She had no towel, so when she got dressed again, her hair, still wet, dampened her shoulders and her shirt. But she felt better, cleaner. A father. She experimented with holding the idea for two, three seconds at a time now without shame. She brushed up next to it, got close, sniffed around it like an animal exploring something new. What would it be like to have a father? What did a father actually do? She had no idea.
She came outside into a night loud with distant laughter and the sound of tree frogs. She didn’t see Caelum. She took a turn of the building and found him in the back, hurling rocks into the growth where the dirt clearing petered out into cypress and shade trees.
“Caelum?” He didn’t turn around and, thinking he hadn’t heard, she took another step forward. “Caelum?”
“Don’t call me that.” He turned to face her, his face caught in the flare of the floodlights, and her stomach went hollow. He looked as if he hated her. “That’s not my name.” This time he directed a volley of rocks at the restrooms, so they pinged against the stucco walls and the sign pointing the way to the showers. “I’m seventy-two. I’m a replica. A human model. Only humans have names.”
Then she knew that what she’d been afraid of was true. He hated her for what she was, or for what she wasn’t.
“You’re wrong,” Lyra said. She felt as if she were being squeezed between two giant plates, as if the whole world had narrowed to this moment. “That isn’t what makes the difference.”
“Oh yeah? You would know, I guess.” He looked away. “I thought we were the same, but we’re not. We’re different. You’re different.”
“So what?” Lyra took a step closer to him. They were separated by less than a foot, but he might have been on the other side of the world. She felt reckless, desperate, the same way she’d felt running after Haven had exploded. He turned back to her, frowning. “So we’re different. Who cares? We chose to escape together. We chose to stay together. We chose each other, didn’t we?” I gave you a name, she almost said, but the memory of that night, and lying so close to him, while the darkness stirred around his body, made her throat constrict. “That’s what makes the difference. Getting to choose, and what you choose.” She took a breath. “I choose you.”
“How can you?” His voice was raw. “You know what I am. I don’t belong anywhere.”
“You belong with me.” When she said it out loud, she knew it was true. “Please.” She’d never had to ask for anything, because she’d never had reason to. But this woke inside of her—the asking and the need, the feeling that if he didn’t say yes, she wouldn’t be able to go on.
“Please,” she repeated, because she could say nothing else. But at the same time she took a step toward him and put a hand on his chest, above his heart, because there was always that to return to, always the truth of its rhythm and the fact that every person, no matter how they were formed or where, had a heart that worked the same way.
They were inches apart. His skin was hot. And though she could feel him, touch him, know his separateness, in that moment she also learned something totally new—that it was possible by touching someone else to dissolve all the space between them.
“I am no one,” he said. In his eyes she was reflected in duplicate. “I was made to be no one.”
“You’re someone to me,” she said. “You’re everything.”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her. They had never learned how to kiss, either of them. But somehow he knew. She did, too. It was beyond instinct. It was joy.
They were clumsy, still. They stumbled and then she was against the wall. She pulled herself into him and found to her amazement that her body knew more than how to ache or shiver or exhaust itself. It knew how to sing.
They barely touched except with their mouths, the way they explored together teeth tongue lips, the way they shivered with the joy of discovery. They were born for the first time in their bodies. They were born together. They came together into the world as everyone should—frightened, uncertain, amazed, grateful.
And for them the world was born, too, in all its complexity and strange glory. They had a place in it, at last, and so at last it became theirs to share. No matter what happened, no matter what trouble came, Lyra knew they would face it together, as they were then: turned human by joy, by a belonging that felt just like freedom.
Turn the page to read Gemma’s story from the beginning. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Gemma’s story.
PRAISE FOR REPLICA
“A searing pair of intertwined stories about the line between science and humanity, told with Oliver’s signature grace, uniqueness, and precision. It’s a new story every way you turn it—but always gorgeous, always haunting.”
—MARIE LU,
#1 New York Times bestselling author of the Young Elites series and Legend
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although in many cases you will find identical portions of dialogue occurring from both Gemma’s and Lyra’s perspectives in their respective narratives, you may also notice minor variations in tone and tempo. This was done deliberately to reflect their individual perspectives. Gemma and Lyra have unique conceptual frameworks that actively interact with and thus define their experiences, just as the act of observing a thing immediately alters the behavior of the thing itself.
The minor variations in the novel reflect the belief that there is no single objective experience of the world. No one sees or hears the same thing in exactly the same way, as anyone who has ever been in an argument with a loved one can attest. In that way we truly are inventors of our own experience. The truth, it turns out, looks a lot like making fiction.
ONE
ESCAPE: THAT WAS WHAT GEMMA dreamed of, especially on nights like this one, when the moon was so big and bright it looked like it was a set piece in a movie, hooked outside her window on a curtain of dark night sky.
In movies, teenagers were always sneaking out. They’d wait until their parents went to bed, ease out from under their blankets already dressed in miniskirts and tank tops, slide down the stairs and unlatch the lock and pop! They’d burst out into the night, like balloons squeezing through a narrow space only to explode.
Other teenagers, Gemma guessed, didn’t have Rufus: a seventy-five-pound retriever who seemed to consist entirely of fur, tongue, and vocal cords.
“Shhh,” Gemma hissed, as Rufus greeted her at the bottom of the stairs, wiggling so hard she was surprised he didn’t fall over.
“Are you all right?”
She’d been awake for only a minute. But already her mother was at the top of the stairs, squinting because she didn’t have her contacts in, dressed in an old Harvard T-shirt and sweatpants.
“I’m fine, Mom.” Gemma grabbed a glass from the cabinet. She would never sneak out. Not that she had anywhere to sneak out to, or anyone to sneak out with, since April’s parents kept her just as leashed up as Gemma’s did.
Still, she imagined for a second that she was halfway to the door, dressed in tight jeans and a shirt that showed off her boobs, the only part of her body she actually liked, on her way to hop in her boyfriend’s car, instead of standing in a darkened kitchen in her pajamas at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday night while Rufus treated her ankles to one of his signature lick-jobs. “Just needed some water.”
“Are you dehydrated?” Her mom said dehydrated as if it meant dying.
“I’m fine.” Gemma rattled the ice in her glass as she returned up the stairs, deliberately avoiding her mom’s eyes. “Go back to bed, okay?”
Her mom, Kristina, hesitated. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Gemma shut her bedroom door in Rufus’s face, not caring that he immediately began to whine. She set the water on her bedside table and flopped back onto the bed. The moon made squares on her bare legs, cutting her skin into portions of light and dark. She briefly let herself imagine what Chloe DeWitt and Aubrey Connelly were doing at that very second. She’d always been told she had a vivid imagination, b
ut she just couldn’t picture it. What was it like to be so totally, fundamentally, ruthlessly normal? What did they think about? What were their problems? Did they have any problems?
Rufus was still whining. Gemma got out of bed and let him in, sighing as he bounded immediately onto the bed and settled down exactly in the center of her pillow. She wasn’t tired yet, anyway. She sat down instead at the vanity that had once belonged to her mother, an ornate Victorian antique she’d loved as a child and hadn’t been able to tell Kristina she’d outgrown. She’d never been able to tell her parents much of anything.
The moon made hollows of her eyes in the mirror, turned her skin practically translucent. She wondered if this was how her parents always saw her: a half ghost, hovering somewhere between this life and the next.
But she wasn’t sick anymore. She hadn’t been sick in years, not since she was a little kid. Still, they treated her as if she might suddenly blow away, like a human house of cards, disturbed by the lightest touch.
She herself could barely remember all those years of sickness—the hospital, the operations, the treatments. Coping, her therapist said. An adaptive defense.
She did remember a garden—and a statue, too. A kneeling god, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure, with one arm raised to the sky, and the other reaching toward the ground, as though to draw something magic from the earth.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 1 of Lyra’s story.
TWO
GEMMA MUST HAVE BEEN THE only overweight sixteen-year-old girl in the entire history of the United States who actually wished she could participate in gym. It would be one thing if she were excused to go to study hall or free period. But due to “scheduling limitations” (the stated reason)—or, as Gemma suspected, the innate sadism of Ms. Vicke, the vice principal—instead Gemma was forced to go to gym and sit in the bleachers, pretending to work, while the rest of her classmates zigzagged across the gym, their sneakers squeaking, or flew across the mulchy, wet soccer fields, running drills.
In the bleachers, there was nowhere to hide. She might as well be a blinking Does Not Belong sign. Even worse: Mrs. Coralee, the gym teacher (also a sadist—the school was full of them), insisted that Gemma change into the puckered nylon shorts and matching tank tops the whole class was forced to wear, which on Gemma only served to further underscore how little she belonged—like wearing full-on ski gear to the beach.
“You are so lucky.” April Ruiz, Gemma’s best friend, swiped a lock of dark hair out of her eyes, as the girls filed back into the locker room. “I’m pretty sure dodgeball was invented by the same people who thought up rectal thermometers and wool tights.”
“Move it, Frankenstein.” Chloe DeWitt jabbed an elbow, hard, in the space where Gemma’s waist should have been, if she had a waist instead of a roll of flab. Gemma probably had forty pounds on Chloe, but the girl was all sharp corners and she knew how to use them to her advantage. Her elbows felt like whittled blades. “Not all of us get to spend the whole period snacking.”
Gemma blushed. She had never, ever eaten in class. She had hardly ever eaten in the cafeteria, precisely so that Chloe, and girls like her, would never get the opportunity to make fun of her for it. But it didn’t matter. From the time Gemma was little, Chloe had made it her mission to ensure that Gemma never forgot that she was a freak. In third grade, she’d hit on the name Frankenstein, after Gemma’s second heart surgery had left her with a thick scar from her chest to her navel. After that, Gemma had never changed except in a bathroom stall—but no one at school besides April and her teachers ever called her anything else.
What Gemma couldn’t understand was why—if she were so delicate, like her parents were saying (you’re delicate, Gemma, that’s why we have to be so careful; no roller coasters, Gemma, your heart is delicate)—she couldn’t look delicate, like one of the small crystal animal figurines that her mom collected and kept enclosed in the corner cabinet, with legs as thin as toothpicks. Like Chloe, with a tan that appeared permanently shellacked to the contours of her body, as finely chiseled and well-tuned as an instrument. Like she had been formed by a god with an eye for detail, whereas Gemma had been slapped together haphazardly by a drunk.
“Yeah,” she muttered, as Chloe and her friends converged on the sinks, laughing. “Lucky.”
“Don’t let Cruella get to you,” April said in a low voice. April always took Gemma’s side. Years ago, they had decided that either they were two aliens in a school of humans or possibly the only two humans in a school of aliens. “Someone forgot to shoot her with her morning dose of tranquilizer.”
April and Gemma waited until Chloe and the pack of wolves—a fitting nickname for more than metaphoric reasons, since Gemma was fairly sure that Aubrey Connelly had had her incisors filed into points, and wouldn’t have been surprised at all to learn that she liked the taste of human flesh—had changed before they stripped. They would both be late for study hall and would have to endure another lecture from Mr. Rotem. But anything was better than changing with the pack of wolves.
“Good news,” April said, when the rest of the locker room had cleared out. “Mom finally caved on the Green Giant. I told her it wasn’t safe to drive sixty miles in that beast, much less six hundred. How’s that for strategy? I used her own psychology against her.”
“And so the hunted becomes the hunter,” Gemma said, in her best movie-announcer voice. Sometimes she thought her favorite part of the week was sitting on the wooden bench just outside the shower stalls, which hadn’t been used in twenty years, talking with April while she washed her face and reapplied her makeup painstakingly, even though the result always made it look like she wasn’t wearing any. Like they were in their own protected world. But not a world her parents had made for her. A world she’d chosen.
“Something like that. Anyway, we’ll be cruising down to Florida in our very own Lexus. Can you believe it? My brother’s so pissed.”
Apart from Gemma’s, April’s parents were the most protective people Gemma knew. Neither Gemma nor April was allowed to date—not that it mattered, since nobody wanted to date them. The list of other things they weren’t allowed to do included, but was not limited to: (1) stay up past ten o’clock; (2) attend any school events or dances unless they were in a large group of females only, which precluded them from going, since they had no other friends; (3) go to Raleigh unless April’s brother, a senior, chaperoned; (4) be on Instagram.
Gemma was sure that even if she were five-eleven and a supermodel look-alike, her parents’ absurd beliefs about social media (It rots the brain! It’s bad for self-esteem!) would have ensured she stayed on the bottom of the social food chain. She was also sure that when her mom and April’s got together, all they did was brainstorm elaborate and ever more absurd ways to make sure that both April and Gemma stayed safe, friendless except for each other, and totally miserable.
When half the junior girls decided to spend spring break in Miami, Gemma hadn’t even bothered petitioning her parents to be allowed to go. She knew she had just about as much chance of being named the first female president of the United States . . . at age sixteen. Besides, she had no desire to spend her vacation bumping into the same predators she spent all her time deliberately avoiding at school.
But April—who was not only prettier, smarter, and far more optimistic than Gemma, so much so that had they not been absolute, sworn lifelong best friends, co-aliens, outcasts together, Gemma would have despised her—hadn’t given in so easily. She’d begged her parents. She’d cried. She had thrown a tantrum—a risky proposition, since her mother, Angela Ruiz, a renowned prosecutor for the state, had been known to frighten grown men into confessions at their first meeting. (And her other mother, Diana, was a computer programmer who had won several kickboxing competitions in her early twenties.)
Then the miraculous had happened. April hit on the magic word: sexism.
It was sexism, April claimed, that her older brother
, Ryan, got to go on spring break with his friends. It was sexism that he got to drive a Lexus while she was stuck with the Green Giant, an ancient chartreuse station wagon. And even though Ryan was two years older, and the Lexus had been a congratulations gift for getting into Harvard early action, suddenly April’s moms had generated a counteroffer: April and Gemma could take the car and drive down to Bowling Springs, Florida, for a week, where April’s grandparents lived.
Even better, they had convinced Gemma’s parents that it was a good idea.
And, yeah, sure, maybe hanging out in a community known for its 65+ dating scene and competitive weekly badminton tournament wasn’t exactly the spring break of every girl’s dream. But it was better than nothing. They could stay for a whole nine days, paddle around the pool, walk down to the community tennis courts, and take their car to the beach. They could drink virgin piña coladas and sample fried gator at the local restaurants. Still better, they would have the house to themselves for three full days while April’s grandparents were off attending some weird Positive Visualization Health Retreat that involved a lot of yoga and deep breathing—a minor detail Gemma had managed to avoid in all of her conversations with her parents.
Discussing spring break plans with her best friend made Gemma feel all-American, beauty-magazine, country-song normal. So much so that she wasn’t sure she actually wanted to go, just so she could keep talking about it.
April had to hop, haul, and wiggle to get into her jeans. Her preferred fit, she always said, was human sushi roll. Gemma’s was airy trash bag. “I’ll pick you up Saturday at eight a.m., got it?”