Replica (9 page)

Gemma kept staring, until Lyra finally felt uncomfortable and looked down at her hands. Had she said the wrong thing again? But she was just reciting what she knew to be true, what everyone had always told her.

Finally Gemma spoke again. Her voice was much softer now. “We should camp here for the night,” she said. For an instant, she even sounded like Dr. O'Donnell. “We'll go back to Wahlee in the morning.”

“We're not going anywhere with you,” 72 said quickly. Lyra was surprised to hear him say
we
. She had never been a
we
. Maybe he'd only confused the word, the way she still confused
I
and
it
sometimes.

“No,” Gemma said. “No, you don't have to go with us. Not unless you want to.”

“Why would we want to?” 72 asked. In the dark he was all hard angles, like someone hacked out of shadow. Now Lyra wasn't sure whether he was ugly or not. His face kept changing, and every time the light fell on it differently he looked like a new person.

Cassiopeia's replica didn't blink. “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.”

The girl was right.
You're not even supposed to exist.
Lyra knew the truth of these words, even though she wasn't sure exactly what they meant. Hadn't that been the point
of the guards and the fences? To keep the replicas safe, and secret, and protected? Everyone who had known them had despised them.
You're not supposed to exist.
Wasn't that what the nurses were always saying? That they were monsters and abominations? All except Nurse Em, all those years ago, and Dr. O'Donnell. But both of them had gone away.

Everyone went away, in the end.

“Can I have more water?” she asked, and so somehow it was decided. 72 turned to look at her with an expression she couldn't read, but she was too tired to worry about him and what he thought and whether they were making the right decision.

Neither of the strangers wanted to sleep near Cassiopeia's body, so they moved instead through the thick patch of hobble-backed trees and tall grasses streaked with bird guano, leaving the corpse behind. Lyra didn't understand it. She liked being near to Cassiopeia's body. It was comforting. She could imagine she was back at Haven, even, that she and Cassiopeia were just lying in separate cots across the narrow space that divided them.

Gemma, the girl, suggested she try a soda. Lyra had never had soda before. At Haven, the vending machines were for the staff only, although sometimes the nurses took pity on the younger replicas and gave them coins from the vending machines to play with, to roll or flip or
barter. Her first impression was that it was much, much too sweet. But she felt better after a few sips, less nauseous. Her hands were steadier, too.

Gemma found a clean sweatshirt in the bottom of Jake's bag and offered it to 72, but he refused. So instead Lyra took it, though it was far too big and she did nothing but pull it on over the filth of her regular shirt. She was warm now, but she was also comforted by the feel of clean cotton and the smell of it, like the laundry detergent they used at Haven that sent the sheets back stiff and crisp as paper. This sweatshirt wasn't stiff, but soft, so soft.

She curled up on the ground and 72 sat next to her.

“I don't trust them,” he whispered, looking over to where the boy and girl were making camp, arguing over who should be allowed to use the backpack as a pillow. “They're not like us.”

“No,” she said. Her tongue felt thick. Her mind felt thick, too, as if it had also been blanketed in cotton. She wanted to say:
We don't exist.
She wanted to say:
We have no choice.
But even as she reached for the words, the cord tethering her thoughts snapped, and she was bobbing, wordless, mindless, into the dark.

It seemed she'd barely fallen asleep before she was jerked into awareness again by movement beside her. She sat up and saw 72 half on his feet with the knife in his hand.

The girl Gemma was standing above them, and for a confused second, before the clutch of dream fully released her, Lyra again mistook her for Cassiopeia and felt a leap of feeling she had no name for.

“It's okay,” the girl said. “It's just me. Gemma, remember?”

72 lowered his knife. Lyra thought he must have been having a bad dream. He looked pale. They'd woken up very close together, side by side again. She wondered whether he'd reached for her again in the middle of the night. For body heat. A person's average body temperature fell during sleep, she knew, sometimes by a full degree. Another thing she had heard and remembered.

“There are still men on the island,” Gemma said immediately. “They're burning what's left of Haven.”

“You saw them? You got close?” The other one, Jake, had woken, too. He stood up, shoving a hand through his hair. Lyra had always been fascinated by hair—she and the other replicas had their scalps shaved every week—and was temporarily mesmerized by the way it fell. “You should have woken me. It's not safe.”

Lyra barely heard him. She stood, too, despite the fact that her legs felt gelatinous and uncertain. The sky was getting light. “What do you mean, they're burning what's left of Haven?”

“Just what I said,” Gemma said.

Lyra had a sudden explosion of memories: the smell of the Stew Pot in the morning and the way the sunlight patterned the linoleum; the courtyard paths splotched with guano; the medicinal smell of a swab on her arm, the pinch of a needle, a voice murmuring she would be okay, okay. All her friends, Squeezeme and Thermoscan and even the Glass Eyes, who could never entirely be trusted—all of them gone. Lyra's memories felt right then like physical things, punching up into her consciousness. The small cot with her number fixed to the steel headboard. Showerheads arrayed in a row and the smell of soap-scented steam and the echo of dozens of voices. Laundry day and trash day and the mournful bellow of the departing barges. Even the things she hated: paper cups filled with pills and vitamins, the nurses sneering at the replicas, or worse, acting as though they were afraid.

Still. Haven was home. It was where she belonged.

“Then there's no going back?” She hadn't realized, fully realized, until the words were out of her mouth that on some level she had been holding on to the idea that this would all pass—the explosions and the fire and the soldiers shouting
stop,
saying,
You know how expensive these things are to make?—
all of it would be explained. Then they would be herded up, they would be returned to Haven, 72 included. They would be evaluated by doctors. The nurses would distribute pills: the prim white Hush-Hush
for pain, the slightly larger Sleepers that made the world relax into fog. Everything would return to normal.

“There's no going back,” 72 said. He wasn't as hard with her as he'd been the day before. Lyra wondered if it was because he felt sorry for her. “I told you that. They'll kill us if they find us. One way or another, they'll kill us.”

Lyra turned away. She wouldn't listen. The guards and soldiers were trained to kill. And she had never liked the doctors or the nurses, the researchers or the birthers with their incomprehensible speech. But she knew that Haven had existed to protect them, that the doctors were trying to keep them safe against the cancers that exploded through the tissue of their lungs and livers and brains, against the diseases that reversed the normal processes of life and made food go up instead of down or lungs drown in fluid of their own creation.

Side effects. The replication process was still imperfect. If it weren't for the doctors, Lyra and 72 would have died years ago, as infants, like so many replicas had, like the whole yellow crop did. She remembered all those tiny bodies bundled carefully in paper sheaths, each of them no bigger than a loaf of bread. Hundreds of them borne away on the barge to be burned in the middle of the ocean.

“We have to get off the marshes. There will be new patrols now that it's light. They'll be looking for survivors.”
Gemma was speaking in a low voice, the kind of voice Lyra associated with the nurses when they wanted something:
calm down, deep breath, just a little burn.
“Come with us, and we'll get you clothes, and hide you someplace no one will be looking for you. Then you can figure out where to go.
We
can figure it out.”

“Okay,” Lyra said, because 72 had just opened his mouth, and she was tired of being spoken for, tired of letting him decide for her. He wasn't a doctor. He had no right to tell her what to do. But she had followed him and she had to make the best of it.

Besides, she didn't think Gemma wanted to hurt them, though she couldn't have said why. Maybe only because Gemma was Cassiopeia's replica, although she knew that was stupid—genotypes often had different personalities. Number 120 had tried to suffocate her own genotype while she slept, because she wanted to be the real one. The only one. Cassiopeia was nice to Lyra, but Calliope liked to kill things. She had once killed a bird while Lyra was watching. And 121 had never spoken a single word.

“Okay, we'll go with you,” she said a little louder, when 72 turned to look at her. She was pleased when he didn't argue, felt a little stronger, a little more in control. Cassiopeia's replica would help them. They needed to know what had happened to Haven and why. Then they could figure out what to do next.

Jake and Gemma had come on a boat called a kayak. Lyra had never seen one before and didn't especially want to ride in it, but there was no choice. Gemma and Jake would have to go on foot, and there might be places so deep they'd have to swim. Neither 72 nor Lyra had ever learned to swim, and she nearly asked him what he had meant by trying to escape Haven, how he'd expected to survive. When she was little she had sometimes dreamed of escape, dreamed of going home on the launches with one of the staff members, being dressed and cared for and cuddled. But she had learned better, had folded that need down inside of her, stored it away. Otherwise, she knew, she might go crazy, like so many of the other replicas who'd chosen to die or tried to sneak out on the trash barges with the nurses and been killed by exhaust in the engine room.

Once again, she wondered if 72 was just a little bit crazy.

Being in the kayak felt like being on a narrow, extremely wobbly gurney. The seat was wet. Her stomach lurched as 72 shoved the kayak into the shallows and then clambered in himself, refusing Jake's help. She couldn't believe they didn't just sink. She was uncomfortably aware of the sloshing of the water below her, which seemed to be attempting to jettison her out of her seat. She was afraid to move, afraid even to breathe.

But miraculously, the kayak stayed afloat, and 72 soon got the hang of paddling. The muscles in his arms and shoulders stood out when he moved, and Lyra found him unexpectedly beautiful to watch. She began to relax, despite the painful slowness of their progress and the continued rhythm of motorboats in the distance, and the ripples from their wakes that sent water sloshing into the kayak.

She should be afraid. She didn't know much about feelings, but she knew that Gemma was afraid, and Jake was afraid, and even 72 was afraid. But for some reason, for a short time, the fear released her. She was floating, gliding toward a new life. She had never thought she'd know what it felt like to be out on the water, had never imagined that a life outside Haven could exist. The outside world, constantly visible to her through the fence, had nonetheless seemed like the soap operas she sometimes saw on the nurses' TV: pretty to look at but essentially unreal.

But the novelty soon wore off. The insects were thick. Gnats swarmed them in mists. They hardly seemed to be moving. Tendrils of floating grass made certain routes impassable and had to be manually separated or threshed aside with a paddle. Several times Gemma lost her footing in the water and nearly went under. Lyra wondered how long they would be able to go, whether they would
make it. She wondered whether they would have to leave Gemma behind, and thought of Cassiopeia lying in the reeds while the sun burned away her retinas.

She felt a momentary regret but didn't know why. Death was natural. Decay, too. It was another thing that made replicas and humans similar: they died.

Finally Gemma called them to a stop. Lyra was relieved for the break and the chance to get off the water, especially now that the midmorning sun was like an exposed eye.

They'd barely dragged the kayak out of the water when Jake yelled, “Get down.”

The hum of an approaching helicopter suddenly doubled, tripled in volume. Lyra's breath was knocked away by its pressure. They went into a crouch beneath the fat sprawl of a mangrove tree as the helicopter roared by overhead. The whole ground trembled. Marsh grass lay flat beneath the wind threshed from the helicopter's giant rotor. Looking up through the branches, Lyra saw a soldier leaning out of the open door to point at something on the horizon. Then the helicopter was gone.

They left the kayak behind and went the rest of the way on foot. The ground was soft and wet and they had to wade through tidal pools where the mud was studded with sharp-toothed clams and splinters of broken shells. The growth here was different, the trees taller and less
familiar to Lyra. She felt as if they were moving deep in an undiscovered wilderness and was shocked when instead Gemma gave a cry of relief and the trees opened up to reveal a small dirt clearing, corroded metal trash bins, and various signs she was too tired to read.

“Thank God,” Gemma said. Lyra watched as Jake moved to a dusty car parked in the lot and loaded his backpack into it. She was afraid all over again. She knew about cars because she'd seen them on TV and Lazy Ass was always complaining about hers,
piece-of-shit,
but she didn't think she wanted to ride in one. Especially since, according to Lazy Ass's stories, at least, cars were always breaking down or leaking oil or giving trouble in some way.