The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman Page A

realize you’re not from this world and start looking for the way through . . . . ”
    He was far more angry than he needed to be. Finally he said, “All right, look. If you pretend you’re my sister, that’ll be a disguise for me, because the person they’re looking for hasn’t got a sister. And if I’m with you, I can show you how to cross roads without getting killed.”
    “All right,” she said humbly.
    “And money. I bet you haven’t—well, how could you have any money? How are you going to get around and eat and so on?”
    “I have got money,” she said, and shook some gold coins out of her purse.
    Will looked at them incredulously.
    “Is that gold? It is, isn’t it? Well, that would get people asking questions, and no mistake. You’re just not safe. I’ll give you some money. Put those coins away and keep them out of sight. And remember—you’re my sister, and your name’s Lisa Ransom.”
    “Lizzie. I pretended to call myself Lizzie before. I can remember that.”
    “All right, Lizzie then. And I’m Mark. Don’t forget.”
    “All right,” she said peaceably.
    Her leg was going to be painful; already it was red and swollen where the car had struck it, and a dark, massive bruise was forming. What with the bruise on her cheek where he’d struck her the night before, she looked as if she’d been badly treated, and that worried him too—suppose some police officer should become curious?
    He tried to put it out of his mind, and they set off together, crossing at the traffic lights and casting just one glance back at the window under the hornbeam trees. They couldn’t see it at all. It was quite invisible, and the traffic was flowing again.
    In Summertown, ten minutes’ walk down the Banbury Road, Will stopped in front of a bank.
    “What are you doing?” said Lyra.
    “I’m going to get some money. I probably better not do it too often, but they won’t register it till the end of the working day, I shouldn’t think.”
    He put his mother’s bank card into the automatic teller and tapped out her PIN number. Nothing seemed to be going wrong, so he withdrew a hundred pounds, and the machine gave it up without a hitch. Lyra watched open-mouthed. He gave her a twenty-pound note.
    “Use that later,” he said. “Buy something and get some change. Let’s find a bus into town.”
    Lyra let him deal with the bus. She sat very quietly, watching the houses and gardens of the city that was hers and not hers. It was like being in someone else’s dream. They got off in the city center next to an old stone church, which she did know, opposite a big department store, which she didn’t.
    “It’s all changed,” she said. “Like . . . That en’t the Cornmarket? And this is the Broad. There’s Balliol. And Bodley’s Library, down there. But where’s Jordan?”
    Now she was trembling badly. It might have been delayed reaction from the accident, or present shock from finding an entirely different building in place of the Jordan College she knew as home.
    “That en’t right,” she said. She spoke quietly, because Will had told her to stop pointing out so loudly the things that were wrong. “This is a different Oxford.”
    “Well, we knew that,” he said.
    He wasn’t prepared for Lyra’s wide-eyed helplessness. He couldn’t know how much of her childhood had been spent running about streets almost identical with these, and how proud she’d been of belonging to Jordan College, whose Scholars were the cleverest, whose coffers the richest, whose beauty the most splendid of all. And now it simply wasn’t there, and she wasn’t Lyra of Jordan anymore; she was a lost little girl in a strange world, belonging nowhere.
    “Well,” she said shakily. “If it en’t here . . . ”
    It was going to take longer than she’d thought, that was all.

FOUR
    TREPANNING
    As soon as Lyra had gone her way, Will found a pay phone and dialed the number of the lawyer’s office on the letter he