Replica (24 page)

“Reconnaissance,” Gemma said.

Jake nodded. “Being on the marshes is like being inside a maze. Red maple and cordgrass, needle rush, palmetto—it grows ten, twelve feet high and swallows up the horizon. My dad had friends who'd gotten lost for hours, even days out there, floating around trying to lick water from plant leaves and eating grubs for dinner and there they were, not a half mile from camp. Once we got
really close, within shouting distance of the island. Well, all of a sudden there must have been eight, ten guards with guns, shouting for us to turn around and head back. My dad was furious. I was just a kid, you know. They acted like they were about to blow our heads off. They probably would have. They've fired on people before, civilians. I know a fisherman from town, says he almost got a hand blown off. Says he thinks it must have been a sniper to get him from that distance. Of course they're all from the military.” He shook his head, smiling faintly. “In all the years I've lived down here, I know of only one person who made it onto the island—some kid snuck under a bad bit of fence in the middle of the night. Got chucked out just as quickly.”

Gemma was having trouble following everything that Jake was saying, but she understood the main points: crazy-tight security, no one allowed to talk. “What about the people who work out there?” she asked. “The guards and the staff?
Someone
must be going on and off the island.”

Jake nodded. “Freight goes in and out, sure, and trash gets collected on Sundays. But no one goes past the gate. The staff goes out on launches from town. Some of them live there and come back to the mainland on leave. Some of them commute. But they won't talk. They won't say a word about what goes on there. Like they're all scared.”
He took a breath. “Everyone except for Nurse M.”

“Nurse M?” Gemma repeated. “Who's Nurse M?”

“I wish I knew.” This time, Jake's smile was crooked, as if he was too tired to make it line up. “Before he died, my dad said he was working some big angle. He said he was going to blow the lid off the whole operation. That's how he talked, you know. Like we were all cast members of some Hollywood spy movie.” A look of pain seized him momentarily. “He told me he'd found a woman, Nurse M, who'd agreed to talk to him. She wanted everyone to know the truth. But the day before they were supposed to meet up, she died. Killed herself, allegedly.” He straightened his fork and knife again, avoiding Gemma's eyes.

Although it was warm in the diner, Gemma felt as if a cold tongue had just licked the back of her neck. “But you don't believe that,” she said slowly, watching him. He shrugged. “You think she was . . . murdered? So she wouldn't be able to talk?”

Now he picked at the surface of the table with a thumbnail. “I don't know. But it looks strange, doesn't it?” He shook his head. “My dad left notes. Tons and tons of notes about Haven, some of them nonsensical, some of them just irrelevant. I never found her real name. He was trying to protect her, I think. But he failed.”

Gemma felt suddenly nauseous. Her father was wrapped up in this. Her family was wrapped up in it. “You said
they told you your father drowned. You don't believe it.” She was afraid to ask. But she had to know.

He looked down at his lap. “After that time we almost got shot, my dad stopped taking me with him when he went out on the marshes. He was scared. But he was getting closer, too. I know that now. He died only two months after Nurse M was found hanging. That's no coincidence.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I still remember the smell of that morning, like this kind of aftershave one of the cops was wearing. Isn't that crazy? I can't remember his face, but I remember his goddamn aftershave.” He laughed softly. She had the urge to reach out and take his hand, but of course, she didn't. “I was fourteen. They told me he'd been fishing when a storm blew in. Said he must have flipped his kayak, got turned around.”

“And what do you think?” Gemma said.

He looked up. His eyes were like twin holes. There was so much pain at the bottom of them, Gemma wanted to look away, but couldn't. “My dad was a lot of things,” he said softly. “But he wasn't an idiot. He could navigate those marshes blindfolded. He was happier on the water than anywhere else. He said it was the only place he belonged, you know?” He looked away again. Gemma wondered what it would be like to lose a parent so young, and found she couldn't imagine it. Would she be unhappy if her father died? She had always fantasized about simply
deleting him from her life, pressing backspace and watching him vanish. But the truth, of course, was more complicated than that.

“What do you think really happened?” she asked.

He sighed. “I think he made it,” he said. “I think he got onto the island. And then I think he was caught. They would have made it look like an accident.”

Gemma felt as if there were a spider caught in her throat, trying to claw its way up her windpipe. She didn't want to believe any of it.

But she did.

“Do you know what they do at Haven?” Gemma asked. It was the question she'd come to Florida to answer—the only question that mattered.

“No,” Jake answered bluntly, and Gemma's heart fell. “But I have some idea.”

She waited, almost afraid to breathe. Jake looked around the diner as though trying to judge whether they were safe. No one was paying them any attention. Still, he called out to the waitress. “Excuse me? Would you mind turning up the volume?” he said. She barely glanced at him before punching up the volume on the remote.

A bug-eyed woman behind a news desk was staring earnestly into the camera, and for a moment Gemma latched on to her voice. “. . . Dr. Mark Saperstein, who is listed as the current director of the Haven Institute,
cannot be reached for comment. It is unknown whether he too was on the island when the explosion . . .”

Jake leaned forward and cleared his throat. “Human experimentation.”

“What?” Gemma looked away from the TV, which was again showing images of the coastline, and the sun setting behind a veil of smoke.

Jake shoved his hand through his hair. “Human experimentation. I know it sounds crazy,” he added, before Gemma could say it. “And I'm not talking about your usual drug trials, either. I'm talking illegal experimentation. Weapons development. Chemical trials. That's why all the security, and why they're so far out of the way. No oversight.”

Gemma frowned. Every medication or treatment that went to market had to go through human clinical trials. Gemma's dad was always railing against the medical ethics board's shortsightedness and how difficult it was to drum up volunteers for certain treatments. He was convinced that thousands of people died every year because the drugs that could have saved them were still being reviewed for safety by the FDA or hadn't been approved yet for human trial. Could Haven be a place designed so researchers could skirt the normal rules, and do their work with no oversight? She could understand, if so, why her father might have refused to pour money into Haven,
and might have left Fine & Ives before his name could be associated with the deal. There had never been a bigger fan of rule following than Geoffrey Ives.

Still, the whole thing was pretty far-fetched. And it wouldn't explain why Gemma's father was so afraid. If he really had refused to participate, if he'd left his own company just to avoid the association with Haven, he would be praised as a hero.

“Where do they get the volunteers?” she asked. Her coffee was cold by now, but it was comforting to hold the mug between her palms.

Jake bit his lip, looking at her sideways. “That's the point,” he says. “I don't think they're volunteers.”

Gemma stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“They're not
getting
volunteers—not for these experiments. They're forcing people to participate.”

“But . . . how?” Gemma asked. The french toast she'd eaten seemed to be sticking in her throat. “They can't just—I don't know—kidnap people.”

“Why not?” Jake leaned forward. “Look, Gemma. This was my dad's work. This was his life. However nuts it sounds, I think he was onto something. Fine and Ives has military contracts, money coming directly from the top.
Half
of Fine and Ives's budget comes from military contracts. This is the government we're taking about.”

Gemma thought of her father and his old company,
and her stomach squirmed. She remembered Christmas parties as a kid at the Carolina Inn, the ceiling draped in tinsel and plastic snowflakes, and everyone standing to applaud her father as he entered, clutching Gemma's hand. She remembered visiting the White House with her dad on a trip to DC, and how he shook the president's hand, and Gemma and her mother got to go downstairs to play ninepins in the White House bowling alley. And men suited up in crisp uniforms pinned with shiny medals going in and out of her father's office, smiling at her, hefting her into the air, tossing and catching her with big muscled arms.

Jake leaned forward, lowering his voice. “You've heard of Dr. Saperstein?” Gemma nodded. She remembered reading that Dr. Saperstein had taken control of Haven after Richard Haven had died in a car accident—the very same year she was born. The coincidence now seemed ominous. “About fifteen years ago, Saperstein weaseled his way onto the board of a nonprofit called the Home Foundation up in Philadelphia. It still exists today,” he added when Gemma shook her head to show she hadn't heard of it. “He spent a few years growing its operations, expanding the volunteer forces, crowing about it in the media. Anyway, my dad dug up all the details. The Home Foundation places kids in foster care. These are the worst cases, children who've bounced around for years, or got
dumped in front of the fire station or the hospital. It was the perfect setup. Kids get shuffled and reshuffled, moved around, drop out of the system, run away, disappear. Nobody's going to look too hard for them, right?”

Gemma felt now as if her thoughts were all gummed up and sticky. Maple Syrup Brain. “I don't get it,” she said. “What are you saying? You can't mean—” She took a deep breath. “They're not doing experiments on kids?”

“They're
only
doing experiments on kids,” Jake said gently—almost apologetically, Gemma thought. “I think Saperstein stole them. He stole them and brought them to Haven. That's why all the security. It's not just to keep us out, you know. Not by a long shot. It's to keep them in.”

Gemma felt dizzy, even though she hadn't moved. It was too terrible. She didn't want to believe it. She wouldn't believe it. “There's no proof,” she said. Her voice sounded tinny and far away, as if she was hearing it through a pipe.

Jake turned to look out the window. The smoke was still smudging the horizon, turning the setting sun to a smoldering orange. He said something so quietly Gemma nearly missed it.

Nearly.

Suddenly her heart was beating so hard, it felt as if it might burst through her chest.

“What?” she said. “What did you just say?”

He sighed. This time when he looked at her, she was afraid.

“I saw them,” he repeated.

“How?” Gemma felt like she was choking.

“Remember that boy I told you about, the one who made it onto Haven through the fence?” Jake half smiled. “I was the boy.”

Turn the page to continue reading Gemma's story.
Click here
to read Chapter 7 of Lyra's story.

THE TWO BASS MOTEL WAS just outside of town—a long, low, shingle-sided building with only a single car in the parking lot. When Gemma requested a room, the ancient owner knocked over her tea in surprise, as if she'd never before heard the words. But the room was clean, although slightly musty-smelling, and decorated, predictably, with lots of fish: an itchy coverlet woven with images of leaping salmon, a framed picture of fly-fishing hooks above the TV, a plastic bass mounted on the wall in the bathroom. Gemma hoped it wasn't the singing kind.

They had agreed that Jake would come back for her at eleven o'clock, and Gemma wasn't sure what was making her so nervous—the idea of trying to sneak into Haven, as Jake had done only once before, or the idea of being alone with him in the dark.

Alone with those perfect hands and eyes and lashes and
fingernail beds. She'd never even
noticed
fingernail beds before. But she'd noticed his.

She powered on her phone. There was a sudden frenzied beeping as a dozen texts and voice mails loaded, and she was surprised to see among all the messages from her mom that Pete had already texted her.

You didn't get eaten by an alligator, did you?

For a quick second, she actually felt guilty, as if she was cheating on Jake. Then, of course, she felt like an idiot. A delusional idiot.

She wrote back:
I'd like to see one try
.

Then she dialed April's number.

April picked up on the first ring and was talking before Gemma could even say hello.

“Thank God, finally, I've been calling you for, like, five hours. I thought you said your parents
caved
, but your mom is freaking out, she said you basically
ran away
, I mean, seriously, I'm talking about National Guard, Armageddon-level freak-out, if screaming were a superpower, she'd seriously be eligible for her own franchise—”

“Did you tell her I was with you?” Gemma asked quickly. The idea of her mother screaming—or even raising her voice—was both difficult to imagine and also terrifying. Her dad was the screamer. Her mom was the apologizer, the mediator, the smoother-over. The nothing-a-glass-of-wine-and-a-Klonopin-can't-fix kind of person.

April snorted. “Do you think I'm a complete amoeba? Of course I did. Except I started running out of reasons you wouldn't come to the phone. First I said you were napping, then that you'd gone out for a swim, then that you were in town getting coffee, and then I had to stop picking up the phone. I'm talking serious harassment here, she's probably called, like, twenty times—”

“I'll call her, okay? I'll call her right now,” Gemma said, and April let out a big
whoosh
of air.

“Please,” she said. “Before your mom calls in a SWAT team. My grandpa will kill me if they trample his geraniums.” And then, in a different voice: “Where
are
you? Are you okay? How did you even get down here?”

“I'm in Barrel Key, not far away,” Gemma said, avoiding April's last question, tracing one of the fish patterned on her coverlet with a finger. All the fish were identical, and all of them had the same anatomical error, an extra fin on the back that gave them a vaguely prehistoric look.

“But what are you doing
there
? I thought you were coming to stay with me.”

“I am. Tomorrow. And then I'll tell you everything. I
promise
,” Gemma said, before April could protest. She'd already lied so much in the past twenty-four hours. She couldn't stand lying to April, too. But what could she say to explain?
Oh, no big deal, someone threw a Frankenstein mask through our window and then a random psycho tried to
nab me from a gas station and I think it's because my dad's old company is kidnapping children and testing chemicals on them and he might have known about it all this time.
“Just trust me, okay?”

April sighed. “Swear you're not holed up in some seedy motel meeting a stranger named Danger66 who claims to be a French exchange student looking for an English tutor.”

Gemma looked around the room, and decided it definitely counted as a seedy motel. “I promise I'm not meeting a stranger named Danger66,” she said. “I promise I'm not meeting
any
stranger.” Jake Witz blinked momentarily in her mind. But he didn't count. She'd sought him out, not the other way around. Besides, she couldn't believe that someone who looked like Jake Witz could be dangerous. She'd been fed a steady diet of Disney growing up. The evil ones were always ugly. By the same logic, she knew that she was destined to be the charming dumpy sidekick for life: only skinny girls got to be leads.

Her next phone call went far less smoothly. April was right. Her mom was in full-on panic mode. Gemma had never heard her mother so upset, except for one time when she was a little kid and decided to smash up her mom's favorite necklace with a hammer to see whether diamonds were really the hardest substance on earth.

“I don't believe you. I really don't believe you. I would
never have expected it, never in a million years—after we specifically told you—”

“Mom, calm down.” Gemma was annoyed not by the injustice of her parents' rules but by the fact that her mom had automatically assumed she would always obey. Just like she'd obeyed as a kid, shivering in those hospital beds, swallowing pills when she was told to swallow them, waking up with new scars, new evidence of damage. “It's not a big deal, okay?”

“Not a big deal? Not a big deal?” Kristina seemed to be gasping the words. “How can you even say that? Do you know how worried I've been? How worried your
father's
been?”

“Yeah. I'm sure he's been crying into his PowerPoint.” The words were out of Gemma's mouth as soon as she thought them.

Kristina drew in a sharp breath. Then she said, in a quiet voice, “For your information, your father is on his way back from Shanghai right now. As soon as he lands, we're getting on a plane and coming straight down to get you—”

“Mom, no.” Gemma was surprised that in an instant, all her anger was gone, and instead she was suddenly on the verge of tears. She took a deep breath. “Please,” she said, because she knew that fighting or yelling wouldn't help. “I'm not in trouble. I'm safe. I'm with April.” She
no longer felt guilty about lying. If Jake was right about what they were doing at Haven, her father must have known about it, and had spent his whole life lying—her mother, too. It was like she'd heard him say: he'd done nothing. “Please let me have this, just this once. Let me be normal.”

Kristina sighed, and Gemma knew she'd said the right thing. She imagined her mother cradling the phone against one shoulder, unscrewing the cap of one of her pill bottles and shaking one into her palm, starting to calm down.

“I'll talk to your dad,” she said. “But you know how he is. He's furious. You lied to us, Gemma.”

How many times have you lied to me?
Gemma nearly said. But she swallowed the words back. She said instead, “You didn't give me much choice.”

To her surprise, her mother laughed. But it was the saddest laugh ever, like she really wanted to cry. “We're just trying to keep you safe, Gem,” she said. “That's all we ever wanted.”

“I'm safe,” she said. “I'm fine.”

When Kristina spoke again, her voice was softer. Probably just the
thought
of a pill working its way through her bloodstream had calmed her. “I expect you to call me first thing in the morning.”

“I will,” Gem said. “Just tell Dad not to worry.”

Kristina hesitated. “I'll see what I can do.”

Gemma hung up. She was briefly euphoric, almost dizzy, but the feeling was short-lived. She'd gotten her mom only temporarily off her back. If her dad insisted on driving straight to April's house . . . if he discovered she wasn't there . . .

But if everything went as planned, she could make it to April's by morning, when her dad was still thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic. If everything went as planned, she might have all the answers she needed tonight.

And then what? What did it matter, really?

She wasn't sure. But she sensed—no, she
knew
—that there was in Haven a reason for her dad's constant, simmering anger; for the pills her mom measured out day by day; for the vast silence that filled her house and the way she caught her parents looking at her sometimes, as if she were a stranger.

She had to know why.

Her phone pinged. She assumed it would be her mom, calling back, but saw she had a new message from Pete: a GIF of a cartoon cowboy wrangling an alligator.

She tried watching TV but couldn't get anything but a blinking error message. She was nervous about what they were about to attempt, which was more dangerous than anything she'd ever even considered—she'd once nearly crapped herself cutting gym class to hang out
with April like badasses behind the tennis courts. She wished she were the kind of girl who, when nervous, lost her appetite. Instead she made four trips to the vending machine, which contained only a few warm sodas, some Kit Kats, cardboard-tasting chips, and a bag of ancient Sour Patch Kids, shriveled and dry as discarded husks of molted cicadas.

She searched for more news about what had happened at Haven, refreshing the few local news sites that were covering it and toggling back and forth between individual blogs and conspiracy sites. The explosion had renewed public interest in Haven. She found a couple of news sites that referenced the controversy from several years ago, in which Haven was listed as one of the research institutes that had illegally purchased human tissue for research, including embryonic and stem cells. She knew embryonic cells were used for medical research. It fit Jake's theory. Fine & Ives had even released a statement, a bland PR document about a sudden fire at one of their research institutes. Every article had attracted dozens of comments, many of them nonsensical or filled with curses and hysterical references to escaped biological agents.

Around nine she saw references on several sites to a terrorist attack, by an individual who supposedly believed she was acting on God's commandment and had somehow managed to infiltrate the island. But there was
frustratingly little information about the attack, and after only twenty minutes, many of the individual story links had been disabled or taken down. She was halfway through an article about the possibility that the person responsible had managed to stow away on the ferry that collected the waste from Haven twice a week when the whole page just blinked and then went dark, as if someone had pulled a curtain over her screen. She reloaded the page several times but kept getting the same 404 error.

“What the hell?” She jabbed her screen with a finger, trying to figure out how a webpage could just disappear while she was looking at it. There was a knock at the door and she jumped. She'd lost track of time completely. It was eleven o'clock already.

Jake had changed into a black T-shirt, dark jeans, and black Vans. When Gemma opened the door, she thought he looked like the lead singer in some indie band April might have been obsessed with. She wished temporarily she'd done something with her hair—more delusion. As if a great hairstyle would distract him from the thirty extra pounds she was packing.

He came into the room without saying hello and sat down on the bed.

“Did you hear?” he said. When he shoved a hand through his hair, it resettled right away. Soft, then. Of course. “The cops traced the explosion.”

She closed the door and leaned against it. It occurred to her that this was exactly what she'd sworn to April she wouldn't do—meet a stranger in a seedy motel room. Maybe she'd sit down next to him and he'd try and touch her thigh or force his tongue down her throat. Then again, she wouldn't mind. If anyone was in danger of getting sexually harassed, it was probably him.

Jake pulled out a laptop from his backpack. “This came into my in-box an hour ago.” He pivoted his computer screen around. “When my dad died, I couldn't bring myself to shut down the Haven Files admin on his website, so messages get routed to my in-box.” She joined him on the bed, moving stiffly, hoping he wouldn't notice. She could smell his soap, and when he shifted the laptop onto her lap, his fingers grazed her thigh.

It was the first time a guy had ever touched her. And even though it was accidental, she got a small thrill.

The message had apparently come through the contact form on his website—it was addressed not to Jake but to the administrator. It was written in all caps.

WHEN JESUS DIED, THE CURTAIN IN THE TEMPLE WAS TORN INTO TWO PIECES. THE GRAVES OPENED, AND MANY OF GOD'S PEOPLE WHO HAD DIED WERE RAISED FROM DEATH. MATTHEW 27:51–3

GOD TURNS HIS FACE FROM ABOMINATIONS
AND CASTS MONSTERS DOWN TO HELL AND THOSE WHO DISOBEY HIS WORD WILL FEEL THE WRATH OF ETERNITY. AT HAVEN DEAD MEN WALK FROM THEIR GRAVES AND GOD DEMANDS JUSTICE FOR THE CRIMES OF THOSE WHO DON'T LISTEN. I WILL BRING HELLFIRE TO HAVEN LIKE GOD DID TO THE SINNERS AT BABYLON TO PURGE THEM FROM THIS EARTH AND I WILL BE WELCOMED BY ALL THE ANGELS IN HEAVEN WHO WILL SING MY PRAISES.

The message was signed
Angel Fire
and included a link to a Tumblr, www.wrathofgod.tumblr.com, but when Gemma tried to click on it, she found it disabled.

Jake took the computer back from her. “The site was registered to an Estelle Williams in Sarasota. They already wiped it clean, but I managed to get screenshots, though. Give me a second.”

Gemma thought of all the pages she'd Googled turning up suddenly wiped or just failing to load. “Who's they?”

He shifted on the bed, and Gemma realized he was nervous. “One of the federal departments, I assume,” Jake said, looking at her sideways, as if expecting she wouldn't believe him. “I wouldn't be surprised if by tomorrow everyone's reporting that Haven never existed at all—it was some holographic experiment and we're all supposed
to forget about it. Look.” He swiveled the screen toward her again. “This is some of Angel Fire's stuff.”