Spiders were funny that way. They leapt first, and the web followed. It was a kind of biological faith, that demanded belief and then turned it real.
“It’s going to be okay,” Gemma said. “Trust me.” She didn’t know if it would. But she didn’t know it wouldn’t be either, and that, she thought, was what being human meant. You built your life into meaning, you transformed it into liquid faith, again and again, like a web; you did it blind, by instinct, because to not do it would be to stop living. And the darkness sieved through. It flowed and gathered and dropped, but it wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t real enough, to touch what you had made.
That was the true gift: to have a story that was still unfolding, like a thread unspooling, and as it did, this single thread separated light from dark, meaning from senselessness, hope from fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” she repeated. She put a hand on Pete’s chest, above his heart, and he put his hand on top of hers, so the rhythm of his heart passed through her palm and back to his. She heard, for a split second, the sound of his life and hers, drawn together along the string of an ancient instrument, and that string hummed with the sound of a thousand thousand other lives, and when she closed her eyes, she saw a spider buried deep underground, spinning music, pure music, for the world.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 29 of Lyra’s story.
PROLOGUE
Monday, May 16, 3:19 a.m.
They looked nervous.
“Jumpy, you know,” he would say, and each time he saw them clearly in his mind: both of them skinny, with complexions the color and texture of wet clay, and eyes like someone had knuckled holes in their faces when they were still wet. “Like they were on the run.”
Of course, plenty of the people who walked into the Four Crossings Motel looked nervous: it was that kind of place. And even if Guy’s mom, Cherree, was always telling him to turn away anyone with track marks or the jumpy look of a major addict, he knew they’d only bought the place because she’d wanted to cash in on the pill poppers and dopeheads, a whole new generation of druggies—suburban moms, and men still wearing their ties from the office, and thirtysomething dental hygienists—who needed a place to crash while they got high.
And then there were the usual cheaters and hookers and lowlifes who came in and out regularly. Guy even knew some of their names. He’d gotten a hand job from one of the working girls, Shawn, who wasn’t a girl at all, more like forty-seven. Up close, she’d smelled like barbecue potato chips.
He knew what people looked like when they were sleepless, desperate, guilty, and plain high out of their minds.
Gemma Ives. The girl’s ID was all messed up, warped like it had gone through the washing machine, and the picture was scratched. He could tell she’d lost weight, though, since the picture was taken—if it even was her in the picture. The guy didn’t have a license at all. He just wrote his name down in the register. It was all about covering your ass, Guy knew, if somebody flatlined in one of the rooms. They just needed to show due diligence. But their debit card matched the ID, and it worked, so he figured fuck it.
“One room, one night,” was all the girl had said. She kept looking over her shoulder, and every time the insects pinged against the glass, she jumped.
As if she were being watched.
As if she were being followed.
Two hundred and forty miles away, a different girl and a boy, both dressed in stolen clothing, both with a stack of stolen cash rubber-banded in their jeans, and their hair cropped so short it might recently have been shaved, slept together in the very last seat of a northbound Greyhound bus. Who knows what they were dreaming about? A sign announced they were coming up on Philadelphia, but they didn’t stir, and the bus didn’t stop, and they sailed on.
PART I
ONE
LYRA HAD STARTED COLLECTING THINGS. When she saw something she liked, she pocketed it, and usually by the end of the day she was weighty with the sloughed-off skin of someone else’s life: losing lottery tickets, Snapple bottle caps, ATM receipts, pens, chewed-up foil that came off the cheap bottles of wine sold down at Two Brothers Beer & Liquor.
In the privacy of her small room in the double-wide trailer gifted to them by Gemma’s father, which to Lyra, formerly known as 24, felt very luxurious, she shook out her new belongings on the comforter and tried to listen, tried to hear them speak to her of this new world and her place in it. Her old belongings had spoken: the bed at Haven had whispered, and the Invacare Snake Tubing asked questions, the snobby syringes had insulted her with their sharp little bite, and the long-nosed, greedy biopsy needles used for marrow extraction had always wanted gossip, more and more of it.
But these new objects told her nothing, spoke of nothing. Or maybe it was just that the outside world was so noisy she couldn’t hear.
She was no longer a human model. She was a she, not an it. But it was now, here, with a room of her own and photographs from her earliest childhood Scotch-taped to the walls, that she didn’t know who or what she was.
Here she could wake when she wanted and eat what she liked, although since she’d never prepared her own food, she and Caelum, who had been 72 until she named him, mostly subsisted on cans of soda and granola bars Rick bought from the grocery store. They did not know how to fry an egg. Rick taught her to use a can opener, but the microwave bothered her; its humming energy reminded her of Mr. I.
Caelum spent hours sitting cross-legged on the couch, watching whatever channel happened to be on when he first pressed the power button: news channels, movie channels, and his favorite, the Home Shopping Network. Lyra had learned to read. Caelum learned how to watch. He learned the world through the things it bought and sold.
He did not want to learn how to read.
There were sixty-two trailers in the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park, and the whole thing could have been slotted down comfortably in two of Haven’s wings. But to Lyra it seemed infinitely bigger, because it was unknown, because of all the things she’d never seen before: wind chimes and old Halloween decorations and cars on cinder blocks and pink plastic flamingos; lawn chairs and barbecues.