“What do you mean, she’s gone?” Pete’s tone sharpened. He leaned against the oak tree to climb to his feet, holding his ribs as though they hurt. She saw there were cuts on the palms of his hands, where he must have crawled over broken glass. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. I woke up and she was gone.” Every time she thought of Calliope standing by the car window, staring down at broken Dr. Saperstein, of the look on her face before Calliope managed to recalibrate her expression to something more appropriate—not joy, exactly, but excitement, and total absorption, like proof of the entire universe was contained there in that car—she felt a strong pull of hopelessness and nausea. Calliope and the other replicas had planned all of it.
Gemma could understand escape. She could even understand revenge. But that—the massacre at the airport, and whatever Calliope had done to Dr. Saperstein—was something different. That was pleasure.
Pete was quiet for a minute. His eyes were almost gold in the early morning sun, and she found herself wishing she could curl up inside them, float away on all that color.
“We can’t wait for her,” he said finally, and Gemma was surprised by the intensity of her relief. “We need to get help. Christ.” His voice cracked. This time, when he smiled, he couldn’t quite get it right. “A fucking cell phone, right? My kingdom for a cell phone.”
“There must be a town somewhere,” Gemma said, partly to reassure herself. “This is America, not Siberia.” That was another thing her father had liked to say. In America, you can count on only two things. Taxes, and finding a McDonald’s.
“Right,” Pete said. “Sure.” But his face was like a dying bulb, full of flicker and uncertainty. She hated to see Pete scared even more than she hated being scared herself. She wished she could stuff Pete’s fear and pain down inside of her, pack it down her stomach like newspaper, just so he could be okay.
But she hadn’t quite forgotten what he’d said to her in the bathroom, how he’d looked at her as if she were at the very distant end of a telescope and he was surprised to find, after all that, how dim and small her light was.
Pete hacked his way into the undergrowth to find her a walking stick; her ankle was still the size of a grapefruit. At a certain point she realized she could no longer hear him moving around in the trees. Suddenly terrified that he had left her, she was about to cry out for him when she heard a shout. In answer, Calliope’s voice lifted over the trees.
“It’s just me,” Calliope said. “It’s all right.”
They came out of the woods together, Calliope and Pete, like some warped vision of her own life. When Calliope saw Gemma she actually laughed, and ran to her, taking up both of her hands and sending another shock of pain, like a hot white light, through Gemma’s whole body.
“Outside is so big,” Calliope said. “I walked for ages before I found a wall.”
She was wearing a long cotton dress and slip-on shoes—she’d found new clothes. And she didn’t look tired. She didn’t even look scared. She looked like the sun had invaded her, glowing beneath her skin. Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope was somehow feeding off Gemma, siphoning her strength and energy. Taking over.
Gemma jerked away.
“Poor Gemma,” Calliope said, but the words didn’t quite sound sincere. “You’re sick.”
“I’m not sick,” Gemma said, even though she felt terrible—dizzy and light-headed, as if the smoke she’d inhaled hadn’t fully left her. “I’m hurt. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine,” Pete echoed, which actually made Gemma feel worse. Like he needed to say it to make it true.
“It’s hungry,” Calliope said soothingly. But she couldn’t conceal her happiness: Gemma had noticed she messed up her pronouns when she was excited. “I found a wooden house. There’s clothing there, and beds. Food to eat. There’s a water pump. We can live there, the three of us,” she said. “We can make a new Haven, but this time we’re the gods. I can nurse you,” she added, because she must have seen Gemma’s face. “I know how.”
Gemma wanted to recoil when Calliope touched her face. But she didn’t. A house meant people, which meant phones, which meant safety. “Can you find your way back?”
Maybe she’d hurt Calliope’s feelings. Calliope took a step backward.
“I think so,” Calliope said, angling her hand to examine her nails, as if she’d lost interest in the conversation.
“Please, Calliope, we need you.” Pete’s voice was gentle and made Gemma ache: it was the voice he’d used when he lifted her shirt in the basement and, without blinking, said beautiful. She wondered now if that had been put on too, to appease her, as he was trying to appease Calliope.
Was there anything in the world that wasn’t just pretend?
Pretend or not, it worked. Calliope smiled again. “I made a path back,” she said, addressing Pete directly. “You can follow me.”
Gemma went slowly, leaning heavily on her walking stick with every other step. Almost immediately she fell behind, though Pete stopped and waited for her whenever he saw that she was struggling,
Calliope often darted ahead, vanishing among the trees, so they had to call her back. She touched everything: tree bark, slender branches pale and new, even the pulp of rotten leaves, bending down to run her fingers in the dirt. Gemma couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, free at last in a world she didn’t know at all, and wondered at how unafraid she seemed.
Gemma had been enclosed too, in a way, bound by her father’s rules and her mother’s concern, and yet she understood now why people released from prison sometimes wished to go back. She longed for walls, for narrow hallways, for doors that locked. She longed for her old life back, for its sharp angles and clarity: who was wrong, who was right.
In this new world, things doubled and mutated. People had faces beneath their faces. Dr. Saperstein was a monster and he wasn’t. She was afraid he’d been right about the replicas raised at Haven. Calliope was made of the same material as Gemma was, and she was also a monster. Whenever Gemma caught her eye, Calliope smiled, but always a fraction of a second too late. She remembered what Saperstein had said: To them there is surviving and not surviving, and that’s it.
Calliope had said she had made a path, left markers so she would be able to find her way back, but if she had, Gemma couldn’t see them. It all looked the same to her, and as the sun rose and the insects rose with it, hovering in swarms, buzzing around Gemma’s wounded hand, she began to think Calliope was either lost or deliberately leading them through the same narrow tunnel of trees. Gemma was so exhausted her vision was blinking out, periodically going to black. She didn’t know why April was always going on and on about saving the trees—there sure as shit seemed to be plenty of trees already, doing fine.
Just when she was about to call for another rest, Pete shouted. And limping toward them, she saw a low post-and-beam fence, rudimentary and half-rotten, and beyond it: fields. Pastures and farmland. Cows blinking sleepily in the sun.
Farmland meant farms meant people. And people meant they were saved.