Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  Something had happened to her by mistake. She was in trouble. And Lyra knew, without question or doubt and without knowing how she knew, that it was because Gemma had come to warn her.

  Had Gemma, like Rick, been taken away?

  She thought of Jake Witz hanging by his belt, and the purple mottle of his face.

  The memory brought back a roar of sound, a memory of Haven exploding into flame, and the char of burning skin carrying over the marshes. She nearly missed the next thing Dr. O’Donnell said.

  “I see. So how many of them escaped?” Then: “We can still use them, you know. If we could spin it—” She broke off. After another minute, she spoke again, this time so close to the door that Lyra startled backward and could still hear her clearly. “Well, maybe it’s for the best. Public support will be the trickiest. If word gets out that they can be violent . . .”

  The last thing she said was, “I’m praying for Gemma.”

  Lyra couldn’t help but wonder whether anyone in the whole world was praying for her and for Caelum. She doubted it.

  Then Lyra had to stumble out of the way, because Dr. O’Donnell turned the key in the lock and opened the door. For a half second, Lyra didn’t recognize her: the lines of her face had converged into a baffling question mark.

  “Sit,” Dr. O’Donnell said. Neither Caelum nor Lyra moved. “Go on. Sit. Please. I won’t hurt you.”

  “You’re a liar,” Caelum said. “Everything you say is a lie.”

  Dr. O’Donnell sighed. She must have gone home at some point to change; she was wearing different clothing than she had been last night. Lyra hated her for this—that she would think to go home, that she would think to shower, that Lyra and Caelum were so small in the orbit of her life they hadn’t even caused a ripple in her routine.

  “I wasn’t lying when I said I could help you,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, but you’re in a difficult position. You’re not supposed to exist.”

  Although she said the words gently, Lyra knew them for what they were: sharp, weaponized things, knives designed to make her bleed. She wouldn’t argue, or cry, or show that they had landed.

  “What happened to Gemma?” she said.

  Dr. O’Donnell looked momentarily startled, and Lyra was glad: she had an advantage, however brief.

  Dr. O’Donnell recovered quickly. “You’re very observant,” she said. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “There wasn’t much to do but observe at Haven,” Lyra said. A wave of dizziness clouded her vision, and she wanted to sit down but didn’t want to give Dr. O’Donnell the satisfaction. “What happened to Gemma?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. O’Donnell said, after a short pause. “No one knows. It seems she disappeared on Sunday morning.”

  So. It was Lyra’s fault.

  Dr. O’Donnell moved away from the door—slowly, as if Caelum and Lyra might startle, as if there was anywhere for them to go. “Can I ask you a question?” She held up both hands when Caelum started to protest. “Then you can ask me anything you want, and I’ll be honest. I promise to tell you everything you want to know.”

  Caelum’s eyes locked briefly on Lyra’s. She shrugged.

  “Go on,” Lyra said. Finally, she took a seat, hoping that Dr. O’Donnell hadn’t noticed her relief. Caelum, however, stayed where he was. “But then it’s our turn.”

  Dr. O’Donnell called up a smile with obvious difficulty. “I promise,” she repeated. Since Caelum wasn’t sitting, she took the empty chair instead, and drew it across from Lyra, so they were almost knee to knee. She leaned forward, and Lyra was sure she would ask about Gemma.

  But instead she said, “Do you know how many replicas escaped Haven after the explosion?”

  Now Lyra was the one who was surprised.

  “Why does it matter?” Caelum asked.

  Dr. O’Donnell barely turned her head to give him a tight smile. “You said you’d answer first.”

  Lyra shook her head. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Caelum and I were hiding. We got under the fence. . . .” When she closed her eyes, she could still see the zigzag of flashlights, and hear the rhythm of helicopters threshing the smoke beneath their propellers. Dozens of them, passing back and forth, back and forth. She remembered screaming. “There were rescue helicopters, though. So there must have been some. Dr. Saperstein survived, didn’t he?” Dr. O’Donnell nodded. “The explosion happened in A-Wing. But there wouldn’t have been replicas there.”

  Dr. O’Donnell was quiet for a bit. She clutched her hands, making her knuckles very white. Were they really the same hands, Lyra wondered, that had smuggled books onto Spruce Island, had touched Lyra’s forehead when she was feverish?

  “Why?” Caelum asked again. When she looked down at her hands, he said, “You promised to answer.”

  Dr. O’Donnell shook herself, as if she were passing out of a rain. “I never liked what Dr. Saperstein was doing at Haven,” she said. “Research of that magnitude . . .” She cleared her throat. “Secrets breed violence. The bigger the secret, the bigger the violence.” Suddenly, she stood up, moving not toward the door but to a barred window with a view of nothing but a blight of straggly trees. “Dr. Saperstein is dead. His secrets killed him. And it’s possible—it’s likely—that the replicas he brought up from Florida managed to escape.”

  “Where?” Lyra asked.

  “I don’t know.” Dr. O’Donnell turned to them when Caelum made a noise in his throat. “That’s the truth. I don’t know. Somewhere in Lancaster County, only an hour or so south of here. That’s all I know. We weren’t exactly on the best of terms.”

  “He was suing you,” Lyra said, parroting back what Sebastian had told her. Again, Dr. O’Donnell looked surprised.

  “You were always very smart,” Dr. O’Donnell said. Lyra wanted to hit her.

  She gripped the sides of her chair, as another wave of dizziness nearly took her sideways. “What do you make here, if you aren’t making cures?”

  Dr. O’Donnell turned back to the window. She waited so long to answer, Lyra began to think that her promise had also been a lie.

  But finally she did. “Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein were convinced that their work could only be done in secret,” she said. “That was wrong.”

  “You said that already,” Caelum said.

  “Just listen.” A sigh moved from Dr. O’Donnell’s shoulders down her spine. “I’ve spent years doing nothing but speaking to people—scientists, engineers, politicians, even—about how important this research is. How important it should be.”

  Lyra decided she hated that word—important. The way Dr. O’Donnell said it made her want to spit. As if it were a beautiful piece of glass, as if Dr. O’Donnell was beautiful just because she carried its syllables around on her tongue. How many people, Lyra wondered, were dead because of someone else’s importance?

  “That’s what we do at CASECS. We promote research. We give hospitals, facilities, even governments the chance to do their own research. That’s where you come in.” Dr. O’Donnell turned away from the window again. She wasn’t smiling. “There’s nowhere else for you to go. I know you understand that. If you leave, you’ll eventually be caught by the same people who wanted to erase you in the first place.”

  “I’m dying anyway,” Lyra said. “Aren’t I?”

  Dr. O’Donnell winced, as if Lyra had fired something sharp at her forehead.

  “You lied about a cure,” Lyra said, although the words curdled in her mouth and left her with a bad taste in her throat. “Admit it.”

  Dr. O’Donnell looked down. “There’s no cure,” she said softly. But Lyra thought, unbelievably, that she really sounded sorry about it. Still, the words fell like a thin knife, Lyra felt, slicing the world in two. She remembered the moment that Caelum had grabbed her wrist and she’d seen his mud-coated nails and felt the strange warmth and newness of his touch, and then a rocketing blast had driven her off her feet. She had thought, th
en, the world might be ending.

  Instead it was ending here, in this room.

  “We hardly understand prions,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “Dr. Saperstein understood them better than anyone in the world, probably, and he wasn’t looking for a cure. The whole point was to study a class of disease that we knew hardly anything about. To see how it could be manipulated, to understand it by making different variations and observing their effects.” She shook her head. “He was collecting data. It had to be incurable.”

  Lyra thought of all the replicas she’d ever known—Lilac Springs and Rose and Cassiopeia and the hundreds of numbered ones they’d never named—standing in a vast row against a blinding sunshine, looking like pen strokes on a page. Looking like data.

  “So why does it matter?” Lyra said. “Why does it matter, if I’m just going to die?”

  Dr. O’Donnell looked up. “I’m offering you more time,” she said.

  Years collapsed in a second. Just for a second, Lyra fell back into the fantasy of Dr. O’Donnell as her savior, as her mother, as her friend.

  “We don’t want anything from you,” Caelum said.

  At the same time Lyra asked, “How?”

  Dr. O’Donnell spoke in a quiet rhythm Lyra knew from their Sunday readings. “Most people in the world—the vast majority of people—don’t even know it’s possible to clone human beings. They’ve heard about cloning sheep, and cloning human organs, even. Dogs, apes, cows, on rare occasions. But Haven’s work was kept so confidential—secret, I mean—that most people, if you told them a single human clone was alive in the world, eating, breathing, thinking—they wouldn’t believe it.” When Dr. O’Donnell spoke, it was like the soft touch of a Sleeper. Lyra’s mind turned dull and soft and malleable. “You’re our proof.”

  She could have laughed. She wanted to cry. “I’m not proof.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “I only meant—”

  Lyra cut her off. “No. You don’t understand. I’m not proof. I’m not even a replica. I wasn’t made at Haven. I wasn’t made at all.” She felt both satisfied and sickened at the fault line of disappointment that shook Dr. O’Donnell’s face. “You didn’t know? I have a father. His name is Rick Harliss. I had a mother too, but she didn’t want me, so she gave me over to Haven and then she died.” Saying it out loud gave her the good kind of pain, like digging in the gums with a fingernail. “I wasn’t made by anything except accident. No one wanted me at all.”

  That was really what had made Caelum so special to her: he wanted her. And not just because of her body and what he could do with it, but for her, something inside neither of them had a name for, the stitching and the thread that held her whole life as a spiderweb holds even the sunlight that passes through it. “There were more of us at Haven. Not just me. Replicas are expensive.” She remembered that day on the marshes, the soldier saying, You know how expensive these things are to make? “I guess that means I was cheap.”

  Dr. O’Donnell shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. Lyra wanted to ask whether she was sorry for Lyra or for herself. “I . . . heard rumors. But that was all before my time.”

  It was the most dangerous kind of lie: the one the liar believed. “That’s convenient for you,” she said. She felt a hard, ugly pull of hatred. Was this all the world was? They’d escaped Haven only to find that Haven existed everywhere.

  Dr. O’Donnell stood up. She stared down at Lyra as if from an enormous height. But when she spoke, she sounded calm. “If you understand anything, I want you to try and understand this,” she said. “We’re all doing our best. We always have been.” But her mouth twisted around the words, and Lyra wondered if on some level even her body knew that was a lie—or at least, that it wasn’t an excuse. “Haven was a crazy place—such a crazy time for everyone. . . . I posted there for three years and I remember I would leave for the holidays, step off that launch, and hardly remember how to be human. . . .” Bad choice of words, and she seemed to realize it. Lyra and Caelum had no idea what any of it meant: the holidays, family, Haven as a fluid world that allowed passage in and out. “Some people might think what we did was wrong. Maybe it was. But it was also a miracle. It was, maybe, the first scientific miracle.” She almost looked like she might cry. “You make choices. You make sacrifices. Sometimes you make the wrong choices. Then you work to correct them. That’s what science is about.”

  Lyra wanted to argue, because she knew there was some problem of logic there: there had to be. Anyone could give names to anything—Dr. O’Donnell had taught her that, when she’d given Lyra her name. If you could do anything you wanted and then call it doing your best, you could invent anything, excuse anything. There had to be a center somewhere. There had to be a truth.

  But suddenly, Lyra found she couldn’t bring up the words she wanted to say. The word center, for example. She could picture it, see it as a hard little seed at the back of her tongue, but she couldn’t find the word. This was a hole of a different kind. She wasn’t dropping into it. It was reaching up to swallow her. Lyra thought of the pages she’d eaten in Sebastian’s bathroom, and the words all dissolving into her blood. She wished she hadn’t: now she was nauseous and thought that they were the things poisoning her, saw the letters reconfigure themselves into deformities, like little mangled prions, and float carelessly toward her heart. Words could make anything: that was their great power, and their great danger. Lyra saw that now.

  Dr. O’Donnell had already started moving for the door when Caelum spoke up again.

  “I have another question.”

  She turned around, keeping her hand on the door.

  “Someone blew up Haven because of their idea of God,” Caelum said. “You know that?”

  Dr. O’Donnell frowned. “I’d heard.”

  “And Haven was for science, and it killed people, too.”

  Dr. O’Donnell said nothing.

  Caelum took a step toward her, and then another. Dr. O’Donnell’s whole body tensed.

  “My question is this.” He stopped when he was no more than four inches away from her, and Lyra could see how badly Dr. O’Donnell wanted to flee, how hard she was trying not to throw the door open and run. “If it’s okay to kill people for science, or for God, is it okay to kill people if you think you need to?”

  “Of course not,” she said sharply.

  “Why not?” He spoke the words softly, but she flinched.

  “I—I don’t expect you to understand.” She couldn’t control herself anymore. She wrenched the door open, forcing him to step back. “The world isn’t black and white. There are no easy answers.”

  Still, Caelum wasn’t done.

  “You said the world isn’t black and white. But the world isn’t like you think it is either,” he said quietly. Dr. O’Donnell froze. “I watched and I watched. There were days I watched so much I thought I wasn’t even a person, just an eye. And even I know that when you push, and you keep pushing, someday, sometime, someone is going to push you back.”

  Dr. O’Donnell turned to face him, very slowly. “Are you threatening me, Caelum?”

  “I don’t need to,” he said. “That’s just the way the world works.” He smiled, too. “We all do our best, like you said.”

  Dr. O’Donnell opened her mouth, but Lyra couldn’t hear her response. A sound filled her ears like the sifting of wind across a desert, a sound of huge emptiness, and her body disappeared, and Dr. O’Donnell and Caelum and the room disappeared, and darkness lifted up and swallowed her like a wave.

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

  TWENTY-ONE

  SHE DIDN’T EXIST AND THEN she did again: she was drinking water, and as the cold touched her lips and tongue and throat, it poured her back into herself. She was so startled she nearly choked.

  Dr. O’Donnell was gone.

  So was Caelum.

  She couldn’t remember where the water had come from—
it was in a mug, and there was writing on the mug, but she couldn’t seem to bring it into focus; the letters were meaningless geometry. She couldn’t understand where Caelum had gone, or Dr. O’Donnell, and in fact she couldn’t remember their names or what they looked like but only that there had been other people with her, a sense that she’d been left behind.

  The room smelled bad, and in a lined plastic trash can there was vomit mixed with a little blood. She knew it must be hers, but for a long time she stared at it, revolted and uncomprehending: she didn’t remember throwing up. She tried to move to the window but found that she was instead pushing on the door, pushing and trying to open it. The door was locked.

  She turned around and the room also turned, swung and changed direction, and just as the letters had disintegrated, the whole place had ceased to have any meaning. She saw lines and angles skating in space like the cleaved wings of birds in the sky, and she couldn’t tack any of it down or make sense of it. Help, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t find the word for help. There was a sound in her ears, a hard knocking. And after a bit she recognized that she was hearing her own heart, and the idea of a heart came back to her, four interlocked chambers webbed with arteries.

  At the same time, words loosed themselves from the dark hole and soared up to her consciousness: room, chairs, rug. Every time she found the word, the shape of the thing stopped struggling and settled down and became familiar.

  She was still in the unused office. Caelum had been with her but he had argued with Dr. O’Donnell and now he was gone. Outside, the light had been reduced to a bare trickle that bled through the tree branches: it was evening. But Caelum had argued with Dr. O’Donnell in the morning.

  She had lost a whole day.

  Think. Someone had brought her the mug of water. She was sure it hadn’t been there earlier. That meant someone must be close, and in fact when she went to the door again and leaned up against it, she could hear the murmur of voices.

  Dr. O’Donnell wouldn’t hurt Caelum, not when she wanted to use him to show off. So Caelum must have been removed either to another room in the building, or somewhere else entirely—which meant first that Lyra had to find him.