Replica (11 page)

“Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” Jake said out loud, still bending over his computer. “That's a category of disease. Mad cow is a TSE.”

“Okay.” Gemma drew out the last syllable. “But what does that mean?” She went to sit next to Jake on the couch, and Lyra licked the bowl clean, after making sure neither of them was looking. Jake kept turning his soda can, adjusting it so that the small square napkin beneath it was parallel to the table's edge.

“I don't know.” Jake scrubbed his forehead with a hand and fixed his laptop so this, too, was parallel. “There are just references to it in the report.”

Lyra saw that next to Jake's computer was the file she'd stolen from Haven. She set her bowl down on the table with a clatter. “You—you shouldn't be looking at that,” she said.

“Why not?” Jake raised an eyebrow. “You stole it, didn't you?”

“Yes,” Lyra said evenly. “But that's different.”

“It's not like they'll miss it now. The whole place is an ash heap.”

In Lyra's head, she saw all of Haven reduced to a column of smoke. Sometimes the bodies that burned came back to Haven in the form of smoke, in a sweet smell that tickled the back of the throat. The nurses hated it, but Lyra didn't.

“Jake,” Gemma said.

He shrugged. “Sorry. But it's true.”

He was right, obviously. She couldn't possibly get in trouble now for stealing the file or allowing someone else to see it—at least, no more trouble than she was already in. Jake went back to thumping away at the computer. Gemma reached out and drew the file onto her lap. Lyra watched her puzzle over it, frowning. Maybe Gemma couldn't read?

But after a minute, Gemma said, “Lyra, do you know what this means? It says the patient—the replica, I mean”—she looked up as though for approval, and Lyra nodded—“was in the yellow cluster.”

The yellow cluster. The saddest cluster of all. Lyra remembered all those tiny corpses with their miniature yellow bracelets, all of them laid out for garbage collection. The nurses had come through wearing gloves and masks that made them look like insects, double wrapping the bodies, disposing of them.

“The Yellows died,” she said, and Gemma flinched. “There were about a hundred of them, all from the
younger crops. Crops,” she went on, when Gemma still looked confused, “separate the different generations. But colors are for clusters. So I'm third crop, green cluster.” She held up her bracelet, where everything was printed neatly.
Gen-3, TG-GR
. Generation 3, Testing Group Green. She didn't understand why Gemma looked sick to her stomach. “They must have made a mistake with the Yellows. Sometimes they did that. Made mistakes. The Pinks died, too.”

“They all died?” Jake asked.

Lyra nodded. “They got sick.”

“Oh my God.” Gemma brought a hand to her mouth. She seemed sad, which Lyra didn't understand. Gemma didn't know anyone in the yellow cluster. And they were just replicas. “It says here she was only fourteen months.”

Lyra almost pointed out that the youngest had died when she was only three or four months, but didn't.

“You said colors are for clusters,” Jake said slowly. “But clusters of what?”

Lyra shrugged. “There are different clusters, and we all get different variants.”

“Variants of what?” he pressed.

Lyra didn't know, exactly, but she wasn't going to admit it. “Medicine,” she said firmly, hoping he wouldn't ask her anything more.

Gemma sucked in a deep breath. “Look, Jake. It's
signed by Dr. Saperstein, just like you said.”

“Dr. Saperstein is in charge of the growth of new crops of replicas,” Lyra said. Despite the fact that she was still annoyed at Jake and Gemma for looking at the file—the
private
file,
her
file—she moved closer to the couch, curious to know what they were doing. “He signs all the death certificates.” Beneath his was a second signature, a name she knew well. Nurse Em had been one of the nicer ones: Nurse Em had taken care when inserting the needles, to make sure it wouldn't hurt; she had sometimes told jokes. “Nurse Em signed, too.”

“Nurse Em.” Gemma closed her eyes and leaned back.

“Holy shit,” Jake said, and Gemma opened her eyes again, giving Jake a look Lyra couldn't decipher.

“Nurse Em was one of the nicest ones. But she left,” Lyra said. An old memory surfaced. She was alone in a hallway, watching Dr. O'Donnell and Nurse Em through a narrow crack in a door. Dr. O'Donnell had her hands on Nurse Em's shoulders and Nurse Em was crying. “Think of what's right, Emily,” Dr. O'Donnell said. “You're a good person. You were just in over your head.” But then Nurse Em had wrenched away from her, knocking over a mop, and Lyra had backed quickly away from the door before Nurse Em barreled through it.

But that couldn't have been a real memory—she remembered a janitor's closet but that couldn't be right,
not when the nurses and doctors had break rooms. And Nurse Em had been crying—but why would Dr. O'Donnell have made Nurse Em cry?

“Let me see that.” Jake took the file from Gemma and leaned over the computer again. Lyra liked watching the impression of his fingers on the keys, the way a stream of letters appeared as though by magic on the screen, far too fast for her to read.
Click. Click. Click.
The screen was now full of tiny type, photographs, diagrams. It was dizzying. She couldn't even tell one letter from another. “This report—all of this terminology, TSEs and neural decay and protein folding—it's all about prions.”

“Prions?” Gemma said. She'd clearly never heard the word before, and Lyra was glad that for once she wasn't the one who was confused.

“Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and prions,” Jake said, squinting at the screen. “Prions are infectious particles. They're proteins, basically, except they're folded all wrong.”

“Replicas are full of prions,” Lyra said, proud of herself for knowing this. The doctors had never said so directly, but she had paid attention: at Haven, there was very little to do but listen. That was the purpose of the spinal taps and all the harvesting—to remove tissue samples to test for prion penetration. Often when replicas died they were dissected, their bones drilled open, for the same reason. She knew that prions were incredibly important—Dr.
Saperstein was always talking about engineering prions to be better and faster-acting—but she didn't know what they were, exactly.

Jake gave her a funny look, as if he had swallowed a bad-tasting medicine.

“I still don't get it,” Gemma said. “What do prions do?”

He read out loud: “‘Prion infectivity is present at high levels in brain or other central nervous system tissues, and at slightly lower levels in the spleen, lymph nodes, bone marrow. . . .' Wait. That's not it. ‘If a prion enters a healthy organism, it induces existing, properly folded proteins to convert into the disease-associated, misfolded prion form. In that sense, they are like cloning devices.'” He looked up at Gemma, and then looked quickly down again. “‘The prion acts as a template to guide the misfolding of more proteins into prion form, leading to an exponential increase of prions in the central nervous system and subsequent symptoms of prion disease. This can take months or even years.'” He put a hand through his hair again and Lyra watched it fall, wondering whether 72's hair would grow out now, whether it would fall just the same way. “‘Prion disease is spread when a person or animal ingests infected tissue, as in the case of bovine SE, or mad cow disease. Prions may also contaminate the water supply, given the presence of blood or other secretions. . . .'”

“So prions are a kind of disease?” Gemma asked.

“The bad kind of prions are disease,” Jake said quietly.

“That can't be right,” Lyra said. She was having trouble following everything that Jake was saying, but she knew that there, at least, he was wrong. She knew that replicas were physically inferior to normal humans—the cloning process was still imperfect, and they were vulnerable. That was the word the doctors and nurses always used when they lined up vitamins and pills, sometimes a dozen in a row. But she'd always thought—and she didn't know why she'd thought this, but she knew it had to do with things overheard, sensed, and implied—that prions were
good
. She'd always had the impression that this was a single way in which replicas were superior to humans: their tissue was humming with prions that could be extracted from them.

She felt a curious tickle at the back of her throat, almost as if she had to sneeze. Sweat prickled in her armpits.

Jake wouldn't look at her. She was used to that.

“Listen to this.” Jake had pulled up new writing—so many lines of text Lyra felt vaguely suffocated. How many words could there possibly be? “Google Saperstein and prions and an article comes up from back in the early 1990s. Saperstein was speaking at a conference about biological terrorism. ‘Chemical weapons and viral and bacterial agents are problematic. Our soldiers risk
exposure even as the weapons are deployed against our enemies. War is changing. Our enemies are changing, growing radicalized and more diverse. I believe the future of biological warfare lies in the isolation of a faster-acting prion that can be distributed via food supply chains.'” Jake was sweating. And Lyra had been sweating too, but now she was cold all over. It felt like she had to use the bathroom, but she couldn't move. “‘We might cripple terrorist groups by disseminating doctored medications and vaccinations, which will be unknowingly spread by health care workers in dangerous and remote environments immune to normal modes of attack.

“‘All known prion diseases in mammals affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue and all are currently untreatable and universally fatal. Imagine'”— Jake was barely whispering—“‘terrorist cells or enemy insurgents unable to think, walk, or speak. Paralyzed or exterminated.'”

“Oh my God,” Gemma said. She brought a hand to her lips. “That's awful.”

From nowhere a vision came to Lyra of a vast, dust-filled field, and thousands of bodies wrapped in dark paper like the Yellows had been, still and silent under a pale-blue sky.

What was it that Jake had read?

All known prion diseases in mammals . . . are currently
untreatable and universally fatal.

“Jesus.” Jake leaned back and closed his eyes. For a long time, no one said anything. Lyra felt strangely as if she had left her body behind, as if she no longer existed at all. She was a wall. She was the floor and the ceiling. “That's the answer to what they were doing at Haven.” Although he'd addressed Gemma, when he opened his eyes again, he looked directly at Lyra, and immediately she slammed back into her body and hated him for it. “Prions live in human tissue. Don't you see?”

Lyra could see. But she couldn't say so. Her voice had dried up. She was filled with misfolded crystals, like tiny slivers of glass, slowly cutting her open from the inside. It was Gemma who spoke.

“They've been experimenting on the replicas,” she said slowly. She wouldn't look at Lyra. “They've been observing the effects of the disease.”

“Not just experimenting on them,” Jake said, and his voice broke. “Incubating them. Gemma, they've been using the replicas to
make
prions. They've been growing the disease
inside
them.”

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 10 of Gemma's story.

“I TOLD YOU.”

Lyra turned and saw 72, his cheek still crisscrossed with lines from the pillow. He was looking not at Jake or Gemma but directly at Lyra, and she couldn't read his expression. She had spent her whole life listening to doctors talk about the workings of the lungs and liver, the blood-brain barrier, and white blood cell counts, but she had never heard a single one explain how faces worked, what they meant, how to read them.

“I told you,” he said again, softer this time, “they never cared. They were never trying to protect us. It was a lie.”

“You knew?” she said.

He stared at her. “Didn't you?” His voice was quiet. “Didn't you, really?”

She looked away, ashamed. He was right, of course. Everything had fallen away, the final veil, the game she'd
been playing for years, the lies she'd been telling herself. It all made sense now. Numbers instead of names,
it
instead of
she
or
he
.
Are you going to teach the rats to play chess?
They were disposable and always had been. It wasn't that they were more prone to diseases, to failures of the liver and lungs. They'd been manufactured to die.

All the times she felt nauseous or dizzy or couldn't remember where she was or where she was going: not side effects of the treatment, but of the disease. Actually, not side effects at all.

Symptoms.

Gemma stood up. “We've done enough for the night,” she said to Jake. Lyra knew that Gemma must feel sorry for them. Or maybe she was only scared. Maybe she thought the disease was contagious.

She wondered how long she had. Six months? A year? It seemed so stupid to have run. What was the point, since she was just going to die anyway? Maybe she should have let the guards shoot her after all.

Jake closed his computer. “It's after ten o'clock,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “My aunt's coming back from Decatur tomorrow. I've got to go home.”

“Let's pick up in the morning, okay? We'll figure out what to do in the morning.” Gemma addressed the words to Jake, but Lyra had a feeling she meant the words for her.

“Are you going to be okay?” Jake asked. He lifted a hand as if he was going to touch Lyra's shoulder, but she took a quick step backward and he let his hand fall.

Lyra shrugged. It hardly mattered. She kept thinking about what Jake had said.
They've been growing the disease inside them.
Like the glass hothouses where Haven grew vegetables and fruit. She pictured her body blown full of air and proteins misfolded into snowflake shapes. She pictured the illustration she'd once seen of a pregnant woman and the child curled inside her womb. They had implanted her. She was carrying an alien child, something deadly and untreatable.

“If you need anything, just give a shout,” Gemma said.

“Here.” Jake bent over and scrawled something on a piece of paper. Normally Lyra loved to see a person writing by hand, the way the letters simply fell from the pen, but now she didn't care. There was no help Jake could give her. No help anyone could give her. “This is my telephone number. Have you used a telephone before?”

“I know what a telephone is,” Lyra said. Though she had never used one herself, the nurses hardly did anything but, and as a little kid she'd sometimes picked up random things—tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, prescription bottles—and pretended to speak into them, pretended there was someone in another world who would answer.

Jake nodded. “This is my address. Here. Just in case. Can you read this?”

Lyra nodded but couldn't bring herself to meet Jake's eyes.

For several minutes after Gemma and Jake left, Lyra stayed where she was, sitting on the couch. 72 moved around the room silently, picking things up and then putting them down. She was unaccountably angry at him. He had predicted this. That meant it was his fault.

“When did you know?” she asked. “
How
did you know?”

He glanced at her, and then turned his attention back to a small bubble of glass: plastic snow swirled down when he inverted it. “I told you. I didn't know
exactly
,” he said. “But I knew they were making us sick. I knew that was the point.” He said it casually.

“How?” Lyra repeated.

He set the snow globe down, and Lyra watched a flurry of artificial snow swirl down on the two tiny figures contained forever in their tiny bubble world: a stretch of plastic beach, a single palm tree. She felt sorry for them. She understood them.

“I didn't ever not know,” he said, frowning. To her surprise, he came to sit next to her on the couch. He still smelled good. This made her ache, for some reason. As if inside of her, someone was driving home a nail. “I
was sick once, as a little kid. Very sick. I remember they thought I was going to die. I went to the Funeral Home.” He looked down at his hands. “They were excited. When they thought I couldn't understand them anymore, they were excited.”

Lyra said nothing. She thought of lying on the table after seeing Mr. I, the happy chatter of the researchers above her, their sandwich-smelling breath and the way they laughed when her eyes refused to follow their penlight.

“When I was a kid I used to pretend,” he said. “I would pretend I was an ant or a lizard or a bird. Anything else. I would catch roaches sometimes coming out of the drains. All the nurses hated the roaches. But even they were better off than we were. They could get out.” He opened his palm, staring as if he didn't recognize it, then closed it again in a fist. “It would be better,” he said, slightly louder, “if they'd hated us. But they didn't.”

About this, too, he was right. Worse than Nurse-Don't-Even-Think-About-It, worse than the ones who were afraid, were the ones who hardly noticed. Who would look not at the replicas but through them, who could talk about what to eat for dinner even as they bundled up dead bodies for burning.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Lyra asked.

“I tried,” he said. “Besides, what good would it do?”

She shook her head. She needed someone to blame.
She had never been so angry before—she hadn't even thought she had the right. People, real people, believed they deserved things and were angry when they didn't get them. Replicas deserved nothing, received nothing, and so were never angry.

What kind of God was it, she wondered, who made people who would do what they had done to her?

“Is that why you ran away?” Lyra asked. She felt like crying. She wasn't in physical pain and yet she felt as if something had changed in her body, as if someone had put tubes in her chest and everything was entangled.

“No,” 72 said. “Not exactly.”

“Why, then?”

He just shook his head. She doubted whether he knew himself. Maybe only for a change. Then he said, “We can't stay here, you know.”

Lyra hadn't expected this. “Why not?”

“We're not safe here,” he said, and his expression turned again, folded up. “I told you. I don't trust them. They aren't replicas.”

“The girl is,” Lyra said.

He frowned. “She doesn't know it,” he said. “No one's told her.”

“But we don't have anywhere else to go,” she said, and once again realized how true it was. How big was the world? She had no idea. They'd driven for what felt like
hours today, and there had been no end to the roads and shopping complexes, streets and houses. And yet Gemma had told her they were still in Florida. How much farther did it all go on? “Besides, what does it matter?”
We'll just die anyway,
she almost added, but she knew he understood.

“I didn't come this far to be a toy,” he said. “I could have gone back to Haven for that.”

Lyra didn't know what he meant, exactly, but she could guess from his tone of voice. “They've been good to us,” she said. “They helped us. They fed us. They gave us clothes and somewhere to sleep.”

“Exactly. So what do they want? They must want something. They're people,” he said. “That's what they do. Don't you see? That's all they
ever
do. They want.”

Was that true? She didn't know. What had Dr. O'Donnell wanted from her? Or Nurse Em, who always smiled at the replicas, who had once told Lyra she had pretty eyes, who saved up her old ferry tokens to give to the young kids to play checkers with?

But maybe that was why they had left Haven: they did not fit in. She still didn't understand what made people so different from replicas, had never been able to understand it. And she had wanted things too, in her life. She had wanted to learn to read. She had been hungry, cold, and tired, and wanted food and her bed. But it was true she had never hurt anyone to get what she wanted.

Was that what made her less than human?

“Is that enough for you?” 72 said. He scared her when he looked this way, and reminded her of the statue in the courtyard at Haven, whose face, deformed by rain, was sightless and cold. “Someone to feed you and order you around, tell you when to sleep? Like a dog?”

She stood. “Well, what's the difference?” she said, and she could tell she'd surprised him, because he flinched. She was surprised, too. Her voice was much louder than she'd expected. “We're replicas, aren't we? We might as well be dogs. That's how they think of us anyway. That's what we were made for. To be dogs—or rats. You weren't pretending all those years ago. You
were
a roach.”

He stared at her for a long second. She could see his chest rising with his breath and knew that beneath his skin hundreds of tiny muscles were contracting in his face even to hold it there, still, watching her. The idea of him and what he was made of, all the different fragile parts spun together, made her dizzy.

Finally he looked away. “That's why I ran,” he said. “I wanted to know whether we could be good for anything else. I wanted to try.” To her surprise, he smiled, just a little. “Besides, even roaches run away. Rats, too.”

They went through the guesthouse, looking for anything that would be useful. In a bedroom closet beneath extra
pillows they found an old backpack, which they filled with the remaining granola bars and bottles of water, plus the bathroom things that Gemma had bought for them. Lyra knew they likely wouldn't need soap but couldn't stand to leave the pretty, paper-wrapped bars behind, so different from anything she'd ever owned.

Jake had left his cell phone charging in the corner and 72 took it, although they had no one to call. It excited Lyra to have it in their possession, to touch the screen and leave fingerprints there. Only people had cell phones.

They took knives from the kitchen, a blanket from the otherwise empty cabinet by the bed. She didn't feel guilty about stealing from Jake and Gemma, who had helped them. She felt nothing at all. Maybe, she thought, the nurses had been right about replicas. Maybe they didn't have souls.

By then the main house had gone dark. 72 suggested they turn the light off too, so in case Jake and Gemma were looking out for them, they would believe Lyra and 72 had gone to bed. They waited there, in the dark, for another twenty minutes just to be sure. They sat again on the sofa side by side, and Lyra thought of her dream of entanglement, all those inches and inches of exposed skin. She was glad he couldn't see her.

Finally he touched her elbow. “It's time,” he said. His face in the dark was different colors of shadow.

Outside, the sound of insects and tree frogs startled Lyra: a rhythmic and almost mechanical thrumming that recalled the throaty roar of Mr. I.

“Wait.” 72 nudged her. Gemma was curled up on a plastic deck chair, still wearing her clothes, using several colorful towels as blankets. Lyra was confused. Had she been watching them? Trying to make sure they didn't escape? She couldn't imagine why she would have otherwise chosen to sleep outside.

Before she could stop him, 72 was already moving closer, stepping very carefully. Lyra followed him with a growing sense of unease. Gemma's face in the moonlight looked so much like Cassiopeia's, she wanted to reach out and lay a hand on Gemma's chest, to feel her breathing and believe Cassiopeia had come back to life. But she didn't, obviously.

Lying next to Gemma on the pool deck was an open notebook. A pen had rolled into the binding. As always Lyra was drawn to the words scribbled across the page. They appeared to glow faintly in the moonlight. Gemma's writing, she thought, was very beautiful. The words reminded her of bird tracks, of birds themselves, pecking their way proudly across the page.

Then a familiar name caught her attention: Emily Huang. Nurse Em.

She placed a finger on the page, mouthing the words
written directly beneath the name. Palm Grove. The words meant nothing to her. There were other names on the page, all of them unfamiliar except for Dr. Saperstein's, which was joined by a small notation to the Home Foundation. She didn't know what that was, either, but beneath it was at last another word she recognized: Gainesville. This, she knew, was a place. A big place. Jake and Gemma had argued about whether they should be getting off at the highway exit to Gainesville and Jake had said,
No one wants to go to Gainesville
, and then Gemma had said,
Except the half a million people who live there
. She figured that Palm Grove might be a place, too.

She took the notebook. Jake had taken the file folder she'd stolen, so it was a fair trade. She straightened up and saw that 72 was rifling through Gemma's bag to get to her wallet. She grabbed his shoulder, shaking her head. Once, years ago, Don't-Even-Think-About-It's wallet had been stolen from the mess hall, and she remembered how terrible it was, how all the replicas' beds were searched and their cubbies turned out, how Don't-Even-Think-About-It was in a foul mood for days and backhanded Lyra for looking at her wrong. They had found it, finally, in a hole torn out of the underside of Ursa Major's mattress, along with all the other things she'd scavenged over the years: dirty socks and a lost earring, ferry tokens, soda can tabs, gum wrappers.