“No. Please.” Dr. Levy worked in the Box. She hated him, and that big, thunderous machine, Mr. I. She hated the grinning lights like blank indifferent faces. She hated Catheter Fingers and Invacare Snake Tubing, Dribble Bags and Sad Sacks, syringe after syringe after syringe. She hated the weird dreams that visited her there, of lions marching around a cylindrical cup, of old voices she was sure she’d never heard but that felt real to her. Even a spinal tap with the Vampire—the long needle inserted into the base of her spinal column between two vertebrae so that her fluids could be extracted for testing—was almost preferable. “I feel fine.”
“Don’t be silly,” Curly said. “It’s for your own good. Come on out of there.”
Lyra edged into the hall, keeping her hands on the walls, which were studded with nails from which brooms and mops and dustpans were hanging. She couldn’t remember what day it was. The knowledge seemed to have dropped through a hole in her awareness. She couldn’t remember what day yesterday had been, either, or what had happened.
“Follow me.” The nurse put her hand on Lyra’s arm, and Lyra was overwhelmed. It was rare that the nurses touched them unless they had to, in order to take their measurements. Lyra’s knowledge of the nurse’s name had evaporated, too, though she was sure she had known it just a second earlier. What was happening to her? It was as if vomiting had shaken up all the information in her brain, muddled it.
Lyra’s eyes were burning and her throat felt raw. When she reached up to wipe her mouth, she was embarrassed to realize she was crying.
“It’s normal,” the nurse said. Lyra wasn’t sure what she meant.
It was quicker from here to go through C-Wing, where the male replicas were kept. Nurse Cheryl—the name came back to Lyra suddenly, loosed from the murky place it had been stuck—Nurse Cheryl, nicknamed Curly for her hair, which corkscrewed around her face, buzzed them in. Lyra hung back. In all her years at Haven, she’d only been through C-Wing a few times. She hadn’t forgotten Pepper, and what had happened. She remembered how Pepper had cried when she’d first been told what was happening to her, that she would be a birther, like all those dark-skinned women who came and left on boats and were never seen outside the barracks. Pepper had left fingernail scratches across the skin of her belly and begged for the doctors to get it out.
But two months later, by the time the doctors determined she couldn’t keep it, she was already talking names: Ocean, Sunday, Valium. After Pepper, all the knives in the mess hall were replaced with plastic versions, and the male and female replicas were kept even more strictly apart.
“It’s okay.” Curly gave her a nudge. “Go on. You’re with me.”
It was hotter in C-Wing. Or maybe Lyra was just hot. In the first room they passed she saw a male replica, lying on an examination table with probes attached to his bare chest. She looked away quickly. It smelled different in C-Wing—the same mixture of antiseptic and bleach and human sweat, but deeper somehow.
They took the stairs up to ground level and moved past a series of dorms, lined with cots just like on the girls’ side and mercifully empty. The males who weren’t sick or in testing were likely getting fed in Stew Pot. Despite the standard-issue white sheets and gray blankets, and the plastic under-bed bins, the rooms managed to give an impression of messiness.
They passed into B-Wing, and Curly showed her credentials to two guards on duty. B-Wing was for research and had restricted access. Passed laboratories, dazzling white, illuminated by rows and rows of fluorescent light, where more researchers were working, moving slowly in their gloves and lab coats, hair concealed beneath translucent gray caps, eyes magnified, insect-like, by their goggles. Banks of computers, screens filled with swirling colors, hard metal equipment, words Lyra had heard her whole life without ever knowing what they meant—spectrometry, biometrics, liquid chromatography—beautiful words, words to trip over and fall into.
One time, she had worked up the courage to ask Dr. O’Donnell what they did all day in the research rooms. It didn’t seem possible that all those men and women were there just to perfect the replication process, to keep the birthers from miscarrying so often after the embryo transfer, to keep the replicas from dying so young.
Dr. O’Donnell had hesitated. “They’re studying what makes you sick,” she said at last, speaking slowly, as if she had to carefully handle the words or they would cut her. “They’re studying how it works, and how long it takes, and why.”
“And how to fix it?” Lyra had asked.
Dr. O’Donnell had barely hesitated. “Of course.”
The Box was made of concrete slab, sat several hundred yards away from the main complex, and was enclosed by its own fence. Unlike the rest of Haven, the G-Wing had no windows, and extra security required Nurse Curly to identify herself twice and show her badge to various armed guards who patrolled the perimeter.
Curly left Lyra in the entrance foyer, in front of the elevator that gave access to Sub-One and, supposedly, the concealed subterranean levels. Lyra tried not to look at the doors that led to the ER, where so many replicas died or failed to thrive in the first place. Even the nurses called the G-Wing the Funeral Home or the Graveyard. Lyra wondered whether Lilac Springs was there even now, and how long she had left.
Soon enough, the elevator doors opened and a technician wearing a heavy white lab coat, her hair concealed beneath a cap, arrived to escort Lyra down to see Mr. I. It was, as far as Lyra could tell, the same tech she’d seen the half-dozen or so times she’d been here in the past month. Then again, she had trouble telling them apart, since their faces were so often concealed behind goggles and a mask, and since they never spoke directly to her.
In Sub-One, they walked down a long, windowless hallway filled with doors marked Restricted. But when a researcher slipped out into the hall, Lyra had a brief view of a sanitation room and, beyond it, a long, galley-shaped laboratory in which dozens of researchers were bent over gleaming equipment, dressed in head-to-toe protective clothing and massive headgear that made them look like the pictures of astronauts Lyra had occasionally seen on the nurses’ TV.
Mr. I sat by itself in a cool bright room humming with recirculated air. To Lyra, Mr. I looked like an open mouth, and the table on which she was supposed to lie down a long pale tongue. The hair stood up on her arms and legs.
“Remember to stay very still,” the tech said, her voice muffled by a paper mask. “Otherwise we’ll just have to start over. And nobody wants that, do we?”
Afterward she was transferred to a smaller room and told to lie down. Sometimes lying this way, with doctors buzzing above her, she lost track of whether she was a human at all or some other thing, a slab of meat or a glass overturned on a countertop. A thing.
“I don’t believe Texas is any further than we are. It’s bullshit. They’re bluffing. Two years ago, they were still infecting bovine tissue—”
“It doesn’t matter if they’re bluffing if our funding gets cut. Everyone thinks they’re closer. Fine and Ives loses the contract. Then we’re shit outta luck.”
High bright lights, cool sensors moving over her body, gloved hands pinching and squeezing. “Sappo thinks the latest variant will do it. I’m talking full progression within a week. Can you imagine the impact?”
“He better be right. What the hell will we do with all of them if we get shut down? Ever think of that?”
Lyra closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted.
“Open your eyes, please. Follow my finger, left to right. Good.”
“Reflexes still look okay.” One of the doctors, the woman, parted her paper gown and squeezed her nipple, hard. Lyra cried out. “And pain response. Do me a favor—check this one’s file, will you? What variant is this?”
“This is similar to the vCJD, just slower-acting. That’s why the pulvinar sign is detectable on the MRI. Very rare in nature, nearly always inherited.”
They worked in silence for a bit. Lyra thought about The Little Prince, and Dr. O’Donnell, and di
stant stars where beautiful things lived and died in freedom. She couldn’t stop crying.
“How do they choose which ones end up in control, and which ones get the different variants?” the male doctor asked after a while.
“Oh, it’s all automated,” the woman said. Now she held Lyra’s eyes open with two fingers, ensuring she couldn’t blink. “Okay, come see this. See the way her left eye is spasming? Myoclonus. That’s another indicator.”
“Mm-hmm. So it’s random?”
“Totally random. The computer does it by algorithm. That way, you know, no one feels bad. Pass me the stethoscope, will you? I bet its heart rate is through the roof.”
That night was very still, and the sound of chanting voices and drumbeats—louder, always, on the days the Suits had visited the island—carried easily over the water. Lyra lay awake for a long time, fighting the constant pull of nausea, listening to the distant rhythm, which didn’t sound so distant after all. At times, she imagined it was coming closer, that suddenly Haven would be overrun with strangers. She imagined all of them made of darkness and shadow instead of blood and muscle and bones. She wondered, for the first time, whether number 72 was maybe not dead after all. She remembered hearing once that the marshes were submerged islands, miles of land that had over time been swallowed up by the water.
She wondered whether 72 had been swallowed up too, or whether he was out there somewhere, listening to the voices.
She took comfort in the presence of the new addition to her collection, buried directly beneath her lower back. She imagined that the file pushed up heat, like a heart, like the warmth of Dr. O’Donnell’s touch. 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. She imagined the smell of lemon and antiseptic, as if Dr. O’Donnell were still there, floating between the beds.
“Don’t worry,” Dr. O’Donnell had once said to her on a night like this one, when the voices were louder than usual. “They can’t get to you,” she’d said more quietly. “They can’t get in.”
But about this, Dr. O’Donnell was wrong.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 5 of Gemma’s story.
SIX
LYRA DID NOT SLEEP WELL. She woke up with a tight, airless feeling in her chest, like the time years ago when Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had held Lyra’s head in the sink to punish her for stealing some chocolate from the nurses’ break room.
Side effects. They would pass. Medicines sometimes made you sick before they made you better. In the dim morning light, with the sound of so many replicas inhaling and exhaling beside her, she closed her eyes. She had a brief memory of a birther rocking her years ago, singing to her, the tickle of hair on her forehead. She opened her eyes again. The birthers didn’t sing. They howled and screamed. Or they wept. They spoke in other languages. But they didn’t sing.
She was nauseous again.
This time she wouldn’t risk throwing up inside. She would have to find someplace more remote—along the beach, maybe behind the tin drums of hazardous waste Haven lined up for collection, somewhere the guards couldn’t see her.
She chose to pass through the courtyard, which was mostly empty. Many of the night nurses would be preparing to take the launch back to Cedar Key. She passed the statue of the first God, Richard Haven. It dominated the center of the yard, where all four walking paths intersected. Here she rested, leaning against the cool marble base, next to a plaque commemorating his work and achievements. He’d had a kind face, Lyra thought. At least, the artist had given him one.
She didn’t remember the flesh-and-blood man. He’d died before she was made. The sculptor had depicted him kneeling, with one arm raised. Lyra guessed he was supposed to be calling out to invisible crowds to come, to look here, but to her it had always looked as if he was stretching one arm toward the clouds, toward the other God, the ones the nurses believed in. Their God, too, hated the replicas.
She squatted next to twin drums marked with a biohazard symbol and threw up into the high grasses that grew between them. She felt slightly better when she stood up, but still weak. She stopped a half-dozen times during the walk back to the main building, earning a disapproving glance from one of the patrolling guards. Normally, she was grateful for the sheer size of Haven, for the tracts of open space and the walkways shaded by hickory trees and high palmettos, for the bright bursts of heliotrope in the flower beds, and the wild taro pushing between the cement paving stones, although she had names for none of them and knew the growth only in general terms: flowers, trees, plants. But today she was exhausted and wished simply to get back to bed 24.
She heard shouting as she entered D-Wing. As Lyra got closer to the dorm, she recognized one of the voices: Dr. Saperstein. She nearly stopped and turned around. God had never come to the bunks, ever.
But then she heard Cassiopeia shout, “Don’t touch them. It’s not fair,” and she kept going.
Up ahead, a nurse hurried out into the hall, skidding a little on the tile, and shot Lyra a strange look before scurrying in the opposite direction, leaving the dorm room door swinging open. Lyra barely caught it before it closed.
Then she stopped, her breath catching. Cassiopeia was on her hands and knees in front of Dr. Saperstein, trying to sweep up her collection of shells, which had been knocked off the windowsill and shattered. All of the individual drawings pasted to the wall behind her bed had been torn down, as if a hard wind had come ripping through the bunk, though it hadn’t disturbed anything else. Then Lyra saw he was holding them, crumpled together in his fist.
“Unbelievable.” He was shouting, but not at the girls. Instead he was yelling at the assembled nursing staff, including Nurse Dolly, who’d found Cassiopeia Scotch tape so they could hang the napkins in the first place. “Do you know how close we are to getting defunded? Do you want to be out of a job? We have a quota, we have protocols—”
“It was my fault,” Nurse Dolly said. “I didn’t see any harm in it.”
God took a step toward her, nearly tripping over Cassiopeia, who was still on the floor, crying softly. Lyra wanted to go to her but found she couldn’t move. God’s shoes crunched quietly on the carpet of shattered seashells.
“No harm in it?” he repeated, and Nurse Dolly quickly looked away. Now he was speaking softly, but strangely, and Lyra was more frightened of him than ever. “I’ve worked my whole career to see this project succeed. We’re doing some of the most important medical work of the past two decades, and yet—” He broke off, shaking his head. “Results. That’s what we need. Results. This is a research facility, not a playpen. Is that clear to everyone?”
No one spoke. In the silence, Lyra could hear her heart. Boom-boom-boom. Like the rhythm of the chanting that carried all the way to Spruce Island from Barrel Key. Monsters, monsters. Burn Haven down.
God sighed. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “We’re doing important work,” he said. “Good work. Never forget that.” He started to turn away and then stopped. “It’s better this way—for everyone.”
But Lyra knew, from the tone of his voice, that he didn’t mean the replicas.
God had to step around Cassiopeia again to move to the door. He barely glanced at her. Instead he kicked at a seashell, sending it skittering across the floor. “Someone clean up this mess, please,” he announced, to no one in particular. Lyra stepped quickly out of the doorway to avoid him.
For a long moment after he was gone, no one moved. Just Cassiopeia, still sorting through the remains of her collection, now reduced to shards and dust. Finally Nurse Dolly went to her.
“All right,” she said, crouching down and grabbing Cassiopeia’s wrist to stop her from reaching for another broken shell. “That’s enough now.”
It happened so quickly: Cassiopeia turned and shoved Nurse Dolly. “Get off me,” she said, and several people cried out, and Lyra took a step forward, saying, “Don’t.”
Maybe she hadn’t meant to push Nurse Dolly hard, or maybe she had. Either way, Nurse Dolly lost her
balance and went backward. In an instant, Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had crossed to Cassiopeia and wrenched her to her feet.
“Wicked thing,” Don’t-Even-Think-About-It spat at her, keeping hold of her wrists. “How dare you touch her—how dare you, when we’ve fed and clothed and kept you all these years? The judgment of God will come for you, don’t you forget it.”
“You don’t own me.” Cassiopeia’s eyes were very bright and she was shaking. Lyra stared at her, filled with a sudden sense of dread. She didn’t understand what Cassiopeia meant—she didn’t understand where she’d found these words, this anger, and for a second she felt as if the room was splitting apart, revealing a dark gulf, a hidden fault line. “You can’t tell me what to do. I don’t belong to you. I’m real. I am.”
“You’re not anything,” Don’t-Even-Think-About-It said. Her face was mottled with anger, like the veined slabs of beef shelved in the kitchen freezers. “You belong to the institute, and to Dr. Saperstein. You can stay here, or you can leave and be killed.”
“I’ll be killed anyway.” Cassiopeia looked almost happy, as if she’d successfully passed her Cog Testing, and Lyra didn’t know why, knew that couldn’t be right. Goosedown, one of Cassiopeia’s other genotypes, stood hugging herself, as if she were the one getting yelled at. They were identical except for the vacancy of Goosedown’s expression. She’d had a habit, when she was little, of smacking her own head against the ground when she was frustrated, and she still had to wear diapers to sleep. “Isn’t that right? We’ll all die here eventually. What’s the difference?”
“Let it go, Maxine.” Nurse Dolly was climbing to her feet, wincing, holding on to her lower back. Lyra was unaccountably angry at Cassiopeia. Nurse Dolly was one of the nicest ones. “It doesn’t understand.”
Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It stood for a moment, still gripping Cassiopeia’s wrists. Then, abruptly, she released her and turned away. “Unnatural,” she muttered. “Devil’s work, all of it.”
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