The next person she asked, a woman counting change behind the gas station counter, told her she couldn’t get to Knoxville without a car. But a third person had overheard the exchange and told Lyra, outside, that she thought there was a local bus station that had buses to Knoxville. She was black, with very red lipstick, and so tall the light haloed behind her, as if she were cracking the sky with her head. She smelled like Dr. O’Donnell had, like lemon soap, very clean. Lyra thanked her and kept going.
It was a seven-mile walk along a bleak industrial road that kept edging close to the interstate and then away again. Stanton Falls was bigger than Ronchowoa but she didn’t know by how much. She knew she was in town when she began to pass occasional strip malls of mostly shuttered stores. She saw a boat shop, too—funnily enough, since she had no idea where the nearest water was—with little motorboats displayed in the brown grass and covered with tarps. She couldn’t have said what drew her across the yard and to the display, only perhaps that it reminded her of where she’d first met Caelum, in an overgrown section of Spruce Island, littered with old waste.
One of the tarps had been loosened and retied. She saw that right away. She tugged it free and knew that someone had slept there. On one of the benches the treads of a dirty sneaker had left marks. There was a crumpled Snickers wrapper, too, wedged between two seat cushions. Probably Caelum had arrived too early, before the bus was running, and had lain down to sleep for a bit.
She was catching up.
But in Knoxville, she lost hope again. Knoxville was by far the biggest place she’d ever been, full of so many people she couldn’t understand how there was enough air to allow them to breathe, and the clamor of noise made the back of her teeth ache. Faces, faces everywhere—all of them looked the same to her.
The Knoxville Transit Center was huge, all glass and concrete and escalators rolling up and down, the loudness and the lights, and the womp, womp, womp of her own heart, like a fist punching her in the chest.
A man shoved her. A woman yelled at her for standing motionless in front of the revolving doors, unsure of how they worked. There were people in lines as if waiting to get medication, and big machines grinding out slips of paper, and numbers on big boards that blinked and changed, dozens of TVs, words everywhere, signs everywhere, the smell of sweat and perfume and bathrooms.
She found a bus after twice standing in the wrong line, and was handed a ticket and told by the girl who sold it to her that next time she could do it through the automated system and also that she had cool hair. “I went short for a while too,” she said, “until my mom said she would boot me from the house.” This gave Lyra a boost, however, as it always did when she went out into the world, into people, and passed.
Because at heart and despite what Raina or Rick thought, she knew the truth now: she wasn’t one of them and would never be.
She had to wait because the bus wasn’t ready to board. She counted how many people wore red hats, and how many people wore black ones. She tried to close her ears to the unfamiliar voices, dozens of conversations that together sounded like the grinding work of one large machine, all stutters and beeps and sharp, hysterical alarms. Whenever an individual voice reached her, she was reminded of how the researchers had spoken, moving in packs down the halls as if they were cabled together invisibly, using English but somehow an English she didn’t understand. A man sitting next to her on the bench picked dirt from his fingernails with a pen cap, and spoke in words that made her head ache for their foreignness. Can’t fault Walsh on that snap . . . you watch and see, Seattle’ll blow holes in their defensive line. . . .
Holes. She closed her eyes; she breathed carefully through her nose. She’d believed for a long time that the outside world might be as big as ten times Haven, and after escaping she knew it had to be at least ten times that. But a bigger vision was impossible. What she knew of Tennessee was Ronchowoa, and the walk to the Target and back, and the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park, and its grid of sixty-two lots.
In the end, she only knew the bus had arrived when a loudspeaker voice announced that it was getting ready to leave, and she had to run to the far end of the terminal, barely gasping through the doors before they shut behind her with a hiss that sounded ominous.
She lurched into a seat just as it began to move. The blur of landscape still made her dizzy. She leaned back, clutching the schedule she’d been given in one hand. It was already wet, damp with sweat. Three and a half hours to Nashville, with one stop at Crossville to pick up new passengers.
She got sick in the tiny, filthy bathroom once, twice, a third time, until nothing came up but bile. She couldn’t rinse her mouth out. There was no water to drink. So she wiped her mouth with a sleeve, toweled off her face with a hem. An old woman seated near the bathroom shook her head and frowned, as if Lyra had gotten sick deliberately, when Lyra made her way carefully back to her seat. But she felt better. She was even a little bit hungry.
In Crossville, there was a layover of twenty minutes, and the passengers disembarked to use the bathrooms and buy food from the station. Lyra was feeling a little braver, so she showed the bank card Gemma had given her to a woman across the aisle.
“I need money,” she said, since Gemma had said that was what the card did.
The woman gave her a strange look. “Well, there’s an ATM right over by the bathrooms,” she said.
Lyra shook her head to show she didn’t know what that meant.
The woman squinted, moved her gum around in her mouth. “It’s your card, isn’t it? You’ve got a code?”
“Four-four-one-one,” Lyra recited, and the woman put up her hands to cover her ears, laughing.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re not supposed to say it out loud.” She put her hands down again, and her son thought it was a game, placed his hands to his ears and down again, said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” and cackled.
“Please,” Lyra said, getting desperate now. The bus would leave in twenty minutes. She was hungry—she had not had anything to eat in twenty-four hours—and the station smelled like frying meat fat, like the Stew Pot in Haven but better. “I need money.”
The woman let out a shush of air, like the sound when SqueezeMe had finished hugging. “Come on. I’ll help you.” She took Lyra’s arm, exactly where SqueezeMe would have in order to read her blood pressure. Her hair was gray and brown, both. Otherwise, she looked a little like Dr. O’Donnell.