But by then she couldn’t go on. Fear and guilt came down on her mind like a veil, rippling all her words into distant impressions. In the house, Rufus began to bark, as if he was determined that she not cry alone.
And, weirdly, just when it felt as if she could cry until she drowned, she felt a sudden pressure, an invisible presence. It was as if an unseen person had just stepped up to place a hand on Gemma’s shoulder and whisper in her ear. It’s okay, this other person said, and Gemma recognized in the silence the voice of Emma: the first, the original. It’s going to be okay.
Pete came forward to put a hand on her back. “It’s okay,” he said, and Gemma startled, turning around to face him. Her impression of Emma’s voice broke apart on the wind. “I’ll drive you.”
Behind him, April’s face was narrow with worry, but she didn’t argue. And Pete even managed to smile. He didn’t look angry anymore.
“We’re your people too, you know,” he said. “We’ll always be your people, if you let us.” He ran a thumb over her lips. His skin tasted like smoke.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Lyra’s story.
FIVE
THE WINSTON-ABLE MOBILE HOME PARK was just under six hours away, forty minutes outside Knoxville. Pete and Gemma drove mostly in silence, with the radio off and the windows down, except when Pete asked whether it would be all right to stop and get coffee.
The drive, the tension, the wind blowing in the wake of passing semis and the windshield dazzling with headlights: it all felt like they’d tripped over a wrinkle in time and wound up back where they were three weeks ago. Gemma tried to sleep but couldn’t. Whenever they passed a cop on the road, she got jumpy. Gemma had told her mom she was going to sleep at April’s house, and Pete had told his parents he was sleeping in one of the Ives’s guest rooms, and April had, after much protestation, gone home so that she could run interference if Gemma’s mom called the house before Gemma got back. April’s moms had left the party early, so there was no reason to think her cover story had been blown so quickly. Still, if worse came to worst, Gemma hoped her mom would assume she had merely lied in order to sleep over at Pete’s house (which Kristina seemed to suspect Gemma was always angling to do—seemed to hope for it).
But she knew, too, that anything was possible. Her dad might have gotten suspicious. He might have radioed friends in the force, friends at the tolls, friends even now crawling dark highways, waiting to stop her and bring her home. A network of owed favors, backroom deals, contracts and alliances: the whole world was a spiderweb and all the threads were made of money.
Geoffrey was the spider. Which made people like her, and like Lyra and Caelum, the flies.
It was just before six o’clock when they spotted a sign for Ronchowoa, a dump of a place whose claim to fame was one of Tennessee’s largest privately owned plastics manufacturers. By then, the darkness was letting up a bit, but the air was smudgy with chemical smoke and had its own gritty texture. Gemma remembered that her dad’s brother, Uncle Ted, had helped restructure the Knox County debt, but she was still surprised to see a strip mall—containing a hair salon, a liquor store, a check-cashing place, and a local bank—sporting the name Ives.
It made sense. The Ives brothers loved nothing so much as ownership.
The trailer park was at the end of a long dirt road that badly needed paving. They went so slowly it felt as if they might simply be rolling in neutral. Gemma was itchy with anxiety, as if she were wearing a full-body wool sock. She saw no sign of Fortner or whoever he had sent to do his business. There were no other cars on the road, no strangers lurking around in the early morning shadows. Then again, she knew there wouldn’t be. People like Fortner worked fast and clean.
Most of the time, at least.
What if they were too late?
She wished for the millionth time that Lyra had called her, and wondered for the millionth time why she hadn’t. Gemma had told her to call first thing after their phone got set up, and had spent hours watching her cell phone, as if she could will it to ring through the pressure of her eyeballs.
Despite the grid of dusty, dirt-rutted streets, none of the trailers seemed to be in numerical order. Gemma’s father had said that they were in number 16; she assumed that the unnumbered trailer between lots 15 and 17 must be the one they were looking for. But then she spotted the plastic children’s toys scattered in the patchy yard. This wasn’t it—couldn’t be.
Still, they got out of the car, moving slowly, quietly, so they wouldn’t startle anyone. Gemma wasn’t in the mood for a showdown about trespassing—and besides, it was possible that even now they were being watched. Spiders had eight eyes, enough to see in all directions. But human spiders had hundreds, maybe thousands, more.
She was almost relieved to hear a dog barking. Everything until then had been so still, so silent, she might otherwise have thought they were too late, that the whole damn place had been rounded up.
Gemma was turning to shush the dog when she saw movement from a dingy white trailer set behind a scrub of balding bushes across the street. A girl or a boy—she couldn’t tell from a distance, not in the half-light—slipped outside and turned to lock the door.
As soon as the girl started down the stairs, Gemma knew her.
“Lyra,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse. It was the first time she’d spoken in hours. “That’s Lyra.”
She and Pete jogged to catch up. Lyra was already moving away from them, head down, as if she was afraid of being followed. Did she know she was in danger? Where was Caelum? She must have heard them approach, because suddenly Lyra whirled around, hands on her backpack straps, elbows out like miniature wings.
“Lyra.” Gemma felt out of breath, though they’d gone barely one hundred feet. Lyra was more beautiful than she remembered. Funnily enough, she was wearing eye makeup. Not just a little, either. Shimmery, smoky, purple eye makeup, the kind April applied to Gemma when she was “practicing her technique.” She’d dyed her hair, too, a platinum blond. She had gained badly needed weight.
“What are you doing here?” Typically, Lyra didn’t smile or even seem that surprised to see them.
Despite having come to warn her, Gemma found at the last second she couldn’t say the words—couldn’t admit to Lyra that everything her father had promised was a lie.
Instead, it was Pete who spoke.
“You’re in danger,” he said. “The people who killed Jake Witz are tracking you and Caelum. They’re probably on their way now.”
Lyra hardly even blinked. “I know,” she said. “They were here already.”
Gemma’s heart fell through a hole. “Is Caelum . . . ?”
“Gone.” She frowned a little, as if the word carried an unexpected taste.
The world tightened around them. Even the air seized up and grew too heavy to breathe. “They—they got him?”