“Gemma, please. That came out all wrong.” He looked truly upset but she didn’t care, didn’t feel sorry for him at all. “You know I didn’t mean . . .” When again she stepped away from him, he let his hand hover there for a second. “What I meant was I can’t go back. I can’t just rewind. Do you understand?” His voice was climbing registers, clawing up toward a point of panic. She saw him bloated by misery, choking on its fumes. “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen, I can’t unknow what I know. I can’t.”
“Keep your voice down,” she said. Something really was burning. She wasn’t imagining it. She could smell smoke now, for sure. Confusedly she thought Calliope must be smoking. But that was crazy—Calliope was still smiling her secret smile, still absorbed in her own invisible kingdom—and besides, the smell was too strong for that.
Pete hadn’t heard or didn’t care. He was talking louder than ever, as if he weren’t so much speaking the words as letting them rattle through him. “I can’t walk out of here and know that these people—people, Gemma, not experiments, not test subjects, human beings—are going to die. I—”
But then he broke off again, and she knew that he, too, had felt the change: the approach of danger that, like a storm, sent invisible messages ahead.
Just as suddenly as clouds might vault from the horizon, Gemma found the source of tension, grabbed it, and tracked it to its source. Calliope was laughing.
Gemma remembered going with her parents to their house in the Outer Banks one summer and hearing coyotes shrieking in the night. They laughed when they killed, her father told her later, but she would have known anyway. It was cruelty set to music: it wasn’t even the pleasure of the kill. It was the pleasure of pain, the pleasure of watching small things die slowly.
And now, here, in this bathroom in an old airport that might as well have been hell on earth, Calliope laughed just like that.
“You’re wrong,” Calliope said, and her words still carried the echo of something old and predatory and hungry. “You mixed it all up. You got it backward.” She was still standing there with her head tilted, still staring vaguely at the ceiling. But by then, of course, Gemma knew. She wasn’t staring. She was listening. And by then Gemma was listening, too: the shouts, the sharp punctuated cries, and footsteps vibrated the floor.
The stinging in Gemma’s throat had been real. Smoke was texturing the air, giving it the appearance of a solid, and somewhere solid matter burned, and transformed to smoke.
“What are you talking about?” Pete asked, and Gemma could hear that he, too, was afraid.
“You said we would die. You said you don’t want to leave us.” She shook her head. She was smiling in a way that Gemma had never seen before. It was as if her smile was actually consuming her face backward, trying to reveal her skull. “But you said it backward. The us won’t die.” She bit her lip, and Gemma tripped over the image of her own habit, her own nervous way of correcting herself. “We won’t die.”
In Gemma’s head, she saw smoke trails plumed over Haven, saw men with rifles, working in the rubble; she saw fireworks leave tentacle trails of smoke across a bloody dawn sky. Crack. Crack. Crack. But these weren’t fireworks. They were bullets that cracked sound in two when they leapt, explosively, from their long slick barrels. They were bullets that made a lot of noise and then killed silently.
People were screaming.
“What’s happening?” Gemma asked. Her voice sounded like it was coming to her from the other side of a tunnel.
Calliope finally looked at Gemma. She was radiant. And in that split second, Gemma saw that both Pete and Dr. Saperstein were wrong. Calliope wasn’t an animal, and she wasn’t a human, either. She was something darker and older and far more dangerous, she was something deeper—a compression of matter and space, a possibility collapsed into the narrowest, narrowest place. Being, urge, energy—emotionless, unthinking, unfeeling—funneled so deep, for so long, that it became an explosion. She was a black hole that could take a planet apart forever, in endless slow motion.
“It’s starting,” she said, and reached up to touch Gemma’s face. Her fingers smelled like metal.
Her fingers smelled like blood.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 15 of Lyra’s story.
SIXTEEN
THEN A BULLET BLASTED THROUGH the bathroom door, ricocheted off the counter, and blew the pinkie finger off Gemma’s left hand.
It was the craziest thing. One second she had five fingers, and the next, her pinkie was missing and blood had patterned the linoleum. And yet at first she knew it had happened only because of how Pete began to shout. For a long, watery second she floated somewhere outside her body, and observed the blood and the missing finger and the raw exposed muscle of her hand with a kind of detached curiosity.
And then the pain came, like a gigantic rubber band that snapped her back into the bathroom, into her body. It was pain like nothing she’d ever known, like the kind of high vibration that could shatter glass, like a full-body flu that burned even in your bones. She couldn’t even scream. She couldn’t try and stop the bleeding, couldn’t move, could only stand there, staring like an idiot, as the blood kept pooling at her feet.
Somehow she ended up on the floor. She wasn’t sure whether time had leapt forward or she’d simply, for a half second, lost consciousness. She no longer had the strength to stand up.
All this happened in three seconds, maybe quicker. When she did finally speak, she could only say, “My finger,” over and over. By then Pete had found a roll of toilet paper—from God knows where, the girls’ room never had any—and he was frantically unwinding it, half the roll at one go, and packing it against the wound. The pressure triggered a new surge of pain and brought her stomach into her mouth.
He wrapped a fist around her hand to stanch the bleeding. It hurt so much she wanted to pull away, to yell at him to stop, but the pain had her in a chokehold now, and she couldn’t.
“It’s okay, Gem, you’re going to be okay,” Pete kept saying. He looked as if he was going to cry. “Deep breaths, you’re going to be fine, I know it hurts, but you’re going to be okay. . . .”