THE LOCKS AT CASECS HADN’T been made to keep people prisoner—especially people like Lyra and Caelum, who were only half-people, raised in a place where a thousand different locks controlled the motion of their daily lives. Lyra and Caelum knew locks that beeped and locks that spun, locks that clicked and locks that jammed. Each of them had its own language, its own clucking tongue.
They rooted in Dr. O’Donnell’s desk. Gemma turned up a business card like the kind the Suits had carried into Haven, dropping occasionally like scattered jewels for the replicas to collect: this one carried the name Allen Fortner. She knew this must mean that Dr. O’Donnell had business with the Suits, or wanted to, even before she turned up a to-do list that included the item: Call Geoffrey Ives.
Rifling through a notepad, she found many to-do lists, and many calls to Gemma’s father.
She wondered whether he was already on his way. More likely, he had simply sent someone to take care of Lyra and Caelum; he was the kind of person who spoke through his money.
She stuffed her pockets with paper, with Post-it notes, with business cards and scrawled reminders. Evidence, although she still wasn’t sure what it proved. But every piece of paper, every scrap, hardened a sense of rage and injustice.
If she had any time left, any time at all, she would take the words and light them on fire so they would explode everywhere; they would drift like a cloud and blacken Dr. O’Donnell’s name, and CASECS’s name, and Geoffrey Ives’s name too. Even if she died, she would find a way to make the words live.
In the bottom drawer, behind a rubble of loose pens, they found a handful of bobby pins. Caelum straightened out one of the bobby pins and inserted it into the keyhole, wiggling until he heard it click. In less than five seconds, they were free.
The hallway was empty, and branched in both directions. Lyra saw no exit signs and couldn’t remember which way to go. The night before, she’d been too overwhelmed to pay attention. Caelum had been brought in by security and was distracted by a small cluster of people who had gathered to watch, but he thought they should turn left, and so they did.
Caelum was right about the rest of CASECS: it was all carpeted hallways and offices marked with unfamiliar names, conference rooms and cubicles. Lyra saw signs of the previous night’s celebration: a bottle of wine, uncorked, and plastic cups that had pooled liquid onto a conference table. There were coffee mugs still exhaling steam at empty desks, and abandoned jackets, purses, and cell phones everywhere, suggesting their owners had, indeed, come to work only to be spirited away.
Fear moved like a film of sweat across Lyra’s body. The hallway seemed to keep unrolling extra feet, stretching endlessly past the same bleak workstations, as if it were expanding. She kept spinning around, thinking she heard footsteps on the carpet, expecting to see Dr. O’Donnell bearing down on them. But they saw no one but a guy wedged into a cubicle, fiddling with a grid of numbers on his computer, ears obscured beneath palm-sized headphones. He didn’t see them.
Finally, the hallway dead-ended and they turned right, startling a girl holding a bakery box. She nearly dropped it, yelped, and turned to hurry away—as if she had reason to be afraid of them.
“We have to hurry,” Caelum said, as if Lyra didn’t know. But she spotted a set of double doors where the girl had whipped out of sight around another turn, and she and Caelum grabbed hands and ran.
Lyra’s heart was gasping. As they got close she thought it might burst; she saw a keypad like the kind they had used at Haven, which required an ID to swipe. But the doors had been propped open with an old paperback book, and beyond them was a stairwell and a sign pointing the way to further levels.
The stairs went down, and twisted them around several landings, past a level called Sub-One, which was unlit. Through a set of swinging doors, Lyra saw a vast room filled with nothing but old machines, abandoned workstations, and freight containers. The double doors opened at her touch.
“In here?” she whispered to Caelum. But just then, a patter of footsteps passed overhead, and he shook his head and pulled her on.
As they descended, the air got noticeably cooler. Lyra remembered what the boy had said about a refrigerator. She pictured an enormous, chilled space, like a dead heart, filled with endless chambers.
The stairs bottomed out at a heavy metal gate; this one was closed and required a digitized code to open. Beyond it was a plain white windowless door, fitted with yet another keypad and marked with a small sign that simply said: Secure Area—Live Samples. Lyra’s blood rushed a frantic rhythm to her head, and in its rhythm she heard the certainty of dark secrets. Whatever CASECS made, whatever Dr. O’Donnell built with all her wanting, it was here.
They had no choice but to backtrack. The climb left Lyra winded and she had to rest on the landing, leaning heavily against Caelum, before they slipped once again through the propped-open doors at the top of the stairs. Maybe, Lyra thought, there was no exit. Maybe Dr. O’Donnell had trapped them, the way in the early days Haven had placed rats in mazes that didn’t lead anywhere, to test how long it took for the sick ones to learn all the dead ends.
They turned again, and this time Lyra’s heart leapt: an exit sign pointed through a set of doors only twenty feet away. She was so happy she failed to register the sudden swell of voices. She slipped easily away from Caelum even as he tried to grab her.
“Lyra, wait.”
But she had started toward the sign already, hooked on the glowing comfort of its syllables. Exit. A funny word, and one she had only lately come to love. At Haven, she had always thought the exit signs were taunting her.
She was halfway there when the wave of voices finally broke across her consciousness; as if the sound was a physical substance and she had mindlessly stepped into its current. Forty or fifty people were gathered in a conference room to crowd around a wall-mounted TV. Had they been turned to face the hallway instead, Lyra would have been visible. She was rooted directly in the middle of the doorway, frozen with sudden terror.
Dr. Saperstein was staring directly at her.
For a confused and terrified second, she mistook the image for the real thing and thought he was really there, staring bleakly over all the CASECS employees, pinning her with his eyes. But of course he wasn’t. It was just an old picture, an image made huge by the television. Almost immediately, Dr. Saperstein vanished, and a female newscaster with stiff black hair and an even stiffer smile took over the screen.
The rush of blood in Lyra’s ears quieted. But just for a minute.
“. . . confirmed that Dr. Mark Saperstein was indeed found dead this morning at an undisclosed location . . .”
A microwave beeped. No one bothered with it. They were all still. Lyra felt as if the air was being pressed out of her lungs.