She took the notebook. Jake had taken the file folder she’d stolen, so it was a fair trade. She straightened up and saw that 72 was rifling through Gemma’s bag to get to her wallet. She grabbed his shoulder, shaking her head. Once, years ago, Don’t-Even-Think-About-It’s wallet had been stolen from the mess hall, and she remembered how terrible it was, how all the replicas’ beds were searched and their cubbies turned out, how Don’t-Even-Think-About-It was in a foul mood for days and backhanded Lyra for looking at her wrong. They had found it, finally, in a hole torn out of the underside of Ursa Major’s mattress, along with all the other things she’d scavenged over the years: dirty socks and a lost earring, ferry tokens, soda can tabs, gum wrappers.
But she couldn’t speak without risking waking Gemma, and even as she watched he removed a wedge of money from her wallet and, pocketing it, returned the wallet to her purse. Lyra put back the notebook anyway. She wasn’t likely to forget Palm Grove.
They scaled the gate because they didn’t know how to make it work and, once they were on the other side, on a street made liquid dark and shiny by the streetlights, began to walk. Bound on either side by houses with their hedges and gates, Lyra did not feel so afraid. But soon they reached a road that stretched blackly into the empty countryside, and she felt a kind of terror she associated with falling: so much space, more space than she’d ever imagined.
Only then did Lyra speak. They’d gone too far to be heard by anyone. Besides, she hated the emptiness of the road and the streetlamps bent silently over their work, like tall arms planted in the earth.
“I know someone who can help us,” she said. Their feet crunched on the gravel at the side of the road. Now she was grateful for the tree frogs. At least they were company.
“Help us?” 72 tilted his head back to look at the sky and the stars spread above them. She couldn’t tell whether he was frightened, but she doubted it. He didn’t seem afraid of anything. Even dying. Maybe he’d just had time to get used to it. She had known that replicas were frailer than real people, more prone to illness, sicklier and smaller. But on some level she’d believed that at Haven, she might be safe.
“I want to know more,” she said. “I want to know why they did this to us. Why they made us sick. I want to know if there’s a cure.”
He stopped walking. He stared at her. “There’s no cure,” he said.
“Not that we know of,” she said. “But you said yourself you didn’t know exactly what they were doing at Haven. There could be a cure. They could have developed one.”
“Why would they?” he said. He looked as if he was trying not to smile. In that moment, she hated him. She’d never met someone who could make her have so many different feelings—who could make her feel at all, really.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why they did anything.”
He looked at her, chewing on the inside of his cheek. She supposed that he wasn’t ugly after all. She supposed that he was beautiful, in his own way, strange and angular, like the spiky plants that grew between the walkways at Haven, with a fan of dark-green leaves. She’d overheard Gemma say that, on the phone in the car earlier. Maybe she hadn’t thought Lyra was listening. There’s a girl and a boy, she’d said. The girl is sick or something. The boy is . . . And she’d lowered her voice to a whisper. Beautiful. Lyra had never really thought of faces as beautiful before, although she had enjoyed the geometry of Jake’s face, and she supposed, in retrospect, that Dr. O’Donnell had been beautiful. At least she was in Lyra’s memory.
She wondered if she herself was ugly.
Two lights appeared in the distance. She raised a hand to her eyes, momentarily dazzled and afraid, and then realized it was only an approaching car. But it began to slow and she was afraid again. Somehow, instinctively, she and 72 took hands. His were large and dry and much nicer than the hands of the doctors, which, wrapped in disposable gloves, always felt both clammy and cold, like something dead.
“You kids all right?” The man in the car had to lean all the way across the seat to talk to them through the open window.
72 nodded. Lyra was glad. She couldn’t speak.
“Funny place for a stroll,” he said. “You be careful, okay? There’s cars come down this road eighty, ninety miles an hour.”
He started to roll up his window and Lyra exhaled, relieved and also stunned. If he’d recognized them as replicas, it didn’t seem like it. Maybe the differences weren’t as obvious as she thought.
“Hello,” she blurted out, and the window froze and then buzzed down again. “Hello,” she repeated, taking a step toward the car and ignoring 72, who hissed something, a warning, probably. “Have you heard of Palm Grove?”
“Palm Grove, Florida?” The man had thick, fleshy fingers, and a cigarette burned between them. “You weren’t thinking of walking there, were you?” He said it half laughing, as if he’d made a joke. But when she didn’t smile, he squinted at her through the smoke unfurling from his cigarette. “The twelve goes straight up the coast to Palm Grove on its way to Tallahassee. If that’s where you’re headed, you can’t miss the bus depot. But it’s a hike. Five or six miles at least.”
Lyra nodded, even though she didn’t know what he meant by the twelve, or how far five or six miles was.
“Won’t catch a bus this late, though,” the man said. “Hope you got a place to stay the night.” He was still staring at her, but now his eyes ticked over her shoulder to 72 and back again. Something shifted in his face. “Hey. You sure you’re okay? You don’t look too good.”