Ringer (Replica) by Lauren Oliver

Author:Lauren Oliver [Oliver, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins
Published: 2017-10-02T18:30:00+00:00

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Gemma’s story.

THREE

FOR TWO DAYS, SHE HARDLY saw Caelum at all, and she felt nothing but terrible relief, like after you finally drop a glass that has been slipping for some time from your fingers.

Caelum was her tether to Haven, but he was also her anchor. Around him she felt stuck in her old life, stuck in her old name. 24. The escaped replica, the human model, the monster.

Rick told her that he’d put Caelum to work. There was little he could do, because in order to become someone in the outside world, you already had to be someone, which required pieces of paper and numbers from the government and identification that neither Lyra nor Caelum had. But Rick had met a guy who owned a tow company and impound lot and needed help on the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight a.m. He was prepared to pay cash, and he would ask no questions.

Money, Lyra was learning, was a source of near-constant worry in the outside world, as it had been in Haven. At Haven the staff had talked constantly about budget cuts and even the possibility of having funding cut off completely. But it surprised her to find out that money everywhere was so difficult to get and hang on to. Gemma’s father had offered them a large sum of money, but Rick had refused it, and when Lyra asked him why, his face darkened.

“Blood money,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have to lean on him for a roof. I won’t take a dollar I don’t have to.”

She had a hard time thinking of Rick Harliss as poor, since he had a car and his own TV and his own narrow house, a bathroom only the three of them shared, multiple sets of clothes—all things that to her seemed rich.

But they were poor, at least that was what Rick said. And while Lyra was his daughter and it was his duty to protect her, Caelum was freeloading—stealing time from the clock, Rick said—and would have to figure out how to make his own way in the world.

Lyra should have heard the threat in those words: that Caelum would have to leave, sooner or later.

On Friday and Saturday morning, after his first two shifts, Caelum left piles of dollar bills on the small kitchen table, secured beneath a can of Hormel chili, and Rick took the money wordlessly and bought more Hormel chili from the store, more toilet paper and toothpaste, more pairs of socks and books for Lyra to read, all of them with creased pastel covers and heroes who always arrived at the right moment.

For two days, Lyra was happy—despite the holes dropping hours of her life, despite the fact that she and Caelum had had their first fight ever, despite the way she had to pick through the boredom of the day on her own, collecting ever more pieces of trash, arranging them and rearranging them as if they would someday yield a sentence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.