Under Their Skin (19 page)

FIFTY

Nick stuffed the papers he was holding into his shirt. Eryn started to shove hers into her sweatshirt pocket, but they didn't fit. She thrust them at Nick instead. This told him they both still had hope. Hope that they could keep these papers secret. Hope that whoever they were about to face could still be reasoned with, maybe even fooled into thinking that Nick and Eryn were too sweet and innocent and ignorant to be killed.

Oh no, Mr. Killer Robot, I don't know that you're a killer. I just think of robots as . . . part of the family.

But the papers in his hands and the ones jabbing his stomach said even the robots in his own family could be killers. Even the robots in his own family should be killed.

Nick jammed Eryn's papers into his shirt too. The door kept opening. It was open far enough now that Nick could see . . .

Mom. And Dad, Michael, Brenda, Ava, and Jackson.

Nick felt everything at once: relief and fear, fear and relief. . . . His heart raced and slowed and raced again.

What were he and Eryn supposed to do now?

“There you are!” Mom cried, rushing toward him and Eryn. “We were so worried!”

She knelt before them, wrapping her arms around both of them, drawing them close, mashing them into a huge hug.

Nick was too overcome to do anything but let himself be hugged. He flopped against Eryn as if the two of them were nothing but rag dolls.

But the papers . . . what if the papers fall out and Mom sees them?
he wondered.

The folded pages stabbed against his bare skin, but Mom had on her winter coat and a fleece underneath that. Surely she couldn't feel them.

Still, the rustle of the papers beneath his shirt woke up Nick's brain. He had to cover for the noise.

“But—those signs,” Nick mumbled into Mom's hair as she continued hugging him. “‘Absolutely no robots allowed.' How could you go past those signs? Wasn't that against your programming?”

Mom made a sound that could have been an amused snort or the beginning of sobs. It reminded Nick of hearing Jackson break down.

“You're forgetting the parental imperative,” she said. She kept her head between Nick's and Eryn's, and pressed them close.

Nick pulled back. Eryn did too.

“The parental what?” Eryn asked.

Back at the door, Michael chuckled.

“I'll translate,” he said. “She means we're programmed to be parents first and foremost. If there's a contradiction in orders or programming, our parental instincts win. So parents
have
to go after children in danger, even at risk to their own lives.”

Nick glanced at Eryn, wanting to tell her,
See? That means our parents could never kill us! We're fine!

Eryn squinted back at him, and he wondered if she was thinking the same thing that popped into his own head next:
Yes, but somebody else's parents wouldn't mind killing us. We're not every robot's kids.

Eryn's squint intensified.

“Ava and Jackson aren't anyone's parents,” she said. “
They
don't have children in danger. So how'd they manage to disobey the signs?”

“Oh, I didn't program them to think of themselves as robots,” Michael said.

Nick didn't even have to look at his sister again to know that she would be staring pointedly at him, thinking
with laser intensity,
See? See? They're the ones we have to worry about!

“Even if we aren't your parents, we wanted to make sure you were safe,” Ava said softly, tilting her heart-shaped face.

She looked more like a kitten than a killer. She sounded so sincere.

“We woke up and heard the grown-ups talking,” Jackson said. “So we followed our dad and your parents into the cave. We wanted to rescue you too! And Mom followed us. Because, duh, then she thought
her
kids were in danger.”

“And all of you kids are in so much trouble,” Dad said, shaking his head so hard his hair flaired out. Mom was usually much more into discipline than he was, so having him scold them made it seem worse. “Putting yourselves in danger—for what?”

“We had to . . . ,” Eryn began. She glanced at Nick and let her voice trail off.

Mom sighed and settled back into a crouch before them. She kept her hands on their shoulders.

“Eryn, Nick, I know this past week has been hard on you,” she said. “I know everything you found out has been a jolt, and you've gotten this strange obsession with
finding answers to
all
your questions. But I've studied human psychology—centuries worth of it—and it is the nature of human life that there is always something that's a mystery. That's a fact we just couldn't explain to you when you were younger. But you're old enough to understand that now. It's part of the transition to adulthood. Accepting that you're never going to have all your questions answered.”

She glanced around, her sharp eyes seeming to take in every corner of the room.

Look what you found,” she said. “An empty room and a broken desk. That's all. That's all you'll ever find, looking for the past. Because if there was more you were supposed to know about the extinction, we'd already know it.”

She really didn't feel the papers through her coat,
Nick thought. This time, he was very careful not to glance at Eryn. It seemed like even a tiny turn of the head would give away that the two of them were keeping secrets. But he could practically feel Eryn thinking along with him:
None of the grown-ups—none of the robots—know about the papers. They won't know anything unless we tell them. And we're not going to.

Mom was still talking, still in her calm, soothing
school-psychologist voice. “I let you look at my generation's ideas for what might have caused the extinction because I thought you would see a natural conclusion: With the changes the previous humans made—their arrangements for the reawakening of human civilization—those were already enough to prevent a second extinction. Probably the original extinction was caused by a complicated combination of many factors. But we've ended poverty, racism, war, the previous humans' environmental destruction of the planet . . . surely that's enough. Surely if there was anything else your generation needed to do, they would have given you those instructions in the awakening video.”

Nick glanced quickly back at the other grown-ups—they were all nodding as if they completely agreed with what Mom was saying. As if none of the others could read the guilty secrets on Nick's and Eryn's faces, either.

“You understand that we had to look, though, don't you, Mom?” Eryn asked, and Nick could tell that she was trying to sound chastised and humbled.

Trying to fake it.

“Yes, but this has gone far enough,” Mom said sternly. “Promise me you're done now. Promise me you won't put yourselves or anyone else in any more danger, looking for reasons for the extinction.”

“I promise,” Eryn said, hanging her head.

“Me too,” Nick said, because what did it matter? They didn't have to look for reasons they already knew.

Now he let himself glance at Eryn, and he hoped she could read a different promise on his face:
I promise I won't say anything about the papers if you don't. We have to keep this secret. And then we have to . . .

He wasn't sure what other promises he needed to make.

“Look, it's been a long night, after a long day—and a long week,” Dad said. “Why don't we get out of this dangerous cave and go grab a few more hours of sleep before morning. We can leave any discussions about punishment for tomorrow. We'll figure out how you can make this up to us then.”

“Sounds good,” Mom said, standing and turning back toward the door.

That's it?
Nick thought.
That's all they're going to say?

Maybe they'd been programmed not to have any curiosity about the extinction; maybe that was programming they couldn't fight.

But shouldn't they, if that parental imperative thing makes them want to keep us out of danger?
Nick thought.

Maybe not wondering about the extinction was an even higher imperative, one
they
didn't even know they had.

And . . . were they programmed somehow to raise us to think negative things about robots?
Nick wondered.
Is that why, from the first time I saw wires sticking out of a human-looking body, I was disgusted? Is it like I've kind of been programmed too?

He didn't know. He felt like he didn't know anything. His thoughts twisted around so much they were practically in knots.

He realized that Eryn had already stood up. She reached down to give him a hand up. And under the cover of reaching for him, she whispered, “We don't have to tell them anything, because we aren't killing anyone. We aren't like that. We'll find some other way.”

Nick felt a pulse of gratitude to his sister for saying that, for spelling out the ground rules.
Their
imperative. It was something to hold on to, even as everything else confused him.

Mom turned and put an arm around Eryn's shoulders, and as they stepped out the door, Dad did the same to Nick. Eryn kept her hand on Nick's arm. For a moment the four of them walked like that, all of them linked together. Maybe kids whose parents had stayed
married walked like that with their families all the time, but for Nick it was something new.

For a split second he could almost imagine they were just an ordinary family—everyone human, his parents still happily married. But then Mom let go of Eryn to turn off the light and shut the door, and Eryn let go of Nick to pull out her flashlight. In the dim glow of the flashlight beam, he could see Michael, Ava, Jackson, and Brenda ahead of him walking together, exactly the same way, and they looked even more like an ordinary happy family.

And they were all robots. Robots who had violated their programming, robots who didn't even have
the right programming—robots who had already proved they could break and act unpredictably.

We won't have to kill anybody,
Nick reminded himself.
We won't. We'll figure out some other solution. We will.

He just didn't know what that solution could possibly be.

EPILOGUE

Jackson walked carefully, sandwiched between his mother and his sister. He tried to keep his thoughts just as confined. His brain had been fritzing out a lot lately, and he knew if it happened again here, in a dangerous cave, his parents would totally freak out.

Also, he didn't want to make a fool of himself in front of those other kids, Eryn and Nick. His stepsiblings.

The
real
humans. The ones who . . .

Don't think about that,
he told himself, swinging away from panic like someone barely avoiding a cliff.
Think about . . . limestone. Sandstone. The beauty of a cave biome.

He knew that he and his sister, Ava, were the only ones who could actually see the cave around them right now. Dad had programmed them to have only ordinary vision, just like anyone else, but Jackson and his sister had figured out how to upgrade their eyes—even giving themselves the ability to see in the dark. It had been easy.

But now, while the others clutched flashlights and still stumbled constantly, he knew better than to brag about his own skills. He knew not to say,
Take a look at the veining in that rock!

He also knew not to say,
Was I the only one who saw those papers Eryn and Nick hid from us as soon as they saw us coming in that door? Was I the only one who read what was written on those papers? About how . . . how . . .

Jackson's knees started to buckle.

No! No! Stop thinking about it!
His brain screamed at him. Or, he screamed silently at his own brain. He was never quite sure which way it worked. His brain—or possibly his own self—screamed back at him,
I can't stop thinking about that! I have to do something! If anyone else sees those words, if Eryn and Nick decide to obey them, I have to . . .

Jackson's body pitched forward. Ava and Mom grabbed for him, but it was too late. His inner circuits sizzled and zapped. He felt his mind blanking out.

His last thought was,
It's okay. I can think about this later. I won't forget. I'll figure out how to handle this.

There was still time to fix everything.

There had to be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my sister's family—Janet, Robert, Will, Jenna, and Megan Terrell—for acting as consultants on certain aspects of this book.

Thank you to my friends Linda Gerber, Erin MacLellan, Jenny Patton, Nancy Roe Pimm, Amjed Qamar, and Linda Stanek for reading early versions of parts of this book and offering helpful advice.

Thank you to Sharon McCubbins, school media librarian at Cumberland Trace Elementary School in Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Violet Fairweather and Alecia Marcum, librarian and former librarian at William H. Natcher Elementary School, also in Bowling Green. When they invited me to speak at their schools—and then my visit came soon after a nearby sinkhole swallowed up eight Corvettes—they gave me a good idea for where to locate an important scene in this book.

And, as always, thank you to my agent, Tracey Adams, and my editor, David Gale, and everyone else at Simon & Schuster for their help.