Replica

  “Here.” She fished out the piece of foil and handed it over to Pete. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Is this a clue or something?” Pete said. “Because I think it was Sergeant Pepper in the pantry with an egg cozy.”

  “Just drive, okay? I need to talk to my friend Jake,” she said. “He’s not picking up his phone.”

  Instantly, Pete’s face changed. “When you said help, I didn’t think you needed a ride to your boyfriend’s,” he said, and although he put the car in drive, she could tell he was hurt.

  “Jake isn’t my boyfriend. Trust me,” she said. “He’s—” She was about to say he was way out of her league, but she didn’t think this would make Pete feel any better. Especially since she was kind of starting to hope Pete might be in her league. “Look, he’s been helping me. It’s complicated. . . .” She trailed off.

  Pete made a face, as if he wasn’t convinced. “So why couldn’t Prince Charming come and get you?”

  “I told you. I can’t get in touch with him,” Gemma said, and Pete snorted. “Look, you’ve got it wrong. Jake’s dad was a big Haven freak. After he died, Jake kind of took over for him.”

  “Haven?” Pete looked confused. “The place we heard about on the radio? The one that got blown up?”

  “Yeah. That one.” Gemma took a deep breath. The GPS was directing them out of the subdivision now, speaking in its measured mechanical voice, and Gemma found herself unconsciously scanning the streets for April in her jogging clothes. She was seized by the sudden idea that once they turned onto the highway, that was it. She would never see April again. And she knew, in part, it had been her fault. She should have talked to April, trusted her sooner, let her in on the secret, explained. She turned back to Pete. “There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t told you. It’s going to sound crazy, okay? If I tell you, you’re going to think I’m bananas. You have to promise not to think that.”

  “I swear,” Pete said. He didn’t seem upset anymore.

  “Turn right on County Route 39,” said the voice of the GPS. Gemma looked once more for April, and the streets were totally empty. As if they were just waiting for something, or someone.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” Gemma said. Her heart was elbowing up against her rib cage, like it was trying to force its way through them. How would she even begin?

  Pete smiled, just a little. “You’ve got eighty-seven miles,” he said, reaching for the doughnuts. “So start talking.”

  It was easy to talk to Pete. Gemma hadn’t expected him to be such a good listener, but he was. He didn’t interrupt with stupid questions or squawk in disbelief when she told him about stumbling across the replicas—literally stumbling—in the marshes. Only once did he interrupt, when she described finding the dead girl with her exact face. Her replica. And then he just said, “Jesus,” and then, “Go on.”

  By the time she finished telling him everything—about the long slog back through the marshes, and the folder that Lyra had smuggled out of Haven, about transmissible spongiform encephalopathies; about waking up to discover the replicas missing with all her money; about Jake and his dad and the Haven Files and Angel Fire and her mission from God—they had reached Jake’s road.

  Jake hadn’t been lying about his aunt’s house being rural. Route 12, on the outskirts of Little Waller, was a treacherous narrow dirt path studded with holes. On either side of the road, behind growth so riotous it looked like the trees were launching some kind of major offensive, prefab houses, little more than glorified trailers, sagged in the midday sun, doing their best to stay on their feet in the wilting heat. Gemma felt an unexpected rise of pity. No wonder Jake had been obsessing about his father’s death for years. She couldn’t imagine there was much else to do. This was a lonely place.

  They had to squeeze by a Florida Energy truck that was teetering in a deep gutter on one side of the lane; a man in a hard hat was high on the pole, fiddling with the wire, and a group of workers were doing nothing but watching. Gemma was relieved to see that Jake’s car was in the driveway, or the small patch of dirt that counted as one. For the first time she noticed the bumper was plastered with bumper stickers, so overlayered and old that most were illegible. She wondered whether it had been his father’s car.

  Pete pulled into the driveway behind Jake’s car but made no move to get out. Instead he hunched forward over the steering wheel, peering up at the house. It was an ugly yellow color, with brown shutters, two of which were hanging at weird angles. Someone had made an effort to clear a patch of front lawn—Gemma thought of Jake, lining up his utensils neatly, and imagined it must be him—but the trees were reclaiming their territory slowly and the window boxes were empty except for dirt. No one had taken much pride in the house, for sure.

  “Well,” Pete said, with his usual cheerfulness. “At least we won’t have to take our shoes off.”

  Gemma licked her lips. The coffee had been too sugary and now her mouth had a weird, gritty feel. Pete still hadn’t responded to her story, not directly. Maybe he didn’t believe her. “Look. All the stuff I told you . . .”

  Pete turned to her. His eyes were the color of Rufus’s. Toffee brown, warm. “You can trust me,” he said. It was as though he read her mind. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  It was as if a bubble of air in her chest had been released. “So . . . you don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “People who pay five bucks for coffee are crazy,” he said. Then he frowned. “But you’re in some deep shit.” She’d never heard him sound so serious, and in that moment she realized he was handsome. Not just cute. Not goofy-looking. Handsome. Clean jaw and a little bit of stubble, all those golden freckles, the hair falling softly across his forehead. “I’m worried about you. Powerful people went to a lot of trouble to keep Haven’s work a secret. My guess is they won’t stop now.”

  “No one knows we were out on the marshes,” Gemma said. Her stomach squirmed, though. “No one knows what we found.”

  “So you think,” Pete said. And then, in a quieter voice, “I’m not trying to scare you. But we have to be careful.” It was amazing, Gemma thought, how nice the word we could sound, and she nearly put her arms around him. She nearly kissed him.

  Christ. She was fantasizing about kissing Pervy Pete. April would never believe it. If April ever spoke to her again.

  It was hotter here than it had been in April’s grandparents’ subdivision, despite all the shade. Gemma felt sorry for the Florida Energy guys.

  “You’ll like Jake,” Gemma said, partly to convince herself. The tree branches lifted and fell silently, touched by a phantom wind. She didn’t know why she felt so nervous. Something about the whole place was creepy, like the set piece of an abandoned road from a horror film after the zombie apocalypse has struck.

  Pete shrugged. But he still looked unhappy, or nervous, or both. “Weird are my people,” he said. “Weird is what I do.”

  “He’ll have a plan. You’ll see,” she said, partly to reassure herself. A tabby cat was sunning itself on the grungy porch and stared insolently at them as the sound of the doorbell echoed through the house. You shouldn’t be here, it seemed to be saying, and Gemma couldn’t help but feel the same way.

  For a long minute, she heard no sounds of movement. She began to feel not just nervous but truly afraid. She jabbed a finger on the bell again and at the same time tried the knob. Locked. Finally she heard footsteps. In the window next to the door, she saw Jake twitch open the blinds, and his dark eyes peer between them. Then the sound of the lock releasing. Relief felt like something physical, like something she could lie down in.

  “God,” she said, when he opened the door. “I was afraid something had happened. I was afraid . . .” But she trailed off, seeing that he had only opened the door a crack and he was angling his body so they couldn’t come inside.

  “What are you doing here?” He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before in his life. He looked furious.

  It wasn’t exactly the welcome sh
e’d been expecting. Next to her, Pete pivoted, staring back toward the street as though considering a quick getaway.

  “You weren’t picking up your phone,” Gemma said. “I called a dozen times.”

  “Can’t find my phone,” he said. “Don’t know what happened to it.” His eyes swept the street behind them. “You should really go.” He started to close the door.

  “Wait.” Gemma got a hand in the door. For a second he looked like he was considering closing it on her fingers, but then he thought better of it. “You don’t understand. The replicas—they’re gone.”

  “Quiet.” Jake hushed her as though she’d cursed in church. She was close enough to see that he was sweating. Fear. Jake Witz, she realized, wasn’t angry. He was terrified. “Keep your voice down.”

  “We came here for your help—” Pete started to say, but Gemma cut him off. She felt wild and reckless and dizzyingly confused.

  “Didn’t you hear me? They’re gone,” she said. “They must have left in the middle of the night. They took my money. Maybe they took your phone, too—”

  “I heard you.” Once again, Jake’s eyes went to the street. “It’s not my problem. Not yours, either. Now get out of here. You shouldn’t have come. I don’t know you, okay?” He raised his voice. He was practically shouting. “I don’t even know you.”

  Once again Gemma stopped Jake from closing the door, just barely, on her fingers. She kept her hand in the doorjamb so he couldn’t. She had that hard-throat feeling of trying not to cry. “What happened?” she said. “Are you in trouble with the cops?”

  “The cops.” Jake let out a sound that could have been a laugh or a cough. “Not the cops.” He took a step forward, startling Gemma and forcing her to release the doorjamb. “My lights are working just fine,” he added almost angrily, leaning so close that Gemma could feel his breath on her face. Before she could ask him what he meant, he closed the door, and the lock slid back into place.

  For a second Gemma just stood there, stunned. Even with Pete standing next to her, she had never felt so alone in her life. She was too embarrassed to look at Pete. She’d dragged him all the way here, promising that Jake would help, and he hadn’t even let them inside. “Something must have happened. He wasn’t like this yesterday.” She thought of the way he’d looked, with sweat standing on his skin, and what he’d said to her: My lights are working just fine.

  “Gemma.” There was a warning in Pete’s voice, but she was too upset to listen to it.

  “Someone must have gotten to him—yesterday he was practically begging me for information—”

  “Gemma.” This time, Pete seized her hand, and she was surprised into silence by the sudden contact. Her palms were sweaty, but his were dry and cool and large. “Funny they need so many guys to work the wires, don’t you think?” he said in a low voice, as he piloted her off the porch and back toward the van. He didn’t look at the Florida Energy men a little ways down the road, but she could tell by the way he was staring straight ahead that he was trying not to look.

  Instinctively, she glanced over to where the six or seven workers in their hard hats and vests were still standing—doing nothing—and had the sense that they had only avoided meeting her eyes by a fraction of a second. And then she understood what Jake had said about the lights.

  Not nonsense. A code. My lights are working just fine. Meaning: no reason for the Florida Energy truck, and the people gathered across the street with their van spiky with antennae. Although Gemma had looked away as quickly as possible, she had caught the eye of one of the men down the road: clean-shaven, hard-eyed, pale as paper. Not the complexion of someone who spent every day working outside.

  Jake was being watched. Which meant: they were now being watched, too. No wonder Jake had practically shoved them off his doorstep, had shouted that he didn’t know them. He’d been trying to protect them. She had the overwhelming urge to turn around, to hurtle back up to the door and pound to be let in and to thank him. But that would be beyond stupid. Instead she walked stiff-backed to the minivan and climbed in, trying to appear unconcerned, as if maybe the whole thing really had been a mistake. Maybe the men—whoever they were—would believe that they were just casual acquaintances of Jake’s, there to return something or say hello.

  In the car, Pete wiped his hands on his jeans before grabbing hold of the steering wheel. They didn’t speak. Pete kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he backed out of the driveway. Please don’t follow us, Gemma thought. She pressed the desire through her fists. Don’t follow us. But a moment later, a maroon Volvo pulled out of another hard-packed dirt driveway and crept up behind them. Could it be a coincidence? She didn’t think so.

  “Do you think—?” she started to ask, but Pete cut her off.

  “Not now,” he said. “Need to think.” Somehow, the fact that Pete—Pete of the endless, stream-of-consciousness babble—had run out of things to say scared her even more than the car behind them.

  It wasn’t a coincidence: the car followed them no matter how many turns they made down shitty country roads, even after they reached downtown Little Waller, such as it was: a few bleak roads studded with tire shops, fast-food restaurants, and liquor and discount stores. The driver didn’t even bother going for subtlety—and this, too, scared Gemma, and made her angry. It was the way a cat toyed with its prey, batting it around a bit, taking its time, certain already of its satisfaction.

  “We need to lose them.” Gemma hardly recognized her voice when she spoke. It was as if an alien had crawled into her throat and taken over her vocal cords.

  “Lose them?” Pete repeated. Gemma realized how tense Pete was. He was practically doubled over the steering wheel, staring hard at the road as if it might simply disappear. “Christ. You’re really taking the knight-in-shining-armor thing to the limit, you know that?” He yanked the wheel hard to the left, and Gemma was thrown against the door. But only thirty seconds later, lazily, the Volvo turned, too. It was so absurd that they were riding around in an eggplant-colored minivan. They might as well be driving a hovercraft. It wasn’t exactly like they could blend. “Who are these guys, anyway?”

  “Maybe cops,” Gemma said. She had an awful, heavy feeling in her gut, like she was trying to digest a roll of toilet paper. She’d dragged Pete into this. She’d dragged them all into this. “Probably military.”

  “Military.” Pete repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. His freckles were standing out ever more clearly from his skin, like even they were thinking of making a break for it. “Jesus . . .”

  “You told me you wanted to help.” Gemma was squeezing her hands so tightly she was sure she’d break the skin.

  Pete sighed. “I do,” he said. “I just didn’t think we’d end up in a chase scene so early in the movie.” Then: “All right, look. Are you buckled in?”

  Gemma nodded. She was too nervous to speak. A sign ahead pointed the way to the interstate, and here there were more cars on the road, funneling onto or off the highway. The Volvo was still following them, but at a distance of about fifty yards.

  Pete put on his blinker and moved into the far left lane, as though he was about to turn across traffic and into a shopping mall that boasted two liquor stores, a nail salon, and a pizza joint. At least one car crowded in behind them, separating them temporarily from the Volvo’s view. The traffic light turned red. Pete inched forward. Gemma could hear him breathing. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe, as if she was being squeezed between two iron plates.

  “What are you . . . ?” she started to say, but then the light turned green and Pete slammed his foot on the accelerator.

  The engine whined, then yanked them forward. Gemma nearly cracked her head on the dashboard before she was pulled backward by the seat belt, smacking her head against the seat. Pete jerked the wheel to the right, cutting across two lanes of traffic. Several drivers leaned a long protest on their horns, and a Chevy screeched to a stop to avoid colliding with them.

  “Wh
at the hell? What the hell?” Gemma was screaming, and more horns went off as Pete careened onto the entrance to the interstate. But then it was over. He was speeding up the on ramp. Traffic blurred past them, a solid moving mass of cars dazzled by sunlight, and then they were there, passing among them, and the Volvo was long gone. The sky was bright and puffy with clouds. They could have been anyone, going anywhere.

  “How’s that for a chase scene?” Pete said. He was out of breath.

  Gemma couldn’t help it: all her fear transformed into the sudden desire to laugh. It practically lifted her out of her seat. She doubled forward, holding her stomach, laughing so hard it hurt. Pete started to laugh, too. Then he snorted, which just made Gemma laugh harder, until she couldn’t breathe and had to lean back, gasping.

  “Not bad,” she said. Her eyes were watering, blurring her vision of the highway and the featureless towns on either side of it, all of them identical, replicas of one another. “Not bad at all.”

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 12 of Lyra’s story.

  THIRTEEN

  THEY DROVE FOR ANOTHER HOUR. Pete switched onto different freeways several times, just in case, although Gemma couldn’t imagine how anyone could still be pursuing them. She was surprised to see a sign for Palm Grove—the town where Emily Huang, the nurse at Haven who’d been killed before she could talk to Mr. Witz, had lived—and equally surprised when Pete turned off the highway.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m starving,” he said. “I’m seriously about to self-cannibalize. And I need both hands to drive.”

  “I’m hungry too,” Gemma said, before remembering that she tried never to admit to being hungry in front of other people. But of course, the fact that they’d just escaped from a military tail made her normal concerns about being overweight seem unimportant. Besides, Pete didn’t look at her that way, as if there was something wrong with her, as if she really shouldn’t, as if she would be pretty if only she’d slim down a bit.