“It’s too late for my heart anyway,” he said sharply, in a different tone. Fear and feeling came back to Gemma all at once when he stood up. But he moved away from her, turning his back. She thought about trying to take the gun but couldn’t bring herself to reach for it. He stood there for a long time, facing the corner where the wallpaper was curling and a door gave entry to the cheap and shitty bathroom, and after a while when Gemma saw his shoulders moving she realized he was crying.

“When Bran was a baby, I was getting high with her mom and she somehow got out of her crib. Cracked her head open on a glass table. I’ll never forget that. How much blood there was. Blood all over the carpet. She needed twenty stitches in her forehead. They almost took her away from us then.” He was losing it. “I never got to say I’m sorry. I never got to tell her . . .” But he choked on whatever else he wanted to say.

Gem wanted to stand up and comfort him, but again she couldn’t move. She was stilled by the memory of Lyra and the scar stitched above her right eyebrow. An ancient scar. Something she might have gotten as a baby.

“Mr. Harliss,” Gemma said. “Do you have a picture of Brandy-Nicole?”

He turned around. His face was the color of a bruise. His upper lip shone with snot, and she was glad when he wiped it away with a sleeve. “Yeah,” he said. He was getting control of himself again. “Been carrying it with me since the day I went away the second time.” He brought an old leather wallet out of a pocket and began fishing around in the billfold. Gemma’s arm in space looked like something foreign, something white and bloated and dead. Emma. The first one’s name was Emma, and she was dead. “Had more than this, but Aimee had ’em, so who knows where they went.”

The picture was small. The girl couldn’t have been older than three. She was sitting on the floor in a blue dress and white tights, her brown hair clipped into pink barrettes, gripping a plastic cup decorated with parading lion silhouettes and grinning at someone to the left of the camera.

“That was only six months before she got took.” Mr. Harliss had moved to sit next to Gemma. Their thighs were practically touching. It was as though he’d forgotten how and why he’d brought them there. As if they were old friends, bound together by grief. “She loved that cup,” he said. “I remember Aimee yelled at her to put it down, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t go anywhere without that damn cup.”

The scar above the girl’s eyebrow was more obvious than it was now. But it was unmistakably her.

Lyra, the replica, the lost child.

Gemma got to her feet. Parts of her body felt leaden, others impossibly light, as if she’d been disassembled and put back together wrong. All of a sudden, she thought her lungs were collapsing. She couldn’t breathe. It was too hot. The air felt wet with heat, as if she was trying to inhale mud.

Peter squinted at her. “Are you all right?” An idiotic question: she didn’t think she’d ever be all right again.

“What?” Mr. Harliss said. “What’s wrong?”

She was going to throw up. She felt like she was relearning to walk, like she was just twitching across the room, like she might collapse. She half expected Mr. Harliss to stop her, but he didn’t. “What’s wrong?” he was saying, “What is it?” But she was at the door. She fumbled to release the chain and the dead bolt, her fingers clumsy-stiff, her body still rioting.

Then she was outside in air that was even worse, heavier, deader than the air inside. The sunshine felt like an insult. She leaned on the railing and stared down over the parking lot, heaving and coughing, trying to bring up whatever was lodged inside of her, that sick, twisted feeling in her guts, the horror of it. She wanted it out. But nothing came up. She was crying, too, all at once. The world went bright and the pain in her head narrowed to a fierce point and she was standing there in the stupid sun sobbing and snotting all over herself. A monster-girl. An alien. She was never meant to be here.

The door opened behind her. She didn’t turn around. It would be Harliss, telling her to get back inside.

But it wasn’t Harliss. Pete came to stand next to her. He put a hand on her elbow. “Gemma?”

She pulled away from him. She knew she must look terrible. She always did when she cried, like something that had just been born, all red and slimy. Not that it mattered. He would never look at her the same way.

“Talk to me, Gemma,” he said.

The fact that he was still trying to be nice to her made her feel even worse.

“Don’t,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“Don’t have to what?” Standing there in the afternoon sunlight, quiet and patient and sad, Pete looked like the most beautiful thing Gemma had ever seen. Like turning a corner, exhausted, lost, and seeing your house up ahead with all the lights on. Of course she would realize she was falling for him at the same time she would find out the truth about her parents and how she had been made from the sister who should have lived.

“You heard what he said.” Gemma couldn’t bring herself to repeat the words. She squeezed the railing tightly, stupidly hoping she’d get a splinter, that she’d bleed some of this away. The parking lot was dazzling with sun and ugliness. “You know what I am now.”

“What you are?” Pete reached out and placed a hand over hers. “What are you talking about?”

She couldn’t stand to have him touch her. She thought of her hand, her skin, grown in some laboratory. Was that how they did it? Did they culture her skin cells, like they would a yogurt, a bacteria? She took her hand away. “I’m a freak,” she said. She couldn’t stop crying. Jesus. “I’m some kind of a monster.” Her heart was beating in her throat, making it hard to talk. “The worst part is I think I always knew. I always felt it.”