Replica
Page 36
“We’ll be okay,” he said, and she loved that, loved hearing him say we, loved being a part of him. He traced a thumb lightly over her cheekbones, and where he touched her she felt beautiful. Like he was sewing up the ugly parts. He smiled, that goofy smile Gemma couldn’t believe she hadn’t always been in love with. “Just think about it. Clones at school. Real clones, not just Chloe and the rest of her drones.”
“Yeah.” Gemma forced a smile. It was a fantasy. Lyra and Caelum would never go to school. If they wanted to stay alive, they’d likely have to go underground, stay hidden, stay on the run. And they would only get sicker. But it was a nice idea and she didn’t want to spoil it.
“Go to sleep,” Pete said more quietly. He leaned forward and touched his lips to hers, but just that light pressure made her whole body shiver. “I’ll keep watch for a bit.”
With the backseats folded down, the minivan was more than big enough to lie down in. Pete had a blanket, too, and he insisted she use his sweatshirt as a pillow.
“Good night, Gemma.” Pete leaned over to kiss her again. This time, he let his lips stay longer, and she felt his warmth on top of her, the impossible and delicious solidity of his body. The bones and blood and skin that separate but also bring us back together. The gift of them.
Even though she was tired, she didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, not after everything that had happened. But she did.
Sometime later she woke up because Pete was shaking her.
“Someone’s coming,” he said.
She sat up. The darkness was gummy-thick, and her whole body felt sticky. The rear door was still open, letting in the noise of tree frogs and the occasional muffled sound of a door opening and closing as people went or returned from the bathroom. She didn’t know what time it was, but she couldn’t have been asleep very long. Pete didn’t look as if he’d slept at all. He was wide awake, alert, staring.
He pointed at the beam of a flashlight moving between the parked vans. She could tell from the pattern it made that whoever was out there was making a tour of each vehicle, as if looking for something specific.
Looking for someone specific.
“Where’s Lyra?” Gemma whispered. Her body was electric with fear. “Where’s Caelum?”
“Outside,” Pete said. “Sleeping.”
How on earth could they have been followed? Gemma was sure they had been careful, switching highways, watching constantly for cars that seemed to be pursuing them. Maybe, she thought, someone was monitoring her phone calls. She’d seen stuff like that on the cop shows on TV, how police could triangulate phone calls to find wanted criminals. Hunted. That was what she felt like—like an animal crouching in a hole, just waiting to be torn apart.
There was no way she could wake Lyra and Caelum and get them in the car without being seen. Already the flashlight—and the person behind it—was less than twenty feet away, moving around an RV that belonged to an older couple Gemma had spoken to earlier. There was no tearing out of here, either, not in the dark, not without risking mowing down some poor dad on his way to the toilet or kids sleeping in a tent.
“Lie down,” Gemma said. Their best bet was to pretend to be asleep and pray they would be passed over—that in the darkness they wouldn’t be recognized. Pete had covered her with a blanket and she drew this up over their faces, so the sound of their breathing was amplified beneath it. She was too scared to process even how close they were lying, his knees pressed to her knees, his chest rising and falling with his breath and their noses practically touching.
But no sooner had they lain down than she heard a voice.
“Gemma? Gemma?”
Instantly, she sat up again, half-delirious, disbelieving. She knew that voice.
“April?” she whispered.
“Oh my God, Gemma. Thank God.” The flashlight thudded to the ground and for a quick second, as April bent to retrieve it, revealed her familiar green Converses. “Shit. Where are you?”
Gemma shook off the blanket and scooted out of the van. She felt clumsy with happiness. “I’m here,” she said, and the flashlight swept over her and held her momentarily in its light. “I’m right here.” She held out both arms and a second later, April was rocketing into them.
“I was so worried about you,” she said, nearly taking Gemma off her feet. “I was so mad, you know—Latin temper and all that—but then a few hours after I left the house I started feeling really, really awful. Like my-stomach-is-trying-to-eat-itself awful. And I came home, and you were gone already, and then your parents called me. . . .”
“How did you find me?” Gemma was half tempted to touch April’s hair and nose and shoulders, to doubly make sure she was real.
“Find My Phone app, duh,” April said. Gemma almost laughed. Of course. “But then you turned your phone off, and then of course as soon as I got here my phone ran out of charge. So I’ve been walking around like a total perv, peeking in people’s windows. . . . Perv?” she squeaked, as Pete climbed out of the van.
Gemma was glad that it was so dark she couldn’t make out April’s expression. “April, you know Pete,” she said, deliberately emphasizing the name and hoping that April would take the hint. “Pete was the one who drove me down to Florida.”
“Uh-huh.” April seemed momentarily speechless, a first for her. Gemma could practically see her making calculations—the size of the van, the fact that both Gemma and Pete had been sleeping inside, together. “Where are the . . . others?” She was deliberately avoiding the word clones, and Gemma remembered what they’d fought about, and what she’d now have to confess to April: that she was one of them. Made. Manufactured. She would have to tell April about her parents’ first child, the lost child she’d been made to replicate. She would have to tell April about Rick Harliss and Jake Witz’s murder. She was hit by a wave of exhaustion again. This was the world she lived in now.
As if he knew what she was thinking, Pete put his arm around her. “They’re sleeping,” he said. “They’re okay.”
Gemma leaned into him, grateful, not even caring what April thought. “We’re all okay,” she said. She reached for April’s hand and gave it a squeeze. There in the darkness, in the middle of nowhere, her boyfriend and her best friend: under the circumstances, she could hardly ask for more.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Lyra’s story.
EIGHTEEN
APRIL SLEPT IN HER CAR. For most of the night, Pete kept his arm around Gemma’s waist, breathing into her hair, and she woke surprisingly refreshed, considering the fact that she was lying with her cheek squashed against the van’s scratchy carpeting and one whole arm was numb.
It was just after six o’clock. She eased out of the van and saw that Lyra and Caelum were still sleeping, their bodies tented under a blanket pulled all the way over their heads. Beneath it they appeared to be one person. She showered and brushed her teeth in the semi-slimy bathroom, next to little kids giddy with the experience of camping and their bleary-eyed moms. Afterward, she woke April, and they went in search of breakfast from the little mini-mart and gas station where Pete had bought all the junk food the night before. They bought hot coffee and muffins the texture of sponges, but were so hungry they didn’t care. They ate at a picnic bench slick with dew and watched the sun beat the mist off the ground. It was going to be another beautiful day.
Gemma told April everything. When she explained what had happened to Jake Witz, she realized she was trying not to cry. But she forced herself to keep talking. She told April about what she’d learned from Rick Harliss, about what her parents had done after their first child had died. About why and how she’d been made. By then she was crying, not even because she felt sorry for herself, but weirdly because she mourned the child, Emma. She even felt sorry for her parents. They must have grieved. They must have been grieving for years. What would it be like to look at your daughter and see a perfect reflection of a child you’d lost?
To her
credit, April didn’t freak out. She waited until Gemma was finished, and then she scooted closer on the bench to give Gemma a hug. April gave the best hugs. Even though Gemma was much larger than April was, somehow April made her feel totally enfolded, totally taken care of.
“I’m proud of you, bug,” April said, using an old nickname, which made Gemma laugh and cry harder at the same time.
Gemma pulled away. “Jeez. I’m like a snot factory,” she said.
“I hear there’s big money in snot nowadays.”
Gemma laughed again, choking a bit, wiping her face with a sleeve. “Do you think I’ll ever feel normal again?”
April snorted. “Come on, Gemma. When did we ever feel normal?” She nudged Gemma’s shoulder. “We’re aliens, remember?”
“You’re an alien,” Gemma said. “I’m a clone.”
“The Adventures of Alien and Clone. Sounds like a Marvel movie. I’m in,” April said. And then, in a different voice, “Besides, normal is overrated. Normal is a word invented by boring people to make them feel better about being boring.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Gemma did, in fact, feel a little better. A little lighter. She was still dreading going home to confront her parents, but she knew she couldn’t delay it forever. The sun had risen. The sky was the color of a Creamsicle, and full of whipped-cream clouds. She stood up. “We should probably wake the others.”
“No way. Uh-uh. You skipped over the most important part of the story.” April grabbed Gemma’s wrist and hauled her down onto the bench again. She was grinning, shark-wide, the way she did. “So,” she said, leaning forward on an elbow. “’Fess up. What’s the deal with you and Perv?”
They were on the road by ten. April followed the van in her car, occasionally tooting her horn or pulling up alongside the van to wave or give a thumbs-up. Pete kept up a constant stream of conversation, as usual, but this time he spoke mostly to Lyra and Caelum, trying to explain all about the world they hardly knew.
“Strip malls are like the arteries of America. They keep the whole country alive. Pizzerias, nail salons, shitty hardware stores . . . this is it, you know? The pinnacle of human achievement. If we ever get to Mars, I bet we’ll build a nail salon first thing.”
Mostly, Gemma listened. Mostly, she turned her face to the window and saw her double reflected there, ghostly over the passing landscape: a different Gemma from the one who’d left home less than a week ago—stronger, both more and less sure of herself. She didn’t know what was coming for her, but she knew that she’d be ready. They were safe for now. They were together. She had April and Pete. Lyra had her. Caelum had a name.
And despite what she’d said to April, she felt a little less alien than she had before. A little smarter. A little more amazed, too, by all the mysteries she’d seen, by the complexity of the universe and the people inside of it.
A little more human, even.
PRAISE FOR REPLICA
“Electric, heartbreaking, pulse-pounding, and timely, Replica is a riveting two-for-one. Two complex heroines, two puzzling mysteries, two weaving adventures, all in one astounding novel.”
—VICTORIA AVEYARD,
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Queen
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Charles Grantham
LAUREN OLIVER is the author of the teen novels Before I Fall, Panic, Vanishing Girls, and the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and are New York Times and international bestselling novels. She is also the author of two standalone novels for middle grade readers, The Spindlers and Liesl & Po, which was an E. B. White Read-Aloud Award nominee, as well as the Curiosity House series and a novel for adults, Rooms. A graduate of the University of Chicago and NYU’s MFA program, Lauren Oliver is also the cofounder of the boutique literary development company Paper Lantern Lit. You can visit her online at www.laurenoliverbooks.com.
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BOOKS BY LAUREN OLIVER
Liesl & Po
The Spindlers
Curiosity House Series
Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head
Curiosity House: The Screaming Statue
The Delirium Series
Delirium
Pandemonium
Requiem
Delirium: The Complete Collection
Hana
Annabel
Raven
Alex
The Book of Shhh
Before I Fall
Panic
Vanishing Girls
Replica
The Lauren Oliver Collection
For Adults
Rooms
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Although many of the larger geographical areas indicated in this book do, in fact, exist, most (if not all) of the streets, landmarks, and other place names are of the author’s invention.
REPLICA. Copyright © 2016 by Laura Schechter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931028
EPub Edition © August 2016 ISBN 9780062394187
ISBN 978-0-06-239416-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-256193-0 (international edition)
ISBN 978-0-06-256730-7 (special edition)
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FIRST EDITION
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