The girl looked startled, as if she hadn’t expected questions. “Putting out fires,” she said, and Lyra frowned. “I don’t mean real fires,” the girl added, seeing that Lyra didn’t understand, and she giggled a little. “It’s just an expression.”
“It means there’s been an emergency,” Caelum said. Lyra looked at him, surprised. “I heard Rick say it.”
Thinking of Rick and the people who had taken him made Lyra feel nauseous again. She wondered whether they were still out there, searching for her and Caelum. She wondered whether she really had seen the man at UPenn or only imagined it; she wondered if they could track her to CASECS. But Dr. O’Donnell would protect her.
She’d promised.
“What emergency?”
Now the girl definitely looked nervous. “Dr. O’Donnell says you have to eat something,” she said, avoiding the question entirely. “I have some water for you, too.”
She deposited the bag on top of the mini fridge and, asshe went to root around inside it, toppled the small vial of special medicine that Dr. O’Donnell had left, stoppered, for Lyra’s morning dosage. Lyra shouted and Caelum made a dive for it.
But it was too late. It hit the ground and opened, liquid seeping out into the carpet. For a second, Caelum stayed there, his hand outstretched. Then he drew back, and Lyra felt a sharp pain: as if something hot had gone straight through her lungs. Unexpectedly, tears came to her eyes.
The blond girl stared from Lyra to Caelum and back. “What?” she said. “What is it?” She followed the direction of Lyra’s gaze then, and gave a quick laugh. “Oh,” she said. Carelessly, she snatched up the now-empty vial and tossed it once, catching it in her palm. “Don’t worry. It won’t stain.” Lyra could only stare at her.
“Imean”—the girl sighed and slipped the vial into her pocket—“it’s just saline, anyway. Salt and water never hurt anybody.”
“She lied to me.”
They were alone again. The girl had left them, promising to get Dr. O’Donnell, frightened perhaps by Lyra’s stillness. This hole was worse than any yet, because she was conscious, she was aware, she was remembering. But she felt that enormous walls of darkness had grown to encloseher. She was shivering at the very bottom of a pit. Caelum was speaking to her from somewhere very far away.
“We have to go. Lyra, listen to me. We have to find a way out of here, now.”
“Why did she lie to me?” She was so cold. Her hands and lips were frozen. Corpses grew cold, she knew; she had touched one before, the day that she had found number 236 dead, her wrists cabled to her bedposts. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Of course it does.” Caelum grabbed her shoulders. “They’re all liars, Lyra. Didn’t I tell you? Each and every one of them is the same.”
She didn’t want to believe it. But when she closed her eyes, she saw memories revolving, taking on new dimensions. She had overheard Dr. O’Donnell fight with Dr. Saperstein, and had always believed it meant that Dr. O’Donnell loved them. But if she’d really loved them, why hadn’t she tried to end the experiment? She had once tried to convince Emily Huang to stand up to God. But she hadn’t stood up herself. She hadn’t exposed Haven.
She had just left.
She had left to do her own experiments, to do whatever it was they really did at CASECS. Tolicense. All the times that Dr. O’Donnell had read to Lyra and the others, had taught them about the stars—was that simply its own experiment?
Maybe all people were the same—they all wanted different things. But they all demanded therightto want whatever it was they wanted. They all thought of it as their birthright.
Caelum let Lyra go. He turned back to the door and tried the handle: locked, from the outside. He aimed a kick for the door and Lyra didn’t even startle at the noise. Dr. O’Donnell had lied to her.
All people were the same.
There was nowhere to go, nowhere for them to run, no time left for her. What did it matter whether she died here or somewhere else?
“We shouldn’t have come here.” Caelum’s voice cracked, and Lyra wanted to tell him it was okay, that it didn’t matter anymore.
“What choice did we have?” Everywhere Lyra turned she hit walls and more walls. “I’m running out of options, Caelum. I’m dying.” It was the first time she’d ever admitted it to Caelum.
When had she become so afraid of dying? For most of her life, she’d seen death as deeply ordinary, almost mechanical, like the difference between having a light on or off. She was afraid that death would be like falling into one of the holes, except that this one would never end, that she would never reach the bottom of it.
She couldn’t stand to look at him, at the angular planes of his cheekbones, at his beautiful eyelashes andlips, all of it undamaged, pristine,beautiful. She was unreasonably angry at him—for being so healthy, for being so beautiful.
Because she knew, of course, that Caelum was the reason she was afraid. She’d never had a reason to care about whether she lived or not. Caelum had given her the reason. Now he would continue, while she would end.
“Don’t,” she said, when he tried to touch her. But he got her wrist before she could turn away from him.
“Hey,” he said, and put a hand on her face, resting his thumb on her cheekbone, forcing her to look at him. “Hey.”
They were chest to chest, breathing together. His eyes, so dark from a distance, were up close layered with filaments of color. She felt, looking at them now, the way she did when looking up at the dark sky, at the stars wheeling in all that blackness.
