Replica (Replica #1)(5)

One day, it seemed to her that Dr. O’Donnell began reading more slowly—not so slowly that the others would notice, but just enough that Lyra could make better sense of the edges of the words and how they snagged on the edges of certain letters, before leaping over the little white spaces of the page. At first she thought it was her imagination. Then, when Dr. O’Donnell placed a finger on the page, and began tracing individual lines of text, tapping occasionally the mysterious dots and dashes, or pausing underneath a particularly entangled word, Lyra knew that it wasn’t.

Dr. O’Donnell was trying to help Lyra to read.

And slowly, slowly—like a microscope adjusted by degrees and degrees, ticking toward clearer resolution—words began to free themselves from the mysterious inky puddles on the page, to throw themselves suddenly at Lyra’s understanding. I. And. Went. Now.

It couldn’t last. Lyra should have known, but of course she didn’t.

She had just gotten a name. She’d been born, really, for the second time. She hardly knew anything.

One Sunday afternoon, Dr. O’Donnell didn’t come. The girls waited for nearly an hour before Cassiopeia, growing bored, announced she was going to walk down to the beach behind A-Wing and try to collect seashells. Although it wasn’t strictly forbidden, Cassiopeia was one of the few replicas that ever ventured down to the water. Lyra had sometimes followed her, but was too scared to go on her own—frightened of the stories the nurses told, of man-eating sharks in Wahlee Sound, of alligators and poisonous snakes in the marshes.

It was a pretty day, not too hot, and great big clouds puffed up with importance. But Lyra didn’t want to go outside. She didn’t want to do anything but sit on the floor next to Dr. O’Donnell, so close she could smell the mix of antiseptic and lemon lotion on her skin, and the fibers of the paper puffing into the air whenever Dr. O’Donnell turned the page.

She had a terrible thought: Dr. O’Donnell must be sick. It was the only explanation. She had never missed a Sunday since the readings had begun, and Lyra refused to believe that Dr. O’Donnell had simply grown tired of their Sunday afternoons together. That she was tiring. That she was too damaged, too slow for Dr. O’Donnell.

Forgetting that she hated the Box, that she held her breath whenever she came within fifty feet of its red-barred doors, Lyra began to run in that direction. She couldn’t explain the sudden terror that gripped her, a feeling like waking in the middle of the night, surrounded by darkness, and having no idea where she was.

She’d nearly reached C-Wing when she heard the sudden rise of angry voices—one of them Dr. O’Donnell’s. She drew back, quickly, into an alcove. She could just make out Dr. O’Donnell and God, facing off in one of the empty testing rooms. The door was partially open, and their voices floated out into the hall.

“I hired you,” God said, “to do your job, not to play at Mother goddamn Teresa.” He raised his hand, and Lyra thought he might hit her. Then she saw that he was holding the old, weathered copy of The Little Prince Dr. O’Donnell had been reading.

“Don’t you see?” Dr. O’Donnell’s face was flushed. Her freckles had disappeared. “What we’re doing . . . Christ. They deserve a little happiness, don’t they? Besides, you said yourself they do better when they get some affection.”

“Stimulation and touch. Not weekly story time.” God slammed the book down on a table, and Lyra jumped. Then he sighed. “We’re not humanitarians. We’re scientists, Cat. And they’re subjects. End of story.”

Dr. O’Donnell raised her chin. Her hair was starting to come loose from her ponytail. If Lyra had known the word love, if she’d really understood it, she would have known she loved Dr. O’Donnell in that moment.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t treat them like regular people,” she said.

God had already started for the door. Lyra caught a glimpse of his heavy black eyebrows, his close-trimmed beard, his eyes so sunken it looked like someone had pressed them back into his head. Now he stiffened and spun around. “Actually, it does,” he said. His voice was very cold, like the touch of the Steel Ear when it slipped beneath her shirt to listen to her heartbeat. “What’s next? Are you going to start teaching the rats to play chess?”


Before she left Haven, Dr. O’Donnell gave Lyra her copy of The Little Prince. Then Lyra was pretty sure Dr. O’Donnell had been crying.

“Be sure and keep it hidden,” she whispered, and briefly touched Lyra’s face.

Afterward, Lyra lay down. And for the afternoon, Lyra’s pillow smelled like antiseptic and lemon lotion, like Dr. O’Donnell’s fingers.


Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Gemma’s story.





FOUR


COG TESTING TOOK PLACE IN a large, drafty room of D-Wing that had once been used to house cages full of rabbits and still smelled faintly of pellet food and animal urine. Lyra didn’t know what had happened to the rabbits. Haven was large, and many of its rooms were off-limits, so she assumed they had been moved. Or maybe they had failed to thrive, too, like so many of the replicas.

Every week Cog Testing varied: the replicas might be asked to pick up small and slippery pins as quickly as possible, or attempt to assemble a three-dimensional puzzle, or to pick out visual patterns on a piece of paper. The female replicas, all nine hundred and sixty of them, were admitted by color in groups of forty over the course of the day. Lilac Springs was out of the Box and took the seat next to Lyra’s. Lilac Springs had named herself after a product she’d seen advertised on the nurses’ TV. Even after the nurses had laughed hysterically and explained to her—and everyone—what a feminine douche was and what it was for, she had refused to change her name, saying she liked the sound of it.