“I—I don’t understand,” the girl said. Her eyes were so wide Lyra could see a whole portion of the night sky reflected in them.

“You’re a replica,” Lyra said impatiently. The girl was slow, much slower than Cassiopeia. But she knew that this wasn’t uncommon. She thought of Lilac Springs—dead now, probably. And 101, who’d never even learned how to hold a fork. She wondered how many of the others had burned.

“A what?” the girl whispered.

“A replica,” Lyra repeated. The girl shook her head. Where she came from, they must be called something different. She recited, “An organism descended from or genetically identical to a single common ancestor.”

“A clone,” the girl said, staring at Lyra so fixedly she was reminded of being under the observation lights, and looked away. “She means a clone, Jake.”

“Yeah, well. I kind of already had that impression,” the boy said, and he made a face, as if he was offended by the sight of Cassiopeia’s body.

Lyra had the sudden urge to reach down and close Cassiopeia’s eyes and wasn’t sure where it had come from—maybe something one of the nurses had said about the way people buried one another. In Haven, the dead replicas had always simply been burned or dumped.

“But—but it’s impossible.” The girl’s voice had gotten very shrill. “It’s impossible, the technology doesn’t exist, it’s illegal. . . .”

Lyra lost patience. The girl was either suffering from side effects or she was very, very stupid to begin with. Failure to thrive. “It’s not impossible,” she said. “At Haven, there were thousands of replicas.”

“Jesus.” The boy closed his eyes. His face was like a second moon, pale and glowing. “Clones. It all makes sense now. . . .”

“Are you crazy? Nothing makes sense.” The girl had turned away, covering her mouth with her hand again, as if she was trying to force back the urge to be sick. “There’s a dead girl with my face on her. We’re standing here in the middle of the fucking night and these—these people are telling me that there are clones running around out there, thousands of them—”

“Gemma, calm down. Okay? Everyone needs to calm down.” The boy spoke loudly even though the girl was the only one who wasn’t calm, or the only one who was showing it, at least. “Can you put that thing down, please?” This was to 72, still holding the knife. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Suddenly Lyra was hit with a wave of dizziness. She went into a crouch and put her head between her knees. Her head was full of a hot and sticky darkness, a swirling that reminded her of heavy clouds of circulating gnats.

“What’s the matter with her?” She heard the girl’s voice, but distantly. If 72 responded, she didn’t hear him.

“Hey.” A minute later, the girl was next to her. “Are you okay?” She put a hand on Lyra’s back, and Lyra jerked away. She was used to being touched, manipulated, even opened up with knives and needles; but this felt different, intimate and almost shameful, like when she’d first been caught by Nurse-Don’t-Even-Think-About-It in the bathroom with her hands submerged in bleach, trying to scrub her first period blood from her underwear. She couldn’t speak. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she would throw up. The girl stood up again and moved away from her, and Lyra almost regretted jerking away. But she didn’t want to be touched by strangers, not anymore, not if she could help it.

Except—she remembered falling asleep, exhausted, on the ground, the way the stars had blurred into a single bright point, leading her into sleep—she hadn’t minded when 72 put his arms around her for warmth. But she was in shock, exhausted. She had needed the body heat. The world outside was too big: it was nice to feel bounded by something.

“Maybe she’s hungry,” the boy said.

She wasn’t hungry, but she stayed quiet. The worst of the nausea had released her, though. Strange how it came like that in dizzying rushes, like getting hit in the head. She sat back, too exhausted to stand again. She was no longer afraid, either. It was obvious that the strangers weren’t there to hurt them or to take them anywhere. Now she just wished they would move on. She didn’t understand the girl who was a replica but didn’t know it. She didn’t understand the boy who was with her, and how they were related.

72 took a quick step forward. “You have food?”

The boy looked to Cassiopeia’s genotype, and she made a quick, impatient gesture with her hand. He shrugged out of his backpack and squatted to unzip it. Lyra had never had the chance to observe two males so close together, and noticed he moved differently from 72. His movements were slow, as if his whole body hurt. 72 moved with a quickness that seemed like an attack. “Sorry. We didn’t bring much.”

72 came forward cautiously. He snatched up a granola bar and a bottle of water and then backtracked quickly. 72 tore open the granola bar with his teeth, spitting out the wrapper, and began to eat. He kept his eyes on the boy—Jake—the whole time, and Lyra knew that he was worried the boy might try to take it back from him. But Jake only watched him.

72 opened the water, drank half of it, and then passed it to Lyra without removing his eyes from Jake. “Drink,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

She hadn’t realized how raw her throat felt until she drank, washing away some of the taste of ash and burning. She wished that Jake and Cassiopeia’s replica would leave so that she could go back to sleep. At the same time, she was worried about what the morning would bring when they found themselves alone on the marshes again, with no food, nothing to drink, nowhere to go.