“Shut up. You know what I mean.” Then: “Do you think . . . do you think they dream and everything?”
“I don’t see why not. Dr. O’Donnell says they . . . like we do,” the girl whispered, so softly that even the rustle of Caelum’s blankets when he turned blew some of her words away. “She never had proof before. So many of the others were morons. She told me some of them couldn’t even use the toilet. But these . . .”
Caelum rolled over again, and so the boy’s response was lost. When he finally settled down, the girl was already speaking.
“. . . depending on what you use them for.” There was a long stretch of quiet, and Lyra feared, though she knew it was impossible, the girl would hear the knocking of her heart and know she was awake and listening. “Everyone always thought AI would come from computers. But we did it first. Biology did it.”
For a long time, they didn’t speak again.
“It’s kind of sad, in a way,” the boy said at last.
“You can’t think of it like that,” the girl responded. “You have to remember there’s a purpose.”
“Cha-ching,” the boy responded. Lyra didn’t know what it meant.
“Sure,” the girl said. She sounded annoyed. “But that isn’t the only reason. We can save hundreds of thousands of lives. Maybe we’ll even cure death.”
“Who knew,” the boy said, “eternal life would spring from a cooler in Allentown, Pennsylvania?”
He closed the door, sealing out the light. Lyra’s heart was beating fast. She rolled over to face Caelum, trying to slow the frantic drumming of her pulse, listening to the sound of their intermingled breathing. She thought about what she had overheard: the talk of AI, which she didn’t understand; licensing, the key to eternal life. She had misunderstood many things, but she had understood that: the key was here, somewhere in CASECS, locked in a cooler. Perhaps the key was in the medicine that Dr. O’Donnell had given her. Or perhaps it was a real key, or a kind of medical equipment.
Though it should have been an electrifying idea, instead it made her uncomfortable. At Haven, they had tried to be gods by making life: and so the replicas had suffered for their miracle.
She wondered what it would look like to cure death, and who would have to suffer for it.
As her mind wandered through strange corridors that bordered on dream, she thought for some reason of a bird they’d found on one of the courtyard pathways when she was a child: a scrawny brown thing, smaller than her palm, it must have mistaken the reflection in one of the windows for an aerial pathway and flown straight into the glass.
She remembered the way it had tried to hop to safety as the replicas had crowded around it, and her sudden lurching awareness of death all around them, not just in the clean white folds of the Box, not contained or containable. And then Calliope, who was then only called number 7, had stepped forward and driven her foot down on top of it, so hard they all heard the crunch.
It was broken, Calliope had said. It’s better to kill it. It’s the right thing.
But Lyra had suspected, had known, that she had just wanted to know what would happen. She was curious to know what it would feel like, that small fragile second when a life snapped beneath her shoe with the sharp crack of a flame leaping to life from the head of a match but in reverse: the sound of darkness, not light.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Gemma’s story.
EIGHTEEN
WHEN SHE FINALLY SLEPT, SHE had a dream of standing in the middle of a large metal chamber that vibrated like the interior chamber of Mr. I, while Anju spoke over the roar, explaining how to license chairs.
Leaning forward over the railing, Lyra saw hundreds and hundreds of chairs lined up along the tongue of a conveyor belt, and for some reason she was repulsed by them, by their jointed design and the crooked look of their spindly legs—until, looking closer, she saw they weren’t made out of wood or plastic, but out of human arms and legs, human feet, thousands of bodies hacked up and rearranged and made available, Anju was saying, for sale on a large scale.
She woke up sweating. The morning, which should have been filled with a buzz of activity and voices, was instead profoundly quiet. Caelum had opened the blinds, and his face was cut into horizontal stripes of light.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her, without turning away from the window.
She sat up, shaking off the sticky remnants of her dream. Her whole body was sore and her legs were purpling with enormous, flower-shaped bruises. But her head was clearer. Maybe the medicine was working already.
“Better,” she said. “What are you doing?”
He turned to face her. “The windows are barred. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing but telephones and office rooms and computers. So why bar the windows and put up the fence? Why security?”
“They want to keep people from getting in,” Lyra said.
“Why? If they’re making medicines, if they’re curing diseases, why all the secrecy?” He shook his head. “They’re hiding something.”
Lyra was annoyed. Caelum saw danger in everything and everybody. But it was easy for him to doubt. He wasn’t the one who needed a cure.
And what bothered her most, deep down, was that she knew he was right.
“Maybe they don’t want anyone stealing from them,” she said. She was about to tell him what she had overheard in the night—about the key to eternal life, about the magic cooler—when the door opened and a girl came in with a paper bag that said Dunkin’ Donuts. Her face was shaped exactly like a circle, her eyes like two exclamation points of surprise.
“Dr. O’Donnell said you might want breakfast.” She looked nervous, Lyra thought—as if she were the one who felt out of place.
“Where is Dr. O’Donnell?” Lyra asked.
The girl looked startled, as if she hadn’t expected questions. “Putting out fires,” she said, and Lyra frowned. “I don’t mean real fires,” the girl added, seeing that Lyra didn’t understand, and she giggled a little. “It’s just an expression.”
“It means there’s been an emergency,” Caelum said. Lyra looked at him, surprised. “I heard Rick say it.”
Thinking of Rick and the people who had taken him made Lyra feel nauseous again. She wondered whether they were still out there, searching for her and Caelum. She wondered whether she really had seen the man at UPenn or only imagined it; she wondered if they could track her to CASECS. But Dr. O’Donnell would protect her.
She’d promised.
“What emergency?”
Now the girl definitely looked nervous. “Dr. O’Donnell says you have to eat something,” she said, avoiding the question entirely. “I have some water for you, too.”