Replica (Replica #1)(36)

“I want to know more,” she said. “I want to know why they did this to us. Why they made us sick. I want to know if there’s a cure.”

He stopped walking. He stared at her. “There’s no cure,” he said.

“Not that we know of,” she said. “But you said yourself you didn’t know exactly what they were doing at Haven. There could be a cure. They could have developed one.”

“Why would they?” he said. He looked as if he was trying not to smile. In that moment, she hated him. She’d never met someone who could make her have so many different feelings—who could make her feel at all, really.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why they did anything.”

He looked at her, chewing on the inside of his cheek. She supposed that he wasn’t ugly after all. She supposed that he was beautiful, in his own way, strange and angular, like the spiky plants that grew between the walkways at Haven, with a fan of dark-green leaves. She’d overheard Gemma say that, on the phone in the car earlier. Maybe she hadn’t thought Lyra was listening. There’s a girl and a boy, she’d said. The girl is sick or something. The boy is . . . And she’d lowered her voice to a whisper. Beautiful. Lyra had never really thought of faces as beautiful before, although she had enjoyed the geometry of Jake’s face, and she supposed, in retrospect, that Dr. O’Donnell had been beautiful. At least she was in Lyra’s memory.

She wondered if she herself was ugly.

Two lights appeared in the distance. She raised a hand to her eyes, momentarily dazzled and afraid, and then realized it was only an approaching car. But it began to slow and she was afraid again. Somehow, instinctively, she and 72 took hands. His were large and dry and much nicer than the hands of the doctors, which, wrapped in disposable gloves, always felt both clammy and cold, like something dead.

“You kids all right?” The man in the car had to lean all the way across the seat to talk to them through the open window.

72 nodded. Lyra was glad. She couldn’t speak.

“Funny place for a stroll,” he said. “You be careful, okay? There’s cars come down this road eighty, ninety miles an hour.”

He started to roll up his window and Lyra exhaled, relieved and also stunned. If he’d recognized them as replicas, it didn’t seem like it. Maybe the differences weren’t as obvious as she thought.

“Hello,” she blurted out, and the window froze and then buzzed down again. “Hello,” she repeated, taking a step toward the car and ignoring 72, who hissed something, a warning, probably. “Have you heard of Palm Grove?”

“Palm Grove, Florida?” The man had thick, fleshy fingers, and a cigarette burned between them. “You weren’t thinking of walking there, were you?” He said it half laughing, as if he’d made a joke. But when she didn’t smile, he squinted at her through the smoke unfurling from his cigarette. “The twelve goes straight up the coast to Palm Grove on its way to Tallahassee. If that’s where you’re headed, you can’t miss the bus depot. But it’s a hike. Five or six miles at least.”

Lyra nodded, even though she didn’t know what he meant by the twelve, or how far five or six miles was.

“Won’t catch a bus this late, though,” the man said. “Hope you got a place to stay the night.” He was still staring at her, but now his eyes ticked over her shoulder to 72 and back again. Something shifted in his face. “Hey. You sure you’re okay? You don’t look too good.”

Lyra backed quickly away from the car. “I’m fine,” she said. “We’re fine.”

He stared at them for another long moment. “Watch out for the drivers down this stretch, like I said. They’ll be halfway to Miami before they realize they got you.”

Then he was gone and his taillights became the red tips of two cigarettes and then vanished.

“You shouldn’t speak to them,” 72 said. “You shouldn’t speak to any of them.”

“He spoke to me,” Lyra said. “Besides, what harm did it do?”

72 just shook his head, still staring in the direction the car had gone, as if he expected it might rematerialize. “What’s in Palm Grove?”

“Someone who might be able to help,” Lyra said carefully.

“Who?” 72 was backlit by the streetlamp and all in shadow.

She knew he might refuse to go with her, and if he did, she would still find her way to Palm Grove. They owed each other nothing. It was chance that had kept them together so far. Still, the idea of being completely on her own was terrifying. She had never been alone at Haven. At the very least the guards had always been watching.

But she saw no way to lie convincingly. She knew no one, had no one, in the outside world, and he knew that. “She was a nurse at Haven,” she said.

“No,” he said immediately, and began walking again, kicking at the gravel and sending it skipping away across the road.

“Wait.” She got a hand around his arm, the one crisscrossed with all those vivid white scars. She turned him around and had a sudden shock: just for a second her body did something, told her something, she didn’t understand.

“No,” he said again.

She dropped his arm. She didn’t know what she wanted from him but she did, and that made her feel confused and exhausted and unhappy. “She’s not like the other ones,” she said. Dr. O’Donnell had said, You’re a good person, even as Nurse Em sobbed so that snot bubbled in her nostrils. You want to make things right. I know you do. That had to mean it was true.