Who were they? What did they want?

72 was alert now, listening. The people—whoever they were—seemed to be just on the other side of the misshapen trees that grew all through the marshes; Nurse Don’t-Even-Think-About-It had said they were bad luck. Lyra and 72 had to move. She shifted into a crouch, and a twig snapped beneath her weight.

“Don’t move,” 72 whispered. “Don’t move.”

But it was too late. She heard crashing in the brush. In the darkness all the sounds were confused, and she didn’t know what had happened and whether they’d been found.

“Who’s there?” 72 called out. But no one answered.

Lyra stood up and plunged blindly in one direction, sliding a little on the mud, her own breath harsh and alien-sounding. Pain ripped through her heel where she stepped: the marshes were full of toothy things, plants and animals that bit back, a world of things that only wanted to draw blood, and for a second she was aware of the stars infinitely high above her, the distance and coldness of them, a long dark plunge into emptiness. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. In the world outside Haven she was nothing, had no past and no future.

Shadows moved on her left. Something heavy hit the ground, and the girl cried out.

Lyra froze. She’d run in exactly the wrong direction, straight toward the strangers and not away from them.

“Jesus. Jesus Christ.”

“That voice.” The girl spoke again. “Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. Christ, Gemma. Look . . .”

Lyra heard coughing, as if someone was trying not to throw up. This, the evidence of side effects, calmed her. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe these were replicas who’d somehow escaped the way she did. She inched forward, parting the tangle of grasses with a hand, until she saw a boy silhouetted in the moonlight, his hand to his mouth, and the girl crouching beside him, whimpering.

“What the hell? What the hell?” he kept saying.

The moon broke loose of the clouds and clarified their features. Forgetting to be afraid, Lyra went forward.

“Cassiopeia,” she said, because she was confused, still half in shock. Of course the girl couldn’t be Cassiopeia, just like it couldn’t be any of her genotypes, 7–10: Cassiopeia was dead, and her genotypes didn’t have soft brown hair, soft everything, a pretty roundness to their faces and bodies. Lyra stopped again, seeing in the grass next to the girl the body, the slender ankles and familiar wristband, the blood darkening her shirt. Cassiopeia. And yet the girl crouching next to her had Cassiopeia’s face and round little nose and freckles. A genotype, then, like Calliope and Goosedown and Tide and Charmin, but one that Lyra didn’t know. Were replicas made in other places, too? It was the only thing she could think of that made sense.

The boy stumbled backward, as if he was afraid Lyra might attack him. The girl—Cassiopeia’s replica, identical to her except for the extra weight she carried and the hair that grazed her shoulders—was staring at Lyra, mouth open as though she was trying to scream but couldn’t.

Finally Cassiopeia’s replica said, “Oh my God. I think—I think she’s one of them.”

“Who are you?” Lyra managed to say. “Where did you come from?”

“Who are you?” The boy had a nice face, geometric, and she found it easy to look at him.

“Lyra,” she said, because she decided there was no point in lying. “Number twenty-four,” she clarified, because wherever they came from, they must have number systems, too. But they just stared at her blankly. She couldn’t understand it. She felt as she had when she had first started to read, staring at the cipher of the letters, those spiky evil things that kept their meaning locked away.

“Oh my God.” The girl brought a hand to her mouth. “There’s another one.”

Lyra turned and saw 72 edging out into the open, holding a knife. He must have stolen it from the kitchen before escaping, and she doubted it was very sharp, but the strangers didn’t know that. Now the boy had both hands out. Lyra thought he looked nervous. For a split second he reminded her of the nurses, and the narrow way they looked at the replicas, and she almost hoped that 72 would hurt him.

“Look,” he said. He wet his bottom lip with his tongue. “Hold on a second. Just hold on.”

“Who are you?” 72 came to stand next to Lyra. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His face, so open in sleep, had closed again, and she had never learned how to read other people’s moods and feelings, had never been taught to.

“We’re nobody,” the boy said. Slowly he helped the girl to her feet. She was wearing normal clothing, Lyra noticed. People-clothing. She understood less than ever. “Listen, we’re not going to hurt you, okay? My name’s Jake Witz. This is Gemma. We got lost in the marshes, that’s all.”

Lyra was now more confused than ever. “But . . .” She met the girl’s eyes for the first time. It was hard to look at her with Cassiopeia, poor Cassiopeia, lying dead at her feet between them. Who would come to collect her body? Who would bundle her up for burning? “Who made you?”

“What?” the girl whispered.

“Who made you?” Lyra repeated. She’d never heard of other places like Haven, and she felt a small stirring of hope, as if a heavy locked door in her chest had just been unlatched. Maybe there were places for them to go after all, places where there were people to take care of them like they’d been cared for at Haven, places with high walls to keep everyone else out.