“Caelum escaped with me,” Lyra said. “We ran and hid. We didn’t want to go back to Haven. They were making us sick.”
She waited for Dr. O’Donnell to apologize or say that Dr. Saperstein had forced the doctors to obey. But she just said, “That was weeks ago. Where have you been all this time?” She seemed truly curious. “Who fed you? Who gave you clothes? Who brought you here, to see me?”
It annoyed Lyra that Dr. O’Donnell assumed someone else had brought them. She didn’t want to tell Dr. O’Donnell about Gemma, or about Rick—they were hers, she decided suddenly, like bed number 24 had been hers, like The Little Prince had been hers after Dr. O’Donnell gave her a copy.
“No one,” she said. Her voice sounded loud. “We came ourselves. We took the bus and a taxi. We slept where we could. And we took what we needed.”
“You mean you stole it?”
“We took it.” Lyra was more than annoyed now. She was angry. “Everybody else has things. Why shouldn’t we?” Dr. O’Donnell’s cell phone was sitting there, on the counter, next to a coffee mug ringed with lipstick, and this infuriated Lyra more: it was evidence. Proof. “People take things all the time. They took what they wanted from us at Haven, didn’t they? Didn’t you?” She didn’t mean to say it, but the words came out and she wasn’t sorry. She was happy when Dr. O’Donnell released her hands, happy to think she had caused Dr. O’Donnell pain.
But when Dr. O’Donnell spoke, she didn’t sound upset. She actually smiled. “You’re tired,” she said. “You’re sick. And, of course, you’re right. You’re right.” And Lyra couldn’t understand it, but Dr. O’Donnell began to laugh.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Gemma’s story.
SEVENTEEN
AFTER A DINNER OF SALTY soup and crackers that dissolved in the broth, Lyra worked up the courage to tell Dr. O’Donnell what she had come for: she wanted to live.
Dr. O’Donnell listened in silence, resting one hand lightly on Lyra’s knee. Lyra should have felt happy, because Dr. O’Donnell was obviously so happy to see her.
But a shadow had attached itself to her thinking; everything dimmed beneath it. Why hadn’t Dr. O’Donnell come to help? Why did she allow the doctors to make all the replicas sick? What was CASECS, that there were no hospital beds but only sofas and armchairs and corkboards, where the doctors wore jeans and sneakers and music played at midnight?
She was reassured, however, when after a long pause, Dr. O’Donnell stood up. “Wait here,” she said, and slipped out the door. When she reappeared, she was holding a small, unmarked bottle of fluid, along with one of the long-snouted syringes Lyra had despised back at Haven, for their cruel curiosity. Now, she was relieved to see it.
“What is it?” Lyra asked. Dr. O’Donnell found a pair of medical gloves at the bottom of a desk drawer and cinched them carefully on her fingers.
“A new medicine,” Dr. O’Donnell said. She drew the liquid carefully into the syringe, keeping her back to Lyra. “Very rare. Very expensive.”
“Will it cure me?” Lyra asked. Hope buoyed her, swelled her with air, and made her feel as if she might lift off toward the ceiling. “Will it make all the prions go away?”
“With any luck,” Dr. O’Donnell said. Then: “Hold out your arm for me.”
Dr. O’Donnell offered Caelum a couch in the office next to hers, which belonged to a beautiful woman named Anju Patel. But in the end, since Caelum insisted on sleeping next to Lyra, Dr. O’Donnell and Anju maneuvered a second couch into Dr. O’Donnell’s office instead.
“Sorry if there are any crumbs in the cushions,” Anju said. She had appeared suddenly, practically careening through the door, wearing sweatpants and an inside-out T-shirt, as if she’d dressed in a hurry. Lyra had overheard Anju tell Dr. O’Donnell she’d been in bed when someone had rung her up to share the news of Lyra and Caelum’s arrival.
The medicine had filled Lyra with a kind of happy warmth: already, she could picture the prions breaking apart, like mist by the sun.
“Cupcakes are my coffee. I need at least one a day just to keep moving.” Anju turned to Dr. O’Donnell. “Sorry, I don’t—I mean, do they understand me?”
“We understand you,” Caelum said. “You like to eat cupcakes?”
For some reason his voice made Anju startle. Then she began to laugh.
“Oh God,” she said. She had tears in her eyes, soon, from laughing, though Lyra didn’t know what was funny. “Yeah, I do. I really do.”
After Dr. O’Donnell had cleaned and bandaged the cut on Caelum’s cheek and set him up with an ice pack to help reduce the swelling around his eye, she left in search of Advil and something to help Caelum sleep. Anju Patel stayed, staring. Her eyes, dark as the nicotine candies Rick had sucked sometimes, were enormous, and Lyra had a sudden fear she would be spiraled down inside them, like water down a drain.
“Are you a doctor too?” Lyra asked, both because she was curious and because she was slowly learning to dislike silence. At Haven, silence, her silence, had not been a choice but simply a condition.
Anju Patel laughed again. “God, no,” she said. “I can’t even get my blood drawn. I’m a baby for things like that.” Lyra didn’t know what she meant, or why anyone would be unable to have blood drawn—for a second she thought Anju meant there was something physically wrong with her, that she couldn’t. “I’m in sales. Licensing, really.”
“What’s licensing?” Caelum asked. Lyra, too, had never heard the word.
Anju Patel’s face changed. “Do you like to ask questions?” she asked, instead of answering. “Are you very curious?”
Caelum shrugged. Again the shadow swept across Lyra’s mind, like a dark-winged bird brushing her with its feather.
“When we don’t know something,” Lyra said, “we ask to know it.”
Anju nodded thoughtfully, as if there were something surprising about that. Maybe Anju was just very stupid. She took a long time to answer.
“Licensing is about rights,” she said finally, very slowly. “It’s about who has the right to do what. It’s about who has the right to own what.”
A chill moved down Lyra’s body and raised the hair on her arms. It always came back to ownership.
“Let’s say you have an idea, a good idea, and you want to share it. To make sure other people can use it. But it was your idea, so you should get rewarded.” Anju was talking very slowly, like the nurses at Haven always had when they were forced to address the replicas directly. Maybe because they had known all along of the holes that would eventually make shrapnel of their brains; maybe they had already zoomed forward in time and seen the replicas idiotic, unable to control their bodies, paralyzed and silenced and then dead.
But didn’t Anju know that Dr. O’Donnell had given Lyra special medicine? Didn’t she understand that Lyra’s brain would be saved?