Where was she now? Where had she gone? Gemma was freezing, gripped by fear. In the distance, the woods rippled as a breeze passed through the trees. Was someone shouting? She couldn’t think. She thought she heard voices crying out.
“We can’t stay here,” she said, as Pete had. But neither of them moved. It was like a nightmare. Too bright, too warm, too empty.
Voices. She definitely heard voices now, not the phantoms but real people. In the distance a long trail of orange dust unfurled, and then she saw horse carts, three of them, and a cluster of people. They were coming fast, and for a moment she felt nothing but relief. They were saved.
Pete had her shoulders. He shook her, and her teeth jumped together. “You need to run. Don’t you understand? We can’t be here. They can’t find you here.”
“What are you talking about?” Her thoughts were still frozen into uselessness. The wagons were closer now. The ground shivered under the vibration of so many hooves. She could make out the men inside them, all men, all dressed in black, all shouting. There was a boy, too, maybe thirteen or fourteen. He was standing, balancing like a sailor on a rolling sea deck, scouting for sure. He was pointing.
“Listen to me, Gemma.” Pete was shouting, but she couldn’t hear him properly.
“Run, Gemma. Listen to me. You gotta move.”
She’d already lifted a hand to wave back, to hail the people in the wagon, because they were waving too, because the boy in front, the one who reminded her of a sailor, was pointing at her.
Pointing, shouting. Angry.
And suddenly she remembered what Calliope had said:
There was a male. He ran off when he saw me.
The cooled coffee with milk congealing into a pale skin on its surface. Half-eaten toast.
You can be my replica.
The men were pouring down off the wagons now, shouting, as the boy still stood with a finger raised, trembling and white-faced with fury, and finally Gemma heard him over the rattling of her heart, over the fear that had her in its grip.
“That’s her,” he was saying. He had the beginnings of a beard, dark and patchy, and a long, narrow face, but it was his eyes that struck her. They were large and terrible, like holes that had been gouged into his face. “That’s her. That one. That’s her.”
Pete shoved her. The shock of pain when she stepped on her ankle jolted her into her body, into understanding: Calliope had killed people and Calliope had disappeared and Gemma, her replica, would be her substitute. “Run.”
They were swarming toward her, jackets flapping in the wind like capes, so she was reminded of insects, of biblical locusts coming down to bring punishment.
Finally, Gemma ran.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 20 of Lyra’s story.
TWENTY-ONE
SHE LOST SIGHT OF PETE almost immediately.
Pain darkened her vision every time she put weight on her left ankle, and her ankle kept folding, rolling her down to her hands and knees. She lost one sandal. She fell, got up, fell, got up. She could hear the men shouting behind her, tunneling toward her like a wave, but she was too afraid to look and see how close they were.
She was choking on her own spit, blind with pain and panic. Down, up again. In the fields the cows watched her lazily, flicking their tails. The woods were impossibly far. She kept running anyway, up and down the swells of land, falling and climbing again to her feet, swallowing her snot.
Then she had crossed the expanse of green and hit the fence, running into it with hardly a break in her step, simply plunging over it, toppling, rolling on her shoulder and then hauling herself again to her feet, sheltered in the sudden shadows, ping-ponging from tree to tree, using her good hand. She tripped and slid down a steep embankment, through a mulch of rotting tree bark: at the bottom of the slope, an enormous felled tree wheeled its roots to the sky. An overhanging lip of earth made a kind of tunnel, and she saw at once this was her only chance: to hide, to wait, to hope that the men missed her. She scuttled backward into the soft rot of this long, damp space. The air smelled like moisture, pulped leaves, and decay.
She waited, shivering, her arms around her knees, listening to the distant shouting of her pursuers. At one point they seemed to be almost directly on top of her, and fear turned her stomach to liquid. But then they passed on.
She lost track of time. Her terror turned every second into a swampy hour, a long agony of waiting. Finally, she realized the woods were quiet. She couldn’t hear anyone shouting.
She hadn’t heard anyone shout in a long time.
Carefully, she shimmied out of her hiding place, still pausing every few breaths to listen for footsteps or the sound of voices. Nothing. Now that her panic had eased up, the pain in her ankle had redoubled. It took her twenty minutes to work her way up the slope she’d tumbled down in seconds.
At the top of the embankment she stood, trying to catch her breath, waving away a cloud of gnats that rose in a swarm. Afternoon sunlight made elegant angles through the trees. That meant hours had passed. She hoped the men who were after her had given up.
She wondered what had happened to Calliope—whether she, too, had made her escape through the woods.
She thought she remembered which direction she’d come from. She would have to go the opposite way, or risk ending up right where she started. If this was farmland, she comforted herself with the idea that she would have to reach another farm eventually—preferably one wired for the twenty-first century, where no one believed that she was a murderer. Even better, she might find a road full of traffic, full of normal people, soccer moms and dentists and teenage drivers with both hands on the wheel.
She swore then that if she ever made it home she would never complain, ever, about being bored. She wanted to be bored every day of her natural life. She wanted to die of boredom, literally.
So she went on, hobbling, limping, leaning heavily on a stick she fished out from the underbrush. She had to stop and rewrap her ankle twice, clumsily because she had only one hand, because she was shaking so hard, and the skin was so enormously puffy it frightened her. Miles of land, tight-knit woods of oak and maple and birch, dappled sun and the sky held at bay by the canopy of branches, the occasional flash of a deer bounding off in the distance, broken stone foundations that might have existed since the days of Paul Revere. She kept telling herself there had to be a road soon, soon, soon.
The afternoon lengthened. The shadows turned the color of a bruise. More than once, she imagined she heard the noise of traffic—there, over that ridge, just behind that stand of trees, she could swear she heard a horn blowing. She was desperately thirsty, and her head hurt. She’d been crying for an hour without realizing it, and squinting hard to try to make treetops into rooftops or telephone poles. In the thickening shadows, she could almost believe it. She’d lost her second sandal too, without realizing it.