Page 46 of Ringer
“It will never be your place if you don’t try,” Lyra said.
“It will never be my place even if I do,” he said.
She went alone. Going anywhere by herself thrilled and terrified her, no matter how often she did it. At Haven she had almost never been alone. There were nurses to accompany them everywhere, and researchers to watch behind glass. There were the silhouettes of the medical machines themselves, and the doctors to operate them. And of course, there were thousands of replicas, all of them dressed identically except for their bracelet tags. They ate and bathed and showered together. They moved together as a single mass, like a swarm of gnats, or a thundercloud.
“Hey. You. I’m talking to you.”
Lyra turned around, still unused to people who addressed her directly, who looked in her eyes instead of at her forehead or shoulder blades. Something strange had happened to her in the outside world: she had begun to forget how to stay invisible.
The girl outside lot 47 was chewing gum and smoking a cigarette from something that resembled a pen. After a closer look Lyra recognized it as the kind of e-cigarette some of the nurses had smoked. “You’re new here,” she said, exhaling a cloud of vapor.
It didn’t sound like a question, so Lyra didn’t answer. She put a hand in her pocket, feeling her newest acquisition: a cold metal bolt she’d found half-embedded in the dirt.
The girl stood up. She was skinny, though not as thin as Lyra, and wearing low-waisted shorts and a shirt that showed off her stomach. She had a birthmark that made a portion of her face darker than the rest. Lyra had once seen something similar, on one of the infants in the Yellow crop before they died in the Postnatal wing.
“My friend Yara thinks you’re a bitch,” the girl said calmly, exhaling again. “Cuz you never talk or say hi to anyone. But I don’t think you’re a bitch. I think you’re just scared. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re scared because you came from somewhere else and never expected to end up here,and now you’re wondering if you’ll ever get out.”
Once again, Lyra said nothing. She didn’t know what a bitch was, although she thought, years ago, she might have heard the word—something to do with Nurse Em, one of the other staff members complaining about her.
“So?” The girl’s eyes were a dark, rich color that reminded Lyra of the mud along the banks in the marshes, teeming with invisible life. “Who’s right? Me or Yara?”
“Neither,” Lyra said. She was startled by the way her voice rolled across the short distance between them. Even though it had been weeks since she’d left Haven, she wasn’t in the habit of speaking. When Caelum came out with her at night, or when he snuck into her room and slid into bed beside her, they rarely spoke out loud. They breathed and touched, communicating through language of the body: pressure and touch, tension and release. “I never thought I’d end up here. I didn’t know there was a here to end up. But I’m not worried about getting out. Thisisout.” She stopped herself from saying anything she shouldn’t.
To Lyra’s surprise, the girl smiled. “I knew you weren’t as dumb as you looked. Half the people round here could double for shitbricks, so you never know. I’m Raina. What’s your name?”
Lyra almost saidtwenty-four. Rick always called her Brandy Nicole. But she had lost so many things in herlife; she wasn’t ready to lose her name, too, and the memory of the woman who’d given it to her.
“Lyra,” she said.
Raina smiled. “You drop out of school or something?”
Lyra didn’t know how to answer.
“School’s dumb anyways,” Raina said. “I finished last year and look at me now, on the nine-to-five shift at Fantasia.” She tilted her head and Lyra thought of the funny, knob-kneed birds that used to scuttle through the gardens at Haven, looking for crabs as small as the fingernails of the infants in Postnatal. The only part of her that wasn’t skinny was her stomach, which had the faintest swell, as if there were a tiny fist inside of it. “You want a Coke?”
Lyra almost said no.
But instead, almost accidentally, she said yes.
Lyra was with Raina, and then she was home, and she couldn’t remember anything that had happened in between. She’d obviously fallen down. Her palms stung and there were flecks of gravel in her skin. Her knee was bleeding.
It was happening more frequently now, these jump cuts in her mind. She knew that what they’d done to her at Haven, what they’d grown in her, was to blame, and remembered that Gemma had said prions made holes grow in the brain, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
That was exactly what it felt like: like holes, and hours of her life simply dropped through them.
Rick’s car, tawny with dust, was parked in front of lot 16, and the lightning bugs were up, as well as swarms of no-see-ums that rose in dark clouds. She heard raised voices as she came up the porch steps, but it wasn’t until she was standing inside, under the bright overhead lights on a secondhandWelcome Homemat, that she saw Caelum and Rick had been fighting. Their last words slotted belatedly up to her consciousness.
It’s enough now. You can’t stay here if you don’t find a way to help.
Both of them turned to look at her. Caelum she couldn’t read. But Rick’s eyes were raw, and his expression she knew from the youngest researchers at Haven whenever they accidentally messed up an IV and blood began to spurt or the replicas cried out: guilt.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Rick said quickly. Patches of scalp showed through his hair, shiny and bright red. “Nothing. Just having a family talk, that’s all.”
“You’re not family,” Caelum said. “You said so yourself.”
Rick stared at him for a long minute. Then he shook himself, like a dog, and moved for the door.
