Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  Now Lyra could see the guards carving the crowd up, dispersing it. But the man with the dead fish eyes was gone.

  Caelum’s face was swollen where he’d been hit. Lyra could tell how much pain he must be in. His cheek was cut. One of the guys who’d hit him must have been wearing a ring.

  “Goddamn. Tell me you aren’t prospectives.” The boy in glasses looked furious. “Come with me. Let’s get out of here before these psychopaths start a riot.”

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

  FOURTEEN

  HIS NAME WAS SEBASTIAN, AND with his help they elbowed their way free of the crowd. From a distance, it resembled an organic mass, a seething, hungry creature.

  Lyra was still having trouble breathing. She kept scanning the street for the man with the fish eyes, or the woman who traveled with him. She felt the weight of invisible observers watching their progress, the way she had always felt the Glass Eyes at Haven.

  “Animals,” Sebastian said again, when they were several blocks away, and the noise of the chanting had faded. Lyra was surprised that it was still early afternoon, still sunny; that the cars still churned by slowly, that nothing else had stopped.

  Caelum hadn’t spoken at all. His left eye was swollen shut. When he leaned over and spat up a gob of blood, the boy shook his head.

  “You should really get some ice on that. And clean the cut, too, so it doesn’t get infected. I’m in med school,” he added, in response to a look from Lyra. “If you want, my apartment’s right around the corner.”

  Lyra hadn’t exactly recognized it as an invitation until he started walking again and Caelum, to her surprise, followed.

  Sebastian lived in a small, bright apartment on the third floor above a sandwich shop. The whole place smelled like the inside of a book. Books sagged the built-in shelves lining the wall. The sun caught thick swaths of dust in the air and striped the room vividly in golden light. She couldn’t see anything in the haze of sun.

  “My roommate’s a lit PhD student,” Sebastian said, when he caught Lyra pacing the shelves, running her fingers over the spines. “Can you believe he still reads paper books? It’s so nineteenth century.”

  The sun made black spots in Lyra’s vision. The room began to turn, slowly, and to stay standing she had to grip the table. Side effects. No. Symptoms.

  “Do you have a bathroom?” she asked him. Sebastian had so many things it made her dizzy: paper clips and mugs, framed photographs and bundles of wire, coins and little porcelain trays to hold them. She could hear all of it screaming, crying out in neglect; she wanted to open her mouth and swallow the whole room. She wished she could stuff all of his belongings down inside her, like some kind of magical potion that would turn her human, totally human, at last.

  Like some kind of magical potion that could make her well.

  “Are you all right?” He squinted at her, and for the first time she noticed how nice his clothing was compared to theirs, how well it fit him, how healthy he looked.

  “Bathroom,” she managed to say again, even as she felt bile biting off the edge of the word, making acid in her throat.

  In the bathroom, she turned on the faucets and opened her mouth and let the black come up, waves of sickness that brought with them a sharp antiseptic burn in her throat and Haven’s smell. They had failed to find Dr. Saperstein, like they had failed to save Rick Harliss, or Jake Witz, or Cassiopeia in the marshes. Everywhere they went, they had left nothing but death behind them.

  And she had nothing but death to look forward to.

  She sat back on her heels, waiting for the rise and fall of the room to go still. Her face was wet. She was crying. A green toothbrush with its bristles splayed, tweezers, a scattering of clipped hair, an empty tissue box gathering dust, a straw basket piled with magazines and paperback books. She wanted things. She wanted a phone, an apartment full of books, tall glasses and ice cube trays and mugs for tea hanging from nails beneath the kitchen cabinets. She wanted a space she could fill and fill with her belongings, until no one could touch her, no one could even reach her past all of her beautiful things.

  She took a paperback from the basket and opened to inhale its pages. She tore off a piece of paper, and then another, and fed the pieces one by one into her mouth until she felt well enough to stand.

  She hadn’t brought her backpack to the bathroom and that was a mistake. But she tucked the paperback into her waistband and found her T-shirt concealed it perfectly. She washed her mouth out. She felt better, with those pieces of paper pulsing their small words out from somewhere deep in her chest.

  Hers.

  Caelum and Sebastian had moved into the kitchen.

  “I should have known the whole demonstration would be a disaster,” Sebastian was saying. Without his glasses, he was beautiful—not as beautiful as Caelum, but still beautiful. He had dark skin, high cheekbones, and eyes the same color as the afternoon sunlight on the wood floor. “But people never listen to reason. They don’t care about facts. They read one think piece in the Times and they get hysterical about everything. I swear, you can’t even fart on this campus without someone screaming environmental policy at you nowadays. You want some water or something? Beer? I have wine but it’s old.”

  “Water’s fine,” Lyra and Caelum said, at the same time.

  “I’m not a conservative,” Sebastian said. He poured water from the tap into tall glasses, and Lyra marveled at how comfortable he was touching everything, as if the whole space was just an extension of his body. “I understand we shouldn’t have theaters named after Ponzi scheme billionaires, or slave owners—and in our country, that excludes more people than you’d think. But Richard Haven?”

  He shook his head. “His work on stem cell regeneration was pioneering. Do you know he built a lab in his room when he was in elementary school? He isolated his first nucleus when he was nine, using a kitchen spatula, basically. I’m exaggerating, but you get the point. He was a genius. You think Steve Jobs made people feel warm and fuzzy? Benjamin Franklin was a total prick, and so was Edison. He bought the idea for the lightbulb, by the way. He was basically just the licensor.”

  He paused to take a breath and Lyra too felt breathless: so many words, ideas, names she’d never heard.

  And she realized, then, that that was what being raised at Haven truly meant, and why she would never be entirely human. It wasn’t that they’d inserted needles to draw bone marrow or fed her a diet of pills, that they’d called her “it,” that she had never been held or cuddled, that her head had been shaved to keep out lice, and small fatal disease cells had been introduced into her muscle tissue just to watch what would happen. She’d been completely torn away from the human timeline, from a vast history of events, achievements, and names spanning more years than she could think of.

  She had no context. She was a word on a blank page. There was no way to read meaning into it. No wonder she felt so alone.

  “Actually, that was one of the reasons I was hoping that Dr. Saperstein would show up today—other than taking a stand, I mean. I’m interested in medical tech, and I’m curious about the IP aspect. They’re saying Cat O’Donnell might be up for a Nobel Prize. But she wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for Haven. The whole idea of individual-specific stem cell regeneration . . . It seems obvious now, but that was a revolutionary idea.”

  The name O’Donnell touched Lyra like the electric zap of the Extraordinary Kissable Graph: one of the machines she’d loved the best at Haven, which read her heartbeats and then drew them, vividly, in climbing green lines and vivid peaks that recalled the mountains she’d seen only on TV.

  “You . . . you know Dr. O’Donnell?” she asked.

  “I mean, not personally.” Sebastian gave her a look she didn’t know how to decipher. “I just know her because of what she’s doing at CASECS. I heard she used to work with Dr. Saperstein at Haven,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “That’s why
he’s suing her. I guess he thinks she stole some of his research. Meanwhile O’Donnell won’t say a word about it. Still, pictures never lie.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and made adjustments to it, tapping and swiping the screen. Then he spun it across the table to her and she lost her breath.

  There, in miniature, was Dr. O’Donnell, stepping off one of the trash ferries that used to travel back and forth to Haven. She was wearing regular clothing, and her head was angled toward Dr. Saperstein, who was next to her, but Lyra would have known her just from the geometry of her ear where it joined her jaw, by the color of her hair, by the way her mouth flattened when she thought.

  Dr. O’Donnell had given them names from the stars, and so she had given them a whole universe.

  And in a single instant, Lyra realized how wrong she had been, how stupid.

  Dr. Saperstein wasn’t God.

  Dr. O’Donnell was.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 14 of Gemma’s story.

  FIFTEEN

  LYRA DIDN’T LIKE TO STEAL from Sebastian. He was nice. He had helped them. He had resurrected Dr. O’Donnell, and shown them where CASECS was, only a short distance away in a place called Allentown.

  But she was beginning to understand that those things didn’t matter. Whether he was nice or not, he had a phone that she wanted, and so she took it when he wasn’t paying attention.

  Richard Haven had a whole building. He had his name above beautiful glass doors. And he was not nice.

  Being nice didn’t matter. Only taking did, the way animals took.

  They wouldn’t get far, Lyra knew, before Sebastian realized that Lyra had stolen his phone.

  But they didn’t need to get far. They didn’t need distance to disappear.

  Being invisible had benefits: it was easy to shoplift, as long as you picked a crowded store (Caelum’s mistake in the 7-Eleven had been to steal when there was no one around to deflect the clerk’s attention; when he had, for a brief, flaring moment, become visible); to edge a little too close, or lean a little too hard, and come away with a phone or a wallet; to pass into a restaurant and then stand up and leave again before anyone could ask that you pay.

  Lyra was now throwing up almost everything she ate, but that was all right, that didn’t stop her.

  They’d agreed their best chance of getting into CASECS to see Dr. O’Donnell was at night. They were thinking, of course, of Haven’s security and of Caelum’s escape, which could never have been accomplished during the day. By evening Caelum had two cell phones and a new wallet of his own, plus more than fifty dollars he’d skimmed from the tables of restaurants and cafés, and Lyra had a leather billfold and several credit cards, plus a necklace she’d found coiled at the bottom of a woman’s purse when she’d dropped her hand casually down inside it.

  Everything she added to her backpack made her feel better, less nauseous, less dizzy. She didn’t understand gravity, but she knew intuitively every bit of weight, no matter how small, slowed her, made her mind turn less quickly, made her feel less as if she might drop down into a place where no one could find her.

  It wasn’t yet dark when they hired a car to take them to Allentown: their first time in a taxi. Though they didn’t have an address for CASECS, the driver managed to locate it easily enough on his phone, and told them the route would take roughly an hour and a half in traffic.

  Maybe she should have felt bad. Maybe she should have felt sorry for all the things they’d stolen. She wondered whether Sebastian was angry, whether the woman with the bright-pink lips from whom she’d taken the necklace would be sad.

  But she didn’t feel bad. They were going to see Dr. O’Donnell, and Dr. O’Donnell would make it all better. She was happier than she’d ever been, sitting in a sticky backseat that smelled like bubble gum, her backpack heavy on her lap, Caelum’s hand occasionally brushing her thigh, her hand, her shoulder, like a bird exploring the territory. She felt human. Didn’t humans, after all, take what they needed? Wasn’t that what humans like Dr. Saperstein, like Richard Haven, had always done?

  They reached Allentown just as dusk lowered like an eyelid. From one minute to the next, streetlamps blinked on, and buildings lost form and instead became beaded strings of lit windows. They wheeled off the highway into long bleak alleys of car lots, parking garages, blocky office buildings, industrial complexes with names like Allegra Solutions and Enterprise Data. Lyra lowered the window and smelled gasoline and tree sap, frying oil and a faint chemical tang.

  The taxi driver slowed, leaning over his steering wheel to squint hard at every street sign. Finally, they turned down a street identical to all the other streets except in name. On the corner, a Kmart showed off a cheerful block facade that reminded Lyra of Haven. A good sign. They kept going, past a fenced-in parking lot and a flotilla of bright-yellow school buses, all sickly in the fading light and pointed in the same direction, like fish suspended in the deep.

  Several blocks later, the street dead-ended in a scrub of thinned-out, trash-filled woods. But as they approached, a narrow drive appeared behind a low stone wall, moving out of the shadow of the trees like some kind of optical illusion.

  CASECS was marked by a single sign planted low in the grass. The No Trespassing sign next to it was leaning at an angle, and half-swallowed by a hedge that had begun to lose its shape. There were no patrolling soldiers, no guard towers, no obvious security measures: just a long, narrow sweep of driveway that pointed to a simple guard hut. The institute itself was concealed by the curvature of the drive, but the distant lights winking through the overhanging trees suggested a building much smaller than she’d been expecting.

  Her heart began gasping, and she imagined the organ like the bird she and the other replicas had once found near A-Wing, sucking in frantic breaths.

  “Here,” Lyra said.

  The driver met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Here? You sure?” When Lyra nodded, he said, “You want me to wait?”

  “No,” Lyra said. Suddenly her happiness broke apart. It lifted into her chest and throat, and beat frantic wings against her rib cage. What if Sebastian had lied? What if he was wrong? What if Dr. O’Donnell didn’t remember her?

  The driver turned around in his seat to peer at Caelum and Lyra, as if he’d just noticed them. “You sure you gonna be okay getting back?”

  “We’re not going back,” she said, and he just shook his head and accepted the money they gave him. Too much, probably—Lyra was too nervous to count and let Caelum do the paying.

  They waited until the cab light became distant and then blinked out. From where they stood, Lyra could see one of Allentown’s major arteries. But this road, sloughed off by the main thoroughfare, was totally without movement, except for the occasional approach of a car toward the Kmart. Haven’s security had depended on its remoteness. But CASECS was hiding in plain sight. No one would ever believe anything of importance would happen here, down the street from the school bus depot.

  They went parallel to the driveway, on the shadowed side of the stone wall that continued along its length, concealed by a vein of trees that ran parallel to the pavement. They moved in silence, stopping every few feet to wait, and listen, and watch for security. But there was no movement, no distant voices or footsteps. Lyra should have been reassured, but instead, she only grew more anxious: she didn’t understand what kind of place this could possibly be.

  They stopped a short distance from the guard hut, edging closer to the stone wall in a crouch, hoping to be mistaken for rocks. Now they had a clear view of the CASECS complex. It was a fraction of the size of Haven: three stories high, blocky white and bleakly rectangular. Security was tighter than it first appeared. A fence ringed at the top with barbed wire marked the periphery and made climbing impossible. Lyra noted, too, the presence of Glass Eyes everywhere, and small glowing pinpricks, like the burning embers of cigarette butts.

  That left only one option: they would simply
have to walk in, and hope they wouldn’t be shot.

  They crouched, and they waited, learning the rhythm of the traffic in and out—almost all of it, at this hour, out. A sweep of headlights, the occasional patter of conversation as the guard—a woman with a sweep of blond hair and a booming laugh—leaned down to greet the driver. The mechanical gate clanked and shuddered open, then closed again. They counted seconds: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The gate was open for anywhere from ten to twenty seconds. More than enough time to run, if they were quick, if Lyra didn’t stumble.

  Still, they would be heading for the guard directly, and Lyra was sure that she had a gun. She thought she could even see it: a dark bulge on the woman’s hip.

  For the first time the whole thing struck her as funny, that they were risking their lives to get back into a facility like Haven after risking their lives to escape in the first place.

  “Let me go alone,” Lyra said to Caelum. Suddenly it seemed important to her, critical, even. She would die anyway, whether pulled apart by the ricochet of bullets or by falling into holes that got ever deeper and harder to escape. Caelum was White. He could go anywhere—he could continue stealing wallets and cell phones, he could drift and disappear and reappear again. There would be other girls who loved him, and saw him as beautiful: human girls, who never knew where he came from and didn’t care. They would do what Lyra had done with him in the hotel room. They could turn themselves into living strands of music that played together.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Caelum said. “We’re together.” He stood up. When she hesitated, he reached back and took her hand again. “Come on.”

  They moved a little closer, until they were only a few feet from the perimeter fence and another, larger sign that announced CASECS to visitors. The headlights of a departing car made Lyra throw a hand up, momentarily dazzled. The gates clanked open again and then closed. The car swam past them, so close that Lyra could make out the silhouette of a man behind the wheel, turning to fiddle with the radio.