Replica (5 page)

LYRA DID NOT SLEEP WELL. She woke up with a tight, airless feeling in her chest, like the time years ago when Nurse Don't-Even-Think-About-It had held Lyra's head in the sink to punish her for stealing some chocolate from the nurses' break room.

Side effects. They would pass. Medicines sometimes made you sick before they made you better. In the dim morning light, with the sound of so many replicas inhaling and exhaling beside her, she closed her eyes. She had a brief memory of a birther rocking her years ago, singing to her, the tickle of hair on her forehead. She opened her eyes again. The birthers didn't sing. They howled and screamed. Or they wept. They spoke in other languages. But they didn't sing.

She was nauseous again.

This time she wouldn't risk throwing up inside. She
would have to find someplace more remote—along the beach, maybe behind the tin drums of hazardous waste Haven lined up for collection, somewhere the guards couldn't see her.

She chose to pass through the courtyard, which was mostly empty. Many of the night nurses would be preparing to take the launch back to Cedar Key. She passed the statue of the first God, Richard Haven. It dominated the center of the yard, where all four walking paths intersected. Here she rested, leaning against the cool marble base, next to a plaque commemorating his work and achievements. He'd had a kind face, Lyra thought. At least, the artist had given him one.

She didn't remember the flesh-and-blood man. He'd died before she was made. The sculptor had depicted him kneeling, with one arm raised. Lyra guessed he was supposed to be calling out to invisible crowds to
come
, to
look here
, but to her it had always looked as if he was stretching one arm toward the clouds, toward the other God, the ones the nurses believed in. Their God, too, hated the replicas.

She squatted next to twin drums marked with a biohazard symbol and threw up into the high grasses that grew between them. She felt slightly better when she stood up, but still weak. She stopped a half-dozen times during the walk back to the main building, earning a disapproving
glance from one of the patrolling guards. Normally, she was grateful for the sheer size of Haven, for the tracts of open space and the walkways shaded by hickory trees and high palmettos, for the bright bursts of heliotrope in the flower beds, and the wild taro pushing between the cement paving stones, although she had names for none of them and knew the growth only in general terms: flowers, trees, plants. But today she was exhausted and wished simply to get back to bed 24.

She heard shouting as she entered D-Wing. As Lyra got closer to the dorm, she recognized one of the voices: Dr. Saperstein. She nearly stopped and turned around. God had never come to the bunks, ever.

But then she heard Cassiopeia shout, “Don't touch them. It's not
fair
,” and she kept going.

Up ahead, a nurse hurried out into the hall, skidding a little on the tile, and shot Lyra a strange look before scurrying in the opposite direction, leaving the dorm room door swinging open. Lyra barely caught it before it closed.

Then she stopped, her breath catching. Cassiopeia was on her hands and knees in front of Dr. Saperstein, trying to sweep up her collection of shells, which had been knocked off the windowsill and shattered. All of the individual drawings pasted to the wall behind her bed had been torn down, as if a hard wind had come ripping through the bunk, though it hadn't disturbed anything
else. Then Lyra saw he was holding them, crumpled together in his fist.

“Unbelievable.” He was shouting, but not at the girls. Instead he was yelling at the assembled nursing staff, including Nurse Dolly, who'd found Cassiopeia Scotch tape so they could hang the napkins in the first place. “Do you know how close we are to getting defunded? Do you want to be out of a job? We have a quota, we have protocols—”

“It was my fault,” Nurse Dolly said. “I didn't see any harm in it.”

God took a step toward her, nearly tripping over Cassiopeia, who was still on the floor, crying softly. Lyra wanted to go to her but found she couldn't move. God's shoes crunched quietly on the carpet of shattered seashells.

“No harm in it?” he repeated, and Nurse Dolly quickly looked away. Now he was speaking softly, but strangely, and Lyra was more frightened of him than ever. “I've worked my whole career to see this project succeed. We're doing some of the most important medical work of the past two decades, and yet—” He broke off, shaking his head. “
Results.
That's what we need.
Results.
This is a research facility, not a playpen. Is that clear to everyone?”

No one spoke. In the silence, Lyra could hear her heart.
Boom-boom-boom.
Like the rhythm of the chanting that carried all the way to Spruce Island from Barrel Key.
Monsters, monsters. Burn Haven down.

God sighed. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “We're doing important work,” he said. “Good work. Never forget that.” He started to turn away and then stopped. “It's better this way—for everyone.”

But Lyra knew, from the tone of his voice, that he didn't mean the replicas.

God had to step around Cassiopeia again to move to the door. He barely glanced at her. Instead he kicked at a seashell, sending it skittering across the floor. “Someone clean up this mess, please,” he announced, to no one in particular. Lyra stepped quickly out of the doorway to avoid him.

For a long moment after he was gone, no one moved. Just Cassiopeia, still sorting through the remains of her collection, now reduced to shards and dust. Finally Nurse Dolly went to her.

“All right,” she said, crouching down and grabbing Cassiopeia's wrist to stop her from reaching for another broken shell. “That's enough now.”

It happened so quickly: Cassiopeia turned and
shoved
Nurse Dolly. “Get off me,” she said, and several people cried out, and Lyra took a step forward, saying, “
Don't
.”

Maybe she hadn't meant to push Nurse Dolly hard, or maybe she had. Either way, Nurse Dolly lost her balance and went backward. In an instant, Nurse
Don't-Even-Think-About-It had crossed to Cassiopeia and wrenched her to her feet.

“Wicked thing,” Don't-Even-Think-About-It spat at her, keeping hold of her wrists. “How dare you touch her—how dare you, when we've fed and clothed and kept you all these years? The judgment of God will come for you, don't you forget it.”

“You don't own me.” Cassiopeia's eyes were very bright and she was shaking. Lyra stared at her, filled with a sudden sense of dread. She didn't understand what Cassiopeia meant—she didn't understand where she'd found these words, this anger, and for a second she felt as if the room was splitting apart, revealing a dark gulf, a hidden fault line. “You can't tell me what to do. I don't belong to you. I'm real. I am.”

“You're not anything,” Don't-Even-Think-About-It said. Her face was mottled with anger, like the veined slabs of beef shelved in the kitchen freezers. “You belong to the institute, and to Dr. Saperstein. You can stay here, or you can leave and be killed.”

“I'll be killed anyway.” Cassiopeia looked almost happy, as if she'd successfully passed her Cog Testing, and Lyra didn't know why, knew that couldn't be right. Goosedown, one of Cassiopeia's other genotypes, stood hugging herself, as if she were the one getting yelled at. They were identical except for the vacancy of Goosedown's
expression. She'd had a habit, when she was little, of smacking her own head against the ground when she was frustrated, and she still had to wear diapers to sleep. “Isn't that right? We'll all die here eventually. What's the difference?”

“Let it go, Maxine.” Nurse Dolly was climbing to her feet, wincing, holding on to her lower back. Lyra was unaccountably angry at Cassiopeia. Nurse Dolly was one of the nicest ones. “It doesn't understand.”

Nurse Don't-Even-Think-About-It stood for a moment, still gripping Cassiopeia's wrists. Then, abruptly, she released her and turned away. “Unnatural,” she muttered. “Devil's work, all of it.”

“Enough.” Nurse Curly spoke up this time, addressing everyone. “You two”—she pointed at Goosedown and Bounty, still watching, frozen—“help number six clean up.”

But Cassiopeia bolted for the door instead, pushing past Nurse Don't-Even-Think-About-It and shaking Lyra off when Lyra went to touch her arm.

“Grab it!” Don't-Even-Think-About-It shouted, but Nurse Dolly shook her head.

“She'll be back.” She sighed. She looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes, and Lyra found herself wondering briefly about the nurse's other life, the one off the island. What would it be like to have a secret
world, a private place away from Haven, away from the replicas and the nurses and the Glass Eyes? She couldn't fathom it.

Nurse Dolly met Lyra's eyes, and Lyra looked quickly away.

“There's nowhere for her to run, anyway,” Nurse Dolly added, but gently, as if in apology.

Cassiopeia wasn't at lunch. The replicas didn't speak about her. They didn't speak at all. It was difficult to feel comfortable surrounded by half the nursing staff and several guards, all of them posted around the perimeter of the room, silent, expressionless, watching the girls eat, many of them wearing masks or full hazmat suits that made them resemble inflated balloons.

Lyra had no appetite. She was still nauseous, and the smell of the Stew Pot made her stomach clench, as if it wanted to bring something up. But she didn't risk skipping lunch. She didn't want to go into the Funeral Home. So she lined up with the other replicas and filled her plate with mashed potatoes and chicken floating in a vivid red sauce the electric color of inner organs and pushed her food around, cut it into small pieces, hid some in her napkin.

Lyra needed to find a new hiding place. The dorm was no longer safe. She was responsible for changing her own
linens—but what if one day she forgot, and the book and the file, her pen and her Altoids tin, were discovered? They'd be taken away and destroyed, and Lyra would never get over it. The book especially—that was her last piece of Dr. O'Donnell, and the only thing that Lyra had ever been given, except for standard-issue clothing and a scratchy blanket for cool nights.

Lyra headed straight to the bunks after lunch. The dorm was mostly empty: after lunch, the female replicas had a half an hour of free time before afternoon physicals. Only a half-dozen replicas had preceded her back, and there was a single nurse on patrol, Nurse Stink, an older woman who chewed special candies made of ginger and garlic for indigestion, and who always smelled like them as a result.

Lyra went straight to bed 24 and, keeping her back angled to the nurse, began stripping the sheets from the bed. At a certain point, she slid a hand between the mattress and the frame and drew out the book, and then the file, at the same time stuffing them down into a pillowcase so they were invisible. Then she headed for the door, pressing the linens tight to her chest, as if they might help muffle the sound of her heart.

“Where are you going?” the nurse asked. She was sitting in a folding chair by the door, fumbling to unwrap one of her candies.

“The laundry,” Lyra answered, surprised that her voice sounded so steady.

“Laundry day was yesterday,” Nurse Stink said.

“I know,” Lyra said, and lowered her voice. “But it's my monthly bleeding.”

The nurse waved a hand as if to say,
Go on
.

Lyra turned left to get to the end of D-Wing. But instead of going downstairs to the laundry, she ducked out of the first exit, a fire door that led to the southeastern side of the institute, where the land sloped very gently toward the fence and the vast marshland beyond it. Birds were wheeling against a pale-blue sky, and the stink of wild taro and dead fish was strong. From here, the marshes were so covered in water lettuce they looked almost like solid ground. But Lyra knew better. She'd been told again and again about the tidal marshes, about fishermen and curiosity seekers and adventurers from Barrel Key who'd lost their way among the tumorous growth and had been found drowned.

Lyra hid the bundle of sheets behind a trimmed hedge. She tucked the pillowcase with her belongings in it under her shirt and kept going, circling the main building. She spotted Cassiopeia, sitting motionless by the fence, staring out over the marshes, hugging her knees to her chest. Lyra thought of going to her but wasn't sure what she would say. And Cassiopeia had caused trouble. She'd
pushed Nurse Dolly. She'd be put in solitary or restrained to her bed, kept like that for a day or two. Besides, Lyra was still weak, and even the idea of trying to comfort Cassiopeia exhausted her.

She'd need to find a place not too remote; a place she could sneak off to easily without arousing suspicion, but a place unused for other purposes, where no one else would think to look.

She kept going, toward a portion of the island she'd rarely explored, praying nobody would stop her. She wasn't sure whether she was breaking any rules, and if anyone asked what she was doing or where she was going, she'd have no answer.

The northern half of the island remained undeveloped and largely untouched, since it had, decades earlier, belonged to a timber company. Now it was a repository of old equipment, sealed chemical drums, and trailers mounted on cinder blocks and padlocked off, for the most part, with heavy chains. Lyra paused at a rusted gate hung with a large sign warning of biohazardous material. But the gate was unlocked, and she decided to risk it. Half of Haven contained biohazardous material anyway.

Here there were no neatly trimmed hedges or stone walkways. This area was cooler, shaded by coast oak and mature pines with old, sweeping branches, although to Lyra it all looked the same. As she walked, she thought
about animals concealed in dark hiding places, gators crawling up beneath the fence, snakes nesting in the trees. Two years earlier, a wild hog had come bursting out of the undergrowth and run circles around the guards in front of the Box. It was one of the few times Lyra could remember seeing any of the doctors laughing.