“You’re making a big mistake.” Gemma’s voice cracked. How many hours had it been since she’d had anything to drink? “Call my dad. Call him.”
“We should have left the gags on,” the man holding Pete muttered. He nudged Pete toward the stairs. Unexpectedly, Pete broke loose, reeling like a drunk. His hands were still bound, but he cracked his head into the man’s jaw; Gemma heard the impact of it, a hollow sound.
Suddenly, everyone was shouting. Gemma screamed as both soldiers launched for Pete at once.
“Don’t hurt him! Please. Please.” She was too scared even to cry. For a second, she lost sight of him in the shuffle of human bodies. One of the soldiers accidentally caught her with an elbow and she bit down on her tongue.
“Easy, easy, easy.” The two soldiers hauled Pete to his feet, pinning him between them. Still, he struggled to break loose. Gemma had never seen him look the way he did then, and she thought randomly of a video April had once shown her during her vegetarian phase: how fighting dogs were burned with cigarettes, beaten with sticks, until they were so angry and desperate they would tear each other up, actually tear each other into pieces.
The dogs in the video knew they were going to die, and that was what made them fight. They had nothing to live for.
“Let go of me.” Pete’s face was so twisted with raw anger, even Gemma was afraid of him. “Get your fucking hands off me.”
“You better tell your boyfriend to calm down.” The man who’d been holding Pete was massaging his jawbone. He glared at Gemma. “Or he’s going to get his head blown off.”
“Please.” Gemma’s voice cracked. “Please, Pete.” At the sound of her voice, he finally went still.
“Good boy,” one of the soldiers said. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
Neither Gemma nor Pete bothered pointing out that that was very hard to believe.
“Take him up,” the man said, still rubbing his jaw and looking pissed about it.
This made Pete go wild again. “Let me stay with her.” But the soldiers pivoted him, with difficulty, toward the stairs. “Let me stay with her. Please.”
Gemma let herself cry then. She couldn’t help it. She felt as if she were watching Pete through the wrong end of a telescope, getting smaller and smaller, though he was only a few feet away.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she kept repeating, even as his voice splintered into echoes and then grew fainter, even though it was obviously not okay, nothing was okay, nothing would be okay ever again.
“Please.” She tried one last time to make them listen. “Please,” she said. “I’m telling you the truth. Geoffrey Ives is my father. Ask Dr. Saperstein, ask anybody—”
But she went silent as, down the hall, a door opened and spilled a gut of light.
“What’s all the shouting for?” A woman’s voice, low and surprisingly warm, floated out to them. For a moment, she was silhouetted in the light. As she came forward, Gemma experienced a shock of displacement: the woman looked like a soccer mom, like one of Kristina’s lunch crew. She was even wearing yoga pants.
“Nothing.” The man finally quit massaging his jaw and straightened up. “Is Saperstein back?”
The yogi shook her head. “Tuesday,” she said.
Gemma’s mouth tasted like plaster, like the soft crumble of a pill. Saperstein knew her father. She’d been counting on the fact that he, at least, would be able to help. She’d comforted herself with the idea that wherever she was being taken, Saperstein would be there.
What would happen to her, and to Pete, before Tuesday when he returned?
“He didn’t go to Penn after all, did he?”
“No. Washington.” The yogi’s eyes swept Gemma. “Where’d you find her?”
“Where we were supposed to.” Gemma’s captor was squeezing her arm so tightly, Gemma could feel her fingernails. “She says it was all a big mistake. She says she doesn’t belong here.”
“Is that right?” The yogi was still watching Gemma curiously—not meanly, not with disgust or contempt, but with true curiosity. “Well, someone’s been feeding her, at least.”
A fist of hatred tightened in Gemma’s stomach. “I’m not lying,” she said. “I can prove it. Call Saperstein. Ask him yourself.”
Gemma couldn’t tell whether the yogi woman was even listening. She only looked puzzled, as if Gemma were speaking in a different language. After a moment, she withdrew, and Gemma heard the murmur of distant voices: she was speaking to people out of sight. Gemma was dizzy with fear. What was she doing?
A minute later, several people wearing medical scrubs flowed down the hall and moved up the stairs without acknowledging either Gemma or the man and woman who’d brought them. They had the same look as all medical staff: harried, professional, too busy to be bothered. The colossal, patchwork strangeness of it all—the yoga pants and the doctors’ scrubs and the soldiers with assault rifles and the reek of sweat—made a sudden rise of hysteria lift in Gemma’s chest.
The woman in yoga pants returned, turning her face to the ceiling as if listening to the pattern of footsteps above them.
“Should I take her up?” Gemma’s captor asked, and she shook her head.
“In a second. I’m going to bring them down first.”
“Bring who down?” Gemma blurted out.
The woman didn’t answer right away. Just then, the sound of footsteps above them grew louder. The door at the top of the landing creaked open, and the doctors, or nurses, or whatever they were, returned.
They had brought along three Gemmas.
Three Gemmas crowded the stairwell. Three Gemmas gazed down at her. Three Gemmas, scalps shaved clean, wearing filthy T-shirts and pants that bagged from the hollows of their hipbones, chittered like small mice, as if at a fun-house reflection.
Gemma lost her breath. A hole opened up beneath her feet. She dropped straight through the floor.
Dimly, she was aware that the woman in yoga pants had turned at last to address her. “My proof,” she said simply.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 8 of Lyra’s story.
NINE
FINALLY, GEMMA WAS ESCORTED UPSTAIRS. The airport terminal was crawling with military personnel, but also people in medical scrubs, rendered identical by their dirty hair and look of shared exhaustion. One woman dressed in a pantsuit, who resembled a fashion mannequin on Fifth Avenue, kept massaging her forehead with perfectly manicured fingers. Gemma didn’t even want to know what government agency she’d crawled out of.
The airport was dizzying not so much because of its size, but because of its regularity, the identical halls stripped of furniture, counters, vendors, arrivals screens. There were very few working lights, and new ribs of plywood divided room from room. The ceiling panels were missing.