Replica (Replica #1)(8)
The fastest way to A-Wing from the testing rooms was through F-Wing. She’d already decided that if anyone asked, she’d say she was on her way to the Stew Pot for lunch.
But no one asked. She passed several nurses sitting in the dayroom, laughing about two women on TV—replicas, Lyra thought, with a quick spark of excitement, until she recognized from small differences between them that they were just twins. Then came the dorms: smaller rooms for the lower staff, where nurses and researchers might sleep as many as four to a room, bunk-style; then the doctors’ quarters, which were more spacious. Finally, the Stew Pot. The smell of cooked meat immediately made her stomach turn.
She hurried on, keeping her head down. When she buzzed into A-Wing, the guard on duty barely glanced up. She passed through the marble lobby with its stone bust of Richard Haven, the first God, which someone had draped in a red-and-blue cape and outfitted with a funny-looking hat: it was some game, Lyra understood, something to do with a place called U Penn, where both the first and second Gods had come from. A plastic Christmas tree, originally purchased for Haven’s annual party, had for three years stood just inside the main entryway, though during the off-season it was unplugged. Photographs of strangers smiled down from the walls, and in one of them Richard Haven and Dr. Saperstein were much younger and dressed in red and blue. They even had their faces painted.
Today, however, she didn’t stop to look. She pushed through the doors that led into the stairwell. It smelled faintly of cigarettes.
The closer she got to Admin, the greater the pressure on her chest, as if there were Invacare Snake Tubing threaded down her throat, pumping liquid into her lungs. Sub-One was always quieter than the ground floor of Haven. Most of the doors down here were fitted with control pads and marked with big red circles divided in two on the diagonal, signs that they were restricted-access only. Plus, the walls seemed to vacuum up noise, absorbing the sound of Lyra’s footsteps as soon as she moved.
Administration was restricted-access, too. Lazy Ass had said Werner would be behind the desk, and Lyra’s whole plan depended on it. Twin windows in the door looked into a space filled with individual office cubicles: flyers pinned to corkboard, keyboards buried under piles of manila files, phones and computers cabled to overloaded power strips. All of Haven’s paperwork came here, from mail to medical reports, before being routed and redirected to its ultimate destination.
Lyra ducked into an alcove twenty feet beyond the entrance to Admin. If she peeked into the hall, she had a clear view of the doors. She prayed she had arrived on time and hadn’t missed her chance. Several times, she inched into the hall to check. But the doors were firmly shut.
Finally, when Lyra had nearly given up hope, she heard a faint click as the locks released. The doors squeaked open. A second later, footsteps headed for the stairs. As soon as she heard the door to the stairwell open, Lyra slipped into the hall.
Lyra had been occasionally sneaking down to Admin ever since Dr. O’Donnell had vanished abruptly. She knew that every day, when most of the other administrative staff was still eating in the Stew Pot, Werner snuck away from his desk, propped the doors of Admin open, and smoked a cigarette—sometimes two—in the stairwell.
Today he had wedged an empty accordion file into the double doors to keep them from closing. Lyra slipped inside, making sure the accordion file stayed in place, and closed the door gently behind her.
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.