Page 29 of Ringer
A sudden sweep of fresh air made Gemma want to cry. Several windows were missing where people had crashed through them. Gemma, Pete, and Calliope leaned out into the night air, still fizzing with rain, and in the distance Gemma saw dark figures escaping into the trees, pouring through the open gate, shaking the fence to dismantle it: replicas, hundreds of them, making a run for it. Two vans were on fire and half a dozen bodies—soldiersand replicas, it looked like—were scattered across the parking lot, like dolls abandoned by a careless child. Most of the usual Jeeps and trucks were missing. Probably the soldiers had gone, carrying their wounded, or maybe seeking reinforcements, and whisked Saperstein and the other staff to safety.
“We’re going to have to jump,” Pete shouted. “It’s the only way.”
Gemma nodded to show she understood. The drop was twenty feet, and almost directly beneath them two replicas lay, half-naked and entangled, their eyes unblinking, exposed to the wind and rain. She didn’t know whether they’d landed wrong or been shot, but it didn’t matter. She would have jumped if the distance was twice as great, would have catapulted into the air without looking back—anything to get out, to get away, as far from the chokehold of the smoke and the fire feeding off bits of skin and scalp and hair as possible.
She jumped.
She was screaming through the air, and her lungs were bursting with the joy of oxygen, and then she landed hard in a barren patch of dirt, next to a scrub of bushes. Her right ankle rolled and she knew right away she’d twisted it, but the pain was nothing compared to the red-funnel fire that burst in her vision when she drove her injured hand down into the ground for balance. It was like themissing finger had instead folded up inside her and shot all the way to her throat; she nearly gagged.
Pete landed with a grunt and scrabbled quickly away from the bodies. Now that Gemma was closer she saw they’d been shot, probably from the air: there was a pattern of blood spatter on the exterior wall. It was Calliope, funnily, who hesitated, teetering on the windowsill, looking now not like the monster Gemma had seen in the bathroom but like a sister Gemma might have dreamed. Smoke undulated and roiled behind her.
“Jump,” Gemma found herself shouting, though minutes earlier she’d been hoping Calliope might simply disappear. “Jump!” Her throat was raw from smoke, and when she tried to draw air again, she began to cough.
Calliope jumped, and for a second Gemma saw her framed in the air like a bird, arms flung wide and mouth open, suspended in the glitter of the fine rain.
Then she landed, gracelessly, but on her feet. Gemma felt the impact herself, whether from the vibration of the ground or because of the doubling effect, she didn’t know. When she stood up and tested her weight, her ankle held, barely.
“What happened?” Pete had already moved to take hold of her injured hand again, but she drew away. It was too painful, too awful, and numbly she half believed she could make everything that had happened untrue again.
“I landed wrong,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Keep pressure on your hand,” was all he said. He’d always looked thin but now, in the slick light of the remaining streetlamps, covered in blood that wasn’t his, he looked truly sick.
They moved across the parking lot, leaving the ruins of the airport behind. Gemma kept expecting to hear a ricochet of shooting, to be stopped, to have her legs eviscerated by bullets. But other than the sound of the fire and a few distant shouts, it was quiet. Why was it so quiet? The fire must be visible for miles. Shouldn’t there be sirens already? Ambulances? Shouldn’t someone have noticed and responded? It was as if...
As if they were miles away from anyone.
It felt to her that they were in the open forever, inching across that bleak expanse of gray pavement, with the painted silhouettes of old parking spaces still faintly visible and bodies flung at intervals facedown on the concrete. But finally they were at the woods, which would hold them and hide them: and at the far end of the woods would be roads, and gas stations, and telephone wires, and help.
Then an explosion made waves of sound that made the ground shudder and vibrated in Gemma’s teeth as she turned around. A portion of the roof had collapsed, and flames shot suddenly to the sky, illuminating alow-hanging covering of red-tinged cloud, before retreating again. Gemma and Pete stood stunned, watching the last of what had once been science’s greatest experiment consuming itself.
Only then did Gemma see Calliope a short distance away, standing next to a sedan leaning on a flat tire, windshield shattered. It had obviously been heading for the gate. Gemma couldn’t see Calliope’s face, but she was strangely immobile, as if something inside the car fascinated her. And for whatever reason Gemma found herself backtracking, limping on her injured ankle. Forever afterward she couldn’t have said why she was compelled to the window of that sedan, only that she was.
When she was still twenty feet away from the car, Calliope leaned in through the open window. Gemma couldn’t see what she was doing, but she thought she heard a shout. This, too, she couldn’t absolutely swear to afterward.
By the time Calliope withdrew, Gemma had come up beside her. It was brighter now: the burning airport had created an artificial dawn. When Calliope turned, Gemma nearly screamed: her hands, her wrists, her shirt, all of it was soaked in blood.
“I tried to help him,” Calliope said quickly. “It was too late.”
For a moment, Gemma couldn’t make sense of whatshe was seeing: a confusion of glass and blood and steel, the horrible staring face, and the metal finger jointed to its forehead. It looked like one of the cubist paintings her father collected, a nonsense-jumble of shapes.
Then, in an instant, she understood: the blood leaking from his mouth, the air bag pinning him to his seat, a steel rod that must have rocketed from the building just before the roof collapsed, whipped through the windshield, and punctured Dr. Saperstein between the eyes. His glasses were gone. In death he looked suprised, and vaguely puzzled, as if he’d come across an unexpected turn in a familiar road.
“Poor Dr. Saperstein,” Calliope whispered, and almost sounded as if she meant it. What had she been doing when she leaned into the car? Why was she so covered in blood?
Gemma turned to look at her. Calliope’s face rapidly shuttered into an expression of disgust. Like a mirror, it rearranged itself to reflect back what it saw. It was very fast and extremely convincing, but Gemma had caught her too early, had seen the truth nesting like an insect beneath her skin.
Of course, that was the problem with simulations. They were never exactly like the real thing.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Lyra’s story.
EIGHTEEN
GEMMA COULDN’T HAVE SAID HOW far they walked that night looking for a road—miles, maybe, or maybe no distance at all, turning circles in the pitch-dark. They had no water, no flashlight, no matches, no way of getting food and shelter. They had managed to stop her bleeding, and Pete had bundled her hand tightly by rebandaging her fist as best he could with his T-shirt, already soaked with her blood. Still, she could easily get an infection, if they didn’t die of hunger or thirst first, or get eaten by wild hogs or wolves or bears or whatever might be prowling in the woods.
Finally, they were forced to stop. Gemma’s ankle was so swollen she could hardly put weight on it.
They slept sitting up between the thick roots of an oak tree. It was still raining. The ground was wet and cold. Gemma leaned against Pete to keep him warm. He hadno shirt. She expected to have nightmares, but instead sleep came to her like the numbing cold of anesthesia: she dropped.
