She wanted to scream, but just like in her dream she couldn’t.Not me,she wanted to say.You’ve got the wrong girl.
But how could she? Three other Gemmas tailed her. Three Gemmas who stood shoulder to shoulder, blink-blink-blink, breathing withherlungs, twitching withherhands, turning their heads on her own too-short neck.
No one would come to save her. Not a single person in the world knew where she was. Even when Pete’s car was discovered—which she had no doubt it had been bynow—there was nothing to suggest where they had gone, not a trace of evidence, no ransom notes, no trail of blood.
Her only hope was that somehow, her parents would catch up to Lyra and Caelum and realize what had happened. That her dad would charge in here in his Big Suit way, threatening to sue everyone from Saperstein to the president of the United States, and she and Pete would be saved. But she knew, too, that would mean that Lyra and Caelum would have to take their place. Maybe the whole thing had a sick poeticism. After all these years, she’d finally ended up back where she started. Where shebelonged.
It was better not to think. She gave up on trying to speak to anyone and didn’t bother trying to get anyone to speak to her. When Dr. Saperstein came back, he would see her, know her, and realize his mistake—that is, if her dad didn’t find a way to track her down first.
Until then, she simply had to survive.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 11 of Lyra’s story.
TWELVE
THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO. No books, no magazines, no computers, no phones. Nothing but mattresses jigsawed on the floor and hundreds of girls sticky with injuries sitting or lying around.
Some of the replicas had made up their own games, rolling pen caps or stacking coffee cups. She even saw a girl, maybe three or four years old, playing with an old syringe. When Gemma tried to take it from her, the girl turned unexpectedly vicious, spitting in her face, going for Gemma’s eyes. Gemma stumbled backward, and someone reached out to steady her. Again, Gemma had the sense of falling into a mirror: one of the reflections, one of herclones, had followed her.
“Don’t worry about the Browns,” the girl said. Her eyes were always moving—around and around, taking in Gemma’s hair, and stud earrings, and fingernails, whichwere painted yellow and green, alternating—as if trying to generate some centrifugal force that would pull Gemma closer. “They’re all soft in the head.”
Gemma went from feeling angry to feeling sick. She turned around again and saw the girl had resumed her play, pulling up wool fibers from a patch of dirty carpet. Another girl, identical to the first, had scuttled closer to watch. Looking at them side by side made Gemma dizzy.
“You’re not one of us,” the girl said. Her breath reeked, and Gemma felt sorry about being disgusted. “You were made somewhere else. There were only five genotypes at Haven. Numbers six through ten. And number six is dead.”
“I know,” Gemma said automatically. “I saw her.” It made a twisted kind of sense that this girl could see what the people in charge couldn’t, or wouldn’t. To them, the replicas weren’t people. They were lab rats. Or they were things, manufactured shells, like so many plastic parts cut from the same mold. It must be hard to keep track.
The girl leaned closer, and Gemma had to stop herself from flinching. At the same time, she was seized by an impulse to dig her fingers into the girl’s eyes, to pull them out, to tear off her skin. She wanted her face back.
“Number six was named. We called her Cassiopeia. Dr. O’Donnell named me, too. My name is Calliope. Are you named?” Calliope’s eyes were huge. Hopeful. Aprilcalled it Gemma’ssad kitten face.
Gemma nodded.“Gemma,” she said.
Calliope smiled. Two of her teeth overlapped. She hadn’t had braces, obviously, like Gemma had. “Gemma,” she repeated. “Where were you made?”
Gemma was exhausted again, though it couldn’t be much past noon. She wondered whether the girl had ever met anyone new, at least anyone who would talk to her. “I was made at Haven, like you, but then I went somewhere else.”
“Outside,” Calliope said, exhaling the word as if it were the final piece of a powerful magic spell.
After that, Calliope wouldn’t leave Gemma alone. She followed Gemma when she walked the 282 paces she could walk, between the curtained-off wing where the sickest replicas lay mangled, tethered weakly to life by grim-faced nurses working a dozen machines; to the two bathrooms, men’s and women’s, in the no-man’s-land between the gendered sides.
When Gemma sat, Calliope sat a few feet away, watching her. At one point Gemma lay down and pretended to sleep. Still, she felt Calliope watching, and she sat up, finally, relieved to realize that she was angry, that there was another feeling elbowing in besides fear.
“What?” Gemma said. Looking at Calliope still gave her a terrible sense of vertigo, like being spun aroundblindfolded and then discovering, with the blindfold off, that the world was still spinning. “What do you want?”
She’d meant to scare her, or startle her away, but Calliope kept staring. Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope had crawled into Gemma’s body, that she wasn’t another person but a shadow, a squatter. That would explain the tight, airless feeling Gemma had, as if when she breathed it had to be for both of them.
“I’m looking at you,” she said, “to see what the outside looks like. You have hair like the nurses. And you’re fatter,” she added, but not meanly at all. Of course, Gemma realized, she didn’t know that this was mean, like she didn’t know it was rude to stare.
This made Gemma feel sorry for hating her face, for hating to see her, for wishing she would disappear.
Calliope tipped onto her knees and pulled herself closer, then rocked back on her heels again. She might have been Gemma’s age, but she seemed younger. “Do you know Dr. O’Donnell?” she asked. “She’s the one who named me. Then she left. A lot of them leave but most of them not for good. She’s outside, too,” Calliope clarified, as if Gemma might not have understood.
Gemma tried to swallow and couldn’t. How to begin to explain? “I don’t know Dr. O’Donnell,” she said at last.
“What about Pinocchio?” Calliope asked. “Do you know Pinocchio?”
“Pinocchio?”Gemma thought Calliope must be joking. But she was completely serious. Her eyes were moon-bright, huge in that thin face—familiar and also totally foreign. It occurred to Gemma that she’d never heard Lyra make a joke. She’d never even heard her be sarcastic.
