Page 57 of Ringer
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 6 of Gemma’s story.
SEVEN
LYRA DID AS SHE WAS told. She set off toward the music, and when she got lost, she simply closed her eyes and listened for the drumbeat rhythm of applause, and the crackle of distant speakers, and turned right or left. She wondered whether Caelum had been here, had waited at the crosswalk for the light to turn green as she was waiting, had thought of her or worried about her or wondered whether she would follow.
The streets grew more crowded and funneled a mass of people down toward the music. Colored flyers fluttered from the lampposts. People drank in the streets and leaned over the balconies of their high-rises to wave. Lyra was overwhelmed by the crush of people, by the blur of strange faces and a celebratory atmosphere she couldn’t understand. Was this another party? She had yet to see any more replicas. The music picked up the tempo of herheart and knocked it hard and fast against her ribs.
Then she turned a corner and saw them: hundreds of identical men milling around a stage elevated in the center of the plaza, all with the same oil-black hair and sideburns and sunglasses, many of them dressed the same, too, in heeled boots and spangly white uniforms. She cried out without meaning to, filled with a sudden, cataclysmic joy.
Replicas. Hundreds of them. Alive, healthy, drinking from red plastic cups, posing for photographs with eager tourists.
But then she got closer, and her heart dropped. She saw at once she’d been mistaken. The men weren’t identical at all. Some were fat, some were dark, others were pale. There were even women among them, with sideburns pasted to their skin that in places had begun to unpeel. They weren’t replicas at all—they were simply regular people, costumed to look the same, for reasons she couldn’t understand.
The disappointment was so heavy she could hardly breathe. All of a sudden she felt trapped—squeezed to death in the vast open space by the pressure of all the strangers around her, by the chaos of so many unfamiliar things. Speakers blew feedback into periodic screeches. Laughter sounded like explosions. The air stank of fried food and sweat. Caelum must have come here, and seen what she had seen. But where would he have goneafterward? He could have wandered in any direction. He could have left Nashville entirely.
She would never find him now.
She was suddenly dizzy. Turning to move out of the crowd, she stumbled.
“Whoa. Take it easy, there, lady. Are you okay?” A woman squinted at her and her dark wig—that’s what it was, a wig—shifted forward an inch on her forehead. “You need some water or something?”
Lyra wrenched away from her. She was hot. She couldn’t think. She hadn’t been afraid at all, not when she believed that in Nashville she would find more replicas. But now she was panicked, and her mouth flooded with the taste of sick.Do you have any idea how many people there are in this country?Gemma had asked.
You’ll never find him,she had said.
She hardly knew where she was going. She just knew she had to get out, away from the noise, away from the music and the crowds. She was desperately thirsty, and whatever energy had carried her this far had abandoned her all at once.
She crossed a scrubby parking lot to a 7-Eleven, stepping onto the curb to avoid two boys smoking outside their car—when, just like that, in the space between one second and the next, she saw him.
Or not him, exactly, but a picture of him, taped to thewindow of the 7-Eleven.
The picture wasn’t very good, and most of his features were obscured. But it was definitely him. She recognized the hooded sweatshirt he was wearing, which they’d found together at the clothes-by-the-pound thrift store Rick had taken them to when they’d first arrived at Winston-Able Mobile Home Park.
There were words on the page, but she had to blink several times to make them come into focus.
Smile! You’re on candid camera.
Thieves will be photographed, shamed, and prosecuted. Just like this one!
She didn’t know whatprosecutedmeant. But she knew what a thief was. Had Caelum stolen something? Was he in trouble?
Suddenly, on the other side of the window, a man’s face appeared: an ancient face, tufted with hair in strange places, and eyebrows that ran to meet each other above the nose. She took a quick step backward before remembering there was glass that separated them.
“In or out?” he said. His breath misted the window, and his voice was faintly muffled. “Or you just going to stand there gaping?”
“I...” Before Lyra could think of an answer, he’dturned, shaking his head, and stumped back toward the cash register. She followed him. Inside, the air smelled like a shoe box. Several customers stood at the counter, waiting to have items scanned. She detached Caelum’s photograph from the window where it had been hung. The old man scowled when she approached him with it.
“Hello,” Lyra said.
A guy so skinny his head looked inflated blinked at her. “There’s a line,” he said.
Lyra ignored him and spoke directly to the man behind the counter. “I know him,” she said, and placed the picture of Caelum down on the counter.
The man just kept running items past the scanner. “That boy is a thief, young lady,” he said. “Tried to lift a package of jerky and a Coca-Cola, right from under my nose. I been in this business a long time. I know a bad seed when I see one.” He glared at Lyra as if to say that he was looking at one right that very second.
“Sorry,” she said—a default word of hers, a word that had always helped at Haven with the nurses and doctors.Sorry I made too much noise. Sorry I’m in the way. Sorry I breathe, that I’m here, sorry I have eyes, sorry I exist.“I’m looking for him. That’s what I mean. I need to find him.”
“You should stay far away from him, is what I think,” the old man said. He’d finished ringing up the skinny guy and gestured the next customer forward.
