Replica (Replica #1)(25)

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.”