“One more all-nighter and I might lose my mind anyway.” Then: “It doesn’t make any sense to me. If CASECS wants to go public next month, why wipe out the old specimens?”
“The DOD’s got Saperstein’s ass to the wall. It isn’t CASECS that wants to clear the slate. They’ve got nothing to do with it.” She put her hands through her hair and looked up. “Besides, they were smart about it. They did the lobbying first. They got the Alzheimer’s lobby, the cancer lobby, the MS lobby—everyone’s lining up. They’re going to go at it from the direction of public interest.”
Hearing God’s name was like a wind. It made Lyra shiver.
The man came down off the porch. For minutes, he and the woman said nothing. He smoked. She picked at something on her pants.
Then she looked up. “You know Saperstein’s supposed to be ribbon-cutting in Philadelphia on Tuesday.”
The man coughed a laugh. “Bad timing.”
“Sure is. Danner told me that UPenn might disinvite him. The students are rioting. They want the name Haven stripped off the goddamn water fountains.”
“They don’t know the half of it.”
“Sure. That’s the whole problem.”
The man shook his head. “Count no man lucky till he’s dead, right?”
They were quiet for a bit, and Lyra was terrified they would hear her heartbeat, which was knocking hollowly in her throat. Then the man spoke up again. “You ever think it’s wrong? Making them in the first place?”
Though her face was still a cutaway of shadow and light, the woman’s posture changed, as if she were hoping the idea would simply slide right off her. “No worse than anything else,” she said. “No worse than the air strikes last year—how many civilians killed? No worse than shooting soldiers up with LSD to watch what happens. No worse than thousands of kids slaving to make those sneakers you like. The world runs on misery. Just as long as it’s not ours, right?”
“Just as long as it’s not ours,” he echoed. Then: “Those shoes aren’t stupid, by the way. They’re classics.”
Lyra didn’t know how the woman would have responded, because a car was approaching. Tires crunched on the gravel, and a sweep of headlights appeared. The man put out a second cigarette and stood up, dusting himself off, neatening his cuffs as if he were there for an interview.
Lyra recognized Rick’s car from the sound the engine made, a growl-spit that Rick was always complaining about. She hoped he would see the strangers and know what she knew, and turn around. Regular people knew so much and yet so little; they had never been taught to scent danger the way she had, to smell the metallic sharpening of tension on the air, the same odor as an approaching scalpel.
He didn’t turn around. He cut the engine and climbed out of the car. “What do you want?” was the first thing he said, and Lyra’s stomach tightened. You did not speak to Power like that. Power spoke to you.
The man responded, with exacting politeness, “Mr. Harliss?” But Lyra wasn’t deceived. At Haven, Dr. Good Morning always spoke gently, and asked questions in just that kind of voice. But he liked to find all the replicas’ weak spots—their poorly healed scars, their new abrasions—and plumb them with his fingers, as if manually drawing out the pain.
Then he would take notes on the way they screamed. Private research, he called it. To see whether their brains experienced sensation the same way.
Rick said nothing. He concentrated on feeding a cigarette from his pack to his mouth. Now it was the woman who tried. “Are you Rick Harliss?”
“Depends on who’s asking.”
“We’re detectives with the county PD. We’re investigating a pattern of B and Es and we have reason to believe your daughter”—she pretended to consult a piece of paper, or maybe she really did—“Brandy-Nicole, may have been a witness on the latest scene. We need to speak with her.”
There was a long, heavy silence. “Bullshit,” Rick said finally.
This was obviously not the answer they had expected. “Excuse me?” the man said.
“You heard me. Bullshit.” Rick got a cigarette lit, came a little closer, and blew a long plume of smoke directly in the man’s face. Lyra couldn’t have come up with the words herself, but in that moment a strong web of feeling knitted together in her chest, and she came as close to loving him as she ever would. “Who sent you?”
There was another short silence. When the man spoke again, his voice was harder, and Lyra felt the impact of the words like little metal hammer blows to the base of her spine.
“You violated parole. You were caught with an illegal handgun. You assaulted a police officer. You jumped bail.”
“I didn’t jump bail,” Harliss said. “They let me go.”
“Our records say you jumped bail. That makes you a fug-i-tive.” He drew out the syllables, stretching them taffylike between his teeth and his tongue.
Rick froze with his cigarette halfway to his mouth. Then, to her surprise, he started to laugh. But the noise was awful, and reminded Lyra of the way Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It used to cough up phlegm when her allergies were bad.
“Shit. He turned on me, didn’t he? Fucking Ives. Piece of shit. Well. It’s my fault for trusting him.”
“We need the kids, Mr. Harliss. Where are they?”
“Fucked if I know.” He took another long drag and spoke with smoke ribboning out from the corners of his mouth. “You don’t believe me?”
“We don’t want any trouble.”
“Neither do I. But it sure as shit seems to find me.” He shook his head. The light was a lurid yellow, and in its glow he looked exhausted, washed out, like an old photograph. “I don’t know where they are, I’m telling you. The boy took off sometime last night. Stole a thousand dollars out of a lockbox from the impound lot and made off with it. As far as I know, he hopped a plane to Mexico.”
“With no ID?”
“You can buy IDs, same as you can buy anything else. Ain’t nothing and no one in this world isn’t for sale. But you know all about that, don’t you?” He smiled narrowly, through another mouthful of smoke.
“Careful,” the woman said. But Lyra could no longer follow their conversation, or the shifting currents of insult and threat that eddied around their spoken words. Caelum was gone. Caelum had stolen money and run off. She knew both that it was impossible—he would never leave her—and that it was true. It explained why he had consented to the job in the first place, and the bed he hadn’t disturbed last night, and why he still wasn’t home.
He had done what he did at Haven: he’d split.
“And the girl?” the woman said. But at that moment, Tank, the fluffy white dog Angie Finch kept in lot 34, started to yap, and Angie Finch’s voice, thick with sleep, hushed him sharply. Something thinned on the air; Lyra had the impression of a drawstring cinched suddenly tight, squeezing out the possibility of escape.