Replica (Replica #1)(109)

The picture was small. The girl couldn’t have been older than three. She was sitting on the floor in a blue dress and white tights, her brown hair clipped into pink barrettes, gripping a plastic cup decorated with parading lion silhouettes and grinning at someone to the left of the camera.

“That was only six months before she got took.” Mr. Harliss had moved to sit next to Gemma. Their thighs were practically touching. It was as though he’d forgotten how and why he’d brought them there. As if they were old friends, bound together by grief. “She loved that cup,” he said. “I remember Aimee yelled at her to put it down, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t go anywhere without that damn cup.”

The scar above the girl’s eyebrow was more obvious than it was now. But it was unmistakably her.

Lyra, the replica, the lost child.

Gemma got to her feet. Parts of her body felt leaden, others impossibly light, as if she’d been disassembled and put back together wrong. All of a sudden, she thought her lungs were collapsing. She couldn’t breathe. It was too hot. The air felt wet with heat, as if she was trying to inhale mud.

Peter squinted at her. “Are you all right?” An idiotic question: she didn’t think she’d ever be all right again.

“What?” Mr. Harliss said. “What’s wrong?”

She was going to throw up. She felt like she was relearning to walk, like she was just twitching across the room, like she might collapse. She half expected Mr. Harliss to stop her, but he didn’t. “What’s wrong?” he was saying, “What is it?” But she was at the door. She fumbled to release the chain and the dead bolt, her fingers clumsy-stiff, her body still rioting.

Then she was outside in air that was even worse, heavier, deader than the air inside. The sunshine felt like an insult. She leaned on the railing and stared down over the parking lot, heaving and coughing, trying to bring up whatever was lodged inside of her, that sick, twisted feeling in her guts, the horror of it. She wanted it out. But nothing came up. She was crying, too, all at once. The world went bright and the pain in her head narrowed to a fierce point and she was standing there in the stupid sun sobbing and snotting all over herself. A monster-girl. An alien. She was never meant to be here.

The door opened behind her. She didn’t turn around. It would be Harliss, telling her to get back inside.

But it wasn’t Harliss. Pete came to stand next to her. He put a hand on her elbow. “Gemma?”

She pulled away from him. She knew she must look terrible. She always did when she cried, like something that had just been born, all red and slimy. Not that it mattered. He would never look at her the same way.

“Talk to me, Gemma,” he said.

The fact that he was still trying to be nice to her made her feel even worse.

“Don’t,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“Don’t have to what?” Standing there in the afternoon sunlight, quiet and patient and sad, Pete looked like the most beautiful thing Gemma had ever seen. Like turning a corner, exhausted, lost, and seeing your house up ahead with all the lights on. Of course she would realize she was falling for him at the same time she would find out the truth about her parents and how she had been made from the sister who should have lived.

“You heard what he said.” Gemma couldn’t bring herself to repeat the words. She squeezed the railing tightly, stupidly hoping she’d get a splinter, that she’d bleed some of this away. The parking lot was dazzling with sun and ugliness. “You know what I am now.”

“What you are?” Pete reached out and placed a hand over hers. “What are you talking about?”

She couldn’t stand to have him touch her. She thought of her hand, her skin, grown in some laboratory. Was that how they did it? Did they culture her skin cells, like they would a yogurt, a bacteria? She took her hand away. “I’m a freak,” she said. She couldn’t stop crying. Jesus. “I’m some kind of a monster.” Her heart was beating in her throat, making it hard to talk. “The worst part is I think I always knew. I always felt it.”

“Gemma, no.” Pete grabbed her by her shoulders so she had no choice but to look at him. She wiped her face with a hand and left a slick trail of wet and maybe snot. Great. “Listen to me, okay? Those men at Haven—the ones who stole children so they could get their funding, the ones who made people, living people, just to use them and poison them—those are the monsters, okay? Not you. You’re amazing, do you hear me? You’re perfect.”

Somehow through the suffocating mud of her misery, this penetrated. No one had ever told her she was perfect. She was about as far from perfect as you could get. And yet looking up at him, at his freckles and his eyes all warm with kindness, she believed that he thought so.

Of all the things that she’d seen and learned in the past week, this seemed like the most miraculous.

“So you don’t hate me?” She swallowed a hiccup. She could only imagine what she looked like, but he didn’t make her feel ugly. He still had his hands on her shoulders and she realized how close they were. No one had ever looked at her the way he was looking at her, or touched her like this, like she was something beautiful that needed preservation.

He smiled, and behind his eyes were doors that opened and said come in. “God, Gemma. You really are dumb sometimes. You know that?”