Lyra was reluctant to leave. Though Gemma was obviously not here, she kept feeling that she’d missed something, kept turning around to stare even as they began to retrace their steps. The houses, dismal, lurching on their feet. Piles of rot and leaves. The trees puncturing the beams. An old circle of stones. Maybe a fire pit, or a garden.
And not a single sign of movement, nothing but the hollow drumming that made her heart ache with loneliness.
They started back the way they’d come, and Detective Reinhardt took the lead again. They’d barely left the cabins behind when they heard him shout. Caelum put a hand on Lyra’s elbow, to help her go faster, and they pushed forward through a leaf-slicked trail marked by the detective’s footsteps in the mud. The rain was coming harder, beating its percussion through the trees.
She saw Reinhardt, moving through the mist toward a girl in a filthy dress, and from a distance, for a second, even Lyra was confused: Gemma, it was Gemma, they’d found her.
But immediately the vision passed. The girl’s body was wrong, and her hair was wrong, the way she stood with her arms very still and tight at her sides was wrong, all of it just a small but critical distance off, like a door hanging an inch off its hinges.
Not Gemma. Calliope.
Caelum realized it too. He dropped Lyra’s arm and started to run, an instinct, as if he could physically get between Calliope and Reinhardt. Lyra started to call out but it was too late, Detective Reinhardt had crossed the distance. He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder even as Caelum shouted, “No!”
Calliope moved quickly. It was like a sudden pulse of electricity had brought a statue to life. From an angle Lyra saw only the quick motion of her hand and then Reinhardt, leaning heavily on her shoulder, so it looked as if he would pull her into an embrace.
Then he released her and stumbled backward, and Lyra saw the knife handle stuck in his abdomen, and blood already darkening his shirt. He reached for the gun holstered to his belt, but only grazed the grip before pulling away again quickly, as if it had scalded him.
For a split second, just before Caelum reached her, Calliope met Lyra’s eyes. Lyra was shocked by the feeling; she stopped moving; it was like running into a wall, a huge hand of immovable stone. She thought then of thestatue of Richard Haven, which had been built from the wrong stone, so that quickly its face had begun to dissolve in the rain; by the time Lyra was named, its eyes were gone, and its nose, and even its lips, so it looked like the blank face of a clock without numbers or hands: like a warning of some terrible future to come where no one could see or speak or hear.
Then Calliope turned and ran, wrenching away from Caelum when he tried to grab her. Caelum hesitated. Lyra knew he was torn between the urge to go after Calliope and the desire to stay with Detective Reinhardt. But they couldn’t let Calliope get away.
“Go,” Lyra said to Caelum. And then, when he still didn’t move,“Go.”
Finally, he took off after Calliope. She had a head start, but she was weak; he would catch her easily.
Lyra dropped next to Detective Reinhardt when he sat down heavily.
“I’m okay,” he said. But he was chalky-looking, sweating. The good news was that Calliope had stuck him in the stomach, not the chest; she’d missed his heart by a mile. “I’m okay.”
“You have to keep pressure on it,” she told him.
“I know. I’m a cop, remember?” He tried to smile, but pain froze his expression into something horrible. “God. When I saw her standing there... She looked so lost....”
“That was number seven,” Lyra said. Calliope didn’t deserve her name; Lyra couldn’t stand to say it out loud.
“Poor kid.” Detective Reinhardt coughed and then cursed, his face screwed up with pain. Lyra couldn’t believe it: Calliope had stuck him with a knife, had caused him all this pain, and still he felt sorry for her. “Do me a favor. Get my belt off, okay?”
She unclipped his duty belt, which was heavy. The gun he carried in his holster was the same as the one Rick Harliss had taught her to fire, only a little heavier. A Glock. Lyra thought the word fit. It was a loud, angry word, and it sounded like an explosion.
Lyra was suddenly furious. “You should have killed her,” she said, thinking of the way Detective Reinhardt had fumbled for his gun. “She would have killed you.”
Detective Reinhardt shook his head. “She’s just a kid,” he said.
“She’s a replica,” Lyra said, but Detective Reinhardt shook his head again.
Lyra saw then that he really, truly didn’t understand the difference. That to him, therewasno difference.
She had been told she was supposed to love Rick Harliss because he was her father, and because he loved her. But she had never felt as if she loved him, and she had worried simply that she didn’t knowhow. Even the way she felt about Caelum, she thought, might not be love atall, but something different, something she had no name for. Hadn’t she heard again and again at Haven that the replicas weren’t all-the-way human, they weren’t real people, they were simulations of people, precisely because theycouldn’tlove? Damaged, monstrous, soulless—these were all different words for the same thing.
But in that moment, and though she hardly knew him at all, she knew absolutely that she loved Detective Reinhardt. It was complete and undeniable, and it changed the whole world around her, like being submerged in a warm bath for the first time. If she could have chosen a father, she would have chosen him.
The gun was cold in her hand. But its grip felt familiar.
“Stay here,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.” He didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t sure he’d heard. His whole face was screwed tight around his pain now, as if it too had been winched around the knife.
She’d been right: it hadn’t taken Caelum long to catch up to Calliope, and Lyra found them quickly. He had gotten her facedown in the wet leaves and pinned her arms behind her back. But she’d obviously fought him. There were deep scratch marks from his cheekbone to his jaw, and a bite mark on the back of his hand.
When Lyra approached, Calliope tried to lift her head. But she couldn’t manage it. She thudded down into the dirt again, one cheek flat to the leaves, the other catchingthe drive of the rain. But her eye, swollen with rage, rolled toward Lyra, like the eye of a spooked animal.
