“Making up a language is different from communicating telepathically.”
“Well, it’s both.” It was weird to see Brandon and Brant together. Brandon was dressed all in black, with a fringe of black hair falling over his eyes and a sweatshirt that had two vampire fangs on it. Brant was wearing blue Chucks and low-rider jeans, and his hair was brown and curly and kept long, supposedly because Aubrey Connelly, his girlfriend and the most coldhearted of all the coldhearted pack wolves, loved to pull it when they were having sex in the back of her BMW.
It didn’t make a difference: they had the same slouch, the same lips, the same wide-spaced brown eyes, the same way of slugging through the halls as if the destination would come to them and not the other way around.
“Did you know that sometimes twins, like, absorb each other in the womb?” Gemma went on. “I watched this thing online about it. This woman thought she had a tumor and then they found teeth and hair and stuff inside. Can you imagine?”
April stared at her. “Eating,” she said, except she had just taken a bite of her sandwich and it came out eaffing.
“Sorry,” Gemma said.
April swallowed and took a huge sip of coconut water, eyeing Gemma the whole time, as if she were a bacterial culture in danger of infecting everybody. “You’re not hungry?” she said.
Gemma moved her sandwich around on her tray a little. “I had a big breakfast.” She wouldn’t meet April’s eyes. April always knew when she was lying.
April shoved her tray aside and leaned forward to cross her arms on the table. “I’m worried about you, Gem.”
“I’m fine,” Gemma said automatically. She must have said it a thousand times in the past few weeks. She kept waiting for it to be true.
“You are not fine. Your brain is on autopilot. You’re hardly eating anything. Suddenly you’re obsessed with the Bollard twins—”
“I’m not obsessed with them,” Gemma said quickly, and forced herself to look away from Brandon, who was slouching toward the door, so pale he could have been the ghost of his twin brother.
“Obsessed,” April repeated. “You talk about the Bollard twins more than you talk about your own boyfriend. Your new boyfriend,” she continued, before Gemma could open her mouth. “Your new awesome boyfriend.”
“Keep your voice down,” Gemma said. At the next table, she caught a group of sophomore boys staring and made a face. She didn’t care if they thought she was crazy. She didn’t care about any of it.
April shoved her hands through her hair. April’s hair was like some kind of energy conductor: when she was upset, her curls looked like they were going to reach out and electrocute you. “Look,” she said, lowering her voice. “I understand—”
“You don’t,” Gemma said, before she could finish.
April stared at her. “I saw it too,” she said. “Pete saw it. We were there.”
It isn’t the same, Gemma wanted to say. But what was the point? Just because they had seen the same things didn’t mean they felt the same way.
“Haven isn’t your problem anymore. It’s not who you are. Lyra and Caelum are safe. There are people, major top-level people, investigating Dr. Saperstein. Your part is done. You wanted to know the truth and now you do. But you can’t let it destroy you.”
Gemma knew April was trying to help. But something black and ugly reached up out of her stomach and gripped her by the throat, a seething anger that had, in the past three weeks, startled her with its intensity.
“I mean, plenty of people have seriously screwy backstories.” That was April’s big problem: she never knew when to stop talking. The anger made Gemma’s head throb, so she heard the echo of the words as though through a cloth. “You know Wynn Dobbs? The sophomore? I heard her dad actually tried to kill her mom with a shovel, just lost it one day and went after her, which is why she lives with her aunt. . . .”
April couldn’t understand what it meant for Gemma to be a replica, and she didn’t want to understand. Gemma was well and truly a freak, and though she and April had joked for years that they were aliens in high school, Gemma might as well have been from a different planet. In fact, she almost wished she were an alien—at least then she’d have somewhere to go back to, a true home, even if it was millions of light-years away.
Instead she’d been cloned, made, manufactured from the stem cells of her parents’ first child, Emma. She was worse than an alien. She was a trespasser. It felt now as if she were living her whole life through one of those vignette filters, the kind that eats up the edges and the details. As if she’d hacked into someone else’s social media accounts and was trying to catfish. Emma should have been sitting at this table, happily crunching through a bag of chips, stressing about her precalc exam. Not Gemma.
Gemma should never have been born at all.
“Gemma? Hello, Gemma?”
Somewhere in the deep echoes of the past, her lost twin, her lost replica, cried out soundlessly to be heard.
What was the point of trying to explain that?
Gemma forced herself to smile. “I’m listening,” she said.
On days that April stayed after school for chorus, Gemma had always taken the bus, refusing her father’s offer of a driver because it would only make her more of a target. But now Pete drove her home, at least on days when he wasn’t working behind the register at the Quick-Mart.
It was Wednesday, May 11, nearly three weeks since she’d last seen Lyra. Pete had gotten rid of the eggplant-colored minivan they’d driven down to Florida. He said it was because of the mileage, but Gemma suspected it was because of the memories, too. Even when they were riding around in his brown Volvo station wagon—the Floating Turd, he called it, although it was definitely an improvement over his last ride—she imagined dark-suited men and women passing her on the streets, tailing her in featureless sedans.
Paranoia, obviously. Her dad had taken care of it, he’d promised her, just like he’d taken care of springing Lyra’s dad from jail and setting him up with a job and a mobile home in some big Tennessee trailer park Gemma had never known he owned. April was right, at least about that part: Lyra and Caelum were safe, and staying with Lyra’s father. Dr. Saperstein had survived the explosion and subsequent fire at Haven, but he and his sick experiments would, her dad assured her, lose their funding after the disaster at Haven. She couldn’t bring herself to ask what would happen to all the replicas who’d managed to survive, but she liked to believe they would be placed somewhere, quietly fed into the foster care system or at least moved into hospice care before the disease they were incubating chewed them up for good.