Replica (Replica #1)(83)

She didn’t see the knife in his hand until the boy stepped forward so that the light showed on its blade.

“Look.” Jake put up both hands, as if he could physically stop the boy’s progress. “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”

The boy gave no sign of having heard. “Who are you?” he said, keeping the knife high. Gemma realized in that second how stupid they’d been, how unprepared. They’d been scared of being arrested for trespassing. Not for a second had they considered that the Haven patients might be dangerous. Maniacs. Brain-altered killers. God only knew what kind of sick experiments they were doing there.

“We’re nobody,” Jake said. Very slowly he reached down and helped Gemma to her feet. Her body felt dull and even heavier than usual, as if it belonged to somebody else. Now, standing, she had a clearer view of the dead girl who looked like her, and it was terrible, worse than any nightmare, like staring into an open grave with a mirror at the bottom of it. She thought she might fall. She hardly trusted her legs to carry her. Jake was still talking, but she could barely understand him. “Listen, we’re not going to hurt you, okay? My name’s Jake Witz. This is Gemma. We got lost in the marshes, that’s all.”

The girl frowned and turned to Gemma. Gemma was glad for the excuse to look somewhere, anywhere other than the body at her feet. “But who made you?”

Gemma was sure she’d misheard. “What?” she whispered.

“Who made you?” the girl repeated, more slowly this time, as if Gemma were very young or very stupid.

The wind, which had filled the marshes with a kind of constant, sibilant hiss, an underlying rhythm, went still. Gemma could feel the pressure of a thousand invisible eyes peering at her from the mud, from their many hiding places. “I—I don’t understand.”

“You’re a replica,” the girl said.

“A what?”

“A replica,” she repeated impatiently. “An organism descended from or genetically identical to a single common ancestor.” Gemma closed her eyes, hit with the sudden memory of being with her mom as a child at an art auction, bored out of her mind, listening to the auctioneer drone on and on about a vase that was supposedly the exact replica of the one in Versailles where Louis XVII had occasionally stored his false teeth. Why, her mother had leaned down to whisper, would anyone spend so much money on a fake?

“A clone,” she said. The word had a stupid, sci-fi sound to it. “She means a clone, Jake.”

Jake winced. “Yeah, well. I kind of already had that impression.” He kept his eyes on the boy with the knife. Gemma felt panic pressing on her from all sides, from inside, as if thousands of tiny fists were beating inside of her to get out.

A clone. A replica. Why would anyone spend so much money on a fake? Gemma’s thoughts were whirling like a hard snow, then disintegrating when she tried to catch hold of them. “But—but it’s impossible.” She knew she was hysterical, she knew she was loud, but she didn’t care and couldn’t help it. “It’s impossible. The technology doesn’t exist; it’s illegal. . . .”

“It’s not impossible,” the Haven girl said. Gemma had the sudden, vicious urge to punch her, to take her huge eyes out of their sockets, to get her to stop speaking, stop staring, stop. “At Haven, there were thousands of replicas.”

“Jesus,” Jake whispered. He closed his eyes for a second, and she saw that he looked almost restful. Peaceful. As if they hadn’t just stumbled on a girl with Gemma’s exact face, her chest black with blood; as if they hadn’t found two survivors of the place, looking scared but also dangerous, like wild animals. “Clones. It all makes sense now.”

“Are you crazy? Nothing makes sense.” Gemma’s heart was twitching like a dying bug. “There’s a dead girl with my face on her.” Jake turned to her, looking stricken, as if she’d reached out and slapped him. She wished she had. She had the urge to slap him, to shake him, to shake the whole world and force it right again, like how her dad smacked the cable box whenever service was coming in weird. Thinking of her dad, of her home, suddenly made her feel very young and very afraid. She wished she’d listened to her parents. They’d been right all along. She should never have come. She wasn’t strong enough. “We’re standing here in the middle of the fucking night and these—these people are telling me that there are clones running around out there, thousands of them—”

“Gemma, calm down.” Jake put a hand on her arm. She nearly screamed. But she was afraid to open her mouth again—afraid of losing it completely.

Her father had known about Haven. All this time, he’d known.

“Everyone needs to calm down, okay?” Jake was saying. The boy with the knife had tensed up again. “Can you put that thing down, please? We’re not going to hurt you.” The boy lowered the knife, finally. Jake had said the right thing, but Gemma didn’t care. Even though they were standing in open air, she felt the sky might at any second collapse and bury them. She kneaded her chest with one hand, willing her heartbeat to slow down. The girl, she noticed, looked sick also. Somehow this made her feel less afraid. They couldn’t be that dangerous, even if they did have a knife and look like creepy escaped psych inmates from a horror film. And when the girl couldn’t stand anymore and instead crouched and ducked her head between her knees, breathing slowly, obviously trying to control her nausea, Gem felt sorry for her, and annoyed at the boy with the knife. He barely glanced at her.