Page 61 of Ringer
“Lyra,” Caelum said, when she didn’t answer. How to sort out her things from the flow of human waste? Where did all these things come from, and who was discarding them so easily? It seemed to Lyra that the whole humanworld was built on waste, and trash, and things manufactured just so that they could be tossed out afterward. She couldn’t save it all. She could never rescue everything. “Lyra, please. Talk to me.”
“You left without me.” It wasn’t what she had been planning to say, but once the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she was still furious at him. “You were just going to leave me behind. You didn’t even say good-bye.”
“I thought I was doing you a favor,” Caelum said. “You seemed happy.”
“I was happy because we were together,” she said. “I thought we would always be together, at least until...” She found she couldn’t think about her sickness. She couldn’t say the words out loud. At Haven, death had never seemed particularly scary. It was a bald, natural fact, like the transformation of food through the digestive tract. Replicas were born, they got sick, they died, their bodies were bundled and burned. Someday she would be ash sifting through the ocean waves, to be consumed by half-blind deepwater fish.
“I’m sorry.” He knelt so she had no choice but to look at him. “I didn’t want to leave you. I didn’t,” he said, reaching out to touch her face, so she couldn’t turn away. He placed a hand on the back of her neck, and her body responded, as it always did, as if she were somethinghollow—a husk, a leaf—and he the wind lifting it. “I thought it would be best. I thought I was protecting you.”
Another passing car threw up a quick wedge of light. Caelum looked so beautiful it was almost painful. She was relieved when the darkness chased the car away again.
She stood up. “What are we going to do now?” They had nothing of any value, and Lyra knew by now that everything in the real world cost money. You needed money to eat, and money to sleep, and money even to use the bathroom in public places, which werefor patrons only.Caelum was quiet. “We’ll find a way,” he said.
“What if Dr. Saperstein won’t help us?”
Caelum’s smile was as thin as a razor. “We’ll make him.”
They backtracked to the station, thirsty now, and moneyless, and ticketless. They hunched down in a dark alcove near the men’s bathroom, with its smell of armpits and old urine, and waited for morning to come.
Lyra balled her pink sweatshirt up beneath her head for a pillow. She closed her eyes and felt the nausea rise and fall like a swell of water, and she was scared. She pictured her own body like a night sky, a web of black tissue, and small disease cells burning like stars inside it; she closed her eyes and saw instead of darkness a blinding light, the compression of all that light, all that energy, into a single blazing explosion.
She woke up swallowing a scream that came up in the toilet with splatter. In her vomit: small comet trails of blood.
Whether she made it to Philadelphia or not, she was running out of time.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Gemma’s story.
PART II
TEN
BARELY SIX HOURS AFTER HE let the skinny girl, Gemma Ives, and her cousin off at the Greyhound station—regretting, on the one hand, not keeping them for more questioning, and on the other hand himself exhausted, eager to believe that they were indeed heading to see someone who could help her, that they were not just two more junkies busing toward their next high—the police commissioner in Nashville, Sarah Rhys, called Detective Kevin Reinhardt’s supervisor, Captain Basher, to say that Mr. and Mrs. Ives would be coming by the station.
The day before, Gemma Ives’s debit card had been used to purchase a one-way ticket to Nashville from the Knoxville Transit Center, and hours later she’d withdrawn two hundred dollars from an ATM at a rest stop in Crossville, suggesting she had, indeed, boarded a bus. It had been less than the requisite forty-eight hours since Mr. Ives’sdaughter had gone missing. Nonetheless, Rhys was issuing an Amber Alert: the girl wasn’t yet eighteen years old.
She was thought, perhaps, to be traveling with a boy.
Detective Reinhardt knocked his chair over in his hurry. He didn’t even double-check the girl’s likeness: her parents had sent the Crossville PD a series of photographic attachments, and Crossville had forwarded them on. Buses started running at six a.m. But she might still be there, he might have time to catch her, she needed sleep, there was still time....
“Where you going with your pants on fire?” Officer Cader was checking her teeth in her computer monitor, working a fingernail between her incisors.
Christ. He should have been a dentist.
He should have been a bus driver.
He should have been something,anythingelse.
He was already through the revolving doors, into air swollen and thick with the promise of more rain, and sprinting to the car, thinking there was still time to catch her.
He plunged through the revolving doors at 6:17 a.m. exactly—record time—into the echo chamber of cell phone conversations and squeaky-soled sneakers, into a colorful foam of faces and rolling luggage. Any other person would have been overwhelmed, but Detective Reinhardt had been a cop for a long time, and his dad had been a cop, and his uncle was a cop, and so was his cousinRebecca. So he looked not where all the color and sound was but where it wasn’t: the negative spaces, the empty corners and hallways and alcoves that regular people were trained to ignore.
His eyes leapt over the crowd. He let himself drift. He released the station so that it floated away from him, like a boat unmoored from the shore. The girl, the funny soft-spoken kid with the eyes made slightly bulbous from being too thin and the bright-red backpack, was the only thing he could have clipped onto.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
“Now boarding, Gate 3, 405 north to Boston.”
And then: a glimpse of red, a flash of platinum-blond hair, a girl who moved like she was drifting.
