She took Jake Witz’s phone from her pocket.

“Hello.” Lyra held out the phone. The girl’s eyes jumped from her screen to Lyra to Caelum. “Can you please help?”

“Help with what?” the girl said. She didn’t sound mean, but she didn’t sound exactly friendly, either. Caelum kept turning around to look at the door, to make sure they hadn’t been followed, and the girl ignored Lyra to watch him.

“We need to find Gemma,” Lyra said. “In the phone,” she added impatiently, and finally the short-haired girl dragged her eyes from Caelum to look at her. “We need to find Gemma in the phone. We don’t know how.”

The girl snorted. She had a metal ring in her nose. “Are you serious?” When Lyra didn’t answer, she rolled her eyes and took the phone. She made several quick movements with her fingers and then passed the phone back to Lyra. “You should really keep that thing locked, you know. Do I get a prize now?”

Lyra’s heart leapt. She pressed the phone to her ear but heard nothing but silence. She shook her head. “It’s not working.”

“Jesus. Where do you come from? The 1800s?” The girl snatched the phone back, made another quick adjustment, and then jammed it to Lyra’s ear. “Happy now?”

The phone was ringing. Lyra held her breath. She counted one ring, two rings, three. How long would it ring, she wondered? But then there was a nearly inaudible click.

“Jake?” Gemma’s voice sounded so close Lyra nearly jerked the phone away in surprise. “Is that you?”

Lyra turned away, so the short-haired girl, who was still watching her suspiciously, wouldn’t be able to hear. “It’s not Jake,” she said. “Jake is dead. And we need your help.”

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 15 of Gemma’s story.

SIXTEEN

GEMMA AND A BLOND-HAIRED BOY named Pete arrived just as a man in an apron was badgering Lyra and Caelum to order something or leave. Lyra was afraid to go outside. She thought it likely that the people who’d been in Jake’s house were still out there, walking the streets, waiting for them. So when Gemma came through the crowd—her eyes big and worried in that pretty moon-face, the face that had so recently belonged to Cassiopeia—she felt a wash of relief so strong she nearly began to cry. They were safe.

“It’s all right. They’re with us, and we’re leaving,” Gemma said, and the man in his apron scurried away. “Are you okay?” she asked, and Lyra nodded. She felt as if a hand had reached down and picked her up. And again, a memory came to her of warmth and closeness, an impression of one of the birthers rocking her, singing in her ear. But she knew it must be made up. The birthers didn’t hold the human models they made. They came and were kept in the darkness of the barracks, and were sent away in darkness, too, after receiving their pay.

The birthers weren’t male, either. But in her memory, or her imagination, or her fantasy, she felt the tickle of a beard on her forehead, and clear gray eyes, and a man’s hands, scarred across the knuckles, touching her face.

Caelum always kept close to her now. Even in the car he sat only inches away from Lyra, with one hand pressed to hers. She understood that they were bound together, and she thought of their lives and their fates like a double-stranded helix, wound around each other, webbed with meaning. And she felt that next to him she could face anything, even a slow death, even the world that kept unfolding into new highways and more people and a greater horizon.

In the car, Lyra told Gemma about going to track down Emily Huang and discovering she was dead.

“I could have told you that,” Gemma said, and Lyra heard the criticism in her voice: If you hadn’t run. She was getting better at sorting out tones and moods.

She described how they had found the card with Jake’s address and determined to go and find him. She told Gemma about the unlocked screen door and finding him in the bedroom with a crust of dried blood on his lips.

“They must have come for him right after we left,” Gemma whispered to the boy, Pete. “God. I might throw up.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, and reached out to place a hand on her thigh. Lyra saw this and wondered if Gemma and Pete were bound in the same way she was to Caelum.

“Both of them strung up, made to look like suicides,” Gemma said, and turned away to cough. There had been a fire, she had told them, but Lyra would have known anyway. The whole car smelled like smoke. “Must be the military’s little specialty.”

“Less suspicious, maybe, than a gun,” Pete said.

She told them about the man and woman who’d shown up only a few minutes later to finish the job of staging a suicide, and how she’d nearly been caught and had to hide behind the sofa.

“Holy shit,” Pete said, and this time it was Gemma who reached over to squeeze his leg.

“I took his computer,” Lyra said.

Gemma turned around in her seat. “You what?”

“I don’t know why.” Lyra was still ashamed that they’d stolen Jake’s cell phone and left in the middle of the night. She didn’t want Gemma to hate her. “I thought it might be useful, so I took it.”

Gemma blinked. If Lyra squinted, she could pretend she was looking at Cassiopeia instead—a healthy Cassiopeia, a Cassiopeia with soft brown hair and a quick smile. She could have been number 11.

“That’s brilliant,” Gemma said. “You’re a genius.”