Replica (26 page)

Gemma was so tired she'd forgotten to be nervous. Now, however, she remembered. “What now?” she whispered. “Do you think we can still get—?” She broke off before she said
closer
. Jake went very still.

They'd both heard it: a muffled cry.

Jake grabbed her arm and pulled her into a crouch. He brought a finger to his lips, but there was no need. Gemma was so frightened, she couldn't have made a sound if she wanted to. The silence was anything but reassuring. They'd heard a voice, a human voice, ten, twenty feet away in the marshes. Which meant that whoever had cried out was now deliberately being quiet. Creeping up on them, maybe. Waiting to attack. Gemma pictured herself handcuffed in a military facility, a single lightbulb swinging overhead, an ugly army sergeant with a face like an old baseball mitt leaning forward to spit on her.

She was scared of Chloe DeWitt, ninety-pound blond shrimpoid. She would never make it in prison.

Then again, maybe she'd just get shot in the back, hit by a sniper from a distance of a hundred yards. One breath
in and one breath out and then darkness forever.

Then they heard it: a faint rustling of the grass, followed by a sharp silence, as if someone had taken a step and then frozen. Jake was so still she couldn't even tell if he was breathing. The footstep had come from somewhere behind them. Jake gestured in the opposite direction.
Move,
he mouthed, and despite the fact that Gem's legs felt stiff and fatter than usual, she began to inch forward, shuffling crablike as quietly as possible. Her thighs were burning and tears sprang up unexpectedly in her eyes. Pathetic. Out here on the marshes in the middle of the night, crying because no one knew where she was, because she hadn't told her mom she loved her, because she hadn't told April, either, because her thighs were really out of shape and she would never wear a bathing suit again. . . . They would kill her, they would shoot first and make it look like an accident. . . .

“Who's there?”

The voice was harsh, male, and came from no more than ten feet behind her.

Gem forgot to stay down, forgot to stay quiet, forgot to keep hidden. Something screamed through her chest and into her head, an ancient voice shouting
go
, a force exploding into her muscles and lifting her to her feet. She was running. She was plunging blindly through the saw grass and the salt-eaten shrubs, ignoring the cuts on
her shins and forearms. There were shouts, now, from all around her, or so it seemed—she didn't stop, wasn't thinking, couldn't hear anything but that drumbeat of panic.

Her foot snagged and her ankle went out. She stumbled on something buried in the grass and for a second that seemed like an eternity she was in the air falling, still imagining hands to reach out and grab her. She landed so hard the wind went out of her and she curled in on herself, shocked and airless, fighting for a breath that wouldn't come. Then Jake was next to her again, pulling her up so she was sitting. She finally took a breath, a long gasp of it, and began coughing.

“Jesus,” he whispered. He was sweating. He looked like he was going to be sick. “Jesus Christ.”

“That voice,” she managed to say. “Where did it come from? Where are they?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Christ, Gemma.
Look
. . .”

She turned to see what had tripped her. Time that had moved so slowly seemed to crack entirely. For a long second she didn't understand what she was seeing, and then she thought—wished, hoped—it was an animal, some kind of strange underwater speckled thing, but then Jake drew back and began to cough, half choking, and dropped his flashlight: Gemma saw in its beam the dimpled elbow, the fingers curled in a half fist, and a green
medical bracelet strapped around the bony wrist.

She couldn't have said, then or afterward, what made her reach out to part the grasses with a hand so that she could better see the girl's face. Instinct, maybe, or shock.

She was thinner than Gemma, much thinner. Her scalp was shaved, but in places a fuzz of brown hair had begun to regrow. Her green eyes were open to the sky and her mouth was open too, as if in a silent scream. There were four freckles on the bridge of her nose, four freckles Gemma knew because she counted them every day in the mirror, because Chloe DeWitt had once taken a pen and connected them during naptime in kindergarten. The soft plump mouth that had been her grandmother's. The hard angular jaw that belonged to her dad.

Behind her, Jake was still gasping. “What the hell? What the hell?”

The girl—the dead girl—was wearing Gemma's face.

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 8 of Lyra's story.

GEMMA SOMETIMES HAD NIGHTMARES WHERE she was trapped in a crowd in an underground vault. In her dreams she was usually looking for someone, often her parents, sometimes April or even Rufus. But everywhere she turned she saw reflections of herself, not in mirrors but in the distorted faces of the people looking back at her, all of these not-Gemmas laughing the more frantic she became. She always woke up shaken and sick.

This was like that, only worse. She had the impression of swinging over a pit, as if the world might simply buck her into nothingness, and she would drown next to the dead girl who could be her twin.

She hadn't seen the stranger approach, hadn't noticed her at all, until she spoke.

“Cassiopeia?” She was extremely thin, not the kind of Chloe DeWitt thinness that came from weight-loss
shakes and detox juicing and SoulCycle, but true, not-enough-to-eat, maybe-dying-of-cancer thinness. It made her bones stand out in her cheeks, her knuckles huge and mannish, her knees like sharp kites angling for a wind. Her head was completely shaved. Above her right eyebrow was a long white scar the width of a needle.

The stranger took an uncertain step forward and nearly tripped over the girl lying dead in the mud, and she drew a sharp breath and stopped, holding herself very still. When she looked up at Gemma, her face had changed. Gemma had the impression of huge eyes sunk in that narrow face, and a question in them she didn't know how to answer. She took in the girl's clothing—a white T-shirt, streaked with mud and grass and what looked like bird shit, ugly cotton elastic-waist pants—and then the girl's breasts, braless, hardly more than two sharp nipples beneath the fabric, her bare feet, the toenails colorless. Bare feet. Where had she come from with no shoes? But Gemma knew, even before she spotted the hospital bracelet, identical to the one secured around the dead girl's wrist.

“Oh my God.” She felt as if her heart had been stilled with a hammer. She pictured it like an old-fashioned clock, splintered into uselessness. “I think—I think she's one of them.”

The Haven girl looked suddenly ferocious. “Who are you?” she said. “Where did you come from?”

“Who are
you
?” Jake's face was the bleached white of bone, but his voice was steady. Gemma wanted to reach out and take his hand. But her body wasn't obeying her correctly, and just then she was distracted by movement behind the girl, and something tall and dark and shadowed resolved itself into a boy.

“Lyra,” the girl said, and, when they said nothing, made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Number twenty-four.”

“Oh my God,” Gemma said again. Her voice sounded high and shrill and unfamiliar, as if it were being piped through a teakettle. Her mind kept reeling away from the dead girl lying not four feet away from her, the pattern of freckles on her face, the exact shape of her mouth, reeling away from the truth of it, like a magnet veering away from its pair. “There's another one.”

She knew the boy must be from Haven, too, as soon as he appeared. He was barefoot, and very thin, though not nearly so thin as the girl. Muscles showed through his T-shirt when he moved. He was mixed race and very beautiful, but there was something hard about him, too. He looked like one of the wax figurines in Madame Tussauds, where she'd gone with her mom on a trip to New York ages ago. As if you could stare and stare into his eyes and get nothing back. A person a little like a black hole: all the light vanished around him.

She didn't see the knife in his hand until the boy stepped forward so that the light showed on its blade.

“Look.” Jake put up both hands, as if he could physically stop the boy's progress. “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”

The boy gave no sign of having heard. “Who are you?” he said, keeping the knife high. Gemma realized in that second how stupid they'd been, how unprepared. They'd been scared of being arrested for trespassing. Not for a second had they considered that the Haven patients might be dangerous. Maniacs. Brain-altered killers. God only knew what kind of sick experiments they were doing there.

“We're nobody,” Jake said. Very slowly he reached down and helped Gemma to her feet. Her body felt dull and even heavier than usual, as if it belonged to somebody else. Now, standing, she had a clearer view of the dead girl who looked like her, and it was terrible, worse than any nightmare, like staring into an open grave with a mirror at the bottom of it. She thought she might fall. She hardly trusted her legs to carry her. Jake was still talking, but she could barely understand him. “Listen, we're not going to hurt you, okay? My name's Jake Witz. This is Gemma. We got lost in the marshes, that's all.”

The girl frowned and turned to Gemma. Gemma was glad for the excuse to look somewhere, anywhere other
than the body at her feet. “But who made you?”

Gemma was sure she'd misheard. “What?” she whispered.

“Who made you?” the girl repeated, more slowly this time, as if Gemma were very young or very stupid.

The wind, which had filled the marshes with a kind of constant, sibilant hiss, an underlying rhythm, went still. Gemma could feel the pressure of a thousand invisible eyes peering at her from the mud, from their many hiding places. “I—I don't understand.”

“You're a replica,” the girl said.

“A
what
?”

“A replica,” she repeated impatiently. “An organism descended from or genetically identical to a single common ancestor.” Gemma closed her eyes, hit with the sudden memory of being with her mom as a child at an art auction, bored out of her mind, listening to the auctioneer drone on and on about a vase that was supposedly the
exact replica
of the one in Versailles where Louis XVII had occasionally stored his false teeth.
Why
, her mother had leaned down to whisper,
would anyone spend so much money on a fake?

“
A clone,” she said. The word had a stupid, sci-fi sound to it. “She means a
clone
, Jake.”

Jake winced. “Yeah, well. I kind of already had that impression.” He kept his eyes on the boy with the knife.
Gemma felt panic pressing on her from all sides, from
inside
, as if thousands of tiny fists were beating inside of her to get out.

A clone. A replica. Why would anyone spend so much money on a fake?
Gemma's thoughts were whirling like a hard snow, then disintegrating when she tried to catch hold of them. “But—but it's impossible.” She knew she was hysterical, she knew she was loud, but she didn't care and couldn't help it. “It's impossible. The technology doesn't exist; it's illegal. . . .”

“It's not impossible,” the Haven girl said. Gemma had the sudden, vicious urge to punch her, to take her huge eyes out of their sockets, to get her to stop speaking, stop staring,
stop
. “At Haven, there were thousands of replicas.”

“Jesus,” Jake whispered. He closed his eyes for a second, and she saw that he looked almost restful. Peaceful. As if they hadn't just stumbled on a
girl with Gemma's exact face
, her chest black with blood; as if they hadn't found two survivors of the place, looking scared but also dangerous, like wild animals. “
Clones
. It all makes sense now.”

“Are you crazy?
Nothing
makes sense.” Gemma's heart was twitching like a dying bug. “There's a
dead girl
with
my face
on her.” Jake turned to her, looking stricken, as if she'd reached out and slapped him. She wished she had.
She had the urge to slap him, to shake him, to shake the whole world and force it right again, like how her dad smacked the cable box whenever service was coming in weird. Thinking of her dad, of her home, suddenly made her feel very young and very afraid. She wished she'd listened to her parents. They'd been right all along. She should never have come. She wasn't strong enough. “We're standing here in the middle of the fucking night and these—these people are telling me that there are clones running around out there, thousands of them—”

“Gemma, calm down.” Jake put a hand on her arm. She nearly screamed. But she was afraid to open her mouth again—afraid of losing it completely.

Her father had known about Haven. All this time, he'd known.

“Everyone needs to calm down, okay?” Jake was saying. The boy with the knife had tensed up again. “Can you put that thing down, please? We're not going to hurt you.” The boy lowered the knife, finally. Jake had said the right thing, but Gemma didn't care. Even though they were standing in open air, she felt the sky might at any second collapse and bury them. She kneaded her chest with one hand, willing her heartbeat to slow down. The girl, she noticed, looked sick also. Somehow this made her feel less afraid. They couldn't be
that
dangerous, even if they did have a knife and look like creepy escaped psych
inmates from a horror film. And when the girl couldn't stand anymore and instead crouched and ducked her head between her knees, breathing slowly, obviously trying to control her nausea, Gem felt sorry for her, and annoyed at the boy with the knife. He barely glanced at her.

She took a deep breath. “What's the matter with her?” No one answered.

Without really intending to, she moved slowly toward the girl. When the girl shuddered, her spine stood out, almost architectural beneath her shirt, and for the first time in her life Gemma was actually happy she wasn't thin. She bent over. Her hand, as it floated toward the girl's shoulder, looked like a foreign object, a balloon or a spacecraft. “Are you okay?”

For a millisecond she was surprised by the feel of the girl's warmth, the tautness of her skin and the muscle beneath it. The girl looked so insubstantial, Gemma had almost expected a hand would pass through her. Then the girl jerked away and Gemma took a quick step backward, her breath catching. The girl had looked at her with something close to hatred, and Gemma was again reminded of an animal—once a few years ago one of their handymen had cornered a rabid raccoon on the property and her father had taken out his rifle to shoot it, and she'd never forgotten how its eyes looked, desperate and wild, before the bullet hit.

“Maybe she's hungry,” Jake said.

The girl said nothing—she wrapped her arms around her knees and dropped her head again, her spine rising and falling with every breath—but the boy took a step forward. “You have food?” His face was so full of open need that Gemma felt another lurch of pity. Had they been starved at Haven?

Jake squatted to rifle through his backpack. “Sorry,” he said, producing a few granola bars and two bottles of water. “We didn't bring much.”

The boy ate in a way that reminded Gemma of a squirrel, holding the granola bar with two hands and chewing quickly until it was all gone. He took water and drank half a bottle before passing it over to the girl, still crouching next to him. He said something too low for Gemma to hear, but the girl took the water from him and drank, and immediately she looked a little better. She would be very beautiful, Gemma thought, if she were heavier, if the lost, dark look of her eyes could somehow be warmed.

Jake couldn't take his eyes off them, the boy and the girl, and Gemma could hardly stand to look at him. She guessed that for him this was the end of a long mystery, the final act. For her this was the start. Her old world had exploded and she'd been born again into a new one. All she wanted was to go back.

“Look,” Jake said to them. “I know you must be tired—you've been through—I don't even
know
what you've been through . . .”

Gemma thought she knew what he wanted, but hoped she was wrong. “Jake, no,” she said warningly. She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to push back the drumbeat of a migraine that was beating dully somewhere behind her eyes.

“They've been living in Haven, Gemma,” Jake said quickly, as if she hadn't understood. “My father died for this. I need to know.”

“Jake,
no
.” The migraine exploded into existence: she imagined some sicko with a hammer pummeling her brain. “I don't believe you. I literally don't believe you. These poor people have been through God knows what—they're starving and cold and they have no place to go—and you want to
interview
them—”

“I don't want to interview them. I want to understand.”

“Not people.” The girl spoke up unexpectedly. Gemma turned to face her.

“What?” she said. The girl was holding the water bottle tightly, her knuckles standing out. But she seemed calm.

“We're not people,” she said. Her voice had a low, musical quality, but it was strangely without affect, as if she hadn't been taught to feel or at least to express herself. “You said, ‘These poor people have been through God
knows what.' But we're replicas. God didn't make us. Dr. Saperstein did. He's
our
God.”

All of Gemma's anger evaporated in an instant. She was alone momentarily in the dark with this thin, frail girl, this
clone
, who believed she was not a person. Gemma wanted to hug her. She wanted to understand, too—how she had become this way, how she had been made and why, who had taught her that God was out of reach. And she knew then that Jake was right, in a way. All the answers she needed, all the mysteries of her past, were bound up in the girl and boy from the island. She was still afraid of them, but also afraid for them in a way she couldn't verbalize. But she couldn't leave them alone. They had to stay close.

“We should camp here for the night,” she heard herself say, before she even knew that she was going to suggest it. Jake looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. Maybe she had. “We'll go back to Wahlee in the morning.”

The boy seemed uncertain. “We're not going anywhere with you.”

“No,” Gemma said evenly. “No, you don't have to go with us. Not unless you want to.”