“Actually, that was one of the reasons I was hoping that Dr. Saperstein would show up today—other than taking a stand, I mean. I’m interested in medical tech, and I’m curious about the IP aspect. They’re saying Cat O’Donnell might be up for a Nobel Prize. But she wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for Haven. The whole idea of individual-specific stem cell regeneration . . . It seems obvious now, but that was a revolutionary idea.”
The name O’Donnell touched Lyra like the electric zap of the Extraordinary Kissable Graph: one of the machines she’d loved the best at Haven, which read her heartbeats and then drew them, vividly, in climbing green lines and vivid peaks that recalled the mountains she’d seen only on TV.
“You . . . you know Dr. O’Donnell?” she asked.
“I mean, not personally.” Sebastian gave her a look she didn’t know how to decipher. “I just know her because of what she’s doing at CASECS. I heard she used to work with Dr. Saperstein at Haven,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “That’s why he’s suing her. I guess he thinks she stole some of his research. Meanwhile O’Donnell won’t say a word about it. Still, pictures never lie.”
He pulled out his cell phone and made adjustments to it, tapping and swiping the screen. Then he spun it across the table to her and she lost her breath.
There, in miniature, was Dr. O’Donnell, stepping off one of the trash ferries that used to travel back and forth to Haven. She was wearing regular clothing, and her head was angled toward Dr. Saperstein, who was next to her, but Lyra would have known her just from the geometry of her ear where it joined her jaw, by the color of her hair, by the way her mouth flattened when she thought.
Dr. O’Donnell had given them names from the stars, and so she had given them a whole universe.
And in a single instant, Lyra realized how wrong she had been, how stupid.
Dr. Saperstein wasn’t God.
Dr. O’Donnell was.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 14 of Gemma’s story.
FIFTEEN
LYRA DIDN’T LIKE TO STEAL from Sebastian. He was nice. He had helped them. He had resurrected Dr. O’Donnell, and shown them where CASECS was, only a short distance away in a place called Allentown.
But she was beginning to understand that those things didn’t matter. Whether he was nice or not, he had a phone that she wanted, and so she took it when he wasn’t paying attention.
Richard Haven had a whole building. He had his name above beautiful glass doors. And he was not nice.
Being nice didn’t matter. Only taking did, the way animals took.
They wouldn’t get far, Lyra knew, before Sebastian realized that Lyra had stolen his phone.
But they didn’t need to get far. They didn’t need distance to disappear.
Being invisible had benefits: it was easy to shoplift, as long as you picked a crowded store (Caelum’s mistake in the 7-Eleven had been to steal when there was no one around to deflect the clerk’s attention; when he had, for a brief, flaring moment, become visible); to edge a little too close, or lean a little too hard, and come away with a phone or a wallet; to pass into a restaurant and then stand up and leave again before anyone could ask that you pay.
Lyra was now throwing up almost everything she ate, but that was all right, that didn’t stop her.
They’d agreed their best chance of getting into CASECS to see Dr. O’Donnell was at night. They were thinking, of course, of Haven’s security and of Caelum’s escape, which could never have been accomplished during the day. By evening Caelum had two cell phones and a new wallet of his own, plus more than fifty dollars he’d skimmed from the tables of restaurants and cafés, and Lyra had a leather billfold and several credit cards, plus a necklace she’d found coiled at the bottom of a woman’s purse when she’d dropped her hand casually down inside it.
Everything she added to her backpack made her feel better, less nauseous, less dizzy. She didn’t understand gravity, but she knew intuitively every bit of weight, no matter how small, slowed her, made her mind turn less quickly, made her feel less as if she might drop down into a place where no one could find her.
It wasn’t yet dark when they hired a car to take them to Allentown: their first time in a taxi. Though they didn’t have an address for CASECS, the driver managed to locate it easily enough on his phone, and told them the route would take roughly an hour and a half in traffic.
Maybe she should have felt bad. Maybe she should have felt sorry for all the things they’d stolen. She wondered whether Sebastian was angry, whether the woman with the bright-pink lips from whom she’d taken the necklace would be sad.
But she didn’t feel bad. They were going to see Dr. O’Donnell, and Dr. O’Donnell would make it all better. She was happier than she’d ever been, sitting in a sticky backseat that smelled like bubble gum, her backpack heavy on her lap, Caelum’s hand occasionally brushing her thigh, her hand, her shoulder, like a bird exploring the territory. She felt human. Didn’t humans, after all, take what they needed? Wasn’t that what humans like Dr. Saperstein, like Richard Haven, had always done?
They reached Allentown just as dusk lowered like an eyelid. From one minute to the next, streetlamps blinked on, and buildings lost form and instead became beaded strings of lit windows. They wheeled off the highway into long bleak alleys of car lots, parking garages, blocky office buildings, industrial complexes with names like Allegra Solutions and Enterprise Data. Lyra lowered the window and smelled gasoline and tree sap, frying oil and a faint chemical tang.
The taxi driver slowed, leaning over his steering wheel to squint hard at every street sign. Finally, they turned down a street identical to all the other streets except in name. On the corner, a Kmart showed off a cheerful block facade that reminded Lyra of Haven. A good sign. They kept going, past a fenced-in parking lot and a flotilla of bright-yellow school buses, all sickly in the fading light and pointed in the same direction, like fish suspended in the deep.
Several blocks later, the street dead-ended in a scrub of thinned-out, trash-filled woods. But as they approached, a narrow drive appeared behind a low stone wall, moving out of the shadow of the trees like some kind of optical illusion.
CASECS was marked by a single sign planted low in the grass. The No Trespassing sign next to it was leaning at an angle, and half-swallowed by a hedge that had begun to lose its shape. There were no patrolling soldiers, no guard towers, no obvious security measures: just a long, narrow sweep of driveway that pointed to a simple guard hut. The institute itself was concealed by the curvature of the drive, but the distant lights winking through the overhanging trees suggested a building much smaller than she’d been expecting.
Her heart began gasping, and she imagined the organ like the bird she and the other replicas had once found near A-Wing, sucking in frantic breaths.
“Here,” Lyra said.
The driver met her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Here? You sure?” When Lyra nodded, he said, “You want me to wait?”