Replica (Replica #1)(28)

“You must have been hoping that something like this would happen,” Lyra said, and a suspicion flickered: Could 72 have somehow been responsible for the disaster at Haven? But no. That didn’t make any sense. They were standing together when the explosion happened. They were touching.

72 frowned as if he knew what she was thinking. “I didn’t hope for anything,” he said. “I was just waiting for my chance.”

“But you must have had a plan,” she insisted. “You must have had an idea of where you would go on the other side.”

“I didn’t have a plan.” He leaned back, closing his eyes. As soon as he did, he once again looked much younger. Or not younger, exactly. Stripped down, somehow, naked. Lyra remembered that once she and Ursa Major and Cassiopeia had spied on the males’ dormitory from the courtyard. Through a partially open blind they’d seen the blurry and bony silhouette of one of the males shirtless and they’d stumbled backward, shocked and gasping, when he turned in their direction. Looking at 72 gave Lyra the same feeling of peering through those blinds, and left her excited and also terrified.

She was almost relieved when he opened his eyes again.

“You asked me what I want. I’ll tell you what I don’t want. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being told what to do, and what to eat, and when to sleep, and when to use the bathroom. I’m tired of being a lab rat.”

“What do you mean, a lab rat?” It was so hot, Lyra was having trouble thinking. Once or twice she’d been sent into B-Wing for some reason or another and seen the milk-white rats in their cages, had seen when they threaded their paws through the bars the elongated pinkness of their strangely human fingers. And some of them were suffering in some stage of an experiment, bloated with pain or covered in dozens of tumorous growths, so heavy they couldn’t lift their heads.

“I watched,” he said simply. “I paid attention.” He turned his face to the window. “When I was little, I didn’t know the difference. I thought I might be an animal. I thought I must be.”

Lyra had an uncomfortable memory again, of number 35 crawling on all fours, insisting on eating her dinner from a bowl on the ground. But number 35 had been soft in the brain. Everyone said so.

“Aren’t you worried about what will happen?” she asked. “Without medicine, without check-ins, with no one to help us when we get sick? We weren’t made for the outside.”

But even as she said it, Lyra thought again of Dr. O’Donnell. She knew how the replicas were built. She was a doctor and she’d worked at Haven. She could help.

“You really believe.” It wasn’t a question. He had turned back to her. “You believe everything they ever told you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. It was so hot. Her face was hot. He was looking at her like some of the nurses did, like she wasn’t exactly real, like he was struggling to see her.

But before he could answer, Jake was back, sliding behind the wheel.

“Sorry,” he said. “Forgot to leave the AC on. I realized you guys must be baking. Hot as balls today, isn’t it?”

72 was still watching Lyra. But then he turned back toward the window.

“Yes,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to one of the humans except in anger, and Lyra noticed that Jake startled in his seat, as if he hadn’t really expected a reply. “Hot.”


Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Gemma’s story.





TEN


LYRA HAD NEVER SEEN SO many houses or imagined that there could be so many people in the world. She knew the facts—she’d heard the nurses and doctors discussing them sometimes, problems with overpopulation, the division between rich and poor—and the nurses often watched TV or listened to the radio or watched videos on their phones when they were bored. But knowing something was different from seeing it: house upon house, many of them identical, so she felt dizzyingly as if she were going forward and also turning a circle; car after car lined up along the streets, grass trim and vividly green. And people everywhere. People driving or out on their lawns or waiting in groups on corners for reasons she couldn’t fathom.

Jake stopped again at one of these houses, and Gemma got out of the car. Lyra watched through the window as a girl with black hair emerged from the house and barreled into Gemma’s arms. Lyra was confused by this, as she was by Jake and Gemma’s relationship, the casual way they spoke to each other, and the fact that Gemma was a replica but didn’t know it. But she was confused by so much she didn’t have the energy to worry about it.

For several minutes, Gemma and the other girl stood outside. Lyra tried to determine whether this second girl, the black-haired one, was a replica or a regular human but couldn’t tell, although she was wearing human clothes and her hair was long. She used her hands a lot. Then the girl went inside, and Gemma returned to the car alone.

“April’s going to open the gate,” she told Jake. She sounded breathless, though she hadn’t walked far. “You can park next to the pool house.”

Jake advanced the car and they corkscrewed left behind the house. Lyra saw a dazzling rectangle of water, still as a bath, which she knew must be a pool. Even though she couldn’t swim, she had the urge to go under, to wash away what felt like days of accumulated dirt and mud and sweat. There were bathtubs in Postnatal, and even though they were too small to lie down in, Lyra had sometimes filled a tub and stepped in to her ankles after it was her turn to tickle, engage, and maintain physical contact with the new replicas.