Page 17 of Ringer
Of course not.Geoffrey’s answer was quick.How could you even think that?
And she believed Geoff because that was what she did, what she was compelled to do, the way the earth was compelled to go around the sun. They’d built the belief together, carefully, spinning turrets, ice-thin pillars, delicate vaulted ceilings alive with all the stories they’d made. Even a single crack would make the whole thing come down.
Now she counted: A truck overturned on the otherside of the highway. A highway memorial to someone who had died. A sign warning of a nearby maximum security prison. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Concrete sprawl and withered shrubbery baking in the heat. And Gemma, little Gemma, her small, glowing secret, somewhere out there. There weren’t enough pills in the whole world to shave Kristina’s fear into some manageable shape, a small white sphere she could swallow and let dissolve in her stomach.
A sign blinked, and disappeared behind them. Thirteen miles of highway left until they reached Nashville.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Lyra’s story.
ELEVEN
“WHERE DID IT COME FROM?”
On Monday, those words had pulled Gemma from one nightmare into another:mirrors,she thought confusedly.
Three-dimensional, living mirrors: three Gemmas wore identical expressions of bland curiosity, three Gemmas had been split and fissured from a single central image. Unconsciously, she brought her hands to her face, her arms, her thighs, to make sure they were still intact. To make sureshewas still intact.
“Which number are you?” asked one of the mirrors.
“You’re not Cassiopeia,” said another.
The third one said, “Cassiopeia is dead.”
“I’m Calliope,” said the first one. She added: “Number seven.” In her eyes, Gemma was reduced to a narrow reflection. A reflection in a reflection in a reflection. Gemma thought of a double helix that mirrored evenas it turned and turned. Symmetry, but a terrible kind. She sat up, half expecting the other Gemmas to move in response. But they didn’t.
“You think it’s dumb?” one of the girls said.
“Dumb how?” one of the others asked.
“Dumb like number eight,” the first one replied, and turned. “Like Goosedown.”
Thud-thud-thud.
Only then did Gemma see another one, a fourth one, even skinnier than all the rest, crouched in the corner not far from them. Her legs were bare and covered with scabs. She was wearing a diaper. She was so thin her head appeared gigantic, her features too far apart, as if they were wrapped around a fishbowl.
Thud-thud-thud.As Gemma watched, she lifted her head and slammed it, once, twice, three times, against the wall; the sun caught a mesh of plaster fine as dust hanging in the air, sifting above her head, before slowly, it began to fall.
The sickest replicas were segregated from the rest of the population, concealed behind rudimentary curtains of burlap, kept mostly unconscious through regular dosages of morphine, at least according to what Gemma overheard. She might have been tempted to peek beyond the curtains and see for herself were it not for the smell.
Blood. Bodies in a constant state of hemorrhage, of organ failure, of beginning to turn.
Someone was always getting sick—in the toilet, in a trash can, on the floor when they couldn’t make it to a trash can. Gemma knew that prions weren’t contagious, at least that they couldn’t be spread by breathing, but still she couldn’t help but see prions turning invisibly on the air like sharp-pointed snowflakes, like dandelion fluff, like burrs that would stick in her lungs when she inhaled.
Diapered toddlers who had never learned to walk instead crawled among the wreckage of dirt, or simply sucked their fingers and cried.
Nurses still wandered the halls, like bewildered ghosts, as if questioning why on earth they couldn’t just move on. They did the best they could to help, with limited supplies, dwindling medication, and power that failed regularly.
A single building, L-shaped, and boys and girls separated by security at the joint. Soldiers moved through crowds of standing cadavers—hollow-cheeked and fire-eyed, dizzy with disease and starvation—by parting them with their rifles. When one of the soldiers, a girl with tight cornrows, stopped to comfort a bawling replica, another soldier reprimanded her.
“You’ll give them the wrong idea,” he said. He was tall, with pale eyelashes and a burst of acne across hisforehead. “It’ll only be worse in the end.”
Gemma tried to find her way to Pete, to make sure he was okay, but was stopped by a redhead in full-on camouflage who looked like someone who might have been in her English class.
“Turn around,” he said. “You speak English? Turn around.”
Another soldier, a girl with her nails painted different rainbow colors, was sitting in a single plastic chair still bolted down in a waiting area otherwise empty of furniture. “They all speak English, dummy,” she said softly. She was playing a video game on her phone. Gemma could tell from the sound effects.
“Doesn’t seem like it, half the time.” Gemma had turned away from him but not quickly enough to miss what he said next. “Shit. I don’t even liketwins.”
