The girl stood up. She was skinny, though not as thin as Lyra, and wearing low-waisted shorts and a shirt that showed off her stomach. She had a birthmark that made a portion of her face darker than the rest. Lyra had once seen something similar, on one of the infants in the Yellow crop before they died in the Postnatal wing.
“My friend Yara thinks you’re a bitch,” the girl said calmly, exhaling again. “Cuz you never talk or say hi to anyone. But I don’t think you’re a bitch. I think you’re just scared. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re scared because you came from somewhere else and never expected to end up here, and now you’re wondering if you’ll ever get out.”
Once again, Lyra said nothing. She didn’t know what a bitch was, although she thought, years ago, she might have heard the word—something to do with Nurse Em, one of the other staff members complaining about her.
“So?” The girl’s eyes were a dark, rich color that reminded Lyra of the mud along the banks in the marshes, teeming with invisible life. “Who’s right? Me or Yara?”
“Neither,” Lyra said. She was startled by the way her voice rolled across the short distance between them. Even though it had been weeks since she’d left Haven, she wasn’t in the habit of speaking. When Caelum came out with her at night, or when he snuck into her room and slid into bed beside her, they rarely spoke out loud. They breathed and touched, communicating through language of the body: pressure and touch, tension and release. “I never thought I’d end up here. I didn’t know there was a here to end up. But I’m not worried about getting out. This is out.” She stopped herself from saying anything she shouldn’t.
To Lyra’s surprise, the girl smiled. “I knew you weren’t as dumb as you looked. Half the people round here could double for shitbricks, so you never know. I’m Raina. What’s your name?”
Lyra almost said twenty-four. Rick always called her Brandy Nicole. But she had lost so many things in her life; she wasn’t ready to lose her name, too, and the memory of the woman who’d given it to her.
“Lyra,” she said.
Raina smiled. “You drop out of school or something?”
Lyra didn’t know how to answer.
“School’s dumb anyways,” Raina said. “I finished last year and look at me now, on the nine-to-five shift at Fantasia.” She tilted her head and Lyra thought of the funny, knob-kneed birds that used to scuttle through the gardens at Haven, looking for crabs as small as the fingernails of the infants in Postnatal. The only part of her that wasn’t skinny was her stomach, which had the faintest swell, as if there were a tiny fist inside of it. “You want a Coke?”
Lyra almost said no.
But instead, almost accidentally, she said yes.
Lyra was with Raina, and then she was home, and she couldn’t remember anything that had happened in between. She’d obviously fallen down. Her palms stung and there were flecks of gravel in her skin. Her knee was bleeding.
It was happening more frequently now, these jump cuts in her mind. She knew that what they’d done to her at Haven, what they’d grown in her, was to blame, and remembered that Gemma had said prions made holes grow in the brain, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
That was exactly what it felt like: like holes, and hours of her life simply dropped through them.
Rick’s car, tawny with dust, was parked in front of lot 16, and the lightning bugs were up, as well as swarms of no-see-ums that rose in dark clouds. She heard raised voices as she came up the porch steps, but it wasn’t until she was standing inside, under the bright overhead lights on a secondhand Welcome Home mat, that she saw Caelum and Rick had been fighting. Their last words slotted belatedly up to her consciousness.
It’s enough now. You can’t stay here if you don’t find a way to help.
Both of them turned to look at her. Caelum she couldn’t read. But Rick’s eyes were raw, and his expression she knew from the youngest researchers at Haven whenever they accidentally messed up an IV and blood began to spurt or the replicas cried out: guilt.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Rick said quickly. Patches of scalp showed through his hair, shiny and bright red. “Nothing. Just having a family talk, that’s all.”
“You’re not family,” Caelum said. “You said so yourself.”
Rick stared at him for a long minute. Then he shook himself, like a dog, and moved for the door.
“I’m working a double,” he said. “I just came back for a bite. I’ll be home later tonight.” He stopped in front of her and reached out two fingers to touch her shoulders. This was a gesture they’d agreed on, an expression of affection she could tolerate. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes,” Lyra said. She knew he wanted more from her but wasn’t sure what or how to give it to him. Sometimes Lyra tried to see herself in his nose and jaw and smile, tried to climb down a rope of feelings to get to one that made sense, but he still looked like a stranger, and felt like one, too. He had given her photographs from when she was a baby, but they felt like images from someone else’s life.
“Okay. Good. Okay.” He dropped his hand. The noise was loud in the quiet. Then he was gone, leaving Caelum and Lyra alone.
The room smelled faintly sour, as it always did. Another thing Lyra had not gotten used to was the dirt in the corners and the insects that tracked behind the faucet, plates and pans half-crusted in the sink when Rick went to work, fruit flies that lifted in clouds from the garbage, and the giant water bugs that came up from the drains in the shower.
Caelum stared at Lyra for a second, then turned back to the TV, although he didn’t sit down.
“What happened?” she said. It wasn’t the first time that Caelum and Rick had fought. Several times she had been startled into awareness by the sound of raised voices, or come out of her bedroom to find them standing too close together. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing.” Caelum turned up the volume. Words flashed on the screen, but they were gone too fast for Lyra to read them. “What happened to your knee?”
So he’d noticed. Lyra bent down and thumbed the blood off. She’d heard at Haven that blood was only red after it oxidized. Strange the way everything changed on contact with the world.
“Nothing,” she said, since that was the answer he’d given her.
“You were gone for a long time,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a question, but Lyra nodded. “Where were you?”
“I made a friend,” Lyra said, and nearly regretted it when Caelum looked up, his face seizing around a quick spasm of pain. “She invited me to a party on Saturday. You’re invited too.”
“A party,” he said. He said the word as if it were in a different language, the way the birthers had said water or help or doctor, if they spoke English at all. “Why?”
“There’s no reason,” she said. She didn’t have an answer. But this made her defensive, not embarrassed. “It’s what people do.”
“People,” he repeated. Now he made the word sound like a medicine that turned bitter as it dissolved. “Your people.”