And now it was getting dark.
She began to shout for help, no longer caring who found her, wishing, now, she’d never run in the first place. She shouted until her voice broke and she couldn’t bear it anymore. No one came, anyway.
And then she saw, in the distance, deliverance: a stone house, a roof overgrown with green moss, but a house. No—more than one house. Three houses lumped next to one another, like faerie houses dropped by some miracle in the middle of the woods.
If she’d been less desperate, she would have noticed the shattered windows, the doors angled off their hinges, the wood rot, and seen it for a settlement no one had entered in years, possibly decades.
If she’d been less tired, she would have noticed the low circle of stones indicating an old sunken well, with only a flimsy covering of ancient wood to keep animals from falling in.
But she was desperate, and tired, and the woods were dark.
She tripped on the edge of the sunken well and saw, briefly, the small covering of ancient wood, like a trapdoor set in the ground. Then she crashed through it and tumbled down into the long, sleek mouth of a thirty-foot hole.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 21 of Lyra’s story.
PART III
TWENTY-TWO
AT ALMOST THE SAME TIME Gemma fell, Kristina and Geoffrey Ives arrived at a Bruinsville, Pennsylvania, police station, not ten miles from the old stone well in the middle of the Sequoia Falls Nature Preserve where their daughter now lay unconscious.
They had arrived in Lancaster County the night before, after one of Geoff’s many military contacts, Captain Agrawal, had signaled that Saperstein might have mistaken Gemma and Pete for the replicas they were pursuing, only to discover a calamity: an explosion at the private facility where Saperstein had been licking his wounds and trying, without success, to rally new financial support. Kristina refused to consider the possibility that Gemma might be among the dead bodies excavated from the wreckage. She wouldn’t even think it.
They were ushered by Captain Agrawal down a narrow hallway to the locked and windowless evidence room in the back. Kristina had to reach out a hand to steady herself against the file cabinets.
How had she ended up in a police station with her daughter missing and children turned to ashes? There seemed to be a gigantic hole in her life that she couldn’t bridge. She couldn’t remember her way across it.
A sudden swoon of terror darkened her vision, made her dizzy on her feet: she imagined they were bringing her inside to show her Gemma’s body, still and cold and lifeless, her lips dark as a bruise.
Years ago, she and Geoff had refused to accept the death of their only child. They had transgressed the natural order: they had taken their child back, after death had already claimed her.
She couldn’t shake the idea that death had come, now, to settle the score.
When the door opened and instead she saw Pete Rogers, bloodless and exhausted-looking and definitely alive, she almost cried out. He was sitting at a table wedged between the metal shelving, which had been cleared of everything but a few cardboard boxes—or maybe that was all the evidence of crime in this part of Lancaster County.? He was gripping a Styrofoam cup of what smelled like hot chocolate, and he had a blanket draped around his shoulders. The room was cold and extremely bleak, with a cement floor and exposed wire-encased lightbulbs.
“It’s the only room that locks besides the drunk tank,” Agrawal said, as if he knew what Kristina was thinking. “I wanted to be sure he had privacy.”
“Pete.” Kristina’s relief lasted only a second—fear grew almost immediately again inside her, a hard, cold metal thing that stuck in her throat. The night before, she’d gone instinctively for the Klonopin in her purse, only to find that suddenly her throat wouldn’t work to swallow. She literally could not get the pill down.
She hadn’t been this sober in years. She hadn’t been this afraid, either.
“Pete.” She went to him and knelt, taking his hands, which were cold, noting the bruised color of his eyelids and the capillaries broken across his cheeks and forehead. “Pete.”
He showed no sign of having heard her.
“He’s in shock,” Geoff said, as though it weren’t obvious.
“One of the troopers picked him up right on the shoulder of the turnpike a quarter of an hour ago, near the intersection of Route 72,” Agrawal said. “My guy nearly plowed him.”
“He needs a hospital,” Kristina said. She had a memory of seeing Pete, April, and Gemma laughing together at her birthday party, playing bocce barefoot on the lawn. Pete’s pants were rolled to the knees and Gemma had several paper cocktail umbrellas tucked behind her ear. She was laughing. Could that really have been only four days ago?
“We’ve got a team from Lancaster General on their way now,” Agrawal said. “I wanted to bring you in first. In case . . .” Kristina didn’t miss the look Captain Agrawal gave her husband.
“Gemma’s still out there.” Pete’s voice was so raw it hurt just to hear. It was as if he was speaking through a mouth full of thorns. He started to stand up, lost his balance, and sat down again. “I lost her. We have to find her.”
“Shhh.” She put a hand on his forehead, which was clammy with sweat. She smoothed back his hair. She had met his mother once—a cheerful, round-faced woman who’d arrived with paint still smudged on one cheek. She was a kindergarten teacher, she’d explained, and Kristina had immediately envied her warm, chaotic friendliness. “It’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”
He was grabbing the table as though he still worried he might fall down, even though he was sitting. “It was Calliope,” he said, his voice cracking over every syllable. “She must have had the whole thing planned from the start. Gemma tried to warn me and I didn’t listen. I didn’t believe her.” He was shaking. Kristina reached out and put a hand on his back, trying to rub some warmth into him. “There was so much blood. . . .”
Immediately, it was as if the cold had flowed into her body as well. “What—what do you mean?” Memories swept suddenly through her head, brightly awful, like dead leaves: Gemma’s veins threaded with tubes and needles, like some kind of alien plant; Gemma’s mouth leaking blood the first time she’d lost a tooth; the thick Y-shaped scar across her chest, so similar to the incision that morticians made after death.
“There were three of them,” Pete said. “One of them was just a kid.”