Jake closed his computer. “It’s after ten o’clock,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “My aunt’s coming back from Decatur tomorrow. I’ve got to go home.”
“Let’s pick up in the morning, okay? We’ll figure out what to do in the morning.” Gemma addressed the words to Jake, but Lyra had a feeling she meant the words for her.
“Are you going to be okay?” Jake asked. He lifted a hand as if he was going to touch Lyra’s shoulder, but she took a quick step backward and he let his hand fall.
Lyra shrugged. It hardly mattered. She kept thinking about what Jake had said. They’ve been growing the disease inside them. Like the glass hothouses where Haven grew vegetables and fruit. She pictured her body blown full of air and proteins misfolded into snowflake shapes. She pictured the illustration she’d once seen of a pregnant woman and the child curled inside her womb. They had implanted her. She was carrying an alien child, something deadly and untreatable.
“If you need anything, just give a shout,” Gemma said.
“Here.” Jake bent over and scrawled something on a piece of paper. Normally Lyra loved to see a person writing by hand, the way the letters simply fell from the pen, but now she didn’t care. There was no help Jake could give her. No help anyone could give her. “This is my telephone number. Have you used a telephone before?”
“I know what a telephone is,” Lyra said. Though she had never used one herself, the nurses hardly did anything but, and as a little kid she’d sometimes picked up random things—tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, prescription bottles—and pretended to speak into them, pretended there was someone in another world who would answer.
Jake nodded. “This is my address. Here. Just in case. Can you read this?”
Lyra nodded but couldn’t bring herself to meet Jake’s eyes.
For several minutes after Gemma and Jake left, Lyra stayed where she was, sitting on the couch. 72 moved around the room silently, picking things up and then putting them down. She was unaccountably angry at him. He had predicted this. That meant it was his fault.
“When did you know?” she asked. “How did you know?”
He glanced at her, and then turned his attention back to a small bubble of glass: plastic snow swirled down when he inverted it. “I told you. I didn’t know exactly,” he said. “But I knew they were making us sick. I knew that was the point.” He said it casually.
“How?” Lyra repeated.
He set the snow globe down, and Lyra watched a flurry of artificial snow swirl down on the two tiny figures contained forever in their tiny bubble world: a stretch of plastic beach, a single palm tree. She felt sorry for them. She understood them.
“I didn’t ever not know,” he said, frowning. To her surprise, he came to sit next to her on the couch. He still smelled good. This made her ache, for some reason. As if inside of her, someone was driving home a nail. “I was sick once, as a little kid. Very sick. I remember they thought I was going to die. I went to the Funeral Home.” He looked down at his hands. “They were excited. When they thought I couldn’t understand them anymore, they were excited.”
Lyra said nothing. She thought of lying on the table after seeing Mr. I, the happy chatter of the researchers above her, their sandwich-smelling breath and the way they laughed when her eyes refused to follow their penlight.
“When I was a kid I used to pretend,” he said. “I would pretend I was an ant or a lizard or a bird. Anything else. I would catch roaches sometimes coming out of the drains. All the nurses hated the roaches. But even they were better off than we were. They could get out.” He opened his palm, staring as if he didn’t recognize it, then closed it again in a fist. “It would be better,” he said, slightly louder, “if they’d hated us. But they didn’t.”
About this, too, he was right. Worse than Nurse-Don’t-Even-Think-About-It, worse than the ones who were afraid, were the ones who hardly noticed. Who would look not at the replicas but through them, who could talk about what to eat for dinner even as they bundled up dead bodies for burning.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lyra asked.
“I tried,” he said. “Besides, what good would it do?”
She shook her head. She needed someone to blame. She had never been so angry before—she hadn’t even thought she had the right. People, real people, believed they deserved things and were angry when they didn’t get them. Replicas deserved nothing, received nothing, and so were never angry.
What kind of God was it, she wondered, who made people who would do what they had done to her?
“Is that why you ran away?” Lyra asked. She felt like crying. She wasn’t in physical pain and yet she felt as if something had changed in her body, as if someone had put tubes in her chest and everything was entangled.
“No,” 72 said. “Not exactly.”
“Why, then?”
He just shook his head. She doubted whether he knew himself. Maybe only for a change. Then he said, “We can’t stay here, you know.”
Lyra hadn’t expected this. “Why not?”
“We’re not safe here,” he said, and his expression turned again, folded up. “I told you. I don’t trust them. They aren’t replicas.”
“The girl is,” Lyra said.
He frowned. “She doesn’t know it,” he said. “No one’s told her.”
“But we don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, and once again realized how true it was. How big was the world? She had no idea. They’d driven for what felt like hours today, and there had been no end to the roads and shopping complexes, streets and houses. And yet Gemma had told her they were still in Florida. How much farther did it all go on? “Besides, what does it matter?” We’ll just die anyway, she almost added, but she knew he understood.