Page 56 of Ringer
A man shoved her. A woman yelled at her for standing motionless in front of the revolving doors, unsure of how they worked. There were people in lines as if waiting to get medication, and big machines grinding out slips of paper, and numbers on big boards that blinked and changed, dozens of TVs, words everywhere, signs everywhere, the smell of sweat and perfume and bathrooms.
She found a bus after twice standing in the wrong line, and was handed a ticket and told by the girl who sold it to her that next time she could do it through the automated system and also that she had cool hair. “I went short for a while too,” she said, “until my mom said she would boot me from the house.” This gave Lyra a boost, however, as it always did when she went out into the world, into people, andpassed.
Because at heart and despite what Raina or Rick thought, she knew the truth now: she wasn’t one of them and would never be.
She had to wait because the bus wasn’t ready to board.She counted how many people wore red hats, and how many people wore black ones. She tried to close her ears to the unfamiliar voices, dozens of conversations that together sounded like the grinding work of one large machine, all stutters and beeps and sharp, hysterical alarms. Whenever an individual voice reached her, she was reminded of how the researchers had spoken, moving in packs down the halls as if they were cabled together invisibly, using English but somehow an English she didn’t understand. A man sitting next to her on the bench picked dirt from his fingernails with a pen cap, and spoke in words that made her head ache for their foreignness.Can’t fault Walsh on that snap... you watch and see, Seattle’ll blow holes in their defensive line....
Holes. She closed her eyes; she breathed carefully through her nose. She’d believed for a long time that the outside world might be as big as ten times Haven, and after escaping she knew it had to be at least ten times that. But a bigger vision was impossible. What she knew of Tennessee was Ronchowoa, and the walk to the Target and back, and the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park, and its grid of sixty-two lots.
In the end, she only knew the bus had arrived when a loudspeaker voice announced that it was getting ready to leave, and she had to run to the far end of the terminal, barely gasping through the doors before they shut behindher with a hiss that sounded ominous.
She lurched into a seat just as it began to move. The blur of landscape still made her dizzy. She leaned back, clutching the schedule she’d been given in one hand. It was already wet, damp with sweat. Three and a half hours to Nashville, with one stop at Crossville to pick up new passengers.
She got sick in the tiny, filthy bathroom once, twice, a third time, until nothing came up but bile. She couldn’t rinse her mouth out. There was no water to drink. So she wiped her mouth with a sleeve, toweled off her face with a hem. An old woman seated near the bathroom shook her head and frowned, as if Lyra had gotten sick deliberately, when Lyra made her way carefully back to her seat. But she felt better. She was even a little bit hungry.
In Crossville, there was a layover of twenty minutes, and the passengers disembarked to use the bathrooms and buy food from the station. Lyra was feeling a little braver, so she showed the bank card Gemma had given her to a woman across the aisle.
“I need money,” she said, since Gemma had said that was what the card did.
The woman gave her a strange look. “Well, there’s an ATM right over by the bathrooms,” she said.
Lyra shook her head to show she didn’t know what that meant.
The woman squinted, moved her gum around in her mouth. “It’s your card, isn’t it? You’ve got a code?”
“Four-four-one-one,” Lyra recited, and the woman put up her hands to cover her ears, laughing.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re not supposed to say it out loud.” She put her hands down again, and her son thought it was a game, placed his hands to his ears and down again, said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,”and cackled.
“Please,” Lyra said, getting desperate now. The bus would leave in twenty minutes. She was hungry—she had not had anything to eat in twenty-four hours—and the station smelled like frying meat fat, like the Stew Pot in Haven but better. “I need money.”
The woman let out ashushof air, like the sound when SqueezeMe had finished hugging. “Come on. I’ll help you.” She took Lyra’s arm, exactly where SqueezeMe would have in order to read her blood pressure. Her hair was gray and brown, both. Otherwise, she looked a little like Dr. O’Donnell.
When they left Crossville, the bus was more crowded than ever, and Lyra’s heart stopped when she saw that among the passengers was a replica like the kind she had seen in the Nashville Elvis Festival brochure: a slick of black hair and dark sunglasses, plus the same beautiful white jumpsuit with beading that caught the sun. She was desperate to ask him questions, but felt too shy; he wastraveling with a large group and spent the whole time chattering with the other travelers, or crooning along to songs the bus driver piped from the speakers. At one point he stood, staggering a little to keep his balance, and danced along to the music, pivoting his hips and holding a soda bottle like a microphone. Everyone laughed and even applauded, and Lyra felt a vague sense of foreboding. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
She was even more discouraged when the bus driver announced their arrival in Nashville. She had been hoping that Nashville would look like Haven: an orderly series of buildings contained by a fence. Instead, it turned out to be a city: stack-block buildings, signs puncturing the sky, roads like the serpentine trails left on the surface of the marshes by passing water snakes, the slow crawl of traffic. More people. Perhaps the world didn’t end at all. Perhaps it went on and on forever. It occurred to her that if she didn’t find Caelum, she wasn’t even sure how she’d get back to Winston-Able, couldn’t remember what bus line she had taken to Knoxville.
But maybe it didn’t matter. Now that she knew the people from Haven were looking for her at Winston-Able, now that they had taken Rick away, she couldn’t return anyway.
She followed the line of passengers off the bus, trying to work up the courage to speak to the man in the cleanwhite suit. He moved quickly with a surge of other travelers toward the station doors, and she knew that as soon as he hit the street, she risked losing him. She was sure that she would find Caelum wherever the replicas were heading, and so she took a deep breath and jogged to catch up, with her backpack slamming against her lower spine and echoing the rhythm of her heart. She had to saypleaseseveral times before he turned around. The people with him—regular people, none of them replicas, but none of them dressed as nurses or doctors, either—turned with him. Under the weight of their stares, Lyra felt suddenly shy.
“What’s the matter, little lady?” he said. He had a deep voice that rumbled in his chest. “You want an autograph or something?”
She knew what an autograph was—it was when a doctor put down his signature on a piece of paper. The nurses were always asking the doctors to autograph one thing or another: disposal orders, cognitive evaluations, the reports generated by the Extraordinary Kissable Graph. This gave her confidence.
“No autograph,” she said. “I’m looking for all the others.”
“You’re here for the festival, huh? You an Elvis fan?”
Raina had said that Elvis was the name of their God. “I need to speak to him,” she said, which made the others laugh.
“Isn’t she sweet,” one of them said.
But another one frowned. “I hope she ain’t on her own. She’s too young for it.”
The replica with the dark hair inched his sunglasses down his nose. “You want to talk to Elvis, do you?” he asked, and she nodded. “Come on. Let me show you something. Come on,” he said, and gestured for her to follow him out the revolving door, into the bright afternoon sunshine, and the wet-tongue heat. In the distance, she could hear the faint roar of a crowd, like the break of ocean waves, and a cascade of music.
“You want to talk to Elvis, little lady, you just close your eyes and listen,” the male said. “You hear that? That’s Elvis talking, right there. You just gotta follow the music.”
