IT WAS TIME TO GO home. They had no options left. Gemma would have to confront her parents. Strangely, the idea no longer frightened her. She felt she’d aged years in the past few days. She felt only a vague pity when she thought of her father, and the secret he’d been carrying all these years, and the dead child they had refused to mourn. For her father and mother thinking they could buy their way out of tragedy.
She would go home, but on her terms: no more lies.
By eleven o’clock Pete could hardly stay awake at the wheel. They weren’t far from Savannah when they passed an RV park and campground, Gemma suggested they stop for the night. She didn’t mind spending one more night on the road. She knew that everything would change in the morning. She had an idea that her life would never be the same, that she’d never go back to worrying about Chloe and Aubrey and the pack wolves, that she’d never spend another gym class sitting miserably in the bleachers, fudging her way through math homework.
She had a feeling this was her last free night.
The campground was enormous and surprisingly full. Gemma estimated there were at least four dozen tour bus–size RVs and even more smaller camper vans, plus tents peaked like angular mushrooms across the sparse grass. It was a beautiful night, and outside there was a feeling of celebration. Old couples sat side by side on lawn chairs dragged out onto the cracked asphalt, drinking wine from paper cups. Children ran between the tents, and a group of twentysomethings with long dreads and bare feet were cooking on a portable camper stove. Fireflies flared sporadically in the darkness, and people shouted to one another and shared beers and stories of where they were going and where they’d come from.
Pete left in search of food from the gas station, and Caelum moved off in the direction of the pay-per-use stalls, walking slightly ahead of Lyra. Gemma suspected he wanted to be left alone, but she followed them at a safe distance, half-believing that they might once again simply melt into the darkness. But after Lyra took money for the showers she knew she could no longer delay the inevitable. It was time to call home.
She’d missed thirty-seven calls from her parents. When she pulled up her texts, she saw they progressed from furious to frenzied to desperate.
Please, her father had written. Wherever you are, please call us. He must have come back early from his business trip. That meant things had really gone nuclear.
She dialed her dad’s cell phone number and he picked up on the first ring.
“Gem?” He sounded frantic, so unlike himself that her resolution faltered. “Gem, is that you? Are you there?”
“I’m here, Dad.” She had to hold her phone away from her ear when Kristina started shouting in the background. Is that her? Where is she? Is she okay? Let me talk to her. . . . “Look, I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”
“Where are you? Jesus Christ, we’ve been so worried—”
“Geoff, let me talk to her.” Kristina’s voice, slurry from crying and maybe from pills, was audible again in the background.
“Hang on, Gem, I’m putting you on speakerphone. Your mother wants to hear your voice.” Fumbling, and the echo of her parents’ voices overlapping. Gemma hated speakerphone, which always made her feel as if she was speaking into a tin can. “Gemma, are you still there? Can you hear us?”
“I can hear you,” she said. “There’s no need to shout.” She watched a mom bouncing a sleepy toddler in her arms, passing back and forth in front of the RV, the kid’s dark hair curling on her shoulder. She felt a momentary grief so strong it was like falling.
“Where are you?” Kristina sounded like she was crying again. “We’ve been so worried. We called April and she said you’d left. Your father jumped on the first plane out of London he could find. She was so upset—”
“April was upset?” Gemma asked quickly.
“What do you think? She told us you had a fight and she’d asked you to leave. She felt awful about it. She’s been worried sick. We’ve all been worried sick.”
“I’m fine,” Gemma said. “I’m with my friend Pete. We’ll be home tomorrow.”
“I want you home tonight,” Gemma’s father said, sounding more like himself. Now that he knew his daughter wasn’t dead in a ditch, he’d apparently decided to resort to playing bad cop. “Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”
It was time. She took a breath. “I went down to see Haven.”
There was a long moment of silence. Gemma watched the fireflies flare and then go dark.
“You . . . what?” Gemma’s dad could barely get the words out.
“I went to Haven.” She closed her eyes and thought of the statue of the man kneeling in the dust, that old childhood memory unearthed, the DNA of another child coiled inside of her. “I went to see where I was made.”
“Where you . . .” Geoff’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “What—what are you talking about?”
“There’s no point in denying it. I know everything.” She was suddenly and completely exhausted. She felt so old—older, even, than her parents. “I know about what you were trying to do at Haven. I know you left Fine and Ives because they wanted to invest. I know the military stepped in and the mission changed.” Gemma’s mom whimpered. This part would be the hardest. “I know about Emma, too,” she said.
Her parents were quiet for so long she checked the phone to see whether the connection had been lost. Finally she heard a kind of gasping and knew that they were still there. She imagined the lies they’d told over the years as a physical force, something with hands, something that had reached out now to choke them.
“Gemma.” Her father was crying. Her father had never cried, not once in her life. She was shocked and also, in a sick way, glad. The mask was falling off. The cracks were showing. Let him cry, the way she had. “We can explain. Please. You need to come home.”
“Please come home, baby.” Kristina sounded like her voice was being squeezed through a pipe, high and agonized, and Gemma felt terrible again. Even now, she hated for her mother to be sad. But Gemma knew she had to be strong.
“Not until you agree to help me,” she said. In the distance she saw Pete returning from the direction of the gas station with a paper bag tucked under his arm. As he passed beneath the streetlamp and back into the RV park, a man smoking a cigarette nearby turned to look at him, and Gemma had a tingling sense of unease. But the man turned away again and was soon lost to Gemma’s view. “You have to help my friends, too.”
“Your friends?”
“We rescued two replicas out on the marshes,” Gemma said. Once again she had to yank her phone away from her ear as both of her parents exploded. She nearly had to shout to be heard over them. “They would have died on their own. They are dying. Haven’s been infecting them.”
“Listen to me, Gemma. You’re in danger right now.” Gemma’s father was calm again, and she felt a swell of nausea. He hadn’t even reacted to the news about how Haven was using its clones. Which meant, of course, that he knew. She wasn’t surprised, but it still made her feel sick. Had he known, too, about the children stolen from their parents, shunted into the foster care system and then conveniently lost? “I know you must be angry. I can only imagine how you feel. I swear to you that your mother and I will explain. But you need to come home now. Tonight. There are people out there, people still involved in Haven, dangerous people. . . . I can’t protect you when you’re hundreds of miles away.”
She thought of Nurse Em, and Jake, both found swinging by their necks. “You have to swear to help us, or I’m not coming home at all,” she said. It was a bluff. She had nowhere to go, and if her parents cut off her credit cards she’d be doubly screwed, but she was counting on the fact that her parents were too upset to think clearly.
“This isn’t a game, Gemma.” Geoff sounded as if he was going to lose it. Gemma had never heard her father so out of control. “You don’t understand how big this is—”
“Swear or I hang up the phone,” she said firmly.
For a second there was nothing but the sound of her father breathing hard on the other end of her line, of her mom whimpering in the background.
“I swear,” he said at last. “I’ll do everything I can.”
Gemma exhaled. She’d unconsciously been holding her breath. “I’ll be home in the morning,” she said, and hung up. Immediately she powered off her phone. She didn’t want them calling her back, bugging her all night. She leaned against Pete’s minivan, listening to the sounds of the mothers calling their children to bed, watching lights dim one by one in the windows of parked RVs. All these people on their way to something, on their way from something. All these stories and lives, all of them orbiting temporarily around the same parking lot before spinning away from one another again. She said a little prayer for Jake Witz.
She thought of her sister—could Emma be called a sister, if she was really Gemma, if Gemma was really her?—and the shadow-life she might have lived, might still be living off in some parallel dimension.
She felt small. She was so tired.
Pete was back. He’d bought water and soda, candy and chips, burritos, and even a tray of gas station nachos. “I thought we’d do a buffet,” he said, squatting to place food out right on the pavement. When he saw Gemma’s face, he stopped. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just tired. Just scared about what comes next.”
He stood up. Backlit by the lights from a nearby camper, his face was unreadable, and his hair looked feather-light. He reached out and touched her cheek, and his hand was so warm, so instantly familiar. A strange and baffling truth: that the people we’re supposed to know best can turn out to be strangers, and that near strangers can feel so much like home.
“We’ll be okay,” he said, and she loved that, loved hearing him say we, loved being a part of him. He traced a thumb lightly over her cheekbones, and where he touched her she felt beautiful. Like he was sewing up the ugly parts. He smiled, that goofy smile Gemma couldn’t believe she hadn’t always been in love with. “Just think about it. Clones at school. Real clones, not just Chloe and the rest of her drones.”
“Yeah.” Gemma forced a smile. It was a fantasy. Lyra and Caelum would never go to school. If they wanted to stay alive, they’d likely have to go underground, stay hidden, stay on the run. And they would only get sicker. But it was a nice idea and she didn’t want to spoil it.
“Go to sleep,” Pete said more quietly. He leaned forward and touched his lips to hers, but just that light pressure made her whole body shiver. “I’ll keep watch for a bit.”
With the backseats folded down, the minivan was more than big enough to lie down in. Pete had a blanket, too, and he insisted she use his sweatshirt as a pillow.
“Good night, Gemma.” Pete leaned over to kiss her again. This time, he let his lips stay longer, and she felt his warmth on top of her, the impossible and delicious solidity of his body. The bones and blood and skin that separate but also bring us back together. The gift of them.
Even though she was tired, she didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, not after everything that had happened. But she did.
Sometime later she woke up because Pete was shaking her.
“Someone’s coming,” he said.
She sat up. The darkness was gummy-thick, and her whole body felt sticky. The rear door was still open, letting in the noise of tree frogs and the occasional muffled sound of a door opening and closing as people went or returned from the bathroom. She didn’t know what time it was, but she couldn’t have been asleep very long. Pete didn’t look as if he’d slept at all. He was wide awake, alert, staring.
He pointed at the beam of a flashlight moving between the parked vans. She could tell from the pattern it made that whoever was out there was making a tour of each vehicle, as if looking for something specific.
Looking for someone specific.
“Where’s Lyra?” Gemma whispered. Her body was electric with fear. “Where’s Caelum?”
“Outside,” Pete said. “Sleeping.”
How on earth could they have been followed? Gemma was sure they had been careful, switching highways, watching constantly for cars that seemed to be pursuing them. Maybe, she thought, someone was monitoring her phone calls. She’d seen stuff like that on the cop shows on TV, how police could triangulate phone calls to find wanted criminals. Hunted. That was what she felt like—like an animal crouching in a hole, just waiting to be torn apart.
There was no way she could wake Lyra and Caelum and get them in the car without being seen. Already the flashlight—and the person behind it—was less than twenty feet away, moving around an RV that belonged to an older couple Gemma had spoken to earlier. There was no tearing out of here, either, not in the dark, not without risking mowing down some poor dad on his way to the toilet or kids sleeping in a tent.
“Lie down,” Gemma said. Their best bet was to pretend to be asleep and pray they would be passed over—that in the darkness they wouldn’t be recognized. Pete had covered her with a blanket and she drew this up over their faces, so the sound of their breathing was amplified beneath it. She was too scared to process even how close they were lying, his knees pressed to her knees, his chest rising and falling with his breath and their noses practically touching.
But no sooner had they lain down than she heard a voice.
“Gemma? Gemma?”
Instantly, she sat up again, half-delirious, disbelieving. She knew that voice.
“April?” she whispered.
“Oh my God, Gemma. Thank God.” The flashlight thudded to the ground and for a quick second, as April bent to retrieve it, revealed her familiar green Converses. “Shit. Where are you?”
Gemma shook off the blanket and scooted out of the van. She felt clumsy with happiness. “I’m here,” she said, and the flashlight swept over her and held her momentarily in its light. “I’m right here.” She held out both arms and a second later, April was rocketing into them.
“I was so worried about you,” she said, nearly taking Gemma off her feet. “I was so mad, you know—Latin temper and all that—but then a few hours after I left the house I started feeling really, really awful. Like my-stomach-is-trying-to-eat-itself awful. And I came home, and you were gone already, and then your parents called me. . . .”
“How did you find me?” Gemma was half tempted to touch April’s hair and nose and shoulders, to doubly make sure she was real.
“Find My Phone app, duh,” April said. Gemma almost laughed. Of course. “But then you turned your phone off, and then of course as soon as I got here my phone ran out of charge. So I’ve been walking around like a total perv, peeking in people’s windows. . . . Perv?” she squeaked, as Pete climbed out of the van.
Gemma was glad that it was so dark she couldn’t make out April’s expression. “April, you know Pete,” she said, deliberately emphasizing the name and hoping that April would take the hint. “Pete was the one who drove me down to Florida.”
“Uh-huh.” April seemed momentarily speechless, a first for her. Gemma could practically see her making calculations—the size of the van, the fact that both Gemma and Pete had been sleeping inside, together. “Where are the . . . others?” She was deliberately avoiding the word clones, and Gemma remembered what they’d fought about, and what she’d now have to confess to April: that she was one of them. Made. Manufactured. She would have to tell April about her parents’ first child, the lost child she’d been made to replicate. She would have to tell April about Rick Harliss and Jake Witz’s murder. She was hit by a wave of exhaustion again. This was the world she lived in now.
As if he knew what she was thinking, Pete put his arm around her. “They’re sleeping,” he said. “They’re okay.”
Gemma leaned into him, grateful, not even caring what April thought. “We’re all okay,” she said. She reached for April’s hand and gave it a squeeze. There in the darkness, in the middle of nowhere, her boyfriend and her best friend: under the circumstances, she could hardly ask for more.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. to read Chapter 17 of Lyra’s story.