Page 14 of Ringer
They thought Gemma and Petewerethe replicas.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 7 of Lyra’s story.
EIGHT
INSIDE: THE SMELL OF SHOE polish, sweat, gunmetal. Two soldiers wearing military fatigues straightened up at their post. They were in a tight corridor, carpeted and filthy. A narrow set of stairs, dirty with footprints, rose into the darkness. Gemma knew once she went up the stairs—wherever they led—things would be hopeless.
“You’re making a big mistake.” Gemma’s voice cracked. How many hours had it been since she’d had anything to drink? “Call my dad. Call him.”
“We should have left the gags on,” the man holding Pete muttered. He nudged Pete toward the stairs. Unexpectedly, Pete broke loose, reeling like a drunk. His hands were still bound, but he cracked his head into the man’s jaw; Gemma heard the impact of it, a hollow sound.
Suddenly, everyone was shouting. Gemma screamed as both soldiers launched for Pete at once.
“Don’t hurt him! Please.Please.” She was too scared even to cry. For a second, she lost sight of him in the shuffle of human bodies. One of the soldiers accidentally caught her with an elbow and she bit down on her tongue.
“Easy, easy, easy.” The two soldiers hauled Pete to his feet, pinning him between them. Still, he struggled to break loose. Gemma had never seen him look the way he did then, and she thought randomly of a video April had once shown her during her vegetarian phase: how fighting dogs were burned with cigarettes, beaten with sticks, until they were so angry and desperate they would tear each other up, actually tear each other into pieces.
The dogs in the video knew they were going to die, and that was what made them fight. They had nothing to live for.
“Let go of me.” Pete’s face was so twisted with raw anger, even Gemma was afraid of him. “Get your fucking hands off me.”
“You better tell your boyfriend to calm down.” The man who’d been holding Pete was massaging his jawbone. He glared at Gemma. “Or he’s going to get his head blown off.”
“Please.” Gemma’s voice cracked. “Please, Pete.” At the sound of her voice, he finally went still.
“Good boy,” one of the soldiers said. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
Neither Gemma nor Pete bothered pointing out that that was very hard to believe.
“Take him up,” the man said, still rubbing his jaw and looking pissed about it.
This made Pete go wild again. “Let me stay with her.” But the soldiers pivoted him, with difficulty, toward the stairs. “Let me stay with her. Please.”
Gemma let herself cry then. She couldn’t help it. She felt as if she were watching Pete through the wrong end of a telescope, getting smaller and smaller, though he was only a few feet away.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she kept repeating, even as his voice splintered into echoes and then grew fainter, even though it was obviously not okay, nothing was okay, nothing would be okay ever again.
“Please.” She tried one last time to make them listen. “Please,” she said. “I’m telling you the truth. Geoffrey Ives is my father. Ask Dr. Saperstein, ask anybody—”
But she went silent as, down the hall, a door opened and spilled a gut of light.
“What’s all the shouting for?” A woman’s voice, low and surprisingly warm, floated out to them. For a moment, she was silhouetted in the light. As she came forward, Gemma experienced a shock of displacement: the woman looked like a soccer mom, like one of Kristina’s lunch crew. She was even wearing yoga pants.
“Nothing.” The man finally quit massaging his jaw and straightened up. “Is Saperstein back?”
The yogi shook her head. “Tuesday,” she said.
Gemma’s mouth tasted like plaster, like the soft crumble of a pill. Saperstein knew her father. She’d been counting on the fact that he, at least, would be able to help. She’d comforted herself with the idea that wherever she was being taken, Saperstein would be there.
What would happen to her, and to Pete, before Tuesday when he returned?
“He didn’t go to Penn after all, did he?”
“No. Washington.” The yogi’s eyes swept Gemma. “Where’d you find her?”
“Where we were supposed to.” Gemma’s captor was squeezing her arm so tightly, Gemma could feel her fingernails. “She says it was all a big mistake. She says she doesn’t belong here.”
“Is that right?” The yogi was still watching Gemma curiously—not meanly, not with disgust or contempt, but with true curiosity. “Well, someone’s been feeding her, at least.”
