Replica (25 page)

Gemma keystroked through a few pages, most of them decorated with grinning skulls or licks of flame and peppered with biblical verse and lots of exclamation points. “She thinks they're raising people from the dead at Haven?” she asked.

“She
thought
that,” he said quietly. “If she really is responsible for what happened, if she did turn herself into one gigantic IED, like they're saying, she's scattered across the marshes by now.” He shook his head, and Gemma couldn't help but think: another person dead. Another person dead because of Haven. Nurse M, Jake's father, and now this woman, Angel Fire. “She must have timed her message to go out to a bunch of people at once. Even the news channels got wind of it, and they're always the last to know anything.” He closed the laptop and slipped it into his backpack—which was, predictably, black—and stood up. “So? Are you ready?”

“I guess so.” She knew it was stupid to be freaked out by some nutter's theory about Haven and its weird science. But she couldn't shake the image of people staggering through the darkness of the marshes, reaching for her with clammy hands.

“You need to be
sure
sure.” Jake stood up. “We might get arrested.”

Suddenly, though, Gemma felt as if all those Sour Patch Kids were nails trying to claw back out of her throat. She had the sense that being arrested would be the best thing that might happen to them.

Jake had told her that several weeks after his father died, he'd woken up in the middle of the night, certain that someone had just shaken him awake. But he was in the room alone. Still, every few minutes he felt a phantom pressure on his shoulder, as though someone was tapping him.

“I know what you're probably thinking,” he'd said, a little too forcefully. “But I don't believe in things like that. Spirits, voices from the grave. I'm not like my dad.”

Still, the impression of a
presence
wouldn't leave him. Every few minutes, there was a tap-tap on his shoulder. So he had stood up, walked down the stairs, and walked straight out of the house.

His mom had just returned from Las Vegas, where she'd been living doing God knows what, essentially refusing to recognize the existence of her son except in the occasional birthday message, usually an email sent a few days late. Within a month, she would be gone again, and Jake would move in with his dad's sister, a widow who'd never had children and never wanted any.

Guided by a certainty he could never afterward explain, he had walked the five miles to the Wahlee basin
campsite where he and his father had set off so many times together, and found a rowboat pitted with rust, likely left there by a local fisherman. The whole time, he said, he could feel an occasional tap on his shoulder, like a kind of Morse code, telling him to go on.

He had no compass. No water. No supplies. And yet somehow that night, alone in the marshes, he knew exactly where to go.

Dawn was breaking by the time he saw a bank of spruce and knew he'd reached Spruce Island. The institute was hidden from view. He realized he must have rowed all the way around to the west side of the island, which was still undeveloped. The security was lighter, too. There was a fence, and guard towers, but at dawn they were abandoned.

And still the finger kept tap-tap-tapping on his shoulder.

He pulled his boat up onto shore, less than ten feet away from a downed tree that had taken down a four-foot section of the fence.

He was on the island less than ten minutes before he was caught, thrown to the ground by military-style guards, frog-marched across the island and out to the dock, where police were already waiting for him. He never went near the main buildings, had only the briefest glimpse of the white-walled institute and the people inside it.

But it was enough.

She looked around the room, wishing she didn't have the melodramatic feeling she was seeing it for the last time. Even though it had been her idea to try and get to Haven tonight—or maybe because it had been—she felt she couldn't back out now. “I'm sure,” she said, grabbing the only sweatshirt she'd brought. She wished it weren't bright pink.

Jake was obviously thinking the same thing, because he frowned. “Take this.” He wrestled a black Windbreaker out of his backpack. It was a warm night, but the mosquitoes on the marshes, he told her, were killer.

Jake's car was so old it seemed predominantly composed of duct tape and string. “Sorry,” he said, with an apologetic smile that made Gemma's heart purr. “But at least you're getting door-to-door service.”

The car rattled so hard when he accelerated she was sure she was about to be expelled from her seat, that the car would just roll over and give up, panting, like a tired dog, but she didn't want to complain, and sat there white-knuckling her seat so hard her fingers ached.

“Just a few more miles,” Jake said. They'd looped around to approach Wahlee from the north, on one of the few roads that gave access to the nature reserve, and the bouncing of the headlights made Gemma feel seasick.

Miraculously, they made it without incident, although
Gemma could have sworn that the car gave a relieved sigh when Jake cut the engine. Stepping outside, she was immediately overwhelmed by the sound of the tree frogs. They were so loud and so uniform they seemed like a single entity, like the heartbeat of the world rising and falling. Even here, she thought she detected a faint smell of smoke.

Jake removed a flashlight from his backpack and gestured for Gemma to follow him. The Wahlee Nature Reserve was technically closed at sunset, and theirs was the only car. They moved onto one of the paths that cut into a thicket of pine and mangrove trees, and immediately Gemma felt a difference in the ground, a sponginess that made her heart turn over a little. Jake had told her casually that all the islands and marshes around here would be gone in twenty years, swallowed up by water. She imagined the trees submerged, stretching ghostly fingers up toward a sun filtered through layers of murky water. She wondered what April would think now, if she knew that Gemma was following a boy she didn't know into a darkened nature reserve with no one around for miles.

She didn't know anymore whether she was glad or worried that she hadn't told anyone where she was going.

They walked for fifteen minutes, though it felt like longer, and the sticky, humid air seemed to get all tangled up
in Gemma's lungs. After a certain point they didn't seem to be following a path at all, and she had no idea how Jake was sure that he was heading in the right direction. The marshes had tides that shifted subtly and without sound: the water wouldn't even warn them before appearing suddenly beneath their feet. Jake stopped and touched her elbow.

“We're close,” he said. “Go carefully. There are tidal pools here.”

“Okay,” Gemma said. Her voice sounded strange in the humid darkness, like it was being muffled by a pillow. She was sorry when Jake took his hand away.

A few paces farther on, Jake stopped completely and angled his flashlight at a patch of ghostly white saw grass, running down to a black expanse she now recognized as an inlet. Partially concealed beneath a myrtle oak was a bright-red kayak, which he'd rented from a local boat shop and stashed earlier that night. It was skinny and long as a Popsicle. Gemma's stomach dropped.

“I don't think we're both going to fit,” Gemma said desperately, as Jake bent over to drag the kayak free of the growth.

“Of course we will. It's a two-seater.” He pointed with the flashlight. There were, in fact, two seats in the kayak—if you could call them seats. Gemma thought they looked like those car seats meant for toddlers.

I'm not going to fit,
Gemma wanted to say. But of course she couldn't. Not to him. Jake was the kind of guy who had size-zero girlfriends who modeled locally and were always complaining about trying to find clothes small enough.

“Can't we get another boat?” she asked desperately. “A
boat
boat?”

He must have thought she was kidding, because he only laughed.

“Anything bigger will just get stuck. Some of the channels out there are so narrow even the kayak's a stretch.” Jake bent down and shoved the kayak down into the water, which sucked at the plastic with a wet farting sound. He steadied it with a foot. “Besides, it's more comfortable than it looks.”

He clambered easily into the kayak—or the floating Popsicle—and somehow enfolded his long legs inside it, as if he were just sitting down in a chair. Then he maneuvered the kayak so he could reach out a hand to help Gemma inside.

“Come on,” he said. “You'll be fine.”

She bit her lip. She had a sudden vision of getting stuck in her seat, of having to be hauled out of the kayak by a crane. Or worse, of not being able to fit inside in the first place. But she took his hand. As soon as she placed a foot into the kayak, it began bucking like a badly trained
horse, and if the boat hadn't still been rooted in the mud of the bank, she was sure the whole thing would have gone over.

“All right, now the other foot . . . there you go, easy now . . .”

Somehow she managed to climb in without flipping the kayak, and even more miraculously, managed to squeeze herself down into the hard plastic seat, feeling a little like an elephant in a girdle.

“See?” Jake used a plastic paddle to push them out of the mud and turn them in the right direction. He was smiling at her again, his teeth white in the moonlight. “Not so bad, is it?”

“For the record,” Gemma blurted out, “this is
exactly
as comfortable as it looks.”

“Aw, come on. Don't be a baby.” But he was still smiling. And as they began to move through the marshes, her spirits lifted. Jake had given her a paddle but instructed her not to use it, and she was happy to let him do the work. They progressed steadily and in near silence except for the slurping of the water on the paddles. They'd agreed in advance that they should try and avoid talking as much as possible, in case there were patrols on the marshes.

So far it seemed their gamble—that after what had happened, security would be trying to get everyone out, not worrying about people trying to get in—was correct.
Occasionally helicopters passed in the distance on their way to and from the island, but less frequently now. And Gemma knew they must still be ferrying people
from
the island. It was unlikely, however, that given Haven's security, any survivors had even
made
it onto the marshes, which explained why they were putting hardly any effort into searching for them.

After an hour they'd met no one, heard no one, although occasionally they seemed to hear shouting in the distance, and Gemma knew they were still quite far from Haven. The marshes really did look like a labyrinth, full of narrow channels that forced them back toward the mainland before they could find another vein of water to follow in the right direction. Every few minutes, Jake stopped to consult the compass on his phone. With the saw grass growing as high as a tall man and mangrove trees furry with overhanging moss, they would have otherwise had no way of knowing where the mainland was and which way led to open ocean.

But there was a strange beauty to the marshes, and the tangles of dark weeds that drifted just below the surface of the water and came up on Jake's paddle, like long, dark fingers drawing him back, and the saw grass painted white with bird guano. The moon was full and bright, even behind a wispy covering of smoke, and so close Gemma could see individual craters, a pattern of trenches and
shadow that made a grinning face. Jake picked out constellations to show her, and Gemma thought they all looked like they were winking down at her, letting her in on some secret. Jake obviously loved the marshes, despite what had happened to his dad here, and he told her stories of camping trips and frog-hunting expeditions, how his dad had renamed all the stars he didn't know and claimed Orion's Belt had been named for a drunk god who liked to pee in the Wahlee. Jake shook his head.
I believed him for so many years.
He smiled.
Whenever I see Orion's Belt, I think of him.

It occurred to Gemma that this was the second time in the past twenty-four hours she'd been squeezed next to a cute boy in a strange vehicle. Maybe tomorrow she would meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger who'd want to take her on a motorcycle ride. Maybe she'd end up in Vegas working for the mob as a professional blackjack dealer.

At that moment, anything at all seemed possible.

She lost track of time completely but knew they must be getting closer. Sometimes she thought she heard the echo of overlapping voices, and once Jake froze, sticking the paddle down into the mud and shoving them into the shadow of an overhanging sand oak. But the voices always receded. If there were other people out in the darkness, the marshes were expansive enough to keep them at a distance.

At one point, Jake fished out his phone to check the
time and Gemma saw that he looked exhausted. She felt horrible: she hadn't been helping at all, and he'd been paddling for nearly two hours.

“One a.m.,” he said. He was a little out of breath. “We must be getting close.”

“You need a break,” Gemma said.

“I'm okay,” Jake said, completely unconvincingly.

“You're a terrible liar,” Gemma said firmly. “You need a break.” She, too, needed to stretch. Her feet had gone numb hours ago.

He didn't argue again. He angled the kayak up into the shallows and freed himself, so tired he didn't even complain when he sank a leg shin-deep in the mud. He helped shove the kayak onto sturdier ground so she could disembark. A rush of sudden feeling invaded her legs and she nearly stumbled. Jake caught her and for a second she was close to him, his hands on her elbow, his lips bow-shaped and his jaw just stubbled with hair and his eyes unreadable in the dark. She quickly pulled away.

She helped him haul the kayak farther into the grass so it wouldn't drift away. The saw grass grew nearly to shoulder height, and Gemma was glad, now, for the Windbreaker: it was sharp, and left sores on her exposed skin. As they hacked through the grass, for the first time in hours she spotted Spruce Island, by this point so close she could make out individual trees, and the spiky points
of the guard towers, which looked to be abandoned. They had somehow come around the westernmost tip of the island, which was densely overgrown. She could make out none of the buildings, although some lingering smoke indicated a point in the distance where they must have been.