To calm herself she recited the alphabet in her head, then counted up from one to one hundred. She listed all the constellations she knew, but that was painful: she imagined Cassiopeia’s face, and Ursa Major’s obsession with hoarding things from the mess hall—old spoons and paper cups, bags of oyster crackers and packages of mustard—and wondered whether she would ever see any of the other replicas again.
“Hey. Are you all right? It’s okay—we’re stopped now.”
Lyra opened her eyes and saw that Gemma was right: they had stopped. They were in what looked like an enormous loading dock, but filled with dozens and dozens of parked cars instead of boats—a parking lot, another idea she’d absorbed from the nurses without ever having seen it. Could all the cars belong to different people? Looming in the distance was a building three times the size of even the Box. W-A-L-M-A-R-T. Lyra flexed her fingers, which ached. She had been holding tight to her seat without realizing it.
“You guys can stay here, okay?” Gemma said. “Just sit tight. We’re going to buy food and stuff. And clothes,” she added. “Do you know your shoe size?”
Lyra shook her head. At Haven they were provided with sandals or slippers. Sometimes they were too big, other times too small, but Lyra so often went barefoot she hadn’t thought it mattered.
“Okay.” Gemma exhaled. “What did you say your names were again?”
“I’m Lyra,” Lyra said. “And this is seventy-two.” She was distracted. Outside the car, Jake was speaking on a cell phone. Lyra felt a twinge of nervousness. Who was he calling? Every so often, he glanced back into the car as if to make sure that Lyra and 72 were still there. What if 72 was right, and Jake and Gemma couldn’t be trusted?
“Seventy-two?” Gemma repeated. “That isn’t a name.”
“It’s my number,” 72 said shortly.
“I’m twenty-four,” Lyra said, by way of explanation. “But one of the doctors named me.” 72 looked faintly annoyed, but Lyra knew he was probably just jealous, because he didn’t yet have a name.
“Wow,” Jake said. “And I thought being named after my father was bad. Sorry,” he added quickly. “Dumb joke. Just . . . stay here, okay? We’ll be back in ten minutes.”
For a while, 72 and Lyra sat in silence. Lyra figured out how to roll down the window but found no relief from the heat outside. It was what Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had called molasses-hot. She watched Jake and Gemma as they narrowed into brushstrokes and then disappeared into W-A-L-M-A-R-T. Gemma’s reference to a grandmother bothered her—but it excited her, too, because of what it meant.
Finally she said, “I don’t think the girl knows she’s a replica.”
72 had been staring out the window—fists lodged in his armpits, hunched over as though he were cold, which was impossible. He turned to her. “What?”
“The girl’s a replica. But I don’t think she knows it.” The idea was taking shape now, and with it the simple suggestion of possibility, of a life that might exist on the other side of Haven. At the same time, she was afraid to voice the possibility out loud, aware that it would sound silly and afraid of what 72 would say. “Which means . . . well, maybe she comes from a place where being a replica doesn’t make a difference. Where they have families and drive cars and things like that.”
Lyra could see herself reflected in 72’s eyes. They were the color of the maple syrup served in the Stew Pot on special occasions, like Christmas and the anniversary of the first God’s death. “Is that what you want?” he said at last. “You want a family?”
“I don’t know.” Lyra turned away from him, embarrassed by the intensity of his stare, which felt like being back in the Box, like being evaluated, having her eyes and knees tested for reflexes. Her idea of mother looked much like the nurses and the Haven staff. Mother was someone to feed and clothe you and make sure you took your medicines. But now, unbidden, an image of Dr. O’Donnell came to her. She imagined herself tucked up in a big white bed while Dr. O’Donnell read out loud. She remembered the way that Dr. O’Donnell’s hands had smelled, and the feel of fingertips skimming the crown of her head. Good night, Lyra. And there were her dreams, too, impressions of a birther who held and rocked her, and a cup with lions around its rim. When she was younger she had searched the mess hall for such a cup before being forced to admit that all the glasses at Haven were plain, made of clear plastic. She knew her dreams must be just that—dreams, a kind of wishful thinking.
But she was too ashamed to confess what she was thinking: that she could find Dr. O’Donnell. That Dr. O’Donnell could be her mother. “What do you want?” Lyra asked instead, turning to 72. “You ran away, even if you didn’t get far.”
“I couldn’t,” 72 said. “I couldn’t figure out a way past the guards.”
“You must have been hoping that something like this would happen,” Lyra said, and a suspicion flickered: Could 72 have somehow been responsible for the disaster at Haven? But no. That didn’t make any sense. They were standing together when the explosion happened. They were touching.
72 frowned as if he knew what she was thinking. “I didn’t hope for anything,” he said. “I was just waiting for my chance.”
“But you must have had a plan,” she insisted. “You must have had an idea of where you would go on the other side.”
“I didn’t have a plan.” He leaned back, closing his eyes. As soon as he did, he once again looked much younger. Or not younger, exactly. Stripped down, somehow, naked. Lyra remembered that once she and Ursa Major and Cassiopeia had spied on the males’ dormitory from the courtyard. Through a partially open blind they’d seen the blurry and bony silhouette of one of the males shirtless and they’d stumbled backward, shocked and gasping, when he turned in their direction. Looking at 72 gave Lyra the same feeling of peering through those blinds, and left her excited and also terrified.
She was almost relieved when he opened his eyes again.
“You asked me what I want. I’ll tell you what I don’t want. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being told what to do, and what to eat, and when to sleep, and when to use the bathroom. I’m tired of being a lab rat.”
“What do you mean, a lab rat?” It was so hot, Lyra was having trouble thinking. Once or twice she’d been sent into B-Wing for some reason or another and seen the milk-white rats in their cages, had seen when they threaded their paws through the bars the elongated pinkness of their strangely human fingers. And some of them were suffering in some stage of an experiment, bloated with pain or covered in dozens of tumorous growths, so heavy they couldn’t lift their heads.
“I watched,” he said simply. “I paid attention.” He turned his face to the window. “When I was little, I didn’t know the difference. I thought I might be an animal. I thought I must be.”
Lyra had an uncomfortable memory again, of number 35 crawling on all fours, insisting on eating her dinner from a bowl on the ground. But number 35 had been soft in the brain. Everyone said so.
“Aren’t you worried about what will happen?” she asked. “Without medicine, without check-ins, with no one to help us when we get sick? We weren’t made for the outside.”
But even as she said it, Lyra thought again of Dr. O’Donnell. She knew how the replicas were built. She was a doctor and she’d worked at Haven. She could help.
“You really believe.” It wasn’t a question. He had turned back to her. “You believe everything they ever told you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. It was so hot. Her face was hot. He was looking at her like some of the nurses did, like she wasn’t exactly real, like he was struggling to see her.
But before he could answer, Jake was back, sliding behind the wheel.
“Sorry,” he said. “Forgot to leave the AC on. I realized you guys must be baking. Hot as balls today, isn’t it?”
72 was still watching Lyra. But then he turned back toward the window.
“Yes,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to one of the hum
ans except in anger, and Lyra noticed that Jake startled in his seat, as if he hadn’t really expected a reply. “Hot.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Gemma’s story.
TEN
LYRA HAD NEVER SEEN SO many houses or imagined that there could be so many people in the world. She knew the facts—she’d heard the nurses and doctors discussing them sometimes, problems with overpopulation, the division between rich and poor—and the nurses often watched TV or listened to the radio or watched videos on their phones when they were bored. But knowing something was different from seeing it: house upon house, many of them identical, so she felt dizzyingly as if she were going forward and also turning a circle; car after car lined up along the streets, grass trim and vividly green. And people everywhere. People driving or out on their lawns or waiting in groups on corners for reasons she couldn’t fathom.
Jake stopped again at one of these houses, and Gemma got out of the car. Lyra watched through the window as a girl with black hair emerged from the house and barreled into Gemma’s arms. Lyra was confused by this, as she was by Jake and Gemma’s relationship, the casual way they spoke to each other, and the fact that Gemma was a replica but didn’t know it. But she was confused by so much she didn’t have the energy to worry about it.
For several minutes, Gemma and the other girl stood outside. Lyra tried to determine whether this second girl, the black-haired one, was a replica or a regular human but couldn’t tell, although she was wearing human clothes and her hair was long. She used her hands a lot. Then the girl went inside, and Gemma returned to the car alone.
“April’s going to open the gate,” she told Jake. She sounded breathless, though she hadn’t walked far. “You can park next to the pool house.”
Jake advanced the car and they corkscrewed left behind the house. Lyra saw a dazzling rectangle of water, still as a bath, which she knew must be a pool. Even though she couldn’t swim, she had the urge to go under, to wash away what felt like days of accumulated dirt and mud and sweat. There were bathtubs in Postnatal, and even though they were too small to lie down in, Lyra had sometimes filled a tub and stepped in to her ankles after it was her turn to tickle, engage, and maintain physical contact with the new replicas.
When the gate closed behind them with a loud clang, Lyra truly felt safe for the first time since leaving Haven. Contained. Controlled. Protected.
Next to the pool was a miniature version of the big house. Sliding doors opened into a large carpeted room that was dark and deliciously cold. The house was mostly white, which Lyra liked. It was like being back in Haven. Goose bumps ran along Lyra’s arm, as if someone had just touched her. Where the carpet ran out was a kitchen alcove that Lyra identified only by its stove: it looked nothing like the kitchen in Stew Pot, a vast and shiny space filled with the hiss of steam from industrial dishwashers. Through an open door she saw a large bed, also made up with a white sheet and blankets and so many pillows she couldn’t imagine what they were all for. And lined up on bookshelves next to the sofa: books. Dozens of books, four times as many as she’d seen in the nurses’ break room, so many that in her excitement the titles blended together and she couldn’t make out a single one.
She wanted to touch them. Their spines looked like different-colored candies the nurses exchanged sometimes, like the sugared lozenges the replicas got sometimes when they had coughs. But she was almost afraid to, afraid that if she did they would all blow apart. She wondered how long it would take her to read every book on the shelves. Months. Years, even. Maybe they would be allowed to stay here, in this clean and pretty room, with the sun that patterned the carpet and the soft hum of hidden air-conditioning.
At W-A-L-M-A-R-T, Gemma had bought Lyra and 72 new clothes—“nothing fancy, and I had to guess how they would fit”—soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, and more food, including cereal and milk, granola bars, cans of soup she said she could show them how to heat in the microwave, and at least a dozen frozen meals. She showed them where the shower was—a single shower stall, the first Lyra had ever seen—and apologized that there was only one bed.
“So, you know, you’ll have to share, unless one of you wants to take the sofa,” she said. Lyra felt suddenly uncomfortable, remembering Pepper and her unborn baby, and how she’d been found with her wrists open; the Christmas parties when the doctors got drunk and sometimes visited the dorms late at night, staggering on their feet and smelling sharply of alcohol swabs. That was why it was better for males and females to stay apart. “I know you must be exhausted, so we’re going to leave you alone for a bit, okay? Just don’t go anywhere.”
Lyra didn’t bother pointing out that they had nowhere to go.
“Get some sleep,” Gemma said. The more Lyra looked at her, the less she resembled Cassiopeia and her other genotypes. That was the funny thing about genotypes, something the nurses and doctors, who could never tell them apart, had never understood. If you looked, you could see differences in the way they moved and spoke and used their hands. Over time, their personalities changed even the way that they looked. And of course Gemma was much heavier than Cassiopeia, and had long hair to her shoulders that looked soft to the touch. Gemma was nicer than Cassiopeia. More prone to worry, too. But they had the same stubbornness—that Lyra could see, too.
As soon as they were alone, Lyra went to the bookshelves. She could feel 72 watching her, but she didn’t care and couldn’t resist any longer. She reached up and ran a finger along the spines, each of them textured differently, some of them gloss-smooth and hard and others soft and crumbly like dirt. L-I-T-T-L-E W-O-M-E-N. Little Women. T-H-E G-O-L-D C-O-A-S-T. When she thought of The Little Prince, lost somewhere on the marshes, she still felt like crying. But these books made up for it, at least a little.
“You were telling the truth,” 72 said. He was watching her closely. “You can read.” He made it sound like a bad thing.
“I told you. Dr. O’Donnell taught me.” She kept skipping her fingers over the titles and, as she did, read out loud: “The Old Man and the Sea. The Long Walk. The Hunger Games.”
He came to stand next to her. Again she could smell him, an earthy sweetness that made her feel slightly dizzy. She’d never found out which of the males Pepper had been with, although Cassiopeia had said a male doctor, because of what happened at the Christmas party, because Pepper had been chosen. But she wondered, now, whether instead it was 72.
“Is it hard?” he asked.
“At the beginning,” she said. She didn’t know why she was thinking of Pepper. She took a step away from 72. “Not so much when you get the hang of it.”
“I thought only people could read,” he blurted out. When she turned to look at him, surprised by the tone of his voice, he turned away. “I’m going to get clean.”
A moment later, she heard the shower pipes shudder and the water start in the bathroom—a familiar sound that lulled her once again into exhaustion. She didn’t understand 72 and his rapid changes of mood. But he’d chosen to stay with her. He hadn’t left her behind. Maybe this complexity was a feature of the male replicas—she didn’t know, had never been allowed to interact with them.
She removed the file she’d taken from its filthy pillowcase and placed it carefully on the desk below the windows. Although she had a roomful of books now—a room full of books, an idea so exciting it made goose bumps on her arms again—the folder, and the single sheet of paper it contained, was her final tether to home. She recognized an old patient report—she’d seen enough of her own reports to recognize a version of the form still in use. But she was too tired to read, and she left the folder open on the desk and returned to the shelves, no longer trying to make sense of the words, just admiring the way the letters looked, the angles and curls and scrolled loops of them.
“I’m all done now.”
She hadn’t heard the shower go off or 72 emerge from the bathroom. She turned and froze. His skin, which had been streaked with bl
ood and caked in a layer of sediment and crusted mud, was now as shiny and polished as a beach stone, and the color of new wood. His eyelashes, grayed by the ash, were long and black. A towel was wrapped around his waist. She was struck again by the strangeness of the male’s body, the broadness of his shoulders and the torqued narrowness of his muscled waist.
“Thank you,” she said, snatching up the clothes Gemma had left for her. She was careful not to pass too close to him when she moved into the bathroom. She shut the door firmly, a little confused by the mechanism of the lock. At Haven, all the doors locked with keypads or codes, except for the bathrooms, which had no locks at all.
She stripped down and balled her filthy clothes in a corner. She had never showered alone before and it felt wonderful: the big echoey bathroom, the space, the aloneness of it. Was this how all people lived? It felt luxurious to her. She spent a few minutes adjusting the taps, delighted by how quickly the water responded. In Haven, there was never enough hot water. The soap Gemma had bought was lilac-scented and pale purple, and Lyra found herself thinking of 72, naked, washing with purple soap, and the urge to giggle bubbled up in her chest, followed by a wave of dizziness. She had to sit with her head between her legs and the water driving down on her shoulders until it passed.
She lathered and rinsed her scalp, scrubbed her ears with a pinkie finger, washed the soles of her feet so that they became so slippery it was treacherous to stand. Finally she felt clean. Even the towels here were better than they were at Haven, where they were thin and stiff from hundreds of washings. Her new clothes felt soft and clean. Gemma had bought her cotton underwear in different colors. She’d never had underwear that was anything but a bleached, dingy beige. Looking at herself in the mirror, she almost could have passed for a real person, except for the length of her hair. She fingered the scar above her right eyebrow. She had scars all over her body now, from spinal taps and harvesting operations to test her blood marrow, but when she was dressed, most of them were concealed. Not this one, though.