They paid with two of Gemma’s bills and got a bewildering assortment of change back. Lyra couldn’t help but think of the younger replicas and how they would have loved to play with all those coins, skipping them or rolling them across the floor, seeing who could get the most heads in a row. She wondered where all the other replicas were, and imagined them in a new Haven, this one perhaps on a mountain and surrounded by the clean smell of pine, before remembering what they were. Carriers.
Disposable.
Lyra asked the waitress about Palm Grove, and she directed them up the road to the bus depot. “Can’t miss it,” she said. “Just take the twelve up toward Tallahassee. Soon as you see the water park, that’s Palm Grove. You kids heading to the water park?” Lyra shook her head. The woman popped her gum. “That’s too bad. They got one slide three stories tall. Cobra, it’s called. And today’s gonna be a bruiser. Where you kids from?”
But Lyra only shook her head again, and they stepped out into the heat.
By the time they reached the bus depot, Lyra’s shoes felt as if they were rubbing all the skin off her feet. She wasn’t used to wearing shoes, but the asphalt was too hot for bare feet and the shoulder was glittering with broken glass. While they waited for the bus, 72 lifted his shirt to wipe his face with it, and she saw a long trail of sweat tracking down the smoothness of his stomach and disappearing beneath the waistband of his pants. It did not disgust her.
When the number 12 came, 72 was obviously proud, at least, to be able to read the number—he nearly shouted it. But once they boarded, they learned they’d have to have a ticket. They had to get off the bus again and return inside, where the man behind the ticket desk shouted at them for holding up the line, for struggling with their dollars and giving over the wrong bills, and Lyra got flustered and spilled coins all over the floor. She was too embarrassed to pick the money up—everyone was staring at her, everyone knew—and instead, once they’d gotten their tickets, she and 72 hurried back outside despite people calling after them. But the bus had gone and they had to wait for a new one. Mercifully, the bus that arrived was mostly empty, so Lyra and 72 could get a seat in the back, far from the other passengers.
It was better to ride in a bus than in a car. It made her less nauseous. But still the world outside her window seemed to go by with dizzying speed, and there was ever more of it: highways rising up over new towns and then falling away into other highways; stretches of blank land burned by the sun into brownness; building and building and building, like an endless line of teeth. After an hour she spotted a monstrous coil of plastic rising into the air, twisting and snakelike and vivid blue, and an enormous billboard tacked into the ground announced Bluefin and Water Park, and several other words between them she didn’t have time to read.
They passed a parking lot glittering with cars and people, natural humans: children brown from the sun, only half-dressed and carting colorful towels, men and women herding them toward the entrance. She saw a mother crouching in front of a girl red in the face from crying, touching her face with a tissue—but the bus was moving too quickly and soon a line of trees ran across her vision, obscuring it.
The driver announced Palm Grove and stopped the bus in front of a run-down motel named the Starlite. Lyra had been imagining a grid of houses in pastel shades, like the neighborhood they’d left in the middle of the night. But Palm Grove was big: big roads with two lanes of traffic, restaurants and gas stations, clothing stores and places to buy groceries. Signs shouted at them from every corner. Milk, 3.99. Guys and Dolls, Albert Irving Auditorium, Saturday. One-Hour Parking Monday through Saturday. She didn’t even see any houses, and she counted at least a dozen people on the streets, passing in and out of shops, talking on phones. It was so hot it felt like being inside a body, beneath the skin of something, filmy and slick. How many humans could possibly be here, in one town?
“And now what?” 72 said. He’d been in a bad mood all morning, ever since she had asked him why he had the scars on his forearms, which were different from the scars she and the other replicas had, the ones from spinal taps and harvesting procedures—all of it, she knew now, to test how deep the prions had gone, how fast they were cloning themselves, how soon the replicas would die.
He had only said accident, and had barely spoken to her on the bus. Instead he had sat with his chin on his chest, his arms folded, his eyes shut. She had counted fourteen scars, four on his right and ten on his left. She had noticed a small mole on his earlobe, had felt a secret thrill at sitting so close after years of seeing no male replicas at all.
“Trust me,” Lyra said, which was what the nurses always said. Shhh. Trust me. Just a little pinch. Stop with that noise. Trust me, it’ll all be over soon.
Lyra worked up the courage to stop the first person she saw who looked to be about her age. The girl was sitting on the curb in front of a store called Digs and was bent over her cell phone, typing on it. When she looked up, Lyra saw that she was wearing makeup and was vaguely surprised—she’d somehow thought makeup was for older humans, like the nurses. “Hello,” she said. “We’re looking for Emily Huang.”
“Emily Huang.” The girl looked Lyra up and down, and then her eyes went to 72. She straightened up, giving him a smile that reminded Lyra of the actresses the nurses used to watch on TV and look at in magazines they left lying around sometimes. Lyra didn’t like it, and she was for the first time aware of the difference between her body and this girl’s. This girl was all curves and prettiness, all smooth skin and beautiful solidity and long, flowing hair. Lyra, in her drab clothing and her sharp bones and the scar above her eyebrow, thought of that word again, ugly. “Emily Huang,” the girl repeated. “She go to Wallace?”