Page 48 of Ringer
It was stupid she’d never wondered, stupid she’d never asked. It was all her fault.
White wascontrol.
And control meant that he was fine.
“Lyra...” He tried to reach for her and she backed away from him, nearly toppling the table in the front hall, bumping against the door. “I’m going to find a way to fix it. I promise. I’m going to find a way to help.”
When he tried to touch her again she lurched past him, knocking a coat from the rack pegged to the wall. She felt like she would cry. She hardly ever cried.
Maybe this too was something that hadoxidized: her feelings had changed color, and flowed more quickly now. She imagined that inside of her, the prions pooled like dark shadows, waiting to swallow her up.
“You can’t help me,” she said. “No one can.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Gemma’s story.
THREE
FOR TWO DAYS, SHE HARDLY saw Caelum at all, and she felt nothing but terrible relief, like after you finally drop a glass that has been slipping for some time from your fingers.
Caelum was her tether to Haven, but he was also her anchor. Around him she felt stuck in her old life, stuck in her old name. 24. The escaped replica, the human model, the monster.
Rick told her that he’d put Caelum to work. There was little he could do, because in order to become someone in the outside world, youalreadyhad to be someone, which required pieces of paper and numbers from the government and identification that neither Lyra nor Caelum had. But Rick had met a guy who owned a tow company and impound lot and needed help on the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight a.m. He was preparedto pay cash, and he would ask no questions.
Money, Lyra was learning, was a source of near-constant worry in the outside world, as it had been in Haven. At Haven the staff had talked constantly about budget cuts and even the possibility of having funding cut off completely. But it surprised her to find out that money everywhere was so difficult to get and hang on to. Gemma’s father had offered them a large sum of money, but Rick had refused it, and when Lyra asked him why, his face darkened.
“Blood money,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have to lean on him for a roof. I won’t take a dollar I don’t have to.”
She had a hard time thinking of Rick Harliss as poor, since he had a car and his own TV and his own narrow house, a bathroom only the three of them shared, multiple sets of clothes—all things that to her seemed rich.
But theywerepoor, at least that was what Rick said. And while Lyra was his daughter and it was his duty to protect her, Caelum was freeloading—stealing time from the clock,Rick said—and would have to figure out how to make his own way in the world.
Lyra should have heard the threat in those words: that Caelum would have to leave, sooner or later.
On Friday and Saturday morning, after his first two shifts, Caelum left piles of dollar bills on the small kitchen table, secured beneath a can of Hormel chili, and Ricktook the money wordlessly and bought more Hormel chili from the store, more toilet paper and toothpaste, more pairs of socks and books for Lyra to read, all of them with creased pastel covers and heroes who always arrived at the right moment.
For two days, Lyra was happy—despite the holes dropping hours of her life, despite the fact that she and Caelum had had their first fight ever, despite the way she had to pick through the boredom of the day on her own, collecting ever more pieces of trash, arranging them and rearranging them as if they would someday yield a sentence. She visited with Raina, and was absorbed in an endless funnel of people, ideas, and places she’d never heard of—Los Angeles, the neo-Nazis in lot 14, veganism, YouTube, Planned Parenthood, the Bill of Rights.
She was angry at Caelum for lying to her, even though she realized he’d never said he was sick and she had never asked. Still, she was angry. He resented her for becoming something he could never be, but there was no greater abandonment than this: she would die, and he would live.
Even so, she never thought she might lose him for good. He had been absorbed into her life, into the constellation of her reality now growing to include the small trailer on lot 16; moths beating against the screens and spiders drowning in the sink, Raina and her parties, clothing purchased from the Salvation Army by the pound. Herwhole life she’d experienced as a series of circles, days that repeated themselves, procedures that happened again and again weekly or monthly or yearly, birthdays that passed without celebration to mark them. Even the fence at Haven had been a rough circle, and Spruce Island had been bounded by water on all sides.
Things didn’t change. They just returned to what they were before. And she and Caelum would return, again and again, to each other.
She should have learned, by now, that nothing was ever so easy.
On Saturday, she didn’t see Caelum at all. In the morning, she found his mattress—concealed behind an ugly fuchsia curtain Rick had strung up from a shower rod—empty and the bed neatly made. But he’d come home at some point: she saw that he’d left money for Rick. Next to the bed was a shoe box he used for his belongings, and when she opened it, she felt like someone had just tapped the center of her rib cage. He, too, had obviously been collecting things when he went out: old coins, a bus schedule, an empty cigarette pack, a brochure, a receipt carefully unfolded and weighted beneath a tin labeledAltoids. She felt a sudden, hard aching for him. At Haven, she had once had an Altoids tin, had kept it stashed carefully in her pillowcase.
He wasn’t home by the time she left to meet Raina, and she couldn’t leave a note for him. She didn’t know how to write and he wouldn’t be able to read it. She wasn’t sure what she would say, anyway.
She and Raina walked together to Ronchowoa, a town lobbed down in the middle of nowhere as if it was made by God’s spit. (That’s how Raina put it.) Lyra still didn’t like being out on the road, and got jumpy whenever she saw a sedan with dark-tinted windows. But it was hard to be nervous when Raina was around. She never stopped talking, for one thing. Just listening to her took up all of Lyra’s attention.
“The Vasquez brothers will be there for sure, they think they’re hot shit because their dad has four car dealerships in Knox County. Watch out for Sammy Vasquez, he’ll have his hands down your pants before he even knows your name....” She laughed. She had a laugh like a solid punch. “I don’t know. Maybe you should let him. I hear you got caught tonguing your own cousin.”
Caelum and Lyra had said they were cousins when they first arrived, because Rick had said it and then they’d repeated it, if anyone asked. “He’s not exactly my cousin.”
“Yeah, I got somecousinslike that.” Raina smirked. “What is he, anyway? Chinese or Korean or something? He’s all mixed-up-looking. Cute, though.”
“I don’t know,” Lyra said. Many of the replicas hadbeen grown from stem cell tissue purchased on the sly from clinics and hospitals, and no one knew exactly where the genotypes had come from.
