She felt a surge of hatred so strong it scared her: it was a hand from the dark side of the universe that reached up to turn her inside out. “You’ve seen plenty of me,” she said, but heard her voice as if it was a stranger’s. “Four, by my count.”
“Looks can be deceiving, believe me. There is only one Gemma Ives.” He smiled again at this. Patient, indulgent, very slightly embarrassed. Sorry about the confusion. These little mix-ups do happen. “Your parents, I’m sure, would agree.”
“Dr. Saperstein—” The woman in the suit began to speak, but he cut her off.
“Later.” For a split second she saw, from beneath the surface of his expression, something sharp and mean solidify: it was like the sudden vision of a very sharp tooth. But almost instantly, it was gone. He smiled at Gemma again and opened a door that led to a small and very ordinary-looking office. “Why don’t you have a seat inside? I’m going to grab a soda. You want a soda? Or something to eat?”
Gemma shook her head, although she was desperately thirsty, and weak with hunger, too. But she didn’t want to take anything Dr. Saperstein offered.
“Go on. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right with you.” When she didn’t move, he hitched his smile a little wider—she could actually see the effort, watch individual muscles straining to achieve the right look. “Go on. It’s all right.”
“No,” she said. She wanted to scream. She wished she could open her mouth and let her rage come up like a sickness. “It’s not. It’s definitely not all right.”
“Well, that’s what we’re going to try and sort out.” He spread his hands. As if she were the one who’d screwed up and now refused to admit it. “Look, I highly doubt you want to stay here. Right? So go on and have a seat, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can scare up some caffeine.”
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 13 of Lyra’s story.
FOURTEEN
DR. SAPERSTEIN RETURNED WITH TWO cans of warm Diet Coke, even though she’d said she didn’t want one. She didn’t want to sit and planned to say no, but at the last minute she was worried about her legs, which had begun to shake. So she sat, tucking her ankles together, pressing her hands between her thighs, hoping he wouldn’t see how afraid she was.
He poured his soda into a plastic cup, took a sip, and made a face. “Why does the diet stuff always taste like the back of a spoon?” He shook his head. “The real stuff always goes first around here.”
Gemma felt more confused than ever. Dr. Saperstein didn’t look evil. She tried to paste what she knew about him onto his face, to make the images align. Emily Huang, those photographs of the two of them together. Jake Witz and his father. Those hundreds and hundreds of starved and broken people he treated like possessions, disposed of by burning them in the middle of the ocean after drilling their bones or opening their skulls for marrow and tissue and cell samples.
But she couldn’t make it hang there. She couldn’t make it fit.
He leaned forward. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you’re here,” he said. Shockingly, she believed him. “I’ve been in Washington, DC, crawling around on my knees trying to save this place. . . .”
“What—what is it?” She had to swallow hard against the feeling that she would begin to cry. “What are you doing with all of them here?”
He shook his head. “Nothing, now,” he said. “I drove straight from DC this morning. Our funding’s been cut.” This time, his smile never traveled up past his lips. “Twenty years of research. Twenty years of effort, incremental gains, mistakes and corrections. All of it . . .” He gestured as if to scatter something into a passing wind.
“And what happens to them?” Gemma said, through a hard fist in her throat. She was still too afraid to ask what she really wanted to know: What would happen to her? And to Pete?
Dr. Saperstein took off his glasses to rub his eyes. “How much did your father tell you about Haven?”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Gemma said. Dr. Saperstein looked surprised. “But I know that you’ve been using the replicas to grow prions.”
“To study prions,” he corrected her. “You make them sound like petri dishes.”
“Isn’t that what they are?” The pressure in Gemma’s chest was so great she felt as though she was speaking around a concrete block. “It was all for the military, wasn’t it? It was all to make weapons.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I won’t ask you how you know that,” he said. She could tell she’d impressed him and, weirdly, felt happy about it. Then she hated herself. Why did she care about impressing him? “Look, you obviously know quite a bit about Haven. But there’s a lot you don’t understand. The US military gave us one of our biggest contracts, yes. But it wasn’t our only one.” Then: “You know the word prion wasn’t even coined until I was in college? It’s been more than thirty years since then, but until I took over the Institute, we’d discovered almost nothing more about the way prions work, or how they progressed, or how fast.” The overhead light grayed the look of his skin. “Prion disorders share traits with some of the most crippling brain diseases we know—diseases like Alzheimer’s, which affects millions of people per year. Diseases we can’t cure or even help.”
“I don’t need a lecture,” Gemma said. “I asked what happens to the replicas now.”
“There are protocols,” he said gently. “I’m sure you understand that. Haven deals with—dealt with—deadly biomaterials. We’re talking about a major health hazard.”
Deadly biomaterials. Otherwise known as: replicas. Gemma recognized the technique: every so often her father hid behind words too, not big words but acronyms, military slang, a patter she could never understand. But she knew what Saperstein was saying, and no amount of fancy vocabulary could make it any less horrible.
“You’re going to kill them,” she said. Though it was what she’d been expecting, it was terrible to say the words out loud. The room seemed suddenly to be filling with fog. Or maybe it was her head that was filling up. She couldn’t make his face come into focus. “What about me? Are you going to kill me, too?”
“Kill you?” He actually laughed. “Last time I checked, that was still illegal in this country. I’m going to make some calls, and sort out some details, and get you home to your father. Then I’m going to hope he doesn’t kill me.”
He didn’t sound like he was lying. “What about Pete?” she asked. She thought, though she couldn’t be sure, that for a split second he froze, and a sour panic rose in her throat. “If you don’t let him go, I’ll tell everyone. My dad will track you down and murder you—”
“Gemma, please. Of course Pete will go home.” If he’d hesitated before, now he spoke easily. “I know you think I’m some kind of monster, but I’m not. I’m a geek from Bethesda, Maryland, who fell in love with science and has loved it my whole life. I have a cat at home. Did you know that? He’s a thirteen-year-old tub named Copernicus. Copper for short. I’m a Dodgers fan, God help me.”