“The Yellows died,” she said, and Gemma flinched. “There were about a hundred of them, all from the younger crops. Crops,” she went on, when Gemma still looked confused, “separate the different generations. But colors are for clusters. So I’m third crop, green cluster.” She held up her bracelet, where everything was printed neatly. Gen-3, TG-GR. Generation 3, Testing Group Green. She didn’t understand why Gemma looked sick to her stomach. “They must have made a mistake with the Yellows. Sometimes they did that. Made mistakes. The Pinks died, too.”
“They all died?” Jake asked.
Lyra nodded. “They got sick.”
“Oh my God.” Gemma brought a hand to her mouth. She seemed sad, which Lyra didn’t understand. Gemma didn’t know anyone in the yellow cluster. And they were just replicas. “It says here she was only fourteen months.”
Lyra almost pointed out that the youngest had died when she was only three or four months, but didn’t.
“You said colors are for clusters,” Jake said slowly. “But clusters of what?”
Lyra shrugged. “There are different clusters, and we all get different variants.”
“Variants of what?” he pressed.
Lyra didn’t know, exactly, but she wasn’t going to admit it. “Medicine,” she said firmly, hoping he wouldn’t ask her anything more.
Gemma sucked in a deep breath. “Look, Jake. It’s signed by Dr. Saperstein, just like you said.”
“Dr. Saperstein is in charge of the growth of new crops of replicas,” Lyra said. Despite the fact that she was still annoyed at Jake and Gemma for looking at the file—the private file, her file—she moved closer to the couch, curious to know what they were doing. “He signs all the death certificates.” Beneath his was a second signature, a name she knew well. Nurse Em had been one of the nicer ones: Nurse Em had taken care when inserting the needles, to make sure it wouldn’t hurt; she had sometimes told jokes. “Nurse Em signed, too.”
“Nurse Em.” Gemma closed her eyes and leaned back.
“Holy shit,” Jake said, and Gemma opened her eyes again, giving Jake a look Lyra couldn’t decipher.
“Nurse Em was one of the nicest ones. But she left,” Lyra said. An old memory surfaced. She was alone in a hallway, watching Dr. O’Donnell and Nurse Em through a narrow crack in a door. Dr. O’Donnell had her hands on Nurse Em’s shoulders and Nurse Em was crying. “Think of what’s right, Emily,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “You’re a good person. You were just in over your head.” But then Nurse Em had wrenched away from her, knocking over a mop, and Lyra had backed quickly away from the door before Nurse Em barreled through it.
But that couldn’t have been a real memory—she remembered a janitor’s closet but that couldn’t be right, not when the nurses and doctors had break rooms. And Nurse Em had been crying—but why would Dr. O’Donnell have made Nurse Em cry?
“Let me see that.” Jake took the file from Gemma and leaned over the computer again. Lyra liked watching the impression of his fingers on the keys, the way a stream of letters appeared as though by magic on the screen, far too fast for her to read. Click. Click. Click. The screen was now full of tiny type, photographs, diagrams. It was dizzying. She couldn’t even tell one letter from another. “This report—all of this terminology, TSEs and neural decay and protein folding—it’s all about prions.”
“Prions?” Gemma said. She’d clearly never heard the word before, and Lyra was glad that for once she wasn’t the one who was confused.
“Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and prions,” Jake said, squinting at the screen. “Prions are infectious particles. They’re proteins, basically, except they’re folded all wrong.”
“Replicas are full of prions,” Lyra said, proud of herself for knowing this. The doctors had never said so directly, but she had paid attention: at Haven, there was very little to do but listen. That was the purpose of the spinal taps and all the harvesting—to remove tissue samples to test for prion penetration. Often when replicas died they were dissected, their bones drilled open, for the same reason. She knew that prions were incredibly important—Dr. Saperstein was always talking about engineering prions to be better and faster-acting—but she didn’t know what they were, exactly.
Jake gave her a funny look, as if he had swallowed a bad-tasting medicine.
“I still don’t get it,” Gemma said. “What do prions do?”
He read out loud: “‘Prion infectivity is present at high levels in brain or other central nervous system tissues, and at slightly lower levels in the spleen, lymph nodes, bone marrow. . . .’ Wait. That’s not it. ‘If a prion enters a healthy organism, it induces existing, properly folded proteins to convert into the disease-associated, misfolded prion form. In that sense, they are like cloning devices.’” He looked up at Gemma, and then looked quickly down again. “‘The prion acts as a template to guide the misfolding of more proteins into prion form, leading to an exponential increase of prions in the central nervous system and subsequent symptoms of prion disease. This can take months or even years.’” He put a hand through his hair again and Lyra watched it fall, wondering whether 72’s hair would grow out now, whether it would fall just the same way. “‘Prion disease is spread when a person or animal ingests infected tissue, as in the case of bovine SE, or mad cow disease. Prions may also contaminate the water supply, given the presence of blood or other secretions. . . .’”