As if they were miles away from anyone.
It felt to her that they were in the open forever, inching across that bleak expanse of gray pavement, with the painted silhouettes of old parking spaces still faintly visible and bodies flung at intervals facedown on the concrete. But finally they were at the woods, which would hold them and hide them: and at the far end of the woods would be roads, and gas stations, and telephone wires, and help.
Then an explosion made waves of sound that made the ground shudder and vibrated in Gemma’s teeth as she turned around. A portion of the roof had collapsed, and flames shot suddenly to the sky, illuminating a low-hanging covering of red-tinged cloud, before retreating again. Gemma and Pete stood stunned, watching the last of what had once been science’s greatest experiment consuming itself.
Only then did Gemma see Calliope a short distance away, standing next to a sedan leaning on a flat tire, windshield shattered. It had obviously been heading for the gate. Gemma couldn’t see Calliope’s face, but she was strangely immobile, as if something inside the car fascinated her. And for whatever reason Gemma found herself backtracking, limping on her injured ankle. Forever afterward she couldn’t have said why she was compelled to the window of that sedan, only that she was.
When she was still twenty feet away from the car, Calliope leaned in through the open window. Gemma couldn’t see what she was doing, but she thought she heard a shout. This, too, she couldn’t absolutely swear to afterward.
By the time Calliope withdrew, Gemma had come up beside her. It was brighter now: the burning airport had created an artificial dawn. When Calliope turned, Gemma nearly screamed: her hands, her wrists, her shirt, all of it was soaked in blood.
“I tried to help him,” Calliope said quickly. “It was too late.”
For a moment, Gemma couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing: a confusion of glass and blood and steel, the horrible staring face, and the metal finger jointed to its forehead. It looked like one of the cubist paintings her father collected, a nonsense-jumble of shapes.
Then, in an instant, she understood: the blood leaking from his mouth, the air bag pinning him to his seat, a steel rod that must have rocketed from the building just before the roof collapsed, whipped through the windshield, and punctured Dr. Saperstein between the eyes. His glasses were gone. In death he looked suprised, and vaguely puzzled, as if he’d come across an unexpected turn in a familiar road.
“Poor Dr. Saperstein,” Calliope whispered, and almost sounded as if she meant it. What had she been doing when she leaned into the car? Why was she so covered in blood?
Gemma turned to look at her. Calliope’s face rapidly shuttered into an expression of disgust. Like a mirror, it rearranged itself to reflect back what it saw. It was very fast and extremely convincing, but Gemma had caught her too early, had seen the truth nesting like an insect beneath her skin.
Of course, that was the problem with simulations. They were never exactly like the real thing.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Lyra’s story.
EIGHTEEN
GEMMA COULDN’T HAVE SAID HOW far they walked that night looking for a road—miles, maybe, or maybe no distance at all, turning circles in the pitch-dark. They had no water, no flashlight, no matches, no way of getting food and shelter. They had managed to stop her bleeding, and Pete had bundled her hand tightly by rebandaging her fist as best he could with his T-shirt, already soaked with her blood. Still, she could easily get an infection, if they didn’t die of hunger or thirst first, or get eaten by wild hogs or wolves or bears or whatever might be prowling in the woods.
Finally, they were forced to stop. Gemma’s ankle was so swollen she could hardly put weight on it.
They slept sitting up between the thick roots of an oak tree. It was still raining. The ground was wet and cold. Gemma leaned against Pete to keep him warm. He had no shirt. She expected to have nightmares, but instead sleep came to her like the numbing cold of anesthesia: she dropped.
It seemed to her that only a few minutes passed before she woke again, and her dreams—liquid nightmares of dark-beaked birds, sticky with blood—scattered sleekly into memory. Sometime in the night, Pete had moved: he was now curled on the ground like a sleeping animal, his hair lifted by a light breeze.
Calliope was gone.
Gemma’s hand was full of a throbbing pain, as if pressure was building up beneath her skin. It took a moment to remember what had happened—her finger, gone. The bullet that had shaved off her finger, the smoke-filled bathroom, the escape. Dr. Saperstein, dead. The replicas, escaped.
And yet the birds were twittering in the trees and shafts of sunlight pinwheeled between branches budding with the pale-green leaves of late spring, and the world was intact.
She let herself cry a little, turning her face into the crook of her arm to muffle the sound. She was cold, and exhausted, and her throat, raw and swollen from all the smoke she’d inhaled, hurt when she swallowed. She was hungry. They’d crawled through a slick of blood and jumped from a second-story window to escape a torpedo of flame, and she cried because she would have killed for some cornflakes, for french toast with butter.
But she was quickly cried out. She kept hearing her father’s voice: No one ever solved a single problem by shedding tears about it. It was yet another of his master-of-the-universe pronouncements, like, the world is full of sheep and lions, and I know which I’d rather be, but in this case it was probably true. They were out of that awful place, at least, and she knew there must be something nearby—why build an airport in the middle of nowhere? Besides, there had been sandwiches brought in, and coffee. They just had to pick a direction and stick with it.
Pete turned over, muttering in his sleep. His lips were purple. His skin looked so pale, so fragile, like tissue paper, and she was suddenly terrified for him.
“Pete.” She leaned over and touched his face. “Pete, wake up.” She was reassured when he opened his eyes almost immediately.
“Is it time to go to school?” His voice cracked but he managed to smile. Gemma found herself laughing. If she was going to die, she was glad that Pete was with her. He sat up slowly. “How’s your hand?”
“It’s fine,” she said, and pulled away when he tried to take it into his lap. She was too afraid to see how bad it was. “Calliope’s gone.”