Ringer Read online

  “Beautiful,” was all he said, touching her scar gently, with a thumb. She was liquid with happiness. She believed him. Weeks ago, someone had thrown a Frankenstein mask through the window. She knew now that it had been a warning from Lyra’s father, Rick Harliss, but at the time she’d been convinced that it was from Chloe DeWitt and the pack wolves.

  But maybe everyone was wearing a mask. Maybe no one was completely normal.

  Maybe she was beautiful.

  She wanted him. The want, the desire, was so huge she felt it incinerate her in a split second, burn her up to a single driving instinct: closer, more. She loosened his belt and undid his jeans without any trouble; it was as if she’d been practicing her whole life, as if she’d carried the knowledge of him in her fingers.

  Suddenly, the basement door opened and footsteps came down the stairs.

  “Glad you could come. Thought you might’ve gone back to town already . . .” Her father’s voice. Of all the stupid luck. She’d never once seen her dad use the basement.

  “Shit.” Pete pulled away, his face almost comical with panic. “Shit.”

  She sat up. Her fingers turned clumsy again, stubborn with disappointment. She struggled to get her bra reclasped, and put her shirt on backward the first time. At least they were concealed behind several aisles of shelving, which, through a kaleidoscope of different supplies, gave them a patchwork view of the stairs.

  Allen Fortner, a military guy her father knew from West Point ages ago, passed momentarily into view, and suspicion scratched at the back of Gemma’s mind. Fortner was FBI, and he and her father hadn’t seen each other in years.

  So what was he doing here, at Gemma’s mom’s party?

  “. . . wasn’t sure what side of the fence you were on,” Fortner was saying. “Trainor never thought you could be bounced this way.”

  “Trainor’s an idiot,” Geoffrey said easily. They had moved out of sight, but Gemma could still hear them perfectly. “Besides, it’s not about loyalty. It’s about future growth.”

  Pete made a movement as if to stand, but she grabbed his arm to stop him.

  “Aren’t you worried about exposure?” Fortner asked.

  “It’s my wife’s fiftieth birthday party,” he said. “You’re an old friend of the family. What’s to expose?” Then: “You didn’t think we invited you for the pig roast, did you?”

  In the long pause that followed these words, all of Gemma’s earlier good feeling collapsed. She knew that this conversation, this man and her father standing between old furniture and rolls of extra toilet paper, was the true reason for everything: the skirts and the music and the honeyed ham and her mother’s happiness.

  A cover.

  “All right,” Fortner said at last. “Talk, then.”

  Geoff’s response was immediate: “I know where they are,” he said. And then, when Fortner was silent, “The subjects. The missing ones.”

  Gemma’s heart was a balloon: all at once, punctured, it collapsed.

  “Christ. It’s been three weeks.”

  “Your guys lost track. I didn’t.”

  “We didn’t lose track,” Fortner said, and he sounded irritated for the first time. “We were dealing with containment issues. Civilians, data leaks—”

  “Sure. Harliss. I know.”

  Next to her, Pete shifted. His knee knocked a shelf containing dozens of bottles of water. They wobbled but didn’t fall. Gemma held her breath.

  Neither Fortner nor her father seemed to notice, because Fortner went on, “You were the one to spring him.” He must have been pacing, because he passed into view again. Through the shelves packed with Christmas ornaments and old memorabilia, Gemma saw Fortner bring a hand to his jaw. It was like he was a robot with only a few preprogrammed modes. But when he spoke again, he just sounded tired. “I should’ve known.”

  “That’s the problem with your end of the business, Allen. No local connections. A guy down at the precinct in Alachua County played basketball with me at West Point. It wasn’t hard.”

  “Why now? Why not before?”

  Again, silence. Gemma felt a finger of sweat move down her back. She was in a crouch, and her thighs were beginning to shake.

  “I made a promise to my daughter,” Geoff said, and Gemma heard the words as if they had glanced off the lip of a well high above her.

  Allen Fortner obviously didn’t buy it either. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I promised her I wouldn’t be the one to hand them over,” Geoff said. “And I won’t be. That’s what your people are for. And I wanted to make sure the Philadelphia team was ready. I did some digging in DC, too, felt out the lobbies. Saperstein’s done, even if he won’t admit it. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a place for the tech. I’ve spoken to Miller, and he thinks we’re ready for a big policy push.”

  Pete reached for Gemma’s hand. She pulled away, balling her fists instead, squeezing until she felt pain. She couldn’t touch him. Her whole life was a lie, and it had festered and turned poisonous.

  She didn’t want to infect him, too.

  “What’s the end goal?” Fortner said. “Talk quickly, now. Your wife will be expecting a cake and her sing-along.”

  That almost killed her, right there. She was still breathing, though. It was amazing the little deaths that she had lived through.

  “We get the contract. Simple enough.” Through the shelves, Gemma caught only quick glimpses of her father, still wearing his party outfit, his colorful Hawaiian shirt. All show. “Triple the size and change the objective, at least in part. There will be a medical aspect, sure. That’s where Miller and our friends in Congress come in. But there’s a bigger endgame, too, to get costs down and make mass production viable. Saperstein bled money out of that place for a decade. His focus was too narrow and his production was too small.”

  “We got functional variants. We got real-world observation.”

  “You’ve got billions of dollars sunk into that shithole, a containment mission on your hands, and a PR shitstorm that will take a quarter of Washington. Come on, Allen. You know as well as I do that Saperstein’s interest was ideological, not functional. He just wanted to prove he could make test subjects from scratch.”

  From scratch. Gemma felt like she was going to throw up. From scratch. Like pancake batter, or Lego kingdoms.

  After a pause, Fortner cleared his throat. “Keep talking.”

  “I’ll give you the location. Everyone feels good. The mess is cleaned up, no one’s in trouble, we move on.” Geoff leaned on the TV console that had once been upstairs. He looked almost bored. “It’s like making toy soldiers,” he added. “Think of how many lives we’ll save.”

  Fortner was quiet again. Gemma’s heart was emptying and filling, turning over like a bucket. She felt as if she might drown.

  “You said you promised your daughter,” he said finally, and just hearing the word made her body go tight. “What made you change your mind?”

  “I kept my promise. I won’t be the one collecting. Besides”—he threw up his hands, a gesture Gemma knew well, like, what does it matter, Kristina, kale salad or arugula, it’s all a bunch of rabbit food—“what would it have done before now? I knew Saperstein would hang himself by his own rope. The Haven team has proved its own incompetence. Billions of dollars down the drain, and enough cleanup to keep a thousand crisis managers employed for a decade.”

  “Where?” Fortner asked finally. For a split second, Gemma still held out hope that her dad would lie.

  “I put them up in a trailer on one of my investment lots. Winston-Able, right off Interstate 40. Lot sixteen, a double-wide. Not far from Knoxville. Didn’t even remember I owned the damn thing until the federal government reminded me in April.” This made Fortner laugh. It sounded like a cat trying to bring up a hairball. “Pulled some strings and got her dad working at Formacine Plastics out there. You know it?”

  Fortner sighed. “I’ll talk to my guys about Philly. S
ee what strings I can pull.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Saperstein shot himself in the dick. He doesn’t listen. This is a new age, Allen. We got the chance to change the world here. ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, you name it—they don’t follow the old rules.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir.”

  “They’re gonna brainwash their army of human IEDs, no reason we can’t make ours.”

  “Like I said, preaching to the choir. But I’m going to have to go up the chain on this one.”

  “I believe in you,” Geoff said, sounding faintly sarcastic.

  Gemma had lost the thread of the conversation, but it no longer mattered. She understood everything that mattered: her father had betrayed Lyra and Caelum. He’d betrayed her, and his promise. She should have known he would.

  Finally, Fortner and Geoff moved toward the stairs together. She could have cried from relief. Gemma’s feet and legs had gone numb.

  But at the last second, Fortner hesitated. When he turned back to Geoff, Gemma saw his face—cold and long and narrow, like an exclamation point—before he passed once again out of view.

  “Your daughter,” he said, and Gemma’s blood turned thick and heavy. “She was made at Haven. One of the first.” It wasn’t a question, but Gemma could hear a question layered beneath the words, like a knife angled up through a fist.

  “She was born there, yes,” Geoff said, and Gemma heard the importance of the correction—born, not made. But did it matter? Made, spliced, implanted—she might as well have been a fast-growing variety of bean sprout.

  Fortner coughed. “You ever wonder what makes the difference?” When Geoff said nothing, he went on, “You want to put the replicas to good use, and I’m with you. But what makes them any different from your girl?”

  “What do you think makes them different?” Geoff’s voice had turned cold. “Someone wanted her.”

  Someone. Gemma noticed that he did not say I.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Lyra’s story.

  FOUR

  THE PARTY WAS STILL GOING. Of course it was. They’d been in the basement for probably an hour. And yet somehow Gemma had expected to resurface and find the whole party incinerated, like Pompeii, vaporized in just a few seconds of suffocating ash. She wouldn’t have been surprised to walk through empty rooms filled with cast-off trash, to find everything grayed with decay, to see her parents’ friends transformed by the alchemical power of disaster into skeletons.

  Now she saw the party for what it was: packaging. Pretty lies packed, beveled, and neatly shaped together, like an intricate sand castle, teetering at the edge of a creeping tide. The leis, the guests, the vivid cocktails colored like drowning sunsets: all of it an excuse for her father to see Allen Fortner, to negotiate with him. Even the cake was bullshit. When was the last time her mom had eaten cake, let herself consume a single thing that wasn’t low-calorie, high-protein, grass-fed, non-GMO?

  They were only playing parts, and Gemma had been playing right along with them.

  Again.

  “Gemma. Gemma.”

  She’d made it outside before Pete caught up with her. The air was alive with fireflies. Someone had lit the tiki torches; even burning could be made pretty, so long as it was contained. Gemma was struck instead by how insubstantial it all looked, the shadows and the light, the women in their bright dresses: like the scrim that dropped during a play so all the stagehands could get the furniture into position. She spotted her mother and father at the center of a group of dancers. It made her sick, that he could dance like that, arms up, not a care in the world, while in the background a faceless army prepared the audience for the next illusion.

  “Talk to me,” Pete said, and put his hands on her face. “Please.”

  Before Gemma could answer, April shouted her name. She came ripping out of the crowd, and Gemma had the impression of a curtain swinging aside to release her.

  “Where have you been? I got stuck talking to—” She caught sight of Gemma’s face and broke off. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  “My dad lied to me.” She felt as if she had to say the words through a fist. “He gave Lyra and Caelum up.”

  “Gave them up?” April repeated the words very slowly, as if Gemma were the one in danger of misunderstanding. Gemma felt her anger, so poorly buried, give a sudden lash.

  “That’s what I said. He gave them up. He sold them out.” She felt like screaming. She felt like taking one of the stupid tiki torches and lighting the whole place on fire. “Haven’s a PR crisis. That’s what he said. And they’re the biggest leak.” The worst was that she couldn’t even be angry at her dad, not really. He was a liar, and lying was what liars did.

  She was the bigger idiot. She’d actually believed him.

  April’s eyes passed briefly to Pete—so briefly that Gemma almost missed it. Almost.

  “I’m sorry,” April said, and reached out, as if she wanted to touch Gemma’s shoulder, or maybe pat Gemma on the head.

  Gemma took a step backward, out of reach. All at once it was as if she was the torch: she was burning with rage, combusting. “You’re sorry?” As if that was it, end of story, too bad. As if Gemma’s favorite toy had just been stolen. “You know what this means, don’t you? You remember how they cleaned up Jake Witz?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Pete said, although it hardly mattered. Everyone was so drunk she could have been shouting.

  Gemma spun around, stumbling a little on the grass, too furious to look at either of her friends. But April and Pete caught up to her almost immediately. Pete tried to take her elbow, but Gemma shook him off.

  “Gemma, please,” Pete said again. “Can you just . . . I mean, can we all stop and think?”

  But she couldn’t stop. There was no time. She closed her eyes and saw Jake Witz, the geometric perfection of his smile, the way he neatened his silverware, the intense stillness of his gaze, as if his eyes were a gravity trying to hold you in place. Already, her memories of him were fading. Too often, she saw him now as she did in her nightmares: half alive, half dead, lisping details about the constellations with a swollen tongue.

  She kept stumbling on the grass, and nearly twisted her ankle when her wedge drove down into a soft bit of soil. She kicked off her shoes and didn’t bother picking them up. She didn’t have a plan, she didn’t know what she would do now that Fortner had a head start, but she knew she had to keep moving, she had to go fast, she had to outrun Jake and her nightmare vision of his face and the sly orbit of Lyra’s and Caelum’s faces, moving eclipse-like to hang in his place. Pete and April could easily outpace her, but she was first to the narrow path that interlinked the front and back yards, and that was so hemmed in by growth they had no choice but to fall back. They were maybe a step behind her, but she heard them the way she heard the distant twitter of birds in the morning—all noise, all background.

  “Christ, Gemma, will you wait for a second?”

  “Can someone please just tell me what the fuck happened?”

  She broke free of the tangle of azaleas. The cars in the driveway looked like a freeze-frame of a collision about to happen. But before she was halfway to the driveway, Pete had his hand on her arm.

  “Jesus spitballs.” He was practically shouting. She’d never seen him mad before, not like this, and a small, distant flare of love went up through the smog of her own pain: you could count on Pete to make up a curse like Jesus spitballs. “Will you talk to us for a minute? Will you actually listen?”

  That word, us, extinguished the flare right away. April and Pete were on the same side, which meant Gemma was left out. Alone.

  “What?” she said. “You want me to listen? So go on. Spit it out,” she prompted, when he said nothing. A floodlight came on automatically, triggered by their movement. In its light, Pete looked hollow and exhausted, and for just a moment, she felt guilty. Then she remembered: it was two against one. All her life she’d f
elt as if she was trying to play a game from outside the stadium, trying to intuit the rules from brief and distant snapshots. But at least April had been with her, and Pete.

  By learning the truth, she’d gone somewhere they couldn’t follow. And that was just a fact.

  April rocketed out of the growth looking as though she’d done personal battle with every inch of it. There were leaves in her hair, on her shirt, clinging to the wet of her shoes. “I won’t,” she panted, “ask”—more panting—“again.” But she did anyway. “What. The. Hell. Happened?”

  Pete still wouldn’t meet Gemma’s eyes, and for some reason that alone made her queasy: it meant for sure he had something to say that she wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Lyra and Caelum are in trouble,” she said, keeping her voice as measured as she could. “I have to help. It’s my fault, don’t you get it? I walked them into this. I hand-fed them to my dad. If anything happens to them—” She broke off, suddenly overwhelmed.

  In her dreams, Jake spoke to her even with the rope around his neck, puckering the skin around it. In her dreams, they were back on the marshes, and sometimes when he opened his mouth, he had beetles on his tongue.

  Would he still be alive if she hadn’t shown up to ask for his help?

  “It isn’t your fault,” April said. “You couldn’t have known.”

  “Let’s hope I get a big E for effort, then,” she said.

  Pete looked at her then, and she wished he hadn’t. His mouth was like a zipper stuck hard in a bad position. “If the military is going after Lyra and Caelum, like you said, you can’t stop it. You’re in danger, too.”