Page 27 of Ringer
Just as suddenly as clouds might vault from the horizon, Gemma found the source of tension, grabbed it, and tracked it to its source. Calliope was laughing.
Gemma remembered going with her parents to theirhouse in the Outer Banks one summer and hearing coyotes shrieking in the night. They laughed when they killed, her father told her later, but she would have known anyway. It was cruelty set to music: it wasn’t even the pleasure of thekill. It was the pleasure of pain, the pleasure of watching small things die slowly.
And now, here, in this bathroom in an old airport that might as well have been hell on earth, Calliope laughed just like that.
“You’re wrong,” Calliope said, and her words still carried the echo of something old and predatory and hungry. “You mixed it all up. You got it backward.” She was still standing there with her head tilted, still staring vaguely at the ceiling. But by then, of course, Gemma knew. She wasn’t staring. She waslistening. And by then Gemma was listening, too: the shouts, the sharp punctuated cries, and footsteps vibrated the floor.
The stinging in Gemma’s throat had been real. Smoke was texturing the air, giving it the appearance of a solid, and somewhere solid matter burned, and transformed to smoke.
“What are you talking about?” Pete asked, and Gemma could hear that he, too, was afraid.
“You said we would die. You said you don’t want to leave us.” She shook her head. She was smiling in a way that Gemma had never seen before. It was as if her smilewas actually consuming her face backward, trying to reveal her skull. “But you said it backward. The us won’t die.” She bit her lip, and Gemma tripped over the image of her own habit, her own nervous way of correcting herself. “Wewon’t die.”
In Gemma’s head, she saw smoke trails plumed over Haven, saw men with rifles, working in the rubble; she saw fireworks leave tentacle trails of smoke across a bloody dawn sky.Crack. Crack. Crack.But these weren’t fireworks. They were bullets that cracked sound in two when they leapt, explosively, from their long slick barrels. They were bullets that made a lot of noise and then killed silently.
People were screaming.
“What’s happening?” Gemma asked. Her voice sounded like it was coming to her from the other side of a tunnel.
Calliope finally looked at Gemma. She was radiant. And in that split second, Gemma saw that both Pete and Dr. Saperstein were wrong. Calliope wasn’t an animal, and she wasn’t a human, either. She was something darker and older and far more dangerous, she was somethingdeeper—a compression of matter and space, a possibility collapsed into the narrowest, narrowest place. Being, urge, energy—emotionless, unthinking, unfeeling—funneled so deep, for so long, that it became an explosion. She was a black hole that could take a planet apart forever,in endless slow motion.
“It’s starting,” she said, and reached up to touch Gemma’s face. Her fingers smelled like metal.
Her fingers smelled like blood.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 15 of Lyra’s story.
SIXTEEN
THEN A BULLET BLASTED THROUGH the bathroom door, ricocheted off the counter, and blew the pinkie finger off Gemma’s left hand.
It was the craziest thing. One second she had five fingers, and the next, her pinkie was missing and blood had patterned the linoleum. And yet at first she knew it had happened only because of how Pete began to shout. For a long, watery second she floated somewhere outside her body, and observed the blood and the missing finger and the raw exposed muscle of her hand with a kind of detached curiosity.
And then the pain came, like a gigantic rubber band that snapped her back into the bathroom, into her body. It was pain like nothing she’d ever known, like the kind of high vibration that could shatter glass, like a full-body flu that burned even in your bones. She couldn’t evenscream. She couldn’t try and stop the bleeding, couldn’t move, could only stand there, staring like an idiot, as the blood kept pooling at her feet.
Somehow she ended up on the floor. She wasn’t sure whether time had leapt forward or she’d simply, for a half second, lost consciousness. She no longer had the strength to stand up.
All this happened in three seconds, maybe quicker. When she did finally speak, she could only say, “My finger,” over and over. By then Pete had found a roll of toilet paper—from God knows where, the girls’ room never had any—and he was frantically unwinding it, half the roll at one go, and packing it against the wound. The pressure triggered a new surge of pain and brought her stomach into her mouth.
He wrapped a fist around her hand to stanch the bleeding. It hurt so much she wanted to pull away, to yell at him to stop, but the pain had her in a chokehold now, and she couldn’t.
“It’s okay, Gem, you’re going to be okay,” Pete kept saying. He looked as if he was going to cry. “Deep breaths, you’re going to be fine, I know it hurts, but you’re going to be okay....”
Another bullet blasted through the door, this time punching out one of the overhead lights. Calliope ducked and scuttled beneath the sinks as a spray of plastic and glasssifted down on them like a snow. Still keeping her injured hand wound tightly in his fist, Pete put an arm around Gemma, herding them inside one of the bathroom stalls. She leaned against the hollow of his chest, and he whisperedit’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,so many times the word and his heartbeat became confused in her head, until she heard in its rhythm that same exact message.
The initial shock had passed and already her body was working to absorb the pain, accept its reality, to find equilibrium inside it: a process she knew intimately after so many hospital visits, so many surgeries and scars. She missed her mom with a sudden sharpness even worse than the physical pain—how she sat next to Gemma’s hospital bed, whisperingit’s gonna be okay, I’m here,just like Pete was doing now; how she’d climb into bed next to Gemma, making a seashell-curve of her body, and the two of them would fall asleep. She missed her mom and wished, more than anything, that she could say she was sorry. She’d been so angry with Kristina that they had barely spoken in weeks, and Gemma could see the way it was killing her mom, coiling her down around an internal misery like a winch.
And now it was too late. They would die here. She closed her eyes and tried to hang on to an impression of her mom’s voice, soothing her to sleep.
“Hush, hush.” It was Calliope’s voice she heard instead.During a break in the rhythm of gunshots, Calliope came toward her. She moved quickly, propelling herself with her palms and sliding belly-down on the floor with the sinuous grace of an eel. Gemma, still half-blind from pain and shock, was repulsed. The gunshots started again, and Gemma found herself briefly fantasizing about a bullet cleaving Calliope’s head in two, or just evaporating her, as her finger had been evaporated.
Calliope crowded into the stall with them and began touching Gemma, stroking her arms, her wrist, her thighs. “Hush, hush, there’s no reason to cry,” she said. “It’s a finger, just a little finger.”
“We need to get out of here,” Pete said. He hadn’t let go of her injured hand, not for a single second, but already the toilet paper was nearly useless, soggy with blood. “She needs a doctor.”
Calliope looked briefly annoyed. “She doesn’t need adoctor,” she said. “I’ll take care of Gemma, don’t worry. Just as soon as it’s over.”
“This isn’t one of your fucking games.” Pete’s voice edged toward a shout. “She’s hurt, can’t you see that? She needshelp.” Gemma wanted to tell him to be quiet—they would be heard, they would be found, they would be killed—but she couldn’t. She didn’t even know who to be afraid of. She was as terrified of Calliope, of her strange little smiles and the light touch of her fingers, asshe was of the guards who were shooting, still shooting. She heard screaming and pictured hundreds of replicas simply mowed down where they were sleeping, a surf of blood rising, coming to drown them all.
