“Stimulation and touch. Not weekly story time.” God slammed the book down on a table, and Lyra jumped. Then he sighed. “We’re not humanitarians. We’re scientists, Cat. And they’re subjects. End of story.”
Dr. O’Donnell raised her chin. Her hair was starting to come loose from her ponytail. If Lyra had known the word love, if she’d really understood it, she would have known she loved Dr. O’Donnell in that moment.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t treat them like regular people,” she said.
God had already started for the door. Lyra caught a glimpse of his heavy black eyebrows, his close-trimmed beard, his eyes so sunken it looked like someone had pressed them back into his head. Now he stiffened and spun around. “Actually, it does,” he said. His voice was very cold, like the touch of the Steel Ear when it slipped beneath her shirt to listen to her heartbeat. “What’s next? Are you going to start teaching the rats to play chess?”
Before she left Haven, Dr. O’Donnell gave Lyra her copy of The Little Prince. Then Lyra was pretty sure Dr. O’Donnell had been crying.
“Be sure and keep it hidden,” she whispered, and briefly touched Lyra’s face.
Afterward, Lyra lay down. And for the afternoon, Lyra’s pillow smelled like antiseptic and lemon lotion, like Dr. O’Donnell’s fingers.
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Gemma’s story.
FOUR
COG TESTING TOOK PLACE IN a large, drafty room of D-Wing that had once been used to house cages full of rabbits and still smelled faintly of pellet food and animal urine. Lyra didn’t know what had happened to the rabbits. Haven was large, and many of its rooms were off-limits, so she assumed they had been moved. Or maybe they had failed to thrive, too, like so many of the replicas.
Every week Cog Testing varied: the replicas might be asked to pick up small and slippery pins as quickly as possible, or attempt to assemble a three-dimensional puzzle, or to pick out visual patterns on a piece of paper. The female replicas, all nine hundred and sixty of them, were admitted by color in groups of forty over the course of the day. Lilac Springs was out of the Box and took the seat next to Lyra’s. Lilac Springs had named herself after a product she’d seen advertised on the nurses’ TV. Even after the nurses had laughed hysterically and explained to her—and everyone—what a feminine douche was and what it was for, she had refused to change her name, saying she liked the sound of it.
“You don’t look so good” was the first thing Lilac Springs said to Lyra. Lilac Springs hardly ever said anything. She was one of the slower replicas. She still needed help getting dressed, and she had never learned her alphabet. “Are you sick?”
Lyra shook her head, keeping her eyes on the table. She’d thrown up again in the middle of the night and was so dizzy afterward that she had to stay there, holding onto the toilet, for a good twenty minutes. Cassiopeia had caught her when she came in to pee. But she didn’t think Cassiopeia would tell. Cassiopeia was always getting in trouble—for not eating her dinner, for talking, for openly staring at the males and even for trying to talk to them, on the few occasions they wound up in the halls or the Box or the Stew Pot together.
“I’m sick,” Lilac Springs said. She was speaking so loudly, Lyra instinctively looked up at the Glass Eyes, even though she knew they didn’t register sound. “They put me in the Box.”
Lyra didn’t have friends at Haven. She didn’t know what a friend was. But she thought she would be unhappy if Lilac Springs died. Lyra had been five years old when Lilac Springs was made, and could still remember how after Lilac Springs had been birthed and transferred to Postnatal for observation she had kicked her small pink feet and waved her fists as if she was dancing.
But it wasn’t looking good. Something was going around the Browns, and the doctors in the Box couldn’t stop it. In the past four months, five of them had died—four females, and number 312 from the males’ side. Two of them had died the same night. The nurses had suited up in heavy gloves and masks and bundled the bodies in a single plastic tarp before hauling them out for collection. And Lilac Springs’s skin was still shiny red and raw-looking, like the skin on top of a blister. Her hair, which was buzzed short like all the other replicas’, was patchy. Some of her scalp showed through.
“It’s not so bad,” Lilac Springs said, even though Lyra still hadn’t responded. “Palmolive came.”
Palmolive was also a Brown. She had started throwing up a few weeks ago and was found wandering the halls in the middle of the night. She had been transferred to the Box when she could hardly choke down a few sips of water without bringing it up again.
“Do you think I’ll be dead soon?” Lilac Springs asked.
Fortunately, the nurses came in before Lyra had to answer. Lazy Ass and Go Figure were administering. They almost always did. But earlier, Lyra had been afraid that it might be somebody else.
Today there were three tests. Whenever Lyra’s heart beat faster, she imagined its four valves opening and closing like shutters, the flow of blood in one direction, an endless loop like all the interlocking wings of Haven. She had learned about hearts like she’d learned about the rest of the human body: because there was nothing else to learn, no truth at Haven except for the physical, nothing besides pain and response, symptom and treatment, breathe in and breathe out and skin stretched over muscle over bone.
First, Nurse Go Figure called out a series of five letters and asked that the replicas memorize them. Then they had to rearrange colored slips of paper until they formed a progression, from green to yellow. Then they had to fit small wooden pieces in similarly shaped holes, a ridiculously easy test, although Lilac Springs seemed to be struggling with it—trying to fit the diamond shape into the triangular hole, and periodically dropping pieces so they landed, clatteringly, to the floor.