Lyra didn’t bother pointing out that they had nowhere to go.
“Get some sleep,” Gemma said. The more Lyra looked at her, the less she resembled Cassiopeia and her other genotypes. That was the funny thing about genotypes, something the nurses and doctors, who could never tell them apart, had never understood. If you looked, you could see differences in the way they moved and spoke and used their hands. Over time, their personalities changed even the way that they looked. And of course Gemma was much heavier than Cassiopeia, and had long hair to her shoulders that looked soft to the touch. Gemma was nicer than Cassiopeia. More prone to worry, too. But they had the same stubbornness—that Lyra could see, too.
As soon as they were alone, Lyra went to the bookshelves. She could feel 72 watching her, but she didn’t care and couldn’t resist any longer. She reached up and ran a finger along the spines, each of them textured differently, some of them gloss-smooth and hard and others soft and crumbly like dirt. L-I-T-T-L-E W-O-M-E-N. Little Women. T-H-E G-O-L-D C-O-A-S-T. When she thought of The Little Prince, lost somewhere on the marshes, she still felt like crying. But these books made up for it, at least a little.
“You were telling the truth,” 72 said. He was watching her closely. “You can read.” He made it sound like a bad thing.
“I told you. Dr. O’Donnell taught me.” She kept skipping her fingers over the titles and, as she did, read out loud: “The Old Man and the Sea. The Long Walk. The Hunger Games.”
He came to stand next to her. Again she could smell him, an earthy sweetness that made her feel slightly dizzy. She’d never found out which of the males Pepper had been with, although Cassiopeia had said a male doctor, because of what happened at the Christmas party, because Pepper had been chosen. But she wondered, now, whether instead it was 72.
“Is it hard?” he asked.
“At the beginning,” she said. She didn’t know why she was thinking of Pepper. She took a step away from 72. “Not so much when you get the hang of it.”
“I thought only people could read,” he blurted out. When she turned to look at him, surprised by the tone of his voice, he turned away. “I’m going to get clean.”
A moment later, she heard the shower pipes shudder and the water start in the bathroom—a familiar sound that lulled her once again into exhaustion. She didn’t understand 72 and his rapid changes of mood. But he’d chosen to stay with her. He hadn’t left her behind. Maybe this complexity was a feature of the male replicas—she didn’t know, had never been allowed to interact with them.
She removed the file she’d taken from its filthy pillowcase and placed it carefully on the desk below the windows. Although she had a roomful of books now—a room full of books, an idea so exciting it made goose bumps on her arms again—the folder, and the single sheet of paper it contained, was her final tether to home. She recognized an old patient report—she’d seen enough of her own reports to recognize a version of the form still in use. But she was too tired to read, and she left the folder open on the desk and returned to the shelves, no longer trying to make sense of the words, just admiring the way the letters looked, the angles and curls and scrolled loops of them.
“I’m all done now.”
She hadn’t heard the shower go off or 72 emerge from the bathroom. She turned and froze. His skin, which had been streaked with blood and caked in a layer of sediment and crusted mud, was now as shiny and polished as a beach stone, and the color of new wood. His eyelashes, grayed by the ash, were long and black. A towel was wrapped around his waist. She was struck again by the strangeness of the male’s body, the broadness of his shoulders and the torqued narrowness of his muscled waist.
“Thank you,” she said, snatching up the clothes Gemma had left for her. She was careful not to pass too close to him when she moved into the bathroom. She shut the door firmly, a little confused by the mechanism of the lock. At Haven, all the doors locked with keypads or codes, except for the bathrooms, which had no locks at all.
She stripped down and balled her filthy clothes in a corner. She had never showered alone before and it felt wonderful: the big echoey bathroom, the space, the aloneness of it. Was this how all people lived? It felt luxurious to her. She spent a few minutes adjusting the taps, delighted by how quickly the water responded. In Haven, there was never enough hot water. The soap Gemma had bought was lilac-scented and pale purple, and Lyra found herself thinking of 72, naked, washing with purple soap, and the urge to giggle bubbled up in her chest, followed by a wave of dizziness. She had to sit with her head between her legs and the water driving down on her shoulders until it passed.
She lathered and rinsed her scalp, scrubbed her ears with a pinkie finger, washed the soles of her feet so that they became so slippery it was treacherous to stand. Finally she felt clean. Even the towels here were better than they were at Haven, where they were thin and stiff from hundreds of washings. Her new clothes felt soft and clean. Gemma had bought her cotton underwear in different colors. She’d never had underwear that was anything but a bleached, dingy beige. Looking at herself in the mirror, she almost could have passed for a real person, except for the length of her hair. She fingered the scar above her right eyebrow. She had scars all over her body now, from spinal taps and harvesting operations to test her blood marrow, but when she was dressed, most of them were concealed. Not this one, though.
In the bedroom, she found 72 stretched out on top of the covers, staring up at the ceiling fan. He was wearing new jeans that Gemma had bought for him, and this fact seemed only to emphasize his shirtlessness and the smooth muscled lines of his chest and shoulders. She’d never noticed how beautiful bodies could be. She’d thought of them only as parts, machine components that serviced a whole. She’d been interested in the males, of course—curious about them—but she’d also learned that curiosity led to disappointment, that it was better not to want, not to look, not to wonder. But she was suddenly terrified of lying next to him, although she couldn’t have said exactly why. Maybe because of what had happened to Pepper. But she thought it was more than that.