Miraculously, they made it without incident, although Gemma could have sworn that the car gave a relieved sigh when Jake cut the engine. Stepping outside, she was immediately overwhelmed by the sound of the tree frogs. They were so loud and so uniform they seemed like a single entity, like the heartbeat of the world rising and falling. Even here, she thought she detected a faint smell of smoke.
Jake removed a flashlight from his backpack and gestured for Gemma to follow him. The Wahlee Nature Reserve was technically closed at sunset, and theirs was the only car. They moved onto one of the paths that cut into a thicket of pine and mangrove trees, and immediately Gemma felt a difference in the ground, a sponginess that made her heart turn over a little. Jake had told her casually that all the islands and marshes around here would be gone in twenty years, swallowed up by water. She imagined the trees submerged, stretching ghostly fingers up toward a sun filtered through layers of murky water. She wondered what April would think now, if she knew that Gemma was following a boy she didn’t know into a darkened nature reserve with no one around for miles.
She didn’t know anymore whether she was glad or worried that she hadn’t told anyone where she was going.
They walked for fifteen minutes, though it felt like longer, and the sticky, humid air seemed to get all tangled up in Gemma’s lungs. After a certain point they didn’t seem to be following a path at all, and she had no idea how Jake was sure that he was heading in the right direction. The marshes had tides that shifted subtly and without sound: the water wouldn’t even warn them before appearing suddenly beneath their feet. Jake stopped and touched her elbow.
“We’re close,” he said. “Go carefully. There are tidal pools here.”
“Okay,” Gemma said. Her voice sounded strange in the humid darkness, like it was being muffled by a pillow. She was sorry when Jake took his hand away.
A few paces farther on, Jake stopped completely and angled his flashlight at a patch of ghostly white saw grass, running down to a black expanse she now recognized as an inlet. Partially concealed beneath a myrtle oak was a bright-red kayak, which he’d rented from a local boat shop and stashed earlier that night. It was skinny and long as a Popsicle. Gemma’s stomach dropped.
“I don’t think we’re both going to fit,” Gemma said desperately, as Jake bent over to drag the kayak free of the growth.
“Of course we will. It’s a two-seater.” He pointed with the flashlight. There were, in fact, two seats in the kayak—if you could call them seats. Gemma thought they looked like those car seats meant for toddlers.
I’m not going to fit, Gemma wanted to say. But of course she couldn’t. Not to him. Jake was the kind of guy who had size-zero girlfriends who modeled locally and were always complaining about trying to find clothes small enough.
“Can’t we get another boat?” she asked desperately. “A boat boat?”
He must have thought she was kidding, because he only laughed.
“Anything bigger will just get stuck. Some of the channels out there are so narrow even the kayak’s a stretch.” Jake bent down and shoved the kayak down into the water, which sucked at the plastic with a wet farting sound. He steadied it with a foot. “Besides, it’s more comfortable than it looks.”
He clambered easily into the kayak—or the floating Popsicle—and somehow enfolded his long legs inside it, as if he were just sitting down in a chair. Then he maneuvered the kayak so he could reach out a hand to help Gemma inside.
“Come on,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
She bit her lip. She had a sudden vision of getting stuck in her seat, of having to be hauled out of the kayak by a crane. Or worse, of not being able to fit inside in the first place. But she took his hand. As soon as she placed a foot into the kayak, it began bucking like a badly trained horse, and if the boat hadn’t still been rooted in the mud of the bank, she was sure the whole thing would have gone over.
“All right, now the other foot . . . there you go, easy now . . .”
Somehow she managed to climb in without flipping the kayak, and even more miraculously, managed to squeeze herself down into the hard plastic seat, feeling a little like an elephant in a girdle.
“See?” Jake used a plastic paddle to push them out of the mud and turn them in the right direction. He was smiling at her again, his teeth white in the moonlight. “Not so bad, is it?”
“For the record,” Gemma blurted out, “this is exactly as comfortable as it looks.”
“Aw, come on. Don’t be a baby.” But he was still smiling. And as they began to move through the marshes, her spirits lifted. Jake had given her a paddle but instructed her not to use it, and she was happy to let him do the work. They progressed steadily and in near silence except for the slurping of the water on the paddles. They’d agreed in advance that they should try and avoid talking as much as possible, in case there were patrols on the marshes.
So far it seemed their gamble—that after what had happened, security would be trying to get everyone out, not worrying about people trying to get in—was correct. Occasionally helicopters passed in the distance on their way to and from the island, but less frequently now. And Gemma knew they must still be ferrying people from the island. It was unlikely, however, that given Haven’s security, any survivors had even made it onto the marshes, which explained why they were putting hardly any effort into searching for them.
After an hour they’d met no one, heard no one, although occasionally they seemed to hear shouting in the distance, and Gemma knew they were still quite far from Haven. The marshes really did look like a labyrinth, full of narrow channels that forced them back toward the mainland before they could find another vein of water to follow in the right direction. Every few minutes, Jake stopped to consult the compass on his phone. With the saw grass growing as high as a tall man and mangrove trees furry with overhanging moss, they would have otherwise had no way of knowing where the mainland was and which way led to open ocean.
But there was a strange beauty to the marshes, and the tangles of dark weeds that drifted just below the surface of the water and came up on Jake’s paddle, like long, dark fingers drawing him back, and the saw grass painted white with bird guano. The moon was full and bright, even behind a wispy covering of smoke, and so close Gemma could see individual craters, a pattern of trenches and shadow that made a grinning face. Jake picked out constellations to show her, and Gemma thought they all looked like they were winking down at her, letting her in on some secret. Jake obviously loved the marshes, despite what had happened to his dad here, and he told her stories of camping trips and frog-hunting expeditions, how his dad had renamed all the stars he didn’t know and claimed Orion’s Belt had been named for a drunk god who liked to pee in the Wahlee. Jake shook his head. I believed him for so many years. He smiled. Whenever I see Orion’s Belt, I think of him.
It occurred to Gemma that this was the second time in the past twenty-four hours she’d been squeezed next to a cute boy in a strange vehicle. Maybe tomorrow she would meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger who’d want to take her on a motorcycle ride. Maybe she’d end up in Vegas working for the mob as a professional blackjack dealer.
At that moment, anything at all seemed possible.
She lost track of time completely but knew they must be getting closer. Sometimes she thought she heard the echo of overlapping voices, and once Jake froze, sticking the paddle down into the mud and shoving them into the shadow of an overhanging sand oak. But the voices always receded. If there were other people out in the darkness, the marshes were expansive enough to keep them at a distance.
At one point, Jake fished out his phone to check the time and Gemma saw that he looked exhausted. She felt horrible: she hadn’t been helping at all, and he’d been paddling for nearly two hours.
“One a.m.,” he said. He was a little out of breath. “We must be getting close.”
“You need a break,” Gemma said.
“I’m okay,” Jake said, completely unconvincingly.
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“You’re a terrible liar,” Gemma said firmly. “You need a break.” She, too, needed to stretch. Her feet had gone numb hours ago.
He didn’t argue again. He angled the kayak up into the shallows and freed himself, so tired he didn’t even complain when he sank a leg shin-deep in the mud. He helped shove the kayak onto sturdier ground so she could disembark. A rush of sudden feeling invaded her legs and she nearly stumbled. Jake caught her and for a second she was close to him, his hands on her elbow, his lips bow-shaped and his jaw just stubbled with hair and his eyes unreadable in the dark. She quickly pulled away.
She helped him haul the kayak farther into the grass so it wouldn’t drift away. The saw grass grew nearly to shoulder height, and Gemma was glad, now, for the Windbreaker: it was sharp, and left sores on her exposed skin. As they hacked through the grass, for the first time in hours she spotted Spruce Island, by this point so close she could make out individual trees, and the spiky points of the guard towers, which looked to be abandoned. They had somehow come around the westernmost tip of the island, which was densely overgrown. She could make out none of the buildings, although some lingering smoke indicated a point in the distance where they must have been.
Gemma was so tired she’d forgotten to be nervous. Now, however, she remembered. “What now?” she whispered. “Do you think we can still get—?” She broke off before she said closer. Jake went very still.
They’d both heard it: a muffled cry.
Jake grabbed her arm and pulled her into a crouch. He brought a finger to his lips, but there was no need. Gemma was so frightened, she couldn’t have made a sound if she wanted to. The silence was anything but reassuring. They’d heard a voice, a human voice, ten, twenty feet away in the marshes. Which meant that whoever had cried out was now deliberately being quiet. Creeping up on them, maybe. Waiting to attack. Gemma pictured herself handcuffed in a military facility, a single lightbulb swinging overhead, an ugly army sergeant with a face like an old baseball mitt leaning forward to spit on her.
She was scared of Chloe DeWitt, ninety-pound blond shrimpoid. She would never make it in prison.
Then again, maybe she’d just get shot in the back, hit by a sniper from a distance of a hundred yards. One breath in and one breath out and then darkness forever.
Then they heard it: a faint rustling of the grass, followed by a sharp silence, as if someone had taken a step and then frozen. Jake was so still she couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. The footstep had come from somewhere behind them. Jake gestured in the opposite direction. Move, he mouthed, and despite the fact that Gem’s legs felt stiff and fatter than usual, she began to inch forward, shuffling crablike as quietly as possible. Her thighs were burning and tears sprang up unexpectedly in her eyes. Pathetic. Out here on the marshes in the middle of the night, crying because no one knew where she was, because she hadn’t told her mom she loved her, because she hadn’t told April, either, because her thighs were really out of shape and she would never wear a bathing suit again. . . . They would kill her, they would shoot first and make it look like an accident. . . .
“Who’s there?”
The voice was harsh, male, and came from no more than ten feet behind her.
Gem forgot to stay down, forgot to stay quiet, forgot to keep hidden. Something screamed through her chest and into her head, an ancient voice shouting go, a force exploding into her muscles and lifting her to her feet. She was running. She was plunging blindly through the saw grass and the salt-eaten shrubs, ignoring the cuts on her shins and forearms. There were shouts, now, from all around her, or so it seemed—she didn’t stop, wasn’t thinking, couldn’t hear anything but that drumbeat of panic.
Her foot snagged and her ankle went out. She stumbled on something buried in the grass and for a second that seemed like an eternity she was in the air falling, still imagining hands to reach out and grab her. She landed so hard the wind went out of her and she curled in on herself, shocked and airless, fighting for a breath that wouldn’t come. Then Jake was next to her again, pulling her up so she was sitting. She finally took a breath, a long gasp of it, and began coughing.
“Jesus,” he whispered. He was sweating. He looked like he was going to be sick. “Jesus Christ.”
“That voice,” she managed to say. “Where did it come from? Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Christ, Gemma. Look . . .”
She turned to see what had tripped her. Time that had moved so slowly seemed to crack entirely. For a long second she didn’t understand what she was seeing, and then she thought—wished, hoped—it was an animal, some kind of strange underwater speckled thing, but then Jake drew back and began to cough, half choking, and dropped his flashlight: Gemma saw in its beam the dimpled elbow, the fingers curled in a half fist, and a green medical bracelet strapped around the bony wrist.
She couldn’t have said, then or afterward, what made her reach out to part the grasses with a hand so that she could better see the girl’s face. Instinct, maybe, or shock.
She was thinner than Gemma, much thinner. Her scalp was shaved, but in places a fuzz of brown hair had begun to regrow. Her green eyes were open to the sky and her mouth was open too, as if in a silent scream. There were four freckles on the bridge of her nose, four freckles Gemma knew because she counted them every day in the mirror, because Chloe DeWitt had once taken a pen and connected them during naptime in kindergarten. The soft plump mouth that had been her grandmother’s. The hard angular jaw that belonged to her dad.
Behind her, Jake was still gasping. “What the hell? What the hell?”
The girl—the dead girl—was wearing Gemma’s face.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 8 of Lyra’s story.
NINE
GEMMA SOMETIMES HAD NIGHTMARES WHERE she was trapped in a crowd in an underground vault. In her dreams she was usually looking for someone, often her parents, sometimes April or even Rufus. But everywhere she turned she saw reflections of herself, not in mirrors but in the distorted faces of the people looking back at her, all of these not-Gemmas laughing the more frantic she became. She always woke up shaken and sick.
This was like that, only worse. She had the impression of swinging over a pit, as if the world might simply buck her into nothingness, and she would drown next to the dead girl who could be her twin.
She hadn’t seen the stranger approach, hadn’t noticed her at all, until she spoke.
“Cassiopeia?” She was extremely thin, not the kind of Chloe DeWitt thinness that came from weight-loss shakes and detox juicing and SoulCycle, but true, not-enough-to-eat, maybe-dying-of-cancer thinness. It made her bones stand out in her cheeks, her knuckles huge and mannish, her knees like sharp kites angling for a wind. Her head was completely shaved. Above her right eyebrow was a long white scar the width of a needle.
The stranger took an uncertain step forward and nearly tripped over the girl lying dead in the mud, and she drew a sharp breath and stopped, holding herself very still. When she looked up at Gemma, her face had changed. Gemma had the impression of huge eyes sunk in that narrow face, and a question in them she didn’t know how to answer. She took in the girl’s clothing—a white T-shirt, streaked with mud and grass and what looked like bird shit, ugly cotton elastic-waist pants—and then the girl’s breasts, braless, hardly more than two sharp nipples beneath the fabric, her bare feet, the toenails colorless. Bare feet. Where had she come from with no shoes? But Gemma knew, even before she spotted the hospital bracelet, identical to the one secured around the dead girl’s wrist.
“Oh my God.” She felt as if her heart had been stilled with a hammer. She pictured it like an old-fashioned clock, splintered into uselessness. “I think—I think she’s one of them.”
The Haven girl looked suddenly ferocious. “Who are you?” she said. “Where did you come from?”
“Who are you?” Jake’s face was the bleached white of bone, but his voice was steady. Gemma w
anted to reach out and take his hand. But her body wasn’t obeying her correctly, and just then she was distracted by movement behind the girl, and something tall and dark and shadowed resolved itself into a boy.
“Lyra,” the girl said, and, when they said nothing, made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Number twenty-four.”
“Oh my God,” Gemma said again. Her voice sounded high and shrill and unfamiliar, as if it were being piped through a teakettle. Her mind kept reeling away from the dead girl lying not four feet away from her, the pattern of freckles on her face, the exact shape of her mouth, reeling away from the truth of it, like a magnet veering away from its pair. “There’s another one.”
She knew the boy must be from Haven, too, as soon as he appeared. He was barefoot, and very thin, though not nearly so thin as the girl. Muscles showed through his T-shirt when he moved. He was mixed race and very beautiful, but there was something hard about him, too. He looked like one of the wax figurines in Madame Tussauds, where she’d gone with her mom on a trip to New York ages ago. As if you could stare and stare into his eyes and get nothing back. A person a little like a black hole: all the light vanished around him.
She didn’t see the knife in his hand until the boy stepped forward so that the light showed on its blade.
“Look.” Jake put up both hands, as if he could physically stop the boy’s progress. “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”
The boy gave no sign of having heard. “Who are you?” he said, keeping the knife high. Gemma realized in that second how stupid they’d been, how unprepared. They’d been scared of being arrested for trespassing. Not for a second had they considered that the Haven patients might be dangerous. Maniacs. Brain-altered killers. God only knew what kind of sick experiments they were doing there.
“We’re nobody,” Jake said. Very slowly he reached down and helped Gemma to her feet. Her body felt dull and even heavier than usual, as if it belonged to somebody else. Now, standing, she had a clearer view of the dead girl who looked like her, and it was terrible, worse than any nightmare, like staring into an open grave with a mirror at the bottom of it. She thought she might fall. She hardly trusted her legs to carry her. Jake was still talking, but she could barely understand him. “Listen, we’re not going to hurt you, okay? My name’s Jake Witz. This is Gemma. We got lost in the marshes, that’s all.”