Ringer (Replica)

by Lauren Oliver

  They went in search of ginger ale: the vending machine at the station was out of everything but Coke. At Haven, she had had ginger ale regularly, because along with the antinausea drugs that got delivered orally or piped in through an IV, the nurses distributed warm ginger ale in small paper cups. The taste of ginger ale reminded her in equal measure of Dr. O’Donnell and of the Box, and so she loved and hated it, also in equal measure.

  Nothing was open this late. They kept walking. Lyra’s legs felt strange and sticky, as if they were made of metal that had rusted. She was exhausted. Her relief at being reunited with Caelum only made her aware of how lost she would have been without him; it wasn’t, therefore, exactly relief. Though Detective Reinhardt had said it was a bad place to walk, she felt that with Caelum next to her, nothing bad could ever happen again. But several blocks from the bus station, Lyra became aware of a change in the shadows around them, a subtle rearrangement of the nighttime noise of that foreign city.

  They were being followed. They’d been herded, actually. Unconsciously trying to outpace the voices even before they knew what the voices meant, they had wound up on a narrow one-way street that contained nothing but a shuttered auto-parts supply store and a vacant warehouse.

  Before Lyra had a chance to warn Caelum, they were surrounded. Five men, not much older than Caelum was, and one girl who hung back, keeping her eyes on her phone. The light from the screen made strange shadows on her face.

  The five boys tossed Lyra’s backpack and took the wallet Gemma had given Lyra, which held Gemma’s bank cards and all of her money. But what really made Lyra angry was the way they scattered her stuff: the bottle caps and old plastic bags filled with clinging browning plant matter and coins and a rusted pin shaped like an apple, all the things she’d collected and cared for at Winston-Able.

  “You a trash lady or something?” one of them said, and hurled away a pen, her favorite pen, its end deformed by chewing.

  They made fun of Caelum for the knife he carried—“You need more than a pair of tweezers, you swag around here like we’re supposed to know you”—and insisted he hand over his money (stolen, Lyra knew, from the cash box at work) and even his belt, which one of the boys wanted. Caelum did what they said without a word. Still, Lyra could feel anger like heat ticking off him, subtle waves of it that made her light-headed.

  When one of the guys moved to touch Lyra’s cheek, Caelum began to growl. At first the boys thought this was funny, and they laughed.

  “Look at this guy. He’s like a cat or something.” A second guy stepped forward and tried to push Caelum.

  Quickly, even as a passing car threw light briefly onto the brick wall behind them and then darkness crowded in after it, Caelum changed. He was a person and then he was something less, something animal and old. He lunged, snapping his teeth.

  The guy wrenched his wrist away, finally. “Freaks,” he said. Though Caelum and Lyra were drastically outnumbered, the power had shifted. “Freaks,” he said again, and when he met Lyra’s eyes, he looked afraid. “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  After they were gone, Lyra bent to retrieve her scattered belongings. But she couldn’t distinguish her things, her special things, from the trash in the gutter, little knobby strangers that meant nothing to her—snub-nosed cigarette butts, tongues of gum stuck to their wrappers.

  “Are you all right?” Caelum asked her. It was practically the first thing he had said to her directly since they’d laughed together like idiots in the police station.

  She didn’t answer him. She was nauseous, and tired, and they had nowhere to sleep, and no money to buy a bus ticket, either. She hated the group of boys who’d followed them and laughingly upended her backpack to shake her things into the gutter. She hated the girl who stood there with her eyes stuck to her phone screen, the girl who couldn’t even be bothered to look. How could they be people the same way that Detective Reinhardt and Gemma and her friend April were people? The difference between people and replicas was one of ownership. Real people owned, and they took, and replicas were owned. A difference of action and object.

  “Lyra,” Caelum said, when she didn’t answer. How to sort out her things from the flow of human waste? Where did all these things come from, and who was discarding them so easily? It seemed to Lyra that the whole human world was built on waste, and trash, and things manufactured just so that they could be tossed out afterward. She couldn’t save it all. She could never rescue everything. “Lyra, please. Talk to me.”

  “You left without me.” It wasn’t what she had been planning to say, but once the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she was still furious at him. “You were just going to leave me behind. You didn’t even say good-bye.”

  “I thought I was doing you a favor,” Caelum said. “You seemed happy.”

  “I was happy because we were together,” she said. “I thought we would always be together, at least until . . .” She found she couldn’t think about her sickness. She couldn’t say the words out loud. At Haven, death had never seemed particularly scary. It was a bald, natural fact, like the transformation of food through the digestive tract. Replicas were born, they got sick, they died, their bodies were bundled and burned. Someday she would be ash sifting through the ocean waves, to be consumed by half-blind deepwater fish.

  “I’m sorry.” He knelt so she had no choice but to look at him. “I didn’t want to leave you. I didn’t,” he said, reaching out to touch her face, so she couldn’t turn away. He placed a hand on the back of her neck, and her body responded, as it always did, as if she were something hollow—a husk, a leaf—and he the wind lifting it. “I thought it would be best. I thought I was protecting you.”

  Another passing car threw up a quick wedge of light. Caelum looked so beautiful it was almost painful. She was relieved when the darkness chased the car away again.

  She stood up. “What are we going to do now?” They had nothing of any value, and Lyra knew by now that everything in the real world cost money. You needed money to eat, and money to sleep, and money even to use the bathroom in public places, which were for patrons only. Caelum was quiet. “We’ll find a way,” he said.

  “What if Dr. Saperstein won’t help us?”

  Caelum’s smile was as thin as a razor. “We’ll make him.”

  They backtracked to the station, thirsty now, and moneyless, and ticketless. They hunched down in a dark alcove near the men’s bathroom, with its smell of armpits and old urine, and waited for morning to come.

  Lyra balled her pink sweatshirt up beneath her head for a pillow. She closed her eyes and felt the nausea rise and fall like a swell of water, and she was scared. She pictured her own body like a night sky, a web of black tissue, and small disease cells burning like stars inside it; she closed her eyes and saw instead of darkness a blinding light, the compression of all that light, all that energy, into a single blazing explosion.

  She woke up swallowing a scream that came up in the toilet with splatter. In her vomit: small comet trails of blood.

  Whether she made it to Philadelphia or not, she was running out of time.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Gemma’s story.

  PART II

  TEN

  BARELY SIX HOURS AFTER HE let the skinny girl, Gemma Ives, and her cousin off at the Greyhound station—regretting, on the one hand, not keeping them for more questioning, and on the other hand himself exhausted, eager to believe that they were indeed heading to see someone who could help her, that they were not just two more junkies busing toward their next high—the police commissioner in Nashville, Sarah Rhys, called Detective Kevin Reinhardt’s supervisor, Captain Basher, to say that Mr. and Mrs. Ives would be coming by the station.

  The day before, Gemma Ives’s debit card had been used to purchase a one-way ticket to Nashville from the Knoxville Transit Center, and hours later she’d withdrawn two hundred dollars from an ATM at a rest stop in Crossville, suggest
ing she had, indeed, boarded a bus. It had been less than the requisite forty-eight hours since Mr. Ives’s daughter had gone missing. Nonetheless, Rhys was issuing an Amber Alert: the girl wasn’t yet eighteen years old.

  She was thought, perhaps, to be traveling with a boy.

  Detective Reinhardt knocked his chair over in his hurry. He didn’t even double-check the girl’s likeness: her parents had sent the Crossville PD a series of photographic attachments, and Crossville had forwarded them on. Buses started running at six a.m. But she might still be there, he might have time to catch her, she needed sleep, there was still time. . . .

  “Where you going with your pants on fire?” Officer Cader was checking her teeth in her computer monitor, working a fingernail between her incisors.

  Christ. He should have been a dentist.

  He should have been a bus driver.

  He should have been something, anything else.

  He was already through the revolving doors, into air swollen and thick with the promise of more rain, and sprinting to the car, thinking there was still time to catch her.

  He plunged through the revolving doors at 6:17 a.m. exactly—record time—into the echo chamber of cell phone conversations and squeaky-soled sneakers, into a colorful foam of faces and rolling luggage. Any other person would have been overwhelmed, but Detective Reinhardt had been a cop for a long time, and his dad had been a cop, and his uncle was a cop, and so was his cousin Rebecca. So he looked not where all the color and sound was but where it wasn’t: the negative spaces, the empty corners and hallways and alcoves that regular people were trained to ignore.

  His eyes leapt over the crowd. He let himself drift. He released the station so that it floated away from him, like a boat unmoored from the shore. The girl, the funny soft-spoken kid with the eyes made slightly bulbous from being too thin and the bright-red backpack, was the only thing he could have clipped onto.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “Now boarding, Gate 3, 405 north to Boston.”

  And then: a glimpse of red, a flash of platinum-blond hair, a girl who moved like she was drifting.

  Almost at once, the crowd re-formed and he lost sight of her. It didn’t matter. He was shoving his way through the funnel of people churning toward the gates, swirling around the big departures board.

  Someone stepped in front of him, and Reinhardt nearly went down over the wheels of a hideous green faux-alligator suitcase. The man looked outraged, as if it were an actual alligator and Reinhardt had just trampled its tail.

  Only then did the loudspeaker voice touch his consciousness.

  “Now boarding, Gate 3, 405 north, destination Boston, with stops in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York . . .”

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Gemma’s story.

  ELEVEN

  “NOW BOARDING, GATE 3, 405 north, destination Boston, with stops in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York . . .”

  Lyra came awake to a booming electronic voice. A cop was frowning down at her.

  “Can’t sleep here,” he said. He had to speak loudly above the echo of so many voices. Spokes of sun, a blur of people holding briefcases, women in sneakers that went squeak-squeak and reminded her of the nurses, children shouting.

  She got to her feet, leaning hard against the wall for support. Caelum was gone. Standing, she was even taller than the police officer. Sweat dampened her underarms, and she could smell herself.

  The cop squinted at her. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” she said quickly. Her voice sounded like it had been chewed up. “Just waiting for my bus.”

  He nodded as if he didn’t quite believe it but moved off anyway. She stood there breathing hard—even the effort of standing had made her dizzy—and tried to think. She couldn’t remember why she was there, only that Caelum had been with her and now he was missing. The pattern of travelers was dizzying. Strangers threshed the lights into shadow patterns. A gigantic clock on the wall with tapered iron hands pointed to 6:09. She was going to be sick again.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall, grateful for the coolness of the stone. Think. But she couldn’t think. She couldn’t remember a thing. Images came to her in flashes: Detective Reinhardt’s big cow eyes, throwing up in the toilet, the veins of blood.

  When she opened her eyes again, she thought for a moment, through the thick haze of sun, she even saw him moving through the shifting crowd of travelers. But then the pattern changed shape and instead she spotted Caelum, dodging the crowd without appearing to notice anyone else.

  “Here,” he said, when he reached her. He was holding a paper bag. From it, he produced a can of ginger ale. Cold.

  “I thought you’d gone,” she blurted out. She lowered her mouth to the soda can, sucking along its rim, comforted by the taste of metal. This was a Haven taste, of tongue depressors and tubes behind the throat, even of Thermoscan, though that had been made of plastic.

  He just shook his head. He looked happier than she’d seen him in a month. “I bought us tickets, too. The bus is boarding.” She remembered now, dimly: those boys moving out of the dark, an impression of wet mouths and the harsh birdlike cries of their laughter. She remembered kneeling in the gutter, trying to sort out her things from the collection of trash.

  “How?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I told you I was going to get our money back,” he said. “And I did. Some of it, anyway.”

  She still didn’t understand. She could hardly remember what they looked like: to her they now seemed a blur, their faces eaten up by shadows, and all their mouths identical and grinning. “You found those boys from last night?” she asked, but knew immediately, from his face, that wasn’t what he meant.

  He took her free hand, pressing something into her palm. She opened her hand and found a battered leather wallet. She saw a flash of wadded bills before he took it back again.

  “They’re all the same, Lyra,” he said. “That’s what you have to understand. Even the ones who say they’ll help are the same.”

  Her head was pulsing, like the rubber pump of a stethoscope when it was squeezed.

  “You stole it,” she said.

  “They took from us,” he said. “So I took back from them.”

  It was wrong to steal. Lyra knew that. Once Calliope, one of Cassiopeia’s genotypes, had stolen a cell phone from the nurses’ break room. Even though they’d found it tucked inside Calliope’s pillowcase, Nurse Swineherd had insisted that all of her genotypes be punished. Privately, Lyra believed that that was when number 8 had gone so soft in the head, that maybe she’d been knocked too many times. Although the truth was that she had always been smaller than the others, and much dumber, too, so maybe she’d simply been born that way.

  Caelum was right: Why should they have to give so much, and never take anything in return?

  If everyone believed they were monsters, shouldn’t they at least be allowed to have teeth?

  She could feel Caelum watching her, felt a question hanging between them like a very fine curtain of fabric. 6:20 now.

  “Last call, Gate 3, 405 north, destination Boston, with stops in Washington, Philadelphia, and on to New York . . .”

  She looked up. The curtain parted. “We better hurry,” she said, “if we want to catch the bus.”

  They slipped easily through gaps in the kaleidoscope of people, like rats, like shadows. All the people Lyra passed did look the same. Their skin and hair and jaws began to blur into a smear of indistinguishable color, into people who were simply not like them.

  But then, for half a second, her eyes snagged again on a vision of Detective Reinhardt pushing frantically through the crowd. This time, she was sure she hadn’t imagined him.

  She nearly lifted a hand to wave.

  But then Caelum took her hand in his, and together they sprinted the rest of the way to the bus, slipping inside just as the doors were closing.

  Tu
rn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 11 of Gemma’s story.

  TWELVE

  LYRA AND CAELUM ARRIVED IN Philadelphia just after eleven p.m., and still a crush of people poured with them into the station. Every time she thought she must have seen all the people there were in the world, all the buildings and cars, they kept coming: it was a little like watching distant waves in the Gulf of Mexico, as she had sometimes done at Haven, to see the way each wave in fact hauled dozens, hundreds, thousands more on its back.

  Lyra knew that Dr. Saperstein was going to speak on Tuesday at a place called UPenn—that was what the people who had taken Rick Harliss away had said. She had been keeping careful track of the days, as Rick had taught her to, and knew that they were a day early. Still, she was nervous.

  Remembering how helpful Detective Reinhardt had been, Lyra suggested that they ask a police officer for directions. Caelum was less certain—the day before, he’d been shunted between holding cells, and desks, and grim-looking officers for hours, waiting to be booked—but after two hours of wandering, he finally agreed.

  They circled back to the bus station, where there were plenty of cops. But the first one just shook his head.

  “If you’re here for the protests,” he said, “you’d be better off just turning right around. This country’s got bigger things to worry about, and we’ve had guys down there clearing the roads for two days. Besides,” he added, narrowing his eyes, “it’s almost midnight. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  The second one, a woman with her hair in tight braids, like Dr. Fine-Yes had worn back at Haven, just stared at Lyra for a long time, up and down, as if her eyes were a broom and Lyra a bunch of dust.

  “How old are you, honey?” she asked, and Lyra grabbed Caelum’s hand and hurried away without answering.

  By then, Lyra was too tired to continue: exhaustion kept rolling up and crashing over her, hauling her down into brief, blinking moments of darkness, so she would come alert and realize she didn’t remember crossing a park, or she didn’t know how they’d ended up inside a neon-bright restaurant that sold hamburgers flattened like palms.