Page 62 of Ringer
Almost at once, the crowd re-formed and he lost sight of her. It didn’t matter. He was shoving his way through the funnel of people churning toward the gates, swirling around the big departures board.
Someone stepped in front of him, and Reinhardt nearly went down over the wheels of a hideous green faux-alligator suitcase. The man looked outraged, as if it were an actual alligator and Reinhardt had just trampled its tail.
Only then did the loudspeaker voice touch his consciousness.
“Now boarding, Gate 3, 405 north, destination Boston, with stops in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York...”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Gemma’s story.
ELEVEN
“NOW BOARDING, GATE 3, 405north, destination Boston, with stops in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York...”
Lyra came awake to a booming electronic voice. A cop was frowning down at her.
“Can’t sleep here,” he said. He had to speak loudly above the echo of so many voices. Spokes of sun, a blur of people holding briefcases, women in sneakers that wentsqueak-squeakand reminded her of the nurses, children shouting.
She got to her feet, leaning hard against the wall for support. Caelum was gone. Standing, she was even taller than the police officer. Sweat dampened her underarms, and she could smell herself.
The cop squinted at her. “You all right?”
“Fine,” she said quickly. Her voice sounded like it hadbeen chewed up. “Just waiting for my bus.”
He nodded as if he didn’t quite believe it but moved off anyway. She stood there breathing hard—even the effort of standing had made her dizzy—and tried to think. She couldn’t remember why she was there, only that Caelum had been with her and now he was missing. The pattern of travelers was dizzying. Strangers threshed the lights into shadow patterns. A gigantic clock on the wall with tapered iron hands pointed to 6:09. She was going to be sick again.
She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall, grateful for the coolness of the stone.Think.But she couldn’t think. She couldn’t remember a thing. Images came to her in flashes: Detective Reinhardt’s big cow eyes, throwing up in the toilet, the veins of blood.
When she opened her eyes again, she thought for a moment, through the thick haze of sun, she even saw him moving through the shifting crowd of travelers. But then the pattern changed shape and instead she spotted Caelum, dodging the crowd without appearing to notice anyone else.
“Here,” he said, when he reached her. He was holding a paper bag. From it, he produced a can of ginger ale. Cold.
“I thought you’d gone,” she blurted out. She lowered her mouth to the soda can, sucking along its rim,comforted by the taste of metal. This was a Haven taste, of tongue depressors and tubes behind the throat, even of Thermoscan, though that had been made of plastic.
He just shook his head. He looked happier than she’d seen him in a month. “I bought us tickets, too. The bus is boarding.” She remembered now, dimly: those boys moving out of the dark, an impression of wet mouths and the harsh birdlike cries of their laughter. She remembered kneeling in the gutter, trying to sort out her things from the collection of trash.
“How?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I told you I was going to get our money back,” he said. “And I did. Some of it, anyway.”
She still didn’t understand. She could hardly remember what they looked like: to her they now seemed a blur, their faces eaten up by shadows, and all their mouths identical and grinning. “You found those boys from last night?” she asked, but knew immediately, from his face, that wasn’t what he meant.
He took her free hand, pressing something into her palm. She opened her hand and found a battered leather wallet. She saw a flash of wadded bills before he took it back again.
“They’re all the same, Lyra,” he said. “That’s what you have to understand. Even the ones who say they’ll help are the same.”
Her head was pulsing, like the rubber pump of a stethoscope when it was squeezed.
“You stole it,” she said.
“They took from us,” he said. “So I took back from them.”
It was wrong to steal. Lyra knew that. Once Calliope, one of Cassiopeia’s genotypes, had stolen a cell phone from the nurses’ break room. Even though they’d found it tucked inside Calliope’s pillowcase, Nurse Swineherd had insisted thatallof her genotypes be punished. Privately, Lyra believed that that was when number 8 had gone so soft in the head, that maybe she’d been knocked too many times. Although the truth was that she had always been smaller than the others, and much dumber, too, so maybe she’d simply been born that way.
Caelum was right: Why should they have to give so much, and never take anything in return?
If everyone believed they were monsters, shouldn’t they at least be allowed to have teeth?
She could feel Caelum watching her, felt a question hanging between them like a very fine curtain of fabric. 6:20 now.
