Replica

  Harliss fired a second shot. Now dozens of people were screaming. Half the people in the parking lot were lying down, or ducking behind cars. For a split second Gemma met Harliss’s eyes and the message felt physical, like the first inhale after the breath is knocked from your lungs. She understood why he’d asked her to keep Lyra safe until he was out. She understood that he’d waited more than a decade to see his daughter again and would now go back to prison because of the promise a stranger had made to him, because of the sheerest, slightest chance that it might help.

  There was no time, only change, only atoms rotating, only Gemma and Pete and Rick Harliss and a love so turned around and imperfect and blind it could only be called faith. Things that existed outside of seconds and minutes and years. Gemma was peaceful now. She was calm. Both men were still on the ground and the cop was running for the staircase with two firefighters behind him—and yet Gemma saw them, suspended, still, held in that moment by a force much larger and more patterned than they were—and the little kid had dropped his lollipop to scream. There were more sirens in the distance.

  Then they were down the stairs and through the crowd in the parking lot and almost at the van. They were beyond the swell of bodies, of voices, of people shouting and crying. They were in a universe made infinitely of itself, and yet small enough to hold these moments, these facts—the smell of smoke in the air, the echo of voices, and Pete’s hand, bigger than hers, stronger, right.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 15 of Lyra’s story.

  SIXTEEN

  GEMMA WISHED THEY COULD DITCH the van and trade it for something less conspicuous. She felt like they were driving around in a giant neon sign. But they made it back to Little Waller without seeing the maroon Volvo. As far as Gemma could tell, they hadn’t been followed.

  It had been more than an hour and Gemma was terrified that Lyra and 72 might have left, or been taken. They found the replicas huddled in a booth in the back of a restaurant called the Blue Gator, with paper shamrocks strung between the televisions and green vinyl booths and Kiss Me, I’m Irish T-shirts for sale behind the bar. They were in trouble: 72 was scowling at the table, and a waiter was badgering them to put in an order.

  “I told you, it’s not up to me.” The waiter had bad dandruff that coated the shoulders of his black T-shirt. “It’s restaurant policy. These booths are for diners, and that means people dining—”

  “It’s all right.” Gemma noticed that Lyra’s face transformed when she pushed through the crowd—Lyra actually looked happy. It was amazing how in such a short time, Gemma felt responsible for this skinny little rag doll with her big eyes and terrible past. Brandy-Nicole. “They’re with us, and we’re leaving.”

  “You weren’t followed?” Gemma asked them, as soon as they were safely back in the car. Pete got on the highway immediately, although they hadn’t agreed on a destination. Easier to disappear on the big roads, in the big towns.

  Lyra shook her head. “We were,” she said. “But not there. Not into that place.”

  “A man looked in from the street,” 72 said. “But he didn’t see us.”

  Above them, the sky was shedding its blue, revealing an undercoat of improbable violets and pinks. Gemma found herself praying that the night, and the darkness that transformed cars to headlights and absorbed individual features, would come quickly. She didn’t want to ask about Jake—on one level, she didn’t want to know—but it was far too late to pretend, and she owed it to Jake to face up to the truth of what had been done to him. “What happened to Jake?”

  Lyra was the one who told them the whole story: about tracking down Emily Huang and learning she was dead, about finding Jake’s address and deciding to go and speak to him, about the man and woman who’d come to clean up the job.

  “Both of them strung up, made to look like suicides.” Gemma’s mouth tasted bitter, as if she’d inhaled ash along with the smoke earlier, and she couldn’t stop coughing. “Must be the military’s little specialty.”

  “Less suspicious, maybe, than a gun,” Pete said quietly. He reached out and put a hand on her knee. Her heartbeat responded, jumped a little beneath his touch. That, at least, was one good thing, maybe the only good thing to come out of this: Pete was hers.

  “Why did you run?” Gemma asked, and for a second neither Lyra nor 72 spoke.

  “It was Caelum’s idea . . . ,” Lyra said finally.

  “Caelum?” Gemma twisted around in her seat and was shocked to see that 72 was actually smiling, staring out the window, as if the smear of highways contained the world’s best secret. She hadn’t seen him smile before—wouldn’t have even said he was capable of smiling—and she was shocked by the change. He’d gone instantly from brooding sociopath to budding Calvin Klein model.

  “I named him,” Lyra said proudly. “Like Dr. O’Donnell named me.”

  “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” The boy now named Caelum turned away from the window to meet Lyra’s eyes. “I’m sorry.” She wondered whether the act of naming him had changed him on deeper levels, too. She couldn’t imagine this boy, the boy sitting politely in the backseat wearing a Seven-Up T-shirt, pulling a knife on them in a swamp.

  “And I almost forgot.” Lyra unzipped a backpack Gemma knew she must have stolen from April’s grandparents’ guesthouse. “Before she died, Nurse Em gave three pieces of art to her next-door neighbor. I found these hidden in the backing.” She passed Lyra two printouts and one handwritten sheet of names. Gemma’s stomach turned over. Brandy-Nicole Harliss was the third name on the list, but there were forty-seven others. That might mean that all these names, all these children, had been taken from their parents or from foster homes when Haven was in danger of running out of funding, used as bodies before new bodies could be manufactured.

  “Can I keep these?” Gemma asked, and Lyra shrugged, although she saw the expression of hunger there—it was the same way Lyra had stared at the bookshelves, like a starving person confronted with a feast. “I’ll give them back, I promise.” There was no point in delaying anymore: she had to tell Lyra about her father. She didn’t know why she felt so nervous. Lyra would probably be happy. She would be happy. She had a dad, which meant she probably had other family out there—cousins, aunts. “There’s something I need to tell you, Lyra. Something about your past.”

  “Now?” Pete said. “Here?”

  Gemma pivoted to look at him. “What’s the point in waiting?”

  “What?” Lyra said. When Gemma turned around again, she noticed that Caelum and Lyra were holding hands. Or not holding hands, exactly—they were touching palm to palm as if they wanted to hold hands but didn’t quite know how to do it. “What is it?”

  Gemma took a deep breath. The sun was bleeding red on the horizon. “You weren’t actually made at Haven.”

  “What do you mean?” It was Caelum who spoke. There was an edge to his voice. Not anger, Gemma thought. Fear. “Where was she made?”

  “Nowhere.” Gemma hadn’t realized how hard it would be to explain. “This list, and all the names on it? I’m pretty sure these are all kids who got taken from their families or from foster care and were brought to Haven, at a time the institute couldn’t afford to keep making human models.” Lyra was sitting there huge-eyed, white-faced, and Gemma had the sudden urge to apologize, to take it all back. But that was insane. Maybe she simply didn’t understand? “The third name, Brandy-Nicole Harliss. That was your birth name. Your real name. That was the name your parents gave you.”

  “My . . .” Lyra inhaled whatever else she was going to say.

  “You have parents,” Gemma said. She thought Lyra might cry, or laugh, or at the very least, smile. But she just kept staring, looking horrified, as if Gemma had opened up a coffin to show her a dead body. “Well, you have a father. He’s been looking for you all this time. He’s loved you all this time.”

  Lyra cried out, as if she’d been hit. And Caelum, Gemma noticed, withdrew his h
and from Lyra’s, and turned back to the window.

  Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Lyra’s story.

  SEVENTEEN

  IT WAS TIME TO GO home. They had no options left. Gemma would have to confront her parents. Strangely, the idea no longer frightened her. She felt she’d aged years in the past few days. She felt only a vague pity when she thought of her father, and the secret he’d been carrying all these years, and the dead child they had refused to mourn. For her father and mother thinking they could buy their way out of tragedy.

  She would go home, but on her terms: no more lies.

  By eleven o’clock Pete could hardly stay awake at the wheel. They weren’t far from Savannah when they passed an RV park and campground, Gemma suggested they stop for the night. She didn’t mind spending one more night on the road. She knew that everything would change in the morning. She had an idea that her life would never be the same, that she’d never go back to worrying about Chloe and Aubrey and the pack wolves, that she’d never spend another gym class sitting miserably in the bleachers, fudging her way through math homework.

  She had a feeling this was her last free night.

  The campground was enormous and surprisingly full. Gemma estimated there were at least four dozen tour bus–size RVs and even more smaller camper vans, plus tents peaked like angular mushrooms across the sparse grass. It was a beautiful night, and outside there was a feeling of celebration. Old couples sat side by side on lawn chairs dragged out onto the cracked asphalt, drinking wine from paper cups. Children ran between the tents, and a group of twentysomethings with long dreads and bare feet were cooking on a portable camper stove. Fireflies flared sporadically in the darkness, and people shouted to one another and shared beers and stories of where they were going and where they’d come from.

  Pete left in search of food from the gas station, and Caelum moved off in the direction of the pay-per-use stalls, walking slightly ahead of Lyra. Gemma suspected he wanted to be left alone, but she followed them at a safe distance, half-believing that they might once again simply melt into the darkness. But after Lyra took money for the showers she knew she could no longer delay the inevitable. It was time to call home.

  She’d missed thirty-seven calls from her parents. When she pulled up her texts, she saw they progressed from furious to frenzied to desperate.

  Please, her father had written. Wherever you are, please call us. He must have come back early from his business trip. That meant things had really gone nuclear.

  She dialed her dad’s cell phone number and he picked up on the first ring.

  “Gem?” He sounded frantic, so unlike himself that her resolution faltered. “Gem, is that you? Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Dad.” She had to hold her phone away from her ear when Kristina started shouting in the background. Is that her? Where is she? Is she okay? Let me talk to her. . . . “Look, I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”

  “Where are you? Jesus Christ, we’ve been so worried—”

  “Geoff, let me talk to her.” Kristina’s voice, slurry from crying and maybe from pills, was audible again in the background.

  “Hang on, Gem, I’m putting you on speakerphone. Your mother wants to hear your voice.” Fumbling, and the echo of her parents’ voices overlapping. Gemma hated speakerphone, which always made her feel as if she was speaking into a tin can. “Gemma, are you still there? Can you hear us?”

  “I can hear you,” she said. “There’s no need to shout.” She watched a mom bouncing a sleepy toddler in her arms, passing back and forth in front of the RV, the kid’s dark hair curling on her shoulder. She felt a momentary grief so strong it was like falling.

  “Where are you?” Kristina sounded like she was crying again. “We’ve been so worried. We called April and she said you’d left. Your father jumped on the first plane out of London he could find. She was so upset—”

  “April was upset?” Gemma asked quickly.

  “What do you think? She told us you had a fight and she’d asked you to leave. She felt awful about it. She’s been worried sick. We’ve all been worried sick.”

  “I’m fine,” Gemma said. “I’m with my friend Pete. We’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “I want you home tonight,” Gemma’s father said, sounding more like himself. Now that he knew his daughter wasn’t dead in a ditch, he’d apparently decided to resort to playing bad cop. “Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”

  It was time. She took a breath. “I went down to see Haven.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Gemma watched the fireflies flare and then go dark.

  “You . . . what?” Gemma’s dad could barely get the words out.

  “I went to Haven.” She closed her eyes and thought of the statue of the man kneeling in the dust, that old childhood memory unearthed, the DNA of another child coiled inside of her. “I went to see where I was made.”

  “Where you . . .” Geoff’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “What—what are you talking about?”

  “There’s no point in denying it. I know everything.” She was suddenly and completely exhausted. She felt so old—older, even, than her parents. “I know about what you were trying to do at Haven. I know you left Fine and Ives because they wanted to invest. I know the military stepped in and the mission changed.” Gemma’s mom whimpered. This part would be the hardest. “I know about Emma, too,” she said.

  Her parents were quiet for so long she checked the phone to see whether the connection had been lost. Finally she heard a kind of gasping and knew that they were still there. She imagined the lies they’d told over the years as a physical force, something with hands, something that had reached out now to choke them.

  “Gemma.” Her father was crying. Her father had never cried, not once in her life. She was shocked and also, in a sick way, glad. The mask was falling off. The cracks were showing. Let him cry, the way she had. “We can explain. Please. You need to come home.”

  “Please come home, baby.” Kristina sounded like her voice was being squeezed through a pipe, high and agonized, and Gemma felt terrible again. Even now, she hated for her mother to be sad. But Gemma knew she had to be strong.

  “Not until you agree to help me,” she said. In the distance she saw Pete returning from the direction of the gas station with a paper bag tucked under his arm. As he passed beneath the streetlamp and back into the RV park, a man smoking a cigarette nearby turned to look at him, and Gemma had a tingling sense of unease. But the man turned away again and was soon lost to Gemma’s view. “You have to help my friends, too.”

  “Your friends?”

  “We rescued two replicas out on the marshes,” Gemma said. Once again she had to yank her phone away from her ear as both of her parents exploded. She nearly had to shout to be heard over them. “They would have died on their own. They are dying. Haven’s been infecting them.”

  “Listen to me, Gemma. You’re in danger right now.” Gemma’s father was calm again, and she felt a swell of nausea. He hadn’t even reacted to the news about how Haven was using its clones. Which meant, of course, that he knew. She wasn’t surprised, but it still made her feel sick. Had he known, too, about the children stolen from their parents, shunted into the foster care system and then conveniently lost? “I know you must be angry. I can only imagine how you feel. I swear to you that your mother and I will explain. But you need to come home now. Tonight. There are people out there, people still involved in Haven, dangerous people. . . . I can’t protect you when you’re hundreds of miles away.”

  She thought of Nurse Em, and Jake, both found swinging by their necks. “You have to swear to help us, or I’m not coming home at all,” she said. It was a bluff. She had nowhere to go, and if her parents cut off her credit cards she’d be doubly screwed, but she was counting on the fact that her parents were too upset to think clearly.

  “This isn’t a game, Gemma.” Geoff sounded as if he was going to lose it. Gemma ha
d never heard her father so out of control. “You don’t understand how big this is—”

  “Swear or I hang up the phone,” she said firmly.

  For a second there was nothing but the sound of her father breathing hard on the other end of her line, of her mom whimpering in the background.

  “I swear,” he said at last. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  Gemma exhaled. She’d unconsciously been holding her breath. “I’ll be home in the morning,” she said, and hung up. Immediately she powered off her phone. She didn’t want them calling her back, bugging her all night. She leaned against Pete’s minivan, listening to the sounds of the mothers calling their children to bed, watching lights dim one by one in the windows of parked RVs. All these people on their way to something, on their way from something. All these stories and lives, all of them orbiting temporarily around the same parking lot before spinning away from one another again. She said a little prayer for Jake Witz.

  She thought of her sister—could Emma be called a sister, if she was really Gemma, if Gemma was really her?—and the shadow-life she might have lived, might still be living off in some parallel dimension.

  She felt small. She was so tired.

  Pete was back. He’d bought water and soda, candy and chips, burritos, and even a tray of gas station nachos. “I thought we’d do a buffet,” he said, squatting to place food out right on the pavement. When he saw Gemma’s face, he stopped. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just tired. Just scared about what comes next.”

  He stood up. Backlit by the lights from a nearby camper, his face was unreadable, and his hair looked feather-light. He reached out and touched her cheek, and his hand was so warm, so instantly familiar. A strange and baffling truth: that the people we’re supposed to know best can turn out to be strangers, and that near strangers can feel so much like home.