“What?” 72 sat up on his elbows. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“There’s no reason.” Realizing she’d been staring, she forced herself to move to the bed. She slipped under the sheets—these, too, softer than any she’d ever known—and curled up with her knees to her chest, as far from 72 as possible. But still her heart was beating fast. She felt, or imagined she felt, warmth radiating off him. He smelled now a different kind of sweet, like shampoo and soap and fresh-scrubbed skin. For a long time they lay there together and she couldn’t stop seeing him next to her, couldn’t stop seeing his lashes lying on his cheeks when he closed his eyes and the high planes of his cheekbones and the darkness of his eyes.
He shifted in the bed. He put a hand on her waist. His hand was hot, burning hot.
“Lyra?” he whispered. His breath felt very close to her ear. She was terrified to move, terrified to turn and see how close he was.
“What?” she whispered back.
“I like your name,” he said. “I wanted to say your name.”
Then the bed shifted again, and she knew he’d rolled over to go to sleep. Finally, after a long time, the tension in her body relaxed, and she slept, too.
When she woke up, it was dark, and for a confused second she thought she was back at Haven. She could smell dinner cooking in the Stew Pot and hear the nurses move between the cots, talking to one another. Then she opened her eyes and remembered. Someone had shut the bedroom door, but a wedge of light showed from the living room. Jake and Gemma were talking in low voices, and something was cooking. The smell brought sudden tears to Lyra’s eyes. She was starving, hungrier than she’d been in weeks.
She eased out of bed, careful not to wake 72. She was vaguely disappointed to see they’d been sleeping with several feet of space between them. In her dream they had been entangled again, sweating and shivering in each other’s arms. In her dream he’d said her name again, but into her mouth, whispering it.
In the big room, Jake was bent over a computer laptop that sat next to a soda on the coffee table. He smiled briefly at Lyra. She was startled—it had been a long time since anyone had smiled at her, probably since Dr. O’Donnell—and she tried to smile back, but her cheeks felt sore and wouldn’t work properly. It didn’t matter. She was too late. He’d already turned his attention back to the computer.
Immediately, Gemma was moving away from the stove with a bowl, skirting the table that divided the kitchen from the library—Lyra thought it must be called a library, anyway, since Dr. O’Donnell had told her that libraries were places you could read books for free. “Here,” Gemma said. “Chili. From a can. Sorry,” she added, when Lyra stared, “I can’t cook.”
But Lyra had only been wondering at all her freedoms, at the fact that Gemma knew how to shop and get food and clothing. Wherever she’d been made, she must have lived for most of her life among real people.
“You need to eat,” Gemma said firmly, and seemed surprised—and pleased—when Lyra took the bowl and spoon and began to eat so quickly she burned the roof of her mouth. She didn’t even bother sitting down, both thrilled and disturbed by the fact that there was no one to yell at her or tell her to keep her seat.
“Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” Jake said out loud, still bending over his computer. “That’s a category of disease. Mad cow is a TSE.”
“Okay.” Gemma drew out the last syllable. “But what does that mean?” She went to sit next to Jake on the couch, and Lyra licked the bowl clean, after making sure neither of them was looking. Jake kept turning his soda can, adjusting it so that the small square napkin beneath it was parallel to the table’s edge.
“I don’t know.” Jake scrubbed his forehead with a hand and fixed his laptop so this, too, was parallel. “There are just references to it in the report.”
Lyra saw that next to Jake’s computer was the file she’d stolen from Haven. She set her bowl down on the table with a clatter. “You—you shouldn’t be looking at that,” she said.
“Why not?” Jake raised an eyebrow. “You stole it, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Lyra said evenly. “But that’s different.”
“It’s not like they’ll miss it now. The whole place is an ash heap.”
In Lyra’s head, she saw all of Haven reduced to a column of smoke. Sometimes the bodies that burned came back to Haven in the form of smoke, in a sweet smell that tickled the back of the throat. The nurses hated it, but Lyra didn’t.
“Jake,” Gemma said.
He shrugged. “Sorry. But it’s true.”
He was right, obviously. She couldn’t possibly get in trouble now for stealing the file or allowing someone else to see it—at least, no more trouble than she was already in. Jake went back to thumping away at the computer. Gemma reached out and drew the file onto her lap. Lyra watched her puzzle over it, frowning. Maybe Gemma couldn’t read?
But after a minute, Gemma said, “Lyra, do you know what this means? It says the patient—the replica, I mean”—she looked up as though for approval, and Lyra nodded—“was in the yellow cluster.”
The yellow cluster. The saddest cluster of all. Lyra remembered all those tiny corpses with their miniature yellow bracelets, all of them laid out for garbage collection. The nurses had come through wearing gloves and masks that made them look like insects, double wrapping the bodies, disposing of them.