She had traced those muscles with her fingers. She had licked them to know the taste.
She wanted to scream, to break something. Now she understood the replicas who spent hours knocking their heads against the walls, or who picked all the skin off their arms.
Rick was gone. He was as good as dead, and it was her fault.
Caelum had left her.
Was she still the same person without him? Who was she? Brandy-Nicole? Lyra? 24? Someone or something else entirely? She touched her face, her breasts, her thighs. She didn’t seem to have cracked anywhere. Nothing had broken off. And yet she felt that something had broken, that there was a big gaping hole somewhere inside her, and air blowing through it.
She knelt on his sheets and put her face to his pillow. It smelled like him. She took the shoe box and carefully laid out the belongings he’d collected, placing them side by side on the mattress, as if they were runes and by some magic she might call him back. The brochure from the Nashville Elvis Festival. Bus schedule. A receipt. The plastic wrapper that had enclosed a utility knife. Several miniature Snickers, uneaten. Old batteries.
And then she blinked and the objects blinked too and became something else, something meaningful: not trash but a sentence written earnestly and urgently, just for her.
She smoothed out the receipt and read the list of things he had purchased from Able Hardware: one utility knife, one pocketknife, one flashlight and four packs of AA batteries, a butane lighter, a can opener. The bus schedule was from something called the Knoxville Transit Center. Her heart jumped. Someone had circled all the buses running between Knoxville and Nashville for Caelum.
Caelum had left her. That was true. Probably, like he’d said, he thought she didn’t want him around. He thought she’d be better off without him. But he’d also left her clues, just in case, and they all pointed to Nashville, where another God named Elvis had made hundreds of replicas.
Caelum had gone home, and she was going home with him.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Gemma’s story.
FIVE
IT DIDN’T TAKE HER LONG to pack. There wasn’t much she owned, and almost all of it had been owned by others first and would, she assumed, be owned by new people later: a bright-pink sweatshirt, a pair of sneakers and one pair of flip-flops, three Tshirts. Even the backpack Rick had purchased for her, red nylon and blotchy with old stains, was doodled over with someone else’s notes and pictures, like a skin covered with faded tattoos. But she was careful to pack all the belongings she’d found, all the things she’d salvaged from the dirt: pens, metal soda tabs, loose coins.
She debated whether to bring Rick’s gun with her, in case the man and woman—Suits, even if they had been dressed casually—caught up. But after weighing it in her hand, the metal oily like a slick of pollution, she put it back. She was afraid not that she wouldn’t be able to use it, but that she would. That she wouldn’t be able to stop.
Maybe, she thought, the strangers who’d taken Rick away were right. Maybe all the replicas were broken. Maybe they didn’t have souls, like the nurses had always said. Maybe they were like the shells that Cassiopeia had sometimes collected, abandoned by whatever had once lived inside of them, full of nothing but a hollow rushing.
But if Caelum was broken, then she was broken in the same way. And she didn’t know much, but she knew that had to count for something.
She was eager to set out as soon as possible, but her body was heavy with exhaustion and waves of dizziness kept tumbling her. She meant to close her eyes just for a minute, to catch her breath, to get her strength back, but woke up hours later in a panic, just as the sun was poking through the sagging blinds. Dawn already.
She shouldered her backpack and slipped outside, fiddling with the door handle, which was loose, to lock it. It gave her a brief pain to think of what would happen to the trailer with no one there to care for it: soon, she knew, it would be reclaimed by squatters, and the other residents of Winston-Able would strip it of its good furniture and sheets and dishware. Or they would gray the walls with cigarette smoke and carpet the floor with a surface of broken bottles, like in lot 48, where people went to get drunk and worse.
But she let this worry slip away from her, like a kind of smoke. She had learned long ago to let things go, to let them pass, to allow all her worry and hurt and need to simply drift, cloudlike, until it had left her behind.
Tank was barking, as usual, as if he knew where she was heading and wanted to be sure she didn’t get there. She turned in the direction of the highway. She would cross through the truck weigh station again and have to pass Eagle Tire. She hoped she wouldn’t see Raina but had no idea how long parties lasted. One time she had woken up at dawn after the Haven Christmas party to the sound of laughter and the crack of gunfire: a few doctors and some of the guards were taking turns hurling bottles and trying to shoot them in midair.
She heard a familiar voice call her name, but knew she must be imagining it: sometimes, in her dreams, she heard Dr. O’Donnell call her voice in just that way. Only the second time did she notice a sharpness to the voice that didn’t sound like dream or memory—and didn’t sound like Dr. O’Donnell, either.
She turned and saw Gemma and Pete. Gemma, flushed and pretty, was wearing clothes that struck her as exotic and reminded her of some of the birds that landed, occasionally, on Spruce Island: elaborately colored, sleek, showy.
“What are you doing here?” Lyra asked them. She thought Gemma’s house was far away, but she couldn’t be sure. The journey from Florida to North Carolina, the meeting between Rick Harliss and Gemma’s parents—seeing parents up close, even—was a hole all of its own. She felt if she got too close to the edge, she might fall into a place that had no bottom.
“You’re in danger,” Pete said. “The people who killed Jake Witz are tracking you and Caelum. They’re probably on their way now.”
“I know,” Lyra said. She thought of Rick, and the way his eyes had swept the dark for her, trying to latch on. She thought of his pink scalp and his blunt fingers and his slow, shy smile, all of it soon to be reduced to nothing but skin cells and decomposition. A long rope of hatred coiled around her throat. “They were here already.”
Gemma was sweating. “Is Caelum . . . ?”
“Gone.” Lyra hated to hear the word out loud. It was like something rattling inside an empty tin can.
Gemma closed her eyes and opened them slowly, as if she was trying to pry herself out of a dream. “They—they got him?”