Page 51 of Ringer
The next room they came to must have been an office once: it was smaller and reeked of cigarette smoke. Someone’s belongings were piled on a mattress in the corner. All the walls were covered with writing, but she couldn’t make out what the words meant. Tendrils of wire punched through the walls and ceiling. Someone had brought speakers and people were dancing. A boy offered her a drink in a can and she took it, thinking it was soda. Then she took a sip and immediately spat it out, wetting Raina’s shoes.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Raina said, and for a quick second, a new face dropped into place over her old one and she looked annoyed—annoyed, and embarrassed.
All at once, Lyra knew she shouldn’t have come. Raina didn’t want her there. Lyra could see it. She recognized the look on Raina’s face; it was the way the nurses looked when they discovered that one of the replicas had wet the bed or gnawed the edge off a pillow or been eating paint chips from the windowsill, like 108 had done when she was hungry.
“I’m sorry,” Lyra whispered.
Raina’s expression softened. “That’s okay. I hate Bud Light, too.”
But it was too late. Lyra, ashamed, knew how Raina really felt. She was Raina’s project, and she was failing, and they both knew it.
She shoved her way back through the room, which had only gotten more crowded. The echo of so many voices had invaded her memory, so all the shouting seemed to be coming from some old association; she was worried she might throw up, or drop into a hole and lose minutes, hours. Someone grabbed her and she nearly screamed, but it was just a girl with hair sculpted high and breath that smelled like hand sanitizer, saying, “Watch where you’re going, bitch.”
Lyra pulled away. Somehow she made it outside. She crunched over the vacant lot, watching for needles, as Raina had instructed her to do. She passed between cargo trucks at the weigh station next to the fizz and hiss of highway traffic and ducked beneath the loose fence. Her eyes burned. She rubbed them with a fist, smearing her makeup.
She’d been stupid to believe, even for a second, that she might someday belong in this world, among these people. She belonged only to Haven, now as ever. Caelum was right all along.
She was cutting between the straggly overgrowth that had reclaimed the abandoned trailers at lots 19 and 20 when she heard the murmur of voices. Edging past thewater hookup across a splinter of exposed concrete, she saw through a web of blistered tree branches an unfamiliar sedan parked directly in front of lot 16, not ten feet away. A man and a woman stood together on the porch. The woman was trying to see in past the slat of drawn blinds that covered the window.
Lyra froze. Although they were dressed in normal clothing, she had no trouble at all recognizing them. She had spent her lifetime around Suits. She read power from minor details, from small differences in the way people stood and spoke and acted. And on the strangers, power was like an oil slick. It darkened everything around them. She could see it, dark and wet, everywhere they put their hands. She felt suffocated by it. Her breath was suddenly liquid and heavy.
“Think someone tipped them off?” the man said. He spoke quietly, but it was late and for once, no one was shouting or playing music. The sound wouldn’t have carried far, but it carried to her.
“Nah. Doubt it. They’re probably out with Harliss.”
“At midnight?” The man shook his head and reached in his pocket for a cigarette pack, then shook one out into his mouth. “Nice family gathering. What do you want to do?”
“What can we do?” The woman took a seat on the porch, resting her elbows on her knees. Next door, theirneighbor had rigged a floodlight to deter thieves—he imagined anyone under the age of forty was a would-be thief—and the artificial brightness hacked her face into exaggerated areas of hollow and highlight. It was a good thing, though. She would be blind, or almost—and hidden in the shadows, Lyra would be practically invisible.
She thought about trying to backtrack, but she was worried her legs would betray her, too scared they would hear her cracking through the undergrowth. Instead, she lowered herself carefully to the ground, hardly daring to breathe. Though she didn’t know where the strangers had come from, she knew plainly enough that they were here to take her away. Caelum was still missing. Where was he? And where was Rick? She hoped he was still at work, and safe; it didn’t look like the strangers intended to leave anytime soon. If they would wait, so would she. She could only hope that Caelum didn’t come home in the meantime.
“What a mess,” the man said. When he exhaled, he tipped his head to the sky, exposing a dark ribbon of throat. Lyra fantasized about putting a bullet right through his skin, sending it back through the architecture of his spinal cord. Why wouldn’t he just let them be? “Sometimes I envy the paper pushers.”
“You’d lose your mind.”
“One more all-nighter and I might lose my mindanyway.” Then: “It doesn’t make any sense to me. If CASECS wants to go public next month, why wipe out the old specimens?”
“The DOD’s got Saperstein’s ass to the wall. It isn’t CASECS that wants to clear the slate. They’ve got nothing to do with it.” She put her hands through her hair and looked up. “Besides, they were smart about it. They did the lobbying first. They got the Alzheimer’s lobby, the cancer lobby, the MS lobby—everyone’s lining up. They’re going to go at it from the direction of public interest.”
Hearing God’s name was like a wind. It made Lyra shiver.
The man came down off the porch. For minutes, he and the woman said nothing. He smoked. She picked at something on her pants.
Then she looked up. “You know Saperstein’s supposed to be ribbon-cutting in Philadelphia on Tuesday.”
The man coughed a laugh. “Bad timing.”
“Sure is. Danner told me that UPenn might disinvite him. The students are rioting. They want the name Haven stripped off the goddamn water fountains.”
“They don’t know the half of it.”
“Sure. That’s the whole problem.”
The man shook his head. “Count no man lucky till he’s dead, right?”
They were quiet for a bit, and Lyra was terrified they would hear her heartbeat, which was knocking hollowly in her throat. Then the man spoke up again. “You ever think it’s wrong? Making them in the first place?”
Though her face was still a cutaway of shadow and light, the woman’s posture changed, as if she were hoping the idea would simply slide right off her. “No worse than anything else,” she said. “No worse than the air strikes last year—how many civilians killed? No worse than shooting soldiers up with LSD to watch what happens. No worse than thousands of kids slaving to make those sneakers you like. The world runs on misery. Just as long as it’s not ours, right?”
