A fist of hatred tightened in Gemma’s stomach. “I’m not lying,” she said. “I can prove it. Call Saperstein. Ask him yourself.”
Gemma couldn’t tell whether the yogi woman was even listening. She only looked puzzled, as if Gemmawere speaking in a different language. After a moment, she withdrew, and Gemma heard the murmur of distant voices: she was speaking to people out of sight. Gemma was dizzy with fear. What was she doing?
A minute later, several people wearing medical scrubs flowed down the hall and moved up the stairs without acknowledging either Gemma or the man and woman who’d brought them. They had the same look as all medical staff: harried, professional, too busy to be bothered. The colossal, patchwork strangeness of it all—the yoga pants and the doctors’ scrubs and the soldiers with assault rifles and the reek of sweat—made a sudden rise of hysteria lift in Gemma’s chest.
The woman in yoga pants returned, turning her face to the ceiling as if listening to the pattern of footsteps above them.
“Should I take her up?” Gemma’s captor asked, and she shook her head.
“In a second. I’m going to bring them down first.”
“Bringwhodown?” Gemma blurted out.
The woman didn’t answer right away. Just then, the sound of footsteps above them grew louder. The door at the top of the landing creaked open, and the doctors, or nurses, or whatever they were, returned.
They had brought along three Gemmas.
Three Gemmas crowded the stairwell. Three Gemmasgazed down at her. Three Gemmas, scalps shaved clean, wearing filthy T-shirts and pants that bagged from the hollows of their hipbones, chittered like small mice, as if at a fun-house reflection.
Gemma lost her breath. A hole opened up beneath her feet. She dropped straight through the floor.
Dimly, she was aware that the woman in yoga pants had turned at last to address her. “My proof,” she said simply.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 8 of Lyra’s story.
NINE
FINALLY, GEMMA WAS ESCORTED UPSTAIRS. The airport terminal was crawling with military personnel, but also people in medical scrubs, rendered identical by their dirty hair and look of shared exhaustion. One woman dressed in a pantsuit, who resembled a fashion mannequin on Fifth Avenue, kept massaging her forehead with perfectly manicured fingers. Gemma didn’t even want to know what government agencyshe’dcrawled out of.
The airport was dizzying not so much because of its size, but because of its regularity, the identical halls stripped of furniture, counters, vendors, arrivals screens. There were very few working lights, and new ribs of plywood divided room from room. The ceiling panels were missing.
Gemma was led to a bathroom with no stalls at all, just toilets bolted to the floor at regular intervals. A nurse wassummoned—she was wearing a shapeless medical smock over her street clothes, and had that blind-mole look of someone who’d just been asleep—to unbutton Gemma’s reeking pants and underwear and haul them to her hips while Gemma peed, since her wrists were still bound.
The nurse’s hands were cold. Gemma tried to blink away the sudden pressure of tears: the woman’s fingers swept the place between Gemma’s legs when she went to hitch up Gemma’s underwear and then jeans.
“Sorry,” the nurse whispered. “We’ll find you something dry to put on in a bit.” But Gemma felt something come down around her, some inner space collapsing.
There was no air-conditioning. If it wasn’t obvious enough from the smell of must and raw wood, from the filthy corners and cables of dust visible through open gaps in the walls, it was clear to her now: whatever this place was, it wasn’t like Haven. There was no experimentation here, no medical treatments or analyses. This was a holding pen, pure and simple.
Outside the bathroom, the woman in the pantsuit was waiting, yawning behind a hand. She straightened up and frowned briefly at Gemma. “Well?”
“Well what?” the nurse responded, keeping a hand on Gemma’s elbow. Her touch was surprisingly gentle, as if she wanted to make up for what had happened in the bathroom.
“That’s the last of them, isn’t it?”
“How should I know?” The two women obviously despised each other. “That’s your business. What I’m supposed to do is keep themalive.” Gemma disliked the way she emphasized that. It suggested the other woman’s business was something else entirely.
“No need to get defensive. I was just asking. They all look the same to me, even the ones that aren’t doubled.”
“I bet.” The nurse’s voice was hard with sarcasm. “We still have bodies to match. Some of ’em no more than fingers—thanks to you.” She sniffed. “But if you say so, you say so.”
They moved again down the hall, cavernous with shadow, and half-splintered spaces suggesting their original purpose: countertops, old glass display cases where she imagined sandwiches withering behind glass.
Something smelled: a trash smell, an inside-of-the-body smell. The scent of urine was strong. They stopped to draw water from a long industrial sink: plastic cups overflowed a massive trash can. The nurse had to hold the cup while Gemma suckled at it like a baby, but she was too thirsty to say no. Then, to her surprise, the woman turned Gemma and released her handcuffs. Gemma nearly fainted from the rush of pleasure, of relief, when she could move her shoulders freely.
But she understood, as the woman gestured her on,why the restraints weren’t necessary: patterns of footsteps sounded softly on the linoleum, overlapping, like the drum of distant rain. Soldiers with guns. Even when they hung back in the dark she could see the barrels winking like animal eyes.
“Be a good one, now, and you won’t get in any trouble,” the nurse said. For the first time since being taken into the van, she felt a spark of hope. This woman wasn’t evil. Maybe she could be made to understand. To believe.
