When Gemma sat, Calliope sat a few feet away, watching her. At one point Gemma lay down and pretended to sleep. Still, she felt Calliope watching, and she sat up, finally, relieved to realize that she was angry, that there was another feeling elbowing in besides fear.
“What?” Gemma said. Looking at Calliope still gave her a terrible sense of vertigo, like being spun around blindfolded and then discovering, with the blindfold off, that the world was still spinning. “What do you want?”
She’d meant to scare her, or startle her away, but Calliope kept staring. Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope had crawled into Gemma’s body, that she wasn’t another person but a shadow, a squatter. That would explain the tight, airless feeling Gemma had, as if when she breathed it had to be for both of them.
“I’m looking at you,” she said, “to see what the outside looks like. You have hair like the nurses. And you’re fatter,” she added, but not meanly at all. Of course, Gemma realized, she didn’t know that this was mean, like she didn’t know it was rude to stare.
This made Gemma feel sorry for hating her face, for hating to see her, for wishing she would disappear.
Calliope tipped onto her knees and pulled herself closer, then rocked back on her heels again. She might have been Gemma’s age, but she seemed younger. “Do you know Dr. O’Donnell?” she asked. “She’s the one who named me. Then she left. A lot of them leave but most of them not for good. She’s outside, too,” Calliope clarified, as if Gemma might not have understood.
Gemma tried to swallow and couldn’t. How to begin to explain? “I don’t know Dr. O’Donnell,” she said at last.
“What about Pinocchio?” Calliope asked. “Do you know Pinocchio?”
“Pinocchio?” Gemma thought Calliope must be joking. But she was completely serious. Her eyes were moon-bright, huge in that thin face—familiar and also totally foreign. It occurred to Gemma that she’d never heard Lyra make a joke. She’d never even heard her be sarcastic.
“Pinocchio’s made out of wood just like a doll,” Calliope said. She slid fluidly and without warning through different ideas, through fiction and reality, the past and present. “Wayne calls me Pinocchio, and I don’t say how Dr. O’Donnell named me first. Names are like that. You have to be careful—once someone names you, you belong to them for life. Pinocchio wanted to go to the outside and be a real boy.” Once again, she leapt to a new stream of thought: she had no meaning, no system to unwind them, to decide what was important and what wasn’t. “He got ate by a whale but then he made a fire in the whale’s stomach.” She laughed and Gemma flinched. It wasn’t exactly a laugh, more like the sound of a hammer against metal. “He made a fire just like the one at Haven. He lit it right in the whale’s belly, right here.” She pointed to her own stomach. She seemed to find this hilarious. “Wayne told me how he did it. And so the whale had to spit him up. I seen fire at Haven and I wasn’t scared, not like some of thems.”
Untangling Calliope’s speech took almost physical effort. She nearly explained that Pinocchio was only a story, but stopped herself.
“Outside is huge,” she said instead. “Much bigger than you can imagine.”
Calliope hugged her knees, shrugging. “I know. I seen it through the fence and on TV, too. Who cares, anyway? It dies, it dies, it dies.” She turned and pointed casually to three replicas. “It dies.” She pointed to herself. Before Gemma could say anything, before she could deny it, Calliope was talking again.
“Haven is much bigger than where here is. Here is only the size of how A-Wing is at Haven. But there’s more doors at Haven, and more nurses, too. I don’t like the nurses, except for some of them are okay, because they feed us greens and blues for sleeping. One of the guards let me touch her gun.” She spoke quickly, hardly pausing for air, as if the words were a kind of sickness she had one chance to get out. “At Haven we can’t go in with the males because of their penises and how a normal baby gets made. So we have to stay away, except at Christmas for the Choosing.”
Something touched Gemma’s spine and neck, and made the fine blond hair April had always called her goose down lift on her arms, just like that, like bird feathers ruffled by a bad wind.
“What do you mean, the Choosing?” she asked, but Calliope wasn’t listening. She was pinballing between stories and ideas, feeding Gemma all the words she’d had to carry alone.
“Have you ever used a penis to make a baby?” she asked, and Gemma, stunned, couldn’t answer. “The doctors still don’t know if they can, I mean if we can, the its. Pepper got a baby in her stomach, but then she cut her wrists so afterward they all got more careful.”
Gemma could hardly follow the story—Calliope combined pronouns or used them indiscriminately. She’d heard Lyra and Caelum refer to themselves as it at different times. All the replicas confused phrases like want and ask, make and own.
I owned it, one of the replicas insisted, when a nurse tried to take away a mold-fuzzed cup of old food remnants she’d been concealing beneath a panel of loose floor tile. I owned it. It’s me. And some of the replicas couldn’t speak at all—they could only growl and keen, like animals.
“So the doctors don’t know.” Calliope was still talking, working a fingernail into a scab on her knee; when the blood flowed she didn’t even wipe it, just watched it make a small path down her shin, as if it was someone else’s blood entirely. “Some of the its are too skinny for the monthly bleeding, but I have mine. Wayne said that means I’m a woman now.”
Nausea came like movement, like the rolling of a boat beneath her. “Who’s Wayne?”
“He’s the one who told me about Pinocchio.” Her eyes weren’t like eyes at all: they were more like fingers, grasping for something. “I always wanted a baby,” she said in a whisper. “Sometimes I used to go to Postnatal and hold them and say nice things to them, like I made them instead of the doctors.”
Blood was rushing so hard in Gemma’s head she could hardly hear. Infants. Babies. She hadn’t seen any since she’d been here. What had happened to all of them?
But she didn’t have to ask. Calliope leaned forward, all big eyes, all hot little breath, all need. “Postnatal burned fast,” she said. “The roof caved in and all my babies got smashed.” Gemma turned away from her. But there was nowhere to go.
Nobody belongs here, child. Not even the devil himself.
Calliope pulled away again, smiling to show her teeth. “I like Haven better for most things. But here’s better because of the males and how you can talk to them if you want.” She said it so casually that Gemma nearly missed it.
“Wait. Wait a second.” She took a deep breath. “What do you mean, you can talk to them?”
Calliope smiled with only the very corners of her mouth, as if it was something rare she had to hoard. “You can come with me,” she said. “You can see for yourself.”