Page 69 of Ringer
He was right. They waited. She squeezed her toes. She named all the bones she could think of—ankle, clavicle, tibia. She would have looked for the stars, too, but they were invisible behind the light-smear from the city.
Lyra lost track of time. Minutes went by, or hours. Theparking lot continued to empty. All the traffic flowed the wrong way. But at last a car approached from the direction of the Kmart, its headlights skimming the stone wall and then latching on to the guard hut, the fence, the harried-looking trees.
“Now,” Caelum said, as the gate began to grind open and the rhythm of conversation reached them—how ya doing, another late one, huh?Suddenly Lyra found that she could not remember how to stand. She tried to shout the urge to her legs, but they didn’t hear her. She was stuck where she was, and as Caelum tried to get her to her feet, she simply landed knees down in the grass instead, barely missing the stone wall with her chin. It was as if her ankles had been bound together by invisible cording.Stand, run, walk,she thought, but her body remained blankly unresponsive, filled with a useless static.
It was too late now: the car was passing inside the complex, tires fizzing on the pavement. Lyra’s heart was so swollen with fear she could feel it in her head, in her mouth, in the bottom of her stomach.
“What happened?” Caelum’s face was unexpectedly illuminated: fluid cheekbones, dark eyes. He was so perfect, so alive, and she was so broken. White cluster. Control. His blood, she imagined, was a deep and royal blue, hers dark and sludgy. “What’s wrong?”
Then she realized why she could see him so clearly,why every eyelash was drawn so vividly: yet another car was coming. This time she didn’t even have to tell her body to move. She didn’t have to think at all. She was on her feet. Caelum cursed, but he was right behind her. She made it over the fence but tripped getting over the curb.
The guard had once again moved into the light to greet the driver, and she was so close Lyra could see the blunt bob of her hair cut to her chin, see her uniform straining over her breasts and revealing a narrow slice of her bra. Lyra couldn’t believe the guard didn’t see them, that she didn’t begin to shoot, but Caelum was right: with the headlights in her eyes, shecouldn’tsee.
They came at an angle, scuttling low around the back of the car—a sleek and silver thing, like an elegant fish—until they were pressed up against the passenger side. Lyra thought even if the guard couldn’t see them, she would surely hear the way Lyra’s breath tore at her throat. A second woman’s voice, high and laughing, touched off a nerve inside of Lyra’s whole body, like the memory of something bad that had once happened to her. The smell of exhaust made her dizzy.
“You have a good night.” The guard was retreating to her hut. The gate churned open and the car eased off its brakes.
Lyra tried to keep pace, flowing through the gate at the same time the car did—but even as she stood up, thedarkness stood too, the sense of vertigo and falling. She was pulled up and down at the same time. She was trying to leap over holes burning open at her feet. Her mouth tasted like gravel, like chemicals, like metal. Someone was shouting. She was at Haven and coughing blood.
“Get up, Lyra. Getup.”
Her ideas rotated. They pivoted and suddenly the true picture emerged: she was on the ground. She’d tripped. She wasn’t at Haven. She was here, at CASECS, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the person shouting wasn’t a doctor but a guard,theguard, who must have heard her fall.
The silver car had stopped. A woman leaned out the window to shout.What happened, what’s the problem, I can’t understand you.
“Not you, not you,” the guard said. But the woman in the silver car was still confused, and the car exhaust kept stinging Lyra’s eyes. “Those two, behind you, two kids, out of the way.”
Caelum grabbed Lyra by the elbow. The guard was running, and Lyra, still on her knees, saw the shiny polish of her boots, the walkie-talkie strapped to her belt, the gun holster. “Hey, you. Hey, stop.”
Lyra made it to her feet, finally, just in time. But Caelum’s hand was torn free—she lost him, they started off in different directions. Now she heard the crackle ofradio interference and the guard shouting again and at the same time Lyra hurtled to the left, the car decided to turn too: she was blinded by a funnel of white light, she saw the grille leap toward her shins and she couldn’t turn, she had no time.
The car hit her or she hit it. She cracked against the hood, rolled off an elbow, and went down.
A woman screamed. Caelum shouted to her but she couldn’t call to him. She was on her back now, breathless beneath a starless sky. She couldn’t move at all, couldn’t feel her arms or legs. Maybe her spine had snapped, maybe her head had rolled off her body.
A car door opened and slammed closed. Footsteps, muted voices, an explosion of radio static and distant voices communicating in a slang patter. The headlights made a halo of her vision. Someone came toward her—Caelum? the guard?—but in the high beams faces became formless shadows.
“Look at her. She’s just a girl.” It was the driver, her voice like a hand that tugged at an ancient memory. Haven and clean sheets and pages that turned with the softhush-hushof wind through the grass. Then: “Oh my God. MyGod.”
The guard was talking into her radio, so many words that they themselves became static bursts. “That’s right, just two kids, some kind of prank, the girl’s down, theboy beat it when I tried to grab him, looks like he headed into the parking lot—”
“I know her. Do you understand? Iknowher.”
Fingers cool on Lyra’s cheeks. The woman slid like an eclipse across the blinding bright lights. Her hair was dirty-blond and gray and loose, and tickled Lyra’s face where it touched her.
“She belongs to Haven. I’m sure of it, I’m absolutely positive....”
Lyra fell. She sank toward a warm and forgiving darkness. The pavement softened beneath her back, the night dissolved into a memory of other nights and other places.
“Can you hear me, hon? Can you hear my voice? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”
She thought she opened her eyes. It didn’t matter anyway. In the dark behind her eyelids she saw a face, so familiar, so often recalled: the freckles and the wide, flat mouth, the smile that saidwelcome,I love you, you’re home.
“She must have hit her head bad....”
“Her name... I wish I could remember.... She was one of the earliest ones....”
“What?”
