“Don’t,” she said. They had gone through this before, when Gemma had first told her that she had a father, that she wasn’t really a replica. I thought we were the same. But we’re not. We’re different, Caelum had said, but she hadn’t believed him then.
But now a new voice began to whisper. Maybe he was right.
“I can’t stay here much longer,” he said. “He doesn’t want me here.” Caelum refused to use Rick’s name. “And you don’t, either.”
“Of course I do,” Lyra said.
Caelum just shook his head. “You have a new life here,” he said.
All the anger she’d been keeping down broke free. It was like a rope whipping up words in her chest. “Why did you leave Haven?” she burst out. “Why did you run away? What do you want?”
“I got what I wanted,” he said, and with a quick step came closer to her. In an instant everything stilled and went white, and she thought he was going to say you, and wings of feeling lifted in her chest. But instead he said, “I wanted to do something on my own. For myself. I wanted to choose.”
“So you chose. Congratulations.” In words, now, she heard the echo of Raina’s voice, the edge of her sarcasm. “Are you happy now?”
“Happy.” He shook his head. “You even talk like one of them now.”
“So what?” She hated him then. More than she’d hated any of the doctors or the nurses or the sanitation teams who’d bundled up the dead replicas in paper sheaths, making jokes the whole time: How many clones does it take to screw in a lightbulb? “So I talk like them. So maybe I have a friend. What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s a lie, that’s what’s wrong with it,” he said. “You’re sick.”
“You don’t seem sick,” Lyra said automatically, and only registered a split second later that he hadn’t, in fact, said we’re sick. And with a kind of yawning horror she realized that what she had said was true. Caelum had been so skinny when they met that his collarbones stood out like wings. But he had put on weight. He didn’t get nauseous, not that she could see, and he never got confused, like she did.
There was a long, terrible moment of silence.
“You’re not sick,” she said at last. She could barely get the words out. Then: “What cluster were you in?”
He looked away. She closed her eyes, tried to picture him as she’d first seen him, his wild eyes and dirt-encrusted fingernails, the wristband looped around his dark skin . . .
He said it at the same time she remembered. “White.”
It was stupid she’d never wondered, stupid she’d never asked. It was all her fault.
White was control.
And control meant that he was fine.
“Lyra . . .” He tried to reach for her and she backed away from him, nearly toppling the table in the front hall, bumping against the door. “I’m going to find a way to fix it. I promise. I’m going to find a way to help.”
When he tried to touch her again she lurched past him, knocking a coat from the rack pegged to the wall. She felt like she would cry. She hardly ever cried.
Maybe this too was something that had oxidized: her feelings had changed color, and flowed more quickly now. She imagined that inside of her, the prions pooled like dark shadows, waiting to swallow her up.
“You can’t help me,” she said. “No one can.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Gemma’s story.
THREE
FOR TWO DAYS, SHE HARDLY saw Caelum at all, and she felt nothing but terrible relief, like after you finally drop a glass that has been slipping for some time from your fingers.
Caelum was her tether to Haven, but he was also her anchor. Around him she felt stuck in her old life, stuck in her old name. 24. The escaped replica, the human model, the monster.
Rick told her that he’d put Caelum to work. There was little he could do, because in order to become someone in the outside world, you already had to be someone, which required pieces of paper and numbers from the government and identification that neither Lyra nor Caelum had. But Rick had met a guy who owned a tow company and impound lot and needed help on the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight a.m. He was prepared to pay cash, and he would ask no questions.
Money, Lyra was learning, was a source of near-constant worry in the outside world, as it had been in Haven. At Haven the staff had talked constantly about budget cuts and even the possibility of having funding cut off completely. But it surprised her to find out that money everywhere was so difficult to get and hang on to. Gemma’s father had offered them a large sum of money, but Rick had refused it, and when Lyra asked him why, his face darkened.
“Blood money,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have to lean on him for a roof. I won’t take a dollar I don’t have to.”
She had a hard time thinking of Rick Harliss as poor, since he had a car and his own TV and his own narrow house, a bathroom only the three of them shared, multiple sets of clothes—all things that to her seemed rich.
But they were poor, at least that was what Rick said. And while Lyra was his daughter and it was his duty to protect her, Caelum was freeloading—stealing time from the clock, Rick said—and would have to figure out how to make his own way in the world.
Lyra should have heard the threat in those words: that Caelum would have to leave, sooner or later.
On Friday and Saturday morning, after his first two shifts, Caelum left piles of dollar bills on the small kitchen table, secured beneath a can of Hormel chili, and Rick took the money wordlessly and bought more Hormel chili from the store, more toilet paper and toothpaste, more pairs of socks and books for Lyra to read, all of them with creased pastel covers and heroes who always arrived at the right moment.
For two days, Lyra was happy—despite the holes dropping hours of her life, despite the fact that she and Caelum had had their first fight ever, despite the way she had to pick through the boredom of the day on her own, collecting ever more pieces of trash, arranging them and rearranging them as if they would someday yield a sentence. She visited with Raina, and was absorbed in an endless funnel of people, ideas, and places she’d never heard of—Los Angeles, the neo-Nazis in lot 14, veganism, YouTube, Planned Parenthood, the Bill of Rights.
She was angry at Caelum for lying to her, even though she realized he’d never said he was sick and she had never asked. Still, she was angry. He resented her for becoming something he could never be, but there was no greater abandonment than this: she would die, and he would live.