Page 53 of Ringer
She swallowed a short cry, shuffling backward and disturbing a rustle of old leaves. Both strangers whipped around—and for a second, before she retreated farther into the shadows, she could swear that Rick’s eyes landed on her. Or maybe he only sensed her presence.
She sat there, sweating in the darkness, stomach cramping from an agony of fear.
The woman took a step in her direction. “You hear that? Something moved back there.”
“I wouldn’t, if I were you.” Rick’s voice was louder now, and froze the woman before she could come any closer. Lyra could see, now, the woman’s heavy jaw and penciled-in eyebrows, her hair showing its real color at the roots. “Not if you like your fingers. Had a lot of problems with coons these last few weeks. Had to shoot one myself. Rabid.”
Now she was sure he’d seen her. It was a lie. They’d had no trouble with raccoons, other than catching one rooting around in the garbage can one time they forgot to put the lid on overnight. Caelum had chased it off by shouting.
Angie Finch’s dog was barking again. Angie’s voice was muffled by the trailer walls. “Shut up, you filthy animal!”
“Look,” Rick said. “I don’t know where they went. Like I told you, they could be halfway to Mexico. If you want to find them, you’re wasting your time talking to me.”
The woman seized on this. “You think they’re together?”
Rick scowled. “I’m done talking,” he said, as if they’dcaught him out in some kind of lie. She understood it was all an act. A show, so they would leave, so Lyra would have a chance to escape.
The strangers exchanged a look. The man cleared his throat. “You know what I think?” He didn’t wait for Rick to answer. “I think you’re hiding something.”
Rick said nothing. Lyra searched his face for the resemblance or the history he’d promised her was there, the story where she was a baby, loved, swaddled, wanted. But she couldn’t find it.
Still, for the first time ever, she had the urge to call himfather. She wanted to tell him to run.
“We can help you,” the woman said. “Get those charges in Florida dropped once and for all. Clear your record, even.”
Rick appeared to be thinking about it. He gnawed the inside of his cheek.
“She isn’t your baby girl anymore,” the woman said softly. “It was a terrible thing that happened to her. Terrible. But all those kids raised out there on that island... they’re all screwed up in the head. They’re made all wrong. They’re dangerous. You understand that, don’t you? They’re putting good people in danger.”
“She would never hurt anybody,” Rick said—but weakly, as if he wasn’t totally convinced.
And he was wrong, anyway. Several times in the pastfew weeks, Rick had walked her out behind lot 40, where someone had pinned paper targets to a rotting fence, and shown her how to shoot his gun. She had seen the guards aiming at waterbirds for target practice back at Haven, and had even heard some of the other replicas boast about trying it out for themselves—some of the male guards would let them do that, hold and fire guns, for exchanges Lyra understood only distantly. Haven was, in a way, like a large-scale replica of the minds it had grown: things needed to be neatly locked away, certain areas inaccessible, the whole place kept clean and bright and orderly so it could function at all.
Rick told her she was a good shot. She liked to imagine Dr. Good Morning’s smile wrapped around the aluminum of a beer can. She tried to picture God pinned to her targets, but whenever she did, her hand faltered. He was cruel and he had filled her with disease. He had done terrible things.
But he was still her God.
“She doesn’t have to want to. She’s sick. She’s got a bad sickness inside her. If word gets out...” The woman shook her head. “Can you imagine the panic? Can you imagine the protests, the violence?”
Rick stood there some more, acting out his uncertainty. Finally, he said, “All right. All right. I’ll come with you. But you gotta help me out, okay? I’m talking clean slate.”
“That’s a promise,” the woman said, and the lie was like a long metal tongue, something smooth and slick and easy. When, Lyra wondered, did people learn to lie, so often and so well?
She wanted to scream,Don’t go. But it was too late. He was getting into their car already.
The woman got behind the wheel, and the man took the passenger seat. Just a few seconds, and they might as well never have been there at all. Headlights dazzled Lyra as the car reversed. She was seized by the sudden memory of lying flat on an observation table, disembodied voices and hands touching her. She could see her father’s face, framed briefly in the car window, and the sweep his eyes made as they looked for her again in the darkness.
A sudden panic overwhelmed her: wrong, wrong, wrong. It was like the alarm that had gone off during the Code Black, except this time the sound was inside her, in her chest, shaking her lungs. She had barely thought about Jake Witz and how she and Caelum had found him hanging from a door with a belt around his throat, but now she did; she saw Rick’s face in place of Jake’s, his skin a mottled purple and his eyes enormous with fluid. She had seen many corpses in her life, had watched countless replicas bundled and packaged onto the freight barge for disposal, but Jake’s was different. Rick would die too, she knew that. That was what Power was—to decide who lived and who didn’t.
Dad.The word rose in her chest, and pushed the breath from her lungs with its weight.Dad.She thought of running after the car, rocketing out from the shadows, and offering herself in his place.
But she stayed where she was. The taillights dimmed and then disappeared, and the growl of the engine quieted to a purr, and finally became the soft tutting of the crickets, singing endlessly from ten thousand hidden places.
Inside the trailer, everything looked the same way it always did. The warped mirror and the framed needlepointHome Is Where the Heart Iswere in place. The TV was still on. An open can of soda had left rings on the old wood coffee table, and next to the sofa the makeshift curtains were still drawn around Caelum’s mattress.
He might have been sleeping. He might have been only moments from strolling through the door, wearing a salvaged T-shirt and jeans that hung below his hipbones, showing off the muscles, like wings, above his waistband.
She had traced those muscles with her fingers. She had licked them to know the taste.
