Replica (Replica #1)(10)
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.
FIVE
“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.