“Look.” The boy was talking to Lyra. Maybe he’d decided she was easier to talk to. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten that 72 had a knife. “I know you must be tired—you’ve been through—I don’t even know what you’ve been through . . .”
“Jake . . .” Cassiopeia’s replica pressed her hand to her eyes.
“They’ve been living in Haven, Gemma,” the boy said quickly. “My father died for this. I need to know.”
Father. The word sent a curious tremor up Lyra’s spine, as if she’d been tapped between her vertebrae. So Lyra was right about him: he was natural-born.
“Jake, no.” Cassiopeia’s replica—the boy had said her name was Gemma, Lyra remembered now—looked and sounded like one of the nurses. Jake fell silent. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I literally don’t believe you. These poor people have been through God knows what—they’re starving and cold and they have no place to go—and you want to interview them—”
“I don’t want to interview them. I want to understand.”
Lyra took another sip of water, swallowing despite the pain. “Not people,” she said, because the girl had been nice to them and she thought it was worth correcting her.
Gemma turned to stare at Lyra. “What?”
“We’re not people,” Lyra said. “You said, ‘These poor people have been through god knows what.’ But we’re replicas. God didn’t make us. Dr. Saperstein did. He’s our god.” She stopped herself from pointing out that Gemma, too, must have been made by someone, even if she didn’t know it.
Gemma kept staring, until Lyra finally felt uncomfortable and looked down at her hands. Had she said the wrong thing again? But she was just reciting what she knew to be true, what everyone had always told her.
Finally Gemma spoke again. Her voice was much softer now. “We should camp here for the night,” she said. For an instant, she even sounded like Dr. O’Donnell. “We’ll go back to Wahlee in the morning.”
“We’re not going anywhere with you,” 72 said quickly. Lyra was surprised to hear him say we. She had never been a we. Maybe he’d only confused the word, the way she still confused I and it sometimes.
“No,” Gemma said. “No, you don’t have to go with us. Not unless you want to.”
“Why would we want to?” 72 asked. In the dark he was all hard angles, like someone hacked out of shadow. Now Lyra wasn’t sure whether he was ugly or not. His face kept changing, and every time the light fell on it differently he looked like a new person.
Cassiopeia’s replica didn’t blink. “You can’t plan on staying here forever. You have no money. No ID. You’re not even supposed to exist. And there will be people looking for you.”
The girl was right. You’re not even supposed to exist. Lyra knew the truth of these words, even though she wasn’t sure exactly what they meant. Hadn’t that been the point of the guards and the fences? To keep the replicas safe, and secret, and protected? Everyone who had known them had despised them. You’re not supposed to exist. Wasn’t that what the nurses were always saying? That they were monsters and abominations? All except Nurse Em, all those years ago, and Dr. O’Donnell. But both of them had gone away.
Everyone went away, in the end.
“Can I have more water?” she asked, and so somehow it was decided. 72 turned to look at her with an expression she couldn’t read, but she was too tired to worry about him and what he thought and whether they were making the right decision.
Neither of the strangers wanted to sleep near Cassiopeia’s body, so they moved instead through the thick patch of hobble-backed trees and tall grasses streaked with bird guano, leaving the corpse behind. Lyra didn’t understand it. She liked being near to Cassiopeia’s body. It was comforting. She could imagine she was back at Haven, even, that she and Cassiopeia were just lying in separate cots across the narrow space that divided them.
Gemma, the girl, suggested she try a soda. Lyra had never had soda before. At Haven, the vending machines were for the staff only, although sometimes the nurses took pity on the younger replicas and gave them coins from the vending machines to play with, to roll or flip or barter. Her first impression was that it was much, much too sweet. But she felt better after a few sips, less nauseous. Her hands were steadier, too.
Gemma found a clean sweatshirt in the bottom of Jake’s bag and offered it to 72, but he refused. So instead Lyra took it, though it was far too big and she did nothing but pull it on over the filth of her regular shirt. She was warm now, but she was also comforted by the feel of clean cotton and the smell of it, like the laundry detergent they used at Haven that sent the sheets back stiff and crisp as paper. This sweatshirt wasn’t stiff, but soft, so soft.
She curled up on the ground and 72 sat next to her.
“I don’t trust them,” he whispered, looking over to where the boy and girl were making camp, arguing over who should be allowed to use the backpack as a pillow. “They’re not like us.”
“No,” she said. Her tongue felt thick. Her mind felt thick, too, as if it had also been blanketed in cotton. She wanted to say: We don’t exist. She wanted to say: We have no choice. But even as she reached for the words, the cord tethering her thoughts snapped, and she was bobbing, wordless, mindless, into the dark.
It seemed she’d barely fallen asleep before she was jerked into awareness again by movement beside her. She sat up and saw 72 half on his feet with the knife in his hand.