“I am no one,” he said. In his eyes she was reflected in duplicate. “I was made to be no one.”
“You’re someone to me,” she said. “You’re everything.”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her. They had never learned how to kiss, either of them. But somehow he knew. She did, too. It was beyond instinct. It was joy.
They were clumsy, still. They stumbled and then she was against the wall. She pulled herself into him and found to her amazement that her body knew more than how to ache or shiver or exhaust itself. It knew how to sing.
They barely touched except with their mouths, the way they explored together teeth tongue lips, the way they shivered with the joy of discovery. They were born for the first time in their bodies. They were born together. They came together into the world as everyone should—frightened, uncertain, amazed, grateful.
And for them the world was born, too, in all its complexity and strange glory. They had a place in it, at last, and so at last it became theirs to share. No matter what happened, no matter what trouble came, Lyra knew they would face it together, as they were then: turned human by joy, by a belonging that felt just like freedom.
Turn the page to read Gemma’s story from the beginning. Click here to read Chapter 17 of Gemma’s story.
PRAISE FOR REPLICA
“A searing pair of intertwined stories about the line between science and humanity, told with Oliver’s signature grace, uniqueness, and precision. It’s a new story every way you turn it—but always gorgeous, always haunting.”
—MARIE LU,
#1 New York Times bestselling author of the Young Elites series and Legend
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although in many cases you will find identical portions of dialogue occurring from both Gemma’s and Lyra’s perspectives in their respective narratives, you may also notice minor variations in tone and tempo. This was done deliberately to reflect their individual perspectives. Gemma and Lyra have unique conceptual frameworks that actively interact with and thus define their experiences, just as the act of observing a thing immediately alters the behavior of the thing itself.
The minor variations in the novel reflect the belief that there is no single objective experience of the world. No one sees or hears the same thing in exactly the same way, as anyone who has ever been in an argument with a loved one can attest. In that way we truly are inventors of our own experience. The truth, it turns out, looks a lot like making fiction.
ONE
ESCAPE: THAT WAS WHAT GEMMA dreamed of, especially on nights like this one, when the moon was so big and bright it looked like it was a set piece in a movie, hooked outside her window on a curtain of dark night sky.
In movies, teenagers were always sneaking out. They’d wait until their parents went to bed, ease out from under their blankets already dressed in miniskirts and tank tops, slide down the stairs and unlatch the lock and pop! They’d burst out into the night, like balloons squeezing through a narrow space only to explode.
Other teenagers, Gemma guessed, didn’t have Rufus: a seventy-five-pound retriever who seemed to consist entirely of fur, tongue, and vocal cords.
“Shhh,” Gemma hissed, as Rufus greeted her at the bottom of the stairs, wiggling so hard she was surprised he didn’t fall over.
“Are you all right?”
She’d been awake for only a minute. But already her mother was at the top of the stairs, squinting because she didn’t have her contacts in, dressed in an old Harvard T-shirt and sweatpants.
“I’m fine, Mom.” Gemma grabbed a glass from the cabinet. She would never sneak out. Not that she had anywhere to sneak out to, or anyone to sneak out with, since April’s parents kept her just as leashed up as Gemma’s did.
Still, she imagined for a second that she was halfway to the door, dressed in tight jeans and a shirt that showed off her boobs, the only part of her body she actually liked, on her way to hop in her boyfriend’s car, instead of standing in a darkened kitchen in her pajamas at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday night while Rufus treated her ankles to one of his signature lick-jobs. “Just needed some water.”
“Are you dehydrated?” Her mom said dehydrated as if it meant dying.
“I’m fine.” Gemma rattled the ice in her glass as she returned up the stairs, deliberately avoiding her mom’s eyes. “Go back to bed, okay?”
Her mom, Kristina, hesitated. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Gemma shut her bedroom door in Rufus’s face, not caring that he immediately began to whine. She set the water on her bedside table and flopped back onto the bed. The moon made squares on her bare legs, cutting her skin into portions of light and dark. She briefly let herself imagine what Chloe DeWitt and Aubrey Connelly were doing at that very second. She’d always been told she had a vivid imagination, but she just couldn’t picture it. What was it like to be so totally, fundamentally, ruthlessly normal? What did they think about? What were their problems? Did they have any problems?
Rufus was still whining. Gemma got out of bed and let him in, sighing as he bounded immediately onto the bed and settled down exactly in the center of her pillow. She wasn’t tired yet, anyway. She sat down instead at the vanity that had once belonged to her mother, an ornate Victorian antique she’d loved as a child and hadn’t been able to tell Kristina she’d outgrown. She’d never been able to tell her parents much of anything.
The moon made hollows of her eyes in the mirror, turned her skin practically translucent. She wondered if this was how her parents always saw her: a half ghost, hovering somewhere between this life and the next.