Later, rumors would circulate: that the bomber believed Haven Institute was actually manufacturing humans to use in some kind of devil’s army, and that both the creations and their creators should be punished by fire; that she had every single page of the Haven Files, all seventy-six of them, printed out, underlined, annotated, and laminated in her bag next to a copy of the Bible, a small image of Jesus on the cross, and a half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich; that she must have been onto something, because of the military crackdown, and the men in hazmat suits who spent weeks sweeping the island, carting off debris, leaving Spruce Island bare and ruined and silent. And why didn’t the story make it onto the news, or any of the major newspapers? Conspiracy, Bill Collops said, polishing his guns. What a world, Missy Gallagher said, shaking her head.
The official story—the one that made it onto the news—stated that chemicals had been mishandled by a new laboratory technician, sparking a huge chemical fire that engulfed the laboratory. But even this story, once established, was quickly suppressed, and Spruce Island, and what may or may not have happened there, was rapidly forgotten.
Of course Lyra didn’t and couldn’t know any of this at the time. At the time, she thought the sky had split apart. At the time, she thought the world was ending.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 7 of Gemma’s story.
EIGHT
THE FORCE OF THE FIRST blast threw her off her feet. She landed palms-down in the mud, with 72 beside her. Her eyes stung from the sudden vapor of dust, which seemed to rise all at once and everywhere, like a soft exhalation. People were screaming. An alarm kept hitting the same high note of panic, over and over, without end.
It was the sound that paralyzed her: shock waves of sound, a screaming in her ears and the back of her teeth, the sound of atoms splitting in two. It took her a second to realize that 72 was no longer beside her. He was on his feet, running.
But after only a few feet he stopped, and, turning around, saw her still frozen, still belly down in the mud like a salamander. He came back. He had to yell to be heard over the fire and the screaming.
“Move,” he said, but even his words sounded distant, as if the ringing in her ears had transformed them to vague music. She couldn’t move. She was cold and suddenly tired. She wanted to sleep. Even her mouth wouldn’t work to say no. “Move now.” She wasn’t very good at judging feelings, but she thought he sounded angry.
She was focusing on very small details: the motion of a rock crab scuttling sideways in the churned-up mud, the hiss of wind through the trees that carried the smell of smoke, the male’s bare feet an inch from her elbow, his toenails ringed with dirt.
Then 72 had her elbow and she was shocked back into awareness of her body. She felt blood pumping through her heart, valves opening and closing like eyelids inside of her.
“Now,” 72 said again. “Now, now.” She wondered whether his mind had become stuck on the word, whether like Lilac Springs and Goosedown and so many others his brain had never formed right. She grabbed the pillowcase from the ground where it had fallen. It had gone a dull, gray color, from all the shimmering dust. The Altoids tin landed in the dirt but she had no time to stop and retrieve it. He was still holding on to her elbow, and she wasn’t thinking well.
A drumbeat pop-pop-popping sound made her heart lurch, because she knew what it was: every so often the guards, bored, fired at alligators that swam too close to the island. She thought there must be alligators—but the alligators would burn—she wondered whether their hides would protect them. . . .
They went back through the broken machinery, moving not toward the marshes but toward the sound of roaring fire and screams. Ash caught in Lyra’s throat and made breathing painful. She didn’t think it strange that they were heading back toward the fire—she could see a shimmering haze of smoke in the distance, beyond the trees, smoke that seemed to have taken on the silhouette of a building—because she knew they needed to find a nurse, they needed to line up, they needed to be told what to do. The nurses would tell them. They would make things better. She longed in that moment for Squeezeme and Thermoscan, longed to feel the familiar squeeze of pressure on her arm and suck down the taste of plastic, longed to be back in bed number 24, touching her windowsill, her headboard, her sheets. They moved past the chemical drums and squeezed through the fence through which Lyra had come looking for a hiding place. She was still holding the pillowcase to her chest with one arm and felt a little better, a little more clearheaded.
But as they came into view of the institute, she stopped. For a second she felt one of the bullets must have gone through her, punched a hole directly in her stomach. She could no longer feel her legs. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing. It was like someone had smashed up reality and then tried to put it together all wrong. A-Wing was gone and B-Wing was on fire. Flames punched through windows and roared across the tar roof. Guards sprinted across the yard, shouting in voices too distorted to make out.
There were bodies in the grass, human bodies, bodies wearing the sensible flat shoes of the nurses and doctor uniforms stained with blood, arms flung out as if they’d done belly flops to the ground. From a distance, it was impossible to distinguish the people from the replicas except by their clothing.
One body appeared to have been lifted off its feet and carried down toward the beach—Lyra could just see, in the distance, waves breaking against a pair of legs—or maybe someone had been down on the beach when the explosion had come. Lyra thought of Cassiopeia and her seashell collection and, although she had seen replicas die and die and die, felt vomit rise in her throat. The vomiting center is located in the rear part of the brain. She had heard that once, from one of the nurses. She didn’t remember when.