“I would trade places with you if I could,” he said. He moved his hand to her chest, and her heartbeat jumped to meet his fingers. “I would trade in a second.”
“I know,” she said. She was calmer now. He had that effect—he softened her fears, blunted them, the way that when night fell it softened corners and edges.
“I’ll stay with you, always,” he said. “I want you to know that. I’ll never leave you again. I’ll go with you anywhere. Anywhere,” he repeated, and then smiled. “Youtamed me, remember? Like the little prince tamed the fox in the desert. And you named me and made me real.”
She wanted to tell him she loved him. She wanted to tell him she was afraid. But she couldn’t get the words out. Her throat was too tight.
Luckily, he said it first. “I love you, Lyra,” he said.
“Me too,” she managed to say.
He kissed her. “I love your lips,” he said. “And your nose.” He kissed her nose, then her eyebrows, then her eyelids and cheeks. “I love your eyebrows. Your cheeks.” He took her hand and gently brought her pinkie finger into his mouth, kissing, sucking gently, and now the distinction between her body and his began to erode. She was his mouth and her finger, his breath and her heartbeat, his tongue and her skin, all at once. “I love your hands,” he whispered, moving finger to finger.
“Me too,” she said, and closed her eyes as he knelt to kiss her stomach, explored her hipbones with his tongue, naming all the places he loved, all the inches of skin, the seashell parts spiraled deep inside of her, filled with tides of wanting.
But her wanting wasn’t a right. It was a gift. It was a blessing. She came to it on her knees, holding out her arms.
“Me too,” she said, and every place he kissed her, her skin came alive, and told her she had to live.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 18 of Gemma’s story.
NINETEEN
THE LOCKS AT CASECS HADN’T been made to keep people prisoner—especially people like Lyra and Caelum, who were only half-people, raised in a place where a thousand different locks controlled the motion of their daily lives. Lyra and Caelum knew locks that beeped and locks that spun, locks that clicked and locks that jammed. Each of them had its own language, its own clucking tongue.
They rooted in Dr. O’Donnell’s desk. Gemma turned up a business card like the kind the Suits had carried into Haven, dropping occasionally like scattered jewels for the replicas to collect: this one carried the name Allen Fortner. She knew this must mean that Dr. O’Donnell had business with the Suits, or wanted to, even before she turned up a to-do list that included the item:Call Geoffrey Ives.
Rifling through a notepad, she found many to-do lists, and many calls to Gemma’s father.
She wondered whether he was already on his way.More likely, he had simply sent someone to take care of Lyra and Caelum; he was the kind of person who spoke through his money.
She stuffed her pockets with paper, with Post-it notes, with business cards and scrawled reminders. Evidence, although she still wasn’t sure what it proved. But every piece of paper, every scrap, hardened a sense of rage and injustice.
If she had any time left, any time at all, she would take the words and light them on fire so they would explode everywhere; they would drift like a cloud and blacken Dr. O’Donnell’s name, and CASECS’s name, and Geoffrey Ives’s name too. Even if she died, she would find a way to make the words live.
In the bottom drawer, behind a rubble of loose pens, they found a handful of bobby pins. Caelum straightened out one of the bobby pins and inserted it into the keyhole, wiggling until he heard it click. In less than five seconds, they were free.
The hallway was empty, and branched in both directions. Lyra saw no exit signs and couldn’t remember which way to go. The night before, she’d been too overwhelmed to pay attention. Caelum had been brought in by security and was distracted by a small cluster of people who had gathered to watch, but he thought they should turn left, and so they did.
Caelum was right about the rest of CASECS: it wasall carpeted hallways and offices marked with unfamiliar names, conference rooms and cubicles. Lyra saw signs of the previous night’s celebration: a bottle of wine, uncorked, and plastic cups that had pooled liquid onto a conference table. There were coffee mugs still exhaling steam at empty desks, and abandoned jackets, purses, and cell phones everywhere, suggesting their owners had, indeed, come to work only to be spirited away.
Fear moved like a film of sweat across Lyra’s body. The hallway seemed to keep unrolling extra feet, stretching endlessly past the same bleak workstations, as if it were expanding. She kept spinning around, thinking she heard footsteps on the carpet, expecting to see Dr. O’Donnell bearing down on them. But they saw no one but a guy wedged into a cubicle, fiddling with a grid of numbers on his computer, ears obscured beneath palm-sized headphones. He didn’t see them.
Finally, the hallway dead-ended and they turned right, startling a girl holding a bakery box. She nearly dropped it, yelped, and turned to hurry away—as ifshehad reason to be afraid of them.
“We have to hurry,” Caelum said, as if Lyra didn’t know. But she spotted a set of double doors where the girl had whipped out of sight around another turn, and she and Caelum grabbed hands and ran.
Lyra’s heart was gasping. As they got close she thoughtit might burst; she saw a keypad like the kind they had used at Haven, which required an ID to swipe. But the doors had been propped open with an old paperback book, and beyond them was a stairwell and a sign pointing the way to further levels.
The stairs went down, and twisted them around several landings, past a level called Sub-One, which was unlit. Through a set of swinging doors, Lyra saw a vast room filled with nothing but old machines, abandoned workstations, and freight containers. The double doors opened at her touch.
“In here?” she whispered to Caelum. But just then, a patter of footsteps passed overhead, and he shook his head and pulled her on.
As they descended, the air got noticeably cooler. Lyra remembered what the boy had said about a refrigerator. She pictured an enormous, chilled space, like a dead heart, filled with endless chambers.
The stairs bottomed out at a heavy metal gate; this one was closed and required a digitized code to open. Beyond it was a plain white windowless door, fitted with yet another keypad and marked with a small sign that simply said:Secure Area—Live Samples. Lyra’s blood rushed a frantic rhythm to her head, and in its rhythm she heard the certainty of dark secrets. Whatever CASECS made, whatever Dr. O’Donnell built with all her wanting, it was here.
They had no choice but to backtrack. The climb left Lyra winded and she had to rest on the landing, leaning heavily against Caelum, before they slipped once again through the propped-open doors at the top of the stairs. Maybe, Lyra thought, there was no exit. Maybe Dr. O’Donnell had trapped them, the way in the early days Haven had placed rats in mazes that didn’t lead anywhere, to test how long it took for the sick ones to learn all the dead ends.
