Page 86 of Ringer
Dr. O’Donnell’s voice was high and clear: it rang out like a bell. The fire truck braked abruptly, and Caelum threw out a hand to keep from cracking into the bumper. One of the firefighters leaned out the driver’s-side doorand cranked around to see what all the noise was. Lyra saw his mouth moving, saw the way his eyes darkened when they landed on her.
Stop.Lyra was screaming, too, or she thought she was. Then she realized she had only been screaming in her head. She threw her voice as hard as she could, hurled it like a stone. “Stop! Please! Help!”
He retreated, yanking the door shut; she didn’t know if he’d heard. The fire truck jerked forward another few feet, and that did it—Lyra gave up, she dropped, her knees gave out and she stumbled. Caelum caught her and tried to draw her in another direction, toward the parking lot. But she could barely stay on her feet. She was too tired—of running, of hiding, of hitting walls, of finding that every face concealed a sharp set of hungry teeth.
Then Dr. O’Donnell threw herself between them and the truck.
“Wait,” she said. Her hair was slicked by sweat to her forehead. “Just wait a second, okay?”
Caelum had to put an arm around Lyra’s waist just to haul her backward. Her feet had stopped obeying her. Her whole body felt as if it were as flimsy, as weightless and useless, as an empty sheath of skin.
But Caelum wouldn’t give up. “Come on, Lyra. Come on. Move.” He was still shouting, although it was suddenly very quiet.
And then, with a start, she realized why: the fire truck’s engine had stopped growling. No more exhaust plumed from its tailpipe. And almost as soon as she noticed, the door opened again, and the firefighter dropped to the pavement from the cab. Another one followed, a woman, this time from the passenger side. Both of them wore heavy rubber suits that made funny squirting noises when they walked—that was how quiet it was.
“Is there a problem?” The firefighter who’d been driving had sharp eyes, placed very close together, as if they’d been made that way just to notice every detail.
“Please,” was all Lyra could say. She was still winded, still gasping for breath—partly from the run, partly from a dizzying sense of relief.
Dr. O’Donnell pivoted neatly to face him. “There’s no problem.” In an instant she transformed. She had been begging them to listen, begging them to stop. But in a split second, she shimmied into a new skin, and Lyra was seized by a sense of dread. “I’m sorry you had to come all the way out here. Honestly, we didn’t expect them to react like this.”
He looked from Dr. O’Donnell, to Lyra and Caelum, and back again. “What do you mean, ‘react’?”
“They’re patient volunteers,” Dr. O’Donnell said smoothly.
“She’s lying,” Caelum burst out.
But Dr. O’Donnell didn’t miss a beat. “Sometimes our volunteers get anxious. Sometimes they get paranoid. It’s the first time anyone’s ever tried to stage an escape, though.”
She slid over the words as if she’d been waiting for years to use them. And Lyra hated her so violently, the hatred blew her apart into a thousand pieces.
Because the worst part, the absolute worst part, was that Dr. O’Donnell truly believed she was good. She was surprised that Lyra and Caelum weren’t grateful; that they didn’t see the way she wanted to use them as a kind of gift.
Because deep down she thought, of course, they didn’t deserve it. Because she thought that it wasobviousthey didn’t.
And that made her worse, even, than Dr. Saperstein. Saperstein had treated the replicas like objects, but at least he never pretended.
Dr. O’Donnell thought the replicas should love her for helping them pretend that they were worth something, when it was so obvious they weren’t.
The woman’s coat was folded down at the waist. She thumbed her suspenders. “So it’s some kind of medical research?”
Dr. O’Donnell smiled. Lyra couldn’t believe she’d ever loved that smile. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “Medicalresearch, pharmaceutical testing. All voluntary, obviously.”
“She’s lying.” Lyra could finally breathe, but the effort of speaking, of trying to be believed, made her words come in hard little bursts. “She’s been keeping us locked up. She won’t—she won’t let us go.” Then: “You can’t believe her.”
Dr. O’Donnell didn’t even glance at Lyra. “Paranoia, like I said.”
The firefighters exchanged a look. “They seem pretty upset,” the man said doubtfully. But Lyra could tell he was wavering.
“Of course they’re upset. They’re having a bad reaction to a new SSRI.” Dr. O’Donnell grew taller, swelled by her lies, or maybe the world shrank around her. She sounded calm. She looked calm. Lyra couldn’t imagine what she and Caelum looked like. “And I can’t help them unless we get them inside. They should be monitored. We should be watching their heart rates.”
Lyra saw at once that Dr. O’Donnell had won. She watched the firefighters tip over into belief; she saw them shake off their doubts, like a kind of irritant.
“Please—” Caelum tried again. But his voice broke, and Lyra knew that he, too, had seen.
“Thank you for coming out here,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “We really appreciate it.”
The firefighters had already turned back to their truck. Though they were only a few feet away, Lyra saw them as though from the bottom of a pit, as if they had already vanished into a memory.
