“How do you know that?” 72 said. He took a step forward, and Lyra nearly tripped trying to get away from him. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him, not after what had happened. Even standing several inches away she felt a current moving through her body, something warm and alive, something that whispered. She hated it.
“I just know,” she said. “She left Haven. She wanted to help us.” In her head she added, Because Dr. O’Donnell believed in her. Because Dr. O’Donnell was always right. She wished, more than anything, that she knew where Dr. O’Donnell lived, and imagined once again the feel of Dr. O’Donnell’s hand skimming the top of her head. Mother. She thought Dr. O’Donnell’s house must be all white and very clean, just like Haven. But maybe instead of being on the ocean it was in a field, and the smell of flowers came through the open windows on the wind.
Another car went by, this time with a punch of music and rhythm. Then another car. This time the window went down and a boy had his head out of it, yelling something she couldn’t make out. An empty can missed her head by only a few inches.
For a long time, 72 just stared at her. She wondered again whether she was ugly, whether he realized that now, the same way she knew now that he was beautiful. As a replica it had never mattered, and it shouldn’t matter now, but it did. She wondered if this was the human world rubbing off on her, whether she might become more human by becoming uglier, by accepting it.
She didn’t want to be ugly in his eyes.
Finally he said, “We should get off the road and find somewhere to sleep for the night.” She thought he almost smiled. “Well, we can’t sleep here. And you heard him. There are no buses until morning.”
They moved off the road and walked instead through a scrum of crushed paper cups, cigarette butts, and empty plastic bags. Soon they came to an area of buildings groveling under the lights that encircled them, including a sign in neon that read Liquorz. Lit as they were in starkness and isolation, they reminded Lyra briefly and painfully of Haven at night when, sleepily, she would get up to use the bathroom and would look out and see the guard towers and floodlights making harsh angles out of the landscape.
One of the buildings’ pitched roofs tapered into the form of a cross and so she thought it must be a church, although otherwise it was identical to its neighbors: shingle-sided and gray, separated by a narrow band of cracked pavement from a gas station and a diner, both closed for the night. Lyra saw that someone had written I was here across the plywood and wasn’t surprised. In a world this big, it must be easy to get lost and need reminders.
Behind the church was a weed-choked field that extended toward another road in the distance, this one even busier. Headlights beaded down the thin fold in the dark like blood along a needle. But the noise was transformed by all the space into a constant shushing, like the sound of ocean waves. They shook out their blanket here, and Lyra was glad that they’d decided to sleep so close to the road and the lights. The space in between, the nothingness and distance, frightened her.
The blanket was small, and when they lay down side by side, on their backs, they couldn’t help but touch. Lyra didn’t know how she would sleep. Her body was telling her something again, urging her to move, to run, to touch him. Instead she crossed her arms tightly and stared at the sky until the stars sharpened in her vision. She tried to pick out Cassiopeia. When she was little, she’d liked to pretend that stars were really lights anchoring distant islands, as if she wasn’t looking up but only out across a dark sea. She knew the truth now but still found stars comforting, especially in their sameness. A sky full of burning replicas.
“Do you know more stories?”
Lyra was startled. She’d thought 72 was asleep. His eyes were closed and one arm was thrown across his face, so his voice was muffled.
“What do you mean?”
He withdrew the arm but kept his eyes closed, so she was free to look at him. Again, his face looked very bare in the dark, as if during the day he wore a different face that only now, with his eyes closed, had rubbed away. She noticed the particular curve of his lips and nostrils, the smooth arrangement of his cheekbones, and wanted to touch and explore them with her fingers. “You can read. You told that story on the marshes. About the girl, Matilda. You must know more, then.”
She thought of The Little Prince and its soft cover, creased through the illustration, its smudgy papers and its smell, now lost forever. She squeezed her ribs hard, half wishing she would crack. “Only one more good one,” she said.
“Tell it,” he said.
Again she was surprised. “What?”
This time he opened his eyes, turning slightly to face her. “Tell it,” he said. And then: “Please.” His lashes were very long. His lips looked like fruit, something to suck on. Now he did smile. She saw his teeth flash white in the dark.
She looked away. The stars spun a little, dizzy above her. “There,” she said, lifting an arm to point. “See that star?”
“Which one?”
“That one. The little twinkly one, just next to the one that looks almost blue.”
It didn’t matter whether he was looking at exactly the same star as she was. But after a moment he said, “I see it.”
“That’s Planet B-612,” she said. “It’s an asteroid, actually. And that’s where the Little Prince comes from.” She closed her eyes, and in her head she heard echoes of Dr. O’Donnell’s voice, smelled lemon soap, watched a finger tracking across the page, pointing out different words. “It’s a small planet, but it’s his. There are three volcanoes on the surface, one active, two inactive. And there are baobab plants that try and overgrow everything. There’s a rose, too. The Little Prince loves the rose.” This was the part of the book that had most confused her, but she said it anyway, because she knew it was important.
“But who is the Little Prince?” 72 asked.
“The Little Prince has golden hair, a scarf, and a lovable laugh,” Lyra said, reciting from memory.
“What’s lovable?” 72 asked.
Lyra shifted. “It means . . .” She didn’t know. “I guess it means someone loves you.”
72 didn’t say anything. She was going to continue her story, but she felt a bad pressure in her chest, as if someone was feeding a tube into her lungs.
“How do you get to be loved?” 72 asked. His voice was quiet, slurred by sleep.
“I don’t know,” Lyra answered honestly. She was glad when he fell asleep, or at least pretended to. She didn’t feel like telling a story much after that.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 11 of Gemma’s story.
TWELVE
IN THE MORNING THEY WERE woken by a shout. Lyra thought they must have been spotted. Instead she saw a man in thick gloves loading trash from the Dumpsters into an enormous truck. Momentarily hypnotized, she watched the trash flattened by machinery that looked like metal teeth. The smell was sweet and vaguely sickening. Still, she was hungry.
Then she remembered the money they’d stolen from Gemma’s wallet. 72 was awake now too, and the man in the gloves stared at them as they stood and rolled up the blanket, stuffing it in their backpack, but said nothing. Lyra was beginning to understand that humans outside Haven didn’t seem to care about them. Maybe their world was simply too big. They couldn’t pay attention to all of it.
72 was hungry too, so they went to the diner next to the gas station and took turns in the bathroom washing their faces and hands. Lyra even wet her scalp and brushed her teeth. There was a stack of small paper cups and electric-blue mouthwash in a dispenser above the sink. When she returned to the table, 72 was fumbling with Jake’s stolen phone.
“It won’t stop ringing,” he said. And in fact the phone lit up in his hands, sending out a tinny musical sound.
“Let me try,” she said. She’d seen cell phones before but had only ever handled one once, when Nurse Em, years ago, had shown Lyra pictures of her dog at home on the mainland. A Pomeranian. White and
fluffy but otherwise ratlike, Lyra had thought, but hadn’t said so. Maybe the dog was still alive. She didn’t know how long dogs normally lived, and whether they outlasted replicas.
She managed to get the phone to stop ringing and returned it to 72, who put it in his pocket. She wondered why he liked carrying it around if they had no one to call. Maybe it was because of what he’d said and why he’d escaped: just to see what it was like. Just for a little.
The menu was so full of writing that Lyra’s head hurt looking at it. There was a whole section named Eggs. How many different ways could eggs be eaten? At Haven they were always scrambled, crispy and brown on the bottom.
“It’s a waste,” 72 said. He seemed angry about the menu. “All this food.” But she thought he was just angry about not being able to read. He made no mention of the story she’d started to tell him last night, of the Little Prince, and Lyra was glad. His question was still bothering her, as was the feeling she’d had afterward, a strange emptiness, as if she was already dead.
A woman came to ask them what they wanted to eat. Lyra had never been asked that question before, and in that moment she deeply missed the Haven mess hall and the food lit orange beneath heating lamps and the way it was deposited onto their plates by sour-faced women wearing hairnets. 72 ordered coffee and eggs. So she ordered the same thing. The eggs were burned on the bottom and tasted like they did at Haven, which made her feel better.
They paid with two of Gemma’s bills and got a bewildering assortment of change back. Lyra couldn’t help but think of the younger replicas and how they would have loved to play with all those coins, skipping them or rolling them across the floor, seeing who could get the most heads in a row. She wondered where all the other replicas were, and imagined them in a new Haven, this one perhaps on a mountain and surrounded by the clean smell of pine, before remembering what they were. Carriers.
Disposable.
Lyra asked the waitress about Palm Grove, and she directed them up the road to the bus depot. “Can’t miss it,” she said. “Just take the twelve up toward Tallahassee. Soon as you see the water park, that’s Palm Grove. You kids heading to the water park?” Lyra shook her head. The woman popped her gum. “That’s too bad. They got one slide three stories tall. Cobra, it’s called. And today’s gonna be a bruiser. Where you kids from?”
But Lyra only shook her head again, and they stepped out into the heat.
By the time they reached the bus depot, Lyra’s shoes felt as if they were rubbing all the skin off her feet. She wasn’t used to wearing shoes, but the asphalt was too hot for bare feet and the shoulder was glittering with broken glass. While they waited for the bus, 72 lifted his shirt to wipe his face with it, and she saw a long trail of sweat tracking down the smoothness of his stomach and disappearing beneath the waistband of his pants. It did not disgust her.
When the number 12 came, 72 was obviously proud, at least, to be able to read the number—he nearly shouted it. But once they boarded, they learned they’d have to have a ticket. They had to get off the bus again and return inside, where the man behind the ticket desk shouted at them for holding up the line, for struggling with their dollars and giving over the wrong bills, and Lyra got flustered and spilled coins all over the floor. She was too embarrassed to pick the money up—everyone was staring at her, everyone knew—and instead, once they’d gotten their tickets, she and 72 hurried back outside despite people calling after them. But the bus had gone and they had to wait for a new one. Mercifully, the bus that arrived was mostly empty, so Lyra and 72 could get a seat in the back, far from the other passengers.
It was better to ride in a bus than in a car. It made her less nauseous. But still the world outside her window seemed to go by with dizzying speed, and there was ever more of it: highways rising up over new towns and then falling away into other highways; stretches of blank land burned by the sun into brownness; building and building and building, like an endless line of teeth. After an hour she spotted a monstrous coil of plastic rising into the air, twisting and snakelike and vivid blue, and an enormous billboard tacked into the ground announced Bluefin and Water Park, and several other words between them she didn’t have time to read.
They passed a parking lot glittering with cars and people, natural humans: children brown from the sun, only half-dressed and carting colorful towels, men and women herding them toward the entrance. She saw a mother crouching in front of a girl red in the face from crying, touching her face with a tissue—but the bus was moving too quickly and soon a line of trees ran across her vision, obscuring it.
The driver announced Palm Grove and stopped the bus in front of a run-down motel named the Starlite. Lyra had been imagining a grid of houses in pastel shades, like the neighborhood they’d left in the middle of the night. But Palm Grove was big: big roads with two lanes of traffic, restaurants and gas stations, clothing stores and places to buy groceries. Signs shouted at them from every corner. Milk, 3.99. Guys and Dolls, Albert Irving Auditorium, Saturday. One-Hour Parking Monday through Saturday. She didn’t even see any houses, and she counted at least a dozen people on the streets, passing in and out of shops, talking on phones. It was so hot it felt like being inside a body, beneath the skin of something, filmy and slick. How many humans could possibly be here, in one town?
“And now what?” 72 said. He’d been in a bad mood all morning, ever since she had asked him why he had the scars on his forearms, which were different from the scars she and the other replicas had, the ones from spinal taps and harvesting procedures—all of it, she knew now, to test how deep the prions had gone, how fast they were cloning themselves, how soon the replicas would die.
He had only said accident, and had barely spoken to her on the bus. Instead he had sat with his chin on his chest, his arms folded, his eyes shut. She had counted fourteen scars, four on his right and ten on his left. She had noticed a small mole on his earlobe, had felt a secret thrill at sitting so close after years of seeing no male replicas at all.
“Trust me,” Lyra said, which was what the nurses always said. Shhh. Trust me. Just a little pinch. Stop with that noise. Trust me, it’ll all be over soon.
Lyra worked up the courage to stop the first person she saw who looked to be about her age. The girl was sitting on the curb in front of a store called Digs and was bent over her cell phone, typing on it. When she looked up, Lyra saw that she was wearing makeup and was vaguely surprised—she’d somehow thought makeup was for older humans, like the nurses. “Hello,” she said. “We’re looking for Emily Huang.”
“Emily Huang.” The girl looked Lyra up and down, and then her eyes went to 72. She straightened up, giving him a smile that reminded Lyra of the actresses the nurses used to watch on TV and look at in magazines they left lying around sometimes. Lyra didn’t like it, and she was for the first time aware of the difference between her body and this girl’s. This girl was all curves and prettiness, all smooth skin and beautiful solidity and long, flowing hair. Lyra, in her drab clothing and her sharp bones and the scar above her eyebrow, thought of that word again, ugly. “Emily Huang,” the girl repeated. “She go to Wallace?”
“I—I don’t think so.” Lyra suddenly wished they hadn’t stopped.
“Sorry.” The girl did look sorry, but she kept her eyes on 72. “Don’t know her.” Then she turned and gave Lyra a smile that wasn’t friendly—more like she’d just eaten something she shouldn’t have. “Cool scalp, by the way. Dig the Cancer Kid look.”
They went on. Lyra could still feel the girl staring and wondered if 72 did, too. All he said was, “Too many people,” and she nodded because her throat was too tight to speak. Ugly. Which meant the other girl was pretty. What a strange way to live, among all these people—it made Lyra feel small, even less important, than she had among the thousands of replicas grown like crops in the barracks.
The next person she stopped was older and ugly: wrinkles that made it look as if her face was melting, pouchy bits of skin waggling under her chin. But sh
e didn’t know who Emily Huang was and only shook her head and moved off. They stopped a man, and a boy about twelve who rode a flat thing fitted with wheels that Lyra remembered only belatedly was called a skateboard. No one knew Emily Huang, and Lyra didn’t like the look the man gave them.
She was hot and thirsty and losing hope. The town kept expanding. Every time they came to the end of a block she saw a new street branching off it with more buildings and more people.
“We’re never going to find her,” 72 said, and she disliked the fact that he sounded happy about it, as if he’d proven a point. “We might as well keep walking.”
“Just hold on,” she said. “Hold on.” Spots of color floated up in front of her vision. Her T-shirt clung to her back. She took a step and found the pavement floated up to meet her. She grabbed hold of a street sign—Loading Dock, No Standing—to keep from falling.
“Hey.” 72’s voice changed. His arm skimmed her elbow. “Are you all right?”
“Hot,” she managed to say.
“Come on,” he said. “With me. You need water. And shade.”
Almost directly across the street was a park that reminded her of the courtyard at Haven, down to the statue standing at its center. This one was of a woman, though, her hands held together in prayer, her head bowed. Tall trees cast the lawns in shade, and benches lined the intersecting pathways. 72 kept a hand on her elbow even though she insisted he didn’t need to.
She did feel better once she’d taken a drink of water from a water fountain and found a bench in the shade where she could rest for a bit. Somewhere in the branches birds twittered out messages to one another. It was pretty here, peaceful. The park ran up to an enormous redbrick building, portions of its facade encased in glossy sheets of climbing ivy. Lyra saw another cross stuck above the glass double doors and the letters beside it: Wallace High School. Her heart jumped. Wallace. The girl on the street had mentioned Wallace.