“He was already gone.” She thought of telling Gemma and Pete where he had gone—that there might be others like them, free, and living happily in Nashville—but she was afraid that they would discourage her and that saying the words out loud would burst them like small bubbles, and make her see how silly she was to hope.
“I saw them come, and I hid until they left.”
“They’ll be back. They’ll be back any second. You have to come with us.”
“I can’t,” Lyra said. “Thank you. I’ll be careful.” She knew they were trying to help. Rick had taught her to say thank you, like he’d taught her to say please, to look people directly in the eyes and say hello, too.
She turned and started off again, but before she had gone four feet, Gemma called her back.
“Wait.” Gemma’s face looked unexpectedly altered, her eyes startlingly bright, as if they’d grown. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
“And where’s Caelum?” Pete’s whole face was pinched with exhaustion, as if someone had sewn his skin on too tight. “Where did he go?”
“Home,” Lyra said, and ignored the way Gemma and Pete looked at each other. She knew they couldn’t understand. The world had grown too big. She had to shrink it back to manageable size, back to the slender weight of the secrets that she and Caelum could carry together. “I’m going after him.”
“I don’t think you understand.” Gemma was trying to be nice. Lyra knew that. But her voice was razor sharp, as if at any second it would fall off an edge into hard anger. “The people who came here won’t just quit. They’ll look until they find you, wherever you are.”
“They’re looking for Caelum and me,” she said. “They won’t expect us to split up. And they won’t expect us to get far. They don’t think we’re smart enough.” She thought of the way the nurses and doctors had always spoken over their heads, had avoided their eyes, had joked and laughed about things in the outside world—never understanding that Lyra had been listening, learning, absorbing. And it struck her as funny, now: they hadn’t thought to watch what they said because they believed they had complete power over her. But as a result, their power had become hers. She’d eaten just enough to survive. “Besides, what other choice do we have?”
Lyra could tell that Gemma knew, immediately, that there were no other choices. Still, she said, “You could come with us. We could drive you somewhere far away. Maine. The Oregon coast. Canada. Wherever.” Places that made Lyra feel uncertain again. Places she’d never heard of.
“Not without Caelum,” she said. Caelum was a person, but he was a place, too. He was her place.
“You’ll never find him,” Gemma said. “Do you know how many people there are in this country? Millions and millions.”
Lyra knew her numbers up to the hundreds, because there had been nearly twenty-four hundred replicas at Haven. But she didn’t know what millions was. “You just said the people who came from Haven will find us.”
“That’s different. They’re bigger than we are. Do you understand that? They have cars. They have drones, and money, and friends everywhere.”
Lyra was surprised to realize she felt sorry for Gemma. Gemma was so desperate to help. She didn’t understand that Lyra and Caelum were beyond reach. They belonged to a different world.
“You forget what they made us to be, though.” Lyra spoke gently. And then: “Invisible.”
She managed to smile. Smiling had always felt strange, but now it was getting easier. “Thank you, though. I mean it.”
“Please. Take this, at least.” Gemma dug in her pocket and found a small wallet that was covered in a repeating yellow graphic of smiling faces. Lyra was momentarily breathless when Gemma handed it to her. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen or held, its plastic slick and new-feeling, bulky with whatever it contained. She wanted to smell it, to nibble on its edges. “You’ll need money. You know how to use an ATM card, right, to get money? The code’s easy. Four-four-one-one. Can you remember that?”
She nodded. She had had to remember numbers for Cog Testing—words, too—and parrot them back for the proctors. She knew now that they had been testing the progression of prion disease, but at the time she had thought they only wanted to prove how smart the replicas had grown. She only wanted to do well.
“Thanks,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to decline it. Already, the plastic wallet had warmed in her hand, pulsing there as if it belonged. She took a step forward, overwhelmed by feeling, and, before she could decide against it, brought her hands to Gemma’s shoulders the way Rick had for her. Gemma’s face reminded her so much of Cassiopeia in that moment that she felt an unexpected doubling of her life before and after. She was two Lyras and she was no one: she was a hole falling through the past. “See you,” she said, stepping quickly away, because for a split second a terrible urge possessed her to hang on, to stay with her hands on Gemma’s shoulders and never let go—an urge she thought she’d been rid of long ago.
She turned away. She knew she’d never see them again. Let go. It was surprisingly difficult to walk, to keep walking, as if the air was throwing up extra resistance. But there was no other choice. Let go. It was the rule that bound everything, as true in the outside world as it had been in Haven.
Let go, let go, let go. She thought of wind through the trees, and laundered white sheets, and the warm fog of anesthetic. Let go. She thought of clouds and shadows and waves; she thought of the ocean, bearing away a boat filled with the small bundled bodies of the dead.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 5 of Gemma’s story.
SIX
LYRA KNEW FROM THE BUS schedule that Caelum was heading to Knoxville, and from there to Nashville. She knew that Knoxville was a large city less than an hour away by car, because that was where Raina’s mom worked at a twenty-four-hour restaurant called Big Tony’s.
But she didn’t know how to get there. The first person she saw, a guy unloading cartons from a grocery truck, pointed her in the right direction and even offered her a ride. But she didn’t like the way he looked at her. “Can’t walk all the way to Knoxville,” he’d called out, when she kept going.