Read Online Replica by Lauren Oliver - Free Book Online Page B

own shoulder, trying to makeit tingle. Even Dr. O’Donnell had never done more than touch Lyra’s forehead when she had a fever. This felt like being with Squeezeme, but more, bigger. She wanted to cry.
    The guard tower was empty, the post abandoned. The smell of rotten fish and sea kelp was almost overwhelming, as if the smoke had underscored and sharpened it. Lyra at last saw where they were heading: almost directly below the guard tower was an area where the fence had been damaged, yanked out of the ground by winds or by one of the wild hogs that still roamed the island at night.
    Seeing that 72 meant to go beneath it, she stopped again, dizzy with the heat and the noise and the harsh animal sounds of screaming. Cassiopeia’s breath sounded as if it was being sucked in and out of an air pump, and Lyra could feel Cassiopeia’s heart beating hard through her back and ribs, blood racing around to all those fragile veins. But there was a hole somewhere, a puncture. Her shirt was heavy and warm with blood.
    Help. She thought the word to no one and to everyone. She knew that people believed in a God who would help them, but God hated the replicas and didn’t care whether they lived or died because he hadn’t made them. Dr. Saperstein had made them. He was their God. Help. She wanted nothing but to return to D-Wing, to lie down in the coolness of the dormitory and pretend nothing had happened.
    â€œIf you stay here, you’ll die,” 72 said, as if he knew what she was thinking. But he’d released her and no longer seemed to care whether she followed him or not. He went first, sliding on his back feetfirst underneath the gap.
    A smell reached her—something sweet and hot she recognized from the Funeral Home as the smell of blood. She looked back at the institute, steadying Cassiopeia on her feet. The dormitories were gone. The peaked roof of A-Wing, normally visible, was gone. In its place were nothing but rolling storm clouds of smoke, and spitting angry fire.
    It took forever to get Cassiopeia beneath the gap. Her eyes were closed and even though her skin was hot, she was shivering so badly Lyra could barely keep ahold of her. Lyra had to repeat her name several times, and then her number, before she responded. She was passing in and out of sleep. Finally 72 had to bend down and take her by the arms, dragging her roughly free of the fence, her damaged leg twisted awkwardly behind her. She cried out in pain. This, at least, woke her up.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” she kept repeating, shaking. “What’s happening?”
    Lyra was next. But before she could get through the fence, she heard a shout behind her. She’d been spotted. One of the guards, face invisible behind his helmet, was sprinting toward her, and she was temporarily mesmerizedby the look of his gun, the enormity of it, all levers and scopes. She’d only seen the guns from a distance and didn’t know why this one should be aimed at her, but for a split second she imagined the bullets screaming almost instantaneously across the distance that separated them, imagined bullets passing through layers of skin.
    â€œStop!” Now she could hear him. “Stop where you are.”
    Instead she dropped to her stomach and slid beneath the gap, shimmying her hips free when for a moment the bottom of the fence snagged on her pants. The guard was still shouting at her to stop but she was out, out and free and once again helping Cassiopeia to her feet. She didn’t know why she was so afraid, but she was. At any second she expected to hear the chitter of bullets on the fence, feel her heart explode sideways, cleaved in two by a bullet.
    But the shots didn’t come, although the guard was still shouting, still coming toward them. At that second there was another rocketing blast (the fire had found its way to the storerooms in the basement of B-Wing, stocked with old chemical samples, medications, solutions