Replica

Gemma absorbed this in silence. Outside the window, the sun had sunk below the rooftops, leaving only a smear of red behind, like a bloody handprint. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Time to wake up our sleeping beauties.”

The houses in this complex were nestled one right next to the other. From above it must have looked like a jigsaw puzzle of roofs and tiled pools and squat gardenia bushes. Gemma could smell someone grilling, and hear the blare of a television from a nearby house. It was weird to think of all those other people so close, fixing dinner or watching Netflix or worrying about their bills, totally unaware of the explosion that had punched through Gemma’s life.

She felt very alone.

The guesthouse was dark. The replicas were still sleeping. Gemma could hear the boy snoring. She eased the door to the bedroom shut, figuring that if she wanted to get the truth about Haven she would need to start by buttering them up a little, earning their trust. She rooted around in the guesthouse cabinets until she found a pot.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked.

“Haven’t you ever heard?” Gemma next began opening the cans of chili she’d bought at Walmart. “Fastest way to a person’s heart is through the stomach.”

Jake smiled. “Ah. Of course. That’s why the police use so many cupcakes in their interrogations.” His hair had a funny cowlick, and for some reason it made Gemma sad. It was so normal. She knew she’d never feel normal again, not ever.

She had always joked about feeling like an alien, but she knew now that until today she’d had no idea what that meant.

“We’re not interrogating them. We’re talking to them. It’s different.” The stove sputtered for several seconds before it lit. “Turn on a light, will you? I can’t see anything.”

The room flared into shape, blandly reassuring: seashell prints on the walls, a sign in the kitchen that said This Way to the Beach. Jake wandered over to the small antique roll-away desk, which was the only piece of furniture in the whole open-plan room that wasn’t white or beach themed. Suddenly, he sucked in a sharp breath, as if he’d just seen a snake.

“What?” she asked “What is it?”

He had picked up a manila folder, the kind Gemma associated with dental records. “It’s a medical report from Haven.” He looked up. His eyes were burning again with that dark light, the kind that seemed to absorb and not reflect. “They must have brought it with them.”

He moved to the couch with the report and powered up his computer again. Gemma came to look. The folder was disappointingly light and contained only a single, double-sided report. Still, it was something. She leaned over and read from the heading. Form 475-A. Release Authorization and Toxicity Report. Human Model 576.

“What does it mean?” she asked. The whole report might as well have been written in another language. Every other phrase was one like over-conversion or neural impairment or some string of weird chemical-looking codes like vCJD-12 or pR-56.

“Let’s ask the oracle,” Jake said. “Google,” he clarified, when she looked at him.

She sat on the arm of the couch, because when she leaned any farther she was forced to inhale him, the new soap smell and the warmth of his skin, and she got distracted. But she felt awkward sitting there, posed and clumsy, like an overinflated doll, and so she returned to the stove just to have something to do.

When the bedroom door opened, she spun around, startled. Lyra looked better than she had on the marshes. Pretty, despite the sallowness of her skin and her cheekbones like beveled edges. But there was something frightening about Lyra’s stillness, and the blandness of her facial expression, as if there was nothing inside directing her, as if she were hollow, like a puppet.

Gemma slopped some of the chili into a bowl. “Here,” she said. Her voice sounded hysterical in the silence. “Chili. From a can. Sorry, I can’t cook. You need to eat.”

Lyra didn’t thank her. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even sit down. She just took the bowl from Gemma automatically and began to eat mechanically, holding the spoon wrong and the bowl to her lips and shoveling the chili into her open mouth. It was strange to see a girl so fragile eat like that, like she was actually a trash compactor. Weirdly, Gemma liked her better for it.

“Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” Jake said, and Gemma jumped. This was it: they were on the verge of understanding. Suddenly all her fear left her at once. It was like standing at the top of a really steep sledding hill and then letting go. There was nothing to do anymore but ride. “That’s a category of disease. Mad cow is a TSE.”

“Okay.” Gemma went to sit next to Jake on the couch again. It was better than standing next to Lyra, the living evidence of whatever deranged experiments they were doing at Haven. “But what does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Jake rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “There are just references to it in the report.”

At the sink, Lyra released her bowl with a clatter. Gemma looked up and saw she’d gone very still. “You shouldn’t be looking at that,” she said. Gemma wondered at Lyra’s loyalty to Haven—was she trying to protect its secrets?

“Why not?” Jake turned to Lyra. “You stole it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Lyra said evenly. “But that’s different.”

“It’s not like they’ll miss it now. The whole place is an ash heap.”

“Jake,” Gemma said quickly. For the first time, Lyra had flinched.