Replica (Replica #1)(34)

“How?” Lyra repeated.

He set the snow globe down, and Lyra watched a flurry of artificial snow swirl down on the two tiny figures contained forever in their tiny bubble world: a stretch of plastic beach, a single palm tree. She felt sorry for them. She understood them.

“I didn’t ever not know,” he said, frowning. To her surprise, he came to sit next to her on the couch. He still smelled good. This made her ache, for some reason. As if inside of her, someone was driving home a nail. “I was sick once, as a little kid. Very sick. I remember they thought I was going to die. I went to the Funeral Home.” He looked down at his hands. “They were excited. When they thought I couldn’t understand them anymore, they were excited.”

Lyra said nothing. She thought of lying on the table after seeing Mr. I, the happy chatter of the researchers above her, their sandwich-smelling breath and the way they laughed when her eyes refused to follow their penlight.

“When I was a kid I used to pretend,” he said. “I would pretend I was an ant or a lizard or a bird. Anything else. I would catch roaches sometimes coming out of the drains. All the nurses hated the roaches. But even they were better off than we were. They could get out.” He opened his palm, staring as if he didn’t recognize it, then closed it again in a fist. “It would be better,” he said, slightly louder, “if they’d hated us. But they didn’t.”

About this, too, he was right. Worse than Nurse-Don’t-Even-Think-About-It, worse than the ones who were afraid, were the ones who hardly noticed. Who would look not at the replicas but through them, who could talk about what to eat for dinner even as they bundled up dead bodies for burning.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lyra asked.

“I tried,” he said. “Besides, what good would it do?”

She shook her head. She needed someone to blame. She had never been so angry before—she hadn’t even thought she had the right. People, real people, believed they deserved things and were angry when they didn’t get them. Replicas deserved nothing, received nothing, and so were never angry.

What kind of God was it, she wondered, who made people who would do what they had done to her?

“Is that why you ran away?” Lyra asked. She felt like crying. She wasn’t in physical pain and yet she felt as if something had changed in her body, as if someone had put tubes in her chest and everything was entangled.

“No,” 72 said. “Not exactly.”

“Why, then?”

He just shook his head. She doubted whether he knew himself. Maybe only for a change. Then he said, “We can’t stay here, you know.”

Lyra hadn’t expected this. “Why not?”

“We’re not safe here,” he said, and his expression turned again, folded up. “I told you. I don’t trust them. They aren’t replicas.”

“The girl is,” Lyra said.

He frowned. “She doesn’t know it,” he said. “No one’s told her.”

“But we don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, and once again realized how true it was. How big was the world? She had no idea. They’d driven for what felt like hours today, and there had been no end to the roads and shopping complexes, streets and houses. And yet Gemma had told her they were still in Florida. How much farther did it all go on? “Besides, what does it matter?” We’ll just die anyway, she almost added, but she knew he understood.

“I didn’t come this far to be a toy,” he said. “I could have gone back to Haven for that.”

Lyra didn’t know what he meant, exactly, but she could guess from his tone of voice. “They’ve been good to us,” she said. “They helped us. They fed us. They gave us clothes and somewhere to sleep.”

“Exactly. So what do they want? They must want something. They’re people,” he said. “That’s what they do. Don’t you see? That’s all they ever do. They want.”

Was that true? She didn’t know. What had Dr. O’Donnell wanted from her? Or Nurse Em, who always smiled at the replicas, who had once told Lyra she had pretty eyes, who saved up her old ferry tokens to give to the young kids to play checkers with?

But maybe that was why they had left Haven: they did not fit in. She still didn’t understand what made people so different from replicas, had never been able to understand it. And she had wanted things too, in her life. She had wanted to learn to read. She had been hungry, cold, and tired, and wanted food and her bed. But it was true she had never hurt anyone to get what she wanted.

Was that what made her less than human?

“Is that enough for you?” 72 said. He scared her when he looked this way, and reminded her of the statue in the courtyard at Haven, whose face, deformed by rain, was sightless and cold. “Someone to feed you and order you around, tell you when to sleep? Like a dog?”

She stood. “Well, what’s the difference?” she said, and she could tell she’d surprised him, because he flinched. She was surprised, too. Her voice was much louder than she’d expected. “We’re replicas, aren’t we? We might as well be dogs. That’s how they think of us anyway. That’s what we were made for. To be dogs—or rats. You weren’t pretending all those years ago. You were a roach.”

He stared at her for a long second. She could see his chest rising with his breath and knew that beneath his skin hundreds of tiny muscles were contracting in his face even to hold it there, still, watching her. The idea of him and what he was made of, all the different fragile parts spun together, made her dizzy.