Ringer (Replica)

by Lauren Oliver

  Second that they had to escape.

  Another wave of nausea tipped her off her feet and she sat down and bent over, waiting for it to pass. At least she didn’t throw up again.

  When she felt better, she moved to the file cabinets and opened all the drawers one by one, hoping to find something she could use to get out. But they were all empty—she didn’t find so much as a pen cap. Even if she could slip out into the hallway, she would need an ID to swipe in and out of doors. But Dr. O’Donnell, wherever she was, had of course taken hers along.

  Think, think. Along with the water, someone had left her a pack of gum, probably because she had been throwing up. Lyra got a small, electric thrill.

  An idea, a very small one, a very desperate one, condensed through the fog of her brain.

  She fed a wad of gum into her mouth and gnawed, then went to the door again; the murmur of voices, probably from an adjacent office, continued uninterrupted. Someone was watching TV. She lifted a fist and banged several times, and after a brief and muffled discussion, footsteps came toward the door. She quickly spat her gum into one hand, and thumbed it into two portions.

  The door handle jumped around while someone took a key to it. When it opened, Lyra saw a girl with chunky black stripes in her hair and very thick glasses.

  “Oh,” she said, and took a step backward, as if she hadn’t expected Lyra to be there. “Oh,” she said again. “I thought I heard you knocking.”

  “I need to pee,” Lyra said. The girl tried to step in front of her, but she shoved into the hall, wedging the gum right into the locking mechanism, forcing it in deep: a trick Raina had taught her.

  The girl took a few quick steps away from her—Lyra realized she was frightened, and didn’t want even accidental contact. The halls were dim, and Lyra knew most of the employees must have gone home for the night, although she could hear the ghost clack-clack of invisible fingers on keyboards, and a few offices still spilled their light onto the carpets.

  In a narrow office across the hall, a boy was hunched over a laptop, watching something. He quickly thumbed off the volume. Lyra’s heart swelled: his ID was lying next to his computer, coiled inside its lanyard at the edge of his desk. Her fingers itched to take it.

  “What does she want?” the boy asked, jerking his head toward Lyra, and even though he sounded tough, Lyra knew he was afraid also, and just trying not to show it.

  “She has to use the bathroom,” the girl said, in a desperate whisper, as if it was a secret. “Where’s O’Donnell?”

  “Still on the phone,” he replied. “She said she might be half an hour.”

  So: Dr. O’Donnell was still here. That was good. It likely meant she hadn’t taken Caelum somewhere else, somewhere that would require a car. But Dr. O’Donnell had said she’d be back in half an hour; that didn’t give her much time to look.

  “Should I . . . take her?” the girl asked, still shying away from Lyra as though she were diseased.

  The boy blinked. “Well, I’m not going with her.”

  “Dr. O’Donnell said not to go anywhere. . . .” The girl trailed off uncertainly.

  Fear could be used. The nurses at Haven had been afraid; they had acted as though the replicas had something sticky on their skin, something that might spread through contact and turn them into monsters. But back then, Lyra had not known how to use this to her advantage.

  Things were different now.

  “I threw up in the trash can,” she said. “There’s some on the floor, too.”

  “We heard,” the girl said. She avoided Lyra’s eyes. Lyra knew the girl was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find the difference between them, the reason she had the key to the room where Lyra was getting sick and not vice versa.

  “Did Caelum get his medicine?” she asked. This made the girl and boy turn to stare at her. “The other one,” she clarified. “The male.”

  The girl looked worried. “What medicine?” she asked loudly, as if Lyra might otherwise fail to understand.

  “He has medicines,” Lyra said. “He always takes them. Otherwise he’ll get sick worse than I did.” She held her breath as the girl chewed on her thumbnail. If she went to get Dr. O’Donnell, Lyra would have to admit Caelum didn’t take medication.

  She counted heartbeats, one, two, three.

  “Can you go and get Sonja?” the girl said finally, turning to the boy. Lyra let out the breath she’d been holding. “Can you ask whether the other one said anything about medicine?”

  “Now?”

  “Just ask,” the girl said. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  The boy leaned to hoist himself to his feet. He grabbed his ID, winding the lanyard between his fingers, and Lyra’s heart skipped down into her fingers. “In one of the cold rooms?”

  The girl nodded. “Sub-Two,” she said, and Lyra had to bite her lip to keep from smiling. Now she knew where Caelum was.

  But she was careful to keep her face blank, to look as dumb as they thought she was. To watch without seeming to pay any attention at all.

  She saw: the way the boy slipped his ID in his back pocket when he stood.

  “I really need to pee,” Lyra repeated.

  She saw: the girl relenting. “Come on. Make it quick.”

  Lyra followed her into the hall, head down, obedient as a cow. Dumb, docile, harmless. The boy glanced at her with barely concealed pity before turning to lock his office door.

  She saw: the loop of lanyard visible above the stitching.

  All she had to do was hook it with two fingers as she was passing.

  Harmless.

  In the bathroom, she used the toilet and washed her mouth out in the sink. There was no time to waste. Once Dr. O’Donnell returned, Lyra would lose her chance.

  The girl had waited in the hall. When Lyra emerged, she saw the boy retracing his steps, making a search of the hallway.

  “I had it right here,” he was saying. Another sleepy-looking employee had come to her office door, blinking and yawning, as if she’d just been napping. “Right here, in my pocket . . .”

  When he looked up and spotted Lyra, he blinked, and Lyra was seized by sudden panic. But his eyes traveled through her down the length of carpet.

  Of course. He wouldn’t think to check her or look in her pockets. They thought she wasn’t capable of it. Too dumb to lie. Too dumb to plan.

  Lyra followed the girl back to the empty office, taking a seat quietly as the girl tried, and failed, to make the key work. She made a face when she saw the gum jamming the lock. “I don’t believe it,” she said. Suspicion tightened her face. “Did you do this?”

  “Do what?” Lyra asked stupidly.

  The girl rolled her eyes. “Worst night ever. Just stay here.”

  Lyra nodded, dozy as an animal.

  She counted the girl’s footsteps until the carpet had absorbed them completely.

  She stood up, steadying herself against the wall. She had to be careful, to stay clear of any holes that might grab her.

  For the moment, the hall was clear. She went quickly, scanning for hiding spots, checking door handles lightly with her fingers, looking for open offices. She ducked into the bathroom again when she heard voices, but the sound of a closing door quieted them. They had gone into an office, whoever they were.

  She found her way to the stairwell without seeing anyone else. The doors were still propped open by the same book, its pages furred with moisture and age.

  The first basement level was still dark, still full of the lumpy silhouettes of old equipment. She kept going, listening carefully for footsteps, since the turns concealed the landings beneath her. The girl with the striped hair had probably already discovered she was missing: Lyra had a minute, maybe two, before the girl panicked and launched an all-out search.

  She reached Sub-Two, and the gate locked with a keypad. She nearly cried when she saw that it required a numbered code: she’d forgotten all about it. Her palms were sweating and dizziness rose like a sudden
swarm of insects. She leaned against the gate, sucking air into lungs that felt like paper.

  She imagined her whole body strapped with fear and anger. She imagined burning up with it, like the woman who, arriving at Spruce Island, had detonated the dozen homemade explosives lashed to her body. She imagined screaming so that all the windows shattered, so the roof blew off, so that everyone above her was consumed in flame.

  She imagined fire.

  She wheeled away from the gate and backtracked up the stairs, leaning heavily on the railing, until she spotted what she wanted: on the landing of Sub-One, directly across from the swinging doors, a small red-handled fire alarm. At Haven the alarms had been enclosed by plastic, surfaces warm and smudgy from the fingers of all the replicas who’d touched them for good luck and connection.

  Pull down, the alarm said.

  She pulled.

  The noise made her teeth ring. It vibrated her eyeballs. Immediately, the stairs filled with the echoes of distant shouting. She rocketed across the landing and hurtled past the swinging doors, into the dark recesses of the empty basement level.

  From where she stood, she could see a steady flow of people up the stairs from Sub-Two. But not Caelum. She kept waiting for him to pass, but all she saw were strangers made identical by their confusion, by the quick-flash way they passed behind the glass.

  She counted them all, the way she’d counted beads of IV fluid from the drip bag: two, seven, nine, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Still Caelum didn’t come.

  The blur of people slowed. She counted three heartbeats when no footsteps rattled the landing, when the window stayed empty of passing faces.

  Hardly thinking, she pushed once again from her hiding place through the swinging doors and hurtled out into the open stairwell. She sprinted down the stairs, no longer thinking of being caught, thinking only of Caelum, of reaching him, of losing her chance.

  As Lyra crashed around the corkscrew of stairs, she saw the gate at the bottom of the stairs was only just swinging closed. She saw the inch of space between lock and gate as a narrow tether. She leapt, shouting, reaching for it the way she might have reached for a rope, and got a hand through the gate just before it clicked shut. Her mouth tasted like iron relief, like blood. Beyond the gate was the door marked Secure Area—Live Samples, which she opened with the stolen keycard.

  It was very cold.

  For a moment she stood with goose bumps lifting the hair on her arms, suddenly confused by a vision of Haven unrolling in front of her, by the collapse of past and present. But it was just an illusion: this hall looked almost identical to so many hallways at Haven.

  There were no offices here. There was no carpeting. Just a long linoleum hallway and windows overlooking darkened laboratories, doors barred and marked with Do Not Enter signs, cameras winking in the ceiling. Her stomach turned. She’d forgotten all about the Glass Eyes, and she felt a pull of both homesickness and revulsion.

  Almost as soon as she started down the hall, a man with an Afro and a goatee turned out of one of the laboratories, shouting something. She froze, thinking he was angry, or that she’d been caught. Then she realized he was just asking her a question.

  “Is it a drill or what?” he said, and she realized, too, that he had no idea who she was. Dr. O’Donnell had told her there were one hundred and fifty people who worked at CASECS: he must simply have mistaken her for one of them.

  “Not a drill,” she said, and had to repeat herself twice over the noise. “Everybody out. I’m making the rounds,” she added, when he started to respond, and she continued past him down the hall. Maybe that was the secret, and why at Haven the doctors and nurses had been able to lie for so long. People were trained to believe.

  Gemma counted two laboratories, each of them a fraction of the size of Haven’s. Some of the pieces of equipment were familiar. She recognized them from the vast, brightly sterile rooms where the doctors had done all the making, had with a shock of electricity made an egg swallow the nucleus, the tight-coiled place where DNA nested, of another person’s cells.

  But CASECS didn’t make replicas. Dr. O’Donnell had said so herself, and Lyra didn’t think it could be a lie. If there were other replicas, Dr. O’Donnell wouldn’t be so desperate to use Caelum as evidence.

  Dr. O’Donnell had said CASECS helped other places do research. But Lyra hadn’t thought to ask what kind of research she meant.

  Or maybe she had thought to ask. Maybe she had known, deep down, and she didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Understanding was like its own kind of alarm—so loud, so overwhelming, that the only choice was to ignore it altogether.

  There were just three other doors in the hall, and one of them wouldn’t open. But the second one did and inside she found Caelum, sitting on the floor, knees up, head down on his arms. She called his name at the precise moment the alarm was silenced, so her voice echoed in the sudden quiet.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked. A stupid question. When he stood up and came toward her, his face was pale, and she noticed new cuts and bruises on his cheek.

  “The guard,” was all he said.

  He didn’t hug her, but from a distance of several feet he lifted his hands and touched her face and smiled.

  “We have to go,” he said, and she nodded.

  But she hesitated when she registered all the industrial freezers, the careful labels and printed signs. The whole room was full of them. Storage freezers, of the kind that kept embryos cold, on ice, until they were ready for use.

  And suddenly she knew.

  Who knew eternal life would spring from a cooler in Allentown, Pennsylvania?

  We give hospitals, facilities, even governments the chance to do their own research.

  “They’re not making replicas,” she said. “They’re selling them.”

  “They’re selling how to make them,” Caelum said. Lyra remembered what the woman Anju had said to explain how licensing worked: Let’s say I invented a new way to manufacture a chair . . .

  “They’re making new Havens all over the place.” He even smiled, but it was a terrible smile, like a new wound. “They’re replicating Haven all around the world.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 21 of Lyra’s story.

  PART III

  TWENTY-TWO

  AS A COP, REINHARDT KNEW lies, but he also knew coincidence. Coincidences happened all the time, everywhere. Plenty of rookie cops wasted time giving too much weight to the kind of background coincidence that blew through every life, every death, every case.

  Coincidences happened everywhere, all the time: but they didn’t happen in the same place, at the same time.

  That was called a pattern.

  The girl who’d called herself Gemma Ives, that skinny little thing with eyes eating up her face, wasn’t any of his business. He had plenty of other cases to worry about, actual cases: three other missing-persons cases had landed on his desk in the past six months alone, two of them teenagers from the same low-income district where he’d grown up, one of them a forty-five-year-old stay-at-home mom on the board of her children’s PTA who’d disappeared in February on her way to the gym. No signs of violence, but no activity on any of her credit cards, either, nothing to indicate whether she was alive or dead. Only yesterday he’d found her in Florida, living with an ex-con who’d retiled her roof last summer. Reinhardt still hadn’t figured out a way to tell her husband.

  As far as he knew, the girl wasn’t in any trouble at all. Just because she’d lied about her name didn’t mean she’d lied about heading for Pennsylvania to see her doctor.

  Of course, she couldn’t have been headed to see Dr. Saperstein, since Dr. Saperstein was dead. It had been all over the morning news. That was coincidence number one.

  Maybe she’d lied about his name, too. But it was funny she’d chosen his name in particular, and funny she’d chosen Gemma Ives’s name, too. Because after Detective Reinhardt had seen the real Gemma Ives�
��s picture, and after he’d Googled around a bit, he found that Geoffrey Ives and Dr. Saperstein, now deceased, knew each other, from a place called Haven, a research institute off the coast of Florida.

  The girl, the skinny big-eyed girl, had said she came from Florida.

  And if you were counting—which Detective Reinhardt wasn’t, because it wasn’t his business, because what did some skinny, desperate stranger matter to him?—but if you were, you would count coincidences two and three.

  And you would know that three coincidences were two coincidences too many.

  Of course, anyone could imagine meaningful connections where none existed. It was all a question of wanting. If you wanted to find a thread between JFK’s assassination and a UFO sighting in New Mexico, you could be sure you would hit on one eventually.

  But Detective Reinhardt didn’t want to find a thread. He didn’t want to see a pattern. He wanted to forget the girl, and forget Gemma Ives, and the smell of moneyed lies that leaked off her father, and the skittish look of his wife, like someone awakening in an unfamiliar room from a terrible nightmare.

  He certainly didn’t want to find significance in the presence of federal investigators on a missing-persons case. He didn’t want to find it strange that they’d grilled him about the girl and her cousin—or whoever he was—he’d picked up Sunday night, though Mr. Ives had said previously that Gemma knew no one of her description.

  He didn’t want to find it suspicious that his captain, usually so forthcoming, shut down Reinhardt as soon as he’d thought to question their participation.

  He didn’t want to see, and he didn’t want to care, and he sure as shit didn’t want to spend Wednesday, his only day off, making the twelve-hour drive to Philadelphia.

  He would have to stop for gas on the way out of Nashville.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 22 of Gemma’s story.