They waited for him in the car while he spoke to the policewoman who had by then sat with them for hours. It was hot. An empty cup of coffee in the cup holder had scented the whole car with hazelnut.
Finally, he returned, and put the car in drive without saying anything except, “I brought you snacks.” At Lyra’s feet was a bag of gas station food and water. Caelum ate three bags of beef jerky, and Lyra drank two bottles of water.
Then Detective Reinhardt said, “Do you want to tell me your real name, at least?”
Inexplicably, the question—how kind it was, how gentle, and how difficult it was to answer—made tears come to Lyra’s eyes.
“Which one?” She turned to the window, swiping her tears away with a palm. “I’ve had three so far.”
And then, after hours of silence—after years of it—she talked. Detective Reinhardt was listening quietly, not saying anything, not interrupting to ask questions, just listening. She told him everything: Haven, all the replicas, Jake Witz, Nurse Emily Huang, Gemma Ives and how she’d saved them. Dr. O’Donnell and CASECS; a world full of places where people could be manufactured, like furniture, for different uses. About Rick Harliss, her real father, and the people who’d taken him away.
Afterward, he was quiet for a long time. Lyra couldn’t tell whether he believed her, and was too tired to ask.
When he finally asked a question, it wasn’t the one she expected. “Do you have any idea where Gemma might be?”
Lyra shook her head. “I heard that she was missing.”
“Missing,” he said. He appeared to be choosing his words carefully. “And in quite a bit of trouble.”
Caelum spoke up for the first time. “What kind of trouble?”
Detective Reinhardt appeared to be chewing the words. Lyra liked that about him. Too many people used words without thinking. “I’m out of my element here,” he said finally. “I’m flying blind.”
“What kind of trouble?” Caelum repeated.
“The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office is looking for Gemma,” he said, with some difficulty. “I got a call about an hour before we talked. Because you’d given me her name,” he added, and sighed. “Funny coincidence.”
Lyra looked down at her hands. “It was the only name I could think of.” Then: “Gemma’s my friend.”
“That’s what the sheriff’s department figured, too. They thought you might be a clue.”
“A clue to what?”
Detective Reinhardt hesitated. “Several people were hurt—badly.” He cleared his throat. “They were killed. There was a witness. He described a girl Gemma’s age, matching her description.”
“It wasn’t her,” Caelum said, and leaned back.
“The witness got a good look at her,” Detective Reinhardt said. “He was very specific. And—” He broke off. Now his whole face corked around his mouth, like there was a wrestling match between them.
“And what?”
He shook his head. She noticed then how tightly he was holding the wheel.
“Dr. Saperstein and the Ives family have history. A long history.”
“Because of Haven,” Lyra said.
“Okay.” He exhaled. “Okay. Because of Haven.” He didn’t believe her, not totally, not all the way. But he didn’t disbelieve her, either. “Dr. Saperstein was found not far away from where the victims were discovered. And the Iveses are there, now, in Lancaster. They drove straight from Nashville. Look, like I said, I’m flying blind.” He held up a hand as if Lyra had argued with him. “But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“But Gemma wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Lyra said. “She couldn’t.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes people can do a good job of hiding who they really are,” he said, as if Lyra didn’t know that. “Some people put on their faces the way you and I put on clothes.”
“Exactly.” She was growing impatient. “The faces don’t mean anything.” But when he glanced at her, puzzled, she could tell she’d misread him. He didn’t understand. He had listened to her without really absorbing it. Maybe he thought she was making it up. “It’s like you said—people can wear different faces. And different people can wear the same face, too. It’s not Gemma,” she repeated, a little louder. “So it must be one of the others.”
“One of the others?” Detective Reinhardt’s voice cracked.
“Yeah. I already told you.” She pivoted in her seat to look at Caelum. “At CASECS, Dr. O’Donnell said some of the other replicas might have escaped. Wherever Dr. Saperstein was, they couldn’t have been far off.”
Detective Reinhardt was quiet for a bit. “So you’re saying that Gemma Ives has—has replicas? That she was . . . cloned?”
“Of course.” Lyra was too tired to be polite. “Were you even listening?”
“I was, I just—” He broke off. “Bear with me, okay? It’s a lot.” He took a hand off the wheel to rub his temples. “So you think—you think one of Gemma’s replicas is responsible?”
“I know it,” she said. She leaned back against the headrest. She thought of Calliope, number 7, squatting to nudge the broken bird with a knuckle before straightening up to smash it beneath her shoe. Lyra had thought at first she intended to help it fly again. “I bet I know which one, too.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 24 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE DAWN CAME, WEAK AND watery, bringing a patter of light rain. Lancaster was long spools of dark green, fields and forests: at any other time, Lyra thought, it would be peaceful.
But now, helicopters motored down over the nature preserve and hovered there like giant mosquitoes. Unmarked, but obviously military grade. There were snipers wearing camouflage visible inside.
“You’re sure you want to be here?” Detective Reinhardt asked, and Lyra realized she’d been clenching her fists so hard she’d left marks.
She nodded. “I want to help Gemma,” she said. “Gemma helped me.” But she was afraid. She was afraid she would not be able to help. She was afraid of the Suits, afraid Detective Reinhardt wouldn’t be able to protect her, afraid that he would try.
But she could no longer be invisible.
Detective Reinhardt drove slowly, showing his badge whenever they were stopped, which was often. The interstate was completely blocked off between the exits to Loag and Middletown, as were all the local roads bordering the Sequoia Falls Nature Preserve. Police had come from all over the state, some of them on their days off.
Detective Reinhardt had said little since they’d reached Lancaster, and had ordered Lyra and Caelum to stay in the car with the doors locked when he climbed out briefly to speak with a cluster of police officers. But she had picked up rumors, whispers, words carried back to the car like a kind of contamination.
There were kids, dozens of them, maybe even more than that, running loose.
Not normal kids, either. Twins, triplets, even quadruplets. Skinny. Feral. Covered with blood.
“Creepy as shit,” she heard one cop say, when Reinhardt swung open the door. “Everyone’s saying that guy Saperstein must have had them in juvenile lockup, but I never seen a juvenile lockup makes kids like these. It’s like something from a horror movie. You can’t make this shit up.”
You can make up anything you want, Lyra felt like calling out to him. Even horror.
But of course, she stayed quiet. She imagined the whispers blowing like tiny seeds from one person to the next. Words were little things, of no substance at all. But they were curiously stubborn. They rooted.
They grew.
It was easy enough for Reinhardt to get through the various cordons. All he had to do was show his badge. Only one trooper seemed interested in Lyra and Caelum, and leaned down to stare at them in the backseat.
“Picked ’em up ten minutes ago trying to hitch a ride,” Reinhardt said easily, before the trooper could ask. “Must have come from Saperstein’s JDC—they won’t say where they’ve
been, got no ID on them.”
Wordlessly, the trooper backed up and waved them through the line, shouting for another trooper to move the sawhorses out of the way.
After that it was easy enough; they pulled over and Reinhardt nosed his car into a thick entanglement of growth, so it was partly concealed. As they climbed out of the car, Lyra could hear the distant whirring of the helicopters, and felt the hairs rise on her neck.
Reinhardt had gotten a copy of the map the search teams were using to organize their efforts. He had marked the approximate location of each of Gemma’s sandals, which had been located several miles apart with a piece of fabric that might have come off her clothing.
Caelum immediately pointed to several shaded-in squares a fingernail’s distance away from where a search crew had turned up her second sandal.
“What’s that?” he asked Reinhardt.
“Those are farmhouses, turn-of-the-century settlement. I’m talking turn of the last century. Three cabins, totally run-down. But the police checked the cabins early this morning,” he added. “I heard it over the radio. Apparently some kid from one of the Amish farms rang up to tip them off about the cabins—he’d walked seven miles just to find a pay phone.” Reinhardt smiled. “He was scared his parents would find out. I guess the place is popular with teenagers around here when they want to be alone. Some things are the same from Lancaster to Miami, huh?”
“She couldn’t have gone far without any shoes,” Lyra said.
Reinhardt looked at her. “She made it more than two miles with only one shoe,” he pointed out. “Besides, the police were already there. They cleared the cabins.”
“Maybe she hid,” Lyra said. “She wouldn’t know she could trust them. She might think they were coming to get her for what happened on the farm.”
“I thought you said she didn’t do it,” Reinhardt said. “That it was one of the other—the others.” He still couldn’t say replica.
“She didn’t,” Lyra said. “But she wouldn’t know that they knew that.” That was what people did when they escaped: they found a place to hide. Caelum had hidden successfully on the island for several days when he was 72, even though there was an armed military guard on the perimeter, even though there must have been fifty people looking for him. It was because he’d stayed on the island, exactly in the middle of where he was supposed to have escaped, that no one had found him.
Besides, places had feelings to them, just like objects did: they whispered things, absorbed secrets and quietly pulsed them back. But most people didn’t hear. They didn’t know how to listen.
Lyra listened, and she heard a whisper even in the lines on the page. A lost and abandoned place, for lost and abandoned people.
“She could have planted the shoes,” Detective Reinhardt said. “She might have wanted to throw people off her trail.”
“Why would she plant them so far apart?” Lyra shook her head. “She might be underground. She might be in a basement or—or hiding under a bed.”
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 ho
lstered 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.
“Poor kid.” Detective Reinhardt coughed and then cursed, his face screwed up with pain. Lyra couldn’t believe it: Calliope had stuck him with a knife, had caused him all this pain, and still he felt sorry for her. “Do me a favor. Get my belt off, okay?”
She unclipped his duty belt, which was heavy. The gun he carried in his holster was the same as the one Rick Harliss had taught her to fire, only a little heavier. A Glock. Lyra thought the word fit. It was a loud, angry word, and it sounded like an explosion.