Replica

by Lauren Oliver

  They turned again and froze. Several blocks away, the sedan was coming toward them at a crawl. They pivoted and began to run. Lyra didn’t know whether they’d been spotted and was too afraid to look. There was a roaring in her ears. The car, getting closer?

  “Town.” Lyra’s breath was coming in short gasps, like something alive inside her chest. “We need to get back to town.”

  She didn’t know whether Caelum had heard. He made a hard right and took off straight across a front yard overgrown with high weeds. A dog began to bark, but no one came out. They squeezed into the narrow dark space between the garage and the house just as the sedan came around the corner, and looking back, Lyra saw the woman’s face, white with concentration, scanning the streets through the open window. Lyra’s legs were shaking so badly Caelum had to put his arms around her to keep her on her feet. His chest moved against her back, his breath was in her hair and on her neck, and she wished the world would end so she could end with it, so she didn’t have to run anymore, so Caelum could stay with her in a dark, close space that felt like being buried.

  But the world didn’t end, of course. When the sedan was once again out of view, Caelum released her. “Now,” he said. But she found she couldn’t move. She was so tired.

  “Wait. I don’t think I can.”

  “Okay.” Caelum looked young in the half dark, with the sky a narrow artery above them. “We’ll stay here for a bit.”

  “No. I don’t think I can. Go on.” Lyra was still having trouble breathing. It felt as if her lungs were wrapped in medical gauze. She leaned back against the garage, which was made of cinder block and very cool, and closed her eyes. The space was full of spiderwebs and wet leaves. It smelled like decay. What was the point, anyway? How long did she really have?

  Half of her wanted simply to walk out into the road and wait for their pursuers to find her. Where would they take her? She would be reunited with the rest of the replicas, she was sure. Or maybe she would be killed and her body disposed of. Maybe they were erasing the experiment, slowly eradicating all indications that Haven had ever existed. But it would be easier. So much easier.

  “You can’t give up now,” Caelum said. “Lyra. Listen to me.” He put a hand on her cheek and she opened her eyes. His thumb moved along the ridge of her cheekbone, as it had last night. His lips were very close. His eyes were dark and long-lashed. Beautiful. “You named me. That means I’m yours, doesn’t it? I’m yours and you’re mine.”

  “I’m scared,” Lyra said. And she was—scared of the running, scared of what would happen to them, but scared, too, of how close he was standing, of how her body changed when he touched her and became fluid-feeling, as if something hard deep inside of her were softening. She knew that there were electrical currents in the body and that was what she was reminded of now, of currents flowing between them, of thousands of lights.

  “I’m scared too,” he said. He leaned forward and touched his forehead to hers. And still her body called out for something, something more and deeper and closer, but she didn’t know what. She wished them out of the bodies that divided them. She thought of the word love, and wondered whether this, this feeling of never being able to get close enough, was it. She had never been taught. But she thought so.

  “I love you,” she said. The words felt strange, foreign to her, like a new food. But not unpleasant.

  “I love you,” Caelum repeated back to her, and smiled. She could tell the words were just as surprising to him. He said them again. “I love you.”

  Inside her chest, a door opened, and she found she was at last breathing easily, and now had the strength to go on.

  They made it back into town without seeing the sedan again, but they were standing at the first bus stop they could find, debating where to go next, when Lyra spotted the man from the house in a parking lot across the road, passing between the businesses, delis, and retail shops that were clustered together, like beads someone had strung along the same necklace. She took Caelum’s hand and they hurried to the most crowded place they could find: a dim restaurant called the Blue Gator, separated from the road by a scrub of sad little trees. Dozens of men were crowded around a counter, drinking and watching sports, occasionally letting out a cheer or a groan in unison. Lyra and Caelum moved toward the back of the restaurant, past old wood tables filled with kids squabbling over plates of french fries and couples drinking and staring dull-eyed at the TVs. A hallway led back toward the kitchen. A girl with a haircut almost like Lyra’s was standing beneath a sign that indicated a restroom, her fingers skating over the screen of her phone, her chin prominent in the blue light cast by its glow. Lyra had an idea.

  She took Jake Witz’s phone from her pocket.

  “Hello.” Lyra held out the phone. The girl’s eyes jumped from her screen to Lyra to Caelum. “Can you please help?”

  “Help with what?” the girl said. She didn’t sound mean, but she didn’t sound exactly friendly, either. Caelum kept turning around to look at the door, to make sure they hadn’t been followed, and the girl ignored Lyra to watch him.

  “We need to find Gemma,” Lyra said. “In the phone,” she added impatiently, and finally the short-haired girl dragged her eyes from Caelum to look at her. “We need to find Gemma in the phone. We don’t know how.”

  The girl snorted. She had a metal ring in her nose. “Are you serious?” When Lyra didn’t answer, she rolled her eyes and took the phone. She made several quick movements with her fingers and then passed the phone back to Lyra. “You should really keep that thing locked, you know. Do I get a prize now?”

  Lyra’s heart leapt. She pressed the phone to her ear but heard nothing but silence. She shook her head. “It’s not working.”

  “Jesus. Where do you come from? The 1800s?” The girl snatched the phone back, made another quick adjustment, and then jammed it to Lyra’s ear. “Happy now?”

  The phone was ringing. Lyra held her breath. She counted one ring, two rings, three. How long would it ring, she wondered? But then there was a nearly inaudible click.

  “Jake?” Gemma’s voice sounded so close Lyra nearly jerked the phone away in surprise. “Is that you?”

  Lyra turned away, so the short-haired girl, who was still watching her suspiciously, wouldn’t be able to hear. “It’s not Jake,” she said. “Jake is dead. And we need your help.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 15 of Gemma’s story.

  SIXTEEN

  GEMMA AND A BLOND-HAIRED BOY named Pete arrived just as a man in an apron was badgering Lyra and Caelum to order something or leave. Lyra was afraid to go outside. She thought it likely that the people who’d been in Jake’s house were still out there, walking the streets, waiting for them. So when Gemma came through the crowd—her eyes big and worried in that pretty moon-face, the face that had so recently belonged to Cassiopeia—she felt a wash of relief so strong she nearly began to cry. They were safe.

  “It’s all right. They’re with us, and we’re leaving,” Gemma said, and the man in his apron scurried away. “Are you okay?” she asked, and Lyra nodded. She felt as if a hand had reached down and picked her up. And again, a memory came to her of warmth and closeness, an impression of one of the birthers rocking her, singing in her ear. But she knew it must be made up. The birthers didn’t hold the human models they made. They came and were kept in the darkness of the barracks, and were sent away in darkness, too, after receiving their pay.

  The birthers weren’t male, either. But in her memory, or her imagination, or her fantasy, she felt the tickle of a beard on her forehead, and clear gray eyes, and a man’s hands, scarred across the knuckles, touching her face.

  Caelum always kept close to her now. Even in the car he sat only inches away from Lyra, with one hand pressed to hers. She understood that they were bound together, and she thought of their lives and their fates like a double-stranded helix, wound around each other, webbed with meaning. And she felt that next to him she coul
d face anything, even a slow death, even the world that kept unfolding into new highways and more people and a greater horizon.

  In the car, Lyra told Gemma about going to track down Emily Huang and discovering she was dead.

  “I could have told you that,” Gemma said, and Lyra heard the criticism in her voice: If you hadn’t run. She was getting better at sorting out tones and moods.

  She described how they had found the card with Jake’s address and determined to go and find him. She told Gemma about the unlocked screen door and finding him in the bedroom with a crust of dried blood on his lips.

  “They must have come for him right after we left,” Gemma whispered to the boy, Pete. “God. I might throw up.”

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, and reached out to place a hand on her thigh. Lyra saw this and wondered if Gemma and Pete were bound in the same way she was to Caelum.

  “Both of them strung up, made to look like suicides,” Gemma said, and turned away to cough. There had been a fire, she had told them, but Lyra would have known anyway. The whole car smelled like smoke. “Must be the military’s little specialty.”

  “Less suspicious, maybe, than a gun,” Pete said.

  She told them about the man and woman who’d shown up only a few minutes later to finish the job of staging a suicide, and how she’d nearly been caught and had to hide behind the sofa.

  “Holy shit,” Pete said, and this time it was Gemma who reached over to squeeze his leg.

  “I took his computer,” Lyra said.

  Gemma turned around in her seat. “You what?”

  “I don’t know why.” Lyra was still ashamed that they’d stolen Jake’s cell phone and left in the middle of the night. She didn’t want Gemma to hate her. “I thought it might be useful, so I took it.”

  Gemma blinked. If Lyra squinted, she could pretend she was looking at Cassiopeia instead—a healthy Cassiopeia, a Cassiopeia with soft brown hair and a quick smile. She could have been number 11.

  “That’s brilliant,” Gemma said. “You’re a genius.”

  Caelum spoke up too, to explain why they had run, and Gemma seemed to understand. Lyra was intensely relieved: she wondered whether in some strange way, some mystery of biology, she and Gemma got along for the same reason she had always liked Cassiopeia.

  “And I almost forgot.” She took the backpack wedged at Caelum’s feet and removed the papers and photos she’d found hidden behind the picture frames at Sheri’s house. “Before she died, Nurse Em gave three pieces of art to her next-door neighbor. I found these hidden in the backing.”

  Gemma held the pages in her hands carefully, as if they were insect wings. She stared for a long time at the list of names that Lyra hadn’t been able to make sense of. “Can I keep these?” she asked.

  “Okay.” Lyra had been looking forward to rebuilding her collection of reading materials, using these pages as a start to her new library. But she knew they might be important—they must be, if Nurse Em had wanted them to stay hidden.

  “I’ll give them back, I promise,” Gemma said, as if she knew what Lyra was thinking. Gemma seemed to have that uncanny ability. Lyra wondered whether Gemma was special, or whether she was simply the first person to care what Lyra thought and felt. Gemma folded the pages carefully and tucked them inside a pocket. Lyra was sorry to see them go. “Look,” Gemma said. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something about your past.”

  The car jerked. Pete had barely swerved to avoid an object in the road, some kind of animal, Lyra thought, although they were past it too quickly for her to make out what it was.

  “What?” she said. “What is it?” She was suddenly afraid but couldn’t say why. She thought she could feel Caelum’s pulse beating through her palm. She thought it began to beat faster.

  Gemma was squinting as if trying to see through a hard light. “You weren’t actually made at Haven.”

  A burst of white behind Lyra’s eyes—a sure sign of a bad headache to come. Side effects. Symptoms. She pictured those hands again, the scar across the knuckles, the tickle of a beard on her forehead. Imagination. Fantasy.

  “What do you mean?” It was Caelum who spoke. “Where was she made?”

  “Nowhere,” Gemma said, and Lyra heard the word as if it was coming to her through water. As if she was drowning. Nowhere. A terrible, lonely word. “This list is of kids who got taken from their families and brought to Haven, at a time the institute couldn’t afford to keep making human models. The third name, Brandy-Nicole Harliss, is your birth name. Your real name. That’s the name your parents gave you.”

  Next to her, Caelum twitched. Lyra’s lungs didn’t feel like they were working. She could hardly breathe. “My . . .” She couldn’t say the word parents. It didn’t make sense. She thought of the birthers in the barracks and the new replicas sleeping in their pretty little incubators in Postnatal. That was her world. That was where she’d come from.

  “You have parents,” Gemma said gently, as if she was delivering bad news. And it was bad news. It was unimaginable, horrific. Lyra had wondered sometimes about what it would be like to have Dr. O’Donnell as a mother, what it would be like to have parents, generally, but never had she truly thought about being a person, natural-born, exploded into being by chance. One of them. “Well, you have a father. He’s been looking for you all this time. He’s loved you all this time.”

  That word, love. It shocked her. It hit her like a blade in the chest and she cried out, feeling the pain of it, the raw unexpectedness, as if an old wound had opened. Although she had dreamed when she was little about going home with one of the nurses—although she’d even, secretly, imagined Dr. O’Donnell returning for her one day, taking Lyra in a lemon-scented hug—these were fantasies, and even in her fantasies home looked much like Haven, with white walls and high lights and the soothing sounds of rubber soles on linoleum.

  She didn’t want love, not from a stranger, not from a father. She was a replica.

  Caelum took his hand from hers. He turned back toward the window.

  No, she wanted to say. She felt somehow dirty. It isn’t true. It can’t be. But she was paralyzed, suffocating under the weight of what Gemma had told her. She couldn’t move to touch Caelum’s arm, to tell him it was all right. She couldn’t ask him to forgive her.

  He didn’t look at her at all after that.

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Gemma’s story.

  SEVENTEEN

  SHE DIDN’T WANT A FATHER.

  She had never even known what a father did, had never completely understood why fathers were necessary. When she tried to imagine one now she thought instead of God, of his dark beard and narrow eyes, of the way he always seemed to be sneering, even when he smiled. She thought of Werner, whose fingers were yellowed and smelled like smoke; or of Nurse Wanna Bet, a male, pinching her skin before inserting the syringes, or fiddling with IV bags, or poking her stomach for signs of distention.

  And yet, alongside these ideas was her impression—her memory?—of that plastic cup, of hands rocking her to sleep and the tickle of a beard.

  Caelum didn’t speak again until they stopped for the night, just outside of a place called Savannah. Lyra was both relieved and disappointed to learn they wouldn’t be going on. She was dreading meeting her father, whoever he was, but also desperate to get it over with, and had assumed Gemma would take her straight back to him. Now she would have to live instead with her fantasy of him, his face transforming into the face of various Haven doctors and nurses, into the soldiers on the marshes with their helmets and guns, into the hard look of the men who came on unmarked barges to load the body when a replica had died: these were the only men she had ever known.

  They stopped at an enormous parking lot full of other vehicles, concealed from the highway beneath a heavy line of plane trees and shaded by woods on all sides. Gemma told her that these camps existed across the country for people traveling by camper van and R
V—two words Lyra didn’t know, although she assumed they referred to the type of cars parked in the lot, which looked as though they’d been inflated to four times normal size—and once again she was struck by just how many people there must be in the world, enough so that even the ones traveling between towns had their own little network of places to stop for the night. It made her sad. She wondered whether she would ever feel she had a place in this world.

  All she knew was that if she had a place, it must be with Caelum.

  “I’ll be back,” Caelum said when they got out of the car—the first words he had spoken in hours.

  “I’ll come with you,” Lyra said quickly. But she found that walking next to him, she couldn’t find words to say what she wanted to say. It was as if a wall had come down between them. She felt as if he was a stranger again, as if he was the boy she’d met out on the marshes. Even his face looked different—harder, more angular.

  At one end of the camp was a whitewashed building with separate bathrooms for men and women, and shower stalls that could be accessed by putting coins in a slot in the lockbox on the doors. Lyra found she did after all want a shower. She wished she could wash off the past few hours: the dizzying reality that somewhere out there were people who’d birthed her, the memory of Jake Witz’s face, bloated and terrible, and the smell of blood and sick that still seemed to hang to her clothes. How did she even know Gemma was telling her the truth? But she trusted Gemma instinctively, no matter what Caelum had originally feared, and when Gemma offered her coins to work the door, she accepted.

  The shower was slick with soap scum and reminded her of the bright tiles of Haven and all the replicas showering in groups, herded under the showers in three-minute bursts. She missed that. She missed the order, the routine, the nurses telling her where to go and when. But at the same time the Lyra who was content to float through the days, who lay down on the paper-covered medical beds and let Squeezeme and Thermoscan do their work, who thought of them as friends, even, felt impossibly foreign. She couldn’t remember being that girl.