Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  But she had to crawl around a dead replica who’d lost half her head to a bullet. She still had a gun in her hand, and Gemma noticed her fingers, long and pale and lovely, and imagined that they still stirred, like underwater plant life moved by a current of water.

  The stairwell was impassible. Even the door marked Authorized Personnel was warm, and Gemma could hear the fire beyond it humming, shredding the physical world into vibration. Calliope tested the door handle, then quickly pulled her fingers away and sucked them into her mouth.

  Trapped. They’d waited too long to get out.

  They headed back across the scrum of debris, of broken bodies and cotton drift. Everything was dark with ash, everything looked like the grit of burning, and even as they made it to the windows, the fire finally punched its way up to the second floor, collapsing a portion of the wall near the stairwell and tonguing its way over the blood-sticky floor.

  A sudden sweep of fresh air made Gemma want to cry. Several windows were missing where people had crashed through them. Gemma, Pete, and Calliope leaned out into the night air, still fizzing with rain, and in the distance Gemma saw dark figures escaping into the trees, pouring through the open gate, shaking the fence to dismantle it: replicas, hundreds of them, making a run for it. Two vans were on fire and half a dozen bodies—soldiers and replicas, it looked like—were scattered across the parking lot, like dolls abandoned by a careless child. Most of the usual Jeeps and trucks were missing. Probably the soldiers had gone, carrying their wounded, or maybe seeking reinforcements, and whisked Saperstein and the other staff to safety.

  “We’re going to have to jump,” Pete shouted. “It’s the only way.”

  Gemma nodded to show she understood. The drop was twenty feet, and almost directly beneath them two replicas lay, half-naked and entangled, their eyes unblinking, exposed to the wind and rain. She didn’t know whether they’d landed wrong or been shot, but it didn’t matter. She would have jumped if the distance was twice as great, would have catapulted into the air without looking back—anything to get out, to get away, as far from the chokehold of the smoke and the fire feeding off bits of skin and scalp and hair as possible.

  She jumped.

  She was screaming through the air, and her lungs were bursting with the joy of oxygen, and then she landed hard in a barren patch of dirt, next to a scrub of bushes. Her right ankle rolled and she knew right away she’d twisted it, but the pain was nothing compared to the red-funnel fire that burst in her vision when she drove her injured hand down into the ground for balance. It was like the missing finger had instead folded up inside her and shot all the way to her throat; she nearly gagged.

  Pete landed with a grunt and scrabbled quickly away from the bodies. Now that Gemma was closer she saw they’d been shot, probably from the air: there was a pattern of blood spatter on the exterior wall. It was Calliope, funnily, who hesitated, teetering on the windowsill, looking now not like the monster Gemma had seen in the bathroom but like a sister Gemma might have dreamed. Smoke undulated and roiled behind her.

  “Jump,” Gemma found herself shouting, though minutes earlier she’d been hoping Calliope might simply disappear. “Jump!” Her throat was raw from smoke, and when she tried to draw air again, she began to cough.

  Calliope jumped, and for a second Gemma saw her framed in the air like a bird, arms flung wide and mouth open, suspended in the glitter of the fine rain.

  Then she landed, gracelessly, but on her feet. Gemma felt the impact herself, whether from the vibration of the ground or because of the doubling effect, she didn’t know. When she stood up and tested her weight, her ankle held, barely.

  “What happened?” Pete had already moved to take hold of her injured hand again, but she drew away. It was too painful, too awful, and numbly she half believed she could make everything that had happened untrue again.

  “I landed wrong,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Keep pressure on your hand,” was all he said. He’d always looked thin but now, in the slick light of the remaining streetlamps, covered in blood that wasn’t his, he looked truly sick.

  They moved across the parking lot, leaving the ruins of the airport behind. Gemma kept expecting to hear a ricochet of shooting, to be stopped, to have her legs eviscerated by bullets. But other than the sound of the fire and a few distant shouts, it was quiet. Why was it so quiet? The fire must be visible for miles. Shouldn’t there be sirens already? Ambulances? Shouldn’t someone have noticed and responded? It was as if . . .

  As if they were miles away from anyone.

  It felt to her that they were in the open forever, inching across that bleak expanse of gray pavement, with the painted silhouettes of old parking spaces still faintly visible and bodies flung at intervals facedown on the concrete. But finally they were at the woods, which would hold them and hide them: and at the far end of the woods would be roads, and gas stations, and telephone wires, and help.

  Then an explosion made waves of sound that made the ground shudder and vibrated in Gemma’s teeth as she turned around. A portion of the roof had collapsed, and flames shot suddenly to the sky, illuminating a low-hanging covering of red-tinged cloud, before retreating again. Gemma and Pete stood stunned, watching the last of what had once been science’s greatest experiment consuming itself.

  Only then did Gemma see Calliope a short distance away, standing next to a sedan leaning on a flat tire, windshield shattered. It had obviously been heading for the gate. Gemma couldn’t see Calliope’s face, but she was strangely immobile, as if something inside the car fascinated her. And for whatever reason Gemma found herself backtracking, limping on her injured ankle. Forever afterward she couldn’t have said why she was compelled to the window of that sedan, only that she was.

  When she was still twenty feet away from the car, Calliope leaned in through the open window. Gemma couldn’t see what she was doing, but she thought she heard a shout. This, too, she couldn’t absolutely swear to afterward.

  By the time Calliope withdrew, Gemma had come up beside her. It was brighter now: the burning airport had created an artificial dawn. When Calliope turned, Gemma nearly screamed: her hands, her wrists, her shirt, all of it was soaked in blood.

  “I tried to help him,” Calliope said quickly. “It was too late.”

  For a moment, Gemma couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing: a confusion of glass and blood and steel, the horrible staring face, and the metal finger jointed to its forehead. It looked like one of the cubist paintings her father collected, a nonsense-jumble of shapes.

  Then, in an instant, she understood: the blood leaking from his mouth, the air bag pinning him to his seat, a steel rod that must have rocketed from the building just before the roof collapsed, whipped through the windshield, and punctured Dr. Saperstein between the eyes. His glasses were gone. In death he looked suprised, and vaguely puzzled, as if he’d come across an unexpected turn in a familiar road.

  “Poor Dr. Saperstein,” Calliope whispered, and almost sounded as if she meant it. What had she been doing when she leaned into the car? Why was she so covered in blood?

  Gemma turned to look at her. Calliope’s face rapidly shuttered into an expression of disgust. Like a mirror, it rearranged itself to reflect back what it saw. It was very fast and extremely convincing, but Gemma had caught her too early, had seen the truth nesting like an insect beneath her skin.

  Of course, that was the problem with simulations. They were never exactly like the real thing.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Lyra’s story.

  EIGHTEEN

  GEMMA COULDN’T HAVE SAID HOW far they walked that night looking for a road—miles, maybe, or maybe no distance at all, turning circles in the pitch-dark. They had no water, no flashlight, no matches, no way of getting food and shelter. They had managed to stop her bleeding, and Pete had bundled her hand tightly by rebandaging her fist as best he could with his T-shirt, already soaked with her b
lood. Still, she could easily get an infection, if they didn’t die of hunger or thirst first, or get eaten by wild hogs or wolves or bears or whatever might be prowling in the woods.

  Finally, they were forced to stop. Gemma’s ankle was so swollen she could hardly put weight on it.

  They slept sitting up between the thick roots of an oak tree. It was still raining. The ground was wet and cold. Gemma leaned against Pete to keep him warm. He had no shirt. She expected to have nightmares, but instead sleep came to her like the numbing cold of anesthesia: she dropped.

  It seemed to her that only a few minutes passed before she woke again, and her dreams—liquid nightmares of dark-beaked birds, sticky with blood—scattered sleekly into memory. Sometime in the night, Pete had moved: he was now curled on the ground like a sleeping animal, his hair lifted by a light breeze.

  Calliope was gone.

  Gemma’s hand was full of a throbbing pain, as if pressure was building up beneath her skin. It took a moment to remember what had happened—her finger, gone. The bullet that had shaved off her finger, the smoke-filled bathroom, the escape. Dr. Saperstein, dead. The replicas, escaped.

  And yet the birds were twittering in the trees and shafts of sunlight pinwheeled between branches budding with the pale-green leaves of late spring, and the world was intact.

  She let herself cry a little, turning her face into the crook of her arm to muffle the sound. She was cold, and exhausted, and her throat, raw and swollen from all the smoke she’d inhaled, hurt when she swallowed. She was hungry. They’d crawled through a slick of blood and jumped from a second-story window to escape a torpedo of flame, and she cried because she would have killed for some cornflakes, for french toast with butter.

  But she was quickly cried out. She kept hearing her father’s voice: No one ever solved a single problem by shedding tears about it. It was yet another of his master-of-the-universe pronouncements, like, the world is full of sheep and lions, and I know which I’d rather be, but in this case it was probably true. They were out of that awful place, at least, and she knew there must be something nearby—why build an airport in the middle of nowhere? Besides, there had been sandwiches brought in, and coffee. They just had to pick a direction and stick with it.

  Pete turned over, muttering in his sleep. His lips were purple. His skin looked so pale, so fragile, like tissue paper, and she was suddenly terrified for him.

  “Pete.” She leaned over and touched his face. “Pete, wake up.” She was reassured when he opened his eyes almost immediately.

  “Is it time to go to school?” His voice cracked but he managed to smile. Gemma found herself laughing. If she was going to die, she was glad that Pete was with her. He sat up slowly. “How’s your hand?”

  “It’s fine,” she said, and pulled away when he tried to take it into his lap. She was too afraid to see how bad it was. “Calliope’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, she’s gone?” Pete’s tone sharpened. He leaned against the oak tree to climb to his feet, holding his ribs as though they hurt. She saw there were cuts on the palms of his hands, where he must have crawled over broken glass. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. I woke up and she was gone.” Every time she thought of Calliope standing by the car window, staring down at broken Dr. Saperstein, of the look on her face before Calliope managed to recalibrate her expression to something more appropriate—not joy, exactly, but excitement, and total absorption, like proof of the entire universe was contained there in that car—she felt a strong pull of hopelessness and nausea. Calliope and the other replicas had planned all of it.

  Gemma could understand escape. She could even understand revenge. But that—the massacre at the airport, and whatever Calliope had done to Dr. Saperstein—was something different. That was pleasure.

  Pete was quiet for a minute. His eyes were almost gold in the early morning sun, and she found herself wishing she could curl up inside them, float away on all that color.

  “We can’t wait for her,” he said finally, and Gemma was surprised by the intensity of her relief. “We need to get help. Christ.” His voice cracked. This time, when he smiled, he couldn’t quite get it right. “A fucking cell phone, right? My kingdom for a cell phone.”

  “There must be a town somewhere,” Gemma said, partly to reassure herself. “This is America, not Siberia.” That was another thing her father had liked to say. In America, you can count on only two things. Taxes, and finding a McDonald’s.

  “Right,” Pete said. “Sure.” But his face was like a dying bulb, full of flicker and uncertainty. She hated to see Pete scared even more than she hated being scared herself. She wished she could stuff Pete’s fear and pain down inside of her, pack it down her stomach like newspaper, just so he could be okay.

  But she hadn’t quite forgotten what he’d said to her in the bathroom, how he’d looked at her as if she were at the very distant end of a telescope and he was surprised to find, after all that, how dim and small her light was.

  Pete hacked his way into the undergrowth to find her a walking stick; her ankle was still the size of a grapefruit. At a certain point she realized she could no longer hear him moving around in the trees. Suddenly terrified that he had left her, she was about to cry out for him when she heard a shout. In answer, Calliope’s voice lifted over the trees.

  “It’s just me,” Calliope said. “It’s all right.”

  They came out of the woods together, Calliope and Pete, like some warped vision of her own life. When Calliope saw Gemma she actually laughed, and ran to her, taking up both of her hands and sending another shock of pain, like a hot white light, through Gemma’s whole body.

  “Outside is so big,” Calliope said. “I walked for ages before I found a wall.”

  She was wearing a long cotton dress and slip-on shoes—she’d found new clothes. And she didn’t look tired. She didn’t even look scared. She looked like the sun had invaded her, glowing beneath her skin. Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope was somehow feeding off Gemma, siphoning her strength and energy. Taking over.

  Gemma jerked away.

  “Poor Gemma,” Calliope said, but the words didn’t quite sound sincere. “You’re sick.”

  “I’m not sick,” Gemma said, even though she felt terrible—dizzy and light-headed, as if the smoke she’d inhaled hadn’t fully left her. “I’m hurt. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Pete echoed, which actually made Gemma feel worse. Like he needed to say it to make it true.

  “It’s hungry,” Calliope said soothingly. But she couldn’t conceal her happiness: Gemma had noticed she messed up her pronouns when she was excited. “I found a wooden house. There’s clothing there, and beds. Food to eat. There’s a water pump. We can live there, the three of us,” she said. “We can make a new Haven, but this time we’re the gods. I can nurse you,” she added, because she must have seen Gemma’s face. “I know how.”

  Gemma wanted to recoil when Calliope touched her face. But she didn’t. A house meant people, which meant phones, which meant safety. “Can you find your way back?”

  Maybe she’d hurt Calliope’s feelings. Calliope took a step backward.

  “I think so,” Calliope said, angling her hand to examine her nails, as if she’d lost interest in the conversation.

  “Please, Calliope, we need you.” Pete’s voice was gentle and made Gemma ache: it was the voice he’d used when he lifted her shirt in the basement and, without blinking, said beautiful. She wondered now if that had been put on too, to appease her, as he was trying to appease Calliope.

  Was there anything in the world that wasn’t just pretend?

  Pretend or not, it worked. Calliope smiled again. “I made a path back,” she said, addressing Pete directly. “You can follow me.”

  Gemma went slowly, leaning heavily on her walking stick with every other step. Almost immediately she fell behind, though Pete stopped and waited for her whenever he saw that she was struggling,

&nbs
p; Calliope often darted ahead, vanishing among the trees, so they had to call her back. She touched everything: tree bark, slender branches pale and new, even the pulp of rotten leaves, bending down to run her fingers in the dirt. Gemma couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, free at last in a world she didn’t know at all, and wondered at how unafraid she seemed.

  Gemma had been enclosed too, in a way, bound by her father’s rules and her mother’s concern, and yet she understood now why people released from prison sometimes wished to go back. She longed for walls, for narrow hallways, for doors that locked. She longed for her old life back, for its sharp angles and clarity: who was wrong, who was right.

  In this new world, things doubled and mutated. People had faces beneath their faces. Dr. Saperstein was a monster and he wasn’t. She was afraid he’d been right about the replicas raised at Haven. Calliope was made of the same material as Gemma was, and she was also a monster. Whenever Gemma caught her eye, Calliope smiled, but always a fraction of a second too late. She remembered what Saperstein had said: To them there is surviving and not surviving, and that’s it.

  Calliope had said she had made a path, left markers so she would be able to find her way back, but if she had, Gemma couldn’t see them. It all looked the same to her, and as the sun rose and the insects rose with it, hovering in swarms, buzzing around Gemma’s wounded hand, she began to think Calliope was either lost or deliberately leading them through the same narrow tunnel of trees. Gemma was so exhausted her vision was blinking out, periodically going to black. She didn’t know why April was always going on and on about saving the trees—there sure as shit seemed to be plenty of trees already, doing fine.

  Just when she was about to call for another rest, Pete shouted. And limping toward them, she saw a low post-and-beam fence, rudimentary and half-rotten, and beyond it: fields. Pastures and farmland. Cows blinking sleepily in the sun.