Lyra had fallen in love with reading during the brief, ecstatic period of time when Dr. O’Donnell had been at Haven, which she now thought of as the best months of her life. When Lyra read, it was as if a series of small windows opened in the back of her mind, flooding her with light and fresh air and visions of other places, other lives, other, period. The only books at Haven were books about science and the body, and these were difficult and full of words she couldn’t sound out. But she read charts when they were left unattended on countertops. She read the magazines the nurses left behind in their break room.
Nurse Swineherd kept talking while she took Lyra’s blood pressure with Squeezeme and stuck Thermoscan under her tongue. Lyra liked Squeezeme and Thermoscan. She liked the way Squeezeme tightened around her upper arm, like a hand holding on to lead her somewhere. She liked Thermoscan’s reassuring beeps, and afterward when Nurse Swineherd said, “Perfectly normal.”
She added, “Don’t know what it was thinking, running that way. Breathe deeply, okay? Good. Now exhale. Good. It’ll drown before it gets past the breaks. Did you hear the surf last night? Like thunder! I’m surprised the body hasn’t turned up already, actually.”
Lyra knew she wasn’t expected to reply. The one time she had, in response to Nurse Swineherd’s cheerful question, “How are we today?” Nurse Swineherd had startled, dropping one of the syringes—Lyra hated the syringes, refused to name them—and had to start over. But she wondered what it would be like to come across the dead body on the beach. She wasn’t afraid of dead bodies. She had seen hundreds of replicas get sick and die. All the Yellows had died, none of them older than twelve months. A fluke, the doctors said: a fever. Lyra had seen the bodies wrapped and prepared for shipping.
A Purple from the seventh crop, number 333, had simply stopped eating. By the time they put her on a tube, it was too late. Number 501 swallowed twenty-four small white Sleepers after Nurse Em, who used to help shave her head and was always gentlest with the razor, went away. Number 421 had gone suddenly, in her sleep. It was Lyra who’d touched her arm to wake her and known, from the strange plastic coldness of her body, that she was dead. Strange that in an instant all the life just evaporated, went away, leaving only the skin and bones, a pile of flesh.
But that’s what they were: bodies. Human and yet not people. She hadn’t so far been able to figure out why. She looked, she thought, like a normal person. So did the other female replicas. They’d been made from normal people, and even birthed from them.
But the making of them marked them. That’s what everybody said. Except for Dr. O’Donnell.
She wouldn’t mind seeing a male up close—the male and female replicas were kept separate, even the dead ones that went off the island in tarps. She was curious about the males, had studied the anatomical charts in the medical textbooks she couldn’t otherwise read. She had looked especially closely at diagrams of the female and male reproductive organs, which seemed, she thought, to mark the primary difference between them, but she couldn’t imagine what a male’s would look like in real life. The only men she saw were doctors, nurses, security, and other members of the staff.
“All right. Almost done. Come here and stand on the scale now, okay?”
Lyra stood up, hoping to catch a glimpse once again of the chart, and its beautiful, symmetrical lettering, which marched like soldiers across the page. But Nurse Swineherd had snatched the clipboard and was writing in Lyra’s newest results. Without releasing her grip on the clipboard, she adjusted the scale expertly with one hand, waiting until it balanced correctly.
“Hmmm.” She frowned, so that the lines between her eyebrows deepened and converged. Once, when Lyra was really little, she had announced that she had found out the difference between people and replicas: people were old, replicas were young. The nurse who was bathing her at the time, a nurse who hadn’t stayed long, and whose name Lyra could no longer remember, had burst out laughing. The story had quickly made the rounds among the nurses and doctors.
“You’ve lost weight,” Nurse Swineherd said, still frowning. “How’s your appetite?”
Several seconds went by before Lyra realized this was a question she was meant to answer. “Fine.”
“No nausea? Cramping? Vomiting?”
Lyra shook her head.
“Vision problems? Confusion?”
Lyra shook her head because she wasn’t very practiced at lying. Two weeks ago she’d vomited so intensely her ribs had ached the following day. Yesterday she’d thrown up in a pillowcase, hoping it would help muffle the sound. Fortunately she’d been able to sneak it in with the rest of the trash, which went off on boats on Sundays, to be burned or dumped into the sea or otherwise disposed of. Given the storm, and the security breach, and the now-probably-dead male, she was confident no one would notice the missing pillowcase.
But the worst thing was that she had gotten lost yesterday, on her way back to the dorms. It didn’t make any sense. She knew every inch of D-Wing, from Natal Intensive to Neural Observation, to the cavernous dorms that housed one hundred female replicas each, to the bathrooms with dozens of showerheads tacked to a wall, a trench-like sink, and ten toilets. But she must have turned right instead of left coming out of the bathroom and had somehow ended up at the locked door that led into C-Wing, blinking confusedly, until a guard had called out to her and startled her into awareness.
But she wouldn’t say so. She couldn’t go to the Box. That’s what everyone called G-Wing. The Box, or the Funeral Home, because half the replicas that went in never came out.