Page 64 of Ringer
THIRTEEN
IN THE MORNING THEY SHOWERED together, soapy, touching each other with slick-fish fingers, filled with the joy of the new. They packed their few belongings, and Lyra took a pen from the nightstand. She left behind the Bible she found there; she associated it too much with Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It, with quick and blinding sideswipes to the head.
They had better luck than the day before. The desk clerk didn’t even blink when they asked for directions to UPenn. She just slid a paper map across the desk and charted the best route with a little ink line.
“It’s a hike, though,” she said. “You might want to Uber.”
Lyra just thanked her and said a quick good-bye.
Itwasa hike: an hour of slogging next to a sluggish gray river and a grid of barely flowing traffic. Lyra marveled atthe look of the houses on the river, enormous and colorful, in a style she had never seen before. Caelum puzzled over the map, charting their progress carefully, inching a finger along the ink pathway when Lyra read out the names of the streets they were passing.
Finally, when his finger was almost directly above the little star indicating they had arrived, Lyra saw something that took her breath away. A group of boys and girls came toward her, singing. There were so many of them that Lyra and Caelum had to step off the sidewalk to avoid being bumped.
“Caelum,” she said, and pointed.
Several of them wore T-shirts marked with a logo she recognized. An electric thrill traveled her whole body.The University of Pennsylvania.Lyra knew it. Caelum knew it. Everyone at Haven knew it.
It was a place both Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein had come from. The bust in the entryway of admin wore a blanket bearing the same logo for a cape. On certain days, certaingamedays, God went into his office and didn’t come out. Sometimes the staff members drank beer on those days, carted from the mainland in coolers on the boats, and sat for longer than usual in front of the TVs, watching sporting events whose rules Lyra didn’t understand.
“UPenn,” she said out loud, and began to laugh asthe group of strangers raised their fists and shouted, “Go Quakers.” Finally, she understood: UPenn meant the University of Pennsylvania, where both of the Gods of Haven had started.
Where the second God, Dr. Saperstein, was soon due to return—and where she and Caelum would be waiting for him.
She’d assumed that UPenn was a single place, almost like Haven, that had produced both Richard Haven and Dr. Saperstein. But once again the outside world smashed itself into a thousand different visions, into dozens of buildings, hundreds of people, noise and color and rhythms she didn’t understand.
Kids sat cross-legged with homemade signs in front of the looming stone buildings, chanting. Others, ignoring them, lay out on blankets in the grass or played a game that involved a flat plastic disk and lots of running.
“I don’t understand where they all come from,” Caelum said, and she knew exactly what he meant: How could all these people have been made if not on purpose?
“Come on,” she said, and took his hand. Caelum was agitated by the crowds. She remembered, suddenly, seeing an eclipse when she was younger, how the nurses had let them file out into the garden to look. Caelum became like that when he was nervous, like something dark that swallowed the light around him.
Lyra was anxious too. The swell of voices from every direction made her head hurt. The blur of colors reminded her of the starbursts that crowded her vision when, stretched out on the examination table, she looked too long at the ceiling lights. If Dr. Saperstein was here, did that mean that other people from Haven were here, too? Guards with guns? People like the ones who had killed Jake Witz, and had come most recently for Rick Harliss?
To her surprise, the first person they approached didn’t hesitate when they asked whether she knew where to find Dr. Saperstein.
“He’s not coming,” the girl said. She was wearing lots of rings, and violet eye shadow that made Lyra think of Raina, and of the strange party where people stood in the half-dark together and also somehow alone, like the individual patches of land submerged in the marshes that only from a distance looked like solid ground. “I mean, they haven’t officially announced it yet, but he won’t.”
Lyra’s palms began to sweat. “What do you mean?” she said, and repeated as faithfully as possible what she had overheard. “He was supposed to be here Tuesday, for the ribbon-cutting.”
“Yeah, but that’s probably not happening either. Have you been to the protests? There’s, like, two thousand people outside.”
“Where?” Caelum asked.
“Over by the Haven Center. Orwhateverthey’re calling it now.” The girl rolled her eyes. When she saw that Lyra and Caelum had no idea what she was talking about, she sighed. “Next to the medical school and PCAM. You know where PCAM is, right? The Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine? It’s right next to the Haven Center. You can’t miss it, it’s right on Civic Center. You students here, or incoming?”
Lyra said nothing.
“Well, you’ll get a real view of Penn, anyway. Protesters and crusty alums and all. Whose side are you on?” She smiled in a way that might not have been friendly.
“No one’s side,” Lyra said, though she had no idea what the girl meant.
At the same time, Caelum said, “Our own side,” and squeezed Lyra’s hand even tighter.
They found PCAM and the medical school—an enormous modern complex, all steel and glass, which reminded Lyra of the real Haven—and next to it, the brand-new Richard C. Haven Center for Regenerative Research.
“He was here,” Lyra whispered excitedly. “The first God washere.”
It seemed impossible that God, the first God, could have existed here, so many hundreds of miles away from Spruce Island. That here, too, in this busy city, he’d put a thumb in the soft clay of reality, he’d existed, people knew his name.
