She was both desperate to see Pete and dreading it, but she couldn’t delay it any longer; he was asking for her. Pete had gone into shock soon after being picked up by the police, and for nearly twenty-four hours he’d been in critical condition, floating in and out of consciousness, while they tried to regulate his organ functions and his temperature. His parents had flown up from Chapel Hill, and they told Gemma only after she’d been admitted did he stabilize. Even though he was unconscious, by then, kept under by a course of anesthesia, it was like he knew.
He’d been moved only that morning from the ICU to a recovery floor. Still, the room they had him in was dark, all the blinds sewn up against the light—“so he doesn’t get overwhelmed,” his mom said, and gave Gemma a hug, before slipping outside with her husband to give Gemma and Pete privacy.
He was propped up on several pillows, but his eyes were closed. She inched toward the bed, scared of waking him, and scared, too, that he wouldn’t wake up. He was so pale, even in the dark she could see veins in his forearms and his chest. He was hooked up to an IV, and an EKG, and the sound brought Gemma back to her childhood, and terrified her: What if Pete was sicker than anyone thought?
But he opened his eyes when she kneed the bed accidentally, and smiled.
“Gemma,” he said. His voice sounded raw. Just hearing him say her name like that, like it was the name he’d been waiting to say his whole life, made her lose it.
“Oh my God.” She started to cry. She couldn’t help it. She loved him so badly; she wanted him to know that. It didn’t even matter whether he felt the same way. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks,” he said. He cracked the smallest, faintest smile. “I forgot my mascara at home.”
It was the second time in a day she’d laughed and cried at the same time. She managed to adjust the hospital bed, so she could climb in next to him, and he laid his head against her chest.
“I thought I would never see you again,” he whispered.
“Shhh.” She put her hands through his hair. “I’m right here.”
“I was so scared.” His voice broke. In the dark, their bodies lost form: they could have been a single person, a single body entangled together in the sheets. “What’s going to happen, Gemma? What’s going to happen to us?”
Gemma leaned back and closed her eyes. She imagined, somewhere in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania, a spider weaving a web in a well. After rain or wind came to destroy it, it wove. It wove with thread so fine it was almost invisible, and she wondered if the spider was ever afraid, that its life was bound up in something that could be blown away with a breath. It wove anyway, either way.
Spiders were funny that way. They leapt first, and the web followed. It was a kind of biological faith, that demanded belief and then turned it real.
“It’s going to be okay,” Gemma said. “Trust me.” She didn’t know if it would. But she didn’t know it wouldn’t be either, and that, she thought, was what being human meant. You built your life into meaning, you transformed it into liquid faith, again and again, like a web; you did it blind, by instinct, because to not do it would be to stop living. And the darkness sieved through. It flowed and gathered and dropped, but it wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t real enough, to touch what you had made.
That was the true gift: to have a story that was still unfolding, like a thread unspooling, and as it did, this single thread separated light from dark, meaning from senselessness, hope from fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” she repeated. She put a hand on Pete’s chest, above his heart, and he put his hand on top of hers, so the rhythm of his heart passed through her palm and back to his. She heard, for a split second, the sound of his life and hers, drawn together along the string of an ancient instrument, and that string hummed with the sound of a thousand thousand other lives, and when she closed her eyes, she saw a spider buried deep underground, spinning music, pure music, for the world.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 29 of Lyra’s story.
PROLOGUE
Monday, May 16, 3:19 a.m.
They looked nervous.
“Jumpy, you know,” he would say, and each time he saw them clearly in his mind: both of them skinny, with complexions the color and texture of wet clay, and eyes like someone had knuckled holes in their faces when they were still wet. “Like they were on the run.”
Of course, plenty of the people who walked into the Four Crossings Motel looked nervous: it was that kind of place. And even if Guy’s mom, Cherree, was always telling him to turn away anyone with track marks or the jumpy look of a major addict, he knew they’d only bought the place because she’d wanted to cash in on the pill poppers and dopeheads, a whole new generation of druggies—suburban moms, and men still wearing their ties from the office, and thirtysomething dental hygienists—who needed a place to crash while they got high.
And then there were the usual cheaters and hookers and lowlifes who came in and out regularly. Guy even knew some of their names. He’d gotten a hand job from one of the working girls, Shawn, who wasn’t a girl at all, more like forty-seven. Up close, she’d smelled like barbecue potato chips.
He knew what people looked like when they were sleepless, desperate, guilty, and plain high out of their minds.
Gemma Ives. The girl’s ID was all messed up, warped like it had gone through the washing machine, and the picture was scratched. He could tell she’d lost weight, though, since the picture was taken—if it even was her in the picture. The guy didn’t have a license at all. He just wrote his name down in the register. It was all about covering your ass, Guy knew, if somebody flatlined in one of the rooms. They just needed to show due diligence. But their debit card matched the ID, and it worked, so he figured fuck it.
“One room, one night,” was all the girl had said. She kept looking over her shoulder, and every time the insects pinged against the glass, she jumped.
As if she were being watched.
As if she were being followed.
Two hundred and forty miles away, a different girl and a boy, both dressed in stolen clothing, both with a stack of stolen cash rubber-banded in their jeans, and their hair cropped so short it might recently have been shaved, slept together in the very last seat of a northbound Greyhound bus. Who knows what they were dreaming about? A sign announced they were coming up on Philadelphia, but they didn’t stir, and the bus didn’t stop, and they sailed on.
PART I
ONE
LYRA HAD STARTED COLLECTING THINGS. When she saw something she liked, she pocketed it, and usually by the end of the day she was weighty with the sloughed-off skin of someone else’s life: losing lottery tickets, Snapple bottle caps, ATM receipts, pens, chewed-up foil that came off the cheap bottles of wine sold down at Two Brothers Beer & Liquor.
In the privacy of her small room in the double-wide trailer gifted to them by Gemma’s father, which to Lyra, formerly known as 24, felt very luxurious, she shook out her new belongings on the comforter and tried to listen, tried to hear them speak to her of this new world and her place in it. Her old belongings had spoken: the bed at Haven had whispered, and the Invacare Snake Tubing asked questions, the snobby syringes had insulted her with their sharp little bite, and the long-nosed, greedy biopsy needles used for marrow extraction had always wanted gossip, more and more of it.
But these new objects told her nothing, spoke of nothing. Or maybe it was just that the outside world was so noisy she couldn’t hear.
She was no longer a human model. She was a she, not an it. But it was now, here, with a room of her own and photographs from her earliest childhood Scotch-taped to the walls, that she didn’t know who or what she was.
Here she could wake when she wanted and eat what she liked, although since she’d never prepared her own food, she and Caelum, who had been 72 until she named him, mostly subsisted on cans of soda and granola bars Rick bought from the grocery store. They did not know how to fry an egg. Rick taug
ht her to use a can opener, but the microwave bothered her; its humming energy reminded her of Mr. I.
Caelum spent hours sitting cross-legged on the couch, watching whatever channel happened to be on when he first pressed the power button: news channels, movie channels, and his favorite, the Home Shopping Network. Lyra had learned to read. Caelum learned how to watch. He learned the world through the things it bought and sold.
He did not want to learn how to read.
There were sixty-two trailers in the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park, and the whole thing could have been slotted down comfortably in two of Haven’s wings. But to Lyra it seemed infinitely bigger, because it was unknown, because of all the things she’d never seen before: wind chimes and old Halloween decorations and cars on cinder blocks and pink plastic flamingos; lawn chairs and barbecues.
Caelum stayed inside and watched the world through the pinhole of the TV screen, and Lyra walked for hours a day and put things in her pockets and sorted through them like an archeologist trying to decode hieroglyphs. They were both trying to learn in their own way, she thought, but she didn’t like it even so. Sameness was the only way she had ever understood who she was. What she was. Now, everything had changed. He was inside, and she was outside, and that made them different—at least, during the day.
Night came again and again like a tide foaming over the trailers and the cars and the scrubby trees, and turning it all to the same smudge of darkness, rubbing shapes into shadows. The night broke Lyra and Caelum’s separateness. It collapsed the space between them; they fell into its depth and landed, blind, together.
Rick worked the graveyard shift, and when he didn’t, he went to bed early, still sweating a faint chemical smell. Every night, Lyra and Caelum walked down to the unoccupied trailers on lots 57 and 58. He found a garden hose, and in the sticky air they’d let it flow, drink from it, throw water between their hands at each other just for the fun of it, because fun was new.
They kissed. They kissed for hours, until Lyra’s lips were sore and tender to touch, still heavy with the pressure of his mouth. With her tongue she found the ridges of his teeth, and the soft rhythms of his tongue in response. She touched the vault of his mouth and the strange slick texture of the inner side of his cheeks. She let him do the same, let him learn her through his tongue. Sometimes it was kissing, and sometimes it was something like learning, like collecting seashells, the way Cassiopeia had, turning them over and over to memorize the miracle of ridges and whorls built by thousands of years of soft water.
They played a game where their eyes stayed closed and they had to see with their mouths instead. Lyra knew bodies for what they did and what they failed to do, and her only feelings had been in sickness or in pain. She learned the soft wonder of the human body on the planes of his chest, and on the angles of his shoulders, and in the soft fuzz of hair, like the gentlest kiss, below his belly button. She learned it on his scalloped ears, and on his kneecaps, and on his long and gentle fingers.
She learned his body, and she learned that her body was a strange and watery thing that pooled and flowed and turned all at once to a current; the pressure of his tongue, on her neck, on her nipples, on her thighs, turned her into a million other things. She became air and the electric possibility of lightning. She became a furred animal, howling in summer. She became his mouth, and she existed in his mouth. She poured her whole body into the radius of the circles he made with his tongue. And at the same time her body became huge, like a long shout of joy hanging in the quiet.
They had a game to kiss each other on every scar, slowly, starting from the neck. They had a game to find the darkest place they could and touch each other until they couldn’t keep track of whose body was where. Your knee or mine? he would say. Your hand or mine? They had a game to act like the night when it came, and erase all the space between them, to lose their bodies entirely, until they didn’t know who was holding and who was being held. She didn’t have a name for some of the things they did, only a melody, a rhythm that hummed in her skin after they were done.
She wanted things she hardly understood: to be closer, closer, closer than bodies could ever be. She wanted to take her body off and for him to shed his, too, and to stand like two shadows overlapping with not a shiver of space between them.
And she wanted to keep her body, so he would keep kissing it.
She learned how to tell time, and every morning, she counted the hours until dark, when Caelum was no longer Caelum, and she was no longer Lyra, and both of them became each other.
She was terrified that one day it wouldn’t work, that the distance would put up a hand, and hold them apart.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 1 of Gemma’s story.
TWO
AND THEN, ON THURSDAY, IT happened.
At Haven, Lyra had been bored so often that, paradoxically, she had almost never been bored at all. Little things consumed her attention: the petty squabbles she imagined between her belongings; the replicas who went to the Box or were disciplined by the nurses; her small missions, planned and executed with all the precision of a military invasion, to steal words from medicine bottle labels or even the nurses’ cigarette packs.
But now that there was so much to see, so much to do, she was often bored. On Thursday, a bright day of puffed-up clouds, the world beyond her windows looked dizzy in its own light. But when Lyra suggested to Caelum that they take a walk, he looked at her with eyes burned like wounds in his face.
“No,” he said. And then, looking back at the TV, “This isn’t my place.”
Caelum had wanted to escape. He’d been Code Black. And now when Lyra thought of Haven and what had happened to it, her memories were intertwined with him, with the moment she’d slipped through the fence past the drums of old construction litter and biohazard signs and where he’d first touched her wrist. If she had known about the world, about space and time, she would have known that matter bends the universe around it. But even without knowing that, she saw how Caelum had bent her universe, and made everything change.
He had wanted to be free, and to see how real people lived. But now they were free and he wouldn’t go outside except at night, when there was nothing at all to see. He learned the world only from what he saw on TV.
“It will never be your place if you don’t try,” Lyra said.
“It will never be my place even if I do,” he said.
She went alone. Going anywhere by herself thrilled and terrified her, no matter how often she did it. At Haven she had almost never been alone. There were nurses to accompany them everywhere, and researchers to watch behind glass. There were the silhouettes of the medical machines themselves, and the doctors to operate them. And of course, there were thousands of replicas, all of them dressed identically except for their bracelet tags. They ate and bathed and showered together. They moved together as a single mass, like a swarm of gnats, or a thundercloud.
“Hey. You. I’m talking to you.”
Lyra turned around, still unused to people who addressed her directly, who looked in her eyes instead of at her forehead or shoulder blades. Something strange had happened to her in the outside world: she had begun to forget how to stay invisible.
The girl outside lot 47 was chewing gum and smoking a cigarette from something that resembled a pen. After a closer look Lyra recognized it as the kind of e-cigarette some of the nurses had smoked. “You’re new here,” she said, exhaling a cloud of vapor.
It didn’t sound like a question, so Lyra didn’t answer. She put a hand in her pocket, feeling her newest acquisition: a cold metal bolt she’d found half-embedded in the dirt.
The girl stood up. She was skinny, though not as thin as Lyra, and wearing low-waisted shorts and a shirt that showed off her stomach. She had a birthmark that made a portion of her face darker than the rest. Lyra had once seen something similar, on one of the infants in the Yellow crop before they died in the Postnatal wing.
“My fr
iend Yara thinks you’re a bitch,” the girl said calmly, exhaling again. “Cuz you never talk or say hi to anyone. But I don’t think you’re a bitch. I think you’re just scared. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re scared because you came from somewhere else and never expected to end up here, and now you’re wondering if you’ll ever get out.”
Once again, Lyra said nothing. She didn’t know what a bitch was, although she thought, years ago, she might have heard the word—something to do with Nurse Em, one of the other staff members complaining about her.
“So?” The girl’s eyes were a dark, rich color that reminded Lyra of the mud along the banks in the marshes, teeming with invisible life. “Who’s right? Me or Yara?”
“Neither,” Lyra said. She was startled by the way her voice rolled across the short distance between them. Even though it had been weeks since she’d left Haven, she wasn’t in the habit of speaking. When Caelum came out with her at night, or when he snuck into her room and slid into bed beside her, they rarely spoke out loud. They breathed and touched, communicating through language of the body: pressure and touch, tension and release. “I never thought I’d end up here. I didn’t know there was a here to end up. But I’m not worried about getting out. This is out.” She stopped herself from saying anything she shouldn’t.
To Lyra’s surprise, the girl smiled. “I knew you weren’t as dumb as you looked. Half the people round here could double for shitbricks, so you never know. I’m Raina. What’s your name?”
Lyra almost said twenty-four. Rick always called her Brandy Nicole. But she had lost so many things in her life; she wasn’t ready to lose her name, too, and the memory of the woman who’d given it to her.
“Lyra,” she said.
Raina smiled. “You drop out of school or something?”
Lyra didn’t know how to answer.
“School’s dumb anyways,” Raina said. “I finished last year and look at me now, on the nine-to-five shift at Fantasia.” She tilted her head and Lyra thought of the funny, knob-kneed birds that used to scuttle through the gardens at Haven, looking for crabs as small as the fingernails of the infants in Postnatal. The only part of her that wasn’t skinny was her stomach, which had the faintest swell, as if there were a tiny fist inside of it. “You want a Coke?”