Page 81 of Ringer
So was Caelum.
She couldn’t remember where the water had come from—it was in a mug, and there was writing on the mug, but she couldn’t seem to bring it into focus; the letters were meaningless geometry. She couldn’t understand where Caelum had gone, or Dr. O’Donnell, and in fact she couldn’t remember their names or what they looked like but only that there had been other people with her, a sense that she’d been left behind.
The room smelled bad, and in a lined plastic trash can there was vomit mixed with a little blood. She knew itmust be hers, but for a long time she stared at it, revolted and uncomprehending: she didn’t remember throwing up. She tried to move to the window but found that she was instead pushing on the door, pushing and trying to open it. The door was locked.
She turned around and the room also turned, swung and changed direction, and just as the letters had disintegrated, the whole place had ceased to have any meaning. She saw lines and angles skating in space like the cleaved wings of birds in the sky, and she couldn’t tack any of it down or make sense of it.Help,she wanted to say, but she couldn’t find the word for help. There was a sound in her ears, a hard knocking. And after a bit she recognized that she was hearing her own heart, and the idea of a heart came back to her, four interlocked chambers webbed with arteries.
At the same time, words loosed themselves from the dark hole and soared up to her consciousness:room, chairs, rug. Every time she found the word, the shape of the thing stopped struggling and settled down and became familiar.
She was still in the unused office. Caelum had been with her but he had argued with Dr. O’Donnell and now he was gone. Outside, the light had been reduced to a bare trickle that bled through the tree branches: it was evening. But Caelum had argued with Dr. O’Donnell in the morning.
She had lost a whole day.
Think.Someone had brought her the mug of water. She was sure it hadn’t been there earlier. That meant someone must be close, and in fact when she went to the door again and leaned up against it, she could hear the murmur of voices.
Dr. O’Donnell wouldn’t hurt Caelum, not when she wanted to use him to show off. So Caelum must have been removed either to another room in the building, or somewhere else entirely—which meant first that Lyra had to find him.
Second that they had to escape.
Another wave of nausea tipped her off her feet and she sat down and bent over, waiting for it to pass. At least she didn’t throw up again.
When she felt better, she moved to the file cabinets and opened all the drawers one by one, hoping to find something she could use to get out. But they were all empty—she didn’t find so much as a pen cap. Even if she could slip out into the hallway, she would need an ID to swipe in and out of doors. But Dr. O’Donnell, wherever she was, had of course taken hers along.
Think, think.Along with the water, someone had left her a pack of gum, probably because she had been throwing up. Lyra got a small, electric thrill.
An idea, a very small one, a very desperate one,condensed through the fog of her brain.
She fed a wad of gum into her mouth and gnawed, then went to the door again; the murmur of voices, probably from an adjacent office, continued uninterrupted. Someone was watching TV. She lifted a fist and banged several times, and after a brief and muffled discussion, footsteps came toward the door. She quickly spat her gum into one hand, and thumbed it into two portions.
The door handle jumped around while someone took a key to it. When it opened, Lyra saw a girl with chunky black stripes in her hair and very thick glasses.
“Oh,” she said, and took a step backward, as if she hadn’t expected Lyra to be there. “Oh,” she said again. “IthoughtI heard you knocking.”
“I need to pee,” Lyra said. The girl tried to step in front of her, but she shoved into the hall, wedging the gum right into the locking mechanism, forcing it in deep: a trick Raina had taught her.
The girl took a few quick steps away from her—Lyra realized she was frightened, and didn’t want even accidental contact. The halls were dim, and Lyra knew most of the employees must have gone home for the night, although she could hear the ghostclack-clackof invisible fingers on keyboards, and a few offices still spilled their light onto the carpets.
In a narrow office across the hall, a boy was hunchedover a laptop, watching something. He quickly thumbed off the volume. Lyra’s heart swelled: his ID was lying next to his computer, coiled inside its lanyard at the edge of his desk. Her fingers itched to take it.
“What doesshewant?” the boy asked, jerking his head toward Lyra, and even though he sounded tough, Lyra knew he was afraid also, and just trying not to show it.
“She has to use the bathroom,” the girl said, in a desperate whisper, as if it was a secret. “Where’s O’Donnell?”
“Still on the phone,” he replied. “She said she might be half an hour.”
So: Dr. O’Donnell was still here. That was good. It likely meant she hadn’t taken Caelum somewhere else, somewhere that would require a car. But Dr. O’Donnell had said she’d be back in half an hour; that didn’t give her much time to look.
“Should I... take her?” the girl asked, still shying away from Lyra as though she were diseased.
The boy blinked. “Well,I’mnot going with her.”
“Dr. O’Donnell said not to go anywhere....” The girl trailed off uncertainly.
Fear could be used. The nurses at Haven had been afraid; they had acted as though the replicas had something sticky on their skin, something that might spread through contact and turn them into monsters. But back then, Lyra had not known how to use this to her advantage.
Things were different now.
“I threw up in the trash can,” she said. “There’s some on the floor, too.”
