Replica (Replica #1)(82)
Her foot snagged and her ankle went out. She stumbled on something buried in the grass and for a second that seemed like an eternity she was in the air falling, still imagining hands to reach out and grab her. She landed so hard the wind went out of her and she curled in on herself, shocked and airless, fighting for a breath that wouldn’t come. Then Jake was next to her again, pulling her up so she was sitting. She finally took a breath, a long gasp of it, and began coughing.
“Jesus,” he whispered. He was sweating. He looked like he was going to be sick. “Jesus Christ.”
“That voice,” she managed to say. “Where did it come from? Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Christ, Gemma. Look . . .”
She turned to see what had tripped her. Time that had moved so slowly seemed to crack entirely. For a long second she didn’t understand what she was seeing, and then she thought—wished, hoped—it was an animal, some kind of strange underwater speckled thing, but then Jake drew back and began to cough, half choking, and dropped his flashlight: Gemma saw in its beam the dimpled elbow, the fingers curled in a half fist, and a green medical bracelet strapped around the bony wrist.
She couldn’t have said, then or afterward, what made her reach out to part the grasses with a hand so that she could better see the girl’s face. Instinct, maybe, or shock.
She was thinner than Gemma, much thinner. Her scalp was shaved, but in places a fuzz of brown hair had begun to regrow. Her green eyes were open to the sky and her mouth was open too, as if in a silent scream. There were four freckles on the bridge of her nose, four freckles Gemma knew because she counted them every day in the mirror, because Chloe DeWitt had once taken a pen and connected them during naptime in kindergarten. The soft plump mouth that had been her grandmother’s. The hard angular jaw that belonged to her dad.
Behind her, Jake was still gasping. “What the hell? What the hell?”
The girl—the dead girl—was wearing Gemma’s face.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 8 of Lyra’s story.
NINE
GEMMA SOMETIMES HAD NIGHTMARES WHERE she was trapped in a crowd in an underground vault. In her dreams she was usually looking for someone, often her parents, sometimes April or even Rufus. But everywhere she turned she saw reflections of herself, not in mirrors but in the distorted faces of the people looking back at her, all of these not-Gemmas laughing the more frantic she became. She always woke up shaken and sick.
This was like that, only worse. She had the impression of swinging over a pit, as if the world might simply buck her into nothingness, and she would drown next to the dead girl who could be her twin.
She hadn’t seen the stranger approach, hadn’t noticed her at all, until she spoke.
“Cassiopeia?” She was extremely thin, not the kind of Chloe DeWitt thinness that came from weight-loss shakes and detox juicing and SoulCycle, but true, not-enough-to-eat, maybe-dying-of-cancer thinness. It made her bones stand out in her cheeks, her knuckles huge and mannish, her knees like sharp kites angling for a wind. Her head was completely shaved. Above her right eyebrow was a long white scar the width of a needle.
The stranger took an uncertain step forward and nearly tripped over the girl lying dead in the mud, and she drew a sharp breath and stopped, holding herself very still. When she looked up at Gemma, her face had changed. Gemma had the impression of huge eyes sunk in that narrow face, and a question in them she didn’t know how to answer. She took in the girl’s clothing—a white T-shirt, streaked with mud and grass and what looked like bird shit, ugly cotton elastic-waist pants—and then the girl’s breasts, braless, hardly more than two sharp nipples beneath the fabric, her bare feet, the toenails colorless. Bare feet. Where had she come from with no shoes? But Gemma knew, even before she spotted the hospital bracelet, identical to the one secured around the dead girl’s wrist.
“Oh my God.” She felt as if her heart had been stilled with a hammer. She pictured it like an old-fashioned clock, splintered into uselessness. “I think—I think she’s one of them.”
The Haven girl looked suddenly ferocious. “Who are you?” she said. “Where did you come from?”
“Who are you?” Jake’s face was the bleached white of bone, but his voice was steady. Gemma wanted to reach out and take his hand. But her body wasn’t obeying her correctly, and just then she was distracted by movement behind the girl, and something tall and dark and shadowed resolved itself into a boy.
“Lyra,” the girl said, and, when they said nothing, made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Number twenty-four.”
“Oh my God,” Gemma said again. Her voice sounded high and shrill and unfamiliar, as if it were being piped through a teakettle. Her mind kept reeling away from the dead girl lying not four feet away from her, the pattern of freckles on her face, the exact shape of her mouth, reeling away from the truth of it, like a magnet veering away from its pair. “There’s another one.”
She knew the boy must be from Haven, too, as soon as he appeared. He was barefoot, and very thin, though not nearly so thin as the girl. Muscles showed through his T-shirt when he moved. He was mixed race and very beautiful, but there was something hard about him, too. He looked like one of the wax figurines in Madame Tussauds, where she’d gone with her mom on a trip to New York ages ago. As if you could stare and stare into his eyes and get nothing back. A person a little like a black hole: all the light vanished around him.