When they left Crossville, the bus was more crowded than ever, and Lyra’s heart stopped when she saw that among the passengers was a replica like the kind she had seen in the Nashville Elvis Festival brochure: a slick of black hair and dark sunglasses, plus the same beautiful white jumpsuit with beading that caught the sun. She was desperate to ask him questions, but felt too shy; he was traveling with a large group and spent the whole time chattering with the other travelers, or crooning along to songs the bus driver piped from the speakers. At one point he stood, staggering a little to keep his balance, and danced along to the music, pivoting his hips and holding a soda bottle like a microphone. Everyone laughed and even applauded, and Lyra felt a vague sense of foreboding. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
She was even more discouraged when the bus driver announced their arrival in Nashville. She had been hoping that Nashville would look like Haven: an orderly series of buildings contained by a fence. Instead, it turned out to be a city: stack-block buildings, signs puncturing the sky, roads like the serpentine trails left on the surface of the marshes by passing water snakes, the slow crawl of traffic. More people. Perhaps the world didn’t end at all. Perhaps it went on and on forever. It occurred to her that if she didn’t find Caelum, she wasn’t even sure how she’d get back to Winston-Able, couldn’t remember what bus line she had taken to Knoxville.
But maybe it didn’t matter. Now that she knew the people from Haven were looking for her at Winston-Able, now that they had taken Rick away, she couldn’t return anyway.
She followed the line of passengers off the bus, trying to work up the courage to speak to the man in the clean white suit. He moved quickly with a surge of other travelers toward the station doors, and she knew that as soon as he hit the street, she risked losing him. She was sure that she would find Caelum wherever the replicas were heading, and so she took a deep breath and jogged to catch up, with her backpack slamming against her lower spine and echoing the rhythm of her heart. She had to say please several times before he turned around. The people with him—regular people, none of them replicas, but none of them dressed as nurses or doctors, either—turned with him. Under the weight of their stares, Lyra felt suddenly shy.
“What’s the matter, little lady?” he said. He had a deep voice that rumbled in his chest. “You want an autograph or something?”
She knew what an autograph was—it was when a doctor put down his signature on a piece of paper. The nurses were always asking the doctors to autograph one thing or another: disposal orders, cognitive evaluations, the reports generated by the Extraordinary Kissable Graph. This gave her confidence.
“No autograph,” she said. “I’m looking for all the others.”
“You’re here for the festival, huh? You an Elvis fan?”
Raina had said that Elvis was the name of their God. “I need to speak to him,” she said, which made the others laugh.
“Isn’t she sweet,” one of them said.
But another one frowned. “I hope she ain’t on her own. She’s too young for it.”
The replica with the dark hair inched his sunglasses down his nose. “You want to talk to Elvis, do you?” he asked, and she nodded. “Come on. Let me show you something. Come on,” he said, and gestured for her to follow him out the revolving door, into the bright afternoon sunshine, and the wet-tongue heat. In the distance, she could hear the faint roar of a crowd, like the break of ocean waves, and a cascade of music.
“You want to talk to Elvis, little lady, you just close your eyes and listen,” the male said. “You hear that? That’s Elvis talking, right there. You just gotta follow the music.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 6 of Gemma’s story.
SEVEN
LYRA DID AS SHE WAS told. She set off toward the music, and when she got lost, she simply closed her eyes and listened for the drumbeat rhythm of applause, and the crackle of distant speakers, and turned right or left. She wondered whether Caelum had been here, had waited at the crosswalk for the light to turn green as she was waiting, had thought of her or worried about her or wondered whether she would follow.
The streets grew more crowded and funneled a mass of people down toward the music. Colored flyers fluttered from the lampposts. People drank in the streets and leaned over the balconies of their high-rises to wave. Lyra was overwhelmed by the crush of people, by the blur of strange faces and a celebratory atmosphere she couldn’t understand. Was this another party? She had yet to see any more replicas. The music picked up the tempo of her heart and knocked it hard and fast against her ribs.
Then she turned a corner and saw them: hundreds of identical men milling around a stage elevated in the center of the plaza, all with the same oil-black hair and sideburns and sunglasses, many of them dressed the same, too, in heeled boots and spangly white uniforms. She cried out without meaning to, filled with a sudden, cataclysmic joy.
Replicas. Hundreds of them. Alive, healthy, drinking from red plastic cups, posing for photographs with eager tourists.
But then she got closer, and her heart dropped. She saw at once she’d been mistaken. The men weren’t identical at all. Some were fat, some were dark, others were pale. There were even women among them, with sideburns pasted to their skin that in places had begun to unpeel. They weren’t replicas at all—they were simply regular people, costumed to look the same, for reasons she couldn’t understand.
The disappointment was so heavy she could hardly breathe. All of a sudden she felt trapped—squeezed to death in the vast open space by the pressure of all the strangers around her, by the chaos of so many unfamiliar things. Speakers blew feedback into periodic screeches. Laughter sounded like explosions. The air stank of fried food and sweat. Caelum must have come here, and seen what she had seen. But where would he have gone afterward? He could have wandered in any direction. He could have left Nashville entirely.
She would never find him now.
She was suddenly dizzy. Turning to move out of the crowd, she stumbled.
“Whoa. Take it easy, there, lady. Are you okay?” A woman squinted at her and her dark wig—that’s what it was, a wig—shifted forward an inch on her forehead. “You need some water or something?”
Lyra wrenched away from her. She was hot. She couldn’t think. She hadn’t been afraid at all, not when she believed that in Nashville she would find more replicas. But now she was panicked, and her mouth flooded with the taste of sick. Do you have any idea how many people there are in this country? Gemma had asked.
You’ll never find him, she had said.
She hardly knew where she was going. She just knew she had to get out, away from the noise, away from the music and the crowds. She was desperately thirsty, and whatever energy had carried her this far had abandoned her all at once.
She crossed a scrubby parking lot to a 7-Eleven, stepping onto the curb to avoid two boys smoking outside their car—when, just like that, in the space between one second and the next, she saw him.
Or not him, exactly, but a picture of him, taped to the window of the 7-Eleven.
The picture wasn’t very good, and most of his features were obscured. But it was definitely him. She recognized the hooded sweatshirt he was wearing, which they’d found together at the clothes-by-the-pound thrift store Rick had taken them to when they’d first arrived at Winston-Able Mobile Home Park.
There were words on the page, but she had to blink several times to make them come into focus.
Smile! You’re on candid camera.