Replica (Replica #1)(17)

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.