Another bullet blasted through the door, this time punching out one of the overhead lights. Calliope ducked and scuttled beneath the sinks as a spray of plastic and glass sifted down on them like a snow. Still keeping her injured hand wound tightly in his fist, Pete put an arm around Gemma, herding them inside one of the bathroom stalls. She leaned against the hollow of his chest, and he whispered it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, so many times the word and his heartbeat became confused in her head, until she heard in its rhythm that same exact message.
The initial shock had passed and already her body was working to absorb the pain, accept its reality, to find equilibrium inside it: a process she knew intimately after so many hospital visits, so many surgeries and scars. She missed her mom with a sudden sharpness even worse than the physical pain—how she sat next to Gemma’s hospital bed, whispering it’s gonna be okay, I’m here, just like Pete was doing now; how she’d climb into bed next to Gemma, making a seashell-curve of her body, and the two of them would fall asleep. She missed her mom and wished, more than anything, that she could say she was sorry. She’d been so angry with Kristina that they had barely spoken in weeks, and Gemma could see the way it was killing her mom, coiling her down around an internal misery like a winch.
And now it was too late. They would die here. She closed her eyes and tried to hang on to an impression of her mom’s voice, soothing her to sleep.
“Hush, hush.” It was Calliope’s voice she heard instead. During a break in the rhythm of gunshots, Calliope came toward her. She moved quickly, propelling herself with her palms and sliding belly-down on the floor with the sinuous grace of an eel. Gemma, still half-blind from pain and shock, was repulsed. The gunshots started again, and Gemma found herself briefly fantasizing about a bullet cleaving Calliope’s head in two, or just evaporating her, as her finger had been evaporated.
Calliope crowded into the stall with them and began touching Gemma, stroking her arms, her wrist, her thighs. “Hush, hush, there’s no reason to cry,” she said. “It’s a finger, just a little finger.”
“We need to get out of here,” Pete said. He hadn’t let go of her injured hand, not for a single second, but already the toilet paper was nearly useless, soggy with blood. “She needs a doctor.”
Calliope looked briefly annoyed. “She doesn’t need a doctor,” she said. “I’ll take care of Gemma, don’t worry. Just as soon as it’s over.”
“This isn’t one of your fucking games.” Pete’s voice edged toward a shout. “She’s hurt, can’t you see that? She needs help.” Gemma wanted to tell him to be quiet—they would be heard, they would be found, they would be killed—but she couldn’t. She didn’t even know who to be afraid of. She was as terrified of Calliope, of her strange little smiles and the light touch of her fingers, as she was of the guards who were shooting, still shooting. She heard screaming and pictured hundreds of replicas simply mowed down where they were sleeping, a surf of blood rising, coming to drown them all.
“It’s not a game,” Calliope said, and she drew away from Gemma, looking hurt. “It was never a game. But you can’t leave now, anyway, not until it’s sure.”
“Not until what’s sure?” Gemma said. Her voice sounded as if it had been punched through with holes. Calliope chewed the inside of her cheek and didn’t answer. She was angry, Gemma knew, because Pete had yelled at her. “Please, Calliope.”
“It’s like Pinocchio, like I told you,” Calliope said, sounding almost bored. “He got swallowed up, so he started a fire to get out.” She held up her left hand, turning it, admiring it from several different angles. Then she began to touch her pinkie finger, bend it and flex it, as if to see whether it, too, would evaporate now that Gemma’s was gone. And yet each time she moved or stroked her finger, Gemma felt a phantom stirring in her own hand, and a new wave of triggered pain.
“You started a fire?” Gemma said, trying to hang on to the thread, to stay focused, to make sense of the nightmare. They’d been so close to being released.
“I didn’t,” Calliope said, still sulking. “Some of the other thems did.”
Gemma remembered feeling, earlier tonight, as she and Calliope wove through a slum of bodies and filthy mattresses, that the replicas weren’t sleeping, only pretending to. She felt suddenly dizzy. How many replicas were there in the airport? Five hundred? Six? More?
And maybe three dozen, four dozen guards, a handful of doctors and nurses.
“Wayne thought he taught me something about fire because of his friend Pinocchio,” Calliope said, with new scorn in her voice that made her seem older. “But I knew about fire forever. When I was little, there was a kitchen fire, and we didn’t use the Stew Pot for days.”
“This . . . this was your idea?” Gemma asked. She remembered what Dr. Saperstein had said. The replicas can’t feel loss, or love, or empathy. To them there is surviving and not surviving, and that’s it.
Calliope ignored that question. “The people always think we don’t remember,” she said. “They think we don’t pay attention, that we don’t listen, that we’re all soft in the head. But I’ve been listening. I know plenty. I know how to use a gun.”
Immediately, as if in direct response to that statement, another quick-fire burst of rifle fire just outside the bathroom sent terrible echoes through Gemma’s head and the back of her teeth. She heard a man’s voice shout—a plea, a call for help, she wasn’t sure—and then another gunshot. But the voice was enough. She had recognized it, and her stomach pooled all the way down in her feet, a terrible, sick helplessness, like having to sprint for the bathroom.
It was Wayne’s voice, Wayne on the ground, Wayne crying for help. And though Gemma couldn’t feel sorry for him, she knew what that must mean: the replicas had taken control.
They were taking revenge.
“It’s always fire, isn’t it?” Calliope said then. “In all the stories, there’s always a fire. Does it hurt to burn, do you think?” And she turned back to Gemma, eyes bright and big and curious, and not unhappy at all.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Lyra’s story.
SEVENTEEN
THEY HAD TO MOVE. THE smoke had sniffed out the corners and ceiling, and it rolled down now in heavy waves, turning the air gritty. Gemma didn’t know where she’d read that during fires most people don’t die from the fire itself, but from inhaling too much smoke. Even now her lungs felt heavy, wet, like a towel soaked through with rain.
“It’s okay now,” Calliope said, and the words were so absurd that they came to Gemma like sounds in a language she didn’t know. It’s okay now. The pain in her hand was a rhythmic throbbing, and she thought it must be her pulse, beating out her blood. When they stood up she saw a butterfly pattern of blood, absurdly red, soaking the toilet paper, and so much of it: it was insane that it should all have come from her, that she would have so much to begin with.