Replica (4 page)

The closer she got to Admin, the greater the pressure on her chest, as if there were Invacare Snake Tubing threaded down her throat, pumping liquid into her lungs. Sub-One
was always quieter than the ground floor of Haven. Most of the doors down here were fitted with control pads and marked with big red circles divided in two on the diagonal, signs that they were restricted-access only. Plus, the walls seemed to vacuum up noise, absorbing the sound of Lyra's footsteps as soon as she moved.

Administration was restricted-access, too. Lazy Ass had said Werner would be behind the desk, and Lyra's whole plan depended on it. Twin windows in the door looked into a space filled with individual office cubicles: flyers pinned to corkboard, keyboards buried under piles of manila files, phones and computers cabled to overloaded power strips. All of Haven's paperwork came here, from mail to medical reports, before being routed and redirected to its ultimate destination.

Lyra ducked into an alcove twenty feet beyond the entrance to Admin. If she peeked into the hall, she had a clear view of the doors. She prayed she had arrived on time and hadn't missed her chance. Several times, she inched into the hall to check. But the doors were firmly shut.

Finally, when Lyra had nearly given up hope, she heard a faint click as the locks released. The doors squeaked open. A second later, footsteps headed for the stairs. As soon as she heard the door to the stairwell open, Lyra slipped into the hall.

Lyra had been occasionally sneaking down to Admin ever since Dr. O'Donnell had vanished abruptly. She knew that every day, when most of the other administrative staff was still eating in the Stew Pot, Werner snuck away from his desk, propped the doors of Admin open, and smoked a cigarette—sometimes two—in the stairwell.

Today he had wedged an empty accordion file into the double doors to keep them from closing. Lyra slipped inside, making sure the accordion file stayed in place, and closed the door gently behind her.

For a few seconds, she stood very still, allowing the silence to enfold her. Administration was actually several interconnected rooms. This, the first of them, brightly modern, was fitted with long ceiling lights similar to the ones used in the labs upstairs. Lyra moved deeper, into the forest of file cabinets and old plastic storage bins, into mountains of paperwork no one had touched for years. A few rooms were dark, or only partly illuminated. And she could hear, in the quiet, the whisper of millions of words, words trapped behind every drawer, words beating their fingernails against the inside of the file cabinets.

All the words she could ever want: words to stuff herself on until she was full, until her eyes burst.

She moved to the farthest corner of the dimmest room and picked a file cabinet at random. She didn't care about the actual reports, about what they might say or mean.
All she cared about was the opportunity to practice. Dr. O'Donnell had explained to her once what a
real
library was, and the function it served in the outside world, and Lyra knew Admin was the closest she would ever get.

She selected a file from the very back—one she was sure hadn't been touched in a long time, slender enough to conceal easily. She closed the cabinet and went carefully back the way she had come, through rooms that grew ever lighter and less dusty.

Then she was in the hall. She slipped into the alcove and waited. Sure enough, less than a minute later, the door to the stairwell squeaked open and clanged shut, and footsteps came down the hall. Werner was back.

She had yet to fulfill her official errand. That meant concealing the hard-won file somewhere, if only for a little while. There weren't many options. She chose a metal bin mounted on the wall marked with a sign she recognized as meaning
hazardous
. Normally the nurses and doctors used them for discarding used gloves, caps, and even syringes, but this one was empty.

Werner didn't even let her in. He came to the door, frowning, when she tapped a finger to the glass.

“What is it?” he said. His voice was muffled through the glass, but he spoke very slowly, as if he wasn't sure Lyra could understand. He wasn't used to dealing with replicas. That was obvious.

“Shannon from security sent me,” she said, stopping herself at the last second from saying
Lazy Ass
.

Werner disappeared. When he returned to open the door, she saw that he had suited up in gloves and a face mask. It wasn't unusual for members of the staff to refuse to interact with the replicas unless they were protected, which Lyra thought was stupid. The diseases that killed the replicas, the conditions that made them small and slow and stupid, were directly related to the cloning process and to being raised at Haven.

He looked at the file in her hand as if it was something dead. “Go on. Give it. And tell
Shannon from security
to do her own work next time.” He snatched the file from her and quickly withdrew, scowling at her from behind the glass. She barely noticed. Already, in her head, she was curling up inside all those letters—new pages, new words to decipher and trip over and decode.

She retrieved the file from the metal bin after checking to see that she was still alone. This was the only part of the plan she hadn't entirely thought out. She had to get the file up to her bed, but if she carried it openly, someone
might
wonder where it had come from. She could say a nurse had given it to her to deliver—but what if someone checked? She wasn't even sure whether she could lie convincingly. She hadn't spoken to the staff so much in years, and she was already exhausted.

Instead she opted to slip it under the waistband of her standard-issue pants, pouching her shirt out over it. The only way to keep it from slipping was to wrap both arms around her stomach, as if she had a bad stomachache. Even then, she had to take small steps, and she imagined that the sound of crinkling paper accompanied her. But she had no choice. Hopefully, she would make it back to D-Wing without having to speak to anyone.

But no sooner had she passed through the doors into the stairwell than she heard the sound of echoing voices. Before she could retreat, God came down the stairs with one of the Suits. Lyra ducked her head and stepped aside, squeezing her arms close around the file, praying they would move past her without stopping.

They stopped.

“Hey.” It was the stranger who spoke. “Hey. You.” His eyes were practically black. He turned to God. “Which one is this?”

“Not sure. Some of the nurses can tell them apart on sight.” God looked at Lyra. “Which one are you?” he asked.

Maybe it was the stolen file pressed to her stomach, but Lyra had the momentary impulse to introduce herself by name. Instead she said, “Number twenty-four.”

“And you just let them wander around like this?” The man was still staring at Lyra, but obviously addressing
himself to God. “Even after what happened?” Lyra knew he must be talking about the Code Black.

“We're following protocols,” God said. God's voice reminded Lyra of the bite of the syringes. “When Haven started, it was important to the private sector that they be treated humanely.”

“There is no private sector. We're the ones holding the purse strings now,” the man said. “What about contagion?”

Lyra was only half listening. Sweat was gathering in the space between the folder and her stomach. She imagined it seeping through the folder, dampening the pages. The folder had shifted fractionally and she was worried a page might escape, but she didn't dare adjust her grip.

“There's no risk except through direct ingestion—as you would know, if you actually read the reports. All right, twenty-four,” God said. “You can go.”

Lyra was so relieved she could have shouted. Instead she lowered her head and, keeping her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, started to move past them.

“Wait.”

The Suit called out to her. Lyra stiffened and turned around to face him on the stairs. They were now nearly eye to eye. She felt the same way she did during examinations, shivering in her paper gown, staring up at the high unblinking lights set in the ceiling: cold and exposed.

“What's the matter with its stomach?” he asked.

Lyra tightened her hands around her waist.
Please,
she thought.
Please.
She couldn't complete the thought. If she were forced to move her arms, the file would drop. She imagined papers spilling from her pants legs, tumbling down the stairs.

God indicated the plastic wristband Lyra always wore. “Green,” he said. “One of the first variants. Slower-acting than your typical vCJD. Most of the Greens are still alive, although we've seen a few signs of neurodegenerative activity recently.”

“So what's that mean in English?”

Unlike the man in the suit, God never made eye contact. He looked at her shoulders, her arms, her kneecaps, her forehead: everywhere but her eyes.

“Side effects,” he said, with a thin smile. Then Lyra was free to go.

Lyra wasn't the only replica that collected things. Rose kept used toothbrushes under her pillow. Palmolive scanned the hallways for dropped coins and stored them in a box that had once contained antibacterial swabs. Cassiopeia had lined up dozens of seashells on the windowsill next to her bed, and additionally had convinced Nurse Dolly to sneak her some Scotch tape so she could hang several drawings she'd created on napkins stolen from the
mess hall. She drew Dumpsters and red-barred circles and stethoscopes and the bust of the first God in his red-and-blue cape and scalpels gleaming in folds of clean cloth. She was very good. Calliope had once taken a cell phone from one of the nurses, and all her genotypes had been punished for it.

But Lyra was careful with her things. She was
private
about them. The file folder she hid carefully under her thin mattress, next to her other prized possessions: several pens, including her favorite, a green one with a retractable tip that said
Fine & Ives
in block white lettering; an empty tin that read
Altoids
; a half-dozen coins she'd found behind the soda machine; her worn and battered copy of
The Little Prince
, which she'd handled so often that many of the pages had come loose from their binding.

“There's a message in this book,” Dr. O'Donnell had told Lyra, before leaving Haven. “In the love of the Little Prince for his rose, there's wisdom we could all learn from.” And Lyra had nodded, trying to pretend she understood, even though she didn't understand. Not about love. Not about hope. Dr. O'Donnell was going away, and once again, Lyra was left behind.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 4 of Gemma's story.

“YOU'VE BEEN LYING TO ME, twenty-four.”

Lyra was on her knees, blinking back tears, swallowing the taste of vomit, when the closet door opened. She couldn't get to her feet fast enough. She spun around, accidentally knocking over a broom with her elbow.

Nurse Curly was staring not at Lyra but at the bucket behind her, now splattered with vomit. Strangely, she didn't seem angry. “I knew it,” she said, shaking her head.

It was early afternoon, and Curly must have just arrived from the launch for the shift change. She wasn't yet wearing her scrubs, but a blue tank top with beading at the shoulders, jeans, and leather sandals. Usually, Lyra was mesmerized by evidence of life outside Haven—the occasional magazine, water-warped, abandoned on the sink in the nurses' toilets; used-up lip balm in the trash; or a
broken flip-flop sitting on a bench in the courtyard—split-second fissures through which a whole other world was revealed.

Today, however, she didn't care.

She'd been so sure that here, in a rarely used janitorial closet in D-Wing Sub-One, she'd be safe. She'd woken up sweating, with her heart going hard and her stomach like something heavy and raw that needed to come out. But the waking bell sounded only a minute later, and she knew that the bathrooms would soon be full of replicas showering, brushing their teeth, whispering beneath the thunderous sound of the water about the Suits and what they could possibly want and whether number 72 had been torn apart by alligators by now—lungs, kidneys, spleen scattered across the marshes.

But the staff bathrooms were just as risky. They were off-limits, first of all, and often crowded—the nurses were always hiding out in stalls trying to make calls or send text messages.

“I'm not sick,” Lyra said quickly, reaching out to grab hold of a shelf. She was still dizzy.

“Come on, now.” As usual Nurse Curly acted as if she hadn't heard. Maybe she hadn't. Lyra had the strangest sense of being invisible, as if she existed behind a curtain and the nurses and doctors could only vaguely see her. “We'll go to Dr. Levy.”

“No. Please.” Dr. Levy worked in the Box. She hated him, and that big, thunderous machine, Mr. I. She hated the grinning lights like blank indifferent faces. She hated Catheter Fingers and Invacare Snake Tubing, Dribble Bags and Sad Sacks, syringe after syringe after syringe. She hated the weird dreams that visited her there, of lions marching around a cylindrical cup, of old voices she was sure she'd never heard but that felt real to her. Even a spinal tap with the Vampire—the long needle inserted into the base of her spinal column between two vertebrae so that her fluids could be extracted for testing—was almost preferable. “I feel fine.”

“Don't be silly,” Curly said. “It's for your own good. Come on out of there.”

Lyra edged into the hall, keeping her hands on the walls, which were studded with nails from which brooms and mops and dustpans were hanging. She couldn't remember what day it was. The knowledge seemed to have dropped through a hole in her awareness. She couldn't remember what day yesterday had been, either, or what had happened.

“Follow me.” The nurse put her hand on Lyra's arm, and Lyra was overwhelmed. It was rare that the nurses touched them unless they had to, in order to take their measurements.‎ Lyra's knowledge of the nurse's name had evaporated, too, though she was sure she had known it
just a second earlier. What was happening to her? It was as if vomiting had shaken up all the information in her brain, muddled it.‎

Lyra's eyes were burning and her throat felt raw. When she reached up to wipe her mouth, she was embarrassed to realize she was crying.‎

“It's normal,” the nurse said. Lyra wasn't sure what she meant.

It was quicker from here to go through C-Wing, where the male replicas were kept. Nurse Cheryl—the name came back to Lyra suddenly, loosed from the murky place it had been stuck—Nurse Cheryl, nicknamed Curly for her hair, which corkscrewed around her face, buzzed them in. Lyra hung back. In all her years at Haven, she'd only been through C-Wing a few times. She hadn't forgotten Pepper, and what had happened. She remembered how Pepper had cried when she'd first been told what was happening to her, that she would be a
birther
, like all those dark-skinned women who came and left on boats and were never seen outside the barracks. Pepper had left fingernail scratches across the skin of her belly and begged for the doctors to get it out.

But two months later, by the time the doctors determined she couldn't keep it, she was already talking names: Ocean, Sunday, Valium. After Pepper, all the knives in the mess hall were replaced with plastic versions, and the male
and female replicas were kept even more strictly apart.

“It's okay.” Curly gave her a nudge. “Go on. You're with me.”

It was hotter in C-Wing. Or maybe Lyra was just hot. In the first room they passed she saw a male replica, lying on an examination table with probes attached to his bare chest. She looked away quickly. It smelled different in C-Wing—the same mixture of antiseptic and bleach and human sweat, but deeper somehow.

They took the stairs up to ground level and moved past a series of dorms, lined with cots just like on the girls' side and mercifully empty. The males who weren't sick or in testing were likely getting fed in Stew Pot. Despite the standard-issue white sheets and gray blankets, and the plastic under-bed bins, the rooms managed to give an impression of messiness.

They passed into B-Wing, and Curly showed her credentials to two guards on duty. B-Wing was for research and had restricted access. Passed laboratories, dazzling white, illuminated by rows and rows of fluorescent light, where more researchers were working, moving slowly in their gloves and lab coats, hair concealed beneath translucent gray caps, eyes magnified, insect-like, by their goggles. Banks of computers, screens filled with swirling colors, hard metal equipment, words Lyra had heard her whole life without ever knowing what they meant—spectrometry,
biometrics, liquid chromatography—beautiful words, words to trip over and fall into.

One time, she had worked up the courage to ask Dr. O'Donnell what they did all day in the research rooms. It didn't seem possible that all those men and women were there just to perfect the replication process, to keep the birthers from miscarrying so often after the embryo transfer, to keep the replicas from dying so young.

Dr. O'Donnell had hesitated. “They're studying what makes you sick,” she said at last, speaking slowly, as if she had to carefully handle the words or they would cut her. “They're studying how it works, and how long it takes, and why.”

“And how to fix it?” Lyra had asked.

Dr. O'Donnell had barely hesitated. “Of course.”

The Box was made of concrete slab, sat several hundred yards away from the main complex, and was enclosed by its own fence. Unlike the rest of Haven, the G-Wing had no windows, and extra security required Nurse Curly to identify herself twice and show her badge to various armed guards who patrolled the perimeter.

Curly left Lyra in the entrance foyer, in front of the elevator that gave access to Sub-One and, supposedly, the concealed subterranean levels. Lyra tried not to look at the doors that led to the ER, where so many replicas died or
failed to thrive
in the first place. Even the nurses called
the G-Wing the Funeral Home or the Graveyard. Lyra wondered whether Lilac Springs was there even now, and how long she had left.

Soon enough, the elevator doors opened and a technician wearing a heavy white lab coat, her hair concealed beneath a cap, arrived to escort Lyra down to see Mr. I. It was, as far as Lyra could tell, the same tech she'd seen the half-dozen or so times she'd been here in the past month. Then again, she had trouble telling them apart, since their faces were so often concealed behind goggles and a mask, and since they never spoke directly to her.

In Sub-One, they walked down a long, windowless hallway filled with doors marked
Restricted
. But when a researcher slipped out into the hall, Lyra had a brief view of a sanitation room and, beyond it, a long, galley-shaped laboratory in which dozens of researchers were bent over gleaming equipment, dressed in head-to-toe protective clothing and massive headgear that made them look like the pictures of astronauts Lyra had occasionally seen on the nurses' TV.

Mr. I sat by itself in a cool bright room humming with recirculated air. To Lyra, Mr. I looked like an open mouth, and the table on which she was supposed to lie down a long pale tongue. The hair stood up on her arms and legs.

“Remember to stay very still,” the tech said, her voice
muffled by a paper mask. “Otherwise we'll just have to start over. And nobody wants that, do we?”

Afterward she was transferred to a smaller room and told to lie down. Sometimes lying this way, with doctors buzzing above her, she lost track of whether she was a human at all or some other thing, a slab of meat or a glass overturned on a countertop. A thing.

“I don't believe Texas is any further than we are. It's bullshit. They're bluffing. Two years ago, they were still infecting bovine tissue—”

“It doesn't matter if they're bluffing if our funding gets cut. Everyone
thinks
they're closer. Fine and Ives loses the contract. Then we're shit outta luck.”

High bright lights, cool sensors moving over her body, gloved hands pinching and squeezing. “Sappo thinks the latest variant will do it. I'm talking full progression within a
week
. Can you imagine the impact?”

“He better be right. What the hell will we do with all of them if we get shut down? Ever think of that?”

Lyra closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted.

“Open your eyes, please. Follow my finger, left to right. Good.”

“Reflexes still look okay.” One of the doctors, the woman, parted her paper gown and squeezed her nipple, hard. Lyra cried out. “And pain response. Do me a
favor—check this one's file, will you? What variant is this?”

“This is similar to the vCJD, just slower-acting. That's why the pulvinar sign is detectable on the MRI. Very rare in nature, nearly always inherited.”

They worked in silence for a bit. Lyra thought about
The Little Prince
, and Dr. O'Donnell, and distant stars where beautiful things lived and died in freedom. She couldn't stop crying.

“How do they choose which ones end up in control, and which ones get the different variants?” the male doctor asked after a while.

“Oh, it's all automated,” the woman said. Now she held Lyra's eyes open with two fingers, ensuring she couldn't blink. “Okay, come see this. See the way her left eye is spasming? Myoclonus. That's another indicator.”

“Mm-hmm. So it's random?”

“Totally random. The computer does it by algorithm. That way, you know, no one feels bad. Pass me the stethoscope, will you? I bet its heart rate is through the roof.”

That night was very still, and the sound of chanting voices and drumbeats—louder, always, on the days the Suits had visited the island—carried easily over the water. Lyra lay awake for a long time, fighting the constant pull of nausea, listening to the distant rhythm, which didn't sound
so distant after all. At times, she imagined it was coming closer, that suddenly Haven would be overrun with strangers. She imagined all of them made of darkness and shadow instead of blood and muscle and bones. She wondered, for the first time, whether number 72 was maybe not dead after all. She remembered hearing once that the marshes were submerged islands, miles of land that had over time been swallowed up by the water.

She wondered whether 72 had been swallowed up too, or whether he was out there somewhere, listening to the voices.

She took comfort in the presence of the new addition to her collection, buried directly beneath her lower back. She imagined that the file pushed up heat, like a heart, like the warmth of Dr. O'Donnell's touch.
98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
She imagined the smell of lemon and antiseptic, as if Dr. O'Donnell were still there, floating between the beds.

“Don't worry,” Dr. O'Donnell had once said to her on a night like this one, when the voices were louder than usual. “They can't get to you,” she'd said more quietly. “They can't get in.”

But about this, Dr. O'Donnell was wrong.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 5 of Gemma's story.