Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  TWENTY-THREE

  THERE WOULD BE NO THIRD chance to escape. Maybe Dr. O’Donnell would lock them in cages, or cuff them to a bed, as some of the replicas at Haven had been cuffed. Or maybe she would simply grow tired of protecting them, and hand them over to one of the Suits who wanted Lyra and Caelum dead.

  You aren’t supposed to exist, she had said.

  Whose fault is that? Lyra should have asked.

  Every second they delayed brought them closer to disaster—and yet they went through the laboratories, smashing everything they could, knocking equipment from the countertops, shattering microscopes, dumping out chemical samples. Lyra knew Dr. O’Donnell and her staff would recover soon enough—they could buy new equipment, order new chemical samples—but it made her feel better. Every test tube that shattered, every hundred-thousand-dollar piece of lab equipment that crashed and splintered into pieces, seemed as it broke to simultaneously split open a kind of joy inside of her.

  Finally, there was nothing left to destroy.

  The hallway carried distant echoes, footsteps overhead, voices shouting words she couldn’t make out. People looking for them.

  They were halfway up the stairs when the rhythm of footsteps narrowed above them: in her head, Lyra saw sound like a cloud that had collapsed into a single dark stream of water. She recognized Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, and the panicked response of the girl who’d escorted her to the bathroom earlier.

  “In here,” she whispered to Caelum, and she pulled him past the swinging doors into the vacant offices on the basement level. Through the cutaway window, she saw Dr. O’Donnell pass, followed by the girl and the boy whose ID she had stolen. There were other employees with them, brown and white and tall and short, but all with the same identical expression of tight-cinched panic.

  They didn’t dare turn on a light and so they went slowly through the dark space, feeling their way, toward an emergency exit sign that floated up through the murk of shadows.

  More shouts, increasingly urgent, vibrated through the ceiling and floated up through the floor, like a dust they disturbed with their feet. It seemed they weren’t getting any closer to escape, as if the darkness kept unrolling.

  “Wait,” she said. She couldn’t breathe. When they reached the emergency exit, a barred door, she was so dizzy she had to stop, leaning heavily against it. “Wait.”

  Suddenly she wasn’t sure. Dr. O’Donnell was right: there was nowhere for them to go. She wondered how much time she even had left. One week? One month? Two? Would they spend the rest of her time simply running, like this, in the dark, trying to stay ahead of the people who wanted to erase them? And what would happen to Caelum once she died?

  It was terrible to think that he would go on, and terrible to think that he wouldn’t.

  “We have to go,” Caelum whispered to her. “They’ll find us here.”

  Lyra still couldn’t breathe. The room was spinning, and ideas began losing their shape: Rick was warming soup in the microwave; there were men passing through rows of beds, touching the replicas with their fingers. She recalled the strange, sweet stink that had sometimes carried back to Haven from the ocean, when the winds were right and the disposal crews hadn’t gone far enough to burn the bodies of the dead. Time, the present, was like a hook; she struggled to hang on.

  “Where will we go?” she said. Caelum’s breath was hot on her cheek. The dim light of the exit sign gave shape to his shoulders and neck. “Dr. O’Donnell was right. No one can help us.”

  “It doesn’t matter if she’s right or not,” Caelum said. His hand found hers in the dark. She was shocked by the sense that her heart had traveled down her arm into her palm, and that he was holding that instead, fragile and alive. “She doesn’t have the right to say,” he said. “She doesn’t have the right to choose.”

  Lyra swallowed. She felt like crying. “I’m going to die,” she whispered. “Aren’t I?”

  He leaned forward. His lips bumped her nose and then her jaw and finally her lips. “Sure,” he said. “But not yet. Not today.”

  Elbowing open the door, they found instead of stairs a cavernous loading bay. They ran together, even though the effort made her gasp, and she kept fearing they would hit some obstacle, a sudden wall that would surprise them, although there were dirty bulbs set in the ceiling‎ that switched on with their movement and she could see there was nothing to stop them.

  Caelum found the switch to control the rolling doors and the noise rattled her whole body: it seemed to take forever before they’d inched high enough for Caelum and Lyra to duck beneath the gap.

  Either her sickness or her fear began to cut things into clips: a short stretch of pavement and a fence they couldn’t climb. Dumpsters to their right. To their left, a sweep of red light: a fire truck had come, although as Lyra watched, the lights went dark and the truck began to shimmy itself into a turn. She couldn’t see the parking lot or the front gates they’d snuck through; they’d come out the back.

  They skirted the building, looking for other gates, or places the fence wasn’t reinforced. But the only way out to the street was through the manned gates. And the fire alarm had driven the staff out into the parking lot; there were still a half-dozen people milling around in front of the double glass doors.

  They could wait for the crowd to break up, but that just meant it was even more likely that Dr. O’Donnell would catch up. The only other option was simply run for it. Charge straight through the lot and count on surprise. The fire truck was just nosing toward the driveway. They might even be able to hitch a ride out through the gate when they opened it.

  “Think you can make it?” Caelum asked her, and she knew he was thinking what she was: Why stop now?

  She nodded, although her legs felt wobbly and she knew that there was always a hole waiting for her, waiting like a long throat to swallow her up.

  He took her hand again, and she was glad. A sudden, strangling fear made her want to cling to him, to tell him that she loved him. But she couldn’t make the words come up. They were stuck behind the fear, which glued her lungs and made it hard to breathe.

  “When I say go,” he said. “Go.”

  It was a good thing they were holding hands. She wasn’t sure her legs would have started moving if he hadn’t yanked her forward. They came around the side of the building, charging straight toward the group of people still milling outside, texting, one of them smoking a cigarette; but by the time anyone thought to look up, they were already blowing by the crowd, weaving through the few cars in the lot and sprinting to follow the fire truck as it approached the gate.

  Everyone was shouting, and touching off explosions in her head. The gate was opening to let the fire truck through. They were too slow. They wouldn’t make it. But Caelum wouldn’t let go of her hand.

  Almost there. The truck had slowed to maneuver through the gates. They were ten feet away, then closer. They were going to make it.

  “Stop, stop, stop.”

  Dr. O’Donnell’s voice was high and clear: it rang out like a bell. The fire truck braked abruptly, and Caelum threw out a hand to keep from cracking into the bumper. One of the firefighters leaned out the driver’s-side door and cranked around to see what all the noise was. Lyra saw his mouth moving, saw the way his eyes darkened when they landed on her.

  Stop. Lyra was screaming, too, or she thought she was. Then she realized she had only been screaming in her head. She threw her voice as hard as she could, hurled it like a stone. “Stop! Please! Help!”

  He retreated, yanking the door shut; she didn’t know if he’d heard. The fire truck jerked forward another few feet, and that did it—Lyra gave up, she dropped, her knees gave out and she stumbled. Caelum caught her and tried to draw her in another direction, toward the parking lot. But she could barely stay on her feet. She was too tired—of running, of hiding, of hitting walls, of finding that every face concealed a sharp set of hungry teeth.

  Then Dr. O’Donnell threw herself between them and the
truck.

  “Wait,” she said. Her hair was slicked by sweat to her forehead. “Just wait a second, okay?”

  Caelum had to put an arm around Lyra’s waist just to haul her backward. Her feet had stopped obeying her. Her whole body felt as if it were as flimsy, as weightless and useless, as an empty sheath of skin.

  But Caelum wouldn’t give up. “Come on, Lyra. Come on. Move.” He was still shouting, although it was suddenly very quiet.

  And then, with a start, she realized why: the fire truck’s engine had stopped growling. No more exhaust plumed from its tailpipe. And almost as soon as she noticed, the door opened again, and the firefighter dropped to the pavement from the cab. Another one followed, a woman, this time from the passenger side. Both of them wore heavy rubber suits that made funny squirting noises when they walked—that was how quiet it was.

  “Is there a problem?” The firefighter who’d been driving had sharp eyes, placed very close together, as if they’d been made that way just to notice every detail.

  “Please,” was all Lyra could say. She was still winded, still gasping for breath—partly from the run, partly from a dizzying sense of relief.

  Dr. O’Donnell pivoted neatly to face him. “There’s no problem.” In an instant she transformed. She had been begging them to listen, begging them to stop. But in a split second, she shimmied into a new skin, and Lyra was seized by a sense of dread. “I’m sorry you had to come all the way out here. Honestly, we didn’t expect them to react like this.”

  He looked from Dr. O’Donnell, to Lyra and Caelum, and back again. “What do you mean, ‘react’?”

  “They’re patient volunteers,” Dr. O’Donnell said smoothly.

  “She’s lying,” Caelum burst out.

  But Dr. O’Donnell didn’t miss a beat. “Sometimes our volunteers get anxious. Sometimes they get paranoid. It’s the first time anyone’s ever tried to stage an escape, though.”

  She slid over the words as if she’d been waiting for years to use them. And Lyra hated her so violently, the hatred blew her apart into a thousand pieces.

  Because the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that Dr. O’Donnell truly believed she was good. She was surprised that Lyra and Caelum weren’t grateful; that they didn’t see the way she wanted to use them as a kind of gift.

  Because deep down she thought, of course, they didn’t deserve it. Because she thought that it was obvious they didn’t.

  And that made her worse, even, than Dr. Saperstein. Saperstein had treated the replicas like objects, but at least he never pretended.

  Dr. O’Donnell thought the replicas should love her for helping them pretend that they were worth something, when it was so obvious they weren’t.

  The woman’s coat was folded down at the waist. She thumbed her suspenders. “So it’s some kind of medical research?”

  Dr. O’Donnell smiled. Lyra couldn’t believe she’d ever loved that smile. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “Medical research, pharmaceutical testing. All voluntary, obviously.”

  “She’s lying.” Lyra could finally breathe, but the effort of speaking, of trying to be believed, made her words come in hard little bursts. “She’s been keeping us locked up. She won’t—she won’t let us go.” Then: “You can’t believe her.”

  Dr. O’Donnell didn’t even glance at Lyra. “Paranoia, like I said.”

  The firefighters exchanged a look. “They seem pretty upset,” the man said doubtfully. But Lyra could tell he was wavering.

  “Of course they’re upset. They’re having a bad reaction to a new SSRI.” Dr. O’Donnell grew taller, swelled by her lies, or maybe the world shrank around her. She sounded calm. She looked calm. Lyra couldn’t imagine what she and Caelum looked like. “And I can’t help them unless we get them inside. They should be monitored. We should be watching their heart rates.”

  Lyra saw at once that Dr. O’Donnell had won. She watched the firefighters tip over into belief; she saw them shake off their doubts, like a kind of irritant.

  “Please—” Caelum tried again. But his voice broke, and Lyra knew that he, too, had seen.

  “Thank you for coming out here,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “We really appreciate it.”

  The firefighters had already turned back to their truck. Though they were only a few feet away, Lyra saw them as though from the bottom of a pit, as if they had already vanished into a memory.

  “Wait.” She cried out from the bottom of a long tunnel of anger and fear. “Wait,” she said again, as both of them turned back to face her.

  Dr. O’Donnell showed her irritation, but only briefly. She was busy playing a role. “Really, we should get them inside—”

  “She said she would let me call my mom,” Lyra blurted out. Caelum tensed.

  But Dr. O’Donnell looked at her with blunted astonishment: it was as if her polish was only a mask, and someone had elbowed it off.

  “She promised,” Lyra said, feeling her way into the lie. If Dr. O’Donnell was going to make up a story, Lyra could get in there, could hook her hands around it and make it hers. “She said I’d be able to call if I got scared.”

  Dr. O’Donnell licked her lips. “I never—”

  But this time, the firefighters were on Lyra’s side. “For God’s sake, let the kid call her mom,” the man said.

  For a half second, Dr. O’Donnell and Lyra locked eyes. Dr. O’Donnell squinted as if they were separated by a hard fog, and Lyra wondered what she saw. That Lyra was small and young. That she was stupid. That she was dying. Just like Calliope, all those years ago, and the bird. It was broken, she’d said. It’s better to kill it. For weeks afterward Lyra had dreamed of the bird coming back to life, but enormous, and swooping down through the dorms to peck their eyes out, one by one.

  Dr. O’Donnell even looked vaguely amused. Of course she knew that Lyra had no mother.

  Of course she knew, or thought she knew, that Lyra had no one to call.

  Maybe that was why she didn’t put up more of a fight.

  She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. She took her phone out of her pocket, and, after punching in her code, passed it wordlessly to Lyra.

  She’d been trained to memorize number series, of course, so that the doctors at Haven would be able to collect data points, would be able to track how quickly her mind was breaking up. And she’d been trained to observe, too: not intentionally, but she had been trained.

  And in the real world, she’d been trained to lie.

  Lyra pressed the numbers very slowly, making sure she got them right.

  Now Dr. O’Donnell was frowning. “Honestly, this isn’t standard. . . .”

  But the firefighters said nothing, and stood there, watching.

  Lyra brought the phone to her ear. She pressed it hard, the way she had with those seashells Cassiopeia had collected long ago, and her breath hitched. It was ringing.

  Once. Twice.

  Answer, she thought. Answer.

  Dr. O’Donnell lost patience. A muscle near her lips twitched. “Okay. That’s enough.”

  “Wait,” Lyra said. Her heart was beating so loudly she lost track of the number of rings.

  Answer.

  And then a fumbling sound, and a cough, announced him.

  “Reinhardt.” His voice sounded rough, but also comforting, like sand.

  She closed her eyes and watched his name float up from the darkness, resolving slowly, like a distant star captured by a telescope.

  “Detective Kevin Reinhardt. Hello,” she said. Her throat was tight. It was painful to speak. When she opened her eyes again, Dr. O’Donnell was staring at her. Shocked. Hands hanging at her sides, limp, like old balloons. “You picked me up in Nashville. You gave me your number and told me to call if I ever needed help.”

  It seemed that everyone was frozen: Caelum, watching her, and the firefighters, watching her, and Dr. O’Donnell, slack-faced and dumb. Only the insects sang, a noise that sounded to her like a motor.

  She took a deep breath.
She had never been taught how to pray, but she did pray, then, without ever having learned it.

  “I need your help,” she said.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 23 of Gemma’s story.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FOR A SHORT TIME, THE firefighters waited with them on the road, pacing in the quiet and talking into their radios, casting cautious glances at Lyra and Caelum from a distance, as if they were fish and too much attention would cause them to startle away.

  Then a cop arrived to replace them, a woman with a high forehead and a long nose that reminded Lyra of a hanging fruit. She wanted to talk, to understand, to hear Lyra’s side of the story.

  But though the woman was kind to her, and though Lyra liked the look of her face and the slope of her nose, she didn’t want to talk to anyone but Detective Kevin Reinhardt. She didn’t even want to get into the police car: she was tired of strangers and their doors.

  So instead, she and Caelum sat on the curb, with the police car parked a dozen feet away, watching the last trickle of car traffic out of CASECS. Dr. O’Donnell and the other CASECS employees weren’t in trouble, exactly, because the trouble couldn’t be reported or understood when neither Caelum nor Lyra would talk, as the policewoman explained to them more than once.

  But they weren’t exactly not in trouble, either. CASECS wasn’t invisible anymore. She kept her hands in her pockets, touching the drift of words, notes, telephone numbers. Proof.

  And so the employees who had lingered to work late, or to catch a glimpse of Lyra and Caelum, spilled into their cars and flooded the exit gates, and tried to vanish. Lyra thought of cockroaches flooding from a clogged drain.

  She tried to pick out Dr. O’Donnell’s car in the sixty or so that passed. But the cars looked the same, and the drivers, inside of them, looked the same too: hunched shadows, leaning over the steering wheels as if that would make them go faster. As if they could escape whatever was coming, just by leaning forward.

  He arrived an hour or so before sunrise, when the darkness was like a scowl that had folded deep into itself.