Replica (Replica #1)(6)

“You don’t look so good” was the first thing Lilac Springs said to Lyra. Lilac Springs hardly ever said anything. She was one of the slower replicas. She still needed help getting dressed, and she had never learned her alphabet. “Are you sick?”

Lyra shook her head, keeping her eyes on the table. She’d thrown up again in the middle of the night and was so dizzy afterward that she had to stay there, holding onto the toilet, for a good twenty minutes. Cassiopeia had caught her when she came in to pee. But she didn’t think Cassiopeia would tell. Cassiopeia was always getting in trouble—for not eating her dinner, for talking, for openly staring at the males and even for trying to talk to them, on the few occasions they wound up in the halls or the Box or the Stew Pot together.

“I’m sick,” Lilac Springs said. She was speaking so loudly, Lyra instinctively looked up at the Glass Eyes, even though she knew they didn’t register sound. “They put me in the Box.”

Lyra didn’t have friends at Haven. She didn’t know what a friend was. But she thought she would be unhappy if Lilac Springs died. Lyra had been five years old when Lilac Springs was made, and could still remember how after Lilac Springs had been birthed and transferred to Postnatal for observation she had kicked her small pink feet and waved her fists as if she was dancing.

But it wasn’t looking good. Something was going around the Browns, and the doctors in the Box couldn’t stop it. In the past four months, five of them had died—four females, and number 312 from the males’ side. Two of them had died the same night. The nurses had suited up in heavy gloves and masks and bundled the bodies in a single plastic tarp before hauling them out for collection. And Lilac Springs’s skin was still shiny red and raw-looking, like the skin on top of a blister. Her hair, which was buzzed short like all the other replicas’, was patchy. Some of her scalp showed through.

“It’s not so bad,” Lilac Springs said, even though Lyra still hadn’t responded. “Palmolive came.”

Palmolive was also a Brown. She had started throwing up a few weeks ago and was found wandering the halls in the middle of the night. She had been transferred to the Box when she could hardly choke down a few sips of water without bringing it up again.

“Do you think I’ll be dead soon?” Lilac Springs asked.

Fortunately, the nurses came in before Lyra had to answer. Lazy Ass and Go Figure were administering. They almost always did. But earlier, Lyra had been afraid that it might be somebody else.

Today there were three tests. Whenever Lyra’s heart beat faster, she imagined its four valves opening and closing like shutters, the flow of blood in one direction, an endless loop like all the interlocking wings of Haven. She had learned about hearts like she’d learned about the rest of the human body: because there was nothing else to learn, no truth at Haven except for the physical, nothing besides pain and response, symptom and treatment, breathe in and breathe out and skin stretched over muscle over bone.

First, Nurse Go Figure called out a series of five letters and asked that the replicas memorize them. Then they had to rearrange colored slips of paper until they formed a progression, from green to yellow. Then they had to fit small wooden pieces in similarly shaped holes, a ridiculously easy test, although Lilac Springs seemed to be struggling with it—trying to fit the diamond shape into the triangular hole, and periodically dropping pieces so they landed, clatteringly, to the floor.

For the last test, Go Figure distributed papers and pens—Lyra held the pen up to her tongue surreptitiously, enjoying the taste of the ink; she wanted another pen badly for her collection—and asked that the replicas write down the five letters they’d memorized, in order. Most of the replicas had learned their numbers to one hundred and the alphabet A through Z, both so they could identify their individual beds and for use in testing, and Lyra took great pleasure in drawing the curves and angles of each number in turn, imagining that numbers, too, were like a language. When she looked up, she saw that Lilac Springs’s paper was still completely blank. Lilac Springs was holding her pen clumsily, staring at it as though she’d never seen one. She hadn’t even remembered a single letter, although Lyra knew she knew her numbers and was very proud of it.

Then Lazy Ass called time, and Nurse Go Figure collected the papers, and they sat in silence as the results were collected, tabulated, and marked in their files. Lyra’s palms began to sweat. Now.

“I forgot the letters,” Lilac Springs said. “I couldn’t remember the letters.”

“All right, that’s it.” Lazy Ass hauled herself out of her chair, wincing, as she always did after testing. The replicas stood, too. Only Lyra remained sitting, her heart clenching and unclenching in her chest.

As always, as soon as Lazy Ass was on her feet, she started complaining: “Goddamn shoes. Goddamn weather. And now my lazy ass gotta go all the way to Admin. Take me twenty minutes just to get there and back. And those men coming today.” Lazy Ass normally worked the security desk and subbed in to help with testing when she had to. She was at least one hundred pounds overweight, and her ankles swelled in the heat until they were thick and round as the trunks of the palms that lined the garden courtyard.?

“Go figure,” said Go Figure, like she always did. She had burnished brown skin that always looked as if it had been recently oiled.

Now. Most of the other replicas had left. Only Lilac Springs remained, still seated, staring at the table.