“So prions are a kind of disease?” Gemma asked.
“The bad kind of prions are disease,” Jake said quietly.
“That can’t be right,” Lyra said. She was having trouble following everything that Jake was saying, but she knew that there, at least, he was wrong. She knew that replicas were physically inferior to normal humans—the cloning process was still imperfect, and they were vulnerable. That was the word the doctors and nurses always used when they lined up vitamins and pills, sometimes a dozen in a row. But she’d always thought—and she didn’t know why she’d thought this, but she knew it had to do with things overheard, sensed, and implied—that prions were good. She’d always had the impression that this was a single way in which replicas were superior to humans: their tissue was humming with prions that could be extracted from them.
She felt a curious tickle at the back of her throat, almost as if she had to sneeze. Sweat prickled in her armpits.
Jake wouldn’t look at her. She was used to that.
“Listen to this.” Jake had pulled up new writing—so many lines of text Lyra felt vaguely suffocated. How many words could there possibly be? “Google Saperstein and prions and an article comes up from back in the early 1990s. Saperstein was speaking at a conference about biological terrorism. ‘Chemical weapons and viral and bacterial agents are problematic. Our soldiers risk exposure even as the weapons are deployed against our enemies. War is changing. Our enemies are changing, growing radicalized and more diverse. I believe the future of biological warfare lies in the isolation of a faster-acting prion that can be distributed via food supply chains.’” Jake was sweating. And Lyra had been sweating too, but now she was cold all over. It felt like she had to use the bathroom, but she couldn’t move. “‘We might cripple terrorist groups by disseminating doctored medications and vaccinations, which will be unknowingly spread by health care workers in dangerous and remote environments immune to normal modes of attack.
“‘All known prion diseases in mammals affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue and all are currently untreatable and universally fatal. Imagine’”— Jake was barely whispering—“‘terrorist cells or enemy insurgents unable to think, walk, or speak. Paralyzed or exterminated.’”
“Oh my God,” Gemma said. She brought a hand to her lips. “That’s awful.”
From nowhere a vision came to Lyra of a vast, dust-filled field, and thousands of bodies wrapped in dark paper like the Yellows had been, still and silent under a pale-blue sky.
What was it that Jake had read?
All known prion diseases in mammals . . . are currently untreatable and universally fatal.
“Jesus.” Jake leaned back and closed his eyes. For a long time, no one said anything. Lyra felt strangely as if she had left her body behind, as if she no longer existed at all. She was a wall. She was the floor and the ceiling. “That’s the answer to what they were doing at Haven.” Although he’d addressed Gemma, when he opened his eyes again, he looked directly at Lyra, and immediately she slammed back into her body and hated him for it. “Prions live in human tissue. Don’t you see?”
Lyra could see. But she couldn’t say so. Her voice had dried up. She was filled with misfolded crystals, like tiny slivers of glass, slowly cutting her open from the inside. It was Gemma who spoke.
“They’ve been experimenting on the replicas,” she said slowly. She wouldn’t look at Lyra. “They’ve been observing the effects of the disease.”
“Not just experimenting on them,” Jake said, and his voice broke. “Incubating them. Gemma, they’ve been using the replicas to make prions. They’ve been growing the disease inside them.”
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Gemma’s story.
ELEVEN
“I TOLD YOU.”
Lyra turned and saw 72, his cheek still crisscrossed with lines from the pillow. He was looking not at Jake or Gemma but directly at Lyra, and she couldn’t read his expression. She had spent her whole life listening to doctors talk about the workings of the lungs and liver, the blood-brain barrier, and white blood cell counts, but she had never heard a single one explain how faces worked, what they meant, how to read them.
“I told you,” he said again, softer this time, “they never cared. They were never trying to protect us. It was a lie.”
“You knew?” she said.
He stared at her. “Didn’t you?” His voice was quiet. “Didn’t you, really?”
She looked away, ashamed. He was right, of course. Everything had fallen away, the final veil, the game she’d been playing for years, the lies she’d been telling herself. It all made sense now. Numbers instead of names, it instead of she or he. Are you going to teach the rats to play chess? They were disposable and always had been. It wasn’t that they were more prone to diseases, to failures of the liver and lungs. They’d been manufactured to die.
All the times she felt nauseous or dizzy or couldn’t remember where she was or where she was going: not side effects of the treatment, but of the disease. Actually, not side effects at all.
Symptoms.
Gemma stood up. “We’ve done enough for the night,” she said to Jake. Lyra knew that Gemma must feel sorry for them. Or maybe she was only scared. Maybe she thought the disease was contagious.
She wondered how long she had. Six months? A year? It seemed so stupid to have run. What was the point, since she was just going to die anyway? Maybe she should have let the guards shoot her after all.