“All right, off you go,” Nurse Swineherd said. “You let me know if you start feeling sick, okay?”
This time, she knew she wasn’t expected to answer. She wouldn’t have to tell anyone she kept throwing up. That was what the Glass Eyes mounted in the ceiling were for. (She wasn’t sure whether she liked the Glass Eyes or not. Sometimes she did, when the chanting from Barrel Key was especially loud and she thought the cameras were keeping her safe. Sometimes, when she wanted to hide that she felt sick, she hated them, those lashless lenses recording her every move. That was the problem: she never knew which side the Glass Eyes were on.)
But she nodded anyway. Lyra had a plan, and the plan required her to be good, at least for a little while.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Gemma’s story.
THREE
THREE DAYS LATER, THE BODY of male number 72 had still not washed up on the beach, as everyone had predicted. At breakfast the day after trash day, Lyra heard the nurses discussing it. Don’t-Even-Think-About-It shook her head and said she was sure the gators had gotten him. If he did make it onto the mainland, she said, he’d likely be shot on sight—nothing but crazies and criminals living out here for miles. And now those men are coming, she added, shaking her head. That was what all the nurses called the Suits: those men.
Lyra had seen their boat in the distance on her way into breakfast: a sleek, motorized schooner, so unlike the battered barge that carted supplies in and trash out and looked as if it was one teaspoon of water away from sinking. She didn’t know exactly what the Suits did, who they were, or why they visited Haven. Over the years she’d heard several references to the military, although they didn’t look like soldiers, at least not the ones she occasionally saw on the nurses’ TV. These men didn’t wear matching outfits, or pants covered in camouflage. They didn’t carry weapons, like the guards did.
When she was younger, the Suits had made Lyra nervous, particularly when all the replicas were forced to line up in front of them to be inspected. The Suits had opened her mouth to look at her teeth. They had asked her to smile or turn around or clap on command, to show she wasn’t an idiot, wasn’t failing to thrive, to wiggle her fingers or move her eyes from left to right.
The inspections had stopped a long time ago, however. Now the Suits came, walked through all the wings, from Admin to the Box, spoke to God, and then returned to the mainland on their boat, and Lyra found that she’d grown less and less interested in them. They belonged to another world. They might as well have been flies touching down, only to take flight again. They didn’t matter to her, not like Thermoscan did, not like her little bed and her windowsill and the meaning embedded deep in a hieroglyph of words.
Today, in particular, she couldn’t think about the Suits, or the mysterious disappearance of number 72. The day after trash day was Monday, which meant Cog Testing, and Lazy Ass, and her last opportunity for a week.
Lyra couldn’t remember when the idea of stealing from Admin had first come to her. It had started, in a way, with Dr. O’Donnell. Dr. O’Donnell had come to Haven six or seven years ago; it was before Lyra had her monthly bleeding. (“Your period,” Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had said gruffly, and, in a rare moment of generosity, shown Lyra how to scrub out her underwear with cold water. “Bleeding makes it sound like a gunshot wound.”) Dr. O’Donnell was—apart from Cassiopeia and numbers 7–10, her four genotypes, all of them genetically and physically identical—the prettiest person at Haven.
Unlike the other nurses and doctors, Dr. O’Donnell didn’t seem to dislike the replicas. She hung around in the dorms even when she wasn’t assigned to monitor. She asked questions. She was the first person who’d ever asked Lyra a question and actually expected a reply—other than “Does it hurt when I touch you there?” or “How’s your appetite?”—and laughed easily, especially over the things the replicas believed, like that the rest of the world must be the size of five or six Havens or that in natural-born humans fathers served no purpose. She taught the replicas clapping games and sang to them in a high, clear voice.
Dr. O’Donnell was shocked when she found out that Haven had no library—only medical textbooks occasionally used for reference moldering in an awkwardly shaped room no one quite knew the use for, and the Bible that Don’t-Even-Think-About-It carted around with her, and occasionally used to take a swipe at replicas that disobeyed her, or to whack the ones too idiotic and brain-scrambled to follow instructions at all.
Whenever Dr. O’Donnell left the island, she returned with a few books in her bag. On Sunday afternoons, she sat in the dorms and read out loud. First it was only books with lots of pictures. Then longer books, with small type running across every page, so many letters it made Lyra dizzy to look. A few dozen replicas always gathered around to hear the stories, and afterward, after lights-out, repeated them in whispers for the other replicas, often making up or mixing up details, Jack and the Beanstalk that grew to Oz; the Lion, the Witch, and the Big Friendly Giant. It was a relief from the boredom, from the smallness of the world. Five wings, six counting the Box. Half the doors locked. All the world circumscribed by water. Half the replicas too dumb to talk, another quarter of them too sick, and still more too angry and violent.
No escape. Never escape.
But for Lyra, something deeper happened. She fell in love, although she didn’t know it and would never have thought in those terms, since she didn’t understand what love was and had only rarely heard the word. Under the influence of Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, and her long fingers (some of them scattered with tiny freckles) turning the pages, a long-buried part of her consciousness woke, stirred, and opened.