Page 22 of Ringer
THIRTEEN
SHE WOKE TO THE DEEP navy light of a predawn sky.
Already, the holding center was full of voices and movement, the scuffle of rubber sneakers, the tooth-chatter of heavy equipment scraped along the ground.
She sat up, edging away from Calliope, who had insisted on sharing the twin mattress. When she stood she was dizzied by a sharp, sudden hunger. She’d received a minuscule ration of spongy baked pasta for dinner, spooned from a tinfoil-covered catering tray of the kind Gemma associated with school fund-raisers.
Gemma knew that meant there must be civilization nearby—a restaurant, a deli, something. She’d even found a receipt for a Joe’s Donuts in Windsor Falls, Pennsylvania, coasting on a surf of overflowing trash outside the bathroom.
But Pennsylvania or Pakistan, what did it matter? Noone knew where they were.
The sleeping replicas, motionless in the half dark, were so closely fitted together that they took on the quality of a single landscape: mounds of soft earth, ridged spines and shoulders.
A sudden light dazzled her and she turned to the window to see a van wheeling away, its headlights briefly revealing funnels of rain. More vans were arriving.
She saw soldiers jogging with rain slickers pulled down to protect their faces. Someone was using orange light sticks, like a real airport ramp handler, to indicate where the vans should park. And out of the airport came a constant flow of equipment: staff members passed in and out hauling plastic bins and waste containers, paperwork lashed into waterproof boxes, medical equipment, stacks of unused linens, snowy piles of plastic-wrapped Hanes T-shirts, hundreds of them, of the kind that were given to the replicas.
Gemma felt as if the rain had found its way inside. She was suddenly very awake and very cold.
They were closing up shop.
She picked her way between the replicas to the central corridor, full of a deep and driving panic, half expecting to find that she was alone, that the walls had been dismantled and the rug pulled up, that she had been left behind. Several nurses, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep,pushed past her wheeling IV carts. The atmosphere was tense, almost desperate.
“What’s happening?” Gemma asked, without expecting anyone to answer, and no one did. “What’s going on?”
A patrolling soldier frowned briefly at Gemma before turning her attention back to several staff members trying to work a medical cart through a door down to the loading dock. “Careful,” she said. “Stairs are wet.” Gemma noticed her fingernails were painted pink.
She kept walking, feeling as if she were in the beginning of a nightmare. Even before anything bad has happened, youknow, you’re sure, that bad things will come. When guards in no-man’s-land prevented her from going any farther, she went again to the window, mesmerized by the look of all the headlights through the rapidly ebbing dark. How quickly would it take them to clean the place out, to erase all the evidence that Haven had ever existed?
And what would they do with the replicas?
Why the sudden urgency? Why now?
But the last question, at least, was answered even as she stood at the window, squinting through a mist of condensation.
Because a new vehicle was arriving, not a van but a regular sedan, like the kind of shitty rental a budget travel agency might give you. From the driver’s seat came a tallman with a dark beard and glasses. He stood for a second, squinting up at the airport, his glasses, in the glow of the exterior lamps, so bright it looked like they themselves were glowing.
He grimaced a little as the rain hit him. Then he ducked and began to jog through a slosh of puddles toward the door, and Gemma saw a flurry of movement, flapping raincoats and umbrellas, as he was enfolded by staff members and hustled inside.
Dr. Saperstein was back.
A woman in a tailored pantsuit came for Gemma midafternoon. It was the same woman Gemma had pegged for a government slug when she had first arrived. As far as Gemma could tell, it was the same suit, too.
They went through a door marked with a sign that unnecessarily statedAuthorized Personnel Only,guarded by two soldiers with long-range rifles. Down a set of stairs, the same ones they’d climbed Sunday night. Gemma knew they must be level with the tarmac, imagined phantom travelers hurrying with rolling suitcases and duffels toward waiting short-haul jets.
Through another door for Authorized Personnel, they reached what must once have been the airport’s administrative hub, an inner funnel of connected rooms still showing the ghost-marks of old desks. The overheadlights were out, and a few standing lamps left whole areas oily with shadow. There were tubs of plastic containers full of shrink-wrapped sterilized needles and miniature urine collection vials. Two fridges were marked with handwritten signs:Live specimens, do not open.
Hidden generators bled thick cables across the floor, and Gemma thought of bits of dark hair clinging to the damp floor of a gym. Stacked messily on a folding table were cardboard boxes full of translucent medical gloves and antibacterial cloths, cotton swabs and rubber thermometer tips, laptops wired to a single power strip, and three-ring binders. Here, she knew, must be the remains of Haven’s record keeping, the experiential evidence it had accumulated over decades and had not yet had a chance to move elsewhere or destroy.
Another woman, this one a stranger, leaned knuckles-down on a desk, in the posture of a gorilla, peering over the shoulder of a red-haired guy at a computer. She immediately straightened up.
“Ah, shit.” The woman had to step over the fluid ropes of electrical cable to get close. Her hair was cut short. She reminded Gemma of one of her favorite nannies, Laverne, a soft-spoken Haitian woman who’d come up from Louisiana and gave hugs that felt like being wrapped in a blanket. But the impression was over the moment she spoke. “What a mess.”
“Hi yourself,” said Gemma’s escort.
“Not what you thought?” The red-haired guy was still lit faintly by the computer screen, and the glare in his glasses had the weird effect of erasing his eyes beneath them. There was something wrong with the skin on the left side of his face, and his chin beneath his lips. It looked weirdly shiny, as if it were covered with a layer of Vaseline. He’d been badly burned, Gemma realized, and her stomach yanked: he’d been at Haven.
Laverne-not-Laverne took two sudden steps forward and snatched up Gemma’s chin, as if it were a fish that might otherwise dart away. She angled her face left and right before Gemma managed to pull away.
