They were closing up shop.
She picked her way between the replicas to the central corridor, full of a deep and driving panic, half expecting to find that she was alone, that the walls had been dismantled and the rug pulled up, that she had been left behind. Several nurses, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, pushed past her wheeling IV carts. The atmosphere was tense, almost desperate.
“What’s happening?” Gemma asked, without expecting anyone to answer, and no one did. “What’s going on?”
A patrolling soldier frowned briefly at Gemma before turning her attention back to several staff members trying to work a medical cart through a door down to the loading dock. “Careful,” she said. “Stairs are wet.” Gemma noticed her fingernails were painted pink.
She kept walking, feeling as if she were in the beginning of a nightmare. Even before anything bad has happened, you know, you’re sure, that bad things will come. When guards in no-man’s-land prevented her from going any farther, she went again to the window, mesmerized by the look of all the headlights through the rapidly ebbing dark. How quickly would it take them to clean the place out, to erase all the evidence that Haven had ever existed?
And what would they do with the replicas?
Why the sudden urgency? Why now?
But the last question, at least, was answered even as she stood at the window, squinting through a mist of condensation.
Because a new vehicle was arriving, not a van but a regular sedan, like the kind of shitty rental a budget travel agency might give you. From the driver’s seat came a tall man with a dark beard and glasses. He stood for a second, squinting up at the airport, his glasses, in the glow of the exterior lamps, so bright it looked like they themselves were glowing.
He grimaced a little as the rain hit him. Then he ducked and began to jog through a slosh of puddles toward the door, and Gemma saw a flurry of movement, flapping raincoats and umbrellas, as he was enfolded by staff members and hustled inside.
Dr. Saperstein was back.
A woman in a tailored pantsuit came for Gemma midafternoon. It was the same woman Gemma had pegged for a government slug when she had first arrived. As far as Gemma could tell, it was the same suit, too.
They went through a door marked with a sign that unnecessarily stated Authorized Personnel Only, guarded by two soldiers with long-range rifles. Down a set of stairs, the same ones they’d climbed Sunday night. Gemma knew they must be level with the tarmac, imagined phantom travelers hurrying with rolling suitcases and duffels toward waiting short-haul jets.
Through another door for Authorized Personnel, they reached what must once have been the airport’s administrative hub, an inner funnel of connected rooms still showing the ghost-marks of old desks. The overhead lights were out, and a few standing lamps left whole areas oily with shadow. There were tubs of plastic containers full of shrink-wrapped sterilized needles and miniature urine collection vials. Two fridges were marked with handwritten signs: Live specimens, do not open.
Hidden generators bled thick cables across the floor, and Gemma thought of bits of dark hair clinging to the damp floor of a gym. Stacked messily on a folding table were cardboard boxes full of translucent medical gloves and antibacterial cloths, cotton swabs and rubber thermometer tips, laptops wired to a single power strip, and three-ring binders. Here, she knew, must be the remains of Haven’s record keeping, the experiential evidence it had accumulated over decades and had not yet had a chance to move elsewhere or destroy.
Another woman, this one a stranger, leaned knuckles-down on a desk, in the posture of a gorilla, peering over the shoulder of a red-haired guy at a computer. She immediately straightened up.
“Ah, shit.” The woman had to step over the fluid ropes of electrical cable to get close. Her hair was cut short. She reminded Gemma of one of her favorite nannies, Laverne, a soft-spoken Haitian woman who’d come up from Louisiana and gave hugs that felt like being wrapped in a blanket. But the impression was over the moment she spoke. “What a mess.”
“Hi yourself,” said Gemma’s escort.
“Not what you thought?” The red-haired guy was still lit faintly by the computer screen, and the glare in his glasses had the weird effect of erasing his eyes beneath them. There was something wrong with the skin on the left side of his face, and his chin beneath his lips. It looked weirdly shiny, as if it were covered with a layer of Vaseline. He’d been badly burned, Gemma realized, and her stomach yanked: he’d been at Haven.
Laverne-not-Laverne took two sudden steps forward and snatched up Gemma’s chin, as if it were a fish that might otherwise dart away. She angled her face left and right before Gemma managed to pull away.
“I don’t know where she came from.” Her eyes on Gemma’s face felt like mosquitoes, circling and circling without landing anywhere. “She’s not one of ours.”
“I told you,” Gemma said, though it was obvious the woman wasn’t speaking to her. She let her hatred narrow like a knife inside her. “You guys fucked up, big-time.”
Not-Laverne was still staring. “Werner, pull up Sources, will you?” She pivoted, finally, and moved behind the computer again, leaning over to point. “D-101,” she said. “See here? Some of our first donor tissue. And these are the genotypes that took. Numbers six through ten.”
“Number six is Disposed,” the man, Werner, said.
The woman in the suit was sweating. “You told us a boy and a girl. This one and her boyfriend fit the description.”
“They aren’t ours.” Not-Laverne looked green. Werner was chewing on an unlit cigarette. Then: “Dr. Saperstein will nail you to the wall for this.”
Gemma was sick of being spoken about as if she wasn’t in the room. “My name is Gemma Ives. Ives,” she repeated, and saw Not-Laverne register the name, saw it pass through her like a current.
“Ives.” Werner nearly choked. He wet his lower lip with his tongue. “Is that like . . . ?”
But he trailed off nervously as behind Gemma another door opened and then closed firmly with a click. The sudden silence filled the room by emptying it of pressure. She felt a pop in her ears, as if they’d just dropped altitude on a plane.
She turned, knowing already what she would see: Dr. Saperstein, smiling, holding his glasses in one hand, shaking his head, like some kindly guidance counselor who’d discovered a mistake in her first-period schedule.
“The last time I saw you, you were six months old,” he said. He looked shorter and older than she’d been picturing him—of course, the photographs she had were outdated, and she’d been a baby when her father had severed his connection to Haven.