Replica

by Lauren Oliver

  The girl frowned and turned to Gemma. Gemma was glad for the excuse to look somewhere, anywhere other than the body at her feet. “But who made you?”

  Gemma was sure she’d misheard. “What?” she whispered.

  “Who made you?” the girl repeated, more slowly this time, as if Gemma were very young or very stupid.

  The wind, which had filled the marshes with a kind of constant, sibilant hiss, an underlying rhythm, went still. Gemma could feel the pressure of a thousand invisible eyes peering at her from the mud, from their many hiding places. “I—I don’t understand.”

  “You’re a replica,” the girl said.

  “A what?”

  “A replica,” she repeated impatiently. “An organism descended from or genetically identical to a single common ancestor.” Gemma closed her eyes, hit with the sudden memory of being with her mom as a child at an art auction, bored out of her mind, listening to the auctioneer drone on and on about a vase that was supposedly the exact replica of the one in Versailles where Louis XVII had occasionally stored his false teeth. Why, her mother had leaned down to whisper, would anyone spend so much money on a fake?

  “A clone,” she said. The word had a stupid, sci-fi sound to it. “She means a clone, Jake.”

  Jake winced. “Yeah, well. I kind of already had that impression.” He kept his eyes on the boy with the knife. Gemma felt panic pressing on her from all sides, from inside, as if thousands of tiny fists were beating inside of her to get out.

  A clone. A replica. Why would anyone spend so much money on a fake? Gemma’s thoughts were whirling like a hard snow, then disintegrating when she tried to catch hold of them. “But—but it’s impossible.” She knew she was hysterical, she knew she was loud, but she didn’t care and couldn’t help it. “It’s impossible. The technology doesn’t exist; it’s illegal. . . .”

  “It’s not impossible,” the Haven girl said. Gemma had the sudden, vicious urge to punch her, to take her huge eyes out of their sockets, to get her to stop speaking, stop staring, stop. “At Haven, there were thousands of replicas.”

  “Jesus,” Jake whispered. He closed his eyes for a second, and she saw that he looked almost restful. Peaceful. As if they hadn’t just stumbled on a girl with Gemma’s exact face, her chest black with blood; as if they hadn’t found two survivors of the place, looking scared but also dangerous, like wild animals. “Clones. It all makes sense now.”

  “Are you crazy? Nothing makes sense.” Gemma’s heart was twitching like a dying bug. “There’s a dead girl with my face on her.” Jake turned to her, looking stricken, as if she’d reached out and slapped him. She wished she had. She had the urge to slap him, to shake him, to shake the whole world and force it right again, like how her dad smacked the cable box whenever service was coming in weird. Thinking of her dad, of her home, suddenly made her feel very young and very afraid. She wished she’d listened to her parents. They’d been right all along. She should never have come. She wasn’t strong enough. “We’re standing here in the middle of the fucking night and these—these people are telling me that there are clones running around out there, thousands of them—”

  “Gemma, calm down.” Jake put a hand on her arm. She nearly screamed. But she was afraid to open her mouth again—afraid of losing it completely.

  Her father had known about Haven. All this time, he’d known.

  “Everyone needs to calm down, okay?” Jake was saying. The boy with the knife had tensed up again. “Can you put that thing down, please? We’re not going to hurt you.” The boy lowered the knife, finally. Jake had said the right thing, but Gemma didn’t care. Even though they were standing in open air, she felt the sky might at any second collapse and bury them. She kneaded her chest with one hand, willing her heartbeat to slow down. The girl, she noticed, looked sick also. Somehow this made her feel less afraid. They couldn’t be that dangerous, even if they did have a knife and look like creepy escaped psych inmates from a horror film. And when the girl couldn’t stand anymore and instead crouched and ducked her head between her knees, breathing slowly, obviously trying to control her nausea, Gem felt sorry for her, and annoyed at the boy with the knife. He barely glanced at her.

  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 s
he 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.

  The question was: Why?

  She knew that whoever was in charge wouldn’t allow the products of his or her experiments to run free, not when those products could talk and think for themselves. She assumed the only reason that the girl and boy, the replicas, hadn’t been found and taken into custody already was because of all the chaos. Probably they were still counting the dead and the missing. Staying on the marshes for any length of time was a huge risk. But Gemma sensed that the clones weren’t ready to move yet, and she knew that she had to stay close to them, that the ember of truth was here, with them. She needed time to think and to plan.

  She expected more resistance from Jake. But he only shook his head and said, “We should try and get some sleep. We’ll want to get off the marshes as soon as possible.” And the clones didn’t argue anymore. They obviously didn’t want to be too far from the food and water.

  They moved to the far side of a contorted thicket of mangrove trees that blocked them from a view of the body. Gemma didn’t want to camp so close to the dead girl. She couldn’t stand to think of her, that face like her face hollowed out by hunger, the hair that Gemma sweated and toiled to keep straight shaved close to her fragile scalp. She had never been superstitious, but it felt like a bad omen, as if the fate of her double might wear off on her.

  On the other hand, she didn’t want to go far in the darkness, and the girl and the boy, the replicas, were exhausted. The replicas bedded down side by side, although Gemma noticed that they hardly spoke or even acknowledged each other. As if they each belonged two separate realities that only coexisted momentarily.

  Jake fell asleep right away, using a rolled-up towel as a pillow and clutching his backpack as though it were a teddy bear. Gemma, however, lay awake long after even the replicas had fallen asleep. It wasn’t just because she was physically uncomfortable—she was clammy and too hot; the whine of mosquitoes needled her; the ground was uneven and unpleasantly spongy; she was dirty and she was sure that she smelled—but because of an itchy, hard-to-name feeling inside, like the wriggling of thousands of ants under her skin, in her blood and her veins. She imagined the girl on the other side of the trees, the second-Gemma, coming to life again, slithering through the mud, reaching for Gemma’s face with bloodied fingernails, reaching for Gemma’s hair, demanding it back. . . . She had to sit up, stifling a cry of terror.

  Someone had cloned her. It was the only explanation that made sense, but she couldn’t accept it. Had her father known? Was that why he had left Fine & Ives, and ruptured forever with his business partner? Was that why he’d wanted Haven shut down? A scientist had taken a sample of Gemma’s DNA when she was a baby and used it to make another Gemma. Except . . .

  The dead girl wasn’t just another Gemma. She had Gemma’s DNA, her face and her freckles, but even now her insides were liquefying, her stomach bloating with gases. She’d had a different name, different memories and preferences, and a very different life. Two people built of the same material, but radically separated by experience and now by death.

  Had her father known? Or had he only suspected?

  Maybe during one of her many hospital stays as a baby, someone had stolen some tissue from her without her parents’ knowledge. That must be it. There would have to be a black market for things like this, places on the internet you could go to buy kiddie porn and new livers and medical samples.

  She knew that was nonsensical, though. What were the chances that her DNA had randomly ended up in the same research institute her father’s company had helped fund?

  She would never sleep. How could she, with that dead girl, that doubled girl, so close by? So many thoughts were turning in her head, she felt dizzy. She had to know. She had to understand this place, and what her father’s connection to it had been. What her connection to it was.

  It was much harder to get into the kayak without Jake there to steady her, and again she had a fear of turning over and getting stuck, like a banana in a too-tight skin. But she managed it eventually and, after flailing around with the paddle for a bit, loosed herself from the tangle of long grass and reeds and maneuvered into the dark, glassy water. She didn’t even know how to read a compass, even though her phone must have had one. But she felt confident that she was sufficiently close to the island that she wouldn’t get lost, and she even had the idea of tying her sweatshirt to the overhanging branches of one of the mangrove trees, so that she would be able to find her way back.

  After only a few minutes, she regretted the decision. Paddling was much harder than Jake had made it look. Her heart was soon thumping and her shoulders ached. And she had to keep angling into the shadows and sloshing onto miniature pockets of land to orient herself. Down in the water she could see nothing, not with the mangroves crowding her and the reeds tall and spindly and white as bone. After a little while, the water became scummy with a fine layer of trash from the island, not just ash but human things, old buttons and charred plastic pieces and even bits of paper. She found a laminated ID entangled among the reeds: the picture showed a grim-faced black woman and indicated low-security clearance. She pocketed it. Now the thudding of her heart had nothing to do with the effort of paddling.

  She came around a bend and sucked in a sharp breath: there beyond another stretch of muddy water was the fence, and empty guard towers, and trees blackened by fire beyond it. She must still be on the side of the island that had never been developed, because she could see only one long building through the trees, a shed or a storehouse that appeared abandoned. She dragged the kayak onto the shore and set out through the reeds down the narrow beach, as frogs splashed noisily into the water to avoid her, keeping very low to the ground in case there were still soldiers patrolling.

  Here in the shallows was even more garbage, accumulated trash frothing against the grass. She angled her phone to the ground as a makeshift flashlight. She found a small rectangular sign, the kind that hung on office doors, indicating the way to Storeroom C, whatever that was. Its plastic was melted at the edges, so the sign looked as if it were bleeding out. She saw bits of plaster and white things studded between the rocks that she realized with a surge of nausea looked like pieces of bone. There were occasional stretches of
sticky-dark stains, blacker than shadow, that she knew must be blood. The explosion must have been tremendous. And then of course had come the wind, which had carried the smell of burning all the way to Barrel Key and blown the fire into a conflagration.

  After five minutes the trees thinned and the smell of charred plastic and campfire and something sweeter and deeper and more unpleasant intensified. At last she could see buildings—or at least, a single building—huge and rectangular and stained with soot, its windows shattered so that it appeared to be staring blankly out over the water. She was shocked to see the fire still burning, glowing dimly inside the building so that the walls were turned the strange translucent pinkish glow of a heart. She dropped into a crouch when she saw movement, pocketing her phone. Dimly she heard people calling to one another, and saw as her eyes adjusted people outfitted in firefighters’ rubber pants and heavy boots. As she watched, she realized they were in fact stoking the fire, keeping it going, keeping it under control. And she understood that they’d been charged with burning the rest of Haven down, to make sure there was nothing left. She could go no farther, not without risking being caught.

  Although the firefighters must have been a thousand yards away, she still winced when she stepped backward and heard a sharp crack. Turning, she saw that she’d stepped on a framed photograph, further shattering the cracked plastic that encased it. She bent down to retrieve it but could make out nothing more than a blur of dark figures. She pocketed it anyway and moved down the beach again, back in the direction she’d come. She waited until she could no longer hear the people or see the glow of fire through the trees before fishing out her phone again for light.