If there were a single place in the world where she would find help, it had to be here, where the Gods of Haven would be once again reunited.
Despite the crowd gathered in front of it, the building itself had the whistling, empty look of an abandoned shell. The revolving glass doors were roped off behind a thick red ribbon, and Lyra’s heart picked up—this, then, must be the ribbon Dr. Saperstein was expected to cut. But the podium positioned directly in front of the doors stayed empty, the microphone crooked uselessly toward the open air, like a finger beckoning to no one. Police sawhorses kept the crowd a safe distance from the building.
Hundreds of people eddied around the steps, blocking the entrance. Lyra kept hold of Caelum’s hand—she wasn’t sure she would have been able to loose herself, he was squeezing so tight—as they edged along the periphery of the crowd, puzzling over what it meant. From the fact that the girl with the violet eye shadow had asked them whether they were students, she now knew this must be a school. Maybe this was simply how schools looked, how teaching took place.
Many of the students carried signs that saidNot Our Penn,Take Haven to Hell,Penn Students for Awareness. Others waved school flags, or carried signs that saidPenn PrideorPenn Students for Science.
Between the two groups there was obvious tension. A makeshift line divided them, like the finger of aninvisible current had divided the crowd in two, and as they watched, two boys began pushing each other and one of them ended up on the ground, his glasses shattered.
Finally, she worked up the courage to ask a girl what all the shouting was about.
The girl, red-faced and sweaty, wearing mismatching shoes and thick glasses, was resting on a stone wall with a cardboard sign tucked between her legs. Because of the way it was angled, Lyra couldn’t read what it said.
“You go here?” She squinted at Lyra and Caelum in turn, and when they shook their heads, seemed to relax. “Oh. I was gonna say. Whatplanetare you from?” She bent down to retrieve her sign, propping it on the wall next to her. This one saidNot Our Penn.
Lyra tried a different tack. “Do you know where to find Dr. Saperstein?” she asked. The sun was too bright. In its glow she felt as if all her holes were visible, all the defects in her brain obvious.
“Oh, the ceremony’s off for sure. They’re just too spinecheese to tell us. You heard about what happened in Florida, right? I mean, you’re notactuallyfrom Mars?”
“Don’t be a dick, Jo.” This came from a boy sitting next to her.
“Florida.” Lyra swallowed. “You mean what happened at the Haven Institute?”
The girl, Jo, nodded. “Richard Haven was a professorhere, like, a million years ago. He’s been dead for, like, a whole decade.” She paused to let this settle in. “Anyway, he went off and made fuck-you money doing biotech and who knows what, and he bought his name onto this building.”
“It wasn’t biotech,” the boy said. “It was pharmaceutical stuff.”
“No one knows what it was, and that’s the point. No oversight. Typical one percent stuff, too big to fail. And Saperstein’s just as bad.” That she addressed to the boy, and he raised both hands. “Anyway”—she turned back to Lyra and Caelum, exhaling heavily, so her bangs moved across her sticky forehead—“the Florida meltdown is, like, the worst environmental catastropheever.”
“Since the BP spill, at least,” the boy chimed in.
“Since the BP spill, forsure.” Jo glared at him. “There are clouds of pollution, like seriously chemical clouds, practicallypoisoningeveryone within eighty miles—”
“Not eighty miles,” the boy put in mildly. “You’re exaggerating.”
The girl didn’t seem to hear him. She was getting worked up now. Her glasses kept slipping. Every few seconds, she thumbed them higher on her nose. “They’re saying there might be generational damage, plus it turns out Saperstein wascompletelyskirting federal regulations, they’re saying he wascloningpeople....”
“Oneperson is saying that,” the boy interrupted her again, and nudged her. “Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to believe everything you read on the internet?”
Finally, she turned on him. “Whose side are you on, anyway?” He shrugged and went quiet, picking at a pimple on his chin. “The point is”—she said, rolling her eyes—“I’m premed, and I don’t want this guy’s name on our buildings. How about Marie Curie? How about awoman? Richard Haven doesn’t represent me. Not my Penn.” She pointed to her sign.
“But where is Dr. Saperstein?” Lyra felt increasingly panicked. In the distance, she spotted a man uniformed in dark blue, wearing mirrored sunglasses: a guard, sent to collect her. Then he was gone, dissipated in the sweeping motions of the crowd, and afterward she wasn’t sure whether she’d imagined him.
Jo blinked at her. “I told you. He’s not coming. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up in jail.”
“Thank you.” Lyra remembered, just barely, to say it. Thinking of Rick, and the way he’d tried to teach her about manners, and how to talk to people, brought on an unexpected spasm of pain.
They turned away from the girl and her sign. Then Caelum pivoted suddenly.
“Hewasmaking clones,” Caelum said.
Both the girl and the boy stared.
“I’m one of them,” he said. “I’m number 72.”
“Ha-ha,” the girl said flatly. An ant was tracking across her sign. She frowned, took it up between two fingers, and squeezed.
In the short time they’d been speaking to Jo, the crowd had grown even denser. Now the protest spilled up the steps, toppling the sawhorses, and as she watched, several students charged the podium and brought it crashing down. Lyra saw a blur of police uniforms among the crowd and felt suddenly as if she were going to faint. Reality slipped slowly toward darkness.
