“One of the others?” Detective Reinhardt’s voice cracked.
“Yeah. I already told you.” She pivoted in her seat to look at Caelum. “At CASECS, Dr. O’Donnell said some of the other replicas might have escaped. Wherever Dr. Saperstein was, they couldn’t have been far off.”
Detective Reinhardt was quiet for a bit. “So you’re saying that Gemma Ives has—has replicas? That she was . . . cloned?”
“Of course.” Lyra was too tired to be polite. “Were you even listening?”
“I was, I just—” He broke off. “Bear with me, okay? It’s a lot.” He took a hand off the wheel to rub his temples. “So you think—you think one of Gemma’s replicas is responsible?”
“I know it,” she said. She leaned back against the headrest. She thought of Calliope, number 7, squatting to nudge the broken bird with a knuckle before straightening up to smash it beneath her shoe. Lyra had thought at first she intended to help it fly again. “I bet I know which one, too.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 24 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE DAWN CAME, WEAK AND watery, bringing a patter of light rain. Lancaster was long spools of dark green, fields and forests: at any other time, Lyra thought, it would be peaceful.
But now, helicopters motored down over the nature preserve and hovered there like giant mosquitoes. Unmarked, but obviously military grade. There were snipers wearing camouflage visible inside.
“You’re sure you want to be here?” Detective Reinhardt asked, and Lyra realized she’d been clenching her fists so hard she’d left marks.
She nodded. “I want to help Gemma,” she said. “Gemma helped me.” But she was afraid. She was afraid she would not be able to help. She was afraid of the Suits, afraid Detective Reinhardt wouldn’t be able to protect her, afraid that he would try.
But she could no longer be invisible.
Detective Reinhardt drove slowly, showing his badge whenever they were stopped, which was often. The interstate was completely blocked off between the exits to Loag and Middletown, as were all the local roads bordering the Sequoia Falls Nature Preserve. Police had come from all over the state, some of them on their days off.?
Detective Reinhardt had said little since they’d reached Lancaster, and had ordered Lyra and Caelum to stay in the car with the doors locked when he climbed out briefly to speak with a cluster of police officers. But she had picked up rumors, whispers, words carried back to the car like a kind of contamination.
There were kids, dozens of them, maybe even more than that, running loose.
Not normal kids, either. Twins, triplets, even quadruplets. Skinny. Feral. Covered with blood.
“Creepy as shit,” she heard one cop say, when Reinhardt swung open the door. “Everyone’s saying that guy Saperstein must have had them in juvenile lockup, but I never seen a juvenile lockup makes kids like these. It’s like something from a horror movie. You can’t make this shit up.”
You can make up anything you want, Lyra felt like calling out to him. Even horror.
But of course, she stayed quiet. She imagined the whispers blowing like tiny seeds from one person to the next. Words were little things, of no substance at all. But they were curiously stubborn. They rooted.
They grew.
It was easy enough for Reinhardt to get through the various cordons. All he had to do was show his badge. Only one trooper seemed interested in Lyra and Caelum, and leaned down to stare at them in the backseat.
“Picked ’em up ten minutes ago trying to hitch a ride,” Reinhardt said easily, before the trooper could ask. “Must have come from Saperstein’s JDC—they won’t say where they’ve been, got no ID on them.”
Wordlessly, the trooper backed up and waved them through the line, shouting for another trooper to move the sawhorses out of the way.
?After that it was easy enough; they pulled over and Reinhardt nosed his car into a thick entanglement of growth, so it was partly concealed. As they climbed out of the car, Lyra could hear the distant whirring of the helicopters, and felt the hairs rise on her neck.
Reinhardt had gotten a copy of the map the search teams were using to organize their efforts. He had marked the approximate location of each of Gemma’s sandals, which had been located several miles apart with a piece of fabric that might have come off her clothing.
Caelum immediately pointed to several shaded-in squares a fingernail’s distance away from where a search crew had turned up her second sandal.
“What’s that?” he asked Reinhardt.
“Those are farmhouses, turn-of-the-century settlement. I’m talking turn of the last century. Three cabins, totally run-down. But the police checked the cabins early this morning,” he added. “I heard it over the radio. Apparently some kid from one of the Amish farms rang up to tip them off about the cabins—he’d walked seven miles just to find a pay phone.” Reinhardt smiled. “He was scared his parents would find out. I guess the place is popular with teenagers around here when they want to be alone. Some things are the same from Lancaster to Miami, huh?”
“She couldn’t have gone far without any shoes,” Lyra said.
Reinhardt looked at her. “She made it more than two miles with only one shoe,” he pointed out. “Besides, the police were already there. They cleared the cabins.”
“Maybe she hid,” Lyra said. “She wouldn’t know she could trust them. She might think they were coming to get her for what happened on the farm.”
“I thought you said she didn’t do it,” Reinhardt said. “That it was one of the other—the others.” He still couldn’t say replica.
“She didn’t,” Lyra said. “But she wouldn’t know that they knew that.” That was what people did when they escaped: they found a place to hide. Caelum had hidden successfully on the island for several days when he was 72, even though there was an armed military guard on the perimeter, even though there must have been fifty people looking for him. It was because he’d stayed on the island, exactly in the middle of where he was supposed to have escaped, that no one had found him.
Besides, places had feelings to them, just like objects did: they whispered things, absorbed secrets and quietly pulsed them back. But most people didn’t hear. They didn’t know how to listen.
Lyra listened, and she heard a whisper even in the lines on the page. A lost and abandoned place, for lost and abandoned people.
“She could have planted the shoes,” Detective Reinhardt said. “She might have wanted to throw people off her trail.”
“Why would she plant them so far apart?” Lyra shook her head. “She might be underground. She might be in a basement or—or hiding under a bed.”