Replica (17 page)

SHE DIDN'T WANT A FATHER.

She had never even known what a father did, had never completely understood why fathers were necessary. When she tried to imagine one now she thought instead of God, of his dark beard and narrow eyes, of the way he always seemed to be sneering, even when he smiled. She thought of Werner, whose fingers were yellowed and smelled like smoke; or of Nurse Wanna Bet, a male, pinching her skin before inserting the syringes, or fiddling with IV bags, or poking her stomach for signs of distention.

And yet, alongside these ideas was her impression—her memory?—of that plastic cup, of hands rocking her to sleep and the tickle of a beard.

Caelum didn't speak again until they stopped for the night, just outside of a place called Savannah. Lyra was both relieved and disappointed to learn they wouldn't be
going on. She was dreading meeting her father, whoever he was, but also desperate to get it over with, and had assumed Gemma would take her straight back to him. Now she would have to live instead with her fantasy of him, his face transforming into the face of various Haven doctors and nurses, into the soldiers on the marshes with their helmets and guns, into the hard look of the men who came on unmarked barges to load the body when a replica had died: these were the only men she had ever known.

They stopped at an enormous parking lot full of other vehicles, concealed from the highway beneath a heavy line of plane trees and shaded by woods on all sides. Gemma told her that these camps existed across the country for people traveling by camper van and RV—two words Lyra didn't know, although she assumed they referred to the type of cars parked in the lot, which looked as though they'd been inflated to four times normal size—and once again she was struck by just how many people there must be in the world, enough so that even the ones traveling between towns had their own little network of places to stop for the night. It made her sad. She wondered whether she would ever feel she had a place in this world.

All she knew was that if she had a place, it must be with Caelum.

“I'll be back,” Caelum said when they got out of the
car—the first words he had spoken in hours.

“I'll come with you,” Lyra said quickly. But she found that walking next to him, she couldn't find words to say what she wanted to say. It was as if a wall had come down between them. She felt as if he was a stranger again, as if he was the boy she'd met out on the marshes. Even his face looked different—harder, more angular.

At one end of the camp was a whitewashed building with separate bathrooms for men and women, and shower stalls that could be accessed by putting coins in a slot in the lockbox on the doors. Lyra found she did after all want a shower. She wished she could wash off the past few hours: the dizzying reality that somewhere out there were people who'd birthed her, the memory of Jake Witz's face, bloated and terrible, and the smell of blood and sick that still seemed to hang to her clothes. How did she even know Gemma was telling her the truth? But she trusted Gemma instinctively, no matter what Caelum had originally feared, and when Gemma offered her coins to work the door, she accepted.

The shower was slick with soap scum and reminded her of the bright tiles of Haven and all the replicas showering in groups, herded under the showers in three-minute bursts. She missed that. She missed the order, the routine, the nurses telling her where to go and when. But at the same time the Lyra who was content to float through the
days, who lay down on the paper-covered medical beds and let Squeezeme and Thermoscan do their work, who thought of them as friends, even, felt impossibly foreign. She couldn't remember being that girl.

She had no towel, so when she got dressed again, her hair, still wet, dampened her shoulders and her shirt. But she felt better, cleaner. A father. She experimented with holding the idea for two, three seconds at a time now without shame. She brushed up next to it, got close, sniffed around it like an animal exploring something new. What would it be like to have a father? What did a father actually
do
? She had no idea.

She came outside into a night loud with distant laughter and the sound of tree frogs. She didn't see Caelum. She took a turn of the building and found him in the back, hurling rocks into the growth where the dirt clearing petered out into cypress and shade trees.

“Caelum?” He didn't turn around and, thinking he hadn't heard, she took another step forward. “Caelum?”

“Don't call me that.” He turned to face her, his face caught in the flare of the floodlights, and her stomach went hollow. He looked as if he hated her. “That's not my name.” This time he directed a volley of rocks at the restrooms, so they pinged against the stucco walls and the sign pointing the way to the showers. “I'm seventy-two. I'm a replica. A human model. Only humans have names.”

Then she knew that what she'd been afraid of was true. He hated her for what she was, or for what she wasn't.

“You're wrong,” Lyra said. She felt as if she were being squeezed between two giant plates, as if the whole world had narrowed to this moment. “That isn't what makes the difference.”

“Oh yeah? You would know, I guess.” He looked away. “I thought we were the same, but we're not. We're different.
You're
different.”

“So what?” Lyra took a step closer to him. They were separated by less than a foot, but he might have been on the other side of the world. She felt reckless, desperate, the same way she'd felt running after Haven had exploded. He turned back to her, frowning. “So we're different. Who cares? We chose to escape together. We chose to stay together. We chose each other, didn't we?”
I gave you a name,
she almost said, but the memory of that night, and lying so close to him, while the darkness stirred around his body, made her throat constrict. “That's what makes the difference. Getting to choose, and what you choose.” She took a breath. “I choose you.”

“How can you?” His voice was raw. “You know what I am. I don't belong anywhere.”

“You belong with me.” When she said it out loud, she knew it was true. “Please.” She'd never had to ask for anything, because she'd never had reason to. But this woke
inside of her—the asking and the need, the feeling that if he didn't say yes, she wouldn't be able to go on.

“Please,” she repeated, because she could say nothing else. But at the same time she took a step toward him and put a hand on his chest, above his heart, because there was always that to return to, always the truth of its rhythm and the fact that every person, no matter how they were formed or where, had a heart that worked the same way.

They were inches apart. His skin was hot. And though she could feel him, touch him,
know
his separateness, in that moment she also learned something totally new—that it was possible by touching someone else to dissolve all the space between them.

“I am no one,” he said. In his eyes she was reflected in duplicate. “I was made to be no one.”

“You're someone to me,” she said. “You're everything.”

He took her face in his hands and kissed her. They had never learned how to kiss, either of them. But somehow he knew. She did, too. It was beyond instinct. It was joy.

They were clumsy, still. They stumbled and then she was against the wall. She pulled herself into him and found to her amazement that her body knew more than how to ache or shiver or exhaust itself. It knew how to sing.

They barely touched except with their mouths, the way they explored together
teeth tongue lips
, the way they
shivered with the joy of discovery. They were born for the first time in their bodies. They were born together. They came together into the world as everyone should—frightened, uncertain, amazed, grateful.

And for them the world was born, too, in all its complexity and strange glory. They had a place in it, at last, and so at last it became theirs to share. No matter what happened, no matter what trouble came, Lyra knew they would face it together, as they were then: turned human by joy, by a belonging that felt just like freedom.

Turn the page to read Gemma's story from the beginning.
Click here
to read Chapter 17 of Gemma's story.

“A searing pair of intertwined stories about the line between science and humanity, told with Oliver's signature grace, uniqueness, and precision. It's a new story every way you turn it—but always gorgeous, always haunting.”

—MARIE LU,

#1
New York Times
bestselling author of the Young Elites series and
Legend

Although in many cases you will find identical portions of dialogue occurring from both Gemma's and Lyra's perspectives in their respective narratives, you may also notice minor variations in tone and tempo. This was done deliberately to reflect their individual perspectives. Gemma and Lyra have unique conceptual frameworks that actively interact with and thus define their experiences, just as the act of observing a thing immediately alters the behavior of the thing itself.

The minor variations in the novel reflect the belief that there is no single objective experience of the world. No one sees or hears the same thing in exactly the same way, as anyone who has ever been in an argument with a loved one can attest. In that way we truly are inventors of our own experience. The truth, it turns out, looks a lot like making fiction.

ESCAPE: THAT WAS WHAT GEMMA dreamed of, especially on nights like this one, when the moon was so big and bright it looked like it was a set piece in a movie, hooked outside her window on a curtain of dark night sky.

In movies, teenagers were always sneaking out. They'd wait until their parents went to bed, ease out from under their blankets already dressed in miniskirts and tank tops, slide down the stairs and unlatch the lock and
pop!
They'd burst out into the night, like balloons squeezing through a narrow space only to explode.

Other teenagers, Gemma guessed, didn't have Rufus: a seventy-five-pound retriever who seemed to consist entirely of fur, tongue, and vocal cords.

“Shhh,” Gemma hissed, as Rufus greeted her at the bottom of the stairs, wiggling so hard she was surprised he didn't fall over.

“Are you all right?”

She'd been awake for only a minute. But already her mother was at the top of the stairs, squinting because she didn't have her contacts in, dressed in an old Harvard T-shirt and sweatpants.

“I'm fine, Mom.” Gemma grabbed a glass from the cabinet. She would
never
sneak out. Not that she had anywhere to sneak out to, or anyone to sneak out with, since April's parents kept her just as leashed up as Gemma's did.

Still, she imagined for a second that she was halfway to the door, dressed in tight jeans and a shirt that showed off her boobs, the only part of her body she actually
liked
, on her way to hop in her boyfriend's car, instead of standing in a darkened kitchen in her pajamas at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday night while Rufus treated her ankles to one of his signature lick-jobs. “Just needed some water.”

“Are you dehydrated?” Her mom said
dehydrated
as if it meant
dying
.

“I'm fine.” Gemma rattled the ice in her glass as she returned up the stairs, deliberately avoiding her mom's eyes. “Go back to bed, okay?”

Her mom, Kristina, hesitated. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“Uh-huh.” Gemma shut her bedroom door in Rufus's face, not caring that he immediately began to whine. She set the water on her bedside table and flopped back onto
the bed. The moon made squares on her bare legs, cutting her skin into portions of light and dark. She briefly let herself imagine what Chloe DeWitt and Aubrey Connelly were doing at that very second. She'd always been told she had a vivid imagination, but she just couldn't picture it. What was it like to be so totally, fundamentally, ruthlessly normal? What did they think about? What were their problems? Did they
have
any problems?

Rufus was still whining. Gemma got out of bed and let him in, sighing as he bounded immediately onto the bed and settled down exactly in the center of her pillow. She wasn't tired yet, anyway. She sat down instead at the vanity that had once belonged to her mother, an ornate Victorian antique she'd loved as a child and hadn't been able to tell Kristina she'd outgrown. She'd never been able to tell her parents much of anything.

The moon made hollows of her eyes in the mirror, turned her skin practically translucent. She wondered if this was how her parents always saw her: a half ghost, hovering somewhere between this life and the next.

But she wasn't sick anymore. She hadn't been sick in years, not since she was a little kid. Still, they treated her as if she might suddenly blow away, like a human house of cards, disturbed by the lightest touch.

She herself could barely remember all those years of sickness—the hospital, the operations, the treatments.
Coping, her therapist said. An
adaptive defense
.

She did remember a garden—and a statue, too. A kneeling god, she thought, but she couldn't be sure, with one arm raised to the sky, and the other reaching toward the ground, as though to draw something magic from the earth.

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 1 of Lyra's story.