Replica

by Lauren Oliver

  “If you need anything, just give a shout,” Gemma said.

  “Here.” Jake bent over and scrawled something on a piece of paper. Normally Lyra loved to see a person writing by hand, the way the letters simply fell from the pen, but now she didn’t care. There was no help Jake could give her. No help anyone could give her. “This is my telephone number. Have you used a telephone before?”

  “I know what a telephone is,” Lyra said. Though she had never used one herself, the nurses hardly did anything but, and as a little kid she’d sometimes picked up random things—tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, prescription bottles—and pretended to speak into them, pretended there was someone in another world who would answer.

  Jake nodded. “This is my address. Here. Just in case. Can you read this?”

  Lyra nodded but couldn’t bring herself to meet Jake’s eyes.

  For several minutes after Gemma and Jake left, Lyra stayed where she was, sitting on the couch. 72 moved around the room silently, picking things up and then putting them down. She was unaccountably angry at him. He had predicted this. That meant it was his fault.

  “When did you know?” she asked. “How did you know?”

  He glanced at her, and then turned his attention back to a small bubble of glass: plastic snow swirled down when he inverted it. “I told you. I didn’t know exactly,” he said. “But I knew they were making us sick. I knew that was the point.” He said it casually.

  “How?” Lyra repeated.

  He set the snow globe down, and Lyra watched a flurry of artificial snow swirl down on the two tiny figures contained forever in their tiny bubble world: a stretch of plastic beach, a single palm tree. She felt sorry for them. She understood them.

  “I didn’t ever not know,” he said, frowning. To her surprise, he came to sit next to her on the couch. He still smelled good. This made her ache, for some reason. As if inside of her, someone was driving home a nail. “I was sick once, as a little kid. Very sick. I remember they thought I was going to die. I went to the Funeral Home.” He looked down at his hands. “They were excited. When they thought I couldn’t understand them anymore, they were excited.”

  Lyra said nothing. She thought of lying on the table after seeing Mr. I, the happy chatter of the researchers above her, their sandwich-smelling breath and the way they laughed when her eyes refused to follow their penlight.

  “When I was a kid I used to pretend,” he said. “I would pretend I was an ant or a lizard or a bird. Anything else. I would catch roaches sometimes coming out of the drains. All the nurses hated the roaches. But even they were better off than we were. They could get out.” He opened his palm, staring as if he didn’t recognize it, then closed it again in a fist. “It would be better,” he said, slightly louder, “if they’d hated us. But they didn’t.”

  About this, too, he was right. Worse than Nurse-Don’t-Even-Think-About-It, worse than the ones who were afraid, were the ones who hardly noticed. Who would look not at the replicas but through them, who could talk about what to eat for dinner even as they bundled up dead bodies for burning.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Lyra asked.

  “I tried,” he said. “Besides, what good would it do?”

  She shook her head. She needed someone to blame. She had never been so angry before—she hadn’t even thought she had the right. People, real people, believed they deserved things and were angry when they didn’t get them. Replicas deserved nothing, received nothing, and so were never angry.

  What kind of God was it, she wondered, who made people who would do what they had done to her?

  “Is that why you ran away?” Lyra asked. She felt like crying. She wasn’t in physical pain and yet she felt as if something had changed in her body, as if someone had put tubes in her chest and everything was entangled.

  “No,” 72 said. “Not exactly.”

  “Why, then?”

  He just shook his head. She doubted whether he knew himself. Maybe only for a change. Then he said, “We can’t stay here, you know.”

  Lyra hadn’t expected this. “Why not?”

  “We’re not safe here,” he said, and his expression turned again, folded up. “I told you. I don’t trust them. They aren’t replicas.”

  “The girl is,” Lyra said.

  He frowned. “She doesn’t know it,” he said. “No one’s told her.”

  “But we don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, and once again realized how true it was. How big was the world? She had no idea. They’d driven for what felt like hours today, and there had been no end to the roads and shopping complexes, streets and houses. And yet Gemma had told her they were still in Florida. How much farther did it all go on? “Besides, what does it matter?” We’ll just die anyway, she almost added, but she knew he understood.

  “I didn’t come this far to be a toy,” he said. “I could have gone back to Haven for that.”

  Lyra didn’t know what he meant, exactly, but she could guess from his tone of voice. “They’ve been good to us,” she said. “They helped us. They fed us. They gave us clothes and somewhere to sleep.”

  “Exactly. So what do they want? They must want something. They’re people,” he said. “That’s what they do. Don’t you see? That’s all they ever do. They want.”

  Was that true? She didn’t know. What had Dr. O’Donnell wanted from her? Or Nurse Em, who always smiled at the replicas, who had once told Lyra she had pretty eyes, who saved up her old ferry tokens to give to the young kids to play checkers with?

  But maybe that was why they had left Haven: they did not fit in. She still didn’t understand what made people so different from replicas, had never been able to understand it. And she had wanted things too, in her life. She had wanted to learn to read. She had been hungry, cold, and tired, and wanted food and her bed. But it was true she had never hurt anyone to get what she wanted.

  Was that what made her less than human?

  “Is that enough for you?” 72 said. He scared her when he looked this way, and reminded her of the statue in the courtyard at Haven, whose face, deformed by rain, was sightless and cold. “Someone to feed you and order you around, tell you when to sleep? Like a dog?”

  She stood. “Well, what’s the difference?” she said, and she could tell she’d surprised him, because he flinched. She was surprised, too. Her voice was much louder than she’d expected. “We’re replicas, aren’t we? We might as well be dogs. That’s how they think of us anyway. That’s what we were made for. To be dogs—or rats. You weren’t pretending all those years ago. You were a roach.”

  He stared at her for a long second. She could see his chest rising with his breath and knew that beneath his skin hundreds of tiny muscles were contracting in his face even to hold it there, still, watching her. The idea of him and what he was made of, all the different fragile parts spun together, made her dizzy.

  Finally he looked away. “That’s why I ran,” he said. “I wanted to know whether we could be good for anything else. I wanted to try.” To her surprise, he smiled, just a little. “Besides, even roaches run away. Rats, too.”

  They went through the guesthouse, looking for anything that would be useful. In a bedroom closet beneath extra pillows they found an old backpack, which they filled with the remaining granola bars and bottles of water, plus the bathroom things that Gemma had bought for them. Lyra knew they likely wouldn’t need soap but couldn’t stand to leave the pretty, paper-wrapped bars behind, so different from anything she’d ever owned.

  Jake had left his cell phone charging in the corner and 72 took it, although they had no one to call. It excited Lyra to have it in their possession, to touch the screen and leave fingerprints there. Only people had cell phones.

  They took knives from the kitchen, a blanket from the otherwise empty cabinet by the bed. She didn’t feel guilty about stealing from Jake and Gemma, who had helped them. She felt nothing at all. Maybe, she thought, the nurses had been right about replicas. Maybe they didn’t have
souls.

  By then the main house had gone dark. 72 suggested they turn the light off too, so in case Jake and Gemma were looking out for them, they would believe Lyra and 72 had gone to bed. They waited there, in the dark, for another twenty minutes just to be sure. They sat again on the sofa side by side, and Lyra thought of her dream of entanglement, all those inches and inches of exposed skin. She was glad he couldn’t see her.

  Finally he touched her elbow. “It’s time,” he said. His face in the dark was different colors of shadow.

  Outside, the sound of insects and tree frogs startled Lyra: a rhythmic and almost mechanical thrumming that recalled the throaty roar of Mr. I.

  “Wait.” 72 nudged her. Gemma was curled up on a plastic deck chair, still wearing her clothes, using several colorful towels as blankets. Lyra was confused. Had she been watching them? Trying to make sure they didn’t escape? She couldn’t imagine why she would have otherwise chosen to sleep outside.

  Before she could stop him, 72 was already moving closer, stepping very carefully. Lyra followed him with a growing sense of unease. Gemma’s face in the moonlight looked so much like Cassiopeia’s, she wanted to reach out and lay a hand on Gemma’s chest, to feel her breathing and believe Cassiopeia had come back to life. But she didn’t, obviously.

  Lying next to Gemma on the pool deck was an open notebook. A pen had rolled into the binding. As always Lyra was drawn to the words scribbled across the page. They appeared to glow faintly in the moonlight. Gemma’s writing, she thought, was very beautiful. The words reminded her of bird tracks, of birds themselves, pecking their way proudly across the page.

  Then a familiar name caught her attention: Emily Huang. Nurse Em.

  She placed a finger on the page, mouthing the words written directly beneath the name. Palm Grove. The words meant nothing to her. There were other names on the page, all of them unfamiliar except for Dr. Saperstein’s, which was joined by a small notation to the Home Foundation. She didn’t know what that was, either, but beneath it was at last another word she recognized: Gainesville. This, she knew, was a place. A big place. Jake and Gemma had argued about whether they should be getting off at the highway exit to Gainesville and Jake had said, No one wants to go to Gainesville, and then Gemma had said, Except the half a million people who live there. She figured that Palm Grove might be a place, too.

  She took the notebook. Jake had taken the file folder she’d stolen, so it was a fair trade. She straightened up and saw that 72 was rifling through Gemma’s bag to get to her wallet. She grabbed his shoulder, shaking her head. Once, years ago, Don’t-Even-Think-About-It’s wallet had been stolen from the mess hall, and she remembered how terrible it was, how all the replicas’ beds were searched and their cubbies turned out, how Don’t-Even-Think-About-It was in a foul mood for days and backhanded Lyra for looking at her wrong. They had found it, finally, in a hole torn out of the underside of Ursa Major’s mattress, along with all the other things she’d scavenged over the years: dirty socks and a lost earring, ferry tokens, soda can tabs, gum wrappers.

  But she couldn’t speak without risking waking Gemma, and even as she watched he removed a wedge of money from her wallet and, pocketing it, returned the wallet to her purse. Lyra put back the notebook anyway. She wasn’t likely to forget Palm Grove.

  They scaled the gate because they didn’t know how to make it work and, once they were on the other side, on a street made liquid dark and shiny by the streetlights, began to walk. Bound on either side by houses with their hedges and gates, Lyra did not feel so afraid. But soon they reached a road that stretched blackly into the empty countryside, and she felt a kind of terror she associated with falling: so much space, more space than she’d ever imagined.

  Only then did Lyra speak. They’d gone too far to be heard by anyone. Besides, she hated the emptiness of the road and the streetlamps bent silently over their work, like tall arms planted in the earth.

  “I know someone who can help us,” she said. Their feet crunched on the gravel at the side of the road. Now she was grateful for the tree frogs. At least they were company.

  “Help us?” 72 tilted his head back to look at the sky and the stars spread above them. She couldn’t tell whether he was frightened, but she doubted it. He didn’t seem afraid of anything. Even dying. Maybe he’d just had time to get used to it. She had known that replicas were frailer than real people, more prone to illness, sicklier and smaller. But on some level she’d believed that at Haven, she might be safe.

  “I want to know more,” she said. “I want to know why they did this to us. Why they made us sick. I want to know if there’s a cure.”

  He stopped walking. He stared at her. “There’s no cure,” he said.

  “Not that we know of,” she said. “But you said yourself you didn’t know exactly what they were doing at Haven. There could be a cure. They could have developed one.”

  “Why would they?” he said. He looked as if he was trying not to smile. In that moment, she hated him. She’d never met someone who could make her have so many different feelings—who could make her feel at all, really.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why they did anything.”

  He looked at her, chewing on the inside of his cheek. She supposed that he wasn’t ugly after all. She supposed that he was beautiful, in his own way, strange and angular, like the spiky plants that grew between the walkways at Haven, with a fan of dark-green leaves. She’d overheard Gemma say that, on the phone in the car earlier. Maybe she hadn’t thought Lyra was listening. There’s a girl and a boy, she’d said. The girl is sick or something. The boy is . . . And she’d lowered her voice to a whisper. Beautiful. Lyra had never really thought of faces as beautiful before, although she had enjoyed the geometry of Jake’s face, and she supposed, in retrospect, that Dr. O’Donnell had been beautiful. At least she was in Lyra’s memory.

  She wondered if she herself was ugly.

  Two lights appeared in the distance. She raised a hand to her eyes, momentarily dazzled and afraid, and then realized it was only an approaching car. But it began to slow and she was afraid again. Somehow, instinctively, she and 72 took hands. His were large and dry and much nicer than the hands of the doctors, which, wrapped in disposable gloves, always felt both clammy and cold, like something dead.

  “You kids all right?” The man in the car had to lean all the way across the seat to talk to them through the open window.

  72 nodded. Lyra was glad. She couldn’t speak.

  “Funny place for a stroll,” he said. “You be careful, okay? There’s cars come down this road eighty, ninety miles an hour.”

  He started to roll up his window and Lyra exhaled, relieved and also stunned. If he’d recognized them as replicas, it didn’t seem like it. Maybe the differences weren’t as obvious as she thought.

  “Hello,” she blurted out, and the window froze and then buzzed down again. “Hello,” she repeated, taking a step toward the car and ignoring 72, who hissed something, a warning, probably. “Have you heard of Palm Grove?”

  “Palm Grove, Florida?” The man had thick, fleshy fingers, and a cigarette burned between them. “You weren’t thinking of walking there, were you?” He said it half laughing, as if he’d made a joke. But when she didn’t smile, he squinted at her through the smoke unfurling from his cigarette. “The twelve goes straight up the coast to Palm Grove on its way to Tallahassee. If that’s where you’re headed, you can’t miss the bus depot. But it’s a hike. Five or six miles at least.”

  Lyra nodded, even though she didn’t know what he meant by the twelve, or how far five or six miles was.

  “Won’t catch a bus this late, though,” the man said. “Hope you got a place to stay the night.” He was still staring at her, but now his eyes ticked over her shoulder to 72 and back again. Something shifted in his face. “Hey. You sure you’re okay? You don’t look too good.”

  Lyra backed quickly away from the car. “I’m fine,” she said. “We’re fine.”r />
  He stared at them for another long moment. “Watch out for the drivers down this stretch, like I said. They’ll be halfway to Miami before they realize they got you.”

  Then he was gone and his taillights became the red tips of two cigarettes and then vanished.

  “You shouldn’t speak to them,” 72 said. “You shouldn’t speak to any of them.”

  “He spoke to me,” Lyra said. “Besides, what harm did it do?”

  72 just shook his head, still staring in the direction the car had gone, as if he expected it might rematerialize. “What’s in Palm Grove?”

  “Someone who might be able to help,” Lyra said carefully.

  “Who?” 72 was backlit by the streetlamp and all in shadow.

  She knew he might refuse to go with her, and if he did, she would still find her way to Palm Grove. They owed each other nothing. It was chance that had kept them together so far. Still, the idea of being completely on her own was terrifying. She had never been alone at Haven. At the very least the guards had always been watching.

  But she saw no way to lie convincingly. She knew no one, had no one, in the outside world, and he knew that. “She was a nurse at Haven,” she said.

  “No,” he said immediately, and began walking again, kicking at the gravel and sending it skipping away across the road.

  “Wait.” She got a hand around his arm, the one crisscrossed with all those vivid white scars. She turned him around and had a sudden shock: just for a second her body did something, told her something, she didn’t understand.

  “No,” he said again.

  She dropped his arm. She didn’t know what she wanted from him but she did, and that made her feel confused and exhausted and unhappy. “She’s not like the other ones,” she said. Dr. O’Donnell had said, You’re a good person, even as Nurse Em sobbed so that snot bubbled in her nostrils. You want to make things right. I know you do. That had to mean it was true.