Page 92 of Ringer
Except that Lyra didn’t feel sorry for Calliope, not one bit.
“I thought you were dead,” Calliope said. Because of the way her head was angled, her voice was distorted. It was a terrible version of Gemma’s voice: it was the same 15 percent wrong as the rest of Calliope.
Lyra ignored that. She knew Calliope likely meant that she thought Lyra had died on the marshes, but she couldn’t help but feel, too, that Calliope had seen immediately how little time she had left, that the disease was starting to show on her skin. “Where’s Gemma?” she said.
“I don’t know any Gemma,” Calliope said, and Caelum gave her a nudge with his knee. Her tongue appeared quickly to wet her lower lip. She was nervous, and Lyra was glad. “I don’t know where she is.”
Lyra didn’t know whether to believe her, but it didn’t matter, anyway. Calliope would never tell her the truth.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked. “You killed that family. You left Gemma to take the blame.”
“I didn’t know what would happen,” Calliope said. Then: “Why do you care, anyway?”
“Gemma’s my friend,” Lyra said.
Calliope’s pupil was so large it seemed to swallow all the color in her eye. “Friend,” she said, and the rain suddenlychanged its pattern through the leaves, creating a ripple sound like laughter. “You were always one of the dumb ones. They’ll kill you. You know that, right? They’re all the same. They’ll pretend to help you and then they’ll hurt you, again and again, just like they did at Haven.”
Lyra had always felt anger as a kind of heat burning through her. But now she was freezing cold. As if from the grip of the gun her whole body was turning to metal very slowly. Calliope had known the truth about Haven, just like Caelum had. But not Lyra.
Was it true, then? Was she really just stupid?
Was she being stupid now?
“Let me go,” Calliope said. “You’re not going to kill me. So let me go.”
“Not until you tell me why,” Lyra said. The trees chittered under the pressure of the rain. They threw the question back at her, and made it sound ridiculous.
“Cassiopeia was dead,” she said. “Number six was dead. Numbers nine and ten, too. They never made it out of the airport. And number eight doesn’t count. Even if she did escape, she couldn’t last long.” Calliope pulled her mouth into a smile, exposing an incisor tooth, graying and sharp. “I wanted to be the only one.”
Lyra closed her eyes. She stood and listened and thought of her whole life like a single point of rain, falling down into nothingness. Calliope was still talking, wheedlingnow, sounding young and afraid. But Lyra could barely hear her.Let me go, Lyra. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was so scared.It was the strangest thing, as if Calliope wasn’t talking at all, as if Lyra was just remembering something she’d said years earlier.
She thought of Detective Reinhardt and Gemma lost forever, and those people on the farm, lying in one another’s blood. Detective Reinhardt had said that some people could wear faces, could slip them on like masks.
Lyra opened her eyes. “Do you remember the baby bird that flew into the glass?” she asked. Funnily enough, she felt calm. “It flew into the glass and broke a wing. I thought I could nurse it.”
Calliope frowned. “No,” she said. But Lyra could tell she was lying.
She could see it so clearly in her mind: the way its tufted feathers fluttered with every breath, the shuttering of its tiny beak, how scared it was.
“You stepped on its head to kill it,” Lyra said. The barrel of Detective Reinhardt’s gun was slick and wet but she felt it, slowly, warming in her hand. “You said it was the right thing to do, because of how it was broken. Because there was no hope of fixing it.”
Calliope went very still. The whole world went still. Even the rain let up momentarily and seemed to gasp midair, deprived even of the will or energy to fall. Calliope’sfear smelled like something chemical. Lyra saw her calculating: right answer, wrong answer.
“I don’t remember,” Calliope said finally, and all the rain unfroze, all of it at once hurtled down fast and thick to break apart, as if trying to blow itself back into elements purer than what it had become. The feeling came back to Lyra’s hand, warmed her fingers and wrist and arm as she raised the gun. It spread down through her heart, opening and closing like the wings of a bird in her chest.
“Funny,” she said. “I never forgot.”
She didn’t need more than one shot, but she fired three anyway, just to be sure.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 25 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-SIX
THE WARMTH FLOWED AWAY FROM her as quickly as it had come. She didn’t feel sorry, or sad. She didn’t feel anything at all. The bullets had ruined Calliope’s face, and forever destroyed her resemblance to Gemma. Therewouldbe only one now: the right one. Still, she wasn’t sure whether she had done the right thing, or why she felt so little. Maybe there really was something wrong with her—with all of them.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked suddenly. She was too afraid to meet Caelum’s eyes, so she stared instead at the leaves turning to pulp in the rain.
“I don’t know,” he answered. Caelum was always honest. It was one of the things she loved about him.
