“I didn’t mean it that way,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “I only meant—”
Lyra cut her off. “No. You don’t understand. I’m not proof. I’m not even a replica. I wasn’t made at Haven. I wasn’t made at all.” She felt both satisfied and sickened at the fault line of disappointment that shook Dr. O’Donnell’s face. “You didn’t know? I have a father. His name is Rick Harliss. I had a mother too, but she didn’t want me, so she gave me over to Haven and then she died.” Saying it out loud gave her the good kind of pain, like digging in the gums with a fingernail. “I wasn’t made by anything except accident. No one wanted me at all.”
That was really what had made Caelum so special to her: he wanted her. And not just because of her body and what he could do with it, but for her, something inside neither of them had a name for, the stitching and the thread that held her whole life as a spiderweb holds even the sunlight that passes through it. “There were more of us at Haven. Not just me. Replicas are expensive.” She remembered that day on the marshes, the soldier saying, You know how expensive these things are to make? “I guess that means I was cheap.”
Dr. O’Donnell shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. Lyra wanted to ask whether she was sorry for Lyra or for herself. “I . . . heard rumors. But that was all before my time.”
It was the most dangerous kind of lie: the one the liar believed. “That’s convenient for you,” she said. She felt a hard, ugly pull of hatred. Was this all the world was? They’d escaped Haven only to find that Haven existed everywhere.
Dr. O’Donnell stood up. She stared down at Lyra as if from an enormous height. But when she spoke, she sounded calm. “If you understand anything, I want you to try and understand this,” she said. “We’re all doing our best. We always have been.” But her mouth twisted around the words, and Lyra wondered if on some level even her body knew that was a lie—or at least, that it wasn’t an excuse. “Haven was a crazy place—such a crazy time for everyone. . . . I posted there for three years and I remember I would leave for the holidays, step off that launch, and hardly remember how to be human. . . .” Bad choice of words, and she seemed to realize it. Lyra and Caelum had no idea what any of it meant: the holidays, family, Haven as a fluid world that allowed passage in and out. “Some people might think what we did was wrong. Maybe it was. But it was also a miracle. It was, maybe, the first scientific miracle.” She almost looked like she might cry. “You make choices. You make sacrifices. Sometimes you make the wrong choices. Then you work to correct them. That’s what science is about.”
Lyra wanted to argue, because she knew there was some problem of logic there: there had to be. Anyone could give names to anything—Dr. O’Donnell had taught her that, when she’d given Lyra her name. If you could do anything you wanted and then call it doing your best, you could invent anything, excuse anything. There had to be a center somewhere. There had to be a truth.
But suddenly, Lyra found she couldn’t bring up the words she wanted to say. The word center, for example. She could picture it, see it as a hard little seed at the back of her tongue, but she couldn’t find the word. This was a hole of a different kind. She wasn’t dropping into it. It was reaching up to swallow her. Lyra thought of the pages she’d eaten in Sebastian’s bathroom, and the words all dissolving into her blood. She wished she hadn’t: now she was nauseous and thought that they were the things poisoning her, saw the letters reconfigure themselves into deformities, like little mangled prions, and float carelessly toward her heart. Words could make anything: that was their great power, and their great danger. Lyra saw that now.
Dr. O’Donnell had already started moving for the door when Caelum spoke up again.
“I have another question.”
She turned around, keeping her hand on the door.
“Someone blew up Haven because of their idea of God,” Caelum said. “You know that?”
Dr. O’Donnell frowned. “I’d heard.”
“And Haven was for science, and it killed people, too.”
Dr. O’Donnell said nothing.
Caelum took a step toward her, and then another. Dr. O’Donnell’s whole body tensed.
“My question is this.” He stopped when he was no more than four inches away from her, and Lyra could see how badly Dr. O’Donnell wanted to flee, how hard she was trying not to throw the door open and run. “If it’s okay to kill people for science, or for God, is it okay to kill people if you think you need to?”
“Of course not,” she said sharply.
“Why not?” He spoke the words softly, but she flinched.
“I—I don’t expect you to understand.” She couldn’t control herself anymore. She wrenched the door open, forcing him to step back. “The world isn’t black and white. There are no easy answers.”
Still, Caelum wasn’t done.
“You said the world isn’t black and white. But the world isn’t like you think it is either,” he said quietly. Dr. O’Donnell froze. “I watched and I watched. There were days I watched so much I thought I wasn’t even a person, just an eye. And even I know that when you push, and you keep pushing, someday, sometime, someone is going to push you back.”
Dr. O’Donnell turned to face him, very slowly. “Are you threatening me, Caelum?”
“I don’t need to,” he said. “That’s just the way the world works.” He smiled, too. “We all do our best, like you said.”
Dr. O’Donnell opened her mouth, but Lyra couldn’t hear her response. A sound filled her ears like the sifting of wind across a desert, a sound of huge emptiness, and her body disappeared, and Dr. O’Donnell and Caelum and the room disappeared, and darkness lifted up and swallowed her like a wave.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 20 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-ONE
SHE DIDN’T EXIST AND THEN she did again: she was drinking water, and as the cold touched her lips and tongue and throat, it poured her back into herself. She was so startled she nearly choked.
Dr. O’Donnell was gone.
So was Caelum.
She couldn’t remember where the water had come from—it was in a mug, and there was writing on the mug, but she couldn’t seem to bring it into focus; the letters were meaningless geometry. She couldn’t understand where Caelum had gone, or Dr. O’Donnell, and in fact she couldn’t remember their names or what they looked like but only that there had been other people with her, a sense that she’d been left behind.