For a few seconds, she stood very still, allowing the silence to enfold her. Administration was actually several interconnected rooms. This, the first of them, brightly modern, was fitted with long ceiling lights similar to the ones used in the labs upstairs. Lyra moved deeper, into the forest of file cabinets and old plastic storage bins, into mountains of paperwork no one had touched for years. A few rooms were dark, or only partly illuminated. And she could hear, in the quiet, the whisper of millions of words, words trapped behind every drawer, words beating their fingernails against the inside of the file cabinets.

All the words she could ever want: words to stuff herself on until she was full, until her eyes burst.

She moved to the farthest corner of the dimmest room and picked a file cabinet at random. She didn’t care about the actual reports, about what they might say or mean. All she cared about was the opportunity to practice. Dr. O’Donnell had explained to her once what a real library was, and the function it served in the outside world, and Lyra knew Admin was the closest she would ever get.

She selected a file from the very back—one she was sure hadn’t been touched in a long time, slender enough to conceal easily. She closed the cabinet and went carefully back the way she had come, through rooms that grew ever lighter and less dusty.

Then she was in the hall. She slipped into the alcove and waited. Sure enough, less than a minute later, the door to the stairwell squeaked open and clanged shut, and footsteps came down the hall. Werner was back.

She had yet to fulfill her official errand. That meant concealing the hard-won file somewhere, if only for a little while. There weren’t many options. She chose a metal bin mounted on the wall marked with a sign she recognized as meaning hazardous. Normally the nurses and doctors used them for discarding used gloves, caps, and even syringes, but this one was empty.

Werner didn’t even let her in. He came to the door, frowning, when she tapped a finger to the glass.

“What is it?” he said. His voice was muffled through the glass, but he spoke very slowly, as if he wasn’t sure Lyra could understand. He wasn’t used to dealing with replicas. That was obvious.

“Shannon from security sent me,” she said, stopping herself at the last second from saying Lazy Ass.

Werner disappeared. When he returned to open the door, she saw that he had suited up in gloves and a face mask. It wasn’t unusual for members of the staff to refuse to interact with the replicas unless they were protected, which Lyra thought was stupid. The diseases that killed the replicas, the conditions that made them small and slow and stupid, were directly related to the cloning process and to being raised at Haven.

He looked at the file in her hand as if it was something dead. “Go on. Give it. And tell Shannon from security to do her own work next time.” He snatched the file from her and quickly withdrew, scowling at her from behind the glass. She barely noticed. Already, in her head, she was curling up inside all those letters—new pages, new words to decipher and trip over and decode.

She retrieved the file from the metal bin after checking to see that she was still alone. This was the only part of the plan she hadn’t entirely thought out. She had to get the file up to her bed, but if she carried it openly, someone might wonder where it had come from. She could say a nurse had given it to her to deliver—but what if someone checked? She wasn’t even sure whether she could lie convincingly. She hadn’t spoken to the staff so much in years, and she was already exhausted.

Instead she opted to slip it under the waistband of her standard-issue pants, pouching her shirt out over it. The only way to keep it from slipping was to wrap both arms around her stomach, as if she had a bad stomachache. Even then, she had to take small steps, and she imagined that the sound of crinkling paper accompanied her. But she had no choice. Hopefully, she would make it back to D-Wing without having to speak to anyone.

But no sooner had she passed through the doors into the stairwell than she heard the sound of echoing voices. Before she could retreat, God came down the stairs with one of the Suits. Lyra ducked her head and stepped aside, squeezing her arms close around the file, praying they would move past her without stopping.

They stopped.

“Hey.” It was the stranger who spoke. “Hey. You.” His eyes were practically black. He turned to God. “Which one is this?”

“Not sure. Some of the nurses can tell them apart on sight.” God looked at Lyra. “Which one are you?” he asked.

Maybe it was the stolen file pressed to her stomach, but Lyra had the momentary impulse to introduce herself by name. Instead she said, “Number twenty-four.”

“And you just let them wander around like this?” The man was still staring at Lyra, but obviously addressing himself to God. “Even after what happened?” Lyra knew he must be talking about the Code Black.

“We’re following protocols,” God said. God’s voice reminded Lyra of the bite of the syringes. “When Haven started, it was important to the private sector that they be treated humanely.”

“There is no private sector. We’re the ones holding the purse strings now,” the man said. “What about contagion?”

Lyra was only half listening. Sweat was gathering in the space between the folder and her stomach. She imagined it seeping through the folder, dampening the pages. The folder had shifted fractionally and she was worried a page might escape, but she didn’t dare adjust her grip.

“There’s no risk except through direct ingestion—as you would know, if you actually read the reports. All right, twenty-four,” God said. “You can go.”