“Florida,” Lyra said, although she had never known where she was from until Gemma had told her. She knew only Haven, and Spruce Island, and Barrel Key. She hadn’t understood the world was so big it had to be endlessly divided: into countries, states, towns, neighborhoods. Was it possible the world was so big it included places, like this Nashville, where replicas were made and lived happily, in the open? “We—we had replicas there too.”
Raina squinted, like she was trying to see Lyra from a distance. “Impersonators, you mean?”
Lyra shook her head; she didn’t know. Her body had turned to vapor. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of all the things in the world she didn’t understand coming toward her, a hard high wave she couldn’t duck or ride. But she clung to the idea of a place where replicas could smile and be photographed in the open: it was a reedy, ropy line of hope.
“I think the whole thing’s stupid,” Raina said. “A bunch of grown men dressing up like some dead rock star from a thousand years ago. I mean, his music isn’t even that good.”
“What do you mean, dressing up?” Lyra asked.
“Well, you know, dyeing their hair, growing sideburns, shopping for costumes and stuff. I mean, it’s just make-believe. But Mike acts like he really is Elvis.” Then, seeing Lyra’s face: “Don’t tell me you don’t know who Elvis is.”
Lyra, miserably confused, said, “He’s like the God in Nashville?”
She was reassured when Raina laughed and agreed. “Oh, for sure,” she said. “He is definitely the God in Nashville.”
In the bathroom, Raina finished Lyra’s makeup, and then dressed her, too.
“You look nervous,” she said, when she stepped back to evaluate her work. “Are you nervous?”
Lyra shook her head. In her mind she had already passed through the party and returned home; Caelum would for sure have come home by now. She didn’t know whether he’d collected the brochure by chance. She didn’t know whether he’d even looked through it—surely he would have told her. And that meant that she could tell him. She would give him this enormous gift, and he would understand that she had forgiven him and that they were still, after all, the same.
“You ever been to a party before?”
There had been a Christmas party at Haven every year, but only for the nurses and researchers and staff. For weeks, administrative staff bolted garlands of sweet-smelling greenery to the walls and lumped colored tinsel across the security desks and strung big red ribbons in the entry hall. The night of the party only a skeleton staff remained, and they were blurry-eyed and rowdy, wearing crooked fur-trimmed red hats and strange bulky sweaters over their uniforms.
Then, the Choosing: a handful of male doctors who came staggering into the dorms sweating the smell of alcohol swabs.
“Not exactly,” Lyra said.
“Didn’t think so,” Raina said. “You’ll love it. Trust me.”
Raina put cream in Lyra’s hair—which was longer than she’d ever had it, feathery and thin, the color of new wood—and set a timer for fifteen minutes. By then the sting of chemicals made Lyra’s eyes water. Lyra bent over to rinse out the dye and afterward Raina finger-combed it and set it with gel.
“Don’t look,” she said, when Lyra started to turn. “Not yet.”
She sprayed Lyra down with something called Vixen. She reached into Lyra’s shirt, and hoisted her breasts in their borrowed bra, and laughed when Lyra didn’t even flinch. Then she spun Lyra around to face the mirror.
The girl looking back at her was a stranger, with white-blond hair and smoky eyes and a tank top that barely cleared the bottom of her breasts. Tight stomach, hips suctioned into their jeans.
“How do you like that, Pinocchio?” Raina slung an arm around her shoulders. “I knew I’d turn you into a real girl.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Gemma’s story.
FOUR
IT WAS NEARLY EIGHT O’CLOCK when they set out, and the sun was low. Lyra had always liked this time of day, when the light turned everything softer and edged it in gold. Even the Winston-Able Mobile Home Park looked beautiful at this time, all the slinky cats sunning their final hour and patchy gravel roads deep with shadows and everyone coming back from work but not drunk or angry yet. She felt new, walking with Raina, her friend, side by side, smelling like a stranger, in borrowed clothes. She felt like a stranger, as if she’d put on not just someone else’s clothes but a whole identity.
All her life she’d been smoothed and blunted down to an object, had her body handled, touched, manipulated without her permission, until even she had come to see it as a kind of external thing, a stone or a piece of wood. For the first time she felt her breasts and legs and hips as hers, truly hers, a delicious inner secret like all of her belongings, tucked away for safekeeping in her room.
They stopped by lot 16 to see whether Caelum had come home yet, even though Raina made fun of her for having a kissing cousin. (“That’s some real hick shit,” she said. “Too hick even for us out here.”) But he hadn’t returned. His bed was still neatly made. Lyra didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed and was a bit of both.
Eagle Tire was a big factory on the other side of the weigh station. To get there, Lyra and Raina shimmied beneath a fence and skirted between enormous trucks, then had to pick their way over a trash-strewn lot.
Inside, and despite all the blown-out windows, it was hot. It smelled like smoke and urine, and the walls were soot-blackened from a decade’s worth of fire pits, since transients and homeless people squatted there when it started to get cold. Almost immediately, Lyra regretted coming. All the kids knew one another, and half of them snickered when they saw Lyra, as if they could also see 24, sticking out at awkward angles, underneath. Some of them were from Winston-Able, and a few girls asked her where her cousin was, lingering on the word and making it sound like something bad Lyra had done.
“Ignore them,” Raina said, as if it were that easy. Lyra didn’t see how she could ignore them when they were everywhere. There were more people massed into the empty rooms of Eagle Tire, more people crunching over broken glass and shouting through the cavernous halls, than she had ever seen outside the Stew Pot at Haven.
At Haven there had been rules, the explicit ones—rise at bell, listen to the nurses and doctors, stay out of all the doors marked with a circle and a red bar, don’t bother the guards—and hundreds of secret rules, too, that grew invisibly and were absorbed like mold spores through the skin. She’d thought it was because Haven was an institute, but out here there were just as many rules, as many codes and ways of behaving. And Raina’s explanations only made Lyra more confused.
“There are those bitches from East Wyatt; just because they got rezoned into PCT now they think they’re hot shit,” she said. “Oh. And check it out. Those are the McNab sisters; don’t talk to them, whole family’s cursed, their grandfather killed himself and that’s what got it started. You know, because of it being a sin and everything.” In the dark, Raina looked much paler, like one of the silvery fish that finned through the shallows near the beach at Haven. “Now every generation, someone dies in a freak accident. They lost their mom to a fluke at Formacine Plastics last year.”
What was rezoning? Or a bitch, for that matter? What did it mean to be cursed? She knew what sins were—Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had often quoted from the Bible—but not why it would be a sin to commit suicide. At Haven, it was only a sin because the replicas were expensive to make.
But regular people came cheap. Didn’t they?
Before she could ask, Raina seized her arm. “Don’t look now,” she said. “Remember those Vasquez boys I was telling you about?” She got no further. Two boys shouldered through the crowd, one tall and skinny with the crowded eyes of a fish, the other shorter, more muscular, his arms dark with tattoos.
“Oh no,” one of the Vasquez brothers said to Raina. “Who let the dogs out?”
She cros
sed her arms. “Same person who let you out of your cage, I guess.”
Lyra found herself standing next to the other brother, the shorter one with the tattoos. “Cool hair,” he said. He lit a cigarette that didn’t smell like a cigarette. It was stronger and reminded her not unpleasantly of the smell of the marshes when the tide was low. “You know what they say about girls with short hair?”
“No,” she said.
“Freaks in bed.” He exhaled. It was so dark she could hardly see his face, just the wet glistening of his lips. “Is it true?”
“Go suck on a tailpipe, Leo,” Raina said, and put a hand on Lyra’s arm to steer her away. “I told you they were retrogrades,” she said. “Their mom’s a boozehound. Must have dropped them one too many times on their heads, that’s what I think.”
The next room they came to must have been an office once: it was smaller and reeked of cigarette smoke. Someone’s belongings were piled on a mattress in the corner. All the walls were covered with writing, but she couldn’t make out what the words meant. Tendrils of wire punched through the walls and ceiling. Someone had brought speakers and people were dancing. A boy offered her a drink in a can and she took it, thinking it was soda. Then she took a sip and immediately spat it out, wetting Raina’s shoes.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Raina said, and for a quick second, a new face dropped into place over her old one and she looked annoyed—annoyed, and embarrassed.
All at once, Lyra knew she shouldn’t have come. Raina didn’t want her there. Lyra could see it. She recognized the look on Raina’s face; it was the way the nurses looked when they discovered that one of the replicas had wet the bed or gnawed the edge off a pillow or been eating paint chips from the windowsill, like 108 had done when she was hungry.
“I’m sorry,” Lyra whispered.
Raina’s expression softened. “That’s okay. I hate Bud Light, too.”
But it was too late. Lyra, ashamed, knew how Raina really felt. She was Raina’s project, and she was failing, and they both knew it.
She shoved her way back through the room, which had only gotten more crowded. The echo of so many voices had invaded her memory, so all the shouting seemed to be coming from some old association; she was worried she might throw up, or drop into a hole and lose minutes, hours. Someone grabbed her and she nearly screamed, but it was just a girl with hair sculpted high and breath that smelled like hand sanitizer, saying, “Watch where you’re going, bitch.”
Lyra pulled away. Somehow she made it outside. She crunched over the vacant lot, watching for needles, as Raina had instructed her to do. She passed between cargo trucks at the weigh station next to the fizz and hiss of highway traffic and ducked beneath the loose fence. Her eyes burned. She rubbed them with a fist, smearing her makeup.
She’d been stupid to believe, even for a second, that she might someday belong in this world, among these people. She belonged only to Haven, now as ever. Caelum was right all along.
She was cutting between the straggly overgrowth that had reclaimed the abandoned trailers at lots 19 and 20 when she heard the murmur of voices. Edging past the water hookup across a splinter of exposed concrete, she saw through a web of blistered tree branches an unfamiliar sedan parked directly in front of lot 16, not ten feet away. A man and a woman stood together on the porch. The woman was trying to see in past the slat of drawn blinds that covered the window.
Lyra froze. Although they were dressed in normal clothing, she had no trouble at all recognizing them. She had spent her lifetime around Suits. She read power from minor details, from small differences in the way people stood and spoke and acted. And on the strangers, power was like an oil slick. It darkened everything around them. She could see it, dark and wet, everywhere they put their hands. She felt suffocated by it. Her breath was suddenly liquid and heavy.
“Think someone tipped them off?” the man said. He spoke quietly, but it was late and for once, no one was shouting or playing music. The sound wouldn’t have carried far, but it carried to her.
“Nah. Doubt it. They’re probably out with Harliss.”
“At midnight?” The man shook his head and reached in his pocket for a cigarette pack, then shook one out into his mouth. “Nice family gathering. What do you want to do?”
“What can we do?” The woman took a seat on the porch, resting her elbows on her knees. Next door, their neighbor had rigged a floodlight to deter thieves—he imagined anyone under the age of forty was a would-be thief—and the artificial brightness hacked her face into exaggerated areas of hollow and highlight. It was a good thing, though. She would be blind, or almost—and hidden in the shadows, Lyra would be practically invisible.
She thought about trying to backtrack, but she was worried her legs would betray her, too scared they would hear her cracking through the undergrowth. Instead, she lowered herself carefully to the ground, hardly daring to breathe. Though she didn’t know where the strangers had come from, she knew plainly enough that they were here to take her away. Caelum was still missing. Where was he? And where was Rick? She hoped he was still at work, and safe; it didn’t look like the strangers intended to leave anytime soon. If they would wait, so would she. She could only hope that Caelum didn’t come home in the meantime.
“What a mess,” the man said. When he exhaled, he tipped his head to the sky, exposing a dark ribbon of throat. Lyra fantasized about putting a bullet right through his skin, sending it back through the architecture of his spinal cord. Why wouldn’t he just let them be? “Sometimes I envy the paper pushers.”
“You’d lose your mind.”
“One more all-nighter and I might lose my mind anyway.” Then: “It doesn’t make any sense to me. If CASECS wants to go public next month, why wipe out the old specimens?”
“The DOD’s got Saperstein’s ass to the wall. It isn’t CASECS that wants to clear the slate. They’ve got nothing to do with it.” She put her hands through her hair and looked up. “Besides, they were smart about it. They did the lobbying first. They got the Alzheimer’s lobby, the cancer lobby, the MS lobby—everyone’s lining up. They’re going to go at it from the direction of public interest.”
Hearing God’s name was like a wind. It made Lyra shiver.
The man came down off the porch. For minutes, he and the woman said nothing. He smoked. She picked at something on her pants.
Then she looked up. “You know Saperstein’s supposed to be ribbon-cutting in Philadelphia on Tuesday.”
The man coughed a laugh. “Bad timing.”
“Sure is. Danner told me that UPenn might disinvite him. The students are rioting. They want the name Haven stripped off the goddamn water fountains.”
“They don’t know the half of it.”
“Sure. That’s the whole problem.”
The man shook his head. “Count no man lucky till he’s dead, right?”
They were quiet for a bit, and Lyra was terrified they would hear her heartbeat, which was knocking hollowly in her throat. Then the man spoke up again. “You ever think it’s wrong? Making them in the first place?”
Though her face was still a cutaway of shadow and light, the woman’s posture changed, as if she were hoping the idea would simply slide right off her. “No worse than anything else,” she said. “No worse than the air strikes last year—how many civilians killed? No worse than shooting soldiers up with LSD to watch what happens. No worse than thousands of kids slaving to make those sneakers you like. The world runs on misery. Just as long as it’s not ours, right?”
“Just as long as it’s not ours,” he echoed. Then: “Those shoes aren’t stupid, by the way. They’re classics.”
Lyra didn’t know how the woman would have responded, because a car was approaching. Tires crunched on the gravel, and a sweep of headlights appeared. The man put out a second cigarette and stood up, dusting himself off, neatening his cuffs as if he were there for an interview.
Lyra recognized Rick’s car from the sound the engine made, a growl-spit that
Rick was always complaining about. She hoped he would see the strangers and know what she knew, and turn around. Regular people knew so much and yet so little; they had never been taught to scent danger the way she had, to smell the metallic sharpening of tension on the air, the same odor as an approaching scalpel.
He didn’t turn around. He cut the engine and climbed out of the car. “What do you want?” was the first thing he said, and Lyra’s stomach tightened. You did not speak to Power like that. Power spoke to you.
The man responded, with exacting politeness, “Mr. Harliss?” But Lyra wasn’t deceived. At Haven, Dr. Good Morning always spoke gently, and asked questions in just that kind of voice. But he liked to find all the replicas’ weak spots—their poorly healed scars, their new abrasions—and plumb them with his fingers, as if manually drawing out the pain.
Then he would take notes on the way they screamed. Private research, he called it. To see whether their brains experienced sensation the same way.
Rick said nothing. He concentrated on feeding a cigarette from his pack to his mouth. Now it was the woman who tried. “Are you Rick Harliss?”
“Depends on who’s asking.”
“We’re detectives with the county PD. We’re investigating a pattern of B and Es and we have reason to believe your daughter”—she pretended to consult a piece of paper, or maybe she really did—“Brandy-Nicole, may have been a witness on the latest scene. We need to speak with her.”
There was a long, heavy silence. “Bullshit,” Rick said finally.
This was obviously not the answer they had expected. “Excuse me?” the man said.
“You heard me. Bullshit.” Rick got a cigarette lit, came a little closer, and blew a long plume of smoke directly in the man’s face. Lyra couldn’t have come up with the words herself, but in that moment a strong web of feeling knitted together in her chest, and she came as close to loving him as she ever would. “Who sent you?”