Replica (15 page)

“I barely raised my voice,” the man said. “You some kinda freak or something?”

Quickly, 72 reached for his pocket, and Lyra was worried he was going for his knife. The man must have been worried, too, because he stumbled backward, toppling his chair. But instead 72 just put the paper with Jake's address onto the desk.

“You have a map,” he said. His voice was low and tight, as if the words were bound together with wire. “Show us how to get here.
Please.
”

The man reached for a map slowly, keeping his eyes on 72. A TV in the corner reeled off the sound of an audience laughing, but otherwise it was so quiet that Lyra could hear the man's lungs, like something wet caught in his chest as he took a red pen, pointed out the different bus routes they could take to reach Little Waller, less than an hour away. Lyra noticed his hand was shaking ever so slightly—and for the first time the idea of being a
freak
, of being a
monster
, made her feel not ashamed but powerful.

There were only two other passengers on the bus, including a man wearing several different layers of clothing who smelled like sweat and urine. Lyra and 72 took a seat at the very back. They sat so close their thighs and knees touched, and Lyra felt the warmth coming through the window like the gentle pressure of a hand. As the bus passed the water park, Lyra pressed her nose to the window, eager again for the sight of all those real human families. But the sun was hard in her eyes and she could
see nothing but blurred, indistinct figures.

Then they were on the highway again, passing long stretches of vivid green space where there were no towns or houses, just trees crowning the roads, just growth and dark spaces.

72 was quiet for so long, leaning back with his eyes closed, she thought he'd fallen asleep. But then he turned to face her. The sunlight fell across his skin and made it seem to glow. When he spoke, she felt his breath on her ear and in her hair. “Can I ask you a question about your story?” he said. “About the little prince, and the rose?”

“Okay.” Lyra took a breath. She again had a sense of his whole body extended there in space, the miracle of all those interwoven molecules that kept him together.

His eyes were dark, and she could see herself inside of them. “You said the Little Prince lived on Planet B-612,” he said. “You pointed it out to me.” He bit his lip and she had the strangest desire to bite it too, to feel his lips with her mouth. “But all the stars look the same. So how do you know?”

“Not if you look closely,” she said. Her body was bright hot, burning. It was his breath on her shoulder and the feel of him next to her in the afternoon sun. “That's what the Little Prince found too, on his travels. He thought his rose was the only rose in the whole universe at first. But then he came down to earth and found a garden of them.”

72 shifted and their knees touched again. The sun made his eyes dazzle, and the rest of the world was disappearing. “What happened then?”

She tried to remember the rest of the story. It was hard to concentrate with him so close. She kept imagining his skin under his clothing, and beneath his skin, his organs and ribs and the blood alive in his veins, kept thinking of this miracle, that he should exist, that they both should, instead of just being empty space. But what came to her was Dr. O'Donnell's voice, and the way she'd leaned forward to read this part of the book, her dirty-blond hair falling out from where it was tucked behind her ears.

“He was very sad,” Lyra said slowly. “He thought the rose had tricked him. She wasn't special. She was just like thousands of other roses. Identical to them,” she added.

“A replica,” 72 said.

“Exactly,” Lyra said, although it was the first time she'd made the connection, and understood, truly understood, why Dr. O'Donnell had given her that particular book. “Just like a replica. Only . . .”

“What?”

“Only the Little Prince realized his rose was special. She was the only one in the universe. Because he'd cared for her, and talked with her, and protected her from caterpillars. She was
his
rose. And that made her more special than all the other roses in the universe combined.” Lyra
found the sun was painful and blinked. She was crying. She turned away and brought a hand to her face quickly, hoping 72 wouldn't see.

But he caught her hand. And before she could ask what he was doing, before she could even be afraid, her body responded. It knew what to do. It sensed a question and answered for her, so she found herself turning to face him, placing her hand against his face so the warmth of him spread through her fingers. They sat there, looking at each other, on a bus suspended in space. She knew it was impossible, but she thought her heart stopped beating completely.

“Lyra,” he whispered.

“What?” she whispered back. His face was cut into geometric shapes by shadows, and he was a beautiful puzzle to her, mysterious and ever-changing.

But he didn't answer. He brought his fingers to her face. He touched her cheekbones and her forehead and the bridge of her nose. “Lyra,” he said again. “I like your name.” Then: “I wish I had a name.”

Lyra closed her eyes. He kept touching her. He ran his fingers across her scalp. He traced the long curve of her earlobe, and then moved a finger down her neck, pressing lightly as though to feel her pulse beating up through his hand. And everywhere he touched, she imagined she was healed. She imagined the disease simply vanishing,
evaporating, like water under the sun. “We can give you a name,” she said, still with her eyes closed. “You can take one from the stars, like I did.”

He was quiet for a while. His hand moved to her shoulder. He walked his fingers along her collarbone. He placed his thumb in the hollow of her throat.

“You pick,” he said, and for the briefest second he touched her lips, too. Then he placed his hand flat against her chest, just above her heart.

In the darkness behind her eyelids she saw a universe explode into being, expand into brightness. She pictured names and stars bright blue or purple or white-hot.

“Caelum,” she said. She knew it was right as soon as she said it out loud. “You'll be Caelum.”

“Caelum,” he repeated. Even without opening her eyes, she could tell he was smiling.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 13 of Gemma's story.

SOMETHING HAD CHANGED. LYRA COULDN'T have said what it was, exactly, only that something had softened in Caelum, or in her, or both. They were bound together. They had chosen each other, to be responsible for and to care for each other.

By four p.m. they had reached Little Waller, although Lyra asked several people to be sure. A policeman spotted them standing at a corner, puzzling over the sign, and came loping down the street. Lyra's chest tightened—he was wearing a uniform similar to the one the guards had worn at Haven, and she thought of that night on the marshes and how the soldiers had been afraid to move Cassiopeia, afraid she might be contagious.
You know how expensive these things are to make?
But the policeman only asked them if they needed help and pointed the way.

“Straight and keep walking,” he said. “That road runs
right out into marshland. Couldn't have picked a nicer day for it.” She didn't know whether he was being serious. It was already so hot the pavement shimmered.

On their way through town they passed a blocky cement building called the Woodcrest Retirement Home. Behind a tall hedgerow, several sprinklers were tossing up water, crossing in midair, making shimmering rainbows. Both Lyra and Caelum crouched to drink, and Lyra felt a bit like a dog but not in a bad way. She and Caelum were a team, a pack. They could survive like this. They would survive. They'd figure out a way.

Together.

Caelum stood guard while Lyra took off her filthy shirt and her jeans, and, crouching, moved into the spray of water to clean herself. They had no towels, so she had to get dressed right away again, but it didn't matter: the water was delicious and cold, and she was happier than she could ever remember being. Then she stood watch for him, although she couldn't resist looking after he'd stripped off his shirt. She had seen anatomical drawings of the muscles connecting the shoulder blades and torqued around the spine, but she had never imagined that they could make this, something seamless and graceful. Something
beautiful
.

They set out again, their shirts damp with water, their socks squelching a little in their shoes. Neither of them
cared. They walked in silence, but it wasn't uncomfortable at all. Lyra and Caelum: the two replicas with names plucked straight from the stars.

Jake's road was little more than a dirt path through the woods, crowded with tall spruce trees and hanging moss and loud with the chitter of birds. All at once Lyra felt her happiness picked apart by anxiety, by the sense of someone concealed and watching. But the road was empty except for a dead turtle, flattened under a car tire, and a bird picking at it. The bird flapped away as soon as they approached.

What was that feeling? It was standing naked in front of a team of doctors and nurses. It was the lights in the operation room, and the shadow of people moving behind glass.

Jake's house, number 1211, looked like it had simply been dropped there, temporarily stifling a nest of exploding growth. Two shutters were broken and the window boxes were empty. But a little lawn had been cleared in front of the porch, and someone had repainted the exterior yellow to conceal the moisture rotting out the baseboards. A cat slunk beneath the porch, and for a paranoid second Lyra was sure that Sheri Hayes had followed them all this way to yell at them for ruining her pictures. But that didn't make sense. And there must be many cats in the
world. There were many
everything
in this world.

Lyra followed Caelum to the front door. The sun was hot on the back of her neck and felt weighty. They knocked and rang the doorbell. No one came. Jake's car was in the driveway, though. Lyra recognized it. They rang the doorbell again. Caelum leaned in to listen at the door. But it was obvious no one was home. There was not a single creak from inside.

“He must be out,” Lyra said at last, although she hated to admit it. The disappointment was almost physical. Suddenly she was exhausted again.

“We'll wait for him here, then,” Caelum said. When Lyra looked at him, he shrugged. “He's got to be back sometime, right?”

“He said his aunt would come home today,” Lyra said. She didn't have a clear sense of what an aunt was but knew it meant family, like mother and grandmother. “What if his aunt finds us first?”

Caelum tested the door, but it was locked. “Come on,” he said. “There must be another way in.”

They went around the house to the back. Here there were no signs, and no grass, either: just a small cement patio and planters filled with dying brown things, plus an old sofa, puddled with rain and specked with mildew. Sliding doors opened onto the patio and these, Lyra was relieved to find, were unlocked. At least they could wait
inside, where she didn't feel so exposed.

The kitchen was a mess. There were papers scattered across the table. The drawers hung open. The refrigerator was pulled away from the wall, revealing plastic disks of insect poison behind it. Even the microwave was open. There was mail on the floor, and Lyra saw footprints where someone had walked.

“It's wrong,” Lyra said immediately.

“What is?”

“All of it.” Lyra thought about how Jake had set a napkin on the coffee table before setting down a glass of water, how he had adjusted his computer so that it ran parallel to the table edge. “Someone else was here before us.”

Caelum looked at her. “Or he doesn't like to pick up after himself,” he said.

“No.” Lyra shook her head. She was afraid. “Someone was here.”

They moved from the kitchen into a small living room. This, too, was a mess. It was as if a library had exploded. Papers, folders, books. A coffee mug, overturned, pooling onto the rug. Jake's computer was on the couch, flashing a moving image—a picture of deep space, vivid with color. When Lyra touched it, the image dissolved, leaving in its place a small white box and the demand for a password. Inspired, she bent down and sought out the letters on the
keyboard one by one. H-A-V-E-N. But the password was refused, and almost immediately she felt sorry. The help they needed wouldn't be found there on the computer anyway.

Caelum went out of the living room. Lyra was about to follow him when she saw several photographs displayed on a wall-mounted shelf. One of them, a portrait of Jake from when he was a kid, was framed. The other two were just stacked there, and smudgy with fingerprints.

In one of them Jake was standing next to a man she originally confused for a much older replica—they had the same dark eyes and hair, the same well-cut chin and cheekbones—but she quickly realized the man must be his father. In another, a woman with white-blond hair and breasts coming out of a tank top was grimacing at the camera, holding tight to Jake's shoulder, as if she was afraid he might run away. Was this
aunt
? It was family, she was sure of it. The woman also had Jake's square chin.

For some reason, this made her sad. Replicas were singular events. They exploded into being and they died, leaving no one. But people were just one in an interlinking series of other people.

She made a sudden decision: she would ask Caelum to be her family. That way, when she died, she wouldn't be completely alone.

In another room, Caelum shouted for her. She turned
and saw him back into the hall. In the dim light, he looked pale.

“What?” she said. “What is it?” But she knew already.

He didn't look at her. “Dead,” he said, with a single nod, and Lyra replaced the photographs, facedown, as if they might hear. “Jake's dead.”

He was hanging from the closet door, just pinned there like an old suit. He'd written with black marker on one of the walls.
I'm so lonely. I can't take it anymore.
This room, the bedroom, was equally as messy as the others. A second computer was open on the bed.

Lyra had seen countless dead bodies, but this one was the first that made her want to look away. Jake Witz was no longer nice to look at. His face was purpled with blood. His tongue was exposed, stiff and dark, like something foreign that had gotten lodged there. His fingernails were broken where he had tried to free the belt, which had been wedged between the door frame and hammered in place to the far side of the door. A thick film of blood and spit had dried on his lips.

“What do you think?” Caelum asked.

“Nurse Emily hung herself, too,” Lyra said, stepping out into the hallway. A wave of dizziness overtook her, and she reached out to steady herself on a wall. Caelum followed her, and briefly put a hand on her lower back.
She wished herself back into the field last night, and their bodies silhouetted by all that darkness. “That's what Sheri said.”

Caelum watched her. “You don't believe it?”

She didn't know what she believed. “Someone was here,” she repeated. She took a step toward the kitchen and stumbled. Caelum caught her elbow before she could fall. “I'm all right,” she said, gasping a little. “I just need to sit.”

But she felt no better sitting in Jake's kitchen and drinking water from one of his water glasses, which tasted like soap from the dishwasher. Someone had been here. Someone from Haven? They couldn't stay here. What if whoever had killed Jake came back to clean up? They needed to get to Gemma, but she had no idea how. She couldn't keep her thoughts together. They kept scattering like points of light across her vision. An alarm was going off. A beeping. She stood up. Then she saw Jake rooting through the backpack and remembered: the phone. The phone was ringing.

The phone.

“I thought you turned it off,” Caelum said.

“It must have come on again,” Lyra said. “Here. Give it to me.” The number on the screen was labeled
Aunt Kit
and she waited, holding her breath, until the phone stopped ringing, her chest full of sharp pains. People
called phones, phones called people. Would Gemma be stored in Jake's phone? Maybe. But she had no idea how to look for Gemma, how to
get
to her.

“Lyra.” Caelum's hand found her wrist. His fingers were cold. But at that moment she heard it too: footsteps outside, the muffled sound of voices. They had barely slipped into the living room before they heard the patio doors slide open and then close again. For a delirious second Lyra hoped that maybe Gemma had come for them, and thought about peeking into the kitchen to check, but when a woman spoke, her voice was unfamiliar.

“These cleanup jobs,” she said. “I feel like a goddamn housekeeper. What exactly are we supposed to do?”

“You're looking at it. The first team left a mess. Livingston's worried someone might get suspicious. Doesn't say suicide. You're supposed to get all your shit in order, not trash the fucking place.”

“Did they find anything?”

“Don't know. The kid knew too much, though, otherwise he wouldn't be swinging from a rope.”

Sweat gathered between Lyra's breasts. She'd been right to worry that the people who killed Jake might come back. Could she and Caelum make it to the front door without being seen? They would have to pass in front of the kitchen. If the strangers were busy or had their backs turned, if they were over by the refrigerator
without a clear view of the hallway, she and Caelum might manage it.

The sound of rustling papers. A chair scraping back from the table. How long would it take them to straighten up the kitchen? Not long. One of them was whistling. Lyra didn't know that people could be so casual about killing other people as they were about killing replicas. She felt something hard and hot in her throat, as if she'd swallowed an explosive. She'd been angry before, and she'd been lonely and afraid. But she had never hated, not like this.

She hated the people in the next room. She hated Dr. Saperstein. She hated the people who had killed Jake Witz, and the people who'd filled her blood with disease. She wanted to see them die.

Caelum eased off the wall, nodding to the front door. Lyra nodded back to show she understood, although she didn't really see how she would move. She was liquid fear and anger. She wanted to scream, and she could hardly stay on her feet.

Caelum moved. For a second that felt like forever, passing the entrance to the kitchen, he was exposed. It seemed to Lyra he was hanging there, hooked to the air the way Jake Witz had been hooked to the door. But then he was in the hall, and the sound of his footsteps was concealed by all the noise from the kitchen. He turned back
to gesture to Lyra.
Come.

She unstuck herself from the wall. She imagined if she turned around she would see her silhouette, all dark and sweat-discolored. On the desk Jake's computer was still flashing the picture of a beach, and then, for reasons that Lyra didn't totally understand, she was moving not toward the door but away from it. She picked up the computer, which was surprisingly light, and hugged it to her chest. She felt as if her body was making decisions and relaying them to her brain and not the other way around.

Caelum was white-faced, staring at her. She knew he wanted to scream at her to hurry up. She knew he wanted to yell
What were you thinking?
She could feel the charge of his fear in the silence.

She took a step toward the door.

The phone in her pocket, Jake's phone, began to ring.

The whole world went silent and still. In Lyra's head, a white burst of panic, a life at an end. The noise from the kitchen had completely stopped.

Then: “What the fuck is that?”

“It's a phone.”

“No shit. Where's it coming from?”

She had no time to think. Vaguely she saw Caelum disappear, retreating down the hall. She took the phone from her pocket and tossed it on the carpet, then shimmied behind the couch, still holding Caelum's computer,
as the man crossed heavily into the room. She got down on the floor, on her stomach, inhaling the smell of old upholstery and dust. When she breathed, dust stirred on the exhale. But she tried not to breathe.