Ringer (Replica #2)
Lauren Oliver
DEDICATION
To the incredible staff of Glasstown Entertainment,
some of my favorite human beings,
for their support and inspiration:
Kamilla Benko, Lexa Hillyer, Adam Silvera,
Jessica Sit, Alexa Wejko, and Lynley Bird
A NOTE FROM LAUREN OLIVER
Dear Reader, I’m thrilled to bring you Ringer, the conclusion to the stories of Lyra and Gemma that began with Replica. As with Replica, Ringer is really two books in one and can be read in several different ways. The structure is designed to invite exploration and to promote unique reading experiences, in keeping with some of the book’s themes: fluid perception and unstable reality; the way our lives both touch other people’s and are changed by our contact with others; and the complex web of cause and effect in which we are all bound together. Both Lyra and Gemma must go on journeys in this book, and I hope that the reading experience will be, for you, a kind of journey.
Look for the cues at the end of each chapter to guide you. If you would like to read Lyra’s story or Gemma’s story in its entirety before switching perspectives, simply read as you normally would, swiping to continue at the end of each chapter. If, however, you want to read Lyra and Gemma’s stories in alternating chapters, the links at the end of each chapter will move you back and forth and allow you to pick up at any point from where you last left off, in either girl’s story.
However you choose to read, I hope you have loved reading Lyra and Gemma’s stories as much as I loved writing them.
Best regards, Lauren Oliver
PROLOGUE
Sunday, May 15, 7:11 a.m.
Their hands were cuffed and gags were winched behind their teeth. They were half lifted, half shoved into the back of an unmarked van. It felt like they’d stumbled into a Law & Order episode, but without a soundtrack to know when the scene was going to end.
She hadn’t managed to scream. She’d been too shocked. In the distance, the constant thrum of traffic on I-40 sounded almost like water. Birds twittered mindlessly in the trees. She kept thinking someone must have seen, someone would call for help, someone would come.
No one came.
But these backwater Tennessee roads were empty even at the busiest times. Seven in the morning on a Sunday, there was no one on the road; it was too early even for the church crowd.
No one but the men in the van, with their hands slick as machine-gun barrels and their orders to obey.
At least the men hadn’t shoved their heads into burlap sacks. She’d seen a movie like that once, where a rich woman kidnapped for ransom was placed in a sack and had inhaled fibers and was asphyxiated, and then the criminals had to figure out how to dump the body and conceal the crime.
Maybe she, too, had been kidnapped for ransom.
But she knew, deep down, that she’d been taken for a different reason entirely.
It was because of Haven.
It was because they’d escaped.
She tried to listen, to keep track of where they were heading as the van picked up speed, bumping them down the road. The potholes threw them so high before slamming them down again that tears came to her eyes when her tailbone hit the van floor.
The ride smoothed out once they were on the highway. It was thunderously loud, like huddling under the bleachers while a homecoming crowd drummed their feet in unison. She felt like a slab of bacon stuck in somebody’s hold. With no sunlight, she quickly lost track of time. Her throat was sore and it was difficult to swallow. The fibers from whatever they’d gagged her with tickled her nose and tonsils. It tasted like a sock.
Maybe they’d bought a pack especially for this purpose.
Her wrists hurt. She wondered whether handcuffs came in extra large, for heavier inmates, the way that condoms came in Magnums, which she had learned only last week, when April gave her a box as a joke. For your very first boyfriend.
Your boyfriend.
His chest was moving fast, as if he was having trouble breathing. His eyes were closed and he’d scooted back against the trunk. His head knocked against the doors every time they hit a bump.
She nudged his ankle with a foot to make him look at her. There was a small bit of blood at his temple where one of the men had hit him, and looking at it made her queasy. She counted the freckles on his nose. She loved the freckles on his nose.
She loved him, and hadn’t known it until that instant, in the back of the van, with cuffs chafing the skin off her wrist and blood moving slowly toward his eyebrow.
She tried to tell him that it would be okay—wordlessly, with her eyes, with noises she made in the back of her throat. But he just shook his head, and she knew he hadn’t understood, and wouldn’t have believed her, anyway.
PART I
ONE
“PICK,” APRIL SAID, AND THEN leaned over to jab Gemma with a finger. “Come on. It doesn’t work if you don’t pick.”
“Left,” Gemma said.
With a flourish, April revealed the bag of chips in her left hand: jalape?o-cheddar flavored. “Sucker,” she said, sliding the chips across the table to Gemma. “Maybe if you’d been paying attention . . .” She produced a second bag of chips, salt and vinegar, Gemma’s favorite, and opened it with her teeth. She offered the bag to Gemma. “Good thing I’m so nice.”
This was a tradition dating from midway through freshman year, when the school had for whatever reason begun stocking various one-off and weird chip flavors—probably, April theorized, because they got them on the cheap in discount variety packs. They’d made a game of picking blind—one good bag, one bad—even though they always split the salt and vinegar anyway.
But Gemma wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t been hungry in weeks, it seemed, not since spring break and Haven and Lyra and Caelum. Before, she’d always been hungry, even if she didn’t like to eat in front of other people. Now everything tasted like dust, or the hard bitter grit of medicine accidentally crunched between the teeth. Every bite was borrowed—no, stolen—from the girl who should have come before.
She, Gemma, wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Hey. Do I have to get you a shock collar or something?” April’s voice was light, but she wasn’t smiling.
Gemma reached over and took a chip, just to make April feel better. Across the cafeteria, the Bollard twins were huddled over the same phone, sharing a pair of headphones, obviously watching a video. Brandon Bollard was actually smiling, although he didn’t seem to know how to do it correctly—he was kind of just baring his teeth.
“Did you know some twins can communicate telepathically?” Gemma asked suddenly.
April sighed so heavily her new bangs fluttered. “That’s not true.”
“It is,” Gemma said. “They have their own languages and stuff.”