“We didn’t know anybody else knew about this cave,” Ava said, and Eryn admired the way her stepsister could sound so calm and easygoing. She might as well be reciting math facts.
Ava’s a robot, Eryn reminded herself. What do you expect?
What if Lida Mae could also tell Ava was a robot? What if she was some . . . historical reenactor/undercover agent, part of a troupe that traveled around secretly looking for robot kids who broke all the rules? Robot children like Ava and Jackson, who were completely illegal? And rule-breaking robot adults like Eryn’s parents and Michael and Brenda, who’d created them?
For once, Eryn could understand why her mother always said Eryn had too much imagination for her own good. Why would anyone need historic reenactors—or any kind of specialist—to search for illegal robot kids like Ava and Jackson? The way Jackson kept spazzing out and breaking down, anyone who looked at him could tell he wasn’t human. Even if his eyes didn’t give him away, his behavior did. That was one of the reasons his parents—and Nick and Eryn’s—had wanted to come out to the nature preserve to hide.
Eryn glanced back to make sure the grown-ups and Jackson were far enough away that Lida Mae wouldn’t be able to tell what they were doing. Eryn could barely see the glow of their flashlights.
Are Nick, Ava, and I too far away from the adults? Eryn wondered. Are we in any danger from this girl?
Lida Mae threw back her head and laughed—a rich, throaty sound.
“Goodness,” she said. “My family’s been living in or near Mammoth Cave for as far back as anyone remembers. Grandpap says one of our ancestors came over on the Mayflower and right away hightailed it to Kentucky to marry himself the daughter of a Shawnee chief. She was, like, Native American royalty. And that’s who the whole Spencer family descended from. Of course we know about this cave!”
Eryn reached behind Ava’s back to poke Nick in the side. She hoped he understood that she meant, Are you listening to this? Listening closely?
She wished she could just ask him out loud, Could it be? Could this girl’s family have survived even when all the other humans went extinct? Because they were hiding in this cave out in the middle of nowhere? Could they maybe not even know anything about robots?
Nick poked her back, which Eryn took to mean, Oh, yeah. And I’ve got questions, too. . . .
Eryn could think of a lot more to ask.
But if Lida Mae’s family has been hiding out in this area for generations, wouldn’t they have seen the desperate scientists hiding frozen embryos for the future, for after the killer robots were gone? Wouldn’t they have seen the robotic trucks coming back for the embryos right before we were born? Wouldn’t they have seen the secret room?
Eryn hoped Nick had figured out some answers, not just more questions. She hoped he understood something she’d missed.
With all their poking each other back and forth, Eryn and Nick weren’t coming up with anything to say to this strange girl, Lida Mae. Fortunately, Ava took control.
“But surely your family leaves sometimes,” Ava murmured. “To go to the grocery or the mall or . . . how far away is the nearest town?”
Lida Mae laughed again. Even totally freaked out and worried, Eryn liked the other girl’s laugh. It was the kind that made Eryn want to giggle too.
“I don’t know, because I’ve never been to town,” Lida Mae said, with a careless shrug that made her sweater slip off her shoulder, revealing the thin, worn strap of a cotton undershirt. “Even my mammy and pap haven’t been in years. It’s miles and miles and miles away, I guess. We’ve got our own sheep for wool, and we grow our own food, and we’ve got the bees for honey—what would we need from any town?”
“You’re saying your family is totally self-sufficient?” Ava asked.
Lida Mae hitched her sweater back up and toyed with one of her braids.
“Can’t say I’ve ever heard that term, ‘self-sufficient,’ before,” she admitted. “But I reckon I can kind of puzzle out the meaning. It’s true my family doesn’t have much use for the outside world. We’ve got everything we need, on our own.”
“So you’re able to survive out in the wilderness without help from anyone?” Ava persisted.
There was something brittle in her voice now. Eryn wondered if Jackson had sounded like that before he collapsed. Maybe being robots didn’t protect the two kids from getting emotional and anxious. Maybe collapsing was just how they dealt with it.
Eryn eased her arm around Ava, in case she’d need to hold her stepsister up. What if Ava collapsed and Lida Mae insisted on bringing out her whole backwoods family to help? What if they saw the same tangled wires and circuit boards inside Ava’s body that had so horrified Nick and Eryn? What would they do then?
At least Nick and I already knew there was such a thing as robots, Eryn thought. At least we were used to working on computers and . . . and . . .
And Eryn wasn’t sure she and Nick had recovered yet from the shock of finding out that Ava and Jackson were robots. Or of finding out that everyone in the world who was thirteen or over was a robot too.
But maybe that’s not true, after all, if Lida Mae’s family has been here for generations, Eryn thought. Because if Lida Mae’s parents and grandparents were robots, they’d be linked to the network with all the other robot adults. And my parents and Michael and Brenda would have known that they were here. They would have been able to find out everything the adults in Lida Mae’s family knew about Mammoth Cave, by going through the robot network. . . .
“So, hey, that’s really cool about your family,” Nick said, his voice oozing fake enthusiasm. Eryn hoped she was the only one who could tell how fake it was, just because she and Nick were twins. “That’s pretty incredible that you don’t need stores. We’d love to see your, uh, farm. Could you show us how it all works?”
Stop! Eryn wanted to scream at Nick. What if this girl says, Sure, come on, and then we have to explain that we can’t go because Jackson broke down and Ava’s about to? Aren’t you paying attention? Aren’t you thinking?
But Lida Mae didn’t say, Sure, come on. She stood there frozen for a moment, caught in the beam of Ava’s flashlight like some prehistoric creature trapped in amber.
And then she whirled around and ran away, deeper and deeper into the dark cave.
THREE
Nick
“You’re sure this girl was real?” Mom asked. “Not a hallucination, not a figment of your imagination?”
“We all three saw her, Mom,” Nick argued. “How could all three of us imagine the same thing?”
After Lida Mae ran away, Ava had turned around and dashed back toward the adults and Jackson. Without a flashlight of their own, Nick and Eryn had had little choice but to follow Ava. Now Nick wished he’d grabbed the flashlight from Ava and chased after Lida Mae instead.
But what if she’d led me somewhere dangerous? Nick wondered. What if the papers under my shirt had fallen out while I was running, and somebody saw them?
It was awful to see holes even in plans that had already been stymied. It made him feel like there weren’t good choices anywhere.
How could there be, when he was carrying instructions that said his life, his sister’s life—no, the very survival of humanity—depended on him and Eryn becoming murderers?
Is it still murder if the only people you kill are robots? he wondered.
His head throbbed. His heart squeezed. He went back to listening to the grown-ups.
“You expect us to believe that some girl was wandering around this cave that absolutely no one knows about, which is covered by KEEP OUT signs, and it’s the middle of the night, and it’s dark . . . and she’s not even carrying a flashlight?” Nick’s stepdad, Michael, asked. “Or, I don’t know—a flaming torch? I didn’t see any light over there but yours. Really, kids, if this is just some prank or tall tale you’re trying to spin, stop right now. We’ve got enough real problems to worry about.”
Nick hadn’t even thought about the f
act that Lida Mae hadn’t had a flashlight. And he’d kind of forgotten about the KEEP OUT signs on the outside of the cave.
“She didn’t have a flashlight or a torch,” Ava said softly. She looked down, as if trying to hide the anguished frown that had crept over her face. Then she looked back up, squinting slightly, which was probably the sweet, innocent Ava version of a defiant expression. “But Lida Mae did have a light. A little one. She was carrying one of those old-fashioned jam or jelly jars, and it kind of glowed, like it had lightning bugs inside.”
“Really?” Eryn said. “I didn’t see that.”
Nick hadn’t either.
“The girl was holding it behind her back while she was talking to us,” Ava said. “And then in front of her while she ran. I only saw it in the split second as she turned.”
“Kiddos, it’s February,” Dad said. “There aren’t lightning bugs around in Kentucky in February.”
“Then it was some other kind of bioluminescent creature,” Ava said, with more stubbornness than Nick would have expected of her. “Some bioluminescent cave creature. They exist. Mom made us read about them in science.”
Nick saw the adults exchange glances. Sometimes Eryn acted like he and she could read each other’s minds, just because they were twins. But the adults, as robots, actually could. It was like they were connected over a special robot Internet.
Or . . . can they still link together down in this cave, out in this nature preserve, when they’re away from the network of all the other robots in the world? Nick wondered.
He didn’t think so. He was pretty sure that here in this cave, his parents and Michael and Brenda were as cut off as a cell phone out of range of a cell tower. He’d never liked the thought of his parents being practically all-knowing. But now it scared him that they weren’t. That they were just as blind and lost as he was.
“Okay, there you go, Jackson,” Brenda said from the ground, where she was still bent over the other boy’s motionless body. “You’re as good as new. Up. Let’s keep moving. Especially if there might be other, uh, people around.”
Nick hadn’t spent much time around Brenda, but she had always seemed so loving and generous and kind. She was pretty, too, with her long, curly red hair, and Nick liked her hippie-mom, easygoing approach to things. But now even she sounded suspicious and paranoid and scared.
Jackson sat up, swaying slightly. And then, as soon as his mother let go of him, he plummeted back toward the ground.
“Brenda!” Michael shouted. “Catch him!”
It was too late. Jackson was already flat on the ground, passed out again.
“Mom!” Ava cried. “I thought you said he was good as new!”
“Shh,” Nick’s own mom said, glancing around as if she expected Lida Mae and a whole crowd of suspicious cave dwellers to materialize out of the cave walls. “Let’s not be shouting about Jackson’s . . . limitations.”
Ava sniffed, and Nick saw his dad put his arm around the girl. Michael went to kneel beside Jackson and Brenda, who seemed to be reaching into the boy’s stomach again. Nick was glad he was standing too far away to see much. But he heard Brenda say in a hushed voice, “See, this wire is so frayed from us fixing him all the time, I bet it’s going to keep coming loose. We can solder it for now, but . . .”
“But that’s just a temporary fix,” Michael muttered. “I’ll have to leave the nature preserve tomorrow and get replacement parts.”
“You should take Jackson with you,” Brenda whispered.
Nick felt a hand clutch his arm. It was Eryn. He turned and met his sister’s eyes. She raised an eyebrow, and the two of them started inching backward, away from the adults and Ava and Jackson. They didn’t stop until they were at the outer edge of the glow of the nearest flashlight.
“If Brenda wants Jackson out of the nature preserve tomorrow . . . ,” Eryn began, whispering into Nick’s ear.
“Then she’s more afraid of Lida Mae’s family finding out he’s a robot than anything else,” Nick finished for her.
Eryn nodded. It was eerie looking at his sister in such near-total darkness. The shadows cast by her eye sockets made it look like she didn’t even have eyes, just dark pits.
Stop freaking yourself out, Nick told himself. Eryn’s the one you trust!
This wasn’t comforting when his next thought was, She’s the only one I can trust.
Eryn stood on tiptoes again to reach Nick’s ear.
“What if Lida Mae or her family were the ones who wrote the papers from the desk in the secret room?” she asked. “What if it’s not even true, it’s just them being . . . prejudiced . . . against civilization? Against robots?”
Nick bent toward Eryn and felt the papers under his shirt stab into his skin. Were they full of lies or nothing but the truth?
Either way they were dangerous, and he and Eryn had to figure out what to do. They had to save humanity without destroying any robots.
That was possible, wasn’t it?
“Tomorrow,” he whispered to his sister. “Tomorrow when Michael leaves with Jackson . . .”
“We find Lida Mae and her family,” Eryn finished for him. “And make them tell us everything.”
FOUR
Jackson
“Why me?” Jackson asked.
Dad clapped his hand on Jackson’s shoulder as they walked down the trail. It was morning again, and the two of them were headed for the van Dad had hidden at the edge of the woods only the day before. They’d left the others behind, still eating breakfast.
“ ‘Why me?’ ” Dad repeated, sounding proud. “Now, that’s a question a typical human kid would ask. It’s much too philosophical for the average robot.”
Jackson squirmed away.
“I’m not trying to sound like a typical kid,” he protested. He purposely left out the word “human.” Why should he aspire to that when his sight was better than a human’s, and his hearing was better than a human’s, and his memory was better than a human’s . . . ?
And I can barely go twenty-four hours without shorting out and making a fool of myself? he thought sheepishly. Something teased at the back of his mind—the memory of the papers he’d seen Nick stuff under his shirt the night before. The ones with the horrifying instructions on them. Maybe he should tell Dad about them, now that they were away from Nick and Eryn. But just thinking the word “papers” made his knees go weak and his head spin.
I’ll think about this after Dad gets my replacement parts, after all my internal links are good again, Jackson told himself. I’ve got plenty of time. Nothing’s going to happen.
Even thinking that made his vision blur. He resolutely narrowed his eyes and gazed at the leafless trees lining the trail, then at the low, gray sky overhead. He thought about nothing but sky, trees, dirt. Nature. Once everything came into focus again, he peered back at Dad.
“What I’m asking is, why am I the one who keeps breaking down, when Ava almost never does?” Jackson asked. “It’s our programming, isn’t it? How’d you design us differently?”
Dad sighed. He usually didn’t like to talk about his kids’ programming. He usually tried to pretend as much as possible that they were totally human . . . just with robotic bodies. He took a cautious glance around and lowered his voice, as if he worried that there might be some creature more advanced than a squirrel within earshot. Someone who could eavesdrop.
“The differences . . . well, you’re male and she’s female,” Dad began.
Jackson tried to decide if saying, Well, duh, I knew that! would earn him a lecture about being respectful or a proud grin because he sounded like a typical human kid. Before Jackson could make up his mind, Dad sighed again.
“My goal was to make the two of you seem like typical human kids from the early twenty-first century,” Dad said. “And Denise explained to me that the gender stereotypes of that time left boys less room to express their emotions than girls. So it would appear that whenever you get emotional, you blow your circuits.”
/> This time Jackson said, “Duh!” without thinking about it. “Dad, I know how it feels,” Jackson added. “I just want to know how to fix it. How to . . . be chill.”
“Some of it’s just a matter of growing up,” Dad began. “Getting through adolescence. Figuring yourself out. If it makes you feel any better, I’m sure generations of fathers and sons have had this same conversation. Or something like it.”
“There haven’t been generations of fathers and sons like us, Dad,” Jackson muttered. “You don’t know what it’s like. Because you’ve never been a kid.”
His father had been a middle-aged adult since the day he’d rolled off the assembly line. That was how it was with all the adults—they weren’t designed to grow and change. Neither were the robot kids aged thirteen and over. As far as Jackson knew, he and Ava were the only robot kids ever who had started out as babies and gone through all the same developmental changes a human would go through in the first twelve years of life. In the beginning, Mom and Dad had even passed them off as human children—“to see if it could be done,” Dad had said.
Until recently, Jackson had been as thrilled as Mom and Dad about fooling everyone.
In the past several months, though, when he began falling apart all the time, he’d started wondering, Would it be so awful to just tell everyone what we are? So they’d understand that I’m not just . . . weird?
Then Mom and Dad had broken it to him that telling anybody what he was would be deadly. Everything about him and Ava was illegal—there weren’t supposed to be any robots who grew and changed. And there weren’t supposed to be any robots their age; the rules were that only humans were supposed to have been born in the past twelve years.
That was why Mom had started homeschooling them, once Jackson and Ava began having trouble hiding their true nature.
And now that was part of the reason Mom and Dad and Denise and Donald had brought them all to this nature preserve, where nobody else was supposed to find them.
So how was it that Ava, Eryn, and Nick said some strange girl had shown up in the cave last night, even as Jackson lay passed out on the cave floor?