Page 66 of Ringer
“We have to get out of here.” Caelum sensed the change at the same time: the current had tipped over to one of fury. The crowd seemed to pour into a single roiling mass, like a tight-knit cloud condensing on the horizon.
“He still might come.”
“You heard them. He’s not coming. He’s not—” But Caelum was whipped away from her when people surged suddenly between them, a wall of people pulsing together like an enormous organ, walls of breath and hair and sweaty skin.
Someone grabbed Lyra’s wrist, hard. She turned and a scream throttled her, lodging somewhere in her throat.
Though she had seen him only from a distance, in the harsh glare of the floodlight, she recognized him: hewas the same man who had come for Rick, but dressed up now like some kind of local security guard. But she would have sworn it was him. She recognized the flatness of his eyes, like the dead stare of a fish.
Are you okay?his mouth was saying. But she couldn’t hear the words. Instead, she heard him laughing. She heard the guards on the marshes weeks and weeks ago, laughing as they toed their way through the blood of dying replicas.
You know how expensive these things are to make?
She wrenched away from him. She spun around—she had a brief impression of open mouths and shouting, a boy with blazing eyes shouting at her. A backpack caught her in the chest and she was knocked off balance. She was on the ground. Someone stepped on her fingers. Sneakers and legs, so many bodies—she was momentarily overwhelmed, she couldn’t breathe.
Even as a girl reached to help her, the crowd moved. Suddenly everyone was shouting and she couldn’t get up. Someone kneed her in the ribs. Through a rift in the crowd, she spotted Caelum, flying at the guy with the backpack. A girl screamed. Caelum was a sudden frenzy of motion; there were three guys fighting him now, and blood on his teeth. As she watched, trying to find the breath to shout, one of the boys caught him on the cheek and then another one on the back of the head, and thena third kneed him in the stomach. Then he was on his knees, spitting up blood, but she couldn’t get to him—still they were separated by a hard blade of moving bodies.
Someone hooked Lyra by the elbows and got her to her feet. Air touched her lungs like a burn. She gasped and tears came to her eyes.
“Are you okay?” the guy shouted. He was wearing glasses with only a single lens. She recognized him as the boy who’d gone down before, shoved by someone. He kept a hand on her arm, even as Caelum finally pushed his way toward her. “Animals,” the boy kept saying. “You’re allanimals.”
Now Lyra could see the guards carving the crowd up, dispersing it. But the man with the dead fish eyes was gone.
Caelum’s face was swollen where he’d been hit. Lyra could tell how much pain he must be in. His cheek was cut. One of the guys who’d hit him must have been wearing a ring.
“Goddamn.Tellme you aren’t prospectives.” The boy in glasses looked furious. “Come with me. Let’s get out of here before these psychopaths start a riot.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 13 of Gemma’s story.
FOURTEEN
HIS NAME WAS SEBASTIAN, AND with his help they elbowed their way free of the crowd. From a distance, it resembled an organic mass, a seething, hungry creature.
Lyra was still having trouble breathing. She kept scanning the street for the man with the fish eyes, or the woman who traveled with him. She felt the weight of invisible observers watching their progress, the way she had always felt the Glass Eyes at Haven.
“Animals,” Sebastian said again, when they were several blocks away, and the noise of the chanting had faded. Lyra was surprised that it was still early afternoon, still sunny; that the cars still churned by slowly, that nothing else had stopped.
Caelum hadn’t spoken at all. His left eye was swollen shut. When he leaned over and spat up a gob of blood, the boy shook his head.
“You should really get some ice on that. And clean the cut, too, so it doesn’t get infected. I’m in med school,” he added, in response to a look from Lyra. “If you want, my apartment’s right around the corner.”
Lyra hadn’t exactly recognized it as an invitation until he started walking again and Caelum, to her surprise, followed.
Sebastian lived in a small, bright apartment on the third floor above a sandwich shop. The whole place smelled like the inside of a book. Books sagged the built-in shelves lining the wall. The sun caught thick swaths of dust in the air and striped the room vividly in golden light. She couldn’t see anything in the haze of sun.
“My roommate’s a lit PhD student,” Sebastian said, when he caught Lyra pacing the shelves, running her fingers over the spines. “Can you believe he still readspaperbooks? It’s so nineteenth century.”
The sun made black spots in Lyra’s vision. The room began to turn, slowly, and to stay standing she had to grip the table. Side effects. No.Symptoms.
“Do you have a bathroom?” she asked him. Sebastian had so many things it made her dizzy: paper clips and mugs, framed photographs and bundles of wire, coins and little porcelain trays to hold them. She could hear all of it screaming, crying out in neglect; she wanted to open her mouth and swallow the whole room. She wished shecould stuff all of his belongings down inside her, like some kind of magical potion that would turn her human, totally human, at last.
Like some kind of magical potion that could make her well.
“Are you all right?” He squinted at her, and for the first time she noticed how nice his clothing was compared to theirs, how well it fit him, how healthy he looked.
“Bathroom,” she managed to say again, even as she felt bile biting off the edge of the word, making acid in her throat.
In the bathroom, she turned on the faucets and opened her mouth and let the black come up, waves of sickness that brought with them a sharp antiseptic burn in her throat and Haven’s smell. They had failed to find Dr. Saperstein, like they had failed to save Rick Harliss, or Jake Witz, or Cassiopeia in the marshes. Everywhere they went, they had left nothing but death behind them.
