Replica (30 page)

“Where's April?” Gemma asked, drawing a glass of water from the sink and drinking deeply. She felt as if she was washing away the taste of the marshes, still burned into the back of her throat.

“She went out,” he said, giving her a smile that could have launched a thousand memes. Strangely, though, it
was Pete she wished for, Pete she wanted to see. Pete belonged to her life Before. “She kept asking questions, but I wasn't sure what I should and shouldn't say. I think she got tired of me.”

He shrugged, and Gemma stopped herself from saying she doubted it. More likely, April had gone out before she could murder Jake by slow humping.

“Did you sleep?” he asked, and Gemma nodded. She nearly told him about the nightmare but didn't.

Gemma pulled out a chair and sat down across from him, cupping her chin in her hands. “How about you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I've been running searches on the explosions, you know. Just trying to sort out what really happened.” He made a face. “You won't believe this.”

“Try me,” she said. Twenty-four hours ago, she wouldn't have believed in clones, or that she'd paddle a kayak across an ash-strewn marshland to try and sneak onto what might as well be a military base, or that somewhere in the world there was a girl bearing her exact likeness. Now she thought she might believe anything.

“The woman who strapped herself full of explosives—”

“Angel Fire,” Gemma said, remembering the name from the message that had come in to the Haven Files.

He nodded. “Right. Angel Fire. She left a backpack at Barrel Key. Maybe she camped there overnight, I don't
know. And she had
every single page
of the Haven Files printed out and stashed in her backpack.” He looked vaguely nauseous. “The website keeps crashing.”

A bad feeling worked at the bottom of Gemma's stomach, like someone had a fist around her intestines. “That's not good, Jake,” she said. “The police will come for you next.”

He laughed, but without humor. “Already have. I missed two calls from some Detective Lieutenant something.”

“What are you going to do?” Gemma asked.

Jake started ordering things on the table, lining up edges, the way he'd done in the diner. A nervous tic, obviously. “I'll be all right,” he said, although he didn't sound convinced. “I had nothing to do with it, anyway. They can't pin anything on me.”

Gemma hoped he was right. “You never told me what happened to Richard Haven,” she said.

Jake sighed and closed his laptop. For a split second, he looked much older. “Killed,” he said simply. “Only a few years after Haven was built. Car accident while he was on vacation in Palm Beach.” She remembered, now, reading something about Richard Haven's death, when she'd first been searching for information about the institute. Already it seemed like a different lifetime. “Most Havenites don't think it was an accident.”

“Havenites?” Gemma repeated, and Jake blushed.

“Sorry,” he said. “That's what the Haven groupies call themselves. My dad was the biggest Havenite of all.”

Gemma absorbed this. “So it was murder? Another murder?” That would make Jake's father, Nurse M, whoever she was, and Richard Haven all victims of murder made to look like accidents or suicides instead.

“It was broad daylight,” Jake said. He leaned back in his chair. “There was no rain, no bad weather, nothing. And from the way the car was positioned and the place it went off the road, it looked like Richard Haven must have swerved to avoid someone. But no one ever came forward.”

“But it doesn't make sense,” Gemma said. “The other woman, the nurse who committed suicide—”

“Nurse M,” Jake said.

“Right. I mean, she was threatening to talk to the media, wasn't she? Your dad was supposed to
interview
her.” He nodded. “I can understand why she'd be a threat. But Richard Haven founded the institute. He wouldn't have wanted it shut down or exposed or whatever.”

Jake rubbed his eyes. “As far as we know,” he said. “But that's the thing. We don't know. Richard Haven was in it from the beginning—before the military got their hands in it through Fine and Ives. Maybe he was having doubts. Maybe he wanted to back out of the whole agreement.
Or maybe he just decided he wanted recognition for his life's work. There could be a thousand reasons he became dangerous.”

Gemma absorbed this in silence. Outside the window, the sun had sunk below the rooftops, leaving only a smear of red behind, like a bloody handprint. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Time to wake up our sleeping beauties.”

The houses in this complex were nestled one right next to the other. From above it must have looked like a jigsaw puzzle of roofs and tiled pools and squat gardenia bushes. Gemma could smell someone grilling, and hear the blare of a television from a nearby house. It was weird to think of all those other people so close, fixing dinner or watching Netflix or worrying about their bills, totally unaware of the explosion that had punched through Gemma's life.

She felt very alone.

The guesthouse was dark. The replicas were still sleeping. Gemma could hear the boy snoring. She eased the door to the bedroom shut, figuring that if she wanted to get the truth about Haven she would need to start by buttering them up a little, earning their trust. She rooted around in the guesthouse cabinets until she found a pot.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked.

“Haven't you ever heard?” Gemma next began opening
the cans of chili she'd bought at Walmart. “Fastest way to a person's heart is through the stomach.”

Jake smiled. “Ah. Of course. That's why the police use so many cupcakes in their interrogations.” His hair had a funny cowlick, and for some reason it made Gemma sad. It was so
normal
. She knew she'd never feel normal again, not ever.

She had always joked about feeling like an alien, but she knew now that until today she'd had no idea what that meant.

“We're not interrogating them. We're talking to them. It's different.” The stove sputtered for several seconds before it lit. “Turn on a light, will you? I can't see anything.”

The room flared into shape, blandly reassuring: seashell prints on the walls, a sign in the kitchen that said
This Way to the Beach
. Jake wandered over to the small antique roll-away desk, which was the only piece of furniture in the whole open-plan room that wasn't white or beach themed. Suddenly, he sucked in a sharp breath, as if he'd just seen a snake.

“What?” she asked “What is it?”

He had picked up a manila folder, the kind Gemma associated with dental records. “It's a medical report from Haven.” He looked up. His eyes were burning again with that dark light, the kind that seemed to absorb and not
reflect. “They must have brought it with them.”

He moved to the couch with the report and powered up his computer again. Gemma came to look. The folder was disappointingly light and contained only a single, double-sided report. Still, it was something. She leaned over and read from the heading.
Form 475-A. Release Authorization and Toxicity Report. Human Model 576.

“What does it mean?” she asked. The whole report might as well have been written in another language. Every other phrase was one like
over-conversion
or
neural impairment
or some string of weird chemical-looking codes like vCJD-12 or pR-56.

“Let's ask the oracle,” Jake said. “Google,” he clarified, when she looked at him.

She sat on the arm of the couch, because when she leaned any farther she was forced to inhale him, the new soap smell and the warmth of his skin, and she got distracted. But she felt awkward sitting there, posed and clumsy, like an overinflated doll, and so she returned to the stove just to have something to do.

When the bedroom door opened, she spun around, startled. Lyra looked better than she had on the marshes. Pretty, despite the sallowness of her skin and her cheekbones like beveled edges. But there was something frightening about Lyra's stillness, and the blandness of her facial expression, as if there was nothing inside directing
her, as if she were hollow, like a puppet.

Gemma slopped some of the chili into a bowl. “Here,” she said. Her voice sounded hysterical in the silence. “Chili. From a can. Sorry, I can't cook. You need to eat.”

Lyra didn't thank her. She didn't say anything. She didn't even sit down. She just took the bowl from Gemma automatically and began to eat mechanically, holding the spoon wrong and the bowl to her lips and shoveling the chili into her open mouth. It was strange to see a girl so fragile eat like that, like she was actually a trash compactor. Weirdly, Gemma liked her better for it.

“Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” Jake said, and Gemma jumped. This was it: they were on the verge of understanding. Suddenly all her fear left her at once. It was like standing at the top of a really steep sledding hill and then letting go. There was nothing to do anymore but ride. “That's a category of disease. Mad cow is a TSE.”

“Okay.” Gemma went to sit next to Jake on the couch again. It was better than standing next to Lyra, the living evidence of whatever deranged experiments they were doing at Haven. “But what does that mean?”

“I don't know.” Jake rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “There are just references to it in the report.”

At the sink, Lyra released her bowl with a clatter. Gemma looked up and saw she'd gone very still. “You
shouldn't be looking at that,” she said. Gemma wondered at Lyra's loyalty to Haven—was she trying to protect its secrets?

“Why not?” Jake turned to Lyra. “You stole it, didn't you?”

“Yes,” Lyra said evenly. “But that's different.”

“It's not like they'll miss it now. The whole place is an ash heap.”

“Jake,” Gemma said quickly. For the first time, Lyra had flinched.

He shrugged. “Sorry. But it's true.” He didn't sound sorry at all. He sounded angry. And Gemma knew how he felt. If even a fraction of what they suspected of Haven was true, she was glad it had burned to the ground. She bent forward over the report again, trying to make sense of the baffling medical terminology and shorthand. Among the jumble of terms she couldn't understand, she spotted repeated references to Human Model 576,
generation seventeen
,
cluster yellow
. “Lyra, do you know what these groups mean?” Gemma kept her voice light. Lyra was still motionless by the sink, as if she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do. Maybe she was. “The patient—the replica, I mean.” She looked up, wondering whether she had used the term correctly. After a second, Lyra barely nodded. “She was in the yellow cluster?”

“The Yellows died,” Lyra said. Gemma went cold.
There was something terrible in Lyra's matter-of-factness. “There were about a hundred of them,” she went on, “all from the youngest crops.” She could have been talking about anything. Groceries. The weather. Toilet paper. “Crops are for different generations. But colors are for clusters. So I'm third crop, green cluster.” She held up her wrist, and Gemma saw the green hospital bracelet, truly saw it, for the first time. “They must have made a mistake with the Yellows. Sometimes they did that. Made mistakes. The Pinks died, too.”

“They all died?” Jake asked.

Lyra nodded. “They got sick.”

“Oh my God.” According to the report, Human Model 576 hadn't been even two years old when she died. “It says here she was only fourteen months,” Gemma said, because somehow she needed to speak the words, to get them out of her chest where they were clawing at her. Not a specimen. A
child
. Small and fat-cheeked with little fists that wanted to grab at things. Gemma loved babies, always had. Who didn't?

“You said colors are for clusters,” Jake said slowly. “But clusters of what?”

Lyra shrugged. “There are different clusters. We all get different variants.”

“Variants of what?” Jake pressed, and Gemma almost didn't want to know the answer.

For a second, Lyra looked almost annoyed. “Medicine,” she said, so sharply that Jake briefly glanced at her.

“Look, Jake. It's signed by Dr. Saperstein, just like you said.” She had the urge to take pair of scissors to it, to cut it into little shreds as if doing so would hurt the real person, too. Below Dr. Saperstein's signature—which was hard and angular and fit Gemma's impression of Dr. Saperstein as someone made all of angles and corners, someone from whom human feeling had been carved away—a nurse, Emily J. Huang, had signed as well.

“Dr. Saperstein is in charge of the growth of new crops of replicas,” Lyra said, and Gemma tried not to wince when she used that word,
crops
. She was surprised when Lyra voluntarily came closer. She didn't sit, but she hovered there. Maybe she
could
read. Her eyes were moving in the right way. Normally Gemma found people who read over her shoulder intensely annoying, but she was afraid of doing anything to startle Lyra away. “He signs all the death certificates.” Gemma was surprised when Lyra smiled faintly. She reached out and touched Emily Huang's name with a finger—gently, as if it were something fragile, a ladybug or a butterfly. “Nurse Em signed, too.”

Nurse Em.
Something burst across Gemma's mind—an electric pulse of understanding. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She saw whiteness, as if she'd been staring
at the sun, and silhouettes stumbling in front of it, chanting soundlessly to her. “Nurse Em,” she said out loud, testing the sound of it. Yes.

“Holy shit,” Jake said, and she knew that he, too, had understood.

Emily J. Huang.

Nurse M.

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 10 of Lyra's story.