Replica (Replica #1)(92)

“You could say that,” she said.

“Feel better.” He’d recovered quickly and was his usual, cheerful self. “Stay away from the gutter, okay?”

“I’ll try,” Gemma said. Before he could hang up, she added, “Hey, Pete?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Thanks. Just . . . thanks.” Then she hung up before she could begin to cry. She rolled over, burying her face in the pillow. When she closed her eyes, she forced herself to focus on Pete’s eyes, and the pale blond of his lashes; the crooked look of his smile and the way he sang along to the radio station, getting all the words wrong. But soon Pete’s face was merging with Jake’s, and Pete was frowning and dressed in all black, at a funeral for Gemma’s father—except when she looked inside the casket, she saw her own face reflected, her own body stitched and sutured and gray beneath its garish makeup, her mouth open as though to scream.


She woke disoriented. Only when she saw that the sun was setting did she realize she’d been asleep for most of the day. She felt a hundred times better, clearer, more focused. For several minutes she lay in bed, letting her heartbeat return to normal, trying to ignore the shadow of the terrible nightmare that still clung to her, like a film of sweat.

Why did she have that stubbornly persistent idea that she’d been at Haven, stayed there for a long period of time? Could her father possibly have allowed the scientists at Haven to extract his only child’s DNA, just so they could create her human double? Could he have been using her, maybe concealing the truth from her mom? It was a horrible idea, and she couldn’t believe it, even of her father.

It was time to get answers.

In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her face and scrubbed her teeth with a finger before remembering she had a toothbrush in her backpack. She found Jake alone in the kitchen in front of his laptop. He got up when he saw her and then quickly sat down again. He was nervous, she realized. She was making him nervous. Was it because he felt sorry for her? Or was he afraid?

“Where’s April?” Gemma asked, drawing a glass of water from the sink and drinking deeply. She felt as if she was washing away the taste of the marshes, still burned into the back of her throat.

“She went out,” he said, giving her a smile that could have launched a thousand memes. Strangely, though, it was Pete she wished for, Pete she wanted to see. Pete belonged to her life Before. “She kept asking questions, but I wasn’t sure what I should and shouldn’t say. I think she got tired of me.”

He shrugged, and Gemma stopped herself from saying she doubted it. More likely, April had gone out before she could murder Jake by slow humping.

“Did you sleep?” he asked, and Gemma nodded. She nearly told him about the nightmare but didn’t.

Gemma pulled out a chair and sat down across from him, cupping her chin in her hands. “How about you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve been running searches on the explosions, you know. Just trying to sort out what really happened.” He made a face. “You won’t believe this.”

“Try me,” she said. Twenty-four hours ago, she wouldn’t have believed in clones, or that she’d paddle a kayak across an ash-strewn marshland to try and sneak onto what might as well be a military base, or that somewhere in the world there was a girl bearing her exact likeness. Now she thought she might believe anything.

“The woman who strapped herself full of explosives—”

“Angel Fire,” Gemma said, remembering the name from the message that had come in to the Haven Files.

He nodded. “Right. Angel Fire. She left a backpack at Barrel Key. Maybe she camped there overnight, I don’t know. And she had every single page of the Haven Files printed out and stashed in her backpack.” He looked vaguely nauseous. “The website keeps crashing.”

A bad feeling worked at the bottom of Gemma’s stomach, like someone had a fist around her intestines. “That’s not good, Jake,” she said. “The police will come for you next.”

He laughed, but without humor. “Already have. I missed two calls from some Detective Lieutenant something.”

“What are you going to do?” Gemma asked.

Jake started ordering things on the table, lining up edges, the way he’d done in the diner. A nervous tic, obviously. “I’ll be all right,” he said, although he didn’t sound convinced. “I had nothing to do with it, anyway. They can’t pin anything on me.”

Gemma hoped he was right. “You never told me what happened to Richard Haven,” she said.

Jake sighed and closed his laptop. For a split second, he looked much older. “Killed,” he said simply. “Only a few years after Haven was built. Car accident while he was on vacation in Palm Beach.” She remembered, now, reading something about Richard Haven’s death, when she’d first been searching for information about the institute. Already it seemed like a different lifetime. “Most Havenites don’t think it was an accident.”

“Havenites?” Gemma repeated, and Jake blushed.

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s what the Haven groupies call themselves. My dad was the biggest Havenite of all.”

Gemma absorbed this. “So it was murder? Another murder?” That would make Jake’s father, Nurse M, whoever she was, and Richard Haven all victims of murder made to look like accidents or suicides instead.