Replica

Lyra was so relieved she could have shouted. Instead she lowered her head and, keeping her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, started to move past them.

“Wait.”

The Suit called out to her. Lyra stiffened and turned around to face him on the stairs. They were now nearly eye to eye. She felt the same way she did during examinations, shivering in her paper gown, staring up at the high unblinking lights set in the ceiling: cold and exposed.

“What’s the matter with its stomach?” he asked.

Lyra tightened her hands around her waist. Please, she thought. Please. She couldn’t complete the thought. If she were forced to move her arms, the file would drop. She imagined papers spilling from her pants legs, tumbling down the stairs.

God indicated the plastic wristband Lyra always wore. “Green,” he said. “One of the first variants. Slower-acting than your typical vCJD. Most of the Greens are still alive, although we’ve seen a few signs of neurodegenerative activity recently.”

“So what’s that mean in English?”

Unlike the man in the suit, God never made eye contact. He looked at her shoulders, her arms, her kneecaps, her forehead: everywhere but her eyes.

“Side effects,” he said, with a thin smile. Then Lyra was free to go.

Lyra wasn’t the only replica that collected things. Rose kept used toothbrushes under her pillow. Palmolive scanned the hallways for dropped coins and stored them in a box that had once contained antibacterial swabs. Cassiopeia had lined up dozens of seashells on the windowsill next to her bed, and additionally had convinced Nurse Dolly to sneak her some Scotch tape so she could hang several drawings she’d created on napkins stolen from the mess hall. She drew Dumpsters and red-barred circles and stethoscopes and the bust of the first God in his red-and-blue cape and scalpels gleaming in folds of clean cloth. She was very good. Calliope had once taken a cell phone from one of the nurses, and all her genotypes had been punished for it.

But Lyra was careful with her things. She was private about them. The file folder she hid carefully under her thin mattress, next to her other prized possessions: several pens, including her favorite, a green one with a retractable tip that said Fine & Ives in block white lettering; an empty tin that read Altoids; a half-dozen coins she’d found behind the soda machine; her worn and battered copy of The Little Prince, which she’d handled so often that many of the pages had come loose from their binding.

“There’s a message in this book,” Dr. O’Donnell had told Lyra, before leaving Haven. “In the love of the Little Prince for his rose, there’s wisdom we could all learn from.” And Lyra had nodded, trying to pretend she understood, even though she didn’t understand. Not about love. Not about hope. Dr. O’Donnell was going away, and once again, Lyra was left behind.

Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 4 of Gemma’s story.

FIVE

“YOU’VE BEEN LYING TO ME, twenty-four.”

Lyra was on her knees, blinking back tears, swallowing the taste of vomit, when the closet door opened. She couldn’t get to her feet fast enough. She spun around, accidentally knocking over a broom with her elbow.

Nurse Curly was staring not at Lyra but at the bucket behind her, now splattered with vomit. Strangely, she didn’t seem angry. “I knew it,” she said, shaking her head.

It was early afternoon, and Curly must have just arrived from the launch for the shift change. She wasn’t yet wearing her scrubs, but a blue tank top with beading at the shoulders, jeans, and leather sandals. Usually, Lyra was mesmerized by evidence of life outside Haven—the occasional magazine, water-warped, abandoned on the sink in the nurses’ toilets; used-up lip balm in the trash; or a broken flip-flop sitting on a bench in the courtyard—split-second fissures through which a whole other world was revealed.

Today, however, she didn’t care.

She’d been so sure that here, in a rarely used janitorial closet in D-Wing Sub-One, she’d be safe. She’d woken up sweating, with her heart going hard and her stomach like something heavy and raw that needed to come out. But the waking bell sounded only a minute later, and she knew that the bathrooms would soon be full of replicas showering, brushing their teeth, whispering beneath the thunderous sound of the water about the Suits and what they could possibly want and whether number 72 had been torn apart by alligators by now—lungs, kidneys, spleen scattered across the marshes.

But the staff bathrooms were just as risky. They were off-limits, first of all, and often crowded—the nurses were always hiding out in stalls trying to make calls or send text messages.

“I’m not sick,” Lyra said quickly, reaching out to grab hold of a shelf. She was still dizzy.

“Come on, now.” As usual Nurse Curly acted as if she hadn’t heard. Maybe she hadn’t. Lyra had the strangest sense of being invisible, as if she existed behind a curtain and the nurses and doctors could only vaguely see her. “We’ll go to Dr. Levy.”

“No. Please.” Dr. Levy worked in the Box. She hated him, and that big, thunderous machine, Mr. I. She hated the grinning lights like blank indifferent faces. She hated Catheter Fingers and Invacare Snake Tubing, Dribble Bags and Sad Sacks, syringe after syringe after syringe. She hated the weird dreams that visited her there, of lions marching around a cylindrical cup, of old voices she was sure she’d never heard but that felt real to her. Even a spinal tap with the Vampire—the long needle inserted into the base of her spinal column between two vertebrae so that her fluids could be extracted for testing—was almost preferable. “I feel fine.”