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.
TWENTY-THREE
THERE WOULD BE NO THIRD chance to escape. Maybe Dr. O’Donnell would lock them in cages, or cuff them to a bed, as some of the replicas at Haven had been cuffed. Or maybe she would simply grow tired of protecting them, and hand them over to one of the Suits who wanted Lyra and Caelum dead.
You aren’t supposed to exist, she had said.
Whose fault is that? Lyra should have asked.
Every second they delayed brought them closer to disaster—and yet they went through the laboratories, smashing everything they could, knocking equipment from the countertops, shattering microscopes, dumping out chemical samples. Lyra knew Dr. O’Donnell and her staff would recover soon enough—they could buy new equipment, order new chemical samples—but it made her feel better. Every test tube that shattered, every hundred-thousand-dollar piece of lab equipment that crashed and splintered into pieces, seemed as it broke to simultaneously split open a kind of joy inside of her.
Finally, there was nothing left to destroy.
The hallway carried distant echoes, footsteps overhead, voices shouting words she couldn’t make out. People looking for them.