Lyra backed quickly away from the car. “I’m fine,” she said. “We’re fine.”
He stared at them for another long moment. “Watch out for the drivers down this stretch, like I said. They’ll be halfway to Miami before they realize they got you.”
Then he was gone and his taillights became the red tips of two cigarettes and then vanished.
“You shouldn’t speak to them,” 72 said. “You shouldn’t speak to any of them.”
“He spoke to me,” Lyra said. “Besides, what harm did it do?”
72 just shook his head, still staring in the direction the car had gone, as if he expected it might rematerialize. “What’s in Palm Grove?”
“Someone who might be able to help,” Lyra said carefully.
“Who?” 72 was backlit by the streetlamp and all in shadow.
She knew he might refuse to go with her, and if he did, she would still find her way to Palm Grove. They owed each other nothing. It was chance that had kept them together so far. Still, the idea of being completely on her own was terrifying. She had never been alone at Haven. At the very least the guards had always been watching.
But she saw no way to lie convincingly. She knew no one, had no one, in the outside world, and he knew that. “She was a nurse at Haven,” she said.
“No,” he said immediately, and began walking again, kicking at the gravel and sending it skipping away across the road.
“Wait.” She got a hand around his arm, the one crisscrossed with all those vivid white scars. She turned him around and had a sudden shock: just for a second her body did something, told her something, she didn’t understand.
“No,” he said again.
She dropped his arm. She didn’t know what she wanted from him but she did, and that made her feel confused and exhausted and unhappy. “She’s not like the other ones,” she said. Dr. O’Donnell had said, You’re a good person, even as Nurse Em sobbed so that snot bubbled in her nostrils. You want to make things right. I know you do. That had to mean it was true.
“How do you know that?” 72 said. He took a step forward, and Lyra nearly tripped trying to get away from him. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him, not after what had happened. Even standing several inches away she felt a current moving through her body, something warm and alive, something that whispered. She hated it.
“I just know,” she said. “She left Haven. She wanted to help us.” In her head she added, Because Dr. O’Donnell believed in her. Because Dr. O’Donnell was always right. She wished, more than anything, that she knew where Dr. O’Donnell lived, and imagined once again the feel of Dr. O’Donnell’s hand skimming the top of her head. Mother. She thought Dr. O’Donnell’s house must be all white and very clean, just like Haven. But maybe instead of being on the ocean it was in a field, and the smell of flowers came through the open windows on the wind.
Another car went by, this time with a punch of music and rhythm. Then another car. This time the window went down and a boy had his head out of it, yelling something she couldn’t make out. An empty can missed her head by only a few inches.
For a long time, 72 just stared at her. She wondered again whether she was ugly, whether he realized that now, the same way she knew now that he was beautiful. As a replica it had never mattered, and it shouldn’t matter now, but it did. She wondered if this was the human world rubbing off on her, whether she might become more human by becoming uglier, by accepting it.
She didn’t want to be ugly in his eyes.
Finally he said, “We should get off the road and find somewhere to sleep for the night.” She thought he almost smiled. “Well, we can’t sleep here. And you heard him. There are no buses until morning.”
They moved off the road and walked instead through a scrum of crushed paper cups, cigarette butts, and empty plastic bags. Soon they came to an area of buildings groveling under the lights that encircled them, including a sign in neon that read Liquorz. Lit as they were in starkness and isolation, they reminded Lyra briefly and painfully of Haven at night when, sleepily, she would get up to use the bathroom and would look out and see the guard towers and floodlights making harsh angles out of the landscape.
One of the buildings’ pitched roofs tapered into the form of a cross and so she thought it must be a church, although otherwise it was identical to its neighbors: shingle-sided and gray, separated by a narrow band of cracked pavement from a gas station and a diner, both closed for the night. Lyra saw that someone had written I was here across the plywood and wasn’t surprised. In a world this big, it must be easy to get lost and need reminders.
Behind the church was a weed-choked field that extended toward another road in the distance, this one even busier. Headlights beaded down the thin fold in the dark like blood along a needle. But the noise was transformed by all the space into a constant shushing, like the sound of ocean waves. They shook out their blanket here, and Lyra was glad that they’d decided to sleep so close to the road and the lights. The space in between, the nothingness and distance, frightened her.
The blanket was small, and when they lay down side by side, on their backs, they couldn’t help but touch. Lyra didn’t know how she would sleep. Her body was telling her something again, urging her to move, to run, to touch him. Instead she crossed her arms tightly and stared at the sky until the stars sharpened in her vision. She tried to pick out Cassiopeia. When she was little, she’d liked to pretend that stars were really lights anchoring distant islands, as if she wasn’t looking up but only out across a dark sea. She knew the truth now but still found stars comforting, especially in their sameness. A sky full of burning replicas.