Page 9 of Ringer
“It isn’t your fault,” April said. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Let’s hope I get a bigEfor effort, then,” she said.
Pete looked at her then, and she wished he hadn’t. His mouth was like a zipper stuck hard in a bad position. “If themilitaryis going after Lyra and Caelum, like you said, you can’t stop it. You’re in danger, too.”
“I don’t have to stop it,” Gemma said. “But I can warn them. I can give them a head start.”
“How?” Pete’s tone sharpened. “You don’t even have a car.”Bang, bang, bang. Little shrapnel words.
“You can’t even drive,” April added. This felt like a low blow. Her parents wouldn’t let her learn to drive: another way they kept her bubbled off in glass, like one of those dumb ballerinas at the center of a snow globe.
“I’ll take the bus,” she said, and turned around again, so Pete and April had to jog to keep up with her.
“You don’t know where you’re going,” Pete pointed out. “It’s almost eleven. It isn’t safe for you to travel on your own. Besides, I doubt they have all-night service to Rococo.”
“Ronchowoa. So I’ll hitchhike. Or I’ll take a bike. I’ll take a horse.” But Gemma’s throat was all knotted up. She turned away, swiping her eyes with her wrist.
“Jesus, Gemma. Will you listen to yourself? You aren’t thinking.” He wasn’t shouting—not even close,not compared to what Gemma’s dad could do—but still, Gemma pulled up as if she’d reached an unexpected cliff. “If the military or the feds or whatever are trying to do a cover-up job—if they’re willing to kill people to make sure the truth never leaks—you’re a target. You were a target before, but you’ll be a bigger target now. I won’t—” His voice broke. “I’m not going to risk you again, okay? Not for Lyra. Not for Caelum. Not for any fucking person on the planet. I won’t do it.”
She started to cry, obviously. Trying not to cry was like trying to hold on to water by squeezing it. She cried until she gasped. “Don’t you see? I have todosomething. I have to help them. They’re my people. They’re like me....”
But by then she couldn’t go on. Fear and guilt came down on her mind like a veil, rippling all her words into distant impressions. In the house, Rufus began to bark, as if he was determined that she not cry alone.
And, weirdly, just when it felt as if she could cry until she drowned, she felt a sudden pressure, an invisible presence. It was as if an unseen person had just stepped up to place a hand on Gemma’s shoulder and whisper in her ear.It’s okay,this other person said, and Gemma recognized in the silence the voice of Emma: the first, the original.It’s going to be okay.
Pete came forward to put a hand on her back. “It’s okay,” he said, and Gemma startled, turning around toface him. Her impression of Emma’s voice broke apart on the wind. “I’ll drive you.”
Behind him, April’s face was narrow with worry, but she didn’t argue. And Pete even managed to smile. He didn’t look angry anymore.
“We’re your people too, you know,” he said. “We’ll always be your people, if you let us.” He ran a thumb over her lips. His skin tasted like smoke.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Lyra’s story.
FIVE
THE WINSTON-ABLE MOBILE HOME PARK was just under six hours away, forty minutes outside Knoxville. Pete and Gemma drove mostly in silence, with the radio off and the windows down, except when Pete asked whether it would be all right to stop and get coffee.
The drive, the tension, the wind blowing in the wake of passing semis and the windshield dazzling with headlights: it all felt like they’d tripped over a wrinkle in time and wound up back where they were three weeks ago. Gemma tried to sleep but couldn’t. Whenever they passed a cop on the road, she got jumpy. Gemma had told her mom she was going to sleep at April’s house, and Pete had told his parents he was sleeping in one of the Ives’s guest rooms, and April had, after much protestation, gone home so that she could run interference if Gemma’s mom called the house before Gemma got back. April’s momshad left the party early, so there was no reason to think her cover story had been blown so quickly. Still, if worse came to worst, Gemma hoped her mom would assume she had merely lied in order to sleep over at Pete’s house (which Kristina seemed to suspect Gemma was always angling to do—seemed tohopefor it).
But she knew, too, that anything was possible. Her dad might have gotten suspicious. He might have radioed friends in the force, friends at the tolls, friends even now crawling dark highways, waiting to stop her and bring her home. A network of owed favors, backroom deals, contracts and alliances: the whole world was a spiderweb and all the threads were made of money.
Geoffrey was the spider. Which made people like her, and like Lyra and Caelum, the flies.
It was just before six o’clock when they spotted a sign for Ronchowoa, a dump of a place whose claim to fame was one of Tennessee’s largest privately owned plastics manufacturers. By then, the darkness was letting up a bit, but the air was smudgy with chemical smoke and had its own gritty texture. Gemma remembered that her dad’s brother, Uncle Ted, had helped restructure the Knox County debt, but she was still surprised to see a strip mall—containing a hair salon, a liquor store, a check-cashing place, and a local bank—sporting the name Ives.
It made sense. The Ives brothers loved nothing so much as ownership.
The trailer park was at the end of a long dirt road that badly needed paving. They went so slowly it felt as if they might simply be rolling in neutral. Gemma was itchy with anxiety, as if she were wearing a full-body wool sock. She saw no sign of Fortner or whoever he had sent to do his business. There were no other cars on the road, no strangers lurking around in the early morning shadows. Then again, she knew there wouldn’t be. People like Fortner worked fast and clean.
Most of the time, at least.
What if they were too late?
She wished for the millionth time that Lyra had called her, and wondered for the millionth time why she hadn’t. Gemma had told her to call first thing after their phone got set up, and had spent hours watching her cell phone, as if she could will it to ring through the pressure of her eyeballs.
Despite the grid of dusty, dirt-rutted streets, none of the trailers seemed to be in numerical order. Gemma’s father had said that they were in number 16; she assumed that the unnumbered trailer between lots 15 and 17 must be the one they were looking for. But then she spotted the plastic children’s toys scattered in the patchy yard. This wasn’t it—couldn’t be.
Still, they got out of the car, moving slowly, quietly, so they wouldn’t startle anyone. Gemma wasn’t in the mood for a showdown about trespassing—and besides, it was possible that even now they were being watched. Spiders had eight eyes, enough to see in all directions. But human spiders had hundreds, maybe thousands, more.
