Ringer (Replica)

by Lauren Oliver

  “School’s dumb anyways,” Raina said. “I finished last year and look at me now, on the nine-to-five shift at Fantasia.” She tilted her head and Lyra thought of the funny, knob-kneed birds that used to scuttle through the gardens at Haven, looking for crabs as small as the fingernails of the infants in Postnatal. The only part of her that wasn’t skinny was her stomach, which had the faintest swell, as if there were a tiny fist inside of it. “You want a Coke?”

  Lyra almost said no.

  But instead, almost accidentally, she said yes.

  Lyra was with Raina, and then she was home, and she couldn’t remember anything that had happened in between. She’d obviously fallen down. Her palms stung and there were flecks of gravel in her skin. Her knee was bleeding.

  It was happening more frequently now, these jump cuts in her mind. She knew that what they’d done to her at Haven, what they’d grown in her, was to blame, and remembered that Gemma had said prions made holes grow in the brain, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

  That was exactly what it felt like: like holes, and hours of her life simply dropped through them.

  Rick’s car, tawny with dust, was parked in front of lot 16, and the lightning bugs were up, as well as swarms of no-see-ums that rose in dark clouds. She heard raised voices as she came up the porch steps, but it wasn’t until she was standing inside, under the bright overhead lights on a secondhand Welcome Home mat, that she saw Caelum and Rick had been fighting. Their last words slotted belatedly up to her consciousness.

  It’s enough now. You can’t stay here if you don’t find a way to help.

  Both of them turned to look at her. Caelum she couldn’t read. But Rick’s eyes were raw, and his expression she knew from the youngest researchers at Haven whenever they accidentally messed up an IV and blood began to spurt or the replicas cried out: guilt.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Rick said quickly. Patches of scalp showed through his hair, shiny and bright red. “Nothing. Just having a family talk, that’s all.”

  “You’re not family,” Caelum said. “You said so yourself.”

  Rick stared at him for a long minute. Then he shook himself, like a dog, and moved for the door.

  “I’m working a double,” he said. “I just came back for a bite. I’ll be home later tonight.” He stopped in front of her and reached out two fingers to touch her shoulders. This was a gesture they’d agreed on, an expression of affection she could tolerate. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes,” Lyra said. She knew he wanted more from her but wasn’t sure what or how to give it to him. Sometimes Lyra tried to see herself in his nose and jaw and smile, tried to climb down a rope of feelings to get to one that made sense, but he still looked like a stranger, and felt like one, too. He had given her photographs from when she was a baby, but they felt like images from someone else’s life.

  “Okay. Good. Okay.” He dropped his hand. The noise was loud in the quiet. Then he was gone, leaving Caelum and Lyra alone.

  The room smelled faintly sour, as it always did. Another thing Lyra had not gotten used to was the dirt in the corners and the insects that tracked behind the faucet, plates and pans half-crusted in the sink when Rick went to work, fruit flies that lifted in clouds from the garbage, and the giant water bugs that came up from the drains in the shower.

  Caelum stared at Lyra for a second, then turned back to the TV, although he didn’t sit down.

  “What happened?” she said. It wasn’t the first time that Caelum and Rick had fought. Several times she had been startled into awareness by the sound of raised voices, or come out of her bedroom to find them standing too close together. “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing.” Caelum turned up the volume. Words flashed on the screen, but they were gone too fast for Lyra to read them. “What happened to your knee?”

  So he’d noticed. Lyra bent down and thumbed the blood off. She’d heard at Haven that blood was only red after it oxidized. Strange the way everything changed on contact with the world.

  “Nothing,” she said, since that was the answer he’d given her.

  “You were gone for a long time,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a question, but Lyra nodded. “Where were you?”

  “I made a friend,” Lyra said, and nearly regretted it when Caelum looked up, his face seizing around a quick spasm of pain. “She invited me to a party on Saturday. You’re invited too.”

  “A party,” he said. He said the word as if it were in a different language, the way the birthers had said water or help or doctor, if they spoke English at all. “Why?”

  “There’s no reason,” she said. She didn’t have an answer. But this made her defensive, not embarrassed. “It’s what people do.”

  “People,” he repeated. Now he made the word sound like a medicine that turned bitter as it dissolved. “Your people.”

  “Don’t,” she said. They had gone through this before, when Gemma had first told her that she had a father, that she wasn’t really a replica. I thought we were the same. But we’re not. We’re different, Caelum had said, but she hadn’t believed him then.

  But now a new voice began to whisper. Maybe he was right.

  “I can’t stay here much longer,” he said. “He doesn’t want me here.” Caelum refused to use Rick’s name. “And you don’t, either.”

  “Of course I do,” Lyra said.

  Caelum just shook his head. “You have a new life here,” he said.

  All the anger she’d been keeping down broke free. It was like a rope whipping up words in her chest. “Why did you leave Haven?” she burst out. “Why did you run away? What do you want?”

  “I got what I wanted,” he said, and with a quick step came closer to her. In an instant everything stilled and went white, and she thought he was going to say you, and wings of feeling lifted in her chest. But instead he said, “I wanted to do something on my own. For myself. I wanted to choose.”

  “So you chose. Congratulations.” In words, now, she heard the echo of Raina’s voice, the edge of her sarcasm. “Are you happy now?”

  “Happy.” He shook his head. “You even talk like one of them now.”

  “So what?” She hated him then. More than she’d hated any of the doctors or the nurses or the sanitation teams who’d bundled up the dead replicas in paper sheaths, making jokes the whole time: How many clones does it take to screw in a lightbulb? “So I talk like them. So maybe I have a friend. What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s a lie, that’s what’s wrong with it,” he said. “You’re sick.”

  “You don’t seem sick,” Lyra said automatically, and only registered a split second later that he hadn’t, in fact, said we’re sick. And with a kind of yawning horror she realized that what she had said was true. Caelum had been so skinny when they met that his collarbones stood out like wings. But he had put on weight. He didn’t get nauseous, not that she could see, and he never got confused, like she did.

  There was a long, terrible moment of silence.

  “You’re not sick,” she said at last. She could barely get the words out. Then: “What cluster were you in?”

  He looked away. She closed her eyes, tried to picture him as she’d first seen him, his wild eyes and dirt-encrusted fingernails, the wristband looped around his dark skin . . .

  He said it at the same time she remembered. “White.”

  It was stupid she’d never wondered, stupid she’d never asked. It was all her fault.

  White was control.

  And control meant that he was fine.

  “Lyra . . .” He tried to reach for her and she backed away from him, nearly toppling the table in the front hall, bumping against the door. “I’m going to find a way to fix it. I promise. I’m going to find a way to help.”

  When he tried to touch her again she lurched past him, knocking a coat from the rack pegged to the wall. She felt like she would cry. She hardly ever cried.

  Maybe this too wa
s something that had oxidized: her feelings had changed color, and flowed more quickly now. She imagined that inside of her, the prions pooled like dark shadows, waiting to swallow her up.

  “You can’t help me,” she said. “No one can.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Gemma’s story.

  THREE

  FOR TWO DAYS, SHE HARDLY saw Caelum at all, and she felt nothing but terrible relief, like after you finally drop a glass that has been slipping for some time from your fingers.

  Caelum was her tether to Haven, but he was also her anchor. Around him she felt stuck in her old life, stuck in her old name. 24. The escaped replica, the human model, the monster.

  Rick told her that he’d put Caelum to work. There was little he could do, because in order to become someone in the outside world, you already had to be someone, which required pieces of paper and numbers from the government and identification that neither Lyra nor Caelum had. But Rick had met a guy who owned a tow company and impound lot and needed help on the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight a.m. He was prepared to pay cash, and he would ask no questions.

  Money, Lyra was learning, was a source of near-constant worry in the outside world, as it had been in Haven. At Haven the staff had talked constantly about budget cuts and even the possibility of having funding cut off completely. But it surprised her to find out that money everywhere was so difficult to get and hang on to. Gemma’s father had offered them a large sum of money, but Rick had refused it, and when Lyra asked him why, his face darkened.

  “Blood money,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have to lean on him for a roof. I won’t take a dollar I don’t have to.”

  She had a hard time thinking of Rick Harliss as poor, since he had a car and his own TV and his own narrow house, a bathroom only the three of them shared, multiple sets of clothes—all things that to her seemed rich.

  But they were poor, at least that was what Rick said. And while Lyra was his daughter and it was his duty to protect her, Caelum was freeloading—stealing time from the clock, Rick said—and would have to figure out how to make his own way in the world.

  Lyra should have heard the threat in those words: that Caelum would have to leave, sooner or later.

  On Friday and Saturday morning, after his first two shifts, Caelum left piles of dollar bills on the small kitchen table, secured beneath a can of Hormel chili, and Rick took the money wordlessly and bought more Hormel chili from the store, more toilet paper and toothpaste, more pairs of socks and books for Lyra to read, all of them with creased pastel covers and heroes who always arrived at the right moment.

  For two days, Lyra was happy—despite the holes dropping hours of her life, despite the fact that she and Caelum had had their first fight ever, despite the way she had to pick through the boredom of the day on her own, collecting ever more pieces of trash, arranging them and rearranging them as if they would someday yield a sentence. She visited with Raina, and was absorbed in an endless funnel of people, ideas, and places she’d never heard of—Los Angeles, the neo-Nazis in lot 14, veganism, YouTube, Planned Parenthood, the Bill of Rights.

  She was angry at Caelum for lying to her, even though she realized he’d never said he was sick and she had never asked. Still, she was angry. He resented her for becoming something he could never be, but there was no greater abandonment than this: she would die, and he would live.

  Even so, she never thought she might lose him for good. He had been absorbed into her life, into the constellation of her reality now growing to include the small trailer on lot 16; moths beating against the screens and spiders drowning in the sink, Raina and her parties, clothing purchased from the Salvation Army by the pound. Her whole life she’d experienced as a series of circles, days that repeated themselves, procedures that happened again and again weekly or monthly or yearly, birthdays that passed without celebration to mark them. Even the fence at Haven had been a rough circle, and Spruce Island had been bounded by water on all sides.

  Things didn’t change. They just returned to what they were before. And she and Caelum would return, again and again, to each other.

  She should have learned, by now, that nothing was ever so easy.

  On Saturday, she didn’t see Caelum at all. In the morning, she found his mattress—concealed behind an ugly fuchsia curtain Rick had strung up from a shower rod—empty and the bed neatly made. But he’d come home at some point: she saw that he’d left money for Rick. Next to the bed was a shoe box he used for his belongings, and when she opened it, she felt like someone had just tapped the center of her rib cage. He, too, had obviously been collecting things when he went out: old coins, a bus schedule, an empty cigarette pack, a brochure, a receipt carefully unfolded and weighted beneath a tin labeled Altoids. She felt a sudden, hard aching for him. At Haven, she had once had an Altoids tin, had kept it stashed carefully in her pillowcase.

  He wasn’t home by the time she left to meet Raina, and she couldn’t leave a note for him. She didn’t know how to write and he wouldn’t be able to read it. She wasn’t sure what she would say, anyway.

  She and Raina walked together to Ronchowoa, a town lobbed down in the middle of nowhere as if it was made by God’s spit. (That’s how Raina put it.) Lyra still didn’t like being out on the road, and got jumpy whenever she saw a sedan with dark-tinted windows. But it was hard to be nervous when Raina was around. She never stopped talking, for one thing. Just listening to her took up all of Lyra’s attention.

  “The Vasquez brothers will be there for sure, they think they’re hot shit because their dad has four car dealerships in Knox County. Watch out for Sammy Vasquez, he’ll have his hands down your pants before he even knows your name. . . .” She laughed. She had a laugh like a solid punch. “I don’t know. Maybe you should let him. I hear you got caught tonguing your own cousin.”

  Caelum and Lyra had said they were cousins when they first arrived, because Rick had said it and then they’d repeated it, if anyone asked. “He’s not exactly my cousin.”

  “Yeah, I got some cousins like that.” Raina smirked. “What is he, anyway? Chinese or Korean or something? He’s all mixed-up-looking. Cute, though.”

  “I don’t know,” Lyra said. Many of the replicas had been grown from stem cell tissue purchased on the sly from clinics and hospitals, and no one knew exactly where the genotypes had come from.

  “It’s all right. My first was a Haitian. My mom nearly flipped her shit. You know, you could be pretty if you weren’t so basic.” This was another thing Raina did: slid sideways into new thoughts without any warning. “You ever think of cleaning up a bit?”

  They went to the big Target, whose bright-white look and antiseptic smell reminded Lyra painfully of Haven. In the cosmetics aisle Raina opened tubes of lipstick and little plastic-shrouded tubs of eye shadow, experimenting with color on Lyra’s cheeks and on the back of her hand, keeping up her nonstop stream of conversation.

  “You got big eyes, that’s good, and your lips are decent too. . . .”

  She’d almost finished with Lyra’s eyes when a woman in a red polo shirt came to yell at them. “What do you think you’re doing? Those aren’t for sampling.”

  “Well, how was I supposed to know?” Raina made her face go blank and dumb, and Lyra had a sudden memory of some of the Yellow crop back at Haven, a bad crop full of replicas who failed to thrive. After the Yellow crop, God mandated that all the newest replicas needed at least two hours of human contact a day.

  “Don’t give me that duff. I’ve seen you in here before.” The woman had a name tag, S-A-M. “I’ve half a mind to call the cops on you myself.”

  “Don’t,” Raina said. “We’ll pay for everything. We always meant to, anyway.”

  The woman shook her head again. But she said, “All right. Follow me.”

  They were halfway to the checkout lanes when Raina gripped Lyra’s elbow and steered her instead toward the exits. They were almost at the door before S-A-M
realized they were no longer following and shouted.

  “Run,” Raina said, and keeping her grip on Lyra’s arm, she and Lyra hurtled toward the exit. An alarm screamed. Memories lit up flash-like in Lyra’s head: Code Black, the sweaty heat, a spring storm that knocked out the power and forced the generators on. They were in the parking lot. They were laughing, and the sky was spinning overhead, and Lyra was dizzy with a sudden happiness that punched her breath out of her chest. She had never laughed like that—she was surprised by how it came, in waves that rocked her whole body and made her feel fizzy and bright and airless.

  Raina’s trailer was the same size as Rick’s but even more cluttered, and Lyra felt a pang to see so many possessions worn and used and taken for granted—family photos hung crookedly in plastic frames, throw pillows shaggy with dog hair, mugs holding a crown of pens. By comparison, Rick’s trailer was as cold and impersonal as the hallways of Haven.

  On a side table sheeted with mail, she noticed the same glossy brochure she had seen in Caelum’s shoe box of belongings. This time she focused on the letters until they ran into meaning: Nashville Elvis Festival.

  Raina caught her looking. “Don’t tell me you’re an Elvis freak too?”

  Lyra didn’t answer: silence, as always, was like a corner for retreating.

  “My mom goes every year. Can you believe she met her boyfriend there? Look. He even made it into the brochure.” Raina shook out the folds of the brochure so it opened suddenly into a fan of narrow pages, and Lyra lost her breath.

  Replicas. Dozens of them, all men, identically dressed in white, but not in hospital gear: in suits with beautiful detailing.

  They looked well-fed. They looked well, period.

  “That’s Mike,” Raina said, and plugged a finger on one of the replicas in the third row. “He won two years ago. My mom saw him perform ‘Hound Dog’ and walked right up to him and asked him out.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s been true love ever since.”

  “I don’t understand.” Lyra’s voice sounded distant to her. “Where is this place?”