Page 47 of Ringer
“I’m working a double,” he said. “I just came back fora bite. I’ll be home later tonight.” He stopped in front of her and reached out two fingers to touch her shoulders. This was a gesture they’d agreed on, an expression of affection she could tolerate. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes,” Lyra said. She knew he wanted more from her but wasn’t sure what or how to give it to him. Sometimes Lyra tried to see herself in his nose and jaw and smile, tried to climb down a rope of feelings to get to one that made sense, but he still looked like a stranger, and felt like one, too. He had given her photographs from when she was a baby, but they felt like images from someone else’s life.
“Okay. Good. Okay.” He dropped his hand. The noise was loud in the quiet. Then he was gone, leaving Caelum and Lyra alone.
The room smelled faintly sour, as it always did. Another thing Lyra had not gotten used to was the dirt in the corners and the insects that tracked behind the faucet, plates and pans half-crusted in the sink when Rick went to work, fruit flies that lifted in clouds from the garbage, and the giant water bugs that came up from the drains in the shower.
Caelum stared at Lyra for a second, then turned back to the TV, although he didn’t sit down.
“What happened?” she said. It wasn’t the first time that Caelum and Rick had fought. Several times she had been startled into awareness by the sound of raised voices,or come out of her bedroom to find them standing too close together. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing.” Caelum turned up the volume. Words flashed on the screen, but they were gone too fast for Lyra to read them. “What happened to your knee?”
So he’d noticed. Lyra bent down and thumbed the blood off. She’d heard at Haven that blood was only red after it oxidized. Strange the way everything changed on contact with the world.
“Nothing,” she said, since that was the answer he’d given her.
“You were gone for a long time,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a question, but Lyra nodded. “Where were you?”
“I made a friend,” Lyra said, and nearly regretted it when Caelum looked up, his face seizing around a quick spasm of pain. “She invited me to a party on Saturday. You’re invited too.”
“A party,” he said. He said the word as if it were in a different language, the way the birthers had saidwaterorhelpordoctor,if they spoke English at all. “Why?”
“There’s no reason,” she said. She didn’t have an answer. But this made her defensive, not embarrassed. “It’s what people do.”
“People,” he repeated. Now he made the word sound like a medicine that turned bitter as it dissolved. “Yourpeople.”
“Don’t,” she said. They had gone through this before, when Gemma had first told her that she had a father, that she wasn’t really a replica.I thought we were the same. But we’re not. We’re different,Caelum had said, but she hadn’t believed him then.
But now a new voice began to whisper.Maybe he was right.
“I can’t stay here much longer,” he said. “Hedoesn’t want me here.” Caelum refused to use Rick’s name. “And you don’t, either.”
“Of course I do,” Lyra said.
Caelum just shook his head. “You have a new life here,” he said.
All the anger she’d been keeping down broke free. It was like a rope whipping up words in her chest. “Why did you leave Haven?” she burst out. “Why did you run away? What do youwant?”
“I got what I wanted,” he said, and with a quick step came closer to her. In an instant everything stilled and went white, and she thought he was going to sayyou, and wings of feeling lifted in her chest. But instead he said, “I wanted to do something on my own. For myself. I wanted to choose.”
“So you chose. Congratulations.” In words, now, she heard the echo of Raina’s voice, the edge of her sarcasm. “Are you happy now?”
“Happy.” He shook his head. “You even talk like one of them now.”
“So what?” She hated him then. More than she’d hated any of the doctors or the nurses or the sanitation teams who’d bundled up the dead replicas in paper sheaths, making jokes the whole time:How many clones does it take to screw in a lightbulb?“So I talk like them. So maybe I have a friend. What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s a lie, that’s what’s wrong with it,” he said. “You’re sick.”
“You don’t seem sick,” Lyra said automatically, and only registered a split second later that he hadn’t, in fact, saidwe’resick. And with a kind of yawning horror she realized that what she had said was true. Caelum had been so skinny when they met that his collarbones stood out like wings. But he had put on weight. He didn’t get nauseous, not that she could see, and he never got confused, like she did.
There was a long, terrible moment of silence.
“You’re not sick,” she said at last. She could barely get the words out. Then: “What cluster were you in?”
He looked away. She closed her eyes, tried to picture him as she’d first seen him, his wild eyes and dirt-encrusted fingernails, the wristband looped around his dark skin...
He said it at the same time she remembered. “White.”
