Blood. Bodies in a constant state of hemorrhage, of organ failure, of beginning to turn.
Someone was always getting sick—in the toilet, in a trash can, on the floor when they couldn’t make it to a trash can. Gemma knew that prions weren’t contagious, at least that they couldn’t be spread by breathing, but still she couldn’t help but see prions turning invisibly on the air like sharp-pointed snowflakes, like dandelion fluff, like burrs that would stick in her lungs when she inhaled.
Diapered toddlers who had never learned to walk instead crawled among the wreckage of dirt, or simply sucked their fingers and cried.
Nurses still wandered the halls, like bewildered ghosts, as if questioning why on earth they couldn’t just move on. They did the best they could to help, with limited supplies, dwindling medication, and power that failed regularly.
A single building, L-shaped, and boys and girls separated by security at the joint. Soldiers moved through crowds of standing cadavers—hollow-cheeked and fire-eyed, dizzy with disease and starvation—by parting them with their rifles. When one of the soldiers, a girl with tight cornrows, stopped to comfort a bawling replica, another soldier reprimanded her.
“You’ll give them the wrong idea,” he said. He was tall, with pale eyelashes and a burst of acne across his forehead. “It’ll only be worse in the end.”
Gemma tried to find her way to Pete, to make sure he was okay, but was stopped by a redhead in full-on camouflage who looked like someone who might have been in her English class.
“Turn around,” he said. “You speak English? Turn around.”
Another soldier, a girl with her nails painted different rainbow colors, was sitting in a single plastic chair still bolted down in a waiting area otherwise empty of furniture. “They all speak English, dummy,” she said softly. She was playing a video game on her phone. Gemma could tell from the sound effects.
“Doesn’t seem like it, half the time.” Gemma had turned away from him but not quickly enough to miss what he said next. “Shit. I don’t even like twins.”
She wanted to scream, but just like in her dream she couldn’t. Not me, she wanted to say. You’ve got the wrong girl.
But how could she? Three other Gemmas tailed her. Three Gemmas who stood shoulder to shoulder, blink-blink-blink, breathing with her lungs, twitching with her hands, turning their heads on her own too-short neck.
No one would come to save her. Not a single person in the world knew where she was. Even when Pete’s car was discovered—which she had no doubt it had been by now—there was nothing to suggest where they had gone, not a trace of evidence, no ransom notes, no trail of blood.
Her only hope was that somehow, her parents would catch up to Lyra and Caelum and realize what had happened. That her dad would charge in here in his Big Suit way, threatening to sue everyone from Saperstein to the president of the United States, and she and Pete would be saved. But she knew, too, that would mean that Lyra and Caelum would have to take their place. Maybe the whole thing had a sick poeticism. After all these years, she’d finally ended up back where she started. Where she belonged.
It was better not to think. She gave up on trying to speak to anyone and didn’t bother trying to get anyone to speak to her. When Dr. Saperstein came back, he would see her, know her, and realize his mistake—that is, if her dad didn’t find a way to track her down first.
Until then, she simply had to survive.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 11 of Lyra’s story.
TWELVE
THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO. No books, no magazines, no computers, no phones. Nothing but mattresses jigsawed on the floor and hundreds of girls sticky with injuries sitting or lying around.
Some of the replicas had made up their own games, rolling pen caps or stacking coffee cups. She even saw a girl, maybe three or four years old, playing with an old syringe. When Gemma tried to take it from her, the girl turned unexpectedly vicious, spitting in her face, going for Gemma’s eyes. Gemma stumbled backward, and someone reached out to steady her. Again, Gemma had the sense of falling into a mirror: one of the reflections, one of her clones, had followed her.
“Don’t worry about the Browns,” the girl said. Her eyes were always moving—around and around, taking in Gemma’s hair, and stud earrings, and fingernails, which were painted yellow and green, alternating—as if trying to generate some centrifugal force that would pull Gemma closer. “They’re all soft in the head.”
Gemma went from feeling angry to feeling sick. She turned around again and saw the girl had resumed her play, pulling up wool fibers from a patch of dirty carpet. Another girl, identical to the first, had scuttled closer to watch. Looking at them side by side made Gemma dizzy.
“You’re not one of us,” the girl said. Her breath reeked, and Gemma felt sorry about being disgusted. “You were made somewhere else. There were only five genotypes at Haven. Numbers six through ten. And number six is dead.”
“I know,” Gemma said automatically. “I saw her.” It made a twisted kind of sense that this girl could see what the people in charge couldn’t, or wouldn’t. To them, the replicas weren’t people. They were lab rats. Or they were things, manufactured shells, like so many plastic parts cut from the same mold. It must be hard to keep track.
The girl leaned closer, and Gemma had to stop herself from flinching. At the same time, she was seized by an impulse to dig her fingers into the girl’s eyes, to pull them out, to tear off her skin. She wanted her face back.
“Number six was named. We called her Cassiopeia. Dr. O’Donnell named me, too. My name is Calliope. Are you named?” Calliope’s eyes were huge. Hopeful. April called it Gemma’s sad kitten face.
Gemma nodded. “Gemma,” she said.
Calliope smiled. Two of her teeth overlapped. She hadn’t had braces, obviously, like Gemma had. “Gemma,” she repeated. “Where were you made?”
Gemma was exhausted again, though it couldn’t be much past noon. She wondered whether the girl had ever met anyone new, at least anyone who would talk to her. “I was made at Haven, like you, but then I went somewhere else.”
“Outside,” Calliope said, exhaling the word as if it were the final piece of a powerful magic spell.
After that, Calliope wouldn’t leave Gemma alone. She followed Gemma when she walked the 282 paces she could walk, between the curtained-off wing where the sickest replicas lay mangled, tethered weakly to life by grim-faced nurses working a dozen machines; to the two bathrooms, men’s and women’s, in the no-man’s-land between the gendered sides.