Replica (Replica #1)(84)

She took a deep breath. “What’s the matter with her?” No one answered.

Without really intending to, she moved slowly toward the girl. When the girl shuddered, her spine stood out, almost architectural beneath her shirt, and for the first time in her life Gemma was actually happy she wasn’t thin. She bent over. Her hand, as it floated toward the girl’s shoulder, looked like a foreign object, a balloon or a spacecraft. “Are you okay?”

For a millisecond she was surprised by the feel of the girl’s warmth, the tautness of her skin and the muscle beneath it. The girl looked so insubstantial, Gemma had almost expected a hand would pass through her. Then the girl jerked away and Gemma took a quick step backward, her breath catching. The girl had looked at her with something close to hatred, and Gemma was again reminded of an animal—once a few years ago one of their handymen had cornered a rabid raccoon on the property and her father had taken out his rifle to shoot it, and she’d never forgotten how its eyes looked, desperate and wild, before the bullet hit.

“Maybe she’s hungry,” Jake said.

The girl said nothing—she wrapped her arms around her knees and dropped her head again, her spine rising and falling with every breath—but the boy took a step forward. “You have food?” His face was so full of open need that Gemma felt another lurch of pity. Had they been starved at Haven?

Jake squatted to rifle through his backpack. “Sorry,” he said, producing a few granola bars and two bottles of water. “We didn’t bring much.”

The boy ate in a way that reminded Gemma of a squirrel, holding the granola bar with two hands and chewing quickly until it was all gone. He took water and drank half a bottle before passing it over to the girl, still crouching next to him. He said something too low for Gemma to hear, but the girl took the water from him and drank, and immediately she looked a little better. She would be very beautiful, Gemma thought, if she were heavier, if the lost, dark look of her eyes could somehow be warmed.

Jake couldn’t take his eyes off them, the boy and the girl, and Gemma could hardly stand to look at him. She guessed that for him this was the end of a long mystery, the final act. For her this was the start. Her old world had exploded and she’d been born again into a new one. All she wanted was to go back.

“Look,” Jake said to them. “I know you must be tired—you’ve been through—I don’t even know what you’ve been through . . .”

Gemma thought she knew what he wanted, but hoped she was wrong. “Jake, no,” she said warningly. She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to push back the drumbeat of a migraine that was beating dully somewhere behind her eyes.

“They’ve been living in Haven, Gemma,” Jake said quickly, as if she hadn’t understood. “My father died for this. I need to know.”

“Jake, no.” The migraine exploded into existence: she imagined some sicko with a hammer pummeling her brain. “I don’t believe you. I literally don’t believe you. These poor people have been through God knows what—they’re starving and cold and they have no place to go—and you want to interview them—”

“I don’t want to interview them. I want to understand.”

“Not people.” The girl spoke up unexpectedly. Gemma turned to face her.

“What?” she said. The girl was holding the water bottle tightly, her knuckles standing out. But she seemed calm.

“We’re not people,” she said. Her voice had a low, musical quality, but it was strangely without affect, as if she hadn’t been taught to feel or at least to express herself. “You said, ‘These poor people have been through God knows what.’ But we’re replicas. God didn’t make us. Dr. Saperstein did. He’s our God.”

All of Gemma’s anger evaporated in an instant. She was alone momentarily in the dark with this thin, frail girl, this clone, who believed she was not a person. Gemma wanted to hug her. She wanted to understand, too—how she had become this way, how she had been made and why, who had taught her that God was out of reach. And she knew then that Jake was right, in a way. All the answers she needed, all the mysteries of her past, were bound up in the girl and boy from the island. She was still afraid of them, but also afraid for them in a way she couldn’t verbalize. But she couldn’t leave them alone. They had to stay close.

“We should camp here for the night,” she heard herself say, before she even knew that she was going to suggest it. Jake looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had. “We’ll go back to Wahlee in the morning.”

The boy seemed uncertain. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”

“No,” Gemma said evenly. “No, you don’t have to go with us. Not unless you want to.”

Once again, Jake just stared at her, as if a hand had just emerged from her mouth and started waving.

“Why would we want to?” the boy asked.

Gemma ignored Jake, speaking directly to the boy. “You can’t plan on staying here forever. You have no money. No ID. You’re not even supposed to exist. And there will be people looking for you.”

She would have known this even if she hadn’t seen, earlier that night, the helicopters pass overhead for hours, even if she hadn’t seen soldiers outfitted in riot gear patrolling the coast. If the girl was telling the truth—and Gemma had proof that she was, in the form of the corpse she could hardly stand to look at—and Haven had indeed been full of clones, there had to be a reason for all the secrecy, the protections, the confidentiality. It should have been a miracle for modern science. The scientists who’d perfected the process should have won Nobel Prizes. Everyone in the world should have known about it. And yet nobody did.