“You think she sold Brandy-Nicole,” Gemma said, but Harliss took it as a question and nodded.
“I didn’t know what to think, not then,” he said. “But a few years later I saw the story of this woman, Monique White, who’d given over her kid to some group when she was a junkie and then cleaned up and tried to get the girl back. But the girl was gone. And she was only an hour from Durham, where we lived. Might not have thought much of it, except one of the hotshots on the board of the Home Foundation gave a quote, the woman was out of her mind, blah blah, the usual BS. Saperstein. The name jumped out at me. It was the same guy your dad had been writing to.”
Gemma was starting to see it. Dr. Saperstein, brilliant and ruthless and cruel. Her father, Mr. Moneybags, and his sudden change of heart. He must have been one of Haven’s early investors, one of their angel investors.
Had he decided he wanted nothing to do with it as soon as Gemma came home? Or was it not until she started talking, started showing her defects, revealing imperfections that rendered her, in comparison to the daughter who’d died, so disappointing? And Richard Haven had been killed, maybe by Dr. Saperstein, maybe because Saperstein wanted to go from simply making clones to using them for bigger reasons. The institute was in danger of shutting down just when Saperstein got control of it. He must have been desperate.
“I don’t understand.” That was Pete again, hugging himself, as if the room was cold, which it wasn’t. It was stifling, airless. “If Haven was making clones, why would they be after regular kids? What was the point?”
“Money,” Gemma said. Her voice squeaked. Harliss looked up at her, surprised, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Pete didn’t look at her at all. “Probably Saperstein wanted my dad’s company to invest, to keep the institute on legs. Maybe they realized remaking dead kids for rich guys wasn’t exactly a cash cow.” Pete cursed under his breath. Gemma got a raw pleasure in saying it. Remaking dead kids. The secret was out. She was a freak and a monster. There was no doubt about that now. “Fine and Ives has always done a lot for the military. So Saperstein would have tried to prove the clones could be useful, to land a big contract. But if they couldn’t afford to keep making them . . . Well, he took children he thought wouldn’t be missed. He used them to test on. Just long enough to get the money he needed.”
“So there were normal kids at Haven,” Pete said, “mixed in with the replicas.”
She couldn’t even be angry that he’d called them normal. What else would they have been? “Probably just in that first generation,” Gemma said. Harliss had said his daughter was roughly her age. “Once Saperstein got the military contract through Fine and Ives, he wouldn’t have taken the risk. Replicas are expensive, but they’re disposable. At least, that’s what everyone at Haven thought.” She thought of the way Lyra’s hands trembled, her thinness, her confusion. She thought of the disease as if it were a kind of infestation, dark insects marching through Lyra’s blood, nesting in the soft folds of her brain.
“All this time I thought maybe Bran was still out there,” Harliss said. He blinked back tears again. It made him look even more doglike, those big watery eyes and the wetness of his nose. “Since I got sprung six weeks ago, I’ve been on the trail. After I saw you”—he nodded briefly in Gemma’s direction, as though they’d met in North Carolina for tea—“I thought I’d come down here myself to see it. I thought I could maybe find a way onto the island, see for myself what they were doing to those poor souls. But I was too late. I was too late. The flames were two, three stories high. Whoever burned it did it good.”
“I know,” Gemma said quietly. “We saw it. We were there.”
Harliss shook his head. “I didn’t know what to do. This one woman, Emily Huang, kept cropping up in all the things I read about the Home Foundation. There was even a picture of her in one of the papers. And then I knew. I’d seen her one time with Aimee. It was at your house. She musta come around with Saperstein, but she spotted Aimee on the way out, started fussing over Brandy-Nicole. I thought I’d come to Palm Grove anyways, even though I heard all about how she strung herself up. What else could I do? And then there I was, sitting in my motel room and thinking about what to do next, and across the street I see you.” He looked up, amazed. “It was like a sign. Like God saying I was on the right path.”
Gemma had almost forgotten that they weren’t there by choice—that they’d been forced there, and that even now Harliss was within reach of the gun. She felt sorry for him, but that didn’t mean she should trust him. He was desperate. That much was obvious. Desperate and with nothing to lose: a bad combination.
“Listen,” Gemma said. “I saw the island. I got close to it. The whole institute’s destroyed. There’s nobody left. If your daughter really was at Haven, she’s gone now. And I doubt you’ll find her again.”
“Gemma.” Pete said her name quietly, but he might as well have been shouting.
But she didn’t care. Everything was broken. And wasn’t it better to get it over with at once, to let the pain in, to let it take you? Wasn’t it better than these years of puncture wounds and paper cuts, these chafing lies and half-truths, that left you rubbed raw and exposed? “You have to give up,” Gemma said. “I’m sorry. But you’ll only be disappointed. It’ll only break your heart.”