Replica (Replica #1)(33)

What was it that Jake had read?

All known prion diseases in mammals . . . are currently untreatable and universally fatal.

“Jesus.” Jake leaned back and closed his eyes. For a long time, no one said anything. Lyra felt strangely as if she had left her body behind, as if she no longer existed at all. She was a wall. She was the floor and the ceiling. “That’s the answer to what they were doing at Haven.” Although he’d addressed Gemma, when he opened his eyes again, he looked directly at Lyra, and immediately she slammed back into her body and hated him for it. “Prions live in human tissue. Don’t you see?”

Lyra could see. But she couldn’t say so. Her voice had dried up. She was filled with misfolded crystals, like tiny slivers of glass, slowly cutting her open from the inside. It was Gemma who spoke.

“They’ve been experimenting on the replicas,” she said slowly. She wouldn’t look at Lyra. “They’ve been observing the effects of the disease.”

“Not just experimenting on them,” Jake said, and his voice broke. “Incubating them. Gemma, they’ve been using the replicas to make prions. They’ve been growing the disease inside them.”


Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Gemma’s story.





ELEVEN


“I TOLD YOU.”

Lyra turned and saw 72, his cheek still crisscrossed with lines from the pillow. He was looking not at Jake or Gemma but directly at Lyra, and she couldn’t read his expression. She had spent her whole life listening to doctors talk about the workings of the lungs and liver, the blood-brain barrier, and white blood cell counts, but she had never heard a single one explain how faces worked, what they meant, how to read them.

“I told you,” he said again, softer this time, “they never cared. They were never trying to protect us. It was a lie.”

“You knew?” she said.

He stared at her. “Didn’t you?” His voice was quiet. “Didn’t you, really?”

She looked away, ashamed. He was right, of course. Everything had fallen away, the final veil, the game she’d been playing for years, the lies she’d been telling herself. It all made sense now. Numbers instead of names, it instead of she or he. Are you going to teach the rats to play chess? They were disposable and always had been. It wasn’t that they were more prone to diseases, to failures of the liver and lungs. They’d been manufactured to die.

All the times she felt nauseous or dizzy or couldn’t remember where she was or where she was going: not side effects of the treatment, but of the disease. Actually, not side effects at all.

Symptoms.

Gemma stood up. “We’ve done enough for the night,” she said to Jake. Lyra knew that Gemma must feel sorry for them. Or maybe she was only scared. Maybe she thought the disease was contagious.

She wondered how long she had. Six months? A year? It seemed so stupid to have run. What was the point, since she was just going to die anyway? Maybe she should have let the guards shoot her after all.

Jake closed his computer. “It’s after ten o’clock,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “My aunt’s coming back from Decatur tomorrow. I’ve got to go home.”

“Let’s pick up in the morning, okay? We’ll figure out what to do in the morning.” Gemma addressed the words to Jake, but Lyra had a feeling she meant the words for her.

“Are you going to be okay?” Jake asked. He lifted a hand as if he was going to touch Lyra’s shoulder, but she took a quick step backward and he let his hand fall.

Lyra shrugged. It hardly mattered. She kept thinking about what Jake had said. They’ve been growing the disease inside them. Like the glass hothouses where Haven grew vegetables and fruit. She pictured her body blown full of air and proteins misfolded into snowflake shapes. She pictured the illustration she’d once seen of a pregnant woman and the child curled inside her womb. They had implanted her. She was carrying an alien child, something deadly and untreatable.

“If you need anything, just give a shout,” Gemma said.

“Here.” Jake bent over and scrawled something on a piece of paper. Normally Lyra loved to see a person writing by hand, the way the letters simply fell from the pen, but now she didn’t care. There was no help Jake could give her. No help anyone could give her. “This is my telephone number. Have you used a telephone before?”

“I know what a telephone is,” Lyra said. Though she had never used one herself, the nurses hardly did anything but, and as a little kid she’d sometimes picked up random things—tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, prescription bottles—and pretended to speak into them, pretended there was someone in another world who would answer.

Jake nodded. “This is my address. Here. Just in case. Can you read this?”

Lyra nodded but couldn’t bring herself to meet Jake’s eyes.

For several minutes after Gemma and Jake left, Lyra stayed where she was, sitting on the couch. 72 moved around the room silently, picking things up and then putting them down. She was unaccountably angry at him. He had predicted this. That meant it was his fault.

“When did you know?” she asked. “How did you know?”

He glanced at her, and then turned his attention back to a small bubble of glass: plastic snow swirled down when he inverted it. “I told you. I didn’t know exactly,” he said. “But I knew they were making us sick. I knew that was the point.” He said it casually.