“Poor kid.” Detective Reinhardt coughed and then cursed, his face screwed up with pain. Lyra couldn’t believe it: Calliope had stuck him with a knife, had caused him all this pain, and still he felt sorry for her. “Do me a favor. Get my belt off, okay?”
She unclipped his duty belt, which was heavy. The gun he carried in his holster was the same as the one Rick Harliss had taught her to fire, only a little heavier. A Glock. Lyra thought the word fit. It was a loud, angry word, and it sounded like an explosion.
Lyra was suddenly furious. “You should have killed her,” she said, thinking of the way Detective Reinhardt had fumbled for his gun. “She would have killed you.”
Detective Reinhardt shook his head. “She’s just a kid,” he said.
“She’s a replica,” Lyra said, but Detective Reinhardt shook his head again.
Lyra saw then that he really, truly didn’t understand the difference. That to him, there was no difference.
She had been told she was supposed to love Rick Harliss because he was her father, and because he loved her. But she had never felt as if she loved him, and she had worried simply that she didn’t know how. Even the way she felt about Caelum, she thought, might not be love at all, but something different, something she had no name for. Hadn’t she heard again and again at Haven that the replicas weren’t all-the-way human, they weren’t real people, they were simulations of people, precisely because they couldn’t love? Damaged, monstrous, soulless—these were all different words for the same thing.
But in that moment, and though she hardly knew him at all, she knew absolutely that she loved Detective Reinhardt. It was complete and undeniable, and it changed the whole world around her, like being submerged in a warm bath for the first time. If she could have chosen a father, she would have chosen him.
The gun was cold in her hand. But its grip felt familiar.
“Stay here,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.” He didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t sure he’d heard. His whole face was screwed tight around his pain now, as if it too had been winched around the knife.
She’d been right: it hadn’t taken Caelum long to catch up to Calliope, and Lyra found them quickly. He had gotten her facedown in the wet leaves and pinned her arms behind her back. But she’d obviously fought him. There were deep scratch marks from his cheekbone to his jaw, and a bite mark on the back of his hand.
When Lyra approached, Calliope tried to lift her head. But she couldn’t manage it. She thudded down into the dirt again, one cheek flat to the leaves, the other catching the drive of the rain. But her eye, swollen with rage, rolled toward Lyra, like the eye of a spooked animal.
Except that Lyra didn’t feel sorry for Calliope, not one bit.
“I thought you were dead,” Calliope said. Because of the way her head was angled, her voice was distorted. It was a terrible version of Gemma’s voice: it was the same 15 percent wrong as the rest of Calliope.
Lyra ignored that. She knew Calliope likely meant that she thought Lyra had died on the marshes, but she couldn’t help but feel, too, that Calliope had seen immediately how little time she had left, that the disease was starting to show on her skin. “Where’s Gemma?” she said.
“I don’t know any Gemma,” Calliope said, and Caelum gave her a nudge with his knee. Her tongue appeared quickly to wet her lower lip. She was nervous, and Lyra was glad. “I don’t know where she is.”
Lyra didn’t know whether to believe her, but it didn’t matter, anyway. Calliope would never tell her the truth.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked. “You killed that family. You left Gemma to take the blame.”
“I didn’t know what would happen,” Calliope said. Then: “Why do you care, anyway?”
“Gemma’s my friend,” Lyra said.
Calliope’s pupil was so large it seemed to swallow all the color in her eye. “Friend,” she said, and the rain suddenly changed its pattern through the leaves, creating a ripple sound like laughter. “You were always one of the dumb ones. They’ll kill you. You know that, right? They’re all the same. They’ll pretend to help you and then they’ll hurt you, again and again, just like they did at Haven.”
Lyra had always felt anger as a kind of heat burning through her. But now she was freezing cold. As if from the grip of the gun her whole body was turning to metal very slowly. Calliope had known the truth about Haven, just like Caelum had. But not Lyra.
Was it true, then? Was she really just stupid?
Was she being stupid now?
“Let me go,” Calliope said. “You’re not going to kill me. So let me go.”
“Not until you tell me why,” Lyra said. The trees chittered under the pressure of the rain. They threw the question back at her, and made it sound ridiculous.
“Cassiopeia was dead,” she said. “Number six was dead. Numbers nine and ten, too. They never made it out of the airport. And number eight doesn’t count. Even if she did escape, she couldn’t last long.” Calliope pulled her mouth into a smile, exposing an incisor tooth, graying and sharp. “I wanted to be the only one.”
Lyra closed her eyes. She stood and listened and thought of her whole life like a single point of rain, falling down into nothingness. Calliope was still talking, wheedling now, sounding young and afraid. But Lyra could barely hear her. Let me go, Lyra. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was so scared. It was the strangest thing, as if Calliope wasn’t talking at all, as if Lyra was just remembering something she’d said years earlier.
She thought of Detective Reinhardt and Gemma lost forever, and those people on the farm, lying in one another’s blood. Detective Reinhardt had said that some people could wear faces, could slip them on like masks.
Lyra opened her eyes. “Do you remember the baby bird that flew into the glass?” she asked. Funnily enough, she felt calm. “It flew into the glass and broke a wing. I thought I could nurse it.”
Calliope frowned. “No,” she said. But Lyra could tell she was lying.
She could see it so clearly in her mind: the way its tufted feathers fluttered with every breath, the shuttering of its tiny beak, how scared it was.
“You stepped on its head to kill it,” Lyra said. The barrel of Detective Reinhardt’s gun was slick and wet but she felt it, slowly, warming in her hand. “You said it was the right thing to do, because of how it was broken. Because there was no hope of fixing it.”
Calliope went very still. The whole world went still. Even the rain let up momentarily and seemed to gasp midair, deprived even of the will or energy to fall. Calliope’s fear smelled like something chemical. Lyra saw her calculating: right answer, wrong answer.
“I don’t remember,” Calliope said finally, and all the rain unfroze, all of it at once hurtled down fast and thick to break apart, as if trying to blow itself back into elements purer than what it had become. The feeling came back to Lyra’s hand, warmed her fingers and wrist and arm as she raised the gun. It spread down through her heart, opening and closing like the wings of a bird in her chest.
“Funny,” she said. “I never forgot.”
She didn’t need more than one shot, but she fired three anyway, just to be sure.