Replica

Nurse Em’s old house had once, the old woman had told them, been the yellow of sunshine and thus easy to spot. Now it was a faded color that reminded Lyra of mustard. The flower beds looked scraggly, and there were four bikes dumped on the front lawn and so many toys it looked as if these were coming up from the ground. Loud music came to them across the lawn.

She closed her eyes and arranged all her memories of Nurse Em in a row: Nurse Em bathing Lyra and a dozen other replicas when they were too young to do it themselves, plunging them into the bathwater and hauling them like slippery, wriggling puppies onto the cold tile floor afterward. Nurse Em standing with Dr. Saperstein in the courtyard, speaking in a low voice, and the way he said, “It’s nothing. They don’t understand,” after Nurse Em turned around and caught Lyra staring; the time in the janitor’s closet with Dr. O’Donnell.

“I’m sorry,” 72 said, and Lyra opened her eyes. Maybe he wasn’t angry at her anymore. His eyes were softened with color.

It was the first time anyone had ever apologized to her. “For what?”

“I know you were hoping she would help,” 72 said.

“Now we have no one,” Lyra said. She pressed a hand to her eyes. She didn’t want 72 to see how upset she was. “Nowhere to go, either.”

72 hesitated. He touched the back of her hand. “You have me,” he said very quietly. She looked up at him, surprised. Her skin tingled where he touched her.

“I do?” she said. She felt hot in her head and chest, but it was a good feeling, like standing in the sun after being too long in the air-conditioning.

He nodded. “You have me,” he said. “I have you.”

He looked as if he might say more, but just then in the house next to Emily Huang’s the garage door rattled open, revealing an enormously fat woman in a tracksuit. She waddled out dragging a trash bin, keeping her eyes on 72 and Lyra. Lyra stepped from him. She felt as if they’d been caught in the middle of something, even though they’d just been standing there. She waited for the woman to turn around and return inside, but instead she just stood there at the end of the driveway, one hand on the trash bin, breathing hard and staring.

“You need something?” she called out to them, when she had caught her breath. She pulled her T-shirt away from her skin. A large sweat stain had darkened between her breasts.

“No,” 72 said quickly.

But the woman kept staring at them, and so Lyra added, “We came looking for Emily Huang. We were . . . friends.” She enjoyed the way the word sounded and felt like repeating it, but bit her tongue so she wouldn’t.

The woman’s face changed, became narrower, as if she were speaking to them through a half-open door. “You knew Emily?”

Lyra had never had to lie so much in her life. She wondered if lying, too, was a human trait. She fumbled for an excuse, and for a second her brain turned up nothing but white noise. What was the word again? “Parents,” she said finally. It came to her like a match striking. “She was friends with my—our—parents.”

Even 72 turned to look at her. Her cheeks were hot. This lie felt different, heavier. The word, parents, had left a thick feeling in her throat, as if it had slugged its way up from her stomach. She was sure that the woman would know that she was lying. But instead she just made a desperate flapping motion. It wasn’t until 72 moved that Lyra realized the woman was gesturing them forward.

“In.” She had a funny, duck-like walk. She kept turning around to see that they were following her. “Come on. Come on.” Lyra didn’t have enough experience to wonder whether it was safe to follow a stranger into her house, and soon they were standing in the coolness of the garage and the door was grinding closed behind them, like an eyelid squeezing shut and wedging out all the light. The garage smelled faintly of fertilizer and chemicals.

“Sorry for being a push,” the woman said, moving to a door that must, Lyra knew, connect with the house. “You never know who’s watching around here. Nosy Nellies, that’s what everyone is. That was Em’s problem, you ask me. Trusted all the wrong people.” She opened the door. “I’m Sheri, by the way. Sheri Hayes. Come on in and have a chat with me. You kids look like you could use a lemonade or a bite to eat.”

Lyra and 72 didn’t look at each other, but she knew what he was thinking: these real-humans were not like the ones at Haven. They were nice. Helpful. Then again, they didn’t know what Lyra and 72 really were. Lyra had a feeling that they wouldn’t be quite so helpful then. She imagined the inside of her body rotted, filled with disease, and wondered if soon it would begin to show on her outside, in the look of her face.

“Well, come on. Don’t just stand there gawping. I’m sweating buckets.”

They followed the woman—Sheri—into the house. Lyra was startled by a cat that streaked across the hall directly in front of her, and jumped back.

“Oh, you’re not allergic, are you? I’ve got three of ’em. Tabby, Tammy, Tommy. All littermates. Little terrors, every last one. But don’t worry, they won’t bite you.”

Lyra saw another two cats perched on a sofa in a darkened living room, their eyes moon-bright and yellow. Her heart was still hammering. She wasn’t used to animals roaming free like that. At Haven the animals were kept in cages. She was glad they went instead into the kitchen.

Sheri sat them down at a wooden table and brought them two glasses of lemonade in tall glasses filled to the rim with ice cubes. It was delicious. She laid out cookies, too, a whole plate of them.