Replica (Replica #1)(53)

They stopped at an enormous parking lot full of other vehicles, concealed from the highway beneath a heavy line of plane trees and shaded by woods on all sides. Gemma told her that these camps existed across the country for people traveling by camper van and RV—two words Lyra didn’t know, although she assumed they referred to the type of cars parked in the lot, which looked as though they’d been inflated to four times normal size—and once again she was struck by just how many people there must be in the world, enough so that even the ones traveling between towns had their own little network of places to stop for the night. It made her sad. She wondered whether she would ever feel she had a place in this world.

All she knew was that if she had a place, it must be with Caelum.

“I’ll be back,” Caelum said when they got out of the car—the first words he had spoken in hours.

“I’ll come with you,” Lyra said quickly. But she found that walking next to him, she couldn’t find words to say what she wanted to say. It was as if a wall had come down between them. She felt as if he was a stranger again, as if he was the boy she’d met out on the marshes. Even his face looked different—harder, more angular.

At one end of the camp was a whitewashed building with separate bathrooms for men and women, and shower stalls that could be accessed by putting coins in a slot in the lockbox on the doors. Lyra found she did after all want a shower. She wished she could wash off the past few hours: the dizzying reality that somewhere out there were people who’d birthed her, the memory of Jake Witz’s face, bloated and terrible, and the smell of blood and sick that still seemed to hang to her clothes. How did she even know Gemma was telling her the truth? But she trusted Gemma instinctively, no matter what Caelum had originally feared, and when Gemma offered her coins to work the door, she accepted.

The shower was slick with soap scum and reminded her of the bright tiles of Haven and all the replicas showering in groups, herded under the showers in three-minute bursts. She missed that. She missed the order, the routine, the nurses telling her where to go and when. But at the same time the Lyra who was content to float through the days, who lay down on the paper-covered medical beds and let Squeezeme and Thermoscan do their work, who thought of them as friends, even, felt impossibly foreign. She couldn’t remember being that girl.

She had no towel, so when she got dressed again, her hair, still wet, dampened her shoulders and her shirt. But she felt better, cleaner. A father. She experimented with holding the idea for two, three seconds at a time now without shame. She brushed up next to it, got close, sniffed around it like an animal exploring something new. What would it be like to have a father? What did a father actually do? She had no idea.

She came outside into a night loud with distant laughter and the sound of tree frogs. She didn’t see Caelum. She took a turn of the building and found him in the back, hurling rocks into the growth where the dirt clearing petered out into cypress and shade trees.

“Caelum?” He didn’t turn around and, thinking he hadn’t heard, she took another step forward. “Caelum?”

“Don’t call me that.” He turned to face her, his face caught in the flare of the floodlights, and her stomach went hollow. He looked as if he hated her. “That’s not my name.” This time he directed a volley of rocks at the restrooms, so they pinged against the stucco walls and the sign pointing the way to the showers. “I’m seventy-two. I’m a replica. A human model. Only humans have names.”

Then she knew that what she’d been afraid of was true. He hated her for what she was, or for what she wasn’t.

“You’re wrong,” Lyra said. She felt as if she were being squeezed between two giant plates, as if the whole world had narrowed to this moment. “That isn’t what makes the difference.”

“Oh yeah? You would know, I guess.” He looked away. “I thought we were the same, but we’re not. We’re different. You’re different.”

“So what?” Lyra took a step closer to him. They were separated by less than a foot, but he might have been on the other side of the world. She felt reckless, desperate, the same way she’d felt running after Haven had exploded. He turned back to her, frowning. “So we’re different. Who cares? We chose to escape together. We chose to stay together. We chose each other, didn’t we?” I gave you a name, she almost said, but the memory of that night, and lying so close to him, while the darkness stirred around his body, made her throat constrict. “That’s what makes the difference. Getting to choose, and what you choose.” She took a breath. “I choose you.”

“How can you?” His voice was raw. “You know what I am. I don’t belong anywhere.”

“You belong with me.” When she said it out loud, she knew it was true. “Please.” She’d never had to ask for anything, because she’d never had reason to. But this woke inside of her—the asking and the need, the feeling that if he didn’t say yes, she wouldn’t be able to go on.

“Please,” she repeated, because she could say nothing else. But at the same time she took a step toward him and put a hand on his chest, above his heart, because there was always that to return to, always the truth of its rhythm and the fact that every person, no matter how they were formed or where, had a heart that worked the same way.

They were inches apart. His skin was hot. And though she could feel him, touch him, know his separateness, in that moment she also learned something totally new—that it was possible by touching someone else to dissolve all the space between them.