She was losing it. She opened her eyes and fumbled to turn on the faucet, drinking from a cupped palm. Behind her, Calliope’s face was a narrow shadow of hers.
“Then there’s the full examining,” Calliope was saying. Gemma didn’t have to ask what that was. She could imagine well enough. “But I never done that yet. I tried one time with a Green, but he got sick right in the middle. Then one of the guards came in and yelled.”
Gemma seized on this. “Didn’t you get in trouble?” she asked. She didn’t want to talk about examining and stethoscope and observation anymore. She didn’t want to think about these broken kids playing doctor.
Calliope looked puzzled. “Lots of the guards play too,” she said.
Gemma understood, now, what Calliope had said to her outside the bathroom, and why the red-haired soldier had looked at them the way he did. He must know what went on at night, and what the other soldiers did with the replicas when they thought they could get away with it.
The door opened again. The boy, the White, had returned, alone.
Gemma’s heart broke, actually broke—she felt it crumble in her chest, like a nub of chalk—but before she could ask what had happened to Pete, the door opened a second time and there he was.
Pete. He looked as if he’d been shocked into aging a hundred years. Feathery white eyelashes, hollows beneath his eyes, skin leached of color.
And yet, when he saw her, he smiled, and everything changed. Her whole world tilted, and slid her toward him, into his arms.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. His voice was the same—he might have been teasing her during a long car ride, and she tasted salt before she realized she was crying.
“Hey,” he said, pulling away to take her face in one hand. He wiped her tears with a thumb. “Hey, now. It’s all right.”
“Are you okay?” She couldn’t stop crying. Both Calliope and the male replica were watching them, truly curious, and Gemma could almost see Calliope calculating, trying to understand the way she and Pete were holding each other, what it meant, and what kind of examining this was. “Did they hurt you?”
“I’m okay, Gem. I promise. I swear.” He ducked a little to look in her eyes, keeping one hand beneath her chin. “The food sucks and this whole place could really use some body spray, but I’m fine.”
It was unbelievable that he could make her laugh, but he did. And then she choked again, and he held her, and she heard his heartbeat through his chest, and tasted her own breath on his T-shirt, and she lost track then of exactly who was who and where she ended and he began. It was like losing yourself in the softening of a warm bed you’ve been looking forward to all day.
Then Gemma felt Calliope’s fingers on her arm—cold fingers, needy.
Only when Pete sucked in a breath did she realize how strange it must be for him to see both of them together, and when he took a quick step backward, something dark and heavy opened in the bottom of her stomach.
“We have to go now,” Calliope said. “We had our turn.” But Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope had merely wanted to interrupt. She didn’t like how Calliope looked at Pete. Like someone starving who just wants to eat and eat and eat until she pukes.
“Christ.” Pete exhaled and put a hand through his hair, tufting it like a bird’s. They hadn’t shaved it. That was one good thing, at least, that they were giving him that. He managed another smile. “Sorry,” he said to Gemma. He reached out and took her hand, but his palm was sweating now. “It’s just . . .” He shook his head.
“I know,” she said. “You don’t have to say it.” That cold, dark thing was still writhing at the bottom of her stomach, and Calliope breathed next to her, clinging to her like a film. She kept his hand in hers and pretended not to notice he was sweating. “You’ll meet me here again tomorrow night?”
“Every night,” he said. His eyes moved to Calliope and back again. Gemma pretended not to see that, either.
She took a step closer to him. “They’re not going to let us out, Pete,” she said, in a low voice, though there was no point in trying to keep it a secret. Calliope could hear everything. Maybe she could even hear inside of Gemma’s head. “We know too much.”
“We’ll find a way,” he said, and his eyes softened.
Then Calliope took Gemma’s hand, and Gemma wondered whether she had just learned that kind of touch from watching Pete. How many of the other things she did and said were just imitation?
Simulacrum. A slight, unreal, or superficial likeness. Calliope’s fingers were long and very bony.
“We had our turn,” she repeated. “More of them get to go.”
“I didn’t get my second observation,” the boy said.
Calliope turned back to him. “Next time you’ll have stethoscope, then,” she said, as if it hardly concerned her.
“Tomorrow,” Gemma said to Pete, even as Calliope drew her toward the door.
“I promise.” But he was looking at Calliope, not at her, and she felt a sudden dread. Now it was Pete doubling, splitting in two, and becoming a twin version of himself who looked the same, who talked the same, but was, deep down, a stranger.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 12 of Lyra’s story.
THIRTEEN
SHE WOKE TO THE DEEP navy light of a predawn sky.
Already, the holding center was full of voices and movement, the scuffle of rubber sneakers, the tooth-chatter of heavy equipment scraped along the ground.
She sat up, edging away from Calliope, who had insisted on sharing the twin mattress. When she stood she was dizzied by a sharp, sudden hunger. She’d received a minuscule ration of spongy baked pasta for dinner, spooned from a tinfoil-covered catering tray of the kind Gemma associated with school fund-raisers.
Gemma knew that meant there must be civilization nearby—a restaurant, a deli, something. She’d even found a receipt for a Joe’s Donuts in Windsor Falls, Pennsylvania, coasting on a surf of overflowing trash outside the bathroom.
But Pennsylvania or Pakistan, what did it matter? No one knew where they were.
The sleeping replicas, motionless in the half dark, were so closely fitted together that they took on the quality of a single landscape: mounds of soft earth, ridged spines and shoulders.
A sudden light dazzled her and she turned to the window to see a van wheeling away, its headlights briefly revealing funnels of rain. More vans were arriving.
She saw soldiers jogging with rain slickers pulled down to protect their faces. Someone was using orange light sticks, like a real airport ramp handler, to indicate where the vans should park. And out of the airport came a constant flow of equipment: staff members passed in and out hauling plastic bins and waste containers, paperwork lashed into waterproof boxes, medical equipment, stacks of unused linens, snowy piles of plastic-wrapped Hanes T-shirts, hundreds of them, of the kind that were given to the replicas.
Gemma felt as if the rain had found its way inside. She was suddenly very awake and very cold.