They were halfway up the stairs when the rhythm of footsteps narrowed above them: in her head, Lyra saw sound like a cloud that had collapsed into a single dark stream of water. She recognized Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, and the panicked response of the girl who’d escorted her to the bathroom earlier.
“In here,” she whispered to Caelum, and she pulled him past the swinging doors into the vacant offices on the basement level. Through the cutaway window, she saw Dr. O’Donnell pass, followed by the girl and the boy whose ID she had stolen. There were other employees with them, brown and white and tall and short, but all with the same identical expression of tight-cinched panic.
They didn’t dare turn on a light and so they went slowly through the dark space, feeling their way, toward an emergency exit sign that floated up through the murk of shadows.
More shouts, increasingly urgent, vibrated through the ceiling and floated up through the floor, like a dust they disturbed with their feet. It seemed they weren’t getting any closer to escape, as if the darkness kept unrolling.
“Wait,” she said. She couldn’t breathe. When they reached the emergency exit, a barred door, she was so dizzy she had to stop, leaning heavily against it. “Wait.”
Suddenly she wasn’t sure. Dr. O’Donnell was right: there was nowhere for them to go. She wondered how much time she even had left. One week? One month? Two? Would they spend the rest of her time simply running, like this, in the dark, trying to stay ahead of the people who wanted to erase them? And what would happen to Caelum once she died?
It was terrible to think that he would go on, and terrible to think that he wouldn’t.
“We have to go,” Caelum whispered to her. “They’ll find us here.”
Lyra still couldn’t breathe. The room was spinning, and ideas began losing their shape: Rick was warming soup in the microwave; there were men passing through rows of beds, touching the replicas with their fingers. She recalled the strange, sweet stink that had sometimes carried back to Haven from the ocean, when the winds were right and the disposal crews hadn’t gone far enough to burn the bodies of the dead. Time, the present, was like a hook; she struggled to hang on.
“Where will we go?” she said. Caelum’s breath was hot on her cheek. The dim light of the exit sign gave shape to his shoulders and neck. “Dr. O’Donnell was right. No one can help us.”
“It doesn’t matter if she’s right or not,” Caelum said. His hand found hers in the dark. She was shocked by the sense that her heart had traveled down her arm into her palm, and that he was holding that instead, fragile and alive. “She doesn’t have the right to say,” he said. “She doesn’t have the right to choose.”
Lyra swallowed. She felt like crying. “I’m going to die,” she whispered. “Aren’t I?”
He leaned forward. His lips bumped her nose and then her jaw and finally her lips. “Sure,” he said. “But not yet. Not today.”
Elbowing open the door, they found instead of stairs a cavernous loading bay. They ran together, even though the effort made her gasp, and she kept fearing they would hit some obstacle, a sudden wall that would surprise them, although there were dirty bulbs set in the ceiling? that switched on with their movement and she could see there was nothing to stop them.
Caelum found the switch to control the rolling doors and the noise rattled her whole body: it seemed to take forever before they’d inched high enough for Caelum and Lyra to duck beneath the gap.
Either her sickness or her fear began to cut things into clips: a short stretch of pavement and a fence they couldn’t climb. Dumpsters to their right. To their left, a sweep of red light: a fire truck had come, although as Lyra watched, the lights went dark and the truck began to shimmy itself into a turn. She couldn’t see the parking lot or the front gates they’d snuck through; they’d come out the back.
They skirted the building, looking for other gates, or places the fence wasn’t reinforced. But the only way out to the street was through the manned gates. And the fire alarm had driven the staff out into the parking lot; there were still a half-dozen people milling around in front of the double glass doors.
They could wait for the crowd to break up, but that just meant it was even more likely that Dr. O’Donnell would catch up. The only other option was simply run for it. Charge straight through the lot and count on surprise. The fire truck was just nosing toward the driveway. They might even be able to hitch a ride out through the gate when they opened it.
“Think you can make it?” Caelum asked her, and she knew he was thinking what she was: Why stop now?
She nodded, although her legs felt wobbly and she knew that there was always a hole waiting for her, waiting like a long throat to swallow her up.
He took her hand again, and she was glad. A sudden, strangling fear made her want to cling to him, to tell him that she loved him. But she couldn’t make the words come up. They were stuck behind the fear, which glued her lungs and made it hard to breathe.
“When I say go,” he said. “Go.”
It was a good thing they were holding hands. She wasn’t sure her legs would have started moving if he hadn’t yanked her forward. They came around the side of the building, charging straight toward the group of people still milling outside, texting, one of them smoking a cigarette; but by the time anyone thought to look up, they were already blowing by the crowd, weaving through the few cars in the lot and sprinting to follow the fire truck as it approached the gate.
Everyone was shouting, and touching off explosions in her head. The gate was opening to let the fire truck through. They were too slow. They wouldn’t make it. But Caelum wouldn’t let go of her hand.
Almost there. The truck had slowed to maneuver through the gates. They were ten feet away, then closer. They were going to make it.
“Stop, stop, stop.”
Dr. O’Donnell’s voice was high and clear: it rang out like a bell. The fire truck braked abruptly, and Caelum threw out a hand to keep from cracking into the bumper. One of the firefighters leaned out the driver’s-side door and cranked around to see what all the noise was. Lyra saw his mouth moving, saw the way his eyes darkened when they landed on her.
Stop. Lyra was screaming, too, or she thought she was. Then she realized she had only been screaming in her head. She threw her voice as hard as she could, hurled it like a stone. “Stop! Please! Help!”
He retreated, yanking the door shut; she didn’t know if he’d heard. The fire truck jerked forward another few feet, and that did it—Lyra gave up, she dropped, her knees gave out and she stumbled. Caelum caught her and tried to draw her in another direction, toward the parking lot. But she could barely stay on her feet. She was too tired—of running, of hiding, of hitting walls, of finding that every face concealed a sharp set of hungry teeth.
Then Dr. O’Donnell threw herself between them and the truck.
“Wait,” she said. Her hair was slicked by sweat to her forehead. “Just wait a second, okay?”