Page 28 of Ringer
“It’s not a game,” Calliope said, and she drew away from Gemma, looking hurt. “It was never a game. But you can’t leave now, anyway, not until it’s sure.”
“Not untilwhat’ssure?” Gemma said. Her voice sounded as if it had been punched through with holes. Calliope chewed the inside of her cheek and didn’t answer. She was angry, Gemma knew, because Pete had yelled at her. “Please, Calliope.”
“It’s like Pinocchio, like I told you,” Calliope said, sounding almost bored. “He got swallowed up, so he started a fire to get out.” She held up her left hand, turning it, admiring it from several different angles. Then she began to touch her pinkie finger, bend it and flex it, as if to see whether it, too, would evaporate now that Gemma’s was gone. And yet each time she moved or stroked her finger, Gemma felt a phantom stirring in her own hand, and a new wave of triggered pain.
“You started a fire?” Gemma said, trying to hang on to the thread, to stay focused, to make sense of the nightmare. They’d been so close to being released.
“Ididn’t,” Calliope said, still sulking. “Some of the other thems did.”
Gemma remembered feeling, earlier tonight, as she and Calliope wove through a slum of bodies and filthy mattresses, that the replicas weren’t sleeping, only pretending to. She felt suddenly dizzy. How many replicas were there in the airport? Five hundred? Six? More?
And maybe three dozen, four dozen guards, a handful of doctors and nurses.
“Wayne thought he taught me something about fire because of his friend Pinocchio,” Calliope said, with new scorn in her voice that made her seem older. “But I knew about fire forever. When I was little, there was a kitchen fire, and we didn’t use the Stew Pot for days.”
“This... this was your idea?” Gemma asked. She remembered what Dr. Saperstein had said.The replicas can’t feel loss, or love, or empathy.To them there is surviving and not surviving, and that’s it.
Calliope ignored that question. “The people always think we don’t remember,” she said. “They think we don’t pay attention, that we don’t listen, that we’re all soft in the head. But I’ve been listening. I know plenty. I know how to use a gun.”
Immediately, as if in direct response to that statement, another quick-fire burst of rifle fire just outside the bathroom sent terrible echoes through Gemma’s head and the back of her teeth. She heard a man’s voice shout—a plea, a call for help, she wasn’t sure—and then another gunshot.But the voice was enough. She had recognized it, and her stomach pooled all the way down in her feet, a terrible, sick helplessness, like having to sprint for the bathroom.
It was Wayne’s voice, Wayne on the ground, Wayne crying for help. And though Gemma couldn’t feel sorry for him, she knew what that must mean: the replicas had taken control.
They were taking revenge.
“It’s always fire, isn’t it?” Calliope said then. “In all the stories, there’s always a fire. Does it hurt to burn, do you think?” And she turned back to Gemma, eyes bright and big and curious, and not unhappy at all.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Lyra’s story.
SEVENTEEN
THEY HAD TO MOVE. THE smoke had sniffed out the corners and ceiling, and it rolled down now in heavy waves, turning the air gritty. Gemma didn’t know where she’d read that during fires most people don’t die from the fire itself, but from inhaling too much smoke. Even now her lungs felt heavy, wet, like a towel soaked through with rain.
“It’s okay now,” Calliope said, and the words were so absurd that they came to Gemma like sounds in a language she didn’t know.It’s okay now.The pain in her hand was a rhythmic throbbing, and she thought it must be her pulse, beating out her blood. When they stood up she saw a butterfly pattern of blood, absurdly red, soaking the toilet paper, and so much of it: it was insane that it should all have come from her, that she would have so much to begin with.
She was freezing. She remembered, then, a bath when she was little, maybe eight or nine, and hearing her parents begin to argue. She’d stayed there, motionless, until the water was freezing: she didn’t know why, in retrospect, she hadn’t just drained the tub. But it hadn’t occurred to her. If she didn’t move, she’d thought, she wouldn’t exist, and if she didn’t exist, she could stop hearing them.
“You’re okay, Gemma.” Pete kept his arm around her, even when he bent to cough. His eyes were tearing up. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.” He was using the same sounds as Calliope, and none of them made sense, and she couldn’t stop laughing, laughing and shivering. “She needs a doctor,” he said—shouted it, actually, his throat raw from smoke, as if he expected someone to hear.
Calliope was at the bathroom door. She touched the handle lightly with a finger, to feel if it was hot. “There are no doctors,” she said.
Only then did Gemma realize that there were no more shots, no more sounds of gunfire. Just the noise of fire getting fat on drywall and ceiling panels and support beams, gobbling up filthy rugs and mattresses, swelling itself with sound. They never told you that about fire, how loud it was, as if everything it touched started to scream.
Outside the bathroom, Gemma was relieved to find no fire. She could hear it close, though: thepopandboomof things changing form suddenly, exploded from solid to gas, a noise that sounded just like terror. But the smoke was even worse, so bad she could hardly see, and a single breath made her choke.
“Get down,” Pete said. He had to repeat it before she understood. In a crouch, he took off his shirt and wound it tight against her fist, since the toilet paper had begun to come apart. They went, crawling, Calliope in the lead. Gemma wanted to leave Calliope—she wanted Calliope to vanish, to disappear into the smoke like a mirage—but she was also terrified of losing her. She would never be able to find the exit. She couldn’t think at all, didn’t know which way the stairs were, thought that everything had burned already, the doors and windows and the way out, that they might be crawling their way to an exit that no longer existed.
In the stories, there is always a fire.
The floor was slicked with blood, and there were bodies everywhere. Gemma wondered whether one of them was Wayne’s. She had the urge to shout for everyone to wake up, to run, to get out, although she knew they were all dead, replicas and soldiers, humans born by chance and by design, all of them sleeping together under a veil of smoke. She was glad that the darkness softened dead bodies into shapes: already, they were losing reality.
But she had to crawl around a dead replica who’d losthalf her head to a bullet. She still had a gun in her hand, and Gemma noticed her fingers, long and pale and lovely, and imagined that they still stirred, like underwater plant life moved by a current of water.
The stairwell was impassible. Even the door markedAuthorized Personnelwas warm, and Gemma could hear the fire beyond it humming, shredding the physical world into vibration. Calliope tested the door handle, then quickly pulled her fingers away and sucked them into her mouth.
Trapped. They’d waited too long to get out.
They headed back across the scrum of debris, of broken bodies and cotton drift. Everything was dark with ash, everything looked like the grit of burning, and even as they made it to the windows, the fire finally punched its way up to the second floor, collapsing a portion of the wall near the stairwell and tonguing its way over the blood-sticky floor.
