Even so, she never thought she might lose him for good. He had been absorbed into her life, into the constellation of her reality now growing to include the small trailer on lot 16; moths beating against the screens and spiders drowning in the sink, Raina and her parties, clothing purchased from the Salvation Army by the pound. Her whole life she’d experienced as a series of circles, days that repeated themselves, procedures that happened again and again weekly or monthly or yearly, birthdays that passed without celebration to mark them. Even the fence at Haven had been a rough circle, and Spruce Island had been bounded by water on all sides.
Things didn’t change. They just returned to what they were before. And she and Caelum would return, again and again, to each other.
She should have learned, by now, that nothing was ever so easy.
On Saturday, she didn’t see Caelum at all. In the morning, she found his mattress—concealed behind an ugly fuchsia curtain Rick had strung up from a shower rod—empty and the bed neatly made. But he’d come home at some point: she saw that he’d left money for Rick. Next to the bed was a shoe box he used for his belongings, and when she opened it, she felt like someone had just tapped the center of her rib cage. He, too, had obviously been collecting things when he went out: old coins, a bus schedule, an empty cigarette pack, a brochure, a receipt carefully unfolded and weighted beneath a tin labeled Altoids. She felt a sudden, hard aching for him. At Haven, she had once had an Altoids tin, had kept it stashed carefully in her pillowcase.
He wasn’t home by the time she left to meet Raina, and she couldn’t leave a note for him. She didn’t know how to write and he wouldn’t be able to read it. She wasn’t sure what she would say, anyway.
She and Raina walked together to Ronchowoa, a town lobbed down in the middle of nowhere as if it was made by God’s spit. (That’s how Raina put it.) Lyra still didn’t like being out on the road, and got jumpy whenever she saw a sedan with dark-tinted windows. But it was hard to be nervous when Raina was around. She never stopped talking, for one thing. Just listening to her took up all of Lyra’s attention.
“The Vasquez brothers will be there for sure, they think they’re hot shit because their dad has four car dealerships in Knox County. Watch out for Sammy Vasquez, he’ll have his hands down your pants before he even knows your name. . . .” She laughed. She had a laugh like a solid punch. “I don’t know. Maybe you should let him. I hear you got caught tonguing your own cousin.”
Caelum and Lyra had said they were cousins when they first arrived, because Rick had said it and then they’d repeated it, if anyone asked. “He’s not exactly my cousin.”
“Yeah, I got some cousins like that.” Raina smirked. “What is he, anyway? Chinese or Korean or something? He’s all mixed-up-looking. Cute, though.”
“I don’t know,” Lyra said. Many of the replicas had been grown from stem cell tissue purchased on the sly from clinics and hospitals, and no one knew exactly where the genotypes had come from.
“It’s all right. My first was a Haitian. My mom nearly flipped her shit. You know, you could be pretty if you weren’t so basic.” This was another thing Raina did: slid sideways into new thoughts without any warning. “You ever think of cleaning up a bit?”
They went to the big Target, whose bright-white look and antiseptic smell reminded Lyra painfully of Haven. In the cosmetics aisle Raina opened tubes of lipstick and little plastic-shrouded tubs of eye shadow, experimenting with color on Lyra’s cheeks and on the back of her hand, keeping up her nonstop stream of conversation.
“You got big eyes, that’s good, and your lips are decent too. . . .”
She’d almost finished with Lyra’s eyes when a woman in a red polo shirt came to yell at them. “What do you think you’re doing? Those aren’t for sampling.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Raina made her face go blank and dumb, and Lyra had a sudden memory of some of the Yellow crop back at Haven, a bad crop full of replicas who failed to thrive. After the Yellow crop, God mandated that all the newest replicas needed at least two hours of human contact a day.
“Don’t give me that duff. I’ve seen you in here before.” The woman had a name tag, S-A-M. “I’ve half a mind to call the cops on you myself.”
“Don’t,” Raina said. “We’ll pay for everything. We always meant to, anyway.”
The woman shook her head again. But she said, “All right. Follow me.”
They were halfway to the checkout lanes when Raina gripped Lyra’s elbow and steered her instead toward the exits. They were almost at the door before S-A-M realized they were no longer following and shouted.
“Run,” Raina said, and keeping her grip on Lyra’s arm, she and Lyra hurtled toward the exit. An alarm screamed. Memories lit up flash-like in Lyra’s head: Code Black, the sweaty heat, a spring storm that knocked out the power and forced the generators on. They were in the parking lot. They were laughing, and the sky was spinning overhead, and Lyra was dizzy with a sudden happiness that punched her breath out of her chest. She had never laughed like that—she was surprised by how it came, in waves that rocked her whole body and made her feel fizzy and bright and airless.
Raina’s trailer was the same size as Rick’s but even more cluttered, and Lyra felt a pang to see so many possessions worn and used and taken for granted—family photos hung crookedly in plastic frames, throw pillows shaggy with dog hair, mugs holding a crown of pens. By comparison, Rick’s trailer was as cold and impersonal as the hallways of Haven.
On a side table sheeted with mail, she noticed the same glossy brochure she had seen in Caelum’s shoe box of belongings. This time she focused on the letters until they ran into meaning: Nashville Elvis Festival.
Raina caught her looking. “Don’t tell me you’re an Elvis freak too?”
Lyra didn’t answer: silence, as always, was like a corner for retreating.
“My mom goes every year. Can you believe she met her boyfriend there? Look. He even made it into the brochure.” Raina shook out the folds of the brochure so it opened suddenly into a fan of narrow pages, and Lyra lost her breath.
Replicas. Dozens of them, all men, identically dressed in white, but not in hospital gear: in suits with beautiful detailing.
They looked well-fed. They looked well, period.
“That’s Mike,” Raina said, and plugged a finger on one of the replicas in the third row. “He won two years ago. My mom saw him perform ‘Hound Dog’ and walked right up to him and asked him out.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s been true love ever since.”
“I don’t understand.” Lyra’s voice sounded distant to her. “Where is this place?”
Raina shot her a puzzled look. “You’ve never been to Nashville?” When Lyra shook her head, Raina frowned. “Where did you come from, again?”
“Florida,” Lyra said, although she had never known where she was from until Gemma had told her. She knew only Haven, and Spruce Island, and Barrel Key. She hadn’t understood the world was so big it had to be endlessly divided: into countries, states, towns, neighborhoods. Was it possible the world was so big it included places, like this Nashville, where replicas were made and lived happily, in the open? “We—we had replicas there too.”