Replica (6 page)

Old tractors; rusted, coiled-up chains; plastic garbage bins; Dumpsters; even an old crane, arm raised as if reaching for the sky: Lyra moved down the long alley of broken-down equipment, her feet squelching in mud that became thicker and deeper as she approached the tidal flats. The insects were thicker here, and louder, too. She knew she was still within the limits of Haven—she could see the fence through the trees, and the flashing of the late sun on the vivid green marshes, and knew that the nearest guards were only a few hundred feet away—but she felt almost as if she had entered another world. As if she could keep walking forever, moving deeper and deeper into the trees, and never be found. She didn't know whether the idea excited or scared her.

She spotted an old motorboat, propped up on cinder blocks and covered with a blue plastic tarp slicked with mold and moisture. A perfect hiding place. She felt a rush of sudden relief. She was so tired. For a second, when she stopped walking, she thought she heard footsteps behind her. But when she turned around, she didn't see anyone.

She peeled back a portion of the tarp and froze, confused. The bottom of the boat was spotted with rust but relatively dry—and someone, she saw, was already using it for a hiding place. There was a folded brown blanket, standard Haven issue, as well as two neatly folded changes of pants, two shirts, and two folded pairs of male's underwear. There was, additionally, a flashlight and several cardboard containers of powdered milk, a can opener marked
Property of Haven Kitchens
, and half a dozen cans of soup.

Something stirred in her mind—an association, a
connection
—but before she could bring the idea into focus, someone spoke.

“That's mine,” a voice said behind her. “Don't touch it.”

She turned and her breath caught in her chest.

Her first thought was that the boy was an outsider and had somehow made his way in. He looked so wild, so
fierce
, she felt he must be a different species. Her second thought was that he was hungry. His cheeks stood out sharply from his face, as if they'd been whittled with a knife. His forearms were marked with little diagonal scars, like a tiny staircase cut into his flesh.

Then she noticed the Haven bracelet—a White—and the idea she'd been reaching for earlier arrived, neat and obvious and undeniable: this was 72. The Code Black. The runaway.

Except he hadn't run away, or at least he hadn't run far. He'd been here, on the north side of the island, the whole time.

“I know you,” she said. “You're seventy-two.”

He didn't deny it. “How did you find me?” He took a step toward her, and Lyra could smell him then—a sharp animal smell, not completely unpleasant. “Which of them sent you?”

“Nobody sent me,” she said. She didn't like being so close to him. She'd never been this close to one of the males, and she couldn't help but think of Pepper, and a diagram she'd seen once of a pregnant woman, who seemed to be digesting her baby. But there was nowhere to go. The side of the boat was digging into her back. “I wasn't looking for you at all.”

“Then what are you doing here?” he asked.

She hesitated. She was still holding the pillowcase with all her belongings, and she squeezed it to her chest. “I didn't mean anything by it,” she said.

He shook his head. “I can't let you go,” he said. He reached out, taking hold of her wrist.

And at that exact moment, the world exploded.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 6 of Gemma's story.

LATER THE RESIDENTS OF BARREL Key would tell stories about seeing the explosion. Several fishermen, bringing in their boats, were nearly thrown overboard by a freak wave that came racing over the sound—caused, it later turned out, by a portion of A-Wing crashing through the fence and collapsing into the shallows. Missy Gallagher saw a finger of flame shoot up in the distance and thought of Revelation and the end of days. Bill Collops thought of terrorists and ran into the basement, screaming for his wife to help him with the boxes of ammo.

The first bomb, detonated in the entry hall, directly next to the bust of Richard Haven, made shrapnel of the walls and beams and caved in the roof. It killed twenty-seven staff members, all of them buried under the rubble. The woman who was carrying the explosives strapped by means of a cookie sheet to her chest was blown into
so many pieces that even her dental records were useless, and they were able to establish her identity only because she had left a bag explaining her motivations and affiliation with the Angels of the First Savior on the mainland, which would subsequently be discovered by soldiers. Her WordPress account, which referenced at length a website known as the Haven Files, suggested she was acting on directives from Jesus Christ to destroy the unnatural perversions at Haven and purge the sinners playing God. The blog had a brief three-hour surge of notoriety and readership before it was permanently and mysteriously erased.

The second and third bombs created a fireball that roared through the halls, reaching temperatures hot enough to sear metal and leave the plastic dinner trays as molten, shapeless messes. Things would not have been so bad were it not for the close proximity of a large shipment of amyl nitrate, which one of the staff members had signed for and thoughtlessly left still packaged in the entry hall, not entirely sure where it was meant to go.

Later, rumors would circulate: that the bomber believed Haven Institute was actually
manufacturing humans
to use in some kind of devil's army, and that both the creations and their creators should be punished by fire; that she had every single page of the Haven Files, all seventy-six of them, printed out, underlined, annotated, and laminated in her bag next to a copy of the Bible, a small image of
Jesus on the cross, and a half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich; that she must have been onto something, because of the military crackdown, and the men in hazmat suits who spent weeks sweeping the island, carting off debris, leaving Spruce Island bare and ruined and silent. And why didn't the story make it onto the news, or any of the major newspapers?
Conspiracy,
Bill Collops said, polishing his guns.
What a world,
Missy Gallagher said, shaking her head.

The official story—the one that made it onto the news—stated that chemicals had been mishandled by a new laboratory technician, sparking a huge chemical fire that engulfed the laboratory. But even this story, once established, was quickly suppressed, and Spruce Island, and what may or may not have happened there, was rapidly forgotten.

Of course Lyra didn't and couldn't know any of this at the time. At the time, she thought the sky had split apart. At the time, she thought the world was ending.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 7 of Gemma's story.

THE FORCE OF THE FIRST blast threw her off her feet. She landed palms-down in the mud, with 72 beside her. Her eyes stung from the sudden vapor of dust, which seemed to rise all at once and everywhere, like a soft exhalation. People were screaming. An alarm kept hitting the same high note of panic, over and over, without end.

It was the sound that paralyzed her: shock waves of sound, a screaming in her ears and the back of her teeth, the sound of atoms splitting in two. It took her a second to realize that 72 was no longer beside her. He was on his feet, running.

But after only a few feet he stopped, and, turning around, saw her still frozen, still belly down in the mud like a salamander. He came back. He had to yell to be heard over the fire and the screaming.

“Move,” he said, but even his words sounded distant, as
if the ringing in her ears had transformed them to vague music. She couldn't move. She was cold and suddenly tired. She wanted to sleep. Even her mouth wouldn't work to say
no
. “Move now.” She wasn't very good at judging feelings, but she thought he sounded angry.

She was focusing on very small details: the motion of a rock crab scuttling sideways in the churned-up mud, the hiss of wind through the trees that carried the smell of smoke, the male's bare feet an inch from her elbow, his toenails ringed with dirt.

Then 72 had her elbow and she was shocked back into awareness of her body. She felt blood pumping through her heart, valves opening and closing like eyelids inside of her.

“Now,” 72 said again. “Now, now.” She wondered whether his mind had become stuck on the word, whether like Lilac Springs and Goosedown and so many others his brain had never formed right. She grabbed the pillowcase from the ground where it had fallen. It had gone a dull, gray color, from all the shimmering dust. The Altoids tin landed in the dirt but she had no time to stop and retrieve it. He was still holding on to her elbow, and she wasn't thinking well.

A drumbeat pop-pop-popping sound made her heart lurch, because she knew what it was: every so often the guards, bored, fired at alligators that swam too close to
the island. She thought there must be alligators—but the alligators would burn—she wondered whether their hides would protect them. . . .

They went back through the broken machinery, moving not toward the marshes but toward the sound of roaring fire and screams. Ash caught in Lyra's throat and made breathing painful. She didn't think it strange that they were heading back toward the fire—she could see a shimmering haze of smoke in the distance, beyond the trees, smoke that seemed to have taken on the silhouette of a building—because she knew they needed to find a nurse, they needed to line up, they needed to be told what to do. The nurses would tell them. They would make things better. She longed in that moment for Squeezeme and Thermoscan, longed to feel the familiar squeeze of pressure on her arm and suck down the taste of plastic, longed to be back in bed number 24, touching her windowsill, her headboard, her sheets. They moved past the chemical drums and squeezed through the fence through which Lyra had come looking for a hiding place. She was still holding the pillowcase to her chest with one arm and felt a little better, a little more clearheaded.

But as they came into view of the institute, she stopped. For a second she felt one of the bullets must have gone through her, punched a hole directly in her stomach. She could no longer feel her legs. She couldn't understand
what she was seeing. It was like someone had smashed up reality and then tried to put it together all wrong. A-Wing was gone and B-Wing was on fire. Flames punched through windows and roared across the tar roof. Guards sprinted across the yard, shouting in voices too distorted to make out.

There were bodies in the grass, human bodies, bodies wearing the sensible flat shoes of the nurses and doctor uniforms stained with blood, arms flung out as if they'd done belly flops to the ground. From a distance, it was impossible to distinguish the people from the replicas except by their clothing.

One body appeared to have been lifted off its feet and carried down toward the beach—Lyra could just see, in the distance, waves breaking against a pair of legs—or maybe someone had been down on the beach when the explosion had come. Lyra thought of Cassiopeia and her seashell collection and, although she had seen replicas die and die and die, felt vomit rise in her throat.
The vomiting center is located in the rear part of the brain.
She had heard that once, from one of the nurses. She didn't remember when.

But now 72 was headed not back to safety, not to the nurses and doctors and gentle Glass Eyes, good Glass Eyes, watchful Glass Eyes, but directly toward one of the guard towers. Now people were pouring from the other wings, nurses and doctors dazed or crying, covered with soot so
they looked as if they'd been cast in stone. For the first time, Lyra realized that they, too, were afraid. That none of this was planned. That no one was coming to tell them what to do.

She stumbled on something in her path: a long pale arm, wrist tagged with a green plastic bracelet. The fingers twitched. A female, Lyra thought, because of the shape of the hands. She was buried beneath a heavy sheet of tin siding that had been hurled across the yard by the first explosion. Lyra saw the fingers curl up in a fist: she was alive, whoever she was.

“Wait,” she said, pulling away from 72 and crouching down to try and free the girl. “Help,” she said, when 72 just stood there, squinting into the distance, looking agitated. He frowned but moved next to her, and together they managed to shift the metal.

Beneath it, Cassiopeia was lying on her back, her face screwed up in pain. Her left leg was twisted at the knee and a gash on her thigh had soaked her pants through with blood. But she was alive. Lyra knelt and touched Cassiopeia's face. Cassiopeia opened her eyes.

“Lyra,” she said, or appeared to say. Her voice was so faint Lyra couldn't hear it.

“Leave it,” 72 said.

“She needs a doctor,” Lyra said, bringing a hand to Cassiopeia's back and helping her sit up. Her hand came
away wet and dark with blood. It wasn't just her leg that was injured.

“There are no more doctors. There's no more Haven. It's done,” 72 said. Lyra felt a liquid panic, as if her lungs were slowly filling with water, like in dreams where she was in the ocean and couldn't find her way to the surface.

There was no world without Haven. Haven
was
the world.

And now the world was burning: the flames had spread to C-Wing and waves of heat reached them even from a distance. The guards were still shouting—doctors were crawling on their hands and knees in the dirt—there were replicas in a line, kneeling, hands behind their heads, pinned in place by the guards with their guns—Lyra couldn't understand any of it.

She helped Cassiopeia to her feet. Cassiopeia was sweating and smelled terrible. She had to lean on Lyra heavily and go half shuffling, half hopping across the yard. In the middle of it all Lyra thought how strange it was to be so physically close to someone. She and Cassiopeia had never touched except by accident, when they were washing up at the same sink, and even when they played with the newest crops, to touch and tickle them, it was because they had to. Nurse Em had put an arm around Lyra once, but Lyra couldn't remember why, only that for days afterward she had touched her own shoulder, trying to make
it tingle. Even Dr. O'Donnell had never done more than touch Lyra's forehead when she had a fever. This felt like being with Squeezeme, but more, bigger. She wanted to cry.

The guard tower was empty, the post abandoned. The smell of rotten fish and sea kelp was almost overwhelming, as if the smoke had underscored and sharpened it. Lyra at last saw where they were heading: almost directly below the guard tower was an area where the fence had been damaged, yanked out of the ground by winds or by one of the wild hogs that still roamed the island at night.

Seeing that 72 meant to go beneath it, she stopped again, dizzy with the heat and the noise and the harsh animal sounds of screaming. Cassiopeia's breath sounded as if it was being sucked in and out of an air pump, and Lyra could feel Cassiopeia's heart beating hard through her back and ribs, blood racing around to all those fragile veins. But there was a hole somewhere, a puncture. Her shirt was heavy and warm with blood.

Help.
She thought the word to no one and to everyone. She knew that people believed in a God who would help them, but God hated the replicas and didn't care whether they lived or died because he hadn't made them. Dr. Saperstein had made them. He was their God.
Help.
She wanted nothing but to return to D-Wing, to lie down in the coolness of the dormitory and pretend nothing had happened.

“If you stay here, you'll die,” 72 said, as if he knew what she was thinking. But he'd released her and no longer seemed to care whether she followed him or not. He went first, sliding on his back feetfirst underneath the gap.

A smell reached her—something sweet and hot she recognized from the Funeral Home as the smell of blood. She looked back at the institute, steadying Cassiopeia on her feet. The dormitories were gone. The peaked roof of A-Wing, normally visible, was gone. In its place were nothing but rolling storm clouds of smoke, and spitting angry fire.

It took forever to get Cassiopeia beneath the gap. Her eyes were closed and even though her skin was hot, she was shivering so badly Lyra could barely keep ahold of her. Lyra had to repeat her name several times, and then her number, before she responded. She was passing in and out of sleep. Finally 72 had to bend down and take her by the arms, dragging her roughly free of the fence, her damaged leg twisted awkwardly behind her. She cried out in pain. This, at least, woke her up.

“What's happening?” she kept repeating, shaking. “What's happening?”

Lyra was next. But before she could get through the fence, she heard a shout behind her. She'd been spotted. One of the guards, face invisible behind his helmet, was sprinting toward her, and she was temporarily mesmerized
by the look of his gun, the enormity of it, all levers and scopes. She'd only seen the guns from a distance and didn't know why this one should be aimed at her, but for a split second she imagined the bullets screaming almost instantaneously across the distance that separated them, imagined bullets passing through layers of skin.

“Stop!” Now she could hear him. “Stop where you are.”

Instead she dropped to her stomach and slid beneath the gap, shimmying her hips free when for a moment the bottom of the fence snagged on her pants. The guard was still shouting at her to stop but she was out, out and free and once again helping Cassiopeia to her feet. She didn't know why she was so afraid, but she was. At any second she expected to hear the chitter of bullets on the fence, feel her heart explode sideways, cleaved in two by a bullet.

But the shots didn't come, although the guard was still shouting, still coming toward them. At that second there was another rocketing blast (the fire had found its way to the storerooms in the basement of B-Wing, stocked with old chemical samples, medications, solutions marked
flammable
and
dangerous
), a final explosion that shot a plume of green flame fifty feet into the air and made the ground shudder. Cassiopeia slipped and fell backward in the mud. Lyra stumbled, and 72 caught her. For a few seconds they were inches apart, and she could smell him again, and see
the fine dark line around his irises, light contracting his pupils, narrowing them to pinpoints.

From above came hailstones of granite and cement, several of them lobbing over the fence and thudding only a few feet from where they were standing. The guard had dropped to his knees and covered his head, and Lyra saw their chance. Together, she and 72 hauled Cassiopeia to her feet and went with her into the marsh. Lyra wasn't sure what they were going to do about Cassiopeia. Already she regretted taking her along. But Cassiopeia was number 6. Like Lyra, she was Gen-3, the first successful crop. Lyra had known her for as long as she could remember.

The water was warmer than she had expected, and cloudy with dirt. Banks of waist-high grass grew between stretches of thick mud and tidal pools scummy with dead insects, all of it new and strange to her, words and feelings she didn't know, sensations that tasted like blood in her mouth and panic reaching up to throttle her. Several years ago, the replicas had been woken by screaming: a man a half-mile from Spruce Island had his leg ripped off at the hip by an alligator before the guards scared it by firing into the air. He was airlifted to a nearby hospital. The nurses had for once allowed them out of their beds to watch the helicopter land with a noise like the giant whirring of insect wings, white grasses flattened by the artificial wind. Once, when she was a child, she'd
even seen an alligator sunning itself on the rocky beach on the southernmost tip of the island, not four feet from the fences. She had been amazed by its knobby hide, its elongated snout, the teeth protruding jaggedly from its mouth, and she remembered standing there flooded with sudden shame: God had made that creature, that monster with a taste for blood, and loved it. But he had not made her.

She felt as if they were walking through endless tunnels bound entirely by mud and grass, and couldn't imagine that 72 knew where he was going, or where he was leading them. Cassiopeia was crying, and only the smoke still lodged in Lyra's chest, still turning the sun to a dull red ember and smudging away the sky, kept Lyra from crying, too. Haven, gone. They were outside the fence. They were in thin, unbound air, in a world of alligators and humans who hated and despised them. They were running away from safety and Lyra didn't know why. Only that the guard had come at her with a gun, looking as if he wanted to shoot.

Why had he drawn his gun? The guards were there for their own protection. To keep the outside world
out
. To keep the replicas safe.