Page 83 of Ringer
She found her way to the stairwell without seeing anyone else. The doors were still propped open by the same book, its pages furred with moisture and age.
The first basement level was still dark, still full of the lumpy silhouettes of old equipment. She kept going, listening carefully for footsteps, since the turns concealed the landings beneath her. The girl with the striped hair had probably already discovered she was missing: Lyra had a minute, maybe two, before the girl panicked and launched an all-out search.
She reached Sub-Two, and the gate locked with a keypad. She nearly cried when she saw that it required a numbered code: she’d forgotten all about it. Her palms were sweating and dizziness rose like a sudden swarm of insects. She leaned against the gate, sucking air into lungs that felt like paper.
She imagined her whole body strapped with fear and anger. She imagined burning up with it, like the woman who, arriving at Spruce Island, had detonated the dozen homemade explosives lashed to her body. She imaginedscreaming so that all the windows shattered, so the roof blew off, so that everyone above her was consumed in flame.
She imagined fire.
She wheeled away from the gate and backtracked up the stairs, leaning heavily on the railing, until she spotted what she wanted: on the landing of Sub-One, directly across from the swinging doors, a small red-handled fire alarm. At Haven the alarms had been enclosed by plastic, surfaces warm and smudgy from the fingers of all the replicas who’d touched them for good luck and connection.
Pull down,the alarm said.
She pulled.
The noise made her teeth ring. It vibrated her eyeballs. Immediately, the stairs filled with the echoes of distant shouting. She rocketed across the landing and hurtled past the swinging doors, into the dark recesses of the empty basement level.
From where she stood, she could see a steady flow of people up the stairs from Sub-Two. But not Caelum. She kept waiting for him to pass, but all she saw were strangers made identical by their confusion, by the quick-flash way they passed behind the glass.
She counted them all, the way she’d counted beads of IV fluid from the drip bag:two,seven, nine, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.Still Caelum didn’t come.
The blur of people slowed. She counted three heartbeats when no footsteps rattled the landing, when the window stayed empty of passing faces.
Hardly thinking, she pushed once again from her hiding place through the swinging doors and hurtled out into the open stairwell. She sprinted down the stairs, no longer thinking of being caught, thinking only of Caelum, of reaching him, of losing her chance.
As Lyra crashed around the corkscrew of stairs, she saw the gate at the bottom of the stairs was only just swinging closed. She saw the inch of space between lock and gate as a narrow tether. She leapt, shouting, reaching for it the way she might have reached for a rope, and got a hand through the gate just before it clicked shut. Her mouth tasted like iron relief, like blood. Beyond the gate was the door markedSecure Area—Live Samples, which she opened with the stolen keycard.
It was very cold.
For a moment she stood with goose bumps lifting the hair on her arms, suddenly confused by a vision of Haven unrolling in front of her, by the collapse of past and present. But it was just an illusion: this hall looked almost identical to so many hallways at Haven.
There were no offices here. There was no carpeting. Just a long linoleum hallway and windows overlooking darkened laboratories, doors barred and marked withDo Not Entersigns, cameras winking in the ceiling. Her stomach turned. She’d forgotten all about the Glass Eyes, and she felt a pull of both homesickness and revulsion.
Almost as soon as she started down the hall, a man with an Afro and a goatee turned out of one of the laboratories, shouting something. She froze, thinking he was angry, or that she’d been caught. Then she realized he was just asking her a question.
“Is it a drill or what?” he said, and she realized, too, that he had no idea who she was. Dr. O’Donnell had told her there were one hundred and fifty people who worked at CASECS: he must simply have mistaken her for one of them.
“Not a drill,” she said, and had to repeat herself twice over the noise. “Everybody out. I’m making the rounds,” she added, when he started to respond, and she continued past him down the hall. Maybe that was the secret, and why at Haven the doctors and nurses had been able to lie for so long. People were trained to believe.
Gemma counted two laboratories, each of them a fraction of the size of Haven’s. Some of the pieces of equipment were familiar. She recognized them from the vast, brightly sterile rooms where the doctors had done all the making, had with a shock of electricity made an egg swallow the nucleus, the tight-coiled place where DNA nested, of another person’s cells.
But CASECS didn’t make replicas. Dr. O’Donnell had said so herself, and Lyra didn’t think it could be a lie. If there were other replicas, Dr. O’Donnell wouldn’t be so desperate to use Caelum as evidence.
Dr. O’Donnell had said CASECS helped other places do research. But Lyra hadn’t thought to ask what kind of research she meant.
Or maybe shehadthought to ask. Maybe she had known, deep down, and she didn’t want to hear the answer.
Understandingwas like its own kind of alarm—so loud, so overwhelming, that the only choice was to ignore it altogether.
There were just three other doors in the hall, and one of them wouldn’t open. But the second one did and inside she found Caelum, sitting on the floor, knees up, head down on his arms. She called his name at the precise moment the alarm was silenced, so her voice echoed in the sudden quiet.
“Are you hurt?” she asked. A stupid question. When he stood up and came toward her, his face was pale, and she noticed new cuts and bruises on his cheek.
“The guard,” was all he said.
He didn’t hug her, but from a distance of several feet he lifted his hands and touched her face and smiled.
“We have to go,” he said, and she nodded.
