“Caelum,” she said, and pointed.
Several of them wore T-shirts marked with a logo she recognized. An electric thrill traveled her whole body. The University of Pennsylvania. Lyra knew it. Caelum knew it. Everyone at Haven knew it.
It was a place both Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein had come from. The bust in the entryway of admin wore a blanket bearing the same logo for a cape. On certain days, certain game days, God went into his office and didn’t come out. Sometimes the staff members drank beer on those days, carted from the mainland in coolers on the boats, and sat for longer than usual in front of the TVs, watching sporting events whose rules Lyra didn’t understand.
“UPenn,” she said out loud, and began to laugh as the group of strangers raised their fists and shouted, “Go Quakers.” Finally, she understood: UPenn meant the University of Pennsylvania, where both of the Gods of Haven had started.
Where the second God, Dr. Saperstein, was soon due to return—and where she and Caelum would be waiting for him.
She’d assumed that UPenn was a single place, almost like Haven, that had produced both Richard Haven and Dr. Saperstein. But once again the outside world smashed itself into a thousand different visions, into dozens of buildings, hundreds of people, noise and color and rhythms she didn’t understand.
Kids sat cross-legged with homemade signs in front of the looming stone buildings, chanting. Others, ignoring them, lay out on blankets in the grass or played a game that involved a flat plastic disk and lots of running.
“I don’t understand where they all come from,” Caelum said, and she knew exactly what he meant: How could all these people have been made if not on purpose?
“Come on,” she said, and took his hand. Caelum was agitated by the crowds. She remembered, suddenly, seeing an eclipse when she was younger, how the nurses had let them file out into the garden to look. Caelum became like that when he was nervous, like something dark that swallowed the light around him.
Lyra was anxious too. The swell of voices from every direction made her head hurt. The blur of colors reminded her of the starbursts that crowded her vision when, stretched out on the examination table, she looked too long at the ceiling lights. If Dr. Saperstein was here, did that mean that other people from Haven were here, too? Guards with guns? People like the ones who had killed Jake Witz, and had come most recently for Rick Harliss?
To her surprise, the first person they approached didn’t hesitate when they asked whether she knew where to find Dr. Saperstein.
“He’s not coming,” the girl said. She was wearing lots of rings, and violet eye shadow that made Lyra think of Raina, and of the strange party where people stood in the half-dark together and also somehow alone, like the individual patches of land submerged in the marshes that only from a distance looked like solid ground. “I mean, they haven’t officially announced it yet, but he won’t.”
Lyra’s palms began to sweat. “What do you mean?” she said, and repeated as faithfully as possible what she had overheard. “He was supposed to be here Tuesday, for the ribbon-cutting.”
“Yeah, but that’s probably not happening either. Have you been to the protests? There’s, like, two thousand people outside.”
“Where?” Caelum asked.
“Over by the Haven Center. Or whatever they’re calling it now.” The girl rolled her eyes. When she saw that Lyra and Caelum had no idea what she was talking about, she sighed. “Next to the medical school and PCAM. You know where PCAM is, right? The Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine? It’s right next to the Haven Center. You can’t miss it, it’s right on Civic Center. You students here, or incoming?”
Lyra said nothing.
“Well, you’ll get a real view of Penn, anyway. Protesters and crusty alums and all. Whose side are you on?” She smiled in a way that might not have been friendly.
“No one’s side,” Lyra said, though she had no idea what the girl meant.
At the same time, Caelum said, “Our own side,” and squeezed Lyra’s hand even tighter.
They found PCAM and the medical school—an enormous modern complex, all steel and glass, which reminded Lyra of the real Haven—and next to it, the brand-new Richard C. Haven Center for Regenerative Research.
“He was here,” Lyra whispered excitedly. “The first God was here.”
It seemed impossible that God, the first God, could have existed here, so many hundreds of miles away from Spruce Island. That here, too, in this busy city, he’d put a thumb in the soft clay of reality, he’d existed, people knew his name.
If there were a single place in the world where she would find help, it had to be here, where the Gods of Haven would be once again reunited.
Despite the crowd gathered in front of it, the building itself had the whistling, empty look of an abandoned shell. The revolving glass doors were roped off behind a thick red ribbon, and Lyra’s heart picked up—this, then, must be the ribbon Dr. Saperstein was expected to cut. But the podium positioned directly in front of the doors stayed empty, the microphone crooked uselessly toward the open air, like a finger beckoning to no one. Police sawhorses kept the crowd a safe distance from the building.
Hundreds of people eddied around the steps, blocking the entrance. Lyra kept hold of Caelum’s hand—she wasn’t sure she would have been able to loose herself, he was squeezing so tight—as they edged along the periphery of the crowd, puzzling over what it meant. From the fact that the girl with the violet eye shadow had asked them whether they were students, she now knew this must be a school. Maybe this was simply how schools looked, how teaching took place.
Many of the students carried signs that said Not Our Penn, Take Haven to Hell, Penn Students for Awareness. Others waved school flags, or carried signs that said Penn Pride or Penn Students for Science.
Between the two groups there was obvious tension. A makeshift line divided them, like the finger of an invisible current had divided the crowd in two, and as they watched, two boys began pushing each other and one of them ended up on the ground, his glasses shattered.
Finally, she worked up the courage to ask a girl what all the shouting was about.
The girl, red-faced and sweaty, wearing mismatching shoes and thick glasses, was resting on a stone wall with a cardboard sign tucked between her legs. Because of the way it was angled, Lyra couldn’t read what it said.
“You go here?” She squinted at Lyra and Caelum in turn, and when they shook their heads, seemed to relax. “Oh. I was gonna say. What planet are you from?” She bent down to retrieve her sign, propping it on the wall next to her. This one said Not Our Penn.