Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 25 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-SIX
THE WARMTH FLOWED AWAY FROM her as quickly as it had come. She didn’t feel sorry, or sad. She didn’t feel anything at all. The bullets had ruined Calliope’s face, and forever destroyed her resemblance to Gemma. There would be only one now: the right one. Still, she wasn’t sure whether she had done the right thing, or why she felt so little. Maybe there really was something wrong with her—with all of them.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked suddenly. She was too afraid to meet Caelum’s eyes, so she stared instead at the leaves turning to pulp in the rain.
“I don’t know,” he answered. Caelum was always honest. It was one of the things she loved about him.
Suddenly she felt like crying. “I’m a replica, really, aren’t I? I’m more replica than anything else.”
He touched her face. His fingers were cool and damp. She blinked at him through the rain webbed in her lashes.
“You’re Lyra,” he said. He smiled, and she fell down into his love for her, touching every layer, and this kind of falling was like its opposite, like flying instead. “That’s all. That’s enough.”
Lyra was relieved to find that Detective Reinhardt was on his feet, leaning heavily against a tree. When Caelum reached for him, he said, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” and even managed to smile.
They had no choice but to give up their search for Gemma. Detective Reinhardt needed help, and it would take longer for someone to find them out here than it would for them to make it back to the car on their own.
Slow. One foot in front of the other. Stop to rest. Lyra turned her face to the sky and whispered an apology to Gemma, for leaving her behind. For failing.
The rain had dropped off, faded to a bare mist, and the leaves shook off their moisture, so it sounded as if high above them, in the cage of the branches, tiny feet jumped from branch to branch. Lyra smelled mulch, rot, growth, and the pure wet sweetness of new blood, of life.
Lyra smelled her old life burning. Every day, the past was burned and you became something new from the ashes.
Lyra smelled burning.
No. She smelled fire.
Detective Reinhardt must have smelled it at the same time, because he winced and grunted, ordered Caelum to stop. But Lyra had already turned. She’d already spotted a thread of smoke unwinding above the trees, back in the direction of the cabins, and she’d already started to run.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 26 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DIMLY, LYRA WAS AWARE OF shouting: the gunshots must have drawn the attention of the searchers. She had been worried about coming across police officers in the woods; she was worried they would ask questions that Detective Reinhardt didn’t know how to answer.
But now, she thought of nothing but Gemma, her friend.
She saw through a break in the trees the architecture of the old cabins, and the smoke coming from somewhere beyond them. She had approached from the back and had a view of collapsed stone timbers and a ruined hearth.
She circled around to the front, completely mindless of the way her heart was jumping arrhythmically in her chest, mindless of the little moments of dark that shuttered her vision for seconds at a time. Gemma, Gemma, Gemma was the only rhythm she could hear. The long finger of smoke was all she could see.
The ground was smoking. Or at least, that’s what it looked like to her from a distance. But as she drew closer, she saw a blackened door laid flat over a lip of stone, and the smoke flowing out from an opening beneath it.
She dropped to her knees, soaking her jeans. She got her fingers around the old door and pushed, recoiling as the column of smoke thickened, carried up by a surge of air. Blinking to clear tears from her vision, she spotted a mass of uniforms coming toward her through the trees—troopers, police officers, firefighters.
“Here,” she screamed. At the bottom of a long well, Gemma was curled up next to a smoldering fire, which blew its thick smoke into the air. Lyra felt as if she were falling, and leaving her body behind. “Here. Here.”
It seemed to take forever for her to lift her hand. She saw it waving there, tethered to the narrow cable of her wrist, and it looked like a distant balloon, like something that didn’t belong to her at all.
“Here, here, here,” she shouted, again and again, as all the uniformed men and women came toward her through a scrim of smoke. Maybe it was a trick of the smoke, or maybe not: but funnily enough, all those strangers fractured in her vision into a kaleidoscope of different angles, and she saw them coming toward her not as a wave, not as a group, but as individual points of color, as individual hands reaching to hold her, as individual arms that caught her just before she dropped.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 27 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-EIGHT
LANCASTER GENERAL LOOKED LIKE THE Haven from her dreams: full of windows that let in long afternoon sunlight, when the clouds eventually broke up; full of the reassuring squeak of footsteps, and the smell of floor polish and fresh flowers. Lyra was placed in her own room and hooked up to an IV to deliver fluids and Zofran to get rid of her nausea. Her window looked out onto an interior garden, just like the one at Haven, except there was no faceless statue here. Just flowers, and benches where visitors sat in the sun.
The IV fluids made her feel better right away, and she began to drift, rising and falling through different dreams: in one, she and Caelum lived in a white house that looked just like the one at April’s grandparents’, and Detective Reinhardt brought them mail, but every single one of the letters he delivered turned into a white bird and flew away.
She woke up because she thought a bird wing swept across her face; it was dark already, and she was startled to see Kristina Ives, Gemma’s mother, draw away.
“Sorry,” she said. She looked embarrassed. “You were so still—I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
Lyra sat up in bed. For the first time in days, she wasn’t nauseous, and movement didn’t give her vertigo. A reading light was on in the corner, and Kristina Ives had obviously been sitting there: her purse was on the floor next to the chair, a magazine rolled up inside of it. “Where’s Caelum?” she asked.