Caelum spoke up too, to explain why they had run, and Gemma seemed to understand. Lyra was intensely relieved: she wondered whether in some strange way, some mystery of biology, she and Gemma got along for the same reason she had always liked Cassiopeia.
“And I almost forgot.” She took the backpack wedged at Caelum’s feet and removed the papers and photos she’d found hidden behind the picture frames at Sheri’s house. “Before she died, Nurse Em gave three pieces of art to her next-door neighbor. I found these hidden in the backing.”
Gemma held the pages in her hands carefully, as if they were insect wings. She stared for a long time at the list of names that Lyra hadn’t been able to make sense of. “Can I keep these?” she asked.
“Okay.” Lyra had been looking forward to rebuilding her collection of reading materials, using these pages as a start to her new library. But she knew they might be important—they must be, if Nurse Em had wanted them to stay hidden.
“I’ll give them back, I promise,” Gemma said, as if she knew what Lyra was thinking. Gemma seemed to have that uncanny ability. Lyra wondered whether Gemma was special, or whether she was simply the first person to care what Lyra thought and felt. Gemma folded the pages carefully and tucked them inside a pocket. Lyra was sorry to see them go. “Look,” Gemma said. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something about your past.”
The car jerked. Pete had barely swerved to avoid an object in the road, some kind of animal, Lyra thought, although they were past it too quickly for her to make out what it was.
“What?” she said. “What is it?” She was suddenly afraid but couldn’t say why. She thought she could feel Caelum’s pulse beating through her palm. She thought it began to beat faster.
Gemma was squinting as if trying to see through a hard light. “You weren’t actually made at Haven.”
A burst of white behind Lyra’s eyes—a sure sign of a bad headache to come. Side effects. Symptoms. She pictured those hands again, the scar across the knuckles, the tickle of a beard on her forehead. Imagination. Fantasy.
“What do you mean?” It was Caelum who spoke. “Where was she made?”
“Nowhere,” Gemma said, and Lyra heard the word as if it was coming to her through water. As if she was drowning. Nowhere. A terrible, lonely word. “This list is of kids who got taken from their families and brought to Haven, at a time the institute couldn’t afford to keep making human models. The third name, Brandy-Nicole Harliss, is your birth name. Your real name. That’s the name your parents gave you.”
Next to her, Caelum twitched. Lyra’s lungs didn’t feel like they were working. She could hardly breathe. “My . . .” She couldn’t say the word parents. It didn’t make sense. She thought of the birthers in the barracks and the new replicas sleeping in their pretty little incubators in Postnatal. That was her world. That was where she’d come from.
“You have parents,” Gemma said gently, as if she was delivering bad news. And it was bad news. It was unimaginable, horrific. Lyra had wondered sometimes about what it would be like to have Dr. O’Donnell as a mother, what it would be like to have parents, generally, but never had she truly thought about being a person, natural-born, exploded into being by chance. One of them. “Well, you have a father. He’s been looking for you all this time. He’s loved you all this time.”
That word, love. It shocked her. It hit her like a blade in the chest and she cried out, feeling the pain of it, the raw unexpectedness, as if an old wound had opened. Although she had dreamed when she was little about going home with one of the nurses—although she’d even, secretly, imagined Dr. O’Donnell returning for her one day, taking Lyra in a lemon-scented hug—these were fantasies, and even in her fantasies home looked much like Haven, with white walls and high lights and the soothing sounds of rubber soles on linoleum.
She didn’t want love, not from a stranger, not from a father. She was a replica.
Caelum took his hand from hers. He turned back toward the window.
No, she wanted to say. She felt somehow dirty. It isn’t true. It can’t be. But she was paralyzed, suffocating under the weight of what Gemma had told her. She couldn’t move to touch Caelum’s arm, to tell him it was all right. She couldn’t ask him to forgive her.
He didn’t look at her at all after that.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 16 of Gemma’s story.
SEVENTEEN
SHE DIDN’T WANT A FATHER.
She had never even known what a father did, had never completely understood why fathers were necessary. When she tried to imagine one now she thought instead of God, of his dark beard and narrow eyes, of the way he always seemed to be sneering, even when he smiled. She thought of Werner, whose fingers were yellowed and smelled like smoke; or of Nurse Wanna Bet, a male, pinching her skin before inserting the syringes, or fiddling with IV bags, or poking her stomach for signs of distention.
And yet, alongside these ideas was her impression—her memory?—of that plastic cup, of hands rocking her to sleep and the tickle of a beard.
Caelum didn’t speak again until they stopped for the night, just outside of a place called Savannah. Lyra was both relieved and disappointed to learn they wouldn’t be going on. She was dreading meeting her father, whoever he was, but also desperate to get it over with, and had assumed Gemma would take her straight back to him. Now she would have to live instead with her fantasy of him, his face transforming into the face of various Haven doctors and nurses, into the soldiers on the marshes with their helmets and guns, into the hard look of the men who came on unmarked barges to load the body when a replica had died: these were the only men she had ever known.