“Go on,” Lyra said. Finally, she took a seat, hoping that Dr. O’Donnell hadn’t noticed her relief. Caelum, however, stayed where he was. “But then it’s our turn.”
Dr. O’Donnell called up a smile with obvious difficulty. “I promise,” she repeated. Since Caelum wasn’t sitting, she took the empty chair instead, and drew it across from Lyra, so they were almost knee to knee. She leaned forward, and Lyra was sure she would ask about Gemma.
But instead she said, “Do you know how many replicas escaped Haven after the explosion?”
Now Lyra was the one who was surprised.
“Why does it matter?” Caelum asked.
Dr. O’Donnell barely turned her head to give him a tight smile. “You said you’d answer first.”
Lyra shook her head. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Caelum and I were hiding. We got under the fence. . . .” When she closed her eyes, she could still see the zigzag of flashlights, and hear the rhythm of helicopters threshing the smoke beneath their propellers. Dozens of them, passing back and forth, back and forth. She remembered screaming. “There were rescue helicopters, though. So there must have been some. Dr. Saperstein survived, didn’t he?” Dr. O’Donnell nodded. “The explosion happened in A-Wing. But there wouldn’t have been replicas there.”
Dr. O’Donnell was quiet for a bit. She clutched her hands, making her knuckles very white. Were they really the same hands, Lyra wondered, that had smuggled books onto Spruce Island, had touched Lyra’s forehead when she was feverish?
“Why?” Caelum asked again. When she looked down at her hands, he said, “You promised to answer.”
Dr. O’Donnell shook herself, as if she were passing out of a rain. “I never liked what Dr. Saperstein was doing at Haven,” she said. “Research of that magnitude . . .” She cleared her throat. “Secrets breed violence. The bigger the secret, the bigger the violence.” Suddenly, she stood up, moving not toward the door but to a barred window with a view of nothing but a blight of straggly trees. “Dr. Saperstein is dead. His secrets killed him. And it’s possible—it’s likely—that the replicas he brought up from Florida managed to escape.”
“Where?” Lyra asked.
“I don’t know.” Dr. O’Donnell turned to them when Caelum made a noise in his throat. “That’s the truth. I don’t know. Somewhere in Lancaster County, only an hour or so south of here. That’s all I know. We weren’t exactly on the best of terms.”
“He was suing you,” Lyra said, parroting back what Sebastian had told her. Again, Dr. O’Donnell looked surprised.
“You were always very smart,” Dr. O’Donnell said. Lyra wanted to hit her.
She gripped the sides of her chair, as another wave of dizziness nearly took her sideways. “What do you make here, if you aren’t making cures?”
Dr. O’Donnell turned back to the window. She waited so long to answer, Lyra began to think that her promise had also been a lie.
But finally she did. “Dr. Haven and Dr. Saperstein were convinced that their work could only be done in secret,” she said. “That was wrong.”
“You said that already,” Caelum said.
“Just listen.” A sigh moved from Dr. O’Donnell’s shoulders down her spine. “I’ve spent years doing nothing but speaking to people—scientists, engineers, politicians, even—about how important this research is. How important it should be.”
Lyra decided she hated that word—important. The way Dr. O’Donnell said it made her want to spit. As if it were a beautiful piece of glass, as if Dr. O’Donnell was beautiful just because she carried its syllables around on her tongue. How many people, Lyra wondered, were dead because of someone else’s importance?
“That’s what we do at CASECS. We promote research. We give hospitals, facilities, even governments the chance to do their own research. That’s where you come in.” Dr. O’Donnell turned away from the window again. She wasn’t smiling. “There’s nowhere else for you to go. I know you understand that. If you leave, you’ll eventually be caught by the same people who wanted to erase you in the first place.”
“I’m dying anyway,” Lyra said. “Aren’t I?”
Dr. O’Donnell winced, as if Lyra had fired something sharp at her forehead.
“You lied about a cure,” Lyra said, although the words curdled in her mouth and left her with a bad taste in her throat. “Admit it.”
Dr. O’Donnell looked down. “There’s no cure,” she said softly. But Lyra thought, unbelievably, that she really sounded sorry about it. Still, the words fell like a thin knife, Lyra felt, slicing the world in two. She remembered the moment that Caelum had grabbed her wrist and she’d seen his mud-coated nails and felt the strange warmth and newness of his touch, and then a rocketing blast had driven her off her feet. She had thought, then, the world might be ending.
Instead it was ending here, in this room.
“We hardly understand prions,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “Dr. Saperstein understood them better than anyone in the world, probably, and he wasn’t looking for a cure. The whole point was to study a class of disease that we knew hardly anything about. To see how it could be manipulated, to understand it by making different variations and observing their effects.” She shook her head. “He was collecting data. It had to be incurable.”
Lyra thought of all the replicas she’d ever known—Lilac Springs and Rose and Cassiopeia and the hundreds of numbered ones they’d never named—standing in a vast row against a blinding sunshine, looking like pen strokes on a page. Looking like data.
“So why does it matter?” Lyra said. “Why does it matter, if I’m just going to die?”
Dr. O’Donnell looked up. “I’m offering you more time,” she said.
Years collapsed in a second. Just for a second, Lyra fell back into the fantasy of Dr. O’Donnell as her savior, as her mother, as her friend.
“We don’t want anything from you,” Caelum said.
At the same time Lyra asked, “How?”
Dr. O’Donnell spoke in a quiet rhythm Lyra knew from their Sunday readings. “Most people in the world—the vast majority of people—don’t even know it’s possible to clone human beings. They’ve heard about cloning sheep, and cloning human organs, even. Dogs, apes, cows, on rare occasions. But Haven’s work was kept so confidential—secret, I mean—that most people, if you told them a single human clone was alive in the world, eating, breathing, thinking—they wouldn’t believe it.” When Dr. O’Donnell spoke, it was like the soft touch of a Sleeper. Lyra’s mind turned dull and soft and malleable. “You’re our proof.”
She could have laughed. She wanted to cry. “I’m not proof.”