LYRA AND CAELUM ARRIVED IN Philadelphia just after eleven p.m., and still a crush of people poured with them into the station. Every time she thought she must have seen all the people there were in the world, all the buildings and cars, they kept coming: it was a little like watching distant waves in the Gulf of Mexico, as she had sometimes done at Haven, to see the way each wave in fact hauled dozens, hundreds, thousands more on its back.
Lyra knew that Dr. Saperstein was going to speak on Tuesday at a place called UPenn—that was what the people who had taken Rick Harliss away had said. She had been keeping careful track of the days, as Rick had taught her to, and knew that they were a day early. Still, she was nervous.
Remembering how helpful Detective Reinhardt had been, Lyra suggested that they ask a police officer for directions. Caelum was less certain—the day before, he’d been shunted between holding cells, and desks, and grim-looking officers for hours, waiting to be booked—but after two hours of wandering, he finally agreed.
They circled back to the bus station, where there were plenty of cops. But the first one just shook his head.
“If you’re here for the protests,” he said, “you’d be better off just turning right around. This country’s got bigger things to worry about, and we’ve had guys down there clearing the roads for two days. Besides,” he added, narrowing his eyes, “it’s almost midnight. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
The second one, a woman with her hair in tight braids, like Dr. Fine-Yes had worn back at Haven, just stared at Lyra for a long time, up and down, as if her eyes were a broom and Lyra a bunch of dust.
“How old are you, honey?” she asked, and Lyra grabbed Caelum’s hand and hurried away without answering.
By then, Lyra was too tired to continue: exhaustion kept rolling up and crashing over her, hauling her down into brief, blinking moments of darkness, so she would come alert and realize she didn’t remember crossing a park, or she didn’t know how they’d ended up inside a neon-bright restaurant that sold hamburgers flattened like palms.
They found a Motel 6. They had no ID, since Lyra’s wallet had been stolen, but the desk clerk just shrugged and handed over a key anyway.
“No smoking in the rooms,” he called out after them. “I’m serious.”
In the room was a carpet the color of vomit, and ancient wallpaper that still exhaled the smell of old cigarettes and booze, two twin beds and an old, blocky TV, a bathroom where mold inched between tiles and decals on the tub floor peeled like brittle leaves. It was the prettiest room Lyra had ever seen, except for the one in the little white house where they’d first been taken by Gemma—she couldn’t believe how big it was, how spacious, that it was all theirs for the night. How many rooms, she thought, must there be in the world: How many rooms like this one, folded across the vast space of the world, pretty and quiet and safe, with doors that locked? It was a beautiful idea.
She showered first, taking her time, letting herself imagine that her body didn’t belong to her at all, that it was just an object, a broken-down chair or a table full of surface cracks, and that she herself was somewhere different, that she would not be affected if her body gave out entirely or was discarded. Afterward she stood in the cloudy bathroom, listening to the muffled noise of the TV from the bedroom, feeling suddenly nervous. She had been with Caelum countless times in vacant trailers and behind the supply shed, and played a game of kissing each other’s scars, and the thin, fragile skin on the inside of the elbows and the back of the knees. But that was in the dark, at Winston-Able, in a room musty with spiderwebs and the smell of bike tires. That was washing up accidentally somewhere, and clinging to each other because there was nowhere else to go.
This was different.
She knotted a towel around her chest. Before Caelum could even turn to look at her, she’d slipped into the bed closest to the bathroom, shivering when the cold sheets touched her bare skin. She pulled the covers to her chin.
“Are you finished?” he asked, and she saw his eyes move down to her shape beneath the blanket, and this made her shiver, too.
The drumming of the shower in the bathroom, the murmur of TV voices—soon she was asleep, falling off the edge of sound into quiet.
She woke to movement, the rustle of sheets and the sudden touch of cold air. She’d fallen asleep in her towel, and she was cold. The lights were off, and the TV was off, and it was quiet except for the faint hum of an air conditioner. For one disoriented second, she didn’t know where Caelum was: she had a vague sense of his outline standing beside her, watching her sleep.
“What are you—?” she started to say, but then Caelum was sliding in next to her in bed, naturally, as if there was no other place to be. He looped a heavy arm across her waist. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, only a thin pair of boxer shorts. She could feel his chest rising and falling, his breath on her cheek, his anklebones when he moved, and immediately she wasn’t cold anymore. She was burning hot.
“Lyra?” he whispered, but before she could say what, he put his mouth against her neck. Then she realized that it hadn’t been a question after all. He found a gap in the towel and slid his hand to her stomach. He touched the architecture of her hips. He moved a hand, carefully, gently, between her thighs. “Lyra, Lyra, Lyra,” he said again, singsonging it, as if he were learning how to speak through saying her name.
She wasn’t a human. She wasn’t a replica. She was a star trail, burning through the darkness, lighting up the room in invisible spectrums of color.
“Caelum,” she said, turning over to him, and opening her mouth to his, letting him pour this new language inside of her, letting it transform them together into music.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 12 of Gemma’s story.
THIRTEEN
IN THE MORNING THEY SHOWERED together, soapy, touching each other with slick-fish fingers, filled with the joy of the new. They packed their few belongings, and Lyra took a pen from the nightstand. She left behind the Bible she found there; she associated it too much with Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It, with quick and blinding sideswipes to the head.
They had better luck than the day before. The desk clerk didn’t even blink when they asked for directions to UPenn. She just slid a paper map across the desk and charted the best route with a little ink line.
“It’s a hike, though,” she said. “You might want to Uber.”
Lyra just thanked her and said a quick good-bye.
It was a hike: an hour of slogging next to a sluggish gray river and a grid of barely flowing traffic. Lyra marveled at the look of the houses on the river, enormous and colorful, in a style she had never seen before. Caelum puzzled over the map, charting their progress carefully, inching a finger along the ink pathway when Lyra read out the names of the streets they were passing.
Finally, when his finger was almost directly above the little star indicating they had arrived, Lyra saw something that took her breath away. A group of boys and girls came toward her, singing. There were so many of them that Lyra and Caelum had to step off the sidewalk to avoid being bumped.