“No,” Lyra said. Suddenly her happiness broke apart. It lifted into her chest and throat, and beat frantic wings against her rib cage. What if Sebastian had lied? What if he was wrong? What if Dr. O’Donnell didn’t remember her?
The driver turned around in his seat to peer at Caelum and Lyra, as if he’d just noticed them. “You sure you gonna be okay getting back?”
“We’re not going back,” she said, and he just shook his head and accepted the money they gave him. Too much, probably—Lyra was too nervous to count and let Caelum do the paying.
They waited until the cab light became distant and then blinked out. From where they stood, Lyra could see one of Allentown’s major arteries. But this road, sloughed off by the main thoroughfare, was totally without movement, except for the occasional approach of a car toward the Kmart. Haven’s security had depended on its remoteness. But CASECS was hiding in plain sight. No one would ever believe anything of importance would happen here, down the street from the school bus depot.
They went parallel to the driveway, on the shadowed side of the stone wall that continued along its length, concealed by a vein of trees that ran parallel to the pavement. They moved in silence, stopping every few feet to wait, and listen, and watch for security. But there was no movement, no distant voices or footsteps. Lyra should have been reassured, but instead, she only grew more anxious: she didn’t understand what kind of place this could possibly be.
They stopped a short distance from the guard hut, edging closer to the stone wall in a crouch, hoping to be mistaken for rocks. Now they had a clear view of the CASECS complex. It was a fraction of the size of Haven: three stories high, blocky white and bleakly rectangular. Security was tighter than it first appeared. A fence ringed at the top with barbed wire marked the periphery and made climbing impossible. Lyra noted, too, the presence of Glass Eyes everywhere, and small glowing pinpricks, like the burning embers of cigarette butts.
That left only one option: they would simply have to walk in, and hope they wouldn’t be shot.
They crouched, and they waited, learning the rhythm of the traffic in and out—almost all of it, at this hour, out. A sweep of headlights, the occasional patter of conversation as the guard—a woman with a sweep of blond hair and a booming laugh—leaned down to greet the driver. The mechanical gate clanked and shuddered open, then closed again. They counted seconds: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The gate was open for anywhere from ten to twenty seconds. More than enough time to run, if they were quick, if Lyra didn’t stumble.
Still, they would be heading for the guard directly, and Lyra was sure that she had a gun. She thought she could even see it: a dark bulge on the woman’s hip.
For the first time the whole thing struck her as funny, that they were risking their lives to get back into a facility like Haven after risking their lives to escape in the first place.
“Let me go alone,” Lyra said to Caelum. Suddenly it seemed important to her, critical, even. She would die anyway, whether pulled apart by the ricochet of bullets or by falling into holes that got ever deeper and harder to escape. Caelum was White. He could go anywhere—he could continue stealing wallets and cell phones, he could drift and disappear and reappear again. There would be other girls who loved him, and saw him as beautiful: human girls, who never knew where he came from and didn’t care. They would do what Lyra had done with him in the hotel room. They could turn themselves into living strands of music that played together.
“Don’t be stupid,” Caelum said. “We’re together.” He stood up. When she hesitated, he reached back and took her hand again. “Come on.”
They moved a little closer, until they were only a few feet from the perimeter fence and another, larger sign that announced CASECS to visitors. The headlights of a departing car made Lyra throw a hand up, momentarily dazzled. The gates clanked open again and then closed. The car swam past them, so close that Lyra could make out the silhouette of a man behind the wheel, turning to fiddle with the radio.
“Next one,” she said. She was suddenly having trouble breathing, and after only a few seconds her feet and legs felt numb and bloated, as if they’d been submerged in freezing water. What if she ran into the driveway and then froze, couldn’t remember where she was or where she was going? She hoped Caelum would hold her hand the whole way, but she didn’t want to ask.
“No,” Caelum said. “We wait for a car going in. The headlights will give us time. The guard will go blind for two, three seconds.”
He was right. They waited. She squeezed her toes. She named all the bones she could think of—ankle, clavicle, tibia. She would have looked for the stars, too, but they were invisible behind the light-smear from the city.
Lyra lost track of time. Minutes went by, or hours. The parking lot continued to empty. All the traffic flowed the wrong way. But at last a car approached from the direction of the Kmart, its headlights skimming the stone wall and then latching on to the guard hut, the fence, the harried-looking trees.
“Now,” Caelum said, as the gate began to grind open and the rhythm of conversation reached them—how ya doing, another late one, huh? Suddenly Lyra found that she could not remember how to stand. She tried to shout the urge to her legs, but they didn’t hear her. She was stuck where she was, and as Caelum tried to get her to her feet, she simply landed knees down in the grass instead, barely missing the stone wall with her chin. It was as if her ankles had been bound together by invisible cording. Stand, run, walk, she thought, but her body remained blankly unresponsive, filled with a useless static.
It was too late now: the car was passing inside the complex, tires fizzing on the pavement. Lyra’s heart was so swollen with fear she could feel it in her head, in her mouth, in the bottom of her stomach.
“What happened?” Caelum’s face was unexpectedly illuminated: fluid cheekbones, dark eyes. He was so perfect, so alive, and she was so broken. White cluster. Control. His blood, she imagined, was a deep and royal blue, hers dark and sludgy. “What’s wrong?”
Then she realized why she could see him so clearly, why every eyelash was drawn so vividly: yet another car was coming. This time she didn’t even have to tell her body to move. She didn’t have to think at all. She was on her feet. Caelum cursed, but he was right behind her. She made it over the fence but tripped getting over the curb.