Ringer (Replica)

by Lauren Oliver

  Lyra could tell that Gemma knew, immediately, that there were no other choices. Still, she said, “You could come with us. We could drive you somewhere far away. Maine. The Oregon coast. Canada. Wherever.” Places that made Lyra feel uncertain again. Places she’d never heard of.

  “Not without Caelum,” she said. Caelum was a person, but he was a place, too. He was her place.

  “You’ll never find him,” Gemma said. “Do you know how many people there are in this country? Millions and millions.”

  Lyra knew her numbers up to the hundreds, because there had been nearly twenty-four hundred replicas at Haven. But she didn’t know what millions was. “You just said the people who came from Haven will find us.”

  “That’s different. They’re bigger than we are. Do you understand that? They have cars. They have drones, and money, and friends everywhere.”

  Lyra was surprised to realize she felt sorry for Gemma. Gemma was so desperate to help. She didn’t understand that Lyra and Caelum were beyond reach. They belonged to a different world.

  “You forget what they made us to be, though.” Lyra spoke gently. And then: “Invisible.”

  She managed to smile. Smiling had always felt strange, but now it was getting easier. “Thank you, though. I mean it.”

  “Please. Take this, at least.” Gemma dug in her pocket and found a small wallet that was covered in a repeating yellow graphic of smiling faces. Lyra was momentarily breathless when Gemma handed it to her. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen or held, its plastic slick and new-feeling, bulky with whatever it contained. She wanted to smell it, to nibble on its edges. “You’ll need money. You know how to use an ATM card, right, to get money? The code’s easy. Four-four-one-one. Can you remember that?”

  She nodded. She had had to remember numbers for Cog Testing—words, too—and parrot them back for the proctors. She knew now that they had been testing the progression of prion disease, but at the time she had thought they only wanted to prove how smart the replicas had grown. She only wanted to do well.

  “Thanks,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to decline it. Already, the plastic wallet had warmed in her hand, pulsing there as if it belonged. She took a step forward, overwhelmed by feeling, and, before she could decide against it, brought her hands to Gemma’s shoulders the way Rick had for her. Gemma’s face reminded her so much of Cassiopeia in that moment that she felt an unexpected doubling of her life before and after. She was two Lyras and she was no one: she was a hole falling through the past. “See you,” she said, stepping quickly away, because for a split second a terrible urge possessed her to hang on, to stay with her hands on Gemma’s shoulders and never let go—an urge she thought she’d been rid of long ago.

  She turned away. She knew she’d never see them again. Let go. It was surprisingly difficult to walk, to keep walking, as if the air was throwing up extra resistance. But there was no other choice. Let go. It was the rule that bound everything, as true in the outside world as it had been in Haven.

  Let go, let go, let go. She thought of wind through the trees, and laundered white sheets, and the warm fog of anesthetic. Let go. She thought of clouds and shadows and waves; she thought of the ocean, bearing away a boat filled with the small bundled bodies of the dead.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 5 of Gemma’s story.

  SIX

  LYRA KNEW FROM THE BUS schedule that Caelum was heading to Knoxville, and from there to Nashville. She knew that Knoxville was a large city less than an hour away by car, because that was where Raina’s mom worked at a twenty-four-hour restaurant called Big Tony’s.

  But she didn’t know how to get there. The first person she saw, a guy unloading cartons from a grocery truck, pointed her in the right direction and even offered her a ride. But she didn’t like the way he looked at her. “Can’t walk all the way to Knoxville,” he’d called out, when she kept going.

  The next person she asked, a woman counting change behind the gas station counter, told her she couldn’t get to Knoxville without a car. But a third person had overheard the exchange and told Lyra, outside, that she thought there was a local bus station that had buses to Knoxville. She was black, with very red lipstick, and so tall the light haloed behind her, as if she were cracking the sky with her head. She smelled like Dr. O’Donnell had, like lemon soap, very clean. Lyra thanked her and kept going.

  It was a seven-mile walk along a bleak industrial road that kept edging close to the interstate and then away again. Stanton Falls was bigger than Ronchowoa but she didn’t know by how much. She knew she was in town when she began to pass occasional strip malls of mostly shuttered stores. She saw a boat shop, too—funnily enough, since she had no idea where the nearest water was—with little motorboats displayed in the brown grass and covered with tarps. She couldn’t have said what drew her across the yard and to the display, only perhaps that it reminded her of where she’d first met Caelum, in an overgrown section of Spruce Island, littered with old waste.

  One of the tarps had been loosened and retied. She saw that right away. She tugged it free and knew that someone had slept there. On one of the benches the treads of a dirty sneaker had left marks. There was a crumpled Snickers wrapper, too, wedged between two seat cushions. Probably Caelum had arrived too early, before the bus was running, and had lain down to sleep for a bit.

  She was catching up.

  But in Knoxville, she lost hope again. Knoxville was by far the biggest place she’d ever been, full of so many people she couldn’t understand how there was enough air to allow them to breathe, and the clamor of noise made the back of her teeth ache. Faces, faces everywhere—all of them looked the same to her.

  The Knoxville Transit Center was huge, all glass and concrete and escalators rolling up and down, the loudness and the lights, and the womp, womp, womp of her own heart, like a fist punching her in the chest.

  A man shoved her. A woman yelled at her for standing motionless in front of the revolving doors, unsure of how they worked. There were people in lines as if waiting to get medication, and big machines grinding out slips of paper, and numbers on big boards that blinked and changed, dozens of TVs, words everywhere, signs everywhere, the smell of sweat and perfume and bathrooms.

  She found a bus after twice standing in the wrong line, and was handed a ticket and told by the girl who sold it to her that next time she could do it through the automated system and also that she had cool hair. “I went short for a while too,” she said, “until my mom said she would boot me from the house.” This gave Lyra a boost, however, as it always did when she went out into the world, into people, and passed.

  Because at heart and despite what Raina or Rick thought, she knew the truth now: she wasn’t one of them and would never be.

  She had to wait because the bus wasn’t ready to board. She counted how many people wore red hats, and how many people wore black ones. She tried to close her ears to the unfamiliar voices, dozens of conversations that together sounded like the grinding work of one large machine, all stutters and beeps and sharp, hysterical alarms. Whenever an individual voice reached her, she was reminded of how the researchers had spoken, moving in packs down the halls as if they were cabled together invisibly, using English but somehow an English she didn’t understand. A man sitting next to her on the bench picked dirt from his fingernails with a pen cap, and spoke in words that made her head ache for their foreignness. Can’t fault Walsh on that snap . . . you watch and see, Seattle’ll blow holes in their defensive line. . . .

  Holes. She closed her eyes; she breathed carefully through her nose. She’d believed for a long time that the outside world might be as big as ten times Haven, and after escaping she knew it had to be at least ten times that. But a bigger vision was impossible. What she knew of Tennessee was Ronchowoa, and the walk to the Target and back, and the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park, and its grid of sixty-two lots.

  In the end, she only knew the bus h
ad arrived when a loudspeaker voice announced that it was getting ready to leave, and she had to run to the far end of the terminal, barely gasping through the doors before they shut behind her with a hiss that sounded ominous.

  She lurched into a seat just as it began to move. The blur of landscape still made her dizzy. She leaned back, clutching the schedule she’d been given in one hand. It was already wet, damp with sweat. Three and a half hours to Nashville, with one stop at Crossville to pick up new passengers.

  She got sick in the tiny, filthy bathroom once, twice, a third time, until nothing came up but bile. She couldn’t rinse her mouth out. There was no water to drink. So she wiped her mouth with a sleeve, toweled off her face with a hem. An old woman seated near the bathroom shook her head and frowned, as if Lyra had gotten sick deliberately, when Lyra made her way carefully back to her seat. But she felt better. She was even a little bit hungry.

  In Crossville, there was a layover of twenty minutes, and the passengers disembarked to use the bathrooms and buy food from the station. Lyra was feeling a little braver, so she showed the bank card Gemma had given her to a woman across the aisle.

  “I need money,” she said, since Gemma had said that was what the card did.

  The woman gave her a strange look. “Well, there’s an ATM right over by the bathrooms,” she said.

  Lyra shook her head to show she didn’t know what that meant.

  The woman squinted, moved her gum around in her mouth. “It’s your card, isn’t it? You’ve got a code?”

  “Four-four-one-one,” Lyra recited, and the woman put up her hands to cover her ears, laughing.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re not supposed to say it out loud.” She put her hands down again, and her son thought it was a game, placed his hands to his ears and down again, said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” and cackled.

  “Please,” Lyra said, getting desperate now. The bus would leave in twenty minutes. She was hungry—she had not had anything to eat in twenty-four hours—and the station smelled like frying meat fat, like the Stew Pot in Haven but better. “I need money.”

  The woman let out a shush of air, like the sound when SqueezeMe had finished hugging. “Come on. I’ll help you.” She took Lyra’s arm, exactly where SqueezeMe would have in order to read her blood pressure. Her hair was gray and brown, both. Otherwise, she looked a little like Dr. O’Donnell.

  When they left Crossville, the bus was more crowded than ever, and Lyra’s heart stopped when she saw that among the passengers was a replica like the kind she had seen in the Nashville Elvis Festival brochure: a slick of black hair and dark sunglasses, plus the same beautiful white jumpsuit with beading that caught the sun. She was desperate to ask him questions, but felt too shy; he was traveling with a large group and spent the whole time chattering with the other travelers, or crooning along to songs the bus driver piped from the speakers. At one point he stood, staggering a little to keep his balance, and danced along to the music, pivoting his hips and holding a soda bottle like a microphone. Everyone laughed and even applauded, and Lyra felt a vague sense of foreboding. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

  She was even more discouraged when the bus driver announced their arrival in Nashville. She had been hoping that Nashville would look like Haven: an orderly series of buildings contained by a fence. Instead, it turned out to be a city: stack-block buildings, signs puncturing the sky, roads like the serpentine trails left on the surface of the marshes by passing water snakes, the slow crawl of traffic. More people. Perhaps the world didn’t end at all. Perhaps it went on and on forever. It occurred to her that if she didn’t find Caelum, she wasn’t even sure how she’d get back to Winston-Able, couldn’t remember what bus line she had taken to Knoxville.

  But maybe it didn’t matter. Now that she knew the people from Haven were looking for her at Winston-Able, now that they had taken Rick away, she couldn’t return anyway.

  She followed the line of passengers off the bus, trying to work up the courage to speak to the man in the clean white suit. He moved quickly with a surge of other travelers toward the station doors, and she knew that as soon as he hit the street, she risked losing him. She was sure that she would find Caelum wherever the replicas were heading, and so she took a deep breath and jogged to catch up, with her backpack slamming against her lower spine and echoing the rhythm of her heart. She had to say please several times before he turned around. The people with him—regular people, none of them replicas, but none of them dressed as nurses or doctors, either—turned with him. Under the weight of their stares, Lyra felt suddenly shy.

  “What’s the matter, little lady?” he said. He had a deep voice that rumbled in his chest. “You want an autograph or something?”

  She knew what an autograph was—it was when a doctor put down his signature on a piece of paper. The nurses were always asking the doctors to autograph one thing or another: disposal orders, cognitive evaluations, the reports generated by the Extraordinary Kissable Graph. This gave her confidence.

  “No autograph,” she said. “I’m looking for all the others.”

  “You’re here for the festival, huh? You an Elvis fan?”

  Raina had said that Elvis was the name of their God. “I need to speak to him,” she said, which made the others laugh.

  “Isn’t she sweet,” one of them said.

  But another one frowned. “I hope she ain’t on her own. She’s too young for it.”

  The replica with the dark hair inched his sunglasses down his nose. “You want to talk to Elvis, do you?” he asked, and she nodded. “Come on. Let me show you something. Come on,” he said, and gestured for her to follow him out the revolving door, into the bright afternoon sunshine, and the wet-tongue heat. In the distance, she could hear the faint roar of a crowd, like the break of ocean waves, and a cascade of music.

  “You want to talk to Elvis, little lady, you just close your eyes and listen,” the male said. “You hear that? That’s Elvis talking, right there. You just gotta follow the music.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 6 of Gemma’s story.

  SEVEN

  LYRA DID AS SHE WAS told. She set off toward the music, and when she got lost, she simply closed her eyes and listened for the drumbeat rhythm of applause, and the crackle of distant speakers, and turned right or left. She wondered whether Caelum had been here, had waited at the crosswalk for the light to turn green as she was waiting, had thought of her or worried about her or wondered whether she would follow.

  The streets grew more crowded and funneled a mass of people down toward the music. Colored flyers fluttered from the lampposts. People drank in the streets and leaned over the balconies of their high-rises to wave. Lyra was overwhelmed by the crush of people, by the blur of strange faces and a celebratory atmosphere she couldn’t understand. Was this another party? She had yet to see any more replicas. The music picked up the tempo of her heart and knocked it hard and fast against her ribs.

  Then she turned a corner and saw them: hundreds of identical men milling around a stage elevated in the center of the plaza, all with the same oil-black hair and sideburns and sunglasses, many of them dressed the same, too, in heeled boots and spangly white uniforms. She cried out without meaning to, filled with a sudden, cataclysmic joy.

  Replicas. Hundreds of them. Alive, healthy, drinking from red plastic cups, posing for photographs with eager tourists.

  But then she got closer, and her heart dropped. She saw at once she’d been mistaken. The men weren’t identical at all. Some were fat, some were dark, others were pale. There were even women among them, with sideburns pasted to their skin that in places had begun to unpeel. They weren’t replicas at all—they were simply regular people, costumed to look the same, for reasons she couldn’t understand.

  The disappointment was so heavy she could hardly breathe. All of a sudden she felt trapped—squeezed to death in the vast open space by the pressure of all the strangers around her, by the chaos
of so many unfamiliar things. Speakers blew feedback into periodic screeches. Laughter sounded like explosions. The air stank of fried food and sweat. Caelum must have come here, and seen what she had seen. But where would he have gone afterward? He could have wandered in any direction. He could have left Nashville entirely.

  She would never find him now.

  She was suddenly dizzy. Turning to move out of the crowd, she stumbled.

  “Whoa. Take it easy, there, lady. Are you okay?” A woman squinted at her and her dark wig—that’s what it was, a wig—shifted forward an inch on her forehead. “You need some water or something?”

  Lyra wrenched away from her. She was hot. She couldn’t think. She hadn’t been afraid at all, not when she believed that in Nashville she would find more replicas. But now she was panicked, and her mouth flooded with the taste of sick. Do you have any idea how many people there are in this country? Gemma had asked.

  You’ll never find him, she had said.

  She hardly knew where she was going. She just knew she had to get out, away from the noise, away from the music and the crowds. She was desperately thirsty, and whatever energy had carried her this far had abandoned her all at once.

  She crossed a scrubby parking lot to a 7-Eleven, stepping onto the curb to avoid two boys smoking outside their car—when, just like that, in the space between one second and the next, she saw him.

  Or not him, exactly, but a picture of him, taped to the window of the 7-Eleven.

  The picture wasn’t very good, and most of his features were obscured. But it was definitely him. She recognized the hooded sweatshirt he was wearing, which they’d found together at the clothes-by-the-pound thrift store Rick had taken them to when they’d first arrived at Winston-Able Mobile Home Park.