Her friends, her enemies, her world.
“What’s Admin, Lyra?” Lilac Springs asked. She was going to ruin everything—and she knew where Admin was. Everybody did. Even Lilac Springs wasn’t that dumb.
“I’ll be quick,” Lyra said, ignoring Lilac Springs.
“Dr. Sappo won’t like it,” Go Figure said. Dr. Sappo was what the staff called God, but only when he couldn’t hear them. Otherwise they called him Dr. Saperstein or Director Saperstein. “They ain’t supposed to get their hands on nothing important.”
Lazy Ass snorted. “I don’t care if he do or don’t like it,” she said. “He ain’t got blisters the size of Mount St. Helens on both feet. Besides, he won’t know one way or the other.”
“What if it messes up?” Go Figure said. “Then you’ll be in trouble.”
“I won’t,” Lyra protested, and then cleared her throat when her voice came out as a croak. “Mess it up, I mean. I know what to do. I go down to Sub-One in A-Wing.”
Lilac Springs began to whine. “I want to go to Admin.”
“Uh-uh,” Nurse Go Figure said, turning to Lilac Springs. “This one’s coming with me.” And then, in a low voice, but not so low both Lilac Springs and Lyra couldn’t hear: “The Browns are going like flies. It’s funny how it hits them all differently.”
“That’s because they ain’t got it right yet.” Lazy Ass shook her head. “All’s I know is they better be for real about how it doesn’t catch.” She was still watching Lyra through half-narrowed eyes, evaluating, drumming the stack of test results as if an answer might come through her fingertips.
“I’ve told you, it isn’t contagious. Not like that, anyway. I’ve been here since the start. Do I look dead to you?”
Lilac Springs began to cry—loudly, a high, blubbering wail, like the cry of one of the infant replicas in the observation units. Go Figure had to practically drag her to her feet and out into the hall. Only when Lyra could no longer hear Lilac Springs’s voice did she realize she’d been holding her breath.
Lazy Ass slid the papers a half inch toward her. Lyra stood up so quickly the chair jumped across the tile floor.
“Straight through and no stopping,” Lazy Ass said. “And if anyone asks you where you’re going, keep walking and mind your own business. Should be Werner down at the desk. Tell him I sent you.”
Lyra could feel the muscles around her lips twitching. But Lazy Ass would be suspicious if she looked too happy. She took the papers—even the sound of paper was delicious—and held them carefully to her chest.
“Go on,” Lazy Ass said.
Lyra didn’t want to wait, fearing Lazy Ass would change her mind. Even after she’d turned into the hall, she kept waiting for the nurse to shout, to call her back, to decide it was a bad idea. The linoleum was cold on her bare feet.
Haven consisted of six wings, A–G. There was no E-Wing, for reasons no one understood, although rumor among the staff was that the first God, Richard Haven, had an ex-wife named Ellen. Except for the Box, officially called G-Wing, all the buildings were interconnected, arranged in a pentagon formation around a four-acre courtyard fitted with gardens and statues, benches, and even a paddleball court for staff use. Electronic double doors divided the wings at each juncture, like a series of mechanized elbows. Only the Box was larger—four stories at least, and as many as three more, supposedly, underground, although given that they were at sea level, that seemed unlikely. It was detached, situated a solid hundred yards away from Haven proper and built of gray cement.
The fastest way to A-Wing from the testing rooms was through F-Wing. She’d already decided that if anyone asked, she’d say she was on her way to the Stew Pot for lunch.
But no one asked. She passed several nurses sitting in the dayroom, laughing about two women on TV—replicas, Lyra thought, with a quick spark of excitement, until she recognized from small differences between them that they were just twins. Then came the dorms: smaller rooms for the lower staff, where nurses and researchers might sleep as many as four to a room, bunk-style; then the doctors’ quarters, which were more spacious. Finally, the Stew Pot. The smell of cooked meat immediately made her stomach turn.
She hurried on, keeping her head down. When she buzzed into A-Wing, the guard on duty barely glanced up. She passed through the marble lobby with its stone bust of Richard Haven, the first God, which someone had draped in a red-and-blue cape and outfitted with a funny-looking hat: it was some game, Lyra understood, something to do with a place called U Penn, where both the first and second Gods had come from. A plastic Christmas tree, originally purchased for Haven’s annual party, had for three years stood just inside the main entryway, though during the off-season it was unplugged. Photographs of strangers smiled down from the walls, and in one of them Richard Haven and Dr. Saperstein were much younger and dressed in red and blue. They even had their faces painted.
Today, however, she didn’t stop to look. She pushed through the doors that led into the stairwell. It smelled faintly of cigarettes.
The closer she got to Admin, the greater the pressure on her chest, as if there were Invacare Snake Tubing threaded down her throat, pumping liquid into her lungs. Sub-One was always quieter than the ground floor of Haven. Most of the doors down here were fitted with control pads and marked with big red circles divided in two on the diagonal, signs that they were restricted-access only. Plus, the walls seemed to vacuum up noise, absorbing the sound of Lyra’s footsteps as soon as she moved.
Administration was restricted-access, too. Lazy Ass had said Werner would be behind the desk, and Lyra’s whole plan depended on it. Twin windows in the door looked into a space filled with individual office cubicles: flyers pinned to corkboard, keyboards buried under piles of manila files, phones and computers cabled to overloaded power strips. All of Haven’s paperwork came here, from mail to medical reports, before being routed and redirected to its ultimate destination.
Lyra ducked into an alcove twenty feet beyond the entrance to Admin. If she peeked into the hall, she had a clear view of the doors. She prayed she had arrived on time and hadn’t missed her chance. Several times, she inched into the hall to check. But the doors were firmly shut.
Finally, when Lyra had nearly given up hope, she heard a faint click as the locks released. The doors squeaked open. A second later, footsteps headed for the stairs. As soon as she heard the door to the stairwell open, Lyra slipped into the hall.
Lyra had been occasionally sneaking down to Admin ever since Dr. O’Donnell had vanished abruptly. She knew that every day, when most of the other administrative staff was still eating in the Stew Pot, Werner snuck away from his desk, propped the doors of Admin open, and smoked a cigarette—sometimes two—in the stairwell.
Today he had wedged an empty accordion file into the double doors to keep them from closing. Lyra slipped inside, making sure the accordion file stayed in place, and closed the door gently behind her.
For a few seconds, she stood very still, allowing the silence to enfold her. Administration was actually several interconnected rooms. This, the first of them, brightly modern, was fitted with long ceiling lights similar to the ones used in the labs upstairs. Lyra moved deeper, into the forest of file cabinets and old plastic storage bins, into mountains of paperwork no one had touched for years. A few rooms were dark, or only partly illuminated. And she could hear, in the quiet, the whisper of millions of words, words trapped behind every drawer, words beating their fingernails against the inside of the file cabinets.
All the words she could ever want: words to stuff herself on until she was full, until her eyes burst.
She moved to the farthest corner of the dimmest room and picked a file cabinet at random. She didn’t care about the actual reports, about what they might say or mean. All she cared about was the opportunity to practice. Dr. O’Donnell had explained to her once what a real library was, and the function it served in the outside world, and Lyra knew Admin was the closest she would ever get.
; She selected a file from the very back—one she was sure hadn’t been touched in a long time, slender enough to conceal easily. She closed the cabinet and went carefully back the way she had come, through rooms that grew ever lighter and less dusty.
Then she was in the hall. She slipped into the alcove and waited. Sure enough, less than a minute later, the door to the stairwell squeaked open and clanged shut, and footsteps came down the hall. Werner was back.
She had yet to fulfill her official errand. That meant concealing the hard-won file somewhere, if only for a little while. There weren’t many options. She chose a metal bin mounted on the wall marked with a sign she recognized as meaning hazardous. Normally the nurses and doctors used them for discarding used gloves, caps, and even syringes, but this one was empty.
Werner didn’t even let her in. He came to the door, frowning, when she tapped a finger to the glass.
“What is it?” he said. His voice was muffled through the glass, but he spoke very slowly, as if he wasn’t sure Lyra could understand. He wasn’t used to dealing with replicas. That was obvious.
“Shannon from security sent me,” she said, stopping herself at the last second from saying Lazy Ass.
Werner disappeared. When he returned to open the door, she saw that he had suited up in gloves and a face mask. It wasn’t unusual for members of the staff to refuse to interact with the replicas unless they were protected, which Lyra thought was stupid. The diseases that killed the replicas, the conditions that made them small and slow and stupid, were directly related to the cloning process and to being raised at Haven.
He looked at the file in her hand as if it was something dead. “Go on. Give it. And tell Shannon from security to do her own work next time.” He snatched the file from her and quickly withdrew, scowling at her from behind the glass. She barely noticed. Already, in her head, she was curling up inside all those letters—new pages, new words to decipher and trip over and decode.
She retrieved the file from the metal bin after checking to see that she was still alone. This was the only part of the plan she hadn’t entirely thought out. She had to get the file up to her bed, but if she carried it openly, someone might wonder where it had come from. She could say a nurse had given it to her to deliver—but what if someone checked? She wasn’t even sure whether she could lie convincingly. She hadn’t spoken to the staff so much in years, and she was already exhausted.
Instead she opted to slip it under the waistband of her standard-issue pants, pouching her shirt out over it. The only way to keep it from slipping was to wrap both arms around her stomach, as if she had a bad stomachache. Even then, she had to take small steps, and she imagined that the sound of crinkling paper accompanied her. But she had no choice. Hopefully, she would make it back to D-Wing without having to speak to anyone.
But no sooner had she passed through the doors into the stairwell than she heard the sound of echoing voices. Before she could retreat, God came down the stairs with one of the Suits. Lyra ducked her head and stepped aside, squeezing her arms close around the file, praying they would move past her without stopping.
They stopped.
“Hey.” It was the stranger who spoke. “Hey. You.” His eyes were practically black. He turned to God. “Which one is this?”
“Not sure. Some of the nurses can tell them apart on sight.” God looked at Lyra. “Which one are you?” he asked.
Maybe it was the stolen file pressed to her stomach, but Lyra had the momentary impulse to introduce herself by name. Instead she said, “Number twenty-four.”
“And you just let them wander around like this?” The man was still staring at Lyra, but obviously addressing himself to God. “Even after what happened?” Lyra knew he must be talking about the Code Black.
“We’re following protocols,” God said. God’s voice reminded Lyra of the bite of the syringes. “When Haven started, it was important to the private sector that they be treated humanely.”
“There is no private sector. We’re the ones holding the purse strings now,” the man said. “What about contagion?”
Lyra was only half listening. Sweat was gathering in the space between the folder and her stomach. She imagined it seeping through the folder, dampening the pages. The folder had shifted fractionally and she was worried a page might escape, but she didn’t dare adjust her grip.
“There’s no risk except through direct ingestion—as you would know, if you actually read the reports. All right, twenty-four,” God said. “You can go.”
Lyra was so relieved she could have shouted. Instead she lowered her head and, keeping her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, started to move past them.
“Wait.”
The Suit called out to her. Lyra stiffened and turned around to face him on the stairs. They were now nearly eye to eye. She felt the same way she did during examinations, shivering in her paper gown, staring up at the high unblinking lights set in the ceiling: cold and exposed.
“What’s the matter with its stomach?” he asked.
Lyra tightened her hands around her waist. Please, she thought. Please. She couldn’t complete the thought. If she were forced to move her arms, the file would drop. She imagined papers spilling from her pants legs, tumbling down the stairs.
God indicated the plastic wristband Lyra always wore. “Green,” he said. “One of the first variants. Slower-acting than your typical vCJD. Most of the Greens are still alive, although we’ve seen a few signs of neurodegenerative activity recently.”
“So what’s that mean in English?”
Unlike the man in the suit, God never made eye contact. He looked at her shoulders, her arms, her kneecaps, her forehead: everywhere but her eyes.
“Side effects,” he said, with a thin smile. Then Lyra was free to go.
Lyra wasn’t the only replica that collected things. Rose kept used toothbrushes under her pillow. Palmolive scanned the hallways for dropped coins and stored them in a box that had once contained antibacterial swabs. Cassiopeia had lined up dozens of seashells on the windowsill next to her bed, and additionally had convinced Nurse Dolly to sneak her some Scotch tape so she could hang several drawings she’d created on napkins stolen from the mess hall. She drew Dumpsters and red-barred circles and stethoscopes and the bust of the first God in his red-and-blue cape and scalpels gleaming in folds of clean cloth. She was very good. Calliope had once taken a cell phone from one of the nurses, and all her genotypes had been punished for it.
But Lyra was careful with her things. She was private about them. The file folder she hid carefully under her thin mattress, next to her other prized possessions: several pens, including her favorite, a green one with a retractable tip that said Fine & Ives in block white lettering; an empty tin that read Altoids; a half-dozen coins she’d found behind the soda machine; her worn and battered copy of The Little Prince, which she’d handled so often that many of the pages had come loose from their binding.
“There’s a message in this book,” Dr. O’Donnell had told Lyra, before leaving Haven. “In the love of the Little Prince for his rose, there’s wisdom we could all learn from.” And Lyra had nodded, trying to pretend she understood, even though she didn’t understand. Not about love. Not about hope. Dr. O’Donnell was going away, and once again, Lyra was left behind.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Gemma’s story.
FIVE
“YOU’VE BEEN LYING TO ME, twenty-four.”
Lyra was on her knees, blinking back tears, swallowing the taste of vomit, when the closet door opened. She couldn’t get to her feet fast enough. She spun around, accidentally knocking over a broom with her elbow.
Nurse Curly was staring not at Lyra but at the bucket behind her, now splattered with vomit. Strangely, she didn’t seem angry. “I knew it,” she said, shaking her head.
It was early afternoon, and Curly must have just arrived from the launch for the shift change. She wasn’t yet wearing her scrubs, but
a blue tank top with beading at the shoulders, jeans, and leather sandals. Usually, Lyra was mesmerized by evidence of life outside Haven—the occasional magazine, water-warped, abandoned on the sink in the nurses’ toilets; used-up lip balm in the trash; or a broken flip-flop sitting on a bench in the courtyard—split-second fissures through which a whole other world was revealed.
Today, however, she didn’t care.
She’d been so sure that here, in a rarely used janitorial closet in D-Wing Sub-One, she’d be safe. She’d woken up sweating, with her heart going hard and her stomach like something heavy and raw that needed to come out. But the waking bell sounded only a minute later, and she knew that the bathrooms would soon be full of replicas showering, brushing their teeth, whispering beneath the thunderous sound of the water about the Suits and what they could possibly want and whether number 72 had been torn apart by alligators by now—lungs, kidneys, spleen scattered across the marshes.
But the staff bathrooms were just as risky. They were off-limits, first of all, and often crowded—the nurses were always hiding out in stalls trying to make calls or send text messages.
“I’m not sick,” Lyra said quickly, reaching out to grab hold of a shelf. She was still dizzy.
“Come on, now.” As usual Nurse Curly acted as if she hadn’t heard. Maybe she hadn’t. Lyra had the strangest sense of being invisible, as if she existed behind a curtain and the nurses and doctors could only vaguely see her. “We’ll go to Dr. Levy.”