Page 36 of Ringer
SHE LOST SIGHT OF PETE almost immediately.
Pain darkened her vision every time she put weight on her left ankle, and her ankle kept folding, rolling her down to her hands and knees. She lost one sandal. She fell, got up, fell, got up. She could hear the men shouting behind her, tunneling toward her like a wave, but she was too afraid to look and see how close they were.
She was choking on her own spit, blind with pain and panic. Down, up again. In the fields the cows watched her lazily, flicking their tails. The woods were impossibly far. She kept running anyway, up and down the swells of land, falling and climbing again to her feet, swallowing her snot.
Then she had crossed the expanse of green and hit the fence, running into it with hardly a break in her step, simply plunging over it, toppling, rolling on her shoulder andthen hauling herself again to her feet, sheltered in the sudden shadows, ping-ponging from tree to tree, using her good hand. She tripped and slid down a steep embankment, through a mulch of rotting tree bark: at the bottom of the slope, an enormous felled tree wheeled its roots to the sky. An overhanging lip of earth made a kind of tunnel, and she saw at once this was her only chance: to hide, to wait, to hope that the men missed her. She scuttled backward into the soft rot of this long, damp space. The air smelled like moisture, pulped leaves, and decay.
She waited, shivering, her arms around her knees, listening to the distant shouting of her pursuers. At one point they seemed to be almost directly on top of her, and fear turned her stomach to liquid. But then they passed on.
She lost track of time. Her terror turned every second into a swampy hour, a long agony of waiting. Finally, she realized the woods were quiet. She couldn’t hear anyone shouting.
She hadn’t heard anyone shout in a long time.
Carefully, she shimmied out of her hiding place, still pausing every few breaths to listen for footsteps or the sound of voices. Nothing. Now that her panic had eased up, the pain in her ankle had redoubled. It took her twenty minutes to work her way up the slope she’d tumbled down in seconds.
At the top of the embankment she stood, trying to catch her breath, waving away a cloud of gnats that rose in a swarm. Afternoon sunlight made elegant angles through the trees. That meant hours had passed. She hoped the men who were after her had given up.
She wondered what had happened to Calliope—whether she, too, had made her escape through the woods.
She thought she remembered which direction she’d come from. She would have to go the opposite way, or risk ending up right where she started. If this was farmland, she comforted herself with the idea that she would have to reach another farm eventually—preferably one wired for the twenty-first century, where no one believed that she was a murderer. Even better, she might find a road full of traffic, full of normal people, soccer moms and dentists and teenage drivers with both hands on the wheel.
She swore then that if she ever made it home she would never complain, ever, about being bored. She wanted to be bored every day of her natural life. She wanted to die of boredom, literally.
So she went on, hobbling, limping, leaning heavily on a stick she fished out from the underbrush. She had to stop and rewrap her ankle twice, clumsily because she had only one hand, because she was shaking so hard, and the skin was so enormously puffy it frightened her. Miles of land, tight-knit woods of oak and maple and birch,dappled sun and the sky held at bay by the canopy of branches, the occasional flash of a deer bounding off in the distance, broken stone foundations that might have existed since the days of Paul Revere. She kept telling herself there had to be a road soon, soon, soon.
The afternoon lengthened. The shadows turned the color of a bruise. More than once, she imagined she heard the noise of traffic—there, over that ridge, just behind that stand of trees, she could swear she heard a horn blowing. She was desperately thirsty, and her head hurt. She’d been crying for an hour without realizing it, and squinting hard to try to make treetops into rooftops or telephone poles. In the thickening shadows, she could almost believe it. She’d lost her second sandal too, without realizing it.
And now it was getting dark.
She began to shout for help, no longer caring who found her, wishing, now, she’d never run in the first place. She shouted until her voice broke and she couldn’t bear it anymore. No one came, anyway.
And then she saw, in the distance, deliverance: a stone house, a roof overgrown with green moss, but ahouse. No—more than one house. Three houses lumped next to one another, like faerie houses dropped by some miracle in the middle of the woods.
If she’d been less desperate, she would have noticed the shattered windows, the doors angled off their hinges, thewood rot, and seen it for a settlement no one had entered in years, possibly decades.
If she’d been less tired, she would have noticed the low circle of stones indicating an old sunken well, with only a flimsy covering of ancient wood to keep animals from falling in.
But she was desperate, and tired, and the woods were dark.
She tripped on the edge of the sunken well and saw, briefly, the small covering of ancient wood, like a trapdoor set in the ground. Then she crashed through it and tumbled down into the long, sleek mouth of a thirty-foot hole.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 21 of Lyra’s story.
PART III
TWENTY-TWO
AT ALMOST THE SAME TIME Gemma fell, Kristina and Geoffrey Ives arrived at a Bruinsville, Pennsylvania, police station, not ten miles from the old stone well in the middle of the Sequoia Falls Nature Preserve where their daughter now lay unconscious.
They had arrived in Lancaster County the night before, after one of Geoff’s many military contacts, Captain Agrawal, had signaled that Saperstein might have mistaken Gemma and Pete for the replicas they were pursuing, only to discover a calamity: an explosion at the private facility where Saperstein had been licking his wounds and trying, without success, to rally new financial support. Kristina refused to consider the possibility that Gemma might be among the dead bodies excavated from the wreckage. She wouldn’t even think it.
They were ushered by Captain Agrawal down a narrowhallway to the locked and windowless evidence room in the back. Kristina had to reach out a hand to steady herself against the file cabinets.
How had she ended up in a police station with her daughter missing and children turned to ashes? There seemed to be a gigantic hole in her life that she couldn’t bridge. She couldn’t remember her way across it.
A sudden swoon of terror darkened her vision, made her dizzy on her feet: she imagined they were bringing her inside to show her Gemma’s body, still and cold and lifeless, her lips dark as a bruise.
Years ago, she and Geoff had refused to accept the death of their only child. They had transgressed the natural order: they had taken their child back, after death had already claimed her.
