“Is this CASECS?” she asked. The room looked nothing like a hospital. There was a desk cluttered with belongings in one corner, and shelves filled with books. A miniature fridge hummed in the corner, and a stuffed bear wearing a Number One Boss shirt gathered dust on top of it. Lyra was lying on a scratchy dark-wool sofa. There were framed posters on the walls, giant posters of people she didn’t recognize. There was a clock on the wall, and a paper calendar with cats. There were no keypads on the door and the only lock was the handle variety.
“This is part of it,” Dr. O’Donnell said. She wasn’t even wearing a lab coat—just jeans and boots and a light sweater. Maybe that was why Lyra felt so shy around her—that and the gray in her hair, the lines around her eyes, the sharp angle of her nose, all features Lyra hadn’t remembered. She had changed or she was different from the start, and either way, Lyra was nervous. “We’re a small operation. We keep a staff of just under a hundred and fifty. That includes the cleaning crew.” She smiled.
Then Lyra remembered Caelum, the way he’d veered off in the darkness when the headlights swept him, and the guard radioing for backup. “Where’s Caelum?” she asked, sitting up and blinking at another rush of birds in her head.
“Caelum. Is that what you call him?”
“That’s his name,” Lyra said, and felt anxious for reasons she couldn’t exactly say. The laughter, the distant drumming of music, a faint smell of alcohol—maybe it all stirred memories of Haven Christmas parties, when the researchers would remove their shoes to slide down the halls in their socks, and the air was edged with a taut, superficial tension, like the lip of water in a glass about to overflow.
“Don’t be afraid,” Dr. O’Donnell said, and that, at least, reassured her: Dr. O’Donnell still had that skill. She could look at something, or someone, and understand. “He looked hungry. Sonja—she’s my research assistant—went for pizza. Caelum’s probably halfway through it by now.” Her smile made new wrinkles appear and others collapse. “Are you hungry?”
Lyra shook her head. She was dizzy, and nauseous, and thirsty. But not hungry. I’m sick, she wanted to say. Help me. But she was too shy. She wished Dr. O’Donnell had been wearing a lab coat. Wished she’d looked more like a doctor, and that the room looked more like a hospital. Here she felt her sickness was a stain, that it would be terribly out of place.
Dr. O’Donnell got a bottle of water from the miniature fridge, which was also stocked with Diet Cokes.
“Drink this, at least,” she said, once again as if she’d read Lyra’s mind. She took a seat, and Lyra was aware of how closely Dr. O’Donnell watched her drink, no doubt taking note of the way Lyra’s hand shook. But Dr. O’Donnell didn’t comment on it, and she didn’t offer to help, either. “I still can’t believe it’s you. Number twenty-four, wasn’t it?”
Lyra nodded. It was strange to hear the words out loud, even after only a few weeks, strange to think of herself again that way, one of a series, something that could be stacked or arranged.
Dr. O’Donnell was watching her. “A Green. Is that right?”
Lyra nodded again, this time because her throat seized.
“And Caelum,” Dr. O’Donnell said, “is he a Green, too?”
“Caelum is a control,” Lyra said, surprised the words brought a bad taste to her mouth. She was expecting Dr. O’Donnell to look sorry for her and was glad she didn’t. But she was also confused. Did Dr. O’Donnell know what that meant? Did she know that meant Lyra was dying, and Caelum had to watch?
Dr. O’Donnell was good, but she had known about the sickness. She had known about the variants and the prions and the holes opening up in Lyra’s brain, and she had lied, like all the others, and claimed that Haven existed for the replicas’ protection.
But maybe Dr. Saperstein had forced her to lie.
In the silence, she heard a new swell of music. Someone shouted, “turn it up, turn it up,” and there was laughter.
“Is there always music here?” she asked.
Dr. O’Donnell laughed. “Sometimes. Not usually so late, though. Some of the staff members are celebrating tonight.” She seemed to hesitate. “We had some good news today.”
Lyra waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. It was, she realized, the longest conversation she’d ever had with Dr. O’Donnell. “What kind of good news?”
Dr. O’Donnell looked surprised. She didn’t know that Lyra had learned how to ask, how to say please and thank you, how to put on mascara and speak to males. Boys. “We’ll be able to continue our work here,” she said carefully. “We had—well, call it a contest. CASECS was up for an important award. And we won.”
“Award.” Lyra held the word on her tongue, and found it tasted like coins. “You mean like money?”
Again, Dr. O’Donnell looked startled. But almost immediately, she was serene again, and Lyra thought of a stone disappearing beneath the surface of a still pond. “Yes, like money.” She pronounced the word as if it were unfamiliar to her. “But more than that. Support. People who believe we’re doing the right thing.”
Lyra wanted to ask her about a cure, and about whether Dr. O’Donnell knew how to cure the twisted shapes deforming her brain. But before she could, Dr. O’Donnell leaned forward and took her hands, and Lyra was startled by their dryness, by the coolness of her touch, both familiar and totally foreign. For some reason she thought of Rick and felt a strong impulse to run, to backpedal into the darkness, to rewind the miles they had covered and return to Winston-Able.
But almost immediately, the impulse passed, and she couldn’t have said where it had come from. Rick was gone. The past was gone. Dead. You had to sever the lines and let it float off on the ocean, or you would simply sink with it.
“Tell me what happened to you, Lyra,” Dr. O’Donnell said softly. “Tell me everything that happened. It’s important.”
“Haven burned down,” she said simply. “Everything burned.”
She waited for Dr. O’Donnell to express surprise, but she didn’t.
“I heard,” she said finally, when Lyra said nothing more. “It was in the news. And besides, Dr. Saperstein—well, we stayed in touch, in a manner of speaking.” But a shadow had crossed her face and Lyra knew enough, now, to read Dr. O’Donnell’s unhappiness. They had always been fighting, Dr. O’Donnell and Dr. Saperstein. Most of what they’d said was above her head, full of scientific words that had washed over her like breaking water. But there had been one memorable fight about the rats, and whether or not the replicas should be allowed to have some toys and games.
Still—if Dr. O’Donnell had left Haven because she wanted to help, why hadn’t she come back when she heard about the fire?
Lyra was having trouble pinning her ideas of Dr. O’Donnell down onto the face in front of her. That was always the problem with faces, with bodies: they told you nothing. Like the genotypes who looked the same but acted completely different. Cassiopeia was proud and strange and angry, but she collected seashells, she scooped insects from the path so they wouldn’t be stepped on.
Then there was Calliope, who would catch spiders just to pull their legs off, one by one. Who’d once stepped on a baby bird, just to hear it crunch beneath her shoe.