Calliope came for her in the middle of the night. It could have been midnight, or four a.m.; there were no clocks in the holding center, and since arriving Gemma had truly been aware of the rubbery nature of time, when there were no watches, phones, or activities to pin it down to.
“Follow me,” she said, and took Gemma’s wrist. Gemma had seen staff members guide the replicas this way, and imagined this was where she’d learned it.
They moved through the maze of sleeping replicas, most of them drugged up on sleeping aids distributed by the nurses before lights-out: pills for the replicas whose pain was greatest, and, when these ran out, simply plastic mouthwash cups full of NyQuil. Gemma had thrown hers out, as she assumed Calliope must have, too.
As they passed through the darkness, Gemma again had a strange doubling feeling, as if she and Calliope were two shadows, two watermarks identically imprinted. Or maybe she was the shadow, and Calliope the real thing.
Only one nurse, nodding to sleep in a swivel desk chair despite the lack of desk, jerked awake to ask where they were going. Calliope whispered, “Bathroom,” and the nurse waved them on.
“Be quick,” she said.
No-man’s-land: the makeshift kitchen, the bathrooms, a plastic card table covered with scattered magazines and phone chargers, what passed for a break room for the staff during the day. A light in the kitchen was on, and as always the coffee machine was burbling and letting off a burned-rubber stink. There was always coffee brewing, at every hour, although so far Gemma hadn’t actually seen anyone drink from the machine.
Only a single soldier was on duty, the same red-haired guy with a pimply jawbone. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
“That one never plays,” Calliope whispered to Gemma.
“Plays what?” Gemma whispered.
But Calliope just shook her head. “He thinks it’s bad luck.”
Gemma saw a quick look of pain tighten the soldier’s features, as if seeing them together hurt. He turned away again as soon as they veered right, toward the bathrooms.
At the last second, instead of going into the girls’ bathroom, they simply went left, into the boys’. Unbelievably simple. Gemma doubted the soldier had even noticed. He probably thought the replicas were all dumb, anyway. It was reasonable to expect they’d make mistakes.
The bathroom was only half-lit. Most of the bulbs had burned out in the ceiling, and a sink filled with paper towels had overflowed, leaving puddles of water on the floor. The tiles seemed to pick up her voice and hurl it in a thousand directions. But the boys’ bathroom had stalls, at least, as well as two puddly urinals.
“What now?” Gemma asked.
“We wait,” Calliope said. “Come.” She took Gemma’s hand and pulled her into one of the toilet stalls. She closed the door behind them and sat down on the toilet seat.
Less than a minute later the bathroom door opened again. Calliope held up a hand, gesturing for Gemma to be quiet. For a long second there was nothing but the drip, drip, drip of water from the faucet.
Then a boy: “Hello.”
Calliope stood up then. “In here,” she said, and opened the door.
He was younger—maybe twelve, thirteen. It was difficult to tell, since all the replicas, skinny as they were, with no concept of words they hadn’t experienced directly, like snow and cross-country, seemed younger than their true age. But Calliope looked pleased anyway.
“A male,” she said, as if Gemma might not be able to tell. The boy had very dark skin and perfect features and the kind of lips Gemma’s mom’s friends paid money for. He would grow up to be beautiful. If he grew up.
“What crop are you?” Calliope asked.
“Fourteen,” he said. “A White.”
This made her smile. “Like me,” she said. “The Whites are the most important.” She turned back to Gemma again. “Well? What do you want him for?”
“I need you to give someone a message for me,” she said. He showed no signs of having understood. “Another male. Like me, from the outside. His name is Pete. Can you ask him to come? Can you bring him?”
The boy looked at Calliope. She nodded, barely. “What’s for me?”
She tilted her head to look at him. Once again, Gemma had the uncanny doubling sensation of watching herself in a fun-house mirror, the kind that elongated and thinned.
“Observation,” she said, and held up one hand. “Five seconds.”
He frowned. “I want to stethoscope,” he said.
She shook her head. “Observation.”
He looked away.
“Ten seconds,” he said finally. “Five now, five when I bring him.”
Finally, Calliope shrugged. Before Gemma could stop her, she lifted her shirt, exposing her chest: ribs visible, small pale nipples identical in shape to Gemma’s, breasts stiff and small and hard, like little knots. Gemma was so horrified, she froze, and by the time she thought to grab Calliope’s arm, to haul her shirt down, Calliope was already finished.
“Five seconds,” she said. She didn’t seem bothered at all, and the boy didn’t seem all that interested. “Now go.”
He turned and left the bathroom. As soon as he was gone, Gemma said, “You shouldn’t have done that.” She felt sick. They hadn’t even cared that she was there, that she was watching. It hadn’t occurred to them to care. She supposed observation, for them, happened in front of lots of people. She wondered if they even knew what privacy meant. “You didn’t have to.”
Calliope looked puzzled. “It’s only observation,” she said. She smiled and showed her crowded teeth. “I’ve observed with twelve males so far. Only number forty-four is ahead of me. She’s observed with fourteen. Plus, she lets anyone stethoscope with her, even the guards if they want.”
She spoke matter-of-factly. There was no playfulness to it. It wasn’t pleasure, just something to do. It wasn’t at all like the party games people had played in middle school, Seven Minutes in Heaven, the stoplight game, all of them excuses to squeeze a nipple in a dark room and knock braces for a bit. All night, Gemma imagined, the bathroom would fill and empty with replicas meeting to touch and bargain and barter and stare.
Gemma leaned up against the counter, not even caring it was wet. The half-light made strange looping shadows on the walls and ceiling. “Stethoscope?”
“Like how the doctors and nurses do it,” Calliope said. She placed a hand on her own chest to demonstrate, inhaling deep. Then she shifted her hand again, and again. Stethoscope: they’d invented their own term for second base. She dropped her hand. “Have you ever done stethoscope?” she asked.
“No,” Gemma lied. She thought of being with Pete in her parents’ basement, next to the rows of canned goods and bottled water, and how he’d traced the long scar between her chest and navel. It could have been a memory from someone else’s life.
She had the crazy idea that maybe Calliope and her other replicas would take not just her skin and hair and freckles, but her past, her life, her memory. The longer she stayed here, the less she would have that would belong to her and to her alone.