HIS NAME WAS SEBASTIAN, AND with his help they elbowed their way free of the crowd. From a distance, it resembled an organic mass, a seething, hungry creature.
Lyra was still having trouble breathing. She kept scanning the street for the man with the fish eyes, or the woman who traveled with him. She felt the weight of invisible observers watching their progress, the way she had always felt the Glass Eyes at Haven.
“Animals,” Sebastian said again, when they were several blocks away, and the noise of the chanting had faded. Lyra was surprised that it was still early afternoon, still sunny; that the cars still churned by slowly, that nothing else had stopped.
Caelum hadn’t spoken at all. His left eye was swollen shut. When he leaned over and spat up a gob of blood, the boy shook his head.
“You should really get some ice on that. And clean the cut, too, so it doesn’t get infected. I’m in med school,” he added, in response to a look from Lyra. “If you want, my apartment’s right around the corner.”
Lyra hadn’t exactly recognized it as an invitation until he started walking again and Caelum, to her surprise, followed.
Sebastian lived in a small, bright apartment on the third floor above a sandwich shop. The whole place smelled like the inside of a book. Books sagged the built-in shelves lining the wall. The sun caught thick swaths of dust in the air and striped the room vividly in golden light. She couldn’t see anything in the haze of sun.
“My roommate’s a lit PhD student,” Sebastian said, when he caught Lyra pacing the shelves, running her fingers over the spines. “Can you believe he still reads paper books? It’s so nineteenth century.”
The sun made black spots in Lyra’s vision. The room began to turn, slowly, and to stay standing she had to grip the table. Side effects. No. Symptoms.
“Do you have a bathroom?” she asked him. Sebastian had so many things it made her dizzy: paper clips and mugs, framed photographs and bundles of wire, coins and little porcelain trays to hold them. She could hear all of it screaming, crying out in neglect; she wanted to open her mouth and swallow the whole room. She wished she could stuff all of his belongings down inside her, like some kind of magical potion that would turn her human, totally human, at last.
Like some kind of magical potion that could make her well.
“Are you all right?” He squinted at her, and for the first time she noticed how nice his clothing was compared to theirs, how well it fit him, how healthy he looked.
“Bathroom,” she managed to say again, even as she felt bile biting off the edge of the word, making acid in her throat.
In the bathroom, she turned on the faucets and opened her mouth and let the black come up, waves of sickness that brought with them a sharp antiseptic burn in her throat and Haven’s smell. They had failed to find Dr. Saperstein, like they had failed to save Rick Harliss, or Jake Witz, or Cassiopeia in the marshes. Everywhere they went, they had left nothing but death behind them.
And she had nothing but death to look forward to.
She sat back on her heels, waiting for the rise and fall of the room to go still. Her face was wet. She was crying. A green toothbrush with its bristles splayed, tweezers, a scattering of clipped hair, an empty tissue box gathering dust, a straw basket piled with magazines and paperback books. She wanted things. She wanted a phone, an apartment full of books, tall glasses and ice cube trays and mugs for tea hanging from nails beneath the kitchen cabinets. She wanted a space she could fill and fill with her belongings, until no one could touch her, no one could even reach her past all of her beautiful things.
She took a paperback from the basket and opened to inhale its pages. She tore off a piece of paper, and then another, and fed the pieces one by one into her mouth until she felt well enough to stand.
She hadn’t brought her backpack to the bathroom and that was a mistake. But she tucked the paperback into her waistband and found her T-shirt concealed it perfectly. She washed her mouth out. She felt better, with those pieces of paper pulsing their small words out from somewhere deep in her chest.
Hers.
Caelum and Sebastian had moved into the kitchen.
“I should have known the whole demonstration would be a disaster,” Sebastian was saying. Without his glasses, he was beautiful—not as beautiful as Caelum, but still beautiful. He had dark skin, high cheekbones, and eyes the same color as the afternoon sunlight on the wood floor. “But people never listen to reason. They don’t care about facts. They read one think piece in the Times and they get hysterical about everything. I swear, you can’t even fart on this campus without someone screaming environmental policy at you nowadays. You want some water or something? Beer? I have wine but it’s old.”
“Water’s fine,” Lyra and Caelum said, at the same time.
“I’m not a conservative,” Sebastian said. He poured water from the tap into tall glasses, and Lyra marveled at how comfortable he was touching everything, as if the whole space was just an extension of his body. “I understand we shouldn’t have theaters named after Ponzi scheme billionaires, or slave owners—and in our country, that excludes more people than you’d think. But Richard Haven?”
He shook his head. “His work on stem cell regeneration was pioneering. Do you know he built a lab in his room when he was in elementary school? He isolated his first nucleus when he was nine, using a kitchen spatula, basically. I’m exaggerating, but you get the point. He was a genius. You think Steve Jobs made people feel warm and fuzzy? Benjamin Franklin was a total prick, and so was Edison. He bought the idea for the lightbulb, by the way. He was basically just the licensor.”
He paused to take a breath and Lyra too felt breathless: so many words, ideas, names she’d never heard.
And she realized, then, that that was what being raised at Haven truly meant, and why she would never be entirely human. It wasn’t that they’d inserted needles to draw bone marrow or fed her a diet of pills, that they’d called her “it,” that she had never been held or cuddled, that her head had been shaved to keep out lice, and small fatal disease cells had been introduced into her muscle tissue just to watch what would happen. She’d been completely torn away from the human timeline, from a vast history of events, achievements, and names spanning more years than she could think of.
She had no context. She was a word on a blank page. There was no way to read meaning into it. No wonder she felt so alone.