“Enough.” Nurse Curly spoke up this time, addressing everyone. “You two”—she pointed at Goosedown and Bounty, still watching, frozen—“help number six clean up.”
But Cassiopeia bolted for the door instead, pushing past Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It and shaking Lyra off when Lyra went to touch her arm.
“Grab it!” Don’t-Even-Think-About-It shouted, but Nurse Dolly shook her head.
“She’ll be back.” She sighed. She looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes, and Lyra found herself wondering briefly about the nurse’s other life, the one off the island. What would it be like to have a secret world, a private place away from Haven, away from the replicas and the nurses and the Glass Eyes? She couldn’t fathom it.
Nurse Dolly met Lyra’s eyes, and Lyra looked quickly away.
“There’s nowhere for her to run, anyway,” Nurse Dolly added, but gently, as if in apology.
Cassiopeia wasn’t at lunch. The replicas didn’t speak about her. They didn’t speak at all. It was difficult to feel comfortable surrounded by half the nursing staff and several guards, all of them posted around the perimeter of the room, silent, expressionless, watching the girls eat, many of them wearing masks or full hazmat suits that made them resemble inflated balloons.
Lyra had no appetite. She was still nauseous, and the smell of the Stew Pot made her stomach clench, as if it wanted to bring something up. But she didn’t risk skipping lunch. She didn’t want to go into the Funeral Home. So she lined up with the other replicas and filled her plate with mashed potatoes and chicken floating in a vivid red sauce the electric color of inner organs and pushed her food around, cut it into small pieces, hid some in her napkin.
Lyra needed to find a new hiding place. The dorm was no longer safe. She was responsible for changing her own linens—but what if one day she forgot, and the book and the file, her pen and her Altoids tin, were discovered? They’d be taken away and destroyed, and Lyra would never get over it. The book especially—that was her last piece of Dr. O’Donnell, and the only thing that Lyra had ever been given, except for standard-issue clothing and a scratchy blanket for cool nights.
Lyra headed straight to the bunks after lunch. The dorm was mostly empty: after lunch, the female replicas had a half an hour of free time before afternoon physicals. Only a half-dozen replicas had preceded her back, and there was a single nurse on patrol, Nurse Stink, an older woman who chewed special candies made of ginger and garlic for indigestion, and who always smelled like them as a result.
Lyra went straight to bed 24 and, keeping her back angled to the nurse, began stripping the sheets from the bed. At a certain point, she slid a hand between the mattress and the frame and drew out the book, and then the file, at the same time stuffing them down into a pillowcase so they were invisible. Then she headed for the door, pressing the linens tight to her chest, as if they might help muffle the sound of her heart.
“Where are you going?” the nurse asked. She was sitting in a folding chair by the door, fumbling to unwrap one of her candies.
“The laundry,” Lyra answered, surprised that her voice sounded so steady.
“Laundry day was yesterday,” Nurse Stink said.
“I know,” Lyra said, and lowered her voice. “But it’s my monthly bleeding.”
The nurse waved a hand as if to say, Go on.
Lyra turned left to get to the end of D-Wing. But instead of going downstairs to the laundry, she ducked out of the first exit, a fire door that led to the southeastern side of the institute, where the land sloped very gently toward the fence and the vast marshland beyond it. Birds were wheeling against a pale-blue sky, and the stink of wild taro and dead fish was strong. From here, the marshes were so covered in water lettuce they looked almost like solid ground. But Lyra knew better. She’d been told again and again about the tidal marshes, about fishermen and curiosity seekers and adventurers from Barrel Key who’d lost their way among the tumorous growth and had been found drowned.
Lyra hid the bundle of sheets behind a trimmed hedge. She tucked the pillowcase with her belongings in it under her shirt and kept going, circling the main building. She spotted Cassiopeia, sitting motionless by the fence, staring out over the marshes, hugging her knees to her chest. Lyra thought of going to her but wasn’t sure what she would say. And Cassiopeia had caused trouble. She’d pushed Nurse Dolly. She’d be put in solitary or restrained to her bed, kept like that for a day or two. Besides, Lyra was still weak, and even the idea of trying to comfort Cassiopeia exhausted her.
She’d need to find a place not too remote; a place she could sneak off to easily without arousing suspicion, but a place unused for other purposes, where no one else would think to look.
She kept going, toward a portion of the island she’d rarely explored, praying nobody would stop her. She wasn’t sure whether she was breaking any rules, and if anyone asked what she was doing or where she was going, she’d have no answer.
The northern half of the island remained undeveloped and largely untouched, since it had, decades earlier, belonged to a timber company. Now it was a repository of old equipment, sealed chemical drums, and trailers mounted on cinder blocks and padlocked off, for the most part, with heavy chains. Lyra paused at a rusted gate hung with a large sign warning of biohazardous material. But the gate was unlocked, and she decided to risk it. Half of Haven contained biohazardous material anyway.
Here there were no neatly trimmed hedges or stone walkways. This area was cooler, shaded by coast oak and mature pines with old, sweeping branches, although to Lyra it all looked the same. As she walked, she thought about animals concealed in dark hiding places, gators crawling up beneath the fence, snakes nesting in the trees. Two years earlier, a wild hog had come bursting out of the undergrowth and run circles around the guards in front of the Box. It was one of the few times Lyra could remember seeing any of the doctors laughing.
Old tractors; rusted, coiled-up chains; plastic garbage bins; Dumpsters; even an old crane, arm raised as if reaching for the sky: Lyra moved down the long alley of broken-down equipment, her feet squelching in mud that became thicker and deeper as she approached the tidal flats. The insects were thicker here, and louder, too. She knew she was still within the limits of Haven—she could see the fence through the trees, and the flashing of the late sun on the vivid green marshes, and knew that the nearest guards were only a few hundred feet away—but she felt almost as if she had entered another world. As if she could keep walking forever, moving deeper and deeper into the trees, and never be found. She didn’t know whether the idea excited or scared her.
She spotted an old motorboat, propped up on cinder blocks and covered with a blue plastic tarp slicked with mold and moisture. A perfect hiding place. She felt a rush of sudden relief. She was so tired. For a second, when she stopped walking, she thought she heard footsteps behind her. But when she turned around, she didn’t see anyone.
She peeled back a portion of the tarp and froze, confused. The bottom of the boat was spotted with rust but relatively dry—and someone, she saw, was already using it for a hiding place. There was a folded brown blanket, standard Haven issue, as well as two neatly folded changes of pants, two shirts, and two folded pairs of male’s underwear. There was, additionally, a flashlight and several cardboard containers of powdered milk, a can opener marked Property of Haven Kitchens, and half a dozen cans of soup.
Something stirred in her mind—an association, a connection—but before she could bring the idea into focus, someone spoke.
“That’s mine,” a voice said behind her. “Don’t touch it.”
She turned and her breath caught in her chest.
Her first thought was that the boy was an outsider and had somehow made his way in. He looked so wild, so fierce, she felt he must be a different species. Her second thought was that he was hungry. His cheeks stood out sharply from his face, as if they’d been whittled with a knife. His forearms were marked with little diagonal scars, like a tiny st
aircase cut into his flesh.
Then she noticed the Haven bracelet—a White—and the idea she’d been reaching for earlier arrived, neat and obvious and undeniable: this was 72. The Code Black. The runaway.
Except he hadn’t run away, or at least he hadn’t run far. He’d been here, on the north side of the island, the whole time.
“I know you,” she said. “You’re seventy-two.”
He didn’t deny it. “How did you find me?” He took a step toward her, and Lyra could smell him then—a sharp animal smell, not completely unpleasant. “Which of them sent you?”
“Nobody sent me,” she said. She didn’t like being so close to him. She’d never been this close to one of the males, and she couldn’t help but think of Pepper, and a diagram she’d seen once of a pregnant woman, who seemed to be digesting her baby. But there was nowhere to go. The side of the boat was digging into her back. “I wasn’t looking for you at all.”
“Then what are you doing here?” he asked.
She hesitated. She was still holding the pillowcase with all her belongings, and she squeezed it to her chest. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said.
He shook his head. “I can’t let you go,” he said. He reached out, taking hold of her wrist.
And at that exact moment, the world exploded.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 6 of Gemma’s story.
SEVEN
LATER THE RESIDENTS OF BARREL Key would tell stories about seeing the explosion. Several fishermen, bringing in their boats, were nearly thrown overboard by a freak wave that came racing over the sound—caused, it later turned out, by a portion of A-Wing crashing through the fence and collapsing into the shallows. Missy Gallagher saw a finger of flame shoot up in the distance and thought of Revelation and the end of days. Bill Collops thought of terrorists and ran into the basement, screaming for his wife to help him with the boxes of ammo.
The first bomb, detonated in the entry hall, directly next to the bust of Richard Haven, made shrapnel of the walls and beams and caved in the roof. It killed twenty-seven staff members, all of them buried under the rubble. The woman who was carrying the explosives strapped by means of a cookie sheet to her chest was blown into so many pieces that even her dental records were useless, and they were able to establish her identity only because she had left a bag explaining her motivations and affiliation with the Angels of the First Savior on the mainland, which would subsequently be discovered by soldiers. Her WordPress account, which referenced at length a website known as the Haven Files, suggested she was acting on directives from Jesus Christ to destroy the unnatural perversions at Haven and purge the sinners playing God. The blog had a brief three-hour surge of notoriety and readership before it was permanently and mysteriously erased.
The second and third bombs created a fireball that roared through the halls, reaching temperatures hot enough to sear metal and leave the plastic dinner trays as molten, shapeless messes. Things would not have been so bad were it not for the close proximity of a large shipment of amyl nitrate, which one of the staff members had signed for and thoughtlessly left still packaged in the entry hall, not entirely sure where it was meant to go.
Later, rumors would circulate: that the bomber believed Haven Institute was actually manufacturing humans to use in some kind of devil’s army, and that both the creations and their creators should be punished by fire; that she had every single page of the Haven Files, all seventy-six of them, printed out, underlined, annotated, and laminated in her bag next to a copy of the Bible, a small image of Jesus on the cross, and a half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich; that she must have been onto something, because of the military crackdown, and the men in hazmat suits who spent weeks sweeping the island, carting off debris, leaving Spruce Island bare and ruined and silent. And why didn’t the story make it onto the news, or any of the major newspapers? Conspiracy, Bill Collops said, polishing his guns. What a world, Missy Gallagher said, shaking her head.
The official story—the one that made it onto the news—stated that chemicals had been mishandled by a new laboratory technician, sparking a huge chemical fire that engulfed the laboratory. But even this story, once established, was quickly suppressed, and Spruce Island, and what may or may not have happened there, was rapidly forgotten.
Of course Lyra didn’t and couldn’t know any of this at the time. At the time, she thought the sky had split apart. At the time, she thought the world was ending.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 7 of Gemma’s story.
EIGHT
THE FORCE OF THE FIRST blast threw her off her feet. She landed palms-down in the mud, with 72 beside her. Her eyes stung from the sudden vapor of dust, which seemed to rise all at once and everywhere, like a soft exhalation. People were screaming. An alarm kept hitting the same high note of panic, over and over, without end.
It was the sound that paralyzed her: shock waves of sound, a screaming in her ears and the back of her teeth, the sound of atoms splitting in two. It took her a second to realize that 72 was no longer beside her. He was on his feet, running.
But after only a few feet he stopped, and, turning around, saw her still frozen, still belly down in the mud like a salamander. He came back. He had to yell to be heard over the fire and the screaming.
“Move,” he said, but even his words sounded distant, as if the ringing in her ears had transformed them to vague music. She couldn’t move. She was cold and suddenly tired. She wanted to sleep. Even her mouth wouldn’t work to say no. “Move now.” She wasn’t very good at judging feelings, but she thought he sounded angry.
She was focusing on very small details: the motion of a rock crab scuttling sideways in the churned-up mud, the hiss of wind through the trees that carried the smell of smoke, the male’s bare feet an inch from her elbow, his toenails ringed with dirt.
Then 72 had her elbow and she was shocked back into awareness of her body. She felt blood pumping through her heart, valves opening and closing like eyelids inside of her.
“Now,” 72 said again. “Now, now.” She wondered whether his mind had become stuck on the word, whether like Lilac Springs and Goosedown and so many others his brain had never formed right. She grabbed the pillowcase from the ground where it had fallen. It had gone a dull, gray color, from all the shimmering dust. The Altoids tin landed in the dirt but she had no time to stop and retrieve it. He was still holding on to her elbow, and she wasn’t thinking well.
A drumbeat pop-pop-popping sound made her heart lurch, because she knew what it was: every so often the guards, bored, fired at alligators that swam too close to the island. She thought there must be alligators—but the alligators would burn—she wondered whether their hides would protect them. . . .
They went back through the broken machinery, moving not toward the marshes but toward the sound of roaring fire and screams. Ash caught in Lyra’s throat and made breathing painful. She didn’t think it strange that they were heading back toward the fire—she could see a shimmering haze of smoke in the distance, beyond the trees, smoke that seemed to have taken on the silhouette of a building—because she knew they needed to find a nurse, they needed to line up, they needed to be told what to do. The nurses would tell them. They would make things better. She longed in that moment for Squeezeme and Thermoscan, longed to feel the familiar squeeze of pressure on her arm and suck down the taste of plastic, longed to be back in bed number 24, touching her windowsill, her headboard, her sheets. They moved past the chemical drums and squeezed through the fence through which Lyra had come looking for a hiding place. She was still holding the pillowcase to her chest with one arm and felt a little better, a little more clearheaded.
But as they came into view of the institute, she stopped. For a second she felt one of the bullets must have gone through her, punched a hole directly in her stomach. She could no longer feel her legs. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing. It was like someone h
ad smashed up reality and then tried to put it together all wrong. A-Wing was gone and B-Wing was on fire. Flames punched through windows and roared across the tar roof. Guards sprinted across the yard, shouting in voices too distorted to make out.
There were bodies in the grass, human bodies, bodies wearing the sensible flat shoes of the nurses and doctor uniforms stained with blood, arms flung out as if they’d done belly flops to the ground. From a distance, it was impossible to distinguish the people from the replicas except by their clothing.
One body appeared to have been lifted off its feet and carried down toward the beach—Lyra could just see, in the distance, waves breaking against a pair of legs—or maybe someone had been down on the beach when the explosion had come. Lyra thought of Cassiopeia and her seashell collection and, although she had seen replicas die and die and die, felt vomit rise in her throat. The vomiting center is located in the rear part of the brain. She had heard that once, from one of the nurses. She didn’t remember when.
But now 72 was headed not back to safety, not to the nurses and doctors and gentle Glass Eyes, good Glass Eyes, watchful Glass Eyes, but directly toward one of the guard towers. Now people were pouring from the other wings, nurses and doctors dazed or crying, covered with soot so they looked as if they’d been cast in stone. For the first time, Lyra realized that they, too, were afraid. That none of this was planned. That no one was coming to tell them what to do.
She stumbled on something in her path: a long pale arm, wrist tagged with a green plastic bracelet. The fingers twitched. A female, Lyra thought, because of the shape of the hands. She was buried beneath a heavy sheet of tin siding that had been hurled across the yard by the first explosion. Lyra saw the fingers curl up in a fist: she was alive, whoever she was.
“Wait,” she said, pulling away from 72 and crouching down to try and free the girl. “Help,” she said, when 72 just stood there, squinting into the distance, looking agitated. He frowned but moved next to her, and together they managed to shift the metal.