It seemed to her that only a few minutes passed before she woke again, and her dreams—liquid nightmares of dark-beaked birds, sticky with blood—scattered sleekly into memory. Sometime in the night, Pete had moved: he was now curled on the ground like a sleeping animal, his hair lifted by a light breeze.
Calliope was gone.
Gemma’s hand was full of a throbbing pain, as if pressure was building up beneath her skin. It took a moment to remember what had happened—her finger, gone. The bullet that had shaved off her finger, the smoke-filled bathroom, the escape. Dr. Saperstein, dead. The replicas, escaped.
And yet the birds were twittering in the trees and shafts of sunlight pinwheeled between branches budding with the pale-green leaves of late spring, and the world was intact.
She let herself cry a little, turning her face into the crook of her arm to muffle the sound. She was cold, and exhausted, and her throat, raw and swollen from all the smoke she’d inhaled, hurt when she swallowed. She was hungry. They’d crawled through a slick of blood and jumped from a second-story window to escape a torpedoof flame, and she cried because she would have killed for some cornflakes, for french toast with butter.
But she was quickly cried out. She kept hearing her father’s voice:No one ever solved a single problem by shedding tears about it.It was yet another of his master-of-the-universe pronouncements, like,the world is full of sheep and lions, and I know which I’d rather be,but in this case it was probably true. They were out of that awful place, at least, and she knew there must besomethingnearby—why build an airport in the middle of nowhere? Besides, there had been sandwiches brought in, and coffee. They just had to pick a direction and stick with it.
Pete turned over, muttering in his sleep. His lips were purple. His skin looked so pale, so fragile, like tissue paper, and she was suddenly terrified for him.
“Pete.” She leaned over and touched his face. “Pete, wake up.” She was reassured when he opened his eyes almost immediately.
“Is it time to go to school?” His voice cracked but he managed to smile. Gemma found herself laughing. If shewasgoing to die, she was glad that Pete was with her. He sat up slowly. “How’s your hand?”
“It’s fine,” she said, and pulled away when he tried to take it into his lap. She was too afraid to see how bad it was. “Calliope’s gone.”
“What do you mean, she’s gone?” Pete’s tonesharpened. He leaned against the oak tree to climb to his feet, holding his ribs as though they hurt. She saw there were cuts on the palms of his hands, where he must have crawled over broken glass. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. I woke up and she was gone.” Every time she thought of Calliope standing by the car window, staring down at broken Dr. Saperstein, of the look on her face before Calliope managed to recalibrate her expression to something more appropriate—not joy, exactly, butexcitement,and total absorption, like proof of the entire universe was contained there in that car—she felt a strong pull of hopelessness and nausea. Calliope and the other replicas had planned all of it.
Gemma could understand escape. She could even understand revenge. But that—the massacre at the airport, and whatever Calliope had done to Dr. Saperstein—was something different. That waspleasure.
Pete was quiet for a minute. His eyes were almost gold in the early morning sun, and she found herself wishing she could curl up inside them, float away on all that color.
“We can’t wait for her,” he said finally, and Gemma was surprised by the intensity of her relief. “We need to get help. Christ.” His voice cracked. This time, when he smiled, he couldn’t quite get it right. “A fucking cell phone, right? My kingdom for a cell phone.”
“There must be a townsomewhere,” Gemma said,partly to reassure herself. “This is America, not Siberia.” That was another thing her father had liked to say.In America, you can count on only two things. Taxes, and finding a McDonald’s.
“Right,” Pete said. “Sure.” But his face was like a dying bulb, full of flicker and uncertainty. She hated to see Pete scared even more than she hated being scared herself. She wished she could stuff Pete’s fear and pain down inside of her, pack it down her stomach like newspaper, just so he could be okay.
But she hadn’t quite forgotten what he’d said to her in the bathroom, how he’d looked at her as if she were at the very distant end of a telescope and he was surprised to find, after all that, how dim and small her light was.
Pete hacked his way into the undergrowth to find her a walking stick; her ankle was still the size of a grapefruit. At a certain point she realized she could no longer hear him moving around in the trees. Suddenly terrified that he had left her, she was about to cry out for him when she heard a shout. In answer, Calliope’s voice lifted over the trees.
“It’s just me,” Calliope said. “It’s all right.”
They came out of the woods together, Calliope and Pete, like some warped vision of her own life. When Calliope saw Gemma she actually laughed, and ran to her, taking up both of her hands and sending another shockof pain, like a hot white light, through Gemma’s whole body.
“Outside is so big,” Calliope said. “I walked for ages before I found a wall.”
She was wearing a long cotton dress and slip-on shoes—she’d found new clothes. And she didn’t look tired. She didn’t even look scared. She looked like the sun had invaded her, glowing beneath her skin. Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope was somehow feeding off Gemma, siphoning her strength and energy. Taking over.
Gemma jerked away.
“Poor Gemma,” Calliope said, but the words didn’t quite sound sincere. “You’re sick.”
“I’m not sick,” Gemma said, even though she felt terrible—dizzy and light-headed, as if the smoke she’d inhaled hadn’t fully left her. “I’m hurt. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine,” Pete echoed, which actually made Gemma feel worse. Like he needed to say it to make it true.
“It’s hungry,” Calliope said soothingly. But she couldn’t conceal her happiness: Gemma had noticed she messed up her pronouns when she was excited. “I found a wooden house. There’s clothing there, and beds. Food to eat. There’s a water pump. We can live there, the three of us,” she said. “We can make a new Haven, but this time we’rethe gods. I can nurse you,” she added, because she must have seen Gemma’s face. “I know how.”
Gemma wanted to recoil when Calliope touched her face. But she didn’t. A house meant people, which meant phones, which meant safety. “Can you find your way back?”
Maybe she’d hurt Calliope’s feelings. Calliope took a step backward.
