Replica (Replica #1)(3)

But that’s what they were: bodies. Human and yet not people. She hadn’t so far been able to figure out why. She looked, she thought, like a normal person. So did the other female replicas. They’d been made from normal people, and even birthed from them.

But the making of them marked them. That’s what everybody said. Except for Dr. O’Donnell.

She wouldn’t mind seeing a male up close—the male and female replicas were kept separate, even the dead ones that went off the island in tarps. She was curious about the males, had studied the anatomical charts in the medical textbooks she couldn’t otherwise read. She had looked especially closely at diagrams of the female and male reproductive organs, which seemed, she thought, to mark the primary difference between them, but she couldn’t imagine what a male’s would look like in real life. The only men she saw were doctors, nurses, security, and other members of the staff.

“All right. Almost done. Come here and stand on the scale now, okay?”

Lyra stood up, hoping to catch a glimpse once again of the chart, and its beautiful, symmetrical lettering, which marched like soldiers across the page. But Nurse Swineherd had snatched the clipboard and was writing in Lyra’s newest results. Without releasing her grip on the clipboard, she adjusted the scale expertly with one hand, waiting until it balanced correctly.

“Hmmm.” She frowned, so that the lines between her eyebrows deepened and converged. Once, when Lyra was really little, she had announced that she had found out the difference between people and replicas: people were old, replicas were young. The nurse who was bathing her at the time, a nurse who hadn’t stayed long, and whose name Lyra could no longer remember, had burst out laughing. The story had quickly made the rounds among the nurses and doctors.

“You’ve lost weight,” Nurse Swineherd said, still frowning. “How’s your appetite?”

Several seconds went by before Lyra realized this was a question she was meant to answer. “Fine.”

“No nausea? Cramping? Vomiting?”

Lyra shook her head.

“Vision problems? Confusion?”

Lyra shook her head because she wasn’t very practiced at lying. Two weeks ago she’d vomited so intensely her ribs had ached the following day. Yesterday she’d thrown up in a pillowcase, hoping it would help muffle the sound. Fortunately she’d been able to sneak it in with the rest of the trash, which went off on boats on Sundays, to be burned or dumped into the sea or otherwise disposed of. Given the storm, and the security breach, and the now-probably-dead male, she was confident no one would notice the missing pillowcase.

But the worst thing was that she had gotten lost yesterday, on her way back to the dorms. It didn’t make any sense. She knew every inch of D-Wing, from Natal Intensive to Neural Observation, to the cavernous dorms that housed one hundred female replicas each, to the bathrooms with dozens of showerheads tacked to a wall, a trench-like sink, and ten toilets. But she must have turned right instead of left coming out of the bathroom and had somehow ended up at the locked door that led into C-Wing, blinking confusedly, until a guard had called out to her and startled her into awareness.

But she wouldn’t say so. She couldn’t go to the Box. That’s what everyone called G-Wing. The Box, or the Funeral Home, because half the replicas that went in never came out.

“All right, off you go,” Nurse Swineherd said. “You let me know if you start feeling sick, okay?”

This time, she knew she wasn’t expected to answer. She wouldn’t have to tell anyone she kept throwing up. That was what the Glass Eyes mounted in the ceiling were for. (She wasn’t sure whether she liked the Glass Eyes or not. Sometimes she did, when the chanting from Barrel Key was especially loud and she thought the cameras were keeping her safe. Sometimes, when she wanted to hide that she felt sick, she hated them, those lashless lenses recording her every move. That was the problem: she never knew which side the Glass Eyes were on.)

But she nodded anyway. Lyra had a plan, and the plan required her to be good, at least for a little while.


Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Gemma’s story.





THREE


THREE DAYS LATER, THE BODY of male number 72 had still not washed up on the beach, as everyone had predicted. At breakfast the day after trash day, Lyra heard the nurses discussing it. Don’t-Even-Think-About-It shook her head and said she was sure the gators had gotten him. If he did make it onto the mainland, she said, he’d likely be shot on sight—nothing but crazies and criminals living out here for miles. And now those men are coming, she added, shaking her head. That was what all the nurses called the Suits: those men.

Lyra had seen their boat in the distance on her way into breakfast: a sleek, motorized schooner, so unlike the battered barge that carted supplies in and trash out and looked as if it was one teaspoon of water away from sinking. She didn’t know exactly what the Suits did, who they were, or why they visited Haven. Over the years she’d heard several references to the military, although they didn’t look like soldiers, at least not the ones she occasionally saw on the nurses’ TV. These men didn’t wear matching outfits, or pants covered in camouflage. They didn’t carry weapons, like the guards did.

When she was younger, the Suits had made Lyra nervous, particularly when all the replicas were forced to line up in front of them to be inspected. The Suits had opened her mouth to look at her teeth. They had asked her to smile or turn around or clap on command, to show she wasn’t an idiot, wasn’t failing to thrive, to wiggle her fingers or move her eyes from left to right.