Page 71 of Ringer
Dr. O’Donnell was good, but she had known about the sickness. She had known about the variants and the prions and the holes opening up in Lyra’s brain, and she had lied, like all the others, and claimed that Haven existed for the replicas’ protection.
But maybe Dr. Saperstein had forced her to lie.
In the silence, she heard a new swell of music. Someone shouted, “turn it up, turn it up,” and there was laughter.
“Is there always music here?” she asked.
Dr. O’Donnell laughed. “Sometimes. Not usually so late, though. Some of the staff members are celebrating tonight.” She seemed to hesitate. “We had some good news today.”
Lyra waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. It was, she realized, the longest conversation she’d ever had with Dr. O’Donnell. “What kind of good news?”
Dr. O’Donnell looked surprised. She didn’t know that Lyra had learned how to ask, how to say please and thank you, how to put on mascara and speak to males.Boys.“We’ll be able to continue our work here,” she said carefully. “We had—well, call it a contest. CASECS was up for an important award. And we won.”
“Award.” Lyra held the word on her tongue, and found it tasted like coins. “You mean like money?”
Again, Dr. O’Donnell looked startled. But almost immediately, she was serene again, and Lyra thought of a stone disappearing beneath the surface of a still pond. “Yes, like money.” She pronounced the word as if it were unfamiliar to her. “But more than that. Support. People who believe we’re doing the right thing.”
Lyra wanted to ask her about a cure, and about whether Dr. O’Donnell knew how to cure the twisted shapesdeforming her brain. But before she could, Dr. O’Donnell leaned forward and took her hands, and Lyra was startled by their dryness, by the coolness of her touch, both familiar and totally foreign. For some reason she thought of Rick and felt a strong impulse to run, to backpedal into the darkness, to rewind the miles they had covered and return to Winston-Able.
But almost immediately, the impulse passed, and she couldn’t have said where it had come from. Rick was gone. The past was gone. Dead. You had to sever the lines and let it float off on the ocean, or you would simply sink with it.
“Tell me what happened to you, Lyra,” Dr. O’Donnell said softly. “Tell me everything that happened. It’s important.”
“Haven burned down,” she said simply. “Everything burned.”
She waited for Dr. O’Donnell to express surprise, but she didn’t.
“I heard,” she said finally, when Lyra said nothing more. “It was in the news. And besides, Dr. Saperstein—well, we stayed in touch, in a manner of speaking.” But a shadow had crossed her face and Lyra knew enough, now, to read Dr. O’Donnell’s unhappiness. They had always been fighting, Dr. O’Donnell and Dr. Saperstein. Most of what they’d said was above her head, full of scientificwords that had washed over her like breaking water. But there had been one memorable fight about the rats, and whether or not the replicas should be allowed to have some toys and games.
Still—if Dr. O’Donnell had left Haven because she wanted to help, why hadn’t she come back when she heard about the fire?
Lyra was having trouble pinning her ideas of Dr. O’Donnell down onto the face in front of her. That was always the problem with faces, with bodies: they told you nothing. Like the genotypes who looked the same but acted completely different. Cassiopeia was proud and strange and angry, but she collected seashells, she scooped insects from the path so they wouldn’t be stepped on.
Then there was Calliope, who would catch spiders just to pull their legs off, one by one. Who’d once stepped on a baby bird, just to hear it crunch beneath her shoe.
“Caelum escaped with me,” Lyra said. “We ran and hid. We didn’t want to go back to Haven. They were making us sick.”
She waited for Dr. O’Donnell to apologize or say that Dr. Saperstein had forced the doctors to obey. But she just said, “That was weeks ago. Where have you been all this time?” She seemed truly curious. “Who fed you? Who gave you clothes? Who brought you here, to see me?”
It annoyed Lyra that Dr. O’Donnell assumed someoneelse had brought them. She didn’t want to tell Dr. O’Donnell about Gemma, or about Rick—they were hers, she decided suddenly, like bed number 24 had been hers, likeThe Little Princehad been hers after Dr. O’Donnell gave her a copy.
“No one,” she said. Her voice sounded loud. “We came ourselves. We took the bus and a taxi. We slept where we could. And we took what we needed.”
“You mean you stole it?”
“We took it.” Lyra was more than annoyed now. She was angry. “Everybody else has things. Why shouldn’t we?” Dr. O’Donnell’s cell phone was sitting there, on the counter, next to a coffee mug ringed with lipstick, and this infuriated Lyra more: it was evidence. Proof. “People take things all the time. They took what they wanted from us at Haven, didn’t they? Didn’t you?” She didn’t mean to say it, but the words came out and she wasn’t sorry. She was happy when Dr. O’Donnell released her hands, happy to think she had caused Dr. O’Donnell pain.
But when Dr. O’Donnell spoke, she didn’t sound upset. She actually smiled. “You’re tired,” she said. “You’re sick. And, of course, you’re right. You’reright.” And Lyra couldn’t understand it, but Dr. O’Donnell began to laugh.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Gemma’s story.
SEVENTEEN
AFTER A DINNER OF SALTY soup and crackers that dissolved in the broth, Lyra worked up the courage to tell Dr. O’Donnell what she had come for: she wanted to live.
Dr. O’Donnell listened in silence, resting one hand lightly on Lyra’s knee. Lyra should have felt happy, because Dr. O’Donnell was obviously so happy to see her.
But a shadow had attached itself to her thinking; everything dimmed beneath it. Why hadn’t Dr. O’Donnell come to help? Why did she allow the doctors to make all the replicas sick? What was CASECS, that there were no hospital beds but only sofas and armchairs and corkboards, where the doctors wore jeans and sneakers and music played at midnight?
