She could tell that Reinhardt didn’t think so. But he folded up the map. “Someone’s going to find her. They’ll stay at it until they do. The dogs will get a scent.”
“The dogs look for dead bodies,” Lyra said. She remembered how the soldiers had brought dogs onto the marshes after the explosion to scent the trails of blood. She didn’t hate dogs, though: she knew it was just their training. “Besides, it rained.” She and Caelum had slid into the water to avoid being caught, and Cassiopeia had been located instead—located, and then permitted to die, flagged for collection later.
Reinhardt said nothing.
“There,” she said, and pointed again to the ghost-silhouettes of the long-abandoned settlements. The paper dimpled beneath her finger, and hissed the smallest of words. Yes.
It was still raining when they set off into the woods, using a compass Reinhardt had on his phone. If they kept straight north from where they had parked, they would eventually hit the old settlement.
It was harder going than Lyra had expected, and she had to stop frequently to rest, overwhelmed by sudden tides of vertigo.
She was falling more. It was like there was a wall up between her brain and her body, and only some of the messages made it through. This was, like the holes, a symptom of the disease as it progressed: she’d seen it at Haven, even, though at the time she hadn’t known what it was, and had believed it was just a problem in the process going wrong. Replicas got sick. They forgot their numbers and then how to use the bathroom and then how to walk and swallow.
She was glad neither Reinhardt nor Caelum asked her if she wanted to go back, though. Caelum just helped her up, every time, without saying a word. And Detective Reinhardt went ahead, scouting the easiest routes, and trying to break apart the growth where it was thickest to make it easier for her to pass through.
It took several hours, but at last they saw, through the tangle of natural growth, the hard sloping angle of a roof and a little stone cottage. The settlement had been made in a literal natural clearing, although growth had reclaimed the area, and one house was little more than rubble, punctured by the hardy fists of oak trees that had grown straight up through a collapsed portion of the roof.
As soon as Lyra saw the place, her stomach sank. It was obvious that Gemma wasn’t here. It took only a few minutes to check the two standing houses: they were each a single room. Inside was a litter of cigarette butts and empty soda cans. But no Gemma. She was glad, too, that Reinhardt didn’t gloat about it, or say he’d told them so.
Instead, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“I thought she’d be here,” Lyra said. Her stomach felt like it had coiled itself around her throat. “I really did.”
“She’ll turn up,” Reinhardt said. “I promise.”
Lyra just shook her head. She knew he was trying to make her feel better, but she knew, too, that it was a promise he had no ability to keep. In the distance, she heard a faint hollow clacking—the noise of a woodpecker, or maybe a squirrel, cracking two stones together. An empty sound.
Lyra was reluctant to leave. Though Gemma was obviously not here, she kept feeling that she’d missed something, kept turning around to stare even as they began to retrace their steps. The houses, dismal, lurching on their feet. Piles of rot and leaves. The trees puncturing the beams. An old circle of stones. Maybe a fire pit, or a garden.
And not a single sign of movement, nothing but the hollow drumming that made her heart ache with loneliness.
They started back the way they’d come, and Detective Reinhardt took the lead again. They’d barely left the cabins behind when they heard him shout. Caelum put a hand on Lyra’s elbow, to help her go faster, and they pushed forward through a leaf-slicked trail marked by the detective’s footsteps in the mud. The rain was coming harder, beating its percussion through the trees.
She saw Reinhardt, moving through the mist toward a girl in a filthy dress, and from a distance, for a second, even Lyra was confused: Gemma, it was Gemma, they’d found her.
But immediately the vision passed. The girl’s body was wrong, and her hair was wrong, the way she stood with her arms very still and tight at her sides was wrong, all of it just a small but critical distance off, like a door hanging an inch off its hinges.
Not Gemma. Calliope.
Caelum realized it too. He dropped Lyra’s arm and started to run, an instinct, as if he could physically get between Calliope and Reinhardt. Lyra started to call out but it was too late, Detective Reinhardt had crossed the distance. He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder even as Caelum shouted, “No!”
Calliope moved quickly. It was like a sudden pulse of electricity had brought a statue to life. From an angle Lyra saw only the quick motion of her hand and then Reinhardt, leaning heavily on her shoulder, so it looked as if he would pull her into an embrace.
Then he released her and stumbled backward, and Lyra saw the knife handle stuck in his abdomen, and blood already darkening his shirt. He reached for the gun holstered to his belt, but only grazed the grip before pulling away again quickly, as if it had scalded him.
?For a split second, just before Caelum reached her, Calliope met Lyra’s eyes. Lyra was shocked by the feeling; she stopped moving; it was like running into a wall, a huge hand of immovable stone. She thought then of the statue of Richard Haven, which had been built from the wrong stone, so that quickly its face had begun to dissolve in the rain; by the time Lyra was named, its eyes were gone, and its nose, and even its lips, so it looked like the blank face of a clock without numbers or hands: like a warning of some terrible future to come where no one could see or speak or hear.
Then Calliope turned and ran, wrenching away from Caelum when he tried to grab her. Caelum hesitated. Lyra knew he was torn between the urge to go after Calliope and the desire to stay with Detective Reinhardt. But they couldn’t let Calliope get away.
“Go,” Lyra said to Caelum. And then, when he still didn’t move, “Go.”
Finally, he took off after Calliope. She had a head start, but she was weak; he would catch her easily.
Lyra dropped next to Detective Reinhardt when he sat down heavily.
“I’m okay,” he said. But he was chalky-looking, sweating. The good news was that Calliope had stuck him in the stomach, not the chest; she’d missed his heart by a mile. “I’m okay.”
“You have to keep pressure on it,” she told him.
“I know. I’m a cop, remember?” He tried to smile, but pain froze his expression into something horrible. “God. When I saw her standing there . . . She looked so lost. . . .”
“That was number seven,” Lyra said. Calliope didn’t deserve her name; Lyra couldn’t stand to say it out loud.