Replica (Replica #1)(97)

Gemma looked up. She hadn’t heard April come outside. Quickly, she pocketed her phone, as if April might read it from across the pool deck.

“What are you doing out here?” April frowned, shaking her bangs from her eyes.

“Nothing. Thinking. Trying not to think.” Gemma stood up. The distance between her and April suddenly felt very great.

“You promised to explain.” April’s voice was all pinched, like it had been zipped up too tightly.

Gemma rubbed her forehead. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m still sorting it out myself.”

April came down off the porch. She was barefoot and already dressed for bed, in cotton shorts and an oversized T-shirt from Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Gemma was struck in that moment by how normal she looked: tan, rested, beautiful. She and April had always talked about being co-aliens, members of a different species dropped on this planet to suffer among the humans, maybe pay penance for crimes committed in a past life on their home planet. But April wasn’t an alien. April belonged.

And for a split second, Gemma hated her.

“Well?” April stopped a few feet away from Gemma, hugging herself. She wasn’t smiling. “I’m listening.”

Gemma looked away, ashamed. April had helped her. April was always helping her. But how could she begin to describe what she had seen? How could she talk about the other-Gemma, the nightmare twin? It was like something out of a horror movie.

“Haven was using the replicas,” she said, because it seemed as good a place to start as any. “They were engineering them for a specific reason. We think Haven was infecting them with some kind of disease,” she added quickly, before she could lose her nerve.

“A disease?” April repeated. She stared openmouthed at Gemma. “And you brought them here?”

“It isn’t contagious like the flu is.” Gemma felt queasy thinking about it. She hoped she was right. She hadn’t truly understood everything Jake was reading to her. The boy seemed all right, almost normal. But she’d seen the girl stumble. Motor coordination problems were some of the first symptoms, he had read. “You can’t get it except through tissue or organ transfers or—ingestion. And it takes years to work. It’s like mad cow disease, or Alzheimer’s, or something like that.”

“My grandparents would kill me,” April said, and Gemma’s anger notched up again. Twenty feet away were two people who had been raised as human petri dishes, and all April could think about was getting in trouble. “What do you think they’re doing in there, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” When Gemma turned, she saw they were no longer in the living room. They must be in the kitchen or bedroom, and out of view. Irrationally, she was glad. She didn’t want April to see them. April didn’t deserve to see them. “I don’t know. Eating. Sleeping. Trying to relax. Whatever people normally do.”

April laughed in a way Gemma didn’t like, as if Gemma had made a joke. “And you’re sure they’re not going to, like, infect us?”

“Only if you decide to go zombie on them and eat their brains,” Gemma said sarcastically, but April actually nodded, as if she was reassured. She was still staring into the guesthouse. A glass of water and an open can of Coke on the coffee table were the only signs that someone had been there at all.

“And they can, like, talk and stuff?” April asked. “And eat normal food?”

“Yes, they can talk and stuff.” Gemma’s voice sounded overloud, but she didn’t care. “They’re people.” If she’d considered even for a second telling April about the girl with Gemma’s face, she knew now she never would. She couldn’t.

“Okay, okay. Jeez. Calm down.” April rolled her eyes, as if Gemma was the one being unreasonable. “Sorry if I’m not a clone expert.”

“Replica,” Gemma corrected her automatically. “They don’t like being called clones.” She didn’t know how she knew this, only that she’d noticed Lyra flinch whenever she used that word, the way April did when someone referred to her dyke parents, or Gemma did when she heard fat.

“Are you serious?” Again, April laughed.

“Yes, I’m serious.” She was suddenly way past anger. She was furious. She wasn’t tied to the girl on the marshes and yet she was: they were bound together, they were the same. Which meant that Gemma had died, too. Just a little. But she had died. “They can talk, they have feelings, they have likes and dislikes, they dream and breathe and hurt like anybody else.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.” Now April was squinting at Gemma as if she didn’t know her. “I’m just a little freaked out, okay?” Gemma said nothing. “You have to admit it’s weird. . . . I mean, you said yourself they were engineered. Shake and bake, test-tube style.”

“I hate to remind you,” Gemma snapped, not even sure why she was so angry, “but so were you.”

Instantly, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. April went very still. “You’re comparing me to one of them?” she whispered. Gemma wasn’t deceived by her tone of voice. The quieter April got, the angrier she was. “You think because my moms are gay, that makes me some kind of freak?”

Gemma already felt guilty. But it was too late to take back the words. And what would April say if she knew that Gemma had a clone floating around somewhere—possibly more than one? That Gemma remembered Haven from her childhood? “I’m just saying.” She couldn’t stand to see the naked hurt on April’s face, so she looked away. “Plenty of people would think you weren’t in a great position to judge.”