Lyra tried a different tack. “Do you know where to find Dr. Saperstein?” she asked. The sun was too bright. In its glow she felt as if all her holes were visible, all the defects in her brain obvious.
“Oh, the ceremony’s off for sure. They’re just too spinecheese to tell us. You heard about what happened in Florida, right? I mean, you’re not actually from Mars?”
“Don’t be a dick, Jo.” This came from a boy sitting next to her.
“Florida.” Lyra swallowed. “You mean what happened at the Haven Institute?”
The girl, Jo, nodded. “Richard Haven was a professor here, like, a million years ago. He’s been dead for, like, a whole decade.” She paused to let this settle in. “Anyway, he went off and made fuck-you money doing biotech and who knows what, and he bought his name onto this building.”
“It wasn’t biotech,” the boy said. “It was pharmaceutical stuff.”
“No one knows what it was, and that’s the point. No oversight. Typical one percent stuff, too big to fail. And Saperstein’s just as bad.” That she addressed to the boy, and he raised both hands. “Anyway”—she turned back to Lyra and Caelum, exhaling heavily, so her bangs moved across her sticky forehead—“the Florida meltdown is, like, the worst environmental catastrophe ever.”
“Since the BP spill, at least,” the boy chimed in.
“Since the BP spill, for sure.” Jo glared at him. “There are clouds of pollution, like seriously chemical clouds, practically poisoning everyone within eighty miles—”
“Not eighty miles,” the boy put in mildly. “You’re exaggerating.”
The girl didn’t seem to hear him. She was getting worked up now. Her glasses kept slipping. Every few seconds, she thumbed them higher on her nose. “They’re saying there might be generational damage, plus it turns out Saperstein was completely skirting federal regulations, they’re saying he was cloning people. . . .”
“One person is saying that,” the boy interrupted her again, and nudged her. “Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to believe everything you read on the internet?”
Finally, she turned on him. “Whose side are you on, anyway?” He shrugged and went quiet, picking at a pimple on his chin. “The point is”—she said, rolling her eyes—“I’m premed, and I don’t want this guy’s name on our buildings. How about Marie Curie? How about a woman? Richard Haven doesn’t represent me. Not my Penn.” She pointed to her sign.
“But where is Dr. Saperstein?” Lyra felt increasingly panicked. In the distance, she spotted a man uniformed in dark blue, wearing mirrored sunglasses: a guard, sent to collect her. Then he was gone, dissipated in the sweeping motions of the crowd, and afterward she wasn’t sure whether she’d imagined him.
Jo blinked at her. “I told you. He’s not coming. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up in jail.”
“Thank you.” Lyra remembered, just barely, to say it. Thinking of Rick, and the way he’d tried to teach her about manners, and how to talk to people, brought on an unexpected spasm of pain.
They turned away from the girl and her sign. Then Caelum pivoted suddenly.
“He was making clones,” Caelum said.
Both the girl and the boy stared.
“I’m one of them,” he said. “I’m number 72.”
“Ha-ha,” the girl said flatly. An ant was tracking across her sign. She frowned, took it up between two fingers, and squeezed.
In the short time they’d been speaking to Jo, the crowd had grown even denser. Now the protest spilled up the steps, toppling the sawhorses, and as she watched, several students charged the podium and brought it crashing down. Lyra saw a blur of police uniforms among the crowd and felt suddenly as if she were going to faint. Reality slipped slowly toward darkness.
“We have to get out of here.” Caelum sensed the change at the same time: the current had tipped over to one of fury. The crowd seemed to pour into a single roiling mass, like a tight-knit cloud condensing on the horizon.
“He still might come.”
“You heard them. He’s not coming. He’s not—” But Caelum was whipped away from her when people surged suddenly between them, a wall of people pulsing together like an enormous organ, walls of breath and hair and sweaty skin.
Someone grabbed Lyra’s wrist, hard. She turned and a scream throttled her, lodging somewhere in her throat.
Though she had seen him only from a distance, in the harsh glare of the floodlight, she recognized him: he was the same man who had come for Rick, but dressed up now like some kind of local security guard. But she would have sworn it was him. She recognized the flatness of his eyes, like the dead stare of a fish.
Are you okay? his mouth was saying. But she couldn’t hear the words. Instead, she heard him laughing. She heard the guards on the marshes weeks and weeks ago, laughing as they toed their way through the blood of dying replicas.
You know how expensive these things are to make?
She wrenched away from him. She spun around—she had a brief impression of open mouths and shouting, a boy with blazing eyes shouting at her. A backpack caught her in the chest and she was knocked off balance. She was on the ground. Someone stepped on her fingers. Sneakers and legs, so many bodies—she was momentarily overwhelmed, she couldn’t breathe.
Even as a girl reached to help her, the crowd moved. Suddenly everyone was shouting and she couldn’t get up. Someone kneed her in the ribs. Through a rift in the crowd, she spotted Caelum, flying at the guy with the backpack. A girl screamed. Caelum was a sudden frenzy of motion; there were three guys fighting him now, and blood on his teeth. As she watched, trying to find the breath to shout, one of the boys caught him on the cheek and then another one on the back of the head, and then a third kneed him in the stomach. Then he was on his knees, spitting up blood, but she couldn’t get to him—still they were separated by a hard blade of moving bodies.
Someone hooked Lyra by the elbows and got her to her feet. Air touched her lungs like a burn. She gasped and tears came to her eyes.
“Are you okay?” the guy shouted. He was wearing glasses with only a single lens. She recognized him as the boy who’d gone down before, shoved by someone. He kept a hand on her arm, even as Caelum finally pushed his way toward her. “Animals,” the boy kept saying. “You’re all animals.”
Now Lyra could see the guards carving the crowd up, dispersing it. But the man with the dead fish eyes was gone.
Caelum’s face was swollen where he’d been hit. Lyra could tell how much pain he must be in. His cheek was cut. One of the guys who’d hit him must have been wearing a ring.
“Goddamn. Tell me you aren’t prospectives.” The boy in glasses looked furious. “Come with me. Let’s get out of here before these psychopaths start a riot.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 13 of Gemma’s story.
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