Replica (Replica #1)(23)

“Look,” he said. He wet his bottom lip with his tongue. “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”

“Who are you?” 72 came to stand next to Lyra. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His face, so open in sleep, had closed again, and she had never learned how to read other people’s moods and feelings, had never been taught to.

“We’re nobody,” the boy said. Slowly he helped the girl to her feet. She was wearing normal clothing, Lyra noticed. People-clothing. She understood less than ever. “Listen, we’re not going to hurt you, okay? My name’s Jake Witz. This is Gemma. We got lost in the marshes, that’s all.”

Lyra was now more confused than ever. “But . . .” She met the girl’s eyes for the first time. It was hard to look at her with Cassiopeia, poor Cassiopeia, lying dead at her feet between them. Who would come to collect her body? Who would bundle her up for burning? “Who made you?”

“What?” the girl whispered.

“Who made you?” Lyra repeated. She’d never heard of other places like Haven, and she felt a small stirring of hope, as if a heavy locked door in her chest had just been unlatched. Maybe there were places for them to go after all, places where there were people to take care of them like they’d been cared for at Haven, places with high walls to keep everyone else out.

“I—I don’t understand,” the girl said. Her eyes were so wide Lyra could see a whole portion of the night sky reflected in them.

“You’re a replica,” Lyra said impatiently. The girl was slow, much slower than Cassiopeia. But she knew that this wasn’t uncommon. She thought of Lilac Springs—dead now, probably. And 101, who’d never even learned how to hold a fork. She wondered how many of the others had burned.

“A what?” the girl whispered.

“A replica,” Lyra repeated. The girl shook her head. Where she came from, they must be called something different. She recited, “An organism descended from or genetically identical to a single common ancestor.”

“A clone,” the girl said, staring at Lyra so fixedly she was reminded of being under the observation lights, and looked away. “She means a clone, Jake.”

“Yeah, well. I kind of already had that impression,” the boy said, and he made a face, as if he was offended by the sight of Cassiopeia’s body.

Lyra had the sudden urge to reach down and close Cassiopeia’s eyes and wasn’t sure where it had come from—maybe something one of the nurses had said about the way people buried one another. In Haven, the dead replicas had always simply been burned or dumped.

“But—but it’s impossible.” The girl’s voice had gotten very shrill. “It’s impossible, the technology doesn’t exist, it’s illegal. . . .”

Lyra lost patience. The girl was either suffering from side effects or she was very, very stupid to begin with. Failure to thrive. “It’s not impossible,” she said. “At Haven, there were thousands of replicas.”

“Jesus.” The boy closed his eyes. His face was like a second moon, pale and glowing. “Clones. It all makes sense now. . . .”

“Are you crazy? Nothing makes sense.” The girl had turned away, covering her mouth with her hand again, as if she was trying to force back the urge to be sick. “There’s a dead girl with my face on her. We’re standing here in the middle of the fucking night and these—these people are telling me that there are clones running around out there, thousands of them—”

“Gemma, calm down. Okay? Everyone needs to calm down.” The boy spoke loudly even though the girl was the only one who wasn’t calm, or the only one who was showing it, at least. “Can you put that thing down, please?” This was to 72, still holding the knife. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Suddenly Lyra was hit with a wave of dizziness. She went into a crouch and put her head between her knees. Her head was full of a hot and sticky darkness, a swirling that reminded her of heavy clouds of circulating gnats.

“What’s the matter with her?” She heard the girl’s voice, but distantly. If 72 responded, she didn’t hear him.

“Hey.” A minute later, the girl was next to her. “Are you okay?” She put a hand on Lyra’s back, and Lyra jerked away. She was used to being touched, manipulated, even opened up with knives and needles; but this felt different, intimate and almost shameful, like when she’d first been caught by Nurse-Don’t-Even-Think-About-It in the bathroom with her hands submerged in bleach, trying to scrub her first period blood from her underwear. She couldn’t speak. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she would throw up. The girl stood up again and moved away from her, and Lyra almost regretted jerking away. But she didn’t want to be touched by strangers, not anymore, not if she could help it.

Except—she remembered falling asleep, exhausted, on the ground, the way the stars had blurred into a single bright point, leading her into sleep—she hadn’t minded when 72 put his arms around her for warmth. But she was in shock, exhausted. She had needed the body heat. The world outside was too big: it was nice to feel bounded by something.

“Maybe she’s hungry,” the boy said.

She wasn’t hungry, but she stayed quiet. The worst of the nausea had released her, though. Strange how it came like that in dizzying rushes, like getting hit in the head. She sat back, too exhausted to stand again. She was no longer afraid, either. It was obvious that the strangers weren’t there to hurt them or to take them anywhere. Now she just wished they would move on. She didn’t understand the girl who was a replica but didn’t know it. She didn’t understand the boy who was with her, and how they were related.