Under Their Skin

  “Want to play cards?” she asked, holding up a deck. “Jackson and I know gin rummy, euchre, hearts, and of course all the little-kid games like go fish, old maid, and crazy eights. . . .”

  “And poker,” Jackson said, grinning in a way that seemed to imply he meant not just poker, but poker with gambling and actual money, which the adults would probably disapprove of.

  “I don’t really—” Nick began, but Ava leaned closer and whispered, “If we don’t start something like this, bet you anything one of the grown-ups will insist we play the alphabet game. You know, where you have to find all the letters of the alphabet on billboards and license plates. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

  Nick didn’t.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Not me,” Eryn said from the other side of the back bench seat. She didn’t even turn her head, just kept her eyes trained on the snowdrifts speeding by.

  “Euchre’s out then, because we need four for that,” Ava said. “And . . .”

  She gestured toward the adults in the two rows at the front of the van, making it clear they were too far away to take part in a card game over the seats.

  “How about hearts, then?” Nick asked, picking a game he barely knew. Dad had been on a kick for a while of trying to convince Nick that board games and card games were even more fun than video games, but it hadn’t worked very well. Playing something called hearts just seemed the most . . . human. Humans had hearts. Robots didn’t.

  Stupid, he told himself a moment later as Ava dealt the cards with, well, robotic precision, using the seat back between them as a table. Hearts is a game of strategy. You’ve got to be really good at keeping track of who picked up which cards. You’re not going to outsmart robots at that!

  But it turned out that Jackson was a terrible hearts player. He lost every hand.

  “What’s your problem?” Ava finally asked him. “It’s like you’re trying to pick up the bad cards!”

  “I am,” Jackson said. “Ever heard of shooting the moon? If I get all the bad cards, I win and both of you lose! Everything flips around!”

  Ava looked back and forth between Jackson and Nick. She put her cards down on her lap and pointed at Nick.

  “Nick is also an adolescent boy,” she said. “And he doesn’t act like his brain is so soaked in testosterone that he can only do stupid, risky things! Don’t you know you can only shoot the moon if you already have a really bad hand?”

  “Maybe I’m just trying to psych you out,” Jackson said, with a wicked grin. “Maybe I’m just tricking you into worrying that you have to pick up some of the bad cards yourself now, to stop me from getting them all!”

  It was weird—after that, hearts started seeming like a really fun game. Nick had to watch both Ava and Jackson carefully, to see if they were trying to psych him out or not. He started ignoring the fact that they could be as stiff and formal and awkward as adults. He almost forgot that they weren’t regular kids.

  After a couple of hours they crossed the Ohio River; an hour or so later they stopped for lunch at a Bob Evans that looked like it could have been the identical twin of the Bob Evans restaurant in Maywood. When they got back on the road, Michael switched to one of the passenger seats and Mom drove.

  “Hey, Eryn, remember that time Mom took us to Niagara Falls right after Dad took us to the Crayola museum in Pennsylvania?” Nick asked. He guessed having divorced parents meant that they’d gotten about twice as many family vacations as most kids. “And you were upset because it was just water, not melted crayons, flowing over the falls?”

  Eryn looked at him, rolled her eyes, and went back to staring out the window like she was a sentry who had to guard the whole family from danger. And she was just looking at a parking lot. A practically empty parking lot, because it was winter time, and no one would be out traveling now unless they had to.

  “Oh, we went to Niagara Falls too,” Ava said. “Did you do the Maid of the Mist tour and get totally soaked?”

  Nick compared notes on family vacations with Ava and Jackson for a while. The grown-ups chimed in too. But Eryn never did.

  By midafternoon they’d made it far enough south that there were no more signs of snow. All the cities and towns seemed to have vanished too; hillsides full of nothing but leafless, dead-looking trees lined both sides of the highway.

  Suddenly Mom swerved and pulled off the highway onto a small spit of gravel. Without discussing it, Dad, Michael, and Brenda hopped out of the van and began pulling branches out of the way so Mom could drive farther and farther into the woods. Maybe there had once been an actual road here, years ago; maybe that was why there was still gravel. But now it was amazing that Mom could keep going, angling the van between the trees, over a rise. By the time she came to a stop, she was far enough into the woods that probably nobody would be able to see them from the highway.

  “Hey, my cell phone doesn’t work here,” Ava complained, holding up a jewel-studded iPhone.

  “Neither does mine,” Jackson added.

  Nick started fumbling with his own pocket, but Eryn shook her head.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “It’s time to stop pretending. This isn’t a happy blended-family trip. We’re here to hide.”

  Sure enough, one second later Mom commanded, “Kids—all of you—hand over your cell phones.”

  Puzzled but obedient, Nick dug out his cell phone and passed it up to Mom. The other three kids did the same.

  And then Mom put all four of the phones on the floor of the van, pulled out a hammer, and swung it down on the pile of phones.

  FORTY-THREE

  I really am a twenty-first-century kid, Eryn thought. Even after everything else that’s happened, that was one of the scariest things I’ve ever witnessed: seeing my mother destroy my cell phone.

  Even after six hours of staring out a car window imagining horrors at every turn, she’d still been tempted to scream, watching Mom swing the hammer at the phones.

  This is real, Eryn thought. We really are in danger. Mom doesn’t believe in destroying anything. She believes in reduce, reuse, recycle—not pounding perfectly good phones down to nothingness.

  Ava and Jackson watched open-mouthed. Nick started to protest, but Eryn shook her head at him.

  “Phones have tracking, remember?” she said.

  Nick gazed wide-eyed back and forth between Mom and Eryn.

  “But then—couldn’t anyone have tracked us here already? Are we where we need to be?” he asked.

  Michael was sliding open the door of the van. He didn’t look surprised by the pile of smashed cell phone parts on the floor next to Mom.

  So he knew she was going to do that, Eryn thought. They planned it all ahead. . . .

  “We’re going the rest of the way on foot,” Michael said. “It’d be smart to carry only what you absolutely have to have in these backpacks.”

  He started handing out small black backpacks. Eryn unzipped hers and saw that it already contained a water bottle and some energy bars and trail mix. There wasn’t room for much more than a change of clothes.

  They planned this out too, Eryn thought.

  Nick was still gazing at the pile of phone parts.

  “But—we have very precise GPS coordinates to follow,” he said. “We need GPS! If one of you grown-ups was counting on using some GPS thingy in your head, won’t that send out our location too?”

  “We’re going old-school,” Michael said, holding up a small, flat wooden box and a folded paper. “Compass and map.”

  That silenced Nick. Eryn noticed that Brenda was slowly walking around the van, holding her hands out in front of her.

  “This does seem to be a complete dead zone,” she said. “I’m not sensing any signals, in or out.”

  Isn’t that what you would expect for a top-secret headquarters? Eryn wondered, her heart b
eating faster.

  “This way,” Michael said, heading deeper into the woods, farther from the highway.

  Silently everyone loaded their backpacks, strapped them on, and then fell into line behind him. The trees were so close together that there was only room to go single file. Mom and Michael were in the lead, then all the kids, then Dad and finally Brenda.

  Are the adults trying to protect us by being in the front and the back, in case anyone attacks? Eryn wondered.

  But who would attack them? And they’d already been in remote areas the past few hours—if anyone was going to attack, wouldn’t it have already happened?

  It’s more likely that the adults are making sure none of us kids runs ahead or straggles behind and gets lost, Eryn thought.

  They trampled on. Leafless, dead-seeming branches and twigs constantly snagged at their clothes and had to be pulled away; old, dead fallen leaves slipped and slid beneath their feet, making the path treacherous.

  But Eryn was starting to think that maybe they were on an actual trail, or at least the ghost of one. Maybe a long time ago this had been a paved road or a bike path. Under the layers of dead leaves, Eryn caught sight of gravel and what might have been bits of broken-up asphalt.

  The gap between the trees widened a bit, and Eryn sped up and walked beside Nick. Everyone else walked alongside someone now too: Mom with Michael, Ava with Jackson, and at the back, Brenda and Dad.

  “Two by two,” Nick muttered. “Remember that story Mom used to read us when we were little? About the guy who saved a pair of every kind of animal? Noah’s Boat, or something like that?”

  “Ark,” Eryn said. “It was Noah’s Ark. That’s the kind of boat he built. That story always confused me so much. I never understood how that Noah guy knew to save the animals, when no one else even knew to save themselves.”

  “Maybe it was one of those stories missing something from religion or philosophy,” Nick said. “Something robots can’t understand, so we don’t understand it either.”

  “Maybe,” Eryn said.

  She hadn’t thought of the Noah’s Ark story in years, but remembering it now just scared her more. What were she and Nick missing? What if there was something really, really essential they needed to know—that they didn’t know because they’d been raised by robots?

  Michael and Mom stopped at the front of the line. Michael kept looking back and forth between the compass and the map.

  “It’s hard to be totally accurate without GPS, but I think we’re generally in the right vicinity for those coordinates you kids found,” he said. “Maybe if we all just look around a little?”

  Eryn’s heart sank. They were surrounded by trees with dead-looking leafless branches soaring overhead, and thick layers of decaying dead leaves underfoot. That’s what they’d been surrounded by for the past hour. What if the janitor at the embryo bank had been totally wrong about the coordinates he’d seen on the automatic truck? What if he’d been right, and even though there’d been an embryo bank here twelve or thirteen years ago, there was nothing here now?

  What if Eryn and Nick had no other clue to go on?

  We don’t have any other clue to go on, she told herself.

  She shuffled off the path slightly, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Don’t go far,” Mom warned. “Remember, if anyone gets lost, we don’t have any way to find you electronically.”

  Somehow that worked on Eryn like reverse psychology, and she took a big step outward; she leaned even farther over a huge fallen tree.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing downhill through gnarled branches. She could just barely see something like a huge humped arch of stone.

  Nick craned his neck behind her.

  “Is it a cave?” he asked. His face lit up. “It is a cave! Wouldn’t a cave be a great place to have a secret headquarters?”

  And then he took off running.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Nick didn’t even have to glance back over his shoulder to know that Eryn was right behind him. He knew he could count on her running too.

  Right now he didn’t care if the others came with them or not. He needed answers. And they were so close now, he’d do anything he could to get them as fast as possible.

  It was messy running downhill, his shoes skidding and slipping on the wet leaves. More than once he had to touch his fingertips down into the mud to keep his balance; more than once he scrapped his shins against fallen logs or upended tree trunks. But he kept going.

  The cave ahead of them was huge. Just the mouth of it was probably as tall as a two- or three-story building. A small waterfall trickled down from the top, and the individual falling droplets made Nick think of some giant beast’s teeth.

  “Stop!” Mom shouted behind them, and Nick felt her grab his arm, jerking him backward. She did the same to Eryn, and Mom’s pull was so strong that all three of them landed on their rears in the cold half-frozen mud.

  “But, Mom, I’m sure that’s got to be where the embryos were,” Eryn protested. “I’m sure that’s where the answers are.”

  “Don’t you see the signs?” Mom said.

  Nick looked again.

  Now he noticed that there were heavy chains linked across the opening of the cave, down near the bottom. He had to squint to see letters on rusty metal placards hanging from the chains and plastered against the hillside. The signs had obviously been there a long time; they blended into the rock. Many of them were covered by old, dead ivy vines.

  “Geez, Mom, even if you’re just supposed to have normal robot vision, it must still be better than ours,” Nick muttered.

  “Those say, ‘Keep Out! Mammoth Cave is susceptible to cave-ins and sinkholes! Danger!’” Mom said.

  Nick yanked his arm away from Mom and leaned forward. Now he could also make out the words Danger! and Keep Out! in the ancient rusty letters.

  “You are not going in there,” Mom lectured them. “If it wasn’t safe whenever those signs were made, it certainly isn’t safe now. Besides, if someone knew the secret to saving an entire species, who would hide it in such a dangerous place?”

  Mom turned back to the others, to wave them away from the danger. So only Nick heard what Eryn whispered:

  “Humans would do that. To keep the secret.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  We have to get into that cave when nobody’s watching.

  The words buzzed in Eryn’s head so loudly she was afraid everyone could hear them; surely everyone could tell what she was thinking just by looking at her. But somehow only Nick seemed to understand. Their eyes met and he nodded.

  “Come on away from there,” Dad shouted from above them on the hill.

  Reluctantly, Eryn turned back.

  Later, she told herself. We’ll find a way.

  It was a lot harder scrambling back up the hillside than it had been slipping and sliding and running down. By the time she and Nick reached the top again, everyone was turned toward Ava and Jackson.

  “Look what we found!” Ava called.

  She was trying to lift a large sign that seemed to have toppled from a rock base. This sign was made of some sort of plastic or laminate, so it wasn’t as weathered and hard to read as the metal ones.

  Ava and Jackson got the sign up at an angle. Now Eryn could see that it said “Mammoth Cave National Park” in large letters and then, in smaller letters below, “A World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Reserve.”

  “This isn’t a national park!” Nick exclaimed. “We’d know about it! Remember I did that national parks project in school last year? None of them are in Kentucky! None of them are called Mammoth Cave!”

  “Maybe this used to be a national park,” Mom said. “Before. But then with the sinkholes and all, it wouldn’t be safe for tourists to come here now.”

  “I wonder how many other things hav
e changed from before,” Jackson said.

  Eryn glanced at him with new respect. That was something she’d been wondering herself, ever since she’d seen the video of Dr. Grimaldi and Dr. Speck. She remembered how Dr. Speck had put it: “Of course, we’re still very human. We couldn’t resist some tinkering. When we saw the opportunity to make improvements, we did try that.”

  Dr. Grimaldi, Dr. Speck, and the others who worked with them had changed more than just the things that might lead to another extinction.

  But shutting down an entire national park? Eryn thought. That seems suspicious.

  Wasn’t that proof—or almost proof—that this was meant to be a top-secret place, a place where secrets were hidden?

  Eryn worked to keep her face smooth, hiding her suspicions.

  Nick sat down on the pile of tumbled-down rocks that had probably once held the Mammoth Cave sign.

  “I’m so tired,” he said. He looked beseechingly at the grown-ups. “Please tell me the reason your backpacks are bigger than ours is that you’ve got tents and sleeping bags and stuff like that for camping out here overnight. It’s going to be dark soon. I don’t think I could hike all the way back to the van right now.”

  Okay, not a bad strategy, Nick, Eryn thought. We have to convince the grown-ups we have to stay here longer, and overnight is a great idea. But are you maybe being a little too obvious?

  Maybe not. Michael gave the ghost of a grin, and started unzipping his backpack. He started pulling out pieces that clicked together and made . . .

  An ax? Eryn wondered.

  “We don’t exactly have tents and sleeping bags,” Michael said. “But we’re going to test our mountaineering skills. We can stay in the woods tonight, but it will be more pioneer style. Roughing it. I think we have just enough light left for putting together a rough lean-to. Who wants to help?”

  No one answered that question. Ava’s eyes grew wide.

  “But . . . but . . . I thought we’d be in a hotel,” she said. She turned toward Brenda. “You said this would be like an ordinary family vacation, just with more people.”