Replica (27 page)

Once again, Jake just stared at her, as if a hand had just emerged from her mouth and started waving.

“Why would we want to?” the boy asked.

Gemma ignored Jake, speaking directly to the boy. “You can't plan on staying here forever. You have no
money. No ID. You're not even supposed to exist. And there will be people looking for you.”

She would have known this even if she hadn't seen, earlier that night, the helicopters pass overhead for hours, even if she hadn't seen soldiers outfitted in riot gear patrolling the coast. If the girl was telling the truth—and Gemma had proof that she was, in the form of the corpse she could hardly stand to look at—and Haven had indeed been full of clones, there had to be a reason for all the secrecy, the protections, the confidentiality. It should have been a miracle for modern science. The scientists who'd perfected the process should have won Nobel Prizes. Everyone in the world should have known about it. And yet nobody did.

The question was: Why?

She knew that whoever was in charge wouldn't allow the products of his or her experiments to run free, not when those products could talk and think for themselves. She assumed the only reason that the girl and boy, the
replicas
, hadn't been found and taken into custody already was because of all the chaos. Probably they were still counting the dead and the missing. Staying on the marshes for any length of time was a huge risk. But Gemma sensed that the clones weren't ready to move yet, and she knew that she had to stay close to them, that the ember of truth was here, with them. She needed time to think and to plan.

She expected more resistance from Jake. But he only shook his head and said, “We should try and get some sleep. We'll want to get off the marshes as soon as possible.” And the clones didn't argue anymore. They obviously didn't want to be too far from the food and water.

They moved to the far side of a contorted thicket of mangrove trees that blocked them from a view of the body. Gemma didn't want to camp so close to the dead girl. She couldn't stand to think of her, that face like her face hollowed out by hunger, the hair that Gemma sweated and toiled to keep straight shaved close to her fragile scalp. She had never been superstitious, but it felt like a bad omen, as if the fate of her double might wear off on her.

On the other hand, she didn't want to go far in the darkness, and the girl and the boy, the replicas, were exhausted. The replicas bedded down side by side, although Gemma noticed that they hardly spoke or even acknowledged each other. As if they each belonged two separate realities that only coexisted momentarily.

Jake fell asleep right away, using a rolled-up towel as a pillow and clutching his backpack as though it were a teddy bear. Gemma, however, lay awake long after even the replicas had fallen asleep. It wasn't just because she was physically uncomfortable—she was clammy and too hot; the whine of mosquitoes needled her; the ground was
uneven and unpleasantly spongy; she was dirty and she was sure that she smelled—but because of an itchy, hard-to-name feeling
inside
, like the wriggling of thousands of ants under her skin, in her blood and her veins. She imagined the girl on the other side of the trees, the second-Gemma, coming to life again, slithering through the mud, reaching for Gemma's face with bloodied fingernails, reaching for Gemma's hair, demanding it back. . . . She had to sit up, stifling a cry of terror.

Someone had cloned her. It was the only explanation that made sense, but she couldn't accept it. Had her father known? Was that why he had left Fine & Ives, and ruptured forever with his business partner? Was that why he'd wanted Haven shut down? A scientist had taken a sample of Gemma's DNA when she was a baby and used it to make another Gemma. Except . . .

The dead girl wasn't just another Gemma. She had Gemma's DNA, her face and her freckles, but even now her insides were liquefying, her stomach bloating with gases. She'd had a different name, different memories and preferences, and a very different life. Two people built of the same material, but radically separated by experience and now by death.

Had her father known? Or had he only suspected?

Maybe during one of her many hospital stays as a baby, someone had stolen some tissue from her without her
parents' knowledge. That must be it. There would have to be a black market for things like this, places on the internet you could go to buy kiddie porn and new livers and medical samples.

She knew that was nonsensical, though. What were the chances that her DNA had randomly ended up in the same research institute her father's company had helped fund?

She would never sleep. How could she, with that dead girl, that doubled girl, so close by? So many thoughts were turning in her head, she felt dizzy. She had to
know
. She had to understand this place, and what her father's connection to it had been. What
her
connection to it was.

It was much harder to get into the kayak without Jake there to steady her, and again she had a fear of turning over and getting stuck, like a banana in a too-tight skin. But she managed it eventually and, after flailing around with the paddle for a bit, loosed herself from the tangle of long grass and reeds and maneuvered into the dark, glassy water. She didn't even know how to read a compass, even though her phone must have had one. But she felt confident that she was sufficiently close to the island that she wouldn't get lost, and she even had the idea of tying her sweatshirt to the overhanging branches of one of the mangrove trees, so that she would be able to find her way back.

After only a few minutes, she regretted the decision.
Paddling was much harder than Jake had made it look. Her heart was soon thumping and her shoulders ached. And she had to keep angling into the shadows and sloshing onto miniature pockets of land to orient herself. Down in the water she could see nothing, not with the mangroves crowding her and the reeds tall and spindly and white as bone. After a little while, the water became scummy with a fine layer of trash from the island, not just ash but human things, old buttons and charred plastic pieces and even bits of paper. She found a laminated ID entangled among the reeds: the picture showed a grim-faced black woman and indicated low-security clearance. She pocketed it. Now the thudding of her heart had nothing to do with the effort of paddling.

She came around a bend and sucked in a sharp breath: there beyond another stretch of muddy water was the fence, and empty guard towers, and trees blackened by fire beyond it. She must still be on the side of the island that had never been developed, because she could see only one long building through the trees, a shed or a storehouse that appeared abandoned. She dragged the kayak onto the shore and set out through the reeds down the narrow beach, as frogs splashed noisily into the water to avoid her, keeping very low to the ground in case there were still soldiers patrolling.

Here in the shallows was even more garbage, accu
mulated trash frothing against the grass. She angled her phone to the ground as a makeshift flashlight. She found a small rectangular sign, the kind that hung on office doors, indicating the way to Storeroom C, whatever that was. Its plastic was melted at the edges, so the sign looked as if it were bleeding out. She saw bits of plaster and white things studded between the rocks that she realized with a surge of nausea looked like pieces of bone. There were occasional stretches of sticky-dark stains, blacker than shadow, that she knew must be blood. The explosion must have been tremendous. And then of course had come the wind, which had carried the smell of burning all the way to Barrel Key and blown the fire into a conflagration.

After five minutes the trees thinned and the smell of charred plastic and campfire and something sweeter and deeper and more unpleasant intensified. At last she could see buildings—or at least, a single building—huge and rectangular and stained with soot, its windows shattered so that it appeared to be staring blankly out over the water. She was shocked to see the fire still burning, glowing dimly inside the building so that the walls were turned the strange translucent pinkish glow of a heart. She dropped into a crouch when she saw movement, pocketing her phone. Dimly she heard people calling to one another, and saw as her eyes adjusted people outfitted in firefighters' rubber pants and heavy boots. As she
watched, she realized they were in fact stoking the fire, keeping it going, keeping it under control. And she understood that they'd been charged with burning the rest of Haven down, to make sure there was nothing left. She could go no farther, not without risking being caught.

Although the firefighters must have been a thousand yards away, she still winced when she stepped backward and heard a sharp crack. Turning, she saw that she'd stepped on a framed photograph, further shattering the cracked plastic that encased it. She bent down to retrieve it but could make out nothing more than a blur of dark figures. She pocketed it anyway and moved down the beach again, back in the direction she'd come. She waited until she could no longer hear the people or see the glow of fire through the trees before fishing out her phone again for light.

She recognized the man in the photo, heavily bearded and wearing a lab coat, as Dr. Saperstein, the current Haven director, from a picture she'd seen on the internet. He was outside, squinting against the sun, and in the distance she recognized the building she'd just watched burning, although the photograph was taken at a different angle, as though from an interior courtyard. Behind him was a statue—
the
statue.

In her memories, indistinct as they were, she'd always assumed that the statue represented some kind of god, but
now she saw it was a David-like figure, a mortal, one arm thrown to the sky, one arm reaching down as though to draw something from the earth. In the photograph she could just make out a strand of DNA, represented by ribbons of interlocking stone, beneath its hand. The man in the statue had the posture of God forming Adam from the dust. It was a statue meant to represent the people at Haven and the work they were doing, the way they formed life from the earth, the way they had taken over for God.

And she, Gemma, remembered it. It was her earliest memory. Which meant: she'd been here before.

Made here.
The idea was there, lodged in her mind, before she could unthink it. Made, manufactured, like the weird veggie patty they served in the cafeteria in school. She felt wild, dramatic, desperate. She thought for a second she might simply sit down and refuse to move, just wait for the salt to eat through her and the crabs to pick apart her bones.

But no. A new idea struck her and this time it felt like salvation, like finding a rope in the middle of a freezing riptide—she
couldn't
have been made at Haven, not cloned like the girl and boy claimed they had been. Like her double must have been. She'd seen dozens of pictures of her mom in the hospital, clutching an infant Gemma to her chest, sweaty and exhausted-looking,
just moments after birth. There was one of her parents together, and minutes-old Gemma red and swaddled in a yellow blanket, and another of a nurse with a bottle of champagne. It was obviously Gemma in the pictures. Even then she'd had soft curls of brown hair and a snub nose that made it look as if it were being supported by an invisible thumb.

She felt calmer. She could breathe again. She was being silly. She might have visited Haven with her dad. And although she associated the statue with the idea of a long stay, she knew she might have made that up, or confused Haven with another one of the hospitals she'd been to as a child.

It was just after five thirty—time to get back, although she dreaded the return, of getting close to that horrible other who would rot out here with no one to mourn or bury her. But already, long electric tentacles of pink were swimming up through the darkness from the horizon. She knew she had to wake the others. It was time to get off the marshes.

She removed the photograph from its broken frame, folded it, and pocketed it next to the laminated ID she'd found entangled in the weeds. She was almost tempted to leave the photograph behind—carrying it made her feel jumpy and also ashamed, as if it were contraband or evidence of a crime. And it was evidence, although she didn't
know, hadn't yet figured out, exactly what the crime had been.

Paddling felt even harder on the way back. Her arms ached and the lack of sleep had taken its toll. She was thirsty and exhausted. Even as it was driven off by the rising sun, the darkness played tricks on her. She kept thinking she saw movement in her peripheral vision, kept whipping around, half expecting to see another bloodied version of herself, holding her paddle like a weapon, only to see nothing but an insect skimming the water or a bullfrog blinking at her between the rushes.

It was lucky that the sky was lightening or she might never have found her way back. She passed dozens of mangrove trees extending out over the water, many of them overhung with mosses that in the dark might have looked like her sweatshirt. But she made it back a little after six and was surprised to find Jake and both clones still asleep. She knelt next to Jake.

“Hey,” she said. He woke suddenly, and for a second as he was still enveloped in sleep, Gemma saw a look of terror seize him. He blinked and it passed. She wondered whether he'd been having a nightmare.

She didn't want to touch the others—she hadn't forgotten how the girl had jerked away from her. Instead she stood at a careful distance and called to them until the boy came awake with a start, on his feet and reaching for his
knife before he was fully awake.

“It's okay,” Gemma said quickly, as his eyes slowly found focus. “It's just me. Gemma, remember?” The boy wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. His chest rose and fell beneath his T-shirt, and again Gemma was struck by how beautiful he was, beautiful and strange and wild-looking, like a new and undiscovered species. She couldn't fathom that he'd spent his whole life behind a fence. He was the kind of person who looked like he should be sailing on open seas, or parachuting down a mountain.