thinking of Rick, and the way he’d tried to teach her about manners, and how to talk to people, brought on an unexpected spasm of pain.

  They turned away from the girl and her sign. Then Caelum pivoted suddenly.

  “He was making clones,” Caelum said.

  Both the girl and the boy stared.

  “I’m one of them,” he said. “I’m number 72.”

  “Ha-ha,” the girl said flatly. An ant was tracking across her sign. She frowned, took it up between two fingers, and squeezed.

  In the short time they’d been speaking to Jo, the crowd had grown even denser. Now the protest spilled up the steps, toppling the sawhorses, and as she watched, several students charged the podium and brought it crashing down. Lyra saw a blur of police uniforms among the crowd and felt suddenly as if she were going to faint. Reality slipped slowly toward darkness.

  “We have to get out of here.” Caelum sensed the change at the same time: the current had tipped over to one of fury. The crowd seemed to pour into a single roiling mass, like a tight-knit cloud condensing on the horizon.

  “He still might come.”

  “You heard them. He’s not coming. He’s not—” But Caelum was whipped away from her when people surged suddenly between them, a wall of people pulsing together like an enormous organ, walls of breath and hair and sweaty skin.

  Someone grabbed Lyra’s wrist, hard. She turned and a scream throttled her, l
odging somewhere in her throat.

  Though she had seen him only from a distance, in the harsh glare of the floodlight, she recognized him: he was the same man who had come for Rick, but dressed up now like some kind of local security guard. But she would have sworn it was him. She recognized the flatness of his eyes, like the dead stare of a fish.

  Are you okay? his mouth was saying. But she couldn’t hear the words. Instead, she heard him laughing. She heard the guards on the marshes weeks and weeks ago, laughing as they toed their way through the blood of dying replicas.

  You know how expensive these things are to make?

  She wrenched away from him. She spun around—she had a brief impression of open mouths and shouting, a boy with blazing eyes shouting at her. A backpack caught her in the chest and she was knocked off balance. She was on the ground. Someone stepped on her fingers. Sneakers and legs, so many bodies—she was momentarily overwhelmed, she couldn’t breathe.

  Even as a girl reached to help her, the crowd moved. Suddenly everyone was shouting and she couldn’t get up. Someone kneed her in the ribs. Through a rift in the crowd, she spotted Caelum, flying at the guy with the backpack. A girl screamed. Caelum was a sudden frenzy of motion; there were three guys fighting him now, and blood on his teeth. As she watched, trying to find the breath to shout, one of the boys caught him on the cheek and then another one on the back of the head, and then a third kneed him in the stomach. Then he was on his knees, spitting up blood, but she couldn’t get to him—still they were separated by a hard blade of moving bodies.

  Someone hooked Lyra by the elbows and got her to her feet. Air touched her lungs like a burn. She gasped and tears came to her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” the guy shouted. He was wearing glasses with only a single lens. She recognized him as the boy who’d gone down before, shoved by someone. He kept a hand on her arm, even as Caelum finally pushed his way toward her. “Animals,” the boy kept saying. “You’re all animals.”