She saw: the loop of lanyard visible above the stitching.
All she had to do was hook it with two fingers as she was passing.
Harmless.
In the bathroom, she used the toilet and washed her mouth out in the sink. There was no time to waste. Once Dr. O’Donnell returned, Lyra would lose her chance.
The girl had waited in the hall. When Lyra emerged, she saw the boy retracing his steps, making a search of the hallway.
“I had it right here,” he was saying. Another sleepy-looking employee had come to her office door, blinking and yawning, as if she’d just been napping. “Right here, in my pocket . . .”
When he looked up and spotted Lyra, he blinked, and Lyra was seized by sudden panic. But his eyes traveled through her down the length of carpet.
Of course. He wouldn’t think to check her or look in her pockets. They thought she wasn’t capable of it. Too dumb to lie. Too dumb to plan.
Lyra followed the girl back to the empty office, taking a seat quietly as the girl tried, and failed, to make the key work. She made a face when she saw the gum jamming the lock. “I don’t believe it,” she said. Suspicion tightened her face. “Did you do this?”
“Do what?” Lyra asked stupidly.
The girl rolled her eyes. “Worst night ever. Just stay here.”
Lyra nodded, dozy as an animal.
She counted the girl’s footsteps until the carpet had absorbed them completely.
She stood up, steadying herself against the wall. She had to be careful, to stay clear of any holes that might grab her.
For the moment, the hall was clear. She went quickly, scanning for hiding spots, checking door handles lightly with her fingers, looking for open offices. She ducked into the bathroom again when she heard voices, but the sound of a closing door quieted them. They had gone into an office, whoever they were.
She found her way to the stairwell without seeing anyone else. The doors were still propped open by the same book, its pages furred with moisture and age.
The first basement level was still dark, still full of the lumpy silhouettes of old equipment. She kept going, listening carefully for footsteps, since the turns concealed the landings beneath her. The girl with the striped hair had probably already discovered she was missing: Lyra had a minute, maybe two, before the girl panicked and launched an all-out search.
She reached Sub-Two, and the gate locked with a keypad. She nearly cried when she saw that it required a numbered code: she’d forgotten all about it. Her palms were sweating and dizziness rose like a sudden swarm of insects. She leaned against the gate, sucking air into lungs that felt like paper.
She imagined her whole body strapped with fear and anger. She imagined burning up with it, like the woman who, arriving at Spruce Island, had detonated the dozen homemade explosives lashed to her body. She imagined screaming so that all the windows shattered, so the roof blew off, so that everyone above her was consumed in flame.
She imagined fire.
She wheeled away from the gate and backtracked up the stairs, leaning heavily on the railing, until she spotted what she wanted: on the landing of Sub-One, directly across from the swinging doors, a small red-handled fire alarm. At Haven the alarms had been enclosed by plastic, surfaces warm and smudgy from the fingers of all the replicas who’d touched them for good luck and connection.
Pull down, the alarm said.
She pulled.
The noise made her teeth ring. It vibrated her eyeballs. Immediately, the stairs filled with the echoes of distant shouting. She rocketed across the landing and hurtled past the swinging doors, into the dark recesses of the empty basement level.
From where she stood, she could see a steady flow of people up the stairs from Sub-Two. But not Caelum. She kept waiting for him to pass, but all she saw were strangers made identical by their confusion, by the quick-flash way they passed behind the glass.
She counted them all, the way she’d counted beads of IV fluid from the drip bag: two, seven, nine, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Still Caelum didn’t come.
The blur of people slowed. She counted three heartbeats when no footsteps rattled the landing, when the window stayed empty of passing faces.
Hardly thinking, she pushed once again from her hiding place through the swinging doors and hurtled out into the open stairwell. She sprinted down the stairs, no longer thinking of being caught, thinking only of Caelum, of reaching him, of losing her chance.
As Lyra crashed around the corkscrew of stairs, she saw the gate at the bottom of the stairs was only just swinging closed. She saw the inch of space between lock and gate as a narrow tether. She leapt, shouting, reaching for it the way she might have reached for a rope, and got a hand through the gate just before it clicked shut. Her mouth tasted like iron relief, like blood. Beyond the gate was the door marked Secure Area—Live Samples, which she opened with the stolen keycard.
It was very cold.
For a moment she stood with goose bumps lifting the hair on her arms, suddenly confused by a vision of Haven unrolling in front of her, by the collapse of past and present. But it was just an illusion: this hall looked almost identical to so many hallways at Haven.
There were no offices here. There was no carpeting. Just a long linoleum hallway and windows overlooking darkened laboratories, doors barred and marked with Do Not Enter signs, cameras winking in the ceiling. Her stomach turned. She’d forgotten all about the Glass Eyes, and she felt a pull of both homesickness and revulsion.
Almost as soon as she started down the hall, a man with an Afro and a goatee turned out of one of the laboratories, shouting something. She froze, thinking he was angry, or that she’d been caught. Then she realized he was just asking her a question.
“Is it a drill or what?” he said, and she realized, too, that he had no idea who she was. Dr. O’Donnell had told her there were one hundred and fifty people who worked at CASECS: he must simply have mistaken her for one of them.
“Not a drill,” she said, and had to repeat herself twice over the noise. “Everybody out. I’m making the rounds,” she added, when he started to respond, and she continued past him down the hall. Maybe that was the secret, and why at Haven the doctors and nurses had been able to lie for so long. People were trained to believe.
Gemma counted two laboratories, each of them a fraction of the size of Haven’s. Some of the pieces of equipment were familiar. She recognized them from the vast, brightly sterile rooms where the doctors had done all the making, had with a shock of electricity made an egg swallow the nucleus, the tight-coiled place where DNA nested, of another person’s cells.
But CASECS didn’t make replicas. Dr. O’Donnell had said so herself, and Lyra didn’t think it could be a lie. If there were other replicas, Dr. O’Donnell wouldn’t be so desperate to use Caelum as evidence.