Lyra had an uncomfortable memory again, of number 35 crawling on all fours, insisting on eating her dinner from a bowl on the ground. But number 35 had been soft in the brain. Everyone said so.
“Aren’t you worried about what will happen?” she asked. “Without medicine, without check-ins, with no one to help us when we get sick? We weren’t made for the outside.”
But even as she said it, Lyra thought again of Dr. O’Donnell. She knew how the replicas were built. She was a doctor and she’d worked at Haven. She could help.
“You really believe.” It wasn’t a question. He had turned back to her. “You believe everything they ever told you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. It was so hot. Her face was hot. He was looking at her like some of the nurses did, like she wasn’t exactly real, like he was struggling to see her.
But before he could answer, Jake was back, sliding behind the wheel.
“Sorry,” he said. “Forgot to leave the AC on. I realized you guys must be baking. Hot as balls today, isn’t it?”
72 was still watching Lyra. But then he turned back toward the window.
“Yes,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to one of the humans except in anger, and Lyra noticed that Jake startled in his seat, as if he hadn’t really expected a reply. “Hot.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 9 of Gemma’s story.
TEN
LYRA HAD NEVER SEEN SO many houses or imagined that there could be so many people in the world. She knew the facts—she’d heard the nurses and doctors discussing them sometimes, problems with overpopulation, the division between rich and poor—and the nurses often watched TV or listened to the radio or watched videos on their phones when they were bored. But knowing something was different from seeing it: house upon house, many of them identical, so she felt dizzyingly as if she were going forward and also turning a circle; car after car lined up along the streets, grass trim and vividly green. And people everywhere. People driving or out on their lawns or waiting in groups on corners for reasons she couldn’t fathom.
Jake stopped again at one of these houses, and Gemma got out of the car. Lyra watched through the window as a girl with black hair emerged from the house and barreled into Gemma’s arms. Lyra was confused by this, as she was by Jake and Gemma’s relationship, the casual way they spoke to each other, and the fact that Gemma was a replica but didn’t know it. But she was confused by so much she didn’t have the energy to worry about it.
For several minutes, Gemma and the other girl stood outside. Lyra tried to determine whether this second girl, the black-haired one, was a replica or a regular human but couldn’t tell, although she was wearing human clothes and her hair was long. She used her hands a lot. Then the girl went inside, and Gemma returned to the car alone.
“April’s going to open the gate,” she told Jake. She sounded breathless, though she hadn’t walked far. “You can park next to the pool house.”
Jake advanced the car and they corkscrewed left behind the house. Lyra saw a dazzling rectangle of water, still as a bath, which she knew must be a pool. Even though she couldn’t swim, she had the urge to go under, to wash away what felt like days of accumulated dirt and mud and sweat. There were bathtubs in Postnatal, and even though they were too small to lie down in, Lyra had sometimes filled a tub and stepped in to her ankles after it was her turn to tickle, engage, and maintain physical contact with the new replicas.
When the gate closed behind them with a loud clang, Lyra truly felt safe for the first time since leaving Haven. Contained. Controlled. Protected.
Next to the pool was a miniature version of the big house. Sliding doors opened into a large carpeted room that was dark and deliciously cold. The house was mostly white, which Lyra liked. It was like being back in Haven. Goose bumps ran along Lyra’s arm, as if someone had just touched her. Where the carpet ran out was a kitchen alcove that Lyra identified only by its stove: it looked nothing like the kitchen in Stew Pot, a vast and shiny space filled with the hiss of steam from industrial dishwashers. Through an open door she saw a large bed, also made up with a white sheet and blankets and so many pillows she couldn’t imagine what they were all for. And lined up on bookshelves next to the sofa: books. Dozens of books, four times as many as she’d seen in the nurses’ break room, so many that in her excitement the titles blended together and she couldn’t make out a single one.
She wanted to touch them. Their spines looked like different-colored candies the nurses exchanged sometimes, like the sugared lozenges the replicas got sometimes when they had coughs. But she was almost afraid to, afraid that if she did they would all blow apart. She wondered how long it would take her to read every book on the shelves. Months. Years, even. Maybe they would be allowed to stay here, in this clean and pretty room, with the sun that patterned the carpet and the soft hum of hidden air-conditioning.
At W-A-L-M-A-R-T, Gemma had bought Lyra and 72 new clothes—“nothing fancy, and I had to guess how they would fit”—soap, shampoo, toothbrushes and toothpaste, and more food, including cereal and milk, granola bars, cans of soup she said she could show them how to heat in the microwave, and at least a dozen frozen meals. She showed them where the shower was—a single shower stall, the first Lyra had ever seen—and apologized that there was only one bed.
“So, you know, you’ll have to share, unless one of you wants to take the sofa,” she said. Lyra felt suddenly uncomfortable, remembering Pepper and her unborn baby, and how she’d been found with her wrists open; the Christmas parties when the doctors got drunk and sometimes visited the dorms late at night, staggering on their feet and smelling sharply of alcohol swabs. That was why it was better for males and females to stay apart. “I know you must be exhausted, so we’re going to leave you alone for a bit, okay? Just don’t go anywhere.”