Code Name Flood
Code Name Flood
Laura Martin
Non-stop action, terrifying dinosaurs and a race to save the world…‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. ‘Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?’Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for nearly wiping out the human race?Sky Mundy’s life has changed dramatically since she fled the underground compound where she grew up. She and her friends are now prey to dinosaurs and being pursued by marines but Sky is determined to follow a map left by her missing father. When the map leads to a hidden underwater lab, Sky is horrified to learn that scientists are still breeding dinosaurs. As she delves deeper into her father’s secrets, Sky uncovers a plan that will destroy the world, unless she can put a stop to it…
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is:
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © Laura Martin 2017
Cover artwork © Fred Gambino
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Laura Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008152925
Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008152932
Version: 2017-03-03
For all the teachers, librarians, and parents working to instill a love of reading in the hearts of the next generation. You are the true heroes of stories.
And to my mom, who first did that for me.
Contents
Cover (#ue5463868-e24b-5649-a23e-189fa96cb748)
Title Page (#u976bc773-bca3-54e2-889e-5c33fc5c7207)
Copyright (#u02ac8cb6-d4e4-59e9-9767-170653f2fad6)
Dedication (#uce8cb43f-35df-52d5-ab20-721841680a9b)
Map (#u0d38706f-ce60-58ee-aea5-72da782e32a7)
Chapter 1 (#u956b5e5c-4a17-5e70-8b0a-06005526fa4a)
Chapter 2 (#u8eaa9a23-fae0-5289-84fd-bfed5d18a163)
Chapter 3 (#u2bfa592b-5706-5a7b-9863-3ee5a296c672)
Chapter 4 (#u2158fb02-5ec6-5c3c-856c-fd993cc9d2be)
Chapter 5 (#u11401936-d28f-5f02-8b33-050cafa7b7a4)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_34bb4788-9c8f-5497-b246-5b2699cb2837)
This was a bad idea. Spectacularly bad, actually. It went against everything I’d learned in my short time topside, but all that didn’t change what we had to do. I glanced back down at my dad’s map, but it showed the same thing it had always shown. The only way to get to Lake Michigan was to leave the shelter of the trees and make a run for it – in the open. My eyes flicked up to take in the sprawling grassland in question, filled, as I knew it would be, with dinosaurs.
A large herd of what I thought had to be Dracorex hogwartsia was grazing close enough for me to count the spikes that bristled all over their bony heads, making them resemble the dragons of fairy tales they were named after. But these creatures were not the stuff of fairy tales or history books. At least not anymore. Behind the herd of dracorex was a grassland that used to contain houses, roads, cars, and everything else humans had used to stake their claim on this earth. All that was gone now. Which made sense, I guess, considering the dinosaurs were the ones who ruled things these days.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Shawn muttered, running a hand through his blond hair so that it stood up in sweaty spikes. “There’s no way we can make it to the lake without getting eaten.”
“What’s your point?” Todd asked as he swung his arms in lazy circles to stretch out his shoulder muscles.
“My point,” Shawn said, grimacing, “is that there has to be a way around this, a way that isn’t so exposed. We’ve always gone around the open areas. Except,” he amended, “for that time we almost became a T. rex’s lunch.” He paused a moment, stifling a shudder. “At least in the trees the only dinosaurs we encountered were little ones. Out there,” he said, gesturing in front of us, “there’s nowhere to hide, no trees to climb, and nothing to slow down those massive monsters.”
“We knew that the closer to Lake Michigan we got, the more open it was going to be,” I said flatly. His attitude shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d grown up with Shawn in North Compound, and unlike Todd, who’d grown up topside, being aboveground was still an uncomfortable and terrifying experience for both of us. I just hid it better.
“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was going to be this open,” Shawn grumbled, and I tried not to roll my eyes as I turned my attention back to the grassland. I’d read that dinosaurs liked to congregate near a source of water, but this was a little ridiculous. Herds of green-, brown-, and amber-coloured dinosaurs were scattered in every direction as far as I could see. To our left, a large group of stegosaurs grazed quietly in the knee-high scrub grasses, the sun reflecting off the wide flat plates that sat in single file down their sloping backs.
“Try to relax,” I said, even as the knot in my gut twisted a little tighter. “If we read the map correctly, the lake should be just on the other side of those hills.”
“Dunes,” Todd corrected. “Those things that look like hills are called dunes.”
“What’s a dune?” Shawn asked.
“Big mounds of sand,” Todd explained. “They border the lake.”
I glanced back out across the tall wavy grasses, silently wishing Shawn was right and there was another way. While the prospect of finally getting to the lake sent a thrill of excitement through me, Shawn’s reminder of our last dash into the open made my already edgy nerves buzz uncomfortably. After a lifetime underground, we hadn’t known any better than to run across an open meadow. It had been the first of many near-death experiences. The note and map my dad had left for me, urging me to take his compass and the small memory plug it contained to Lake Michigan, hadn’t said anything about how to actually survive topside. That part we’d had to figure out the hard way.
I tugged at my ponytail to free it from the snarled thorns of the bush. A few curly red strands got caught in the branches, and they fluttered gently in the wind. I snatched them and shoved them in my pocket. I wasn’t taking any chances. North Compound’s marines had found us twice now. We’d eliminated any chance that we were carrying a tracking device, so that left the old-fashioned way of finding us. By foot. Ever since we’d realised this, we’d gone out of our way to hide all traces of our movements. Hopefully it would be enough. I took a deep breath to calm my nerves. The tangy, earthy flavour of this topside world still felt foreign, but unfortunately, it did nothing to slow my hammering heart or shaking hands, so I balled them into fists and mentally commanded myself to get it together.
“Can we just get on with it?” I asked.
“Sure,” Todd said as he leant forward to stretch out his leg muscles.
Shawn scowled at Todd and then turned to me. “How are you so OK with potentially getting eaten alive?”
“Or trampled,” Todd added, adjusting his pack. “Don’t forget trampled.”
“If you were trying to make me feel better, you just failed miserably,” Shawn grumbled.
“I wasn’t.” Todd smirked. A week ago, that smirk would have fooled me. Now I could see the slight tension around his green eyes that gave away his own nerves. Seeing Shawn’s glowering face, Todd shrugged. “Look at it this way,” he said, gesturing to the massive dinosaurs. “If that many plant eaters are comfortable enough to feed, they don’t think there are any large predators around.”
“Yeah,” Shawn muttered. “But they could be wrong.”
“Just keep running no matter what happens,” Todd said. “Both of you are still too bad a shot to turn and fight if something comes after us.”
“Hey,” I protested. “You said this morning that we were getting better.”
Todd wrinkled his nose apologetically. “I was being nice.”
“You aren’t nice.” Shawn scowled.
Todd laughed. “You are improving. Especially since you had that lesson with Ivan. You might actually be a step above horrendous now.”
“Well, that’s something,” Shawn mumbled.
My heart clenched painfully. Ivan should have caught up with us by now. Either he hadn’t survived his encounter with the marines two days ago, or something had happened to delay him. I swallowed hard, trying not to imagine all the terrible things that could slow down someone as savvy at surviving topside as my grandfather.
Todd looked at both of us in turn. “Ready?” he asked. I nodded, and Shawn grumbled something unintelligible. Todd must have taken that as confirmation, because he sprang up from the bushes and sprinted into the open.
“Really?” Shawn said, clambering to his feet. “Not even a one, two, three? Or a ready, get-set, go?” He was still grumbling under his breath as we took off after Todd.
The feeling of being exposed intensified as we left the looming shelter of the trees. Todd flew through the waist-high grasses, his long legs eating up the distance with powerful strides. Shawn and I were not powerful or fast. Short and stocky, Shawn pumped his arms, his face already flushed a bright red as he struggled to keep up. I wasn’t sure what I looked like, but I doubted it was much better.
The herd of stegosaurus picked their heads up, bugling a warning to their young, who quickly found shelter under their parents’ tree-trunk-like legs. Their wary brown eyes and solemn faces studied us as we passed. If I hadn’t been sucking air as fast as I could get it, I would have let out a sigh of relief. Todd had been fairly certain that they wouldn’t stampede and squash us, but fairly certain and certain were two very different things.
The wind whipped across the grasses, making them sway and bend like waves, and I looked back to see the trees quickly disappearing behind us. Suddenly my foot caught on a rock and I flew forward. I hit the ground hard, my hands thrown out instinctively in front of me. They landed in something soft and slimy, and an awful smell met my nose. Before I could figure out what I’d just fallen into, I was scrambling to my feet and running to catch up with Shawn and Todd. Glancing back, I saw a gigantic pile of what looked like fist-sized brown balls in a slightly smashed pile. My stomach rolled as I realised that I was liberally coated in what had to be fresh dinosaur poop.
Todd slowed his pace a few minutes later, allowing Shawn and me to catch up enough to run on either side of him.
“See dead ahead?” he asked, pointing. I tried not to be too bitter that he wasn’t even breathing hard. Following his finger, I spotted several large circular depressions in the ground, each of them with a pile of white ovals in the centre.
“Are those nests?” I asked.
“Yup.” Todd frowned. “Not sure of what, though.”
“They’re everywhere,” Shawn huffed as he took in the huge nests that lay in almost every direction.
“It’ll take too long to go around. We have to go through,” Todd said. “Whatever you do, don’t touch the eggs. Somewhere around here are their parents, and the last thing we want is for them to think we’re messing with their babies.”
“Got it,” Shawn said, shaking his sweat-drenched hair out of his eyes.
Todd turned to me, his nose wrinkled. “Did you fall in dinosaur dung?”
I grimaced. “Do you even have to ask?” The smell radiating off me alone should have been clue enough.
Todd shook his head, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Follow me,” he called, shooting ahead of us again as we entered the nesting area. The ground underfoot turned to sand, and suddenly running was even harder than it had been before. As we flashed past the nests, I caught a glimpse of the large white eggs, each delicately speckled with brown.
“Jump!” Todd yelled, leaping suddenly into the air. I jumped, glancing down to see a strip of three nests, side by side, impossible to avoid. Shawn was not as quick, and I heard a surprised grunt followed by a shower of sand spraying across my back. I whirled in time to see him sprawl, face-first, into the middle of a nest. A sharp crack rang out as his head hit one of the eggs. The shell buckled in and started oozing a clear liquid. Shawn sat up quickly, but in his attempt to get to his feet again he bumped the broken egg, sending it clattering into one of its neighbours. It split in two and a slim brown creature flopped out, struggling to free itself from a gooey membrane.
I stared in wonder.
“Not good,” Todd said in my ear, and I realised I’d stopped running. He lurched past me and yanked Shawn out of the sandy nest. The little brown dinosaur opened its mouth in a wordless cry, its eyes sealed shut.
“Take your tunic off,” Todd barked at Shawn, his face drawn and pale.
“What?” Shawn asked, trying in vain to wipe the goo from the egg out of his hair. Todd didn’t wait – ripping Shawn’s pack and large bow off his back, he thrust them into my arms and then yanked Shawn’s tunic up over his head. Shawn yelped in protest, but Todd was already chucking it away from us. Shawn grabbed his pack from me just as the tiny dinosaur let out a high-pitched cry that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Run,” Todd commanded. Shawn slung his pack and bow over his bare shoulders, and we took off. The screech of the tiny dinosaur followed us as we weaved through nest after endless nest. The sound of an ear-piercing shriek from behind us forced me to turn my head. To our left, still not much more than dots in the distance, was a herd of rust-coloured dinosaurs. And they were coming straight for us, fast.
“What are those?” Shawn called.
“The parents,” Todd called, putting on a burst of speed. I hadn’t thought it was possible to run any faster, but I found a reserve of strength and pushed harder.
The sound of the advancing dinosaurs grew more deafening by the second, their angry shrieks reverberating up my spine and right into my brain. I craned my neck to look back again. They were predators. If their rows of gleaming teeth hadn’t made that immediately obvious, the fact that they were running on well-muscled back legs sealed the deal. But it was their eyes that had me doing a double take. Unlike most dinosaurs I’d encountered, whose eyes were along the sides of their heads, these sat in the front under lethal-looking spikes, almost human in their positioning.
Suddenly the sand was deeper than before, and I looked up to see Todd on all fours scrambling up a mountain. The dunes, I thought as I automatically mimicked his movements. The sand burned under my hands as I fought to keep up. For every step I took, I felt like I slid back down two, and within moments my eyes, nose, and mouth were full of grit. The sound of Shawn’s hoarse breathing behind me made it obvious that he wasn’t faring much better, and even Todd was gasping for the first time. Despite everything, that fact scared me most of all. If Todd was struggling, did we even have a chance?
Reaching the top of the dune, Todd launched himself off the peak, soaring a good ten feet before landing in the soft sand of the downhill slope. He immediately jumped again to land with a spray of sand another ten feet down. There was no time to think about it. I jumped. The wind tore at my clothes, and my stomach dropped as the dune rushed up to meet me. When my feet finally touched down, they sank into the soft sand just long enough for me to take off again. But in that second of flying, I felt wildly and amazingly alive.
My elation fizzled when I saw Todd scrambling up another dune even bigger than the first. Blinking the grit out of my eyes, I followed. I hadn’t thought it was possible for anything to be harder than that first dune. I’d been wrong. My muscles shook and cramped in protest as I forced them to do battle with yet another endless sand mountain.
When we finally made it to the top, I turned back in time to watch the dinosaurs crest the first dune. The entire herd hadn’t pursued us, presumably leaving the majority behind to defend the undisturbed nests. Not that it mattered. Even one of those beasts was more than our match. The handful still following us were much larger than I’d originally thought. At close to twenty feet from muscled tail to blunt snout, they were almost as big as the T. rex.
I looked ahead to see Todd and Shawn already halfway down the second dune, but before I took my own flying leap, I saw something that made me cry in relief. There, spread out as far as I could see, was Lake Michigan. My hand went involuntarily to the compass that hung around my neck. I’d made it. Almost. Three more dunes, smaller than the one I stood on, separated me from the lake and successfully delivering the data plug that, if my dad was right, meant the salvation of the human race. I leapt after Todd and Shawn.
The next two dunes were smaller, but our exhaustion made us clumsy and slow. Even Todd stumbled and slid backwards as we made our way up their hot, slippery surfaces. Luckily, the deep sand seemed to slow the smashed-faced dinosaurs down as well, and I heard their frustrated squeals every time we disappeared from sight over the top of a dune. Finally, we were climbing the last one.
Shawn was struggling more than me. The veins on his neck and forehead bulged, and sand stuck to his sweaty arms and shoulders like a mottled, grainy second skin. He looked to be on the verge of collapsing.
“We got this,” I encouraged him, grabbing his pack to keep him from slipping backwards again. “We’re almost there. The lake is just over the top of this dune.”
“Can’t. Breathe,” he gasped.
A triumphant roar sliced through the air as the dinosaurs crested the dune directly behind us. If we didn’t move, they’d be on us in seconds.
“Come on!” Todd shouted, and suddenly he was on the other side of Shawn. Together we hauled him up the dune. Instead of leaping off, we kind of tumbled and slid down the far side, sand spraying up to catch in my hair, tunic, and mouth.
We ran, arms churning, as we battled to make it to the water before the dinosaurs that were already sliding down the last dune. Even though the expanse of blue-gray water got closer and closer by the second, I knew we’d never make it. The dinosaurs were close enough that I could smell them now, a pungent mix of decay and old blood. This was where it was going to end.
(#ulink_3e219f6f-76dd-5ddd-91d5-fe8de70b9480)
When we were still a hundred yards away from the lake, I spotted the brown object floating on top of the water’s surface with two men standing inside of it. Sweat stung my eyes, but I didn’t notice. Boat, my exhausted brain provided for me, that’s a boat. I’d read about boats, of course, but I’d never seen one. Todd must have spotted it too because he immediately veered towards it. It flashed across my mind that those men could be marines, but in that moment I didn’t care. The pack of rust-coloured scales and flashing white teeth were mere feet behind us now.
The men in the boat were dressed in strange blue jumpsuits and had black guns pressed to their shoulders. As we approached, a flash of red erupted from each barrel, and I heard an angry shriek as a spray of sand pelted my back. The men fired again as we raced into the icy water. The cold was so shocking after the heat of the sand that it would have taken my breath away if I’d had any left to take. I sloshed through the shallow water, running until it was too deep, and then I instinctively paddled, pulling handfuls of water past me. Moments later my fingernails dug into the rough wood of the boat. One of the men grabbed the back of my tunic and heaved me up over the edge, while the other stood firing shot after shot into our would-be assailants.
Todd and Shawn landed on top of me as they too were hauled in. Managing to untangle myself from the boys, I struggled to my knees and peered out over the edge of the boat. The dinosaurs were slumped across the beach, their legs stuck out at all angles and their mouths hanging open. There had to be at least twenty of them, their eyes vacant.
I realised suddenly that the only sound I could hear was the water lapping against the side of the boat, and the silence seemed deafening after the earsplitting roars of moments before. The two men lowered their guns as Todd and Shawn pulled themselves to standing positions.
“Are they dead?” Shawn wheezed, running a trembling hand over his face. “Please tell me they’re dead.”
“Of course they’re not dead,” said one of the blue jump-suited men, as though this should have been obvious, leveling his serious grey eyes on us.
“They sure look dead to me,” Todd commented, spitting a gob of sand into the water. He shoved his hands into his hair and tousled it roughly, sending a mist of grainy sand over Shawn and me.
“They’re just tranquilised,” said the other man with the gun, turning to inspect us. I jumped as I realised that what I’d taken for a slimly built man was actually a girl not much older than me. Her closely cropped black hair stuck out in odd spikes and twists over laughing hazel eyes. Her easy smile was a sharp contrast to the man beside her, whose narrowed eyes held no hint of warmth or kindness. “Those guys won’t wake up for at least three hours, and they’ll have killer headaches when they do.”
“Tranquilised?” Shawn repeated. “Why would you tranquilise them instead of killing them?”
“Wasteful,” said the older man stiffly. “The carnotaurus numbers aren’t stable. Their last breeding season was a bad one. Those right there,” he said, pointing to five large dinosaurs slumped near one another, “are probably breeding females. Did you know that their name literally means meat-eating bull? The name came from those impressive horns. Beautiful creatures. Simply amazing. Their eyes face forward instead of off to the side like all the others, one of the reasons they’re such efficient hunters. Although,” he amended, “it’s extremely rare for that many of them to chase prey like that. They prefer to hunt alone. In fact, I’ve only seen that behaviour when they believe their young are threatened.”
I’d never heard someone talk about dinosaurs with such obvious admiration.
“You mean like if someone fell headfirst into a nest and cracked an egg open with his big head?” Todd grumbled, glaring at Shawn.
“Right,” Shawn said. “Because I meant to do that. It was loads of fun at this end. By the way, why did you rip my shirt off?” he asked as he attempted to scrape the layer of sand off his neck and shoulders that the lake water hadn’t already rinsed off.
“Because I was trying to avoid that,” Todd said, pointing to the beach full of not-dead dinosaurs. He shook his head in disgust. “Obviously it wasn’t enough. They were still able to track your scent.”
Ignoring the boys’ bickering, I studied the girl curiously. “Why do you care about the, what did you call them? The carnotaurus numbers?”
“That is a good question,” Todd said, looking from the man to the girl. “Who are you people?”
“Wait a second,” Shawn said. “You don’t know them, Todd? Why did you run towards their boat?”
“Did you see a better option?” Todd asked, eyebrows raised.
“Clearly savages,” the older man sneered, turning to the back of the boat, where a small black motor was perched. “I told you we shouldn’t have picked them up, Chaz. Don’t get too close, they probably have fleas.”
“Fleas?” Todd said in indignant disbelief. “And who are you calling savages?”
I put a restraining hand on him; now was not the time to insult the people who had just saved us.
“At least you don’t have to report their deaths now. Think of the mound and a half of paperwork you just avoided,” the girl said good-naturedly. “Besides, we’ll send a team back to attach tags and trackers before the carnotaurs wake up, so it isn’t a total loss.” The man huffed into his moustache and pulled a handle on the motor. It sputtered to life.
“We’ll drop you off a mile or so down the shoreline,” the man said coolly. “That way other members of the herd won’t be able to find your trail. Although I suggest you bathe the one who fell into the nest. The stench of a hatchling can linger for months if you don’t.”
“Months?” Shawn squeaked, looking pale.
“Actually,” the man said, wrinkling his nose, “you would all benefit from bathing. You smell like faeces.”
“That would be me,” I said, raising my hand. I couldn’t smell the dinosaur poop I’d landed in anymore, but I’d probably become immune to it. The man had called us savages, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. My green tunic and leggings were liberally stained and spotted with dinosaur dung, a film of wet sand still clung to my skin, and my red hair hung in wet tangled ringlets. Shawn and Todd didn’t look much better. Shawn was dripping wet sand onto the floor of the boat, shirtless, his hair smashed down on his head in dirty clumps. Todd had somehow ripped a large gash in the shoulder of his tunic so it drooped to the side, his bow and other gear a tangle of straps across his chest. In sharp contrast, the girl was immaculate in her crisp blue jumpsuit with its neat red badge on the upper shoulder that depicted the silhouette of a long-necked brachiosaurus.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Scientists.” The girl grinned. “We’ve been studying dinosaur populations around the lake since before the pandemic.” She extended her hand, and I shook it. “I’m Chaz, by the way, Chaz McGuire. This grumpy but brilliant man is Dr Steve Schwartz.” Dr Schwartz didn’t acknowledge his introduction as he fiddled with the puttering motor positioned at the back of the boat. I glanced around, taking in the small craft’s flat wooden hull. Narrow benches built into the sides of the boat were the only available seating, leaving the centre of the boat open with enough space for the five of us to move around comfortably. Lying open near Dr Schwartz’s feet was a blue duffel bag. Leaning over, I peered inside it to see equipment I was all too familiar with as the daughter of a biologist – small sample bottles, logbooks, and various bits of technology used to measure, catalog, and label scientific findings.
What had that girl, Chaz, said? That they had been studying dinosaurs since before the pandemic? How was that possible? The pandemic, set off by the resurrection of the dinosaurs over 150 years ago, had moved swiftly, decimating over 99 per cent of the human population within days and forcing the remaining survivors underground. Well, I amended, most of the survivors. Todd’s village, the Oaks, was proof that not everyone had found refuge underground. Yet this girl acted as though the pandemic had come and gone and they’d gone right on studying dinosaurs. It made no sense.
“Do you live in a tree village like Todd?” Shawn asked, the confusion in his voice echoing my own thoughts as he shrugged into the damp tunic Todd handed him.
Todd shook his head as he eyed the girl’s strange jumpsuit. “There aren’t any villages within miles of the lake. Too dangerous. They must be compound moles like you guys.”
“Not possible,” I countered. “There are only four compounds, and none of them are anywhere close to here.” They were in fact located on the northern, southern, eastern, and western corners of what used to be North America. And up until I’d met Todd, I’d believed that they were the last holdouts of the human race, used as safe houses for the survivors of the pandemic. Now I was faced with yet another person who apparently lived outside the Noah’s rule.
Chaz grinned while she watched this exchange, as though she was enjoying a private joke. “We aren’t affiliated with the compounds or any tree villages. Good guesses, though. Actually—”
“That will be enough, Chaz,” Schwartz said sharply, cutting her off midsentence. “You’re making me regret promoting you to my assistant. One more word and you’ll be back scooping out pens.”
Chaz cringed, and I cocked my head to the side as I considered what Schwartz had just said. What pens could Chaz possibly have to scoop? I glanced back at the bag of scientific equipment again. Who were these people? Before I could ask, Schwartz turned a lever on the motor, and the boat suddenly lurched forward. My feet went out from under me, and I yelped, toppling backwards into Todd, who hit Shawn. Someone’s elbow connected with my head as I landed hard on my back. The boat continued its surge forward, the bottom vibrating underneath me so hard my teeth clattered together.
“Thanks for that,” Todd called over the roaring motor as Chaz helped him to his feet.
“Sorry,” Chaz said cheerily as she extended her hand to me. “Schwartz isn’t really a people person.”
“You don’t say,” Shawn said wryly, shooting Schwartz a dirty look. Grabbing Chaz’s hand, I attempted to clamber to my feet, but my pack caught on something, bringing me up short. There was a sharp ripping noise, and I stood up as my pack tore open, and its hastily packed contents spilled out. As if in slow motion, I saw my father’s map fall. I’d been consulting it so frequently that I hadn’t bothered to tuck it back inside my compass for safekeeping. I lunged for the map but missed as it got picked up by the wind and tumbled across the floor of the boat. Moments before it was about to go airborne and out, a booted foot smashed down on top of it, successfully halting its escape. Sighing in relief, I grabbed for it. The boot didn’t move. I looked up into Schwartz’s annoyed face.
“What is a savage doing with a map?” he asked, bending down to retrieve it before I could protest. Schwartz’s expression went from annoyed to fearful as he surveyed the meandering line that led from North Compound to the centre of Lake Michigan. “Chaz, get your weapon out,” he snapped. “Don’t let them move.”
“What?” Chaz asked, looking just as confused as I felt. “You mean the tranquiliser gun?”
“Of course the tranquiliser gun. Don’t make me say it again!” Schwartz bellowed. Chaz scrambled to follow orders and whipped her large black gun up to her shoulder.
Dr Schwartz let the motor sputter out and die as he continued to study my map as though he’d seen a ghost. The boat bobbed up and down in the waves, and my stomach rolled sickeningly. I didn’t think I liked being on a boat.
“Tie them up,” he finally said, rolling my map up and storing it in the duffel bag at his feet. Shawn opened his mouth to protest, but snapped it shut as Schwartz picked up his own tranquiliser gun. One by one, we put our hands out and allowed ourselves to be tied.
“A tranquiliser probably wouldn’t kill you,” Chaz murmured under her breath to us as she tightened the ropes on Todd’s wrists.
“Gee, thanks,” Todd sniffed.
“Yeah, I’m sure something calibrated to drop a dinosaur would be really great for our health,” Shawn muttered with a murderous look at Schwartz. It wasn’t until Chaz had double-checked the ropes on our wrists that Schwartz walked up to stand in front of me.
“No one should have a map that leads directly to the lab,” Schwartz said, scowling. “Where did you get it?”
I pressed my lips together and looked down. Schwartz grabbed my shoulder roughly and shoved me backwards until the hard wood of the boat’s edge dug painfully into the backs of my knees. My jaw clenched. If he thought he was going to bully information out of me I wasn’t ready to give, he was wrong. I’d come too far, survived too much, to risk failing my dad and the mission he’d given me by trusting the wrong person now. Swallowing hard, I remained silent and met his angry glare with one of my own.
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” he said, leaning forward so I was forced to lean back further over the water. “Talk or you go overboard.”
I flicked my eyes back towards the shore; it wasn’t that far away. But with my hands tied together it might as well have been miles.
“Whoa,” Chaz said. “Dr Schwartz, sir, isn’t that a bit much? I mean, she’s just a kid.”
I felt the faintest tug of hope. Maybe Chaz wouldn’t let this guy do anything too drastic.
“So are you,” he sniffed. “Do as you’re told.”
“Yes, sir,” Chaz said, but she sounded uncertain. When I still didn’t say anything, Schwartz sighed and backed up a step, giving me some much-needed breathing room. My feeling of relief flitted away when he grabbed Shawn by the front of the tunic and shoved him against the opposite side of the boat. Shawn swayed dangerously backwards but his feet stayed firmly planted and Schwartz’s grip on him held him upright over the dark waves lapping against the boat. My heart felt like it had jumped into my throat, and I attempted to swallow it as I took in the obvious threat to my best friend’s life. It was time to talk.
“It’s from my dad,” I said. “A family heirloom. No importance.” It was a lie. The map was the most important thing I owned. But every instinct I had was screaming at me not to trust this man, and I was not going to tell him anything I didn’t absolutely have to.
Schwartz just stood there, his face unreadable as he studied me. I held my breath.
“Liar,” he said, but I barely heard him because over his shoulder I’d just seen an all-too-familiar look come over my best friend’s face. Before I could tell him not to, Shawn pulled back and clobbered Schwartz on the side of the head with his bound fists. Schwartz yelped, and as if in slow motion, I saw him lose his grip on the front of Shawn’s tunic. Shawn fought to keep his balance for a gut-wrenching heartbeat before toppling backwards and off the boat. He disappeared below the surface of the blue-black water, and I screamed, rushing forward even though I knew he was out of reach. A moment later, Shawn came up, gasping and thrashing as he fought to keep his head above the waves. With his hands still tied in front of him, he was forced to keep himself afloat with nothing but his legs as his heavy pack and gear dragged him down.
“He’s going to drown!” I gasped as Shawn’s head went under again. Panic dug its cold fingers into my heart. If I jumped in, all I would do was drown with him. In desperation, I attempted to rip at the rope binding my hands with my teeth, but it was no use. The next thing I knew, Schwartz had grabbed the back of my tunic and yanked me roughly away from the edge and onto the floor of the boat. He was shouting at me, but I was too lost in my fog of panic to hear him.
“Tell me who gave you that map,” he bellowed again, obviously deciding to use Shawn’s predicament to his advantage.
“She already did!” Todd yelled. “Can’t you see Shawn’s drowning?”
I stumbled to my feet in time to see Shawn struggle to the surface, grab a lungful of air, and go down again.
“He’ll get eaten before he can drown,” Chaz said, her lips pressed in a grim line. “Look.” Something in her voice cut through my panic, and Todd and I snapped our heads to follow her pointing finger.
“What is that thing?” Todd breathed. My heart stuttered to a terrified stop as I took in the creature swimming towards us. Its enormous head alone was almost as long as our boat and reminded me of an alligator with long yellow teeth jutting out from jaws that looked capable of crushing a human in one bite. Its massive body was serpentine and fluid as it cut through the water like a snake. A dark blue-black in colour, it blended almost seamlessly with the waves, and if Chaz hadn’t pointed it out, I might not have noticed it until it was upon us. But now that I had seen it, I knew it was going to haunt my nightmares. I had no clue what kind of plesiosaur it was, but it was one of the scariest things I’d ever seen. Which, considering everything I’d seen since coming topside, was really saying something.
“Get him out,” I begged as angry, helpless tears slid down my face. “Please.”
“Talk,” Schwartz said coldly.
“Sir!” Chaz said, dropping her gun to the floor of the boat as she lunged forward to make a grab for Shawn.
Schwartz shot a hand out to restrain her, his face pinched. “The safety of the lab is in jeopardy. Follow your orders.”
Words began pouring out of me, as though if I just said the right combination, I could save Shawn. Whether I trusted Schwartz didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but getting Shawn out of the water. Fast.
“My dad gave it to me. He told me to come here.” I choked, frantic. “He didn’t say why. Just get him out. Please!”
“Dr Schwartz?” Chaz said as Shawn spluttered back to the surface. “That’s Pretty Boy. It could capsize us.” Tearing my eyes away from Shawn, I saw the beast sink down into the murky water. Somehow not seeing it was scarier than seeing it had been.
Schwartz sighed. “Fine, we’ll finish this at the lab.” Leaning over, he grabbed Shawn’s tunic, and with Chaz’s help he hauled him back into the boat, where he flopped in an exhausted heap, gasping for air. Schwartz was just turning back to the motor when the boat lurched suddenly, almost toppling Todd into the water. Chaz grabbed him and threw him to the floor of the boat next to Shawn.
“Dr Schwartz!” she yelled. “He’s testing us. Please get this thing moving, or we’re all dead.” Schwartz’s face went white, and he grabbed the cord of the motor, giving it a firm yank. The engine snarled and died. He pulled at it again, and it gave another hopeful rumble before sputtering out. The plesiosaur emerged beside us, and if I’d had the inclination to reach out a hand, I could have pricked a finger on one of the teeth that was roughly the length of my forearm. What had Chaz called it? Pretty Boy? What a stupid name for one of the ugliest creatures I’d ever seen. It sized us up before bumping its head into the boat again, making it tilt violently. Its message was clear. It was going to toy with us first, terrify us, before swallowing us whole.
“Dr Schwartz!” Chaz yelled, going for her tranquiliser gun.
“Saying my name isn’t helping,” Schwartz snapped. “And don’t shoot it. It’ll drown if we tranquilise it.”
“Good! Drown it!” Todd shouted, but Schwartz ignored him as he gave the cord another yank. This time the engine spluttered to life. He cranked the handle, and we shot off across the water, the shoreline shrinking behind us as we headed towards the middle of the lake. Pretty Boy submerged again, and I waited for it to reemerge and chase us. It didn’t.
I sank down beside my soaked and shivering friend. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words sounded pitiful. Shawn had almost just been shot, drowned, and fed to a monster. Sorry didn’t really cut it.
“What was that thing?” Shawn gasped, his eyes not leaving the spot where Pretty Boy had disappeared, and I realised that in the struggle to stay afloat Shawn hadn’t seen the monster approaching.
“I have no idea,” Todd said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s the reason my mom said to never swim in Lake Michigan.” Shawn’s face went green, but before I could ask him if he was OK, he’d crawled awkwardly to the edge of the boat and puked. Not wanting to lose him overboard again, I grabbed the back of his drenched tunic with my still-bound hands and held on until he finally flopped back onto the floor of the boat, his eyes shut.
I bent over him, worried. “Shawn?” I asked, not sure if I should ask if he was OK. Clearly he wasn’t. Not that I blamed him.
“He’ll be fine,” Todd said. “Just give him a minute.” I nodded, unconvinced. Just then my canteen rolled against my foot and I looked down to see the contents of my pack scattered across the floor of the boat. Every now and then the wind would catch a packet of dinosaur jerky or a pair of socks and send them flying into the lake. My journal lay in the corner by Schwartz’s foot, its pages damp and flayed open in the wind. Eyeing Schwartz to make sure he wasn’t looking, I grabbed it and slid it into Todd’s still-intact pack. Todd saw what I was doing, and when Schwartz’s back was turned, we collected what little supplies were left and tucked them all into Todd’s pack. Shawn continued to sprawl on the bottom of the boat, showing no intention of moving despite the bumping and jarring he was getting as the boat skipped across the choppy waves.
“We’ll interrogate them back at the lab,” Schwartz called to Chaz, shouting to be heard over the slap of the boat’s hull on the water.
Todd leaned in so only Shawn and I could hear him. “What lab is that Schwartz guy talking about?” he asked. “Lake Michigan is huge. I doubt this thing has enough gas to make it across the entire lake.”
“The lab isin the middle of the lake,” Chaz said, making us jump as she crouched down in front of us, her giant black tranquiliser gun slung casually over her shoulder.
I unconsciously clutched my compass. Maybe the lab was what my dad had wanted me to find? After all, he had marked the centre of the lake as the location of a member of the Colombe, and how many things could be in the middle of a lake? The Colombe was the secret organisation my dad and mom had founded in an attempt to bring people aboveground again. My grandfather, Ivan, had explained that after the Noah had discovered the organisation, a few had escaped. Was one of them hiding in this mysterious lab? Five years’ worth of questions burned hot inside my chest, but after what had just happened to Shawn, I was worried that I wasn’t going to like the answers I got.
(#ulink_b5d26359-e82b-5204-865d-b8350bf2bb11)
“Home sweet home,” Chaz crowed later when Schwartz cut the motor down to a crawl. She stood up and stretched, a wide grin on her face. I glanced around in confusion. Surrounding us on all sides was a seemingly never-ending expanse of rolling waves with no land in sight. What was she talking about?
“Are you sure you should stop here?” Shawn asked, sitting up for the first time to peer nervously at the surrounding water. He hadn’t spoken since he’d thrown up, and his voice still sounded shaky. Not that I could blame him. The image of Pretty Boy swimming towards my best friend was one I wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon. It had been too loud to do any talking on the trip, and we’d spent what felt like an eternity huddled together on the floor of the boat trying to stay warm as the wind sliced right through our wet clothes.
“Of course I’m sure,” Chaz said. “Get ready to duck.”
“Duck?” Todd asked, glancing up at the sky. “I thought those went extinct years ago.”
Chaz snorted. “They did. Sorry, I meant duck your head. I forgot how hard it is for people to spot the boat dock the first time. Look dead ahead. See where those waves are crashing sort of funny?” I followed her pointing finger and blinked in surprise. About ten feet in front of us the waves were behaving oddly, seeming to hit an invisible object before careening back in the opposite direction. I squinted and then jerked back in surprise when my eyes finally made sense of what they were seeing. Rising from the water was a gigantic mirrored bubble, ingeniously camouflaged with reflective glass so that it melded with the shifting waves of the lake. If I hadn’t known exactly where to look, I could have passed within a foot of it and missed it. Before I could marvel anymore, our boat slid into a small circular hole in the side of the bubble, and into a network of floating wooden docks that spiraled out from a circular centre deck like the spokes on a wheel. Tied to the docks were other small boats like our own, as well as a few larger ones, but the most prominent feature of the entire space was the large glass box on the centre deck. The sound of the water lapping against the walls of the bubble echoed around us as Chaz tied up the boat, and we all got out.
“What is this place?” Todd asked.
“Entrance C,” Schwartz said briskly, leading us towards the glass box, where he pushed a few buttons on a side panel. Moments later a glass elevator emerged, dripping. It seemed so out of place surrounded by the water and waves.
“So this lab?” Shawn said as the doors slid open. “It’s …?”
“At the bottom of the lake,” Chaz grinned. “The place was built as a top-secret testing facility pre-Jurassic domination.”
“Jurassic domi-what?” Todd asked.
“Jurassic domination is the term we use for when the power shift occurred after the pandemic that decimated the human race,” Schwartz said stiffly as he grabbed my upper arm and manoeuvered me roughly into the elevator. Todd and Shawn followed with Chaz right behind. The elevator was cramped, and I found myself pressed against the cool glass wall, my bound hands smashed awkwardly in front of me. My wrists ached, and I twisted them in an attempt to ease the pressure without much success. Still being tied up seemed redundant at this point. We had nowhere to run, and after what had happened to Shawn, none of us was going to attempt to escape by swimming. Although I wasn’t so sure I’d make a run for it even if I had the opportunity. Schwartz and Chaz were my only shot at getting some answers, and after coming this far, I wasn’t going to leave without them. The elevator doors slid shut, and with a soft hum we were sinking. The docking area disappeared and the dark blue of Lake Michigan enveloped the elevator shaft.
Schools of silver-and-blue fish swam in dizzying swirls around the elevator as we sank. Larger, darker shapes were also visible, but they were too far away to see distinctly.
“Are those what I think they are?” Shawn asked, pointing to the hazy blobs.
Chaz turned to squint where he was pointing. “Yup, those are Pretty Boy’s buddies.”
“You seriously named that thing that almost ate Shawn?” I asked. “Why?”
Chaz shrugged. “We’ve named the big ones. Pretty Boy is a kronosaurus; they are particularly nasty. They can eat you in one bite. But I think I’d actually prefer to be eaten by one of them. It would be better than having an elasmosaurus nibble on you a while.” She didn’t seem to notice the look of absolute gob-smacked astonishment on our faces because she went on as though this were all completely normal. “We have regular old plesiosaurs and pliosaurs too.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “Let’s see, we have the nothosaurs, simolestes, and mosasaurs here. Oh, and a few dunkleosteus. Those suckers have jaws on them like you wouldn’t believe! Dr Schwartz gets the credit for all of them,” she said proudly. “If he hadn’t tweaked their genes, they couldn’t live in fresh water, or our climate for that matter. Most of them lived in the oceans originally.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. “Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?”
“Well, yes. Sort of,” Chaz said with a worried look at Schwartz. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” All I could manage was to shake my head at Chaz. Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for almost wiping out the human race? I swallowed the tirade of hot anger that bubbled inside me as I imagined them bringing back the very monster that had almost eaten my best friend just moments before.
“You made all those plesiosaurs? That’s just sick,” Shawn said, my own disgust reflected in his face.
“Swimming dinosaurs,” Todd sniffed. “I don’t care what fancy name you call them.”
“They aren’t technically dinosaurs. They’re swimming marine reptiles,” Chaz corrected.
“To savages, dinosaurs and plesiosaurs are nothing but something to eat. You are wasting your time with explanations, Chaz. So, yes, Todd was it? They are just swimming dinosaurs,” Schwartz sneered. Todd bristled.
“They protect this lab,” Chaz said with an apologetic shrug at Todd behind Schwartz’s back. “No one comes poking around plesiosaur-infested waters.”
We continued our steady descent in silence, and soon the sun no longer penetrated the water far enough for us to see the fish or the plesiosaurs. I shivered as the temperature in the elevator became markedly cooler.
Todd was starting to tremble too, but not from the cold. I noticed that his face was white and sweat was running down it. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he was the one who’d been thrown in the lake with Pretty Boy.
“Are you OK?” I asked, pulled momentarily from my thoughts about this mysterious lab and the monsters they’d created to protect it. “You look horrible.”
“I don’t like small spaces,” he said tersely, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Wonderful,” Schwartz drawled drily, “a claustrophobic savage.” He’d pulled a small port screen out of the duffel bag at his feet and studiously ignored us as he began typing something into it. I gave Todd’s shoulder an awkward pat with my bound hands. I wasn’t especially fond of the tiny space either. My ears were starting to ache and throb. Noticing my wince of pain, Chaz quickly explained how to clear our ears to relieve the pressure from our descent by holding our noses. A minute and one satisfying pop later and the stabbing pain in my head was gone. I made a mental note not to let that happen again. The elevator passed into the insides of a building, and I looked away from Todd to stare. The first floor we slid past was full of lab equipment.
“Whoa,” Todd said, letting out a low whistle of appreciation, and I nodded in mute agreement. This place was massive. Unlike North Compound’s confining walls of stone and concrete, these walls were made of glass, so you could see through all the rooms from one end to the other, making it hard to tell where one room stopped and another room started.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it,” Chaz said proudly. “This is just the research floor; wait until you see the rest of it.” The next floor the elevator descended through was covered in wall-to-wall troughs of plants under grow lights, reminding me of the underground chambers in North Compound where we’d grown turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Like the floor above, this one too seemed ten times bigger than even the large meeting auditorium back at North.
“Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Shawn.
“I am,” Shawn breathed.
The elevator didn’t give us long to gawk before dropping down into the biggest room I’d ever seen. All comparisons to North Compound disappeared as I pressed my hands to the glass and stared in wonder at hundreds of dinosaurs, all housed in enormous glass cages. Arching above the dinosaur pens was a tangled network of glass walkways, bustling with blue jump-suited people.
“No way.” Todd gasped. Shawn made a disbelieving choking noise, and I pounded him on the back with my bound hands.
“You keep dinosaurs down here?” I gasped.
“Of course,” Schwartz replied. “We run one of the top breeding programs in the world.”
“We run the only breeding program in the world,” Chaz muttered.
Schwartz glared at her before turning his attention back to us. “We have also tamed and trained some of the brighter species. We’ve gathered invaluable data from living in such close proximity. They act as message carriers, test subjects, and pets. You may not kill any of them,” he said, giving us a hard look. “Everyone who lives down here does so because they believe in the beauty and continuation of the dinosaur. Remember that.”
“But why?” I asked, dumbstruck.
“What do you mean why?” Schwartz sniffed.
I shook my head in amazement as I took in the hundreds of cages. “Why would you breed them? After what happened with the pandemic?”
“The ecosystem,” Chaz said. “When people brought the dinosaurs out of extinction one hundred and fifty years ago, no one thought about the impact these guys would have on the ecosystem if they ran wild.” She jerked her head at one of the cages. “They were supposed to just stay in zoos and wildlife preserves, right? Well, obviously, they didn’t. After the pandemic, these guys took over and a lot of other animals went extinct. It threw everything out of whack. Our lab has been trying to correct that with selective breeding and repopulation.”
Her explanation sounded like a more scientific version of Ivan’s table demonstration when we had been back at his house the night before the marines found us again. He’d been trying to explain to Shawn that if you removed all the dinosaurs, the carefully balanced world of predator and prey that we lived in would collapse. And while Chaz wasn’t talking about removing the dinosaurs entirely, she seemed to be making the same general point. Had things changed so much in the last 150 years that we now needed dinosaurs to keep the topside world functional? And if that was true, then what Chaz was saying about balancing out the dinosaur population made a lot of sense. I shook my head as I tried to process this bizarre concept. I had grown up in a compound where everyone talked about the time before the dinosaurs like it was this ideal utopia that could be reclaimed. But what if Ivan and Chaz were right and the dinosaurs were here to stay?
Before I could respond, the elevator continued its steady descent, and I craned my head back to get one last look at the cage of what had to be Parasaurolophus before it disappeared from sight. We passed through a floor that looked like a school, glass desks lined up neatly in glass rooms. The place seemed to go on forever, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that it was all underwater. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of it, I never would have believed it.
“So much glass,” Shawn marveled next to me, and I realised he was right. Glass had been something we’d had to scavenge and reuse over and over again in North Compound, as we were unable to manufacture it.
Chaz leant forward. “I’m not sure if you noticed while running from that pack of carnotaurs, but we have a lot of sand around here.” When neither of us said anything, she cocked her head to the side. “That’s how you make glass. You heat sand to really high temperatures. Didn’t you know that?” All I could do was shake my head in wonder as we passed through another floor, this one made up of small apartments.
Our elevator finally bumped to a stop, and we spilled out into a gigantic lab lit with harsh fluorescents. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the dark murk of Lake Michigan. A few scientists glanced up from their large stationary port screens as we entered, eyeing us with interest before turning back to their work. Schwartz gave Chaz a meaningful look before striding away to meet three lab-coated men huddled around a port screen. A small yellow dinosaur that only came up to my knee scurried past us and clambered nimbly up Chaz’s leg and onto her shoulder. Chaz dug a large dead beetle out of her pocket and handed it up to the little creature. It cooed happily.
“This is Pip.” She grinned as she passed up another treat. “She’s kind of the mascot for this floor of the lab. She was supposed to get released back into the wild, but she was so darn cute they decided to let her stay.”
“What is she exactly?” Todd asked, slightly less green now that we weren’t in the tiny elevator.
“Compsognathus,” Chaz said. “It’s Greek for dainty jaw. Dr Schwartz’s team was able to extract her DNA from a bone found in Germany. He’s one of the most brilliant paleontologists we have here at the lab.” The little creature was more bird than dinosaur, and I had to admit that Chaz had a point; she was sort of cute. Vibrant yellow with blue eyes that took up most of her pointed face; she lashed her long, thin tail delicately from side to side for balance as she surveyed us from her perch on Chaz’s shoulder.
“Ecosystem or no ecosystem, I can’t believe you’re still actively bringing new species back to life,” Shawn said, his fists clenched. Oblivious to Shawn’s anger in her preoccupation with Pip, Chaz nodded happily.
“Ten new species just last year. We have an above-ground facility where we release them. It’s really amazing.”
“Amazing is not the word I would use,” Todd said sarcastically.
“Spoken like a true savage,” Schwartz said drily as he rejoined our group. He turned to Chaz. “Dr Robinson is sending a team out to tag the carnotaurs we stunned. Please accompany him. I’ll escort these three to see Boznic.”
Chaz nodded and was turning to go when one of the men in lab coats trotted up, a worried look on his face. He whispered something quietly in Schwartz’s ear, and Schwartz scowled and nodded. With a resigned sigh he turned to Chaz, who had stopped to watch this interaction. “Change of plans. Escort them to conference room B. I’ll alert Boznic and meet you there after I deal with this.” With a curt nod to the man in the lab coat, Schwartz turned and followed him at a jog.
“Looks like you’re with me,” Chaz said as Pip hopped from her shoulder and scampered away. “Which,” she said confidentially, “is kind of shocking. I’m not sure if you noticed, but Schwartz isn’t my biggest fan. He only tolerates me because he owes my dad a favour.” She stared after Schwartz’s retreating form, her forehead scrunched in thought. With a shrug, she motioned for us to climb back into the elevator. Todd’s face still had a sickly green colour to it, and I saw him give the tranquiliser gun hanging by Chaz’s side an assessing look. Not wanting him to pull anything stupid, I gave his shoulder a shove with my own, and he stumbled forward into the elevator. Shawn followed us inside, a preoccupied scowl on his face. Despite the disturbing revelation that these people were breeding dinosaurs, I couldn’t help but feel a tingle of excitement. This had to be what my dad had put on his map. It just had to be. As soon as the doors slid shut behind us, Chaz pushed a few buttons and took the tranquiliser gun off her shoulder with a grin.
“I’ll make you a deal. If you promise not to deck me, I’ll put this thing away. Makes me twitchy pointing it at people anyway.” She shuddered and slung the large black weapon onto her back. “Besides, it’s about out of battery anyway, and running away is impossible now that you’re down here.”
“What do you mean impossible?” Todd asked, eyeing the panel on the side of the elevator speculatively.
“Well, you saw how touchy Schwartz was about you guys finding out about this place. It’s because no one knows about us – not the Noah, not the compounds, not anybody,” Chaz explained. “We’re top secret.”
“I thought the Oaks was top secret too,” Todd muttered darkly, and I winced. His village had been captured when the Noah’s marines somehow tracked me and Shawn all the way from North Compound.
When I’d left the compound with nothing but my dad’s compass and a poorly drawn map, I’d never expected that the Noah would send General Kennedy and his marines after me. Why would the Noah, the man who controlled all four of the compounds, waste his time on a twelve-year-old girl? The whole idea was mind-boggling, but it was one I’d had to come to terms with.
In fact, there were a lot of things about the world that I’d had to adjust to after coming topside. For one, that people like Todd existed: people who lived outside the Noah’s control and the compound’s protection. For my entire life, I’d thought survival topside was impossible due to the dinosaurs. Now I was face-to-face with yet another example of that lie. Chaz and the rest of the people in the lab were obviously not descendants of the people the original Noah had shepherded underground over 150 years ago. Which meant that, like Todd, they’d never believed the Noah was the great saviour of the human race like Shawn and I had. It was simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating.
“What?” Todd cried, and I focussed back in on the conversion. Chaz had continued talking while I’d been lost in my own thoughts, and from the look of horror on Todd’s face, I’d missed something big.
“Like I said,” Chaz shrugged. “We’re always short-handed, and lab kids start working early. It’s not that great a job really. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a step up from mucking out stalls, but Dr Schwartz isn’t the most personable guy.”
“We noticed.” Shawn scowled. “About the time he tried to feed me to a sea monster.”
“Well, in his defence, you did hit him,” Chaz said. “I don’t think he really would have thrown you overboard.” Shawn shuddered and Chaz smiled apologetically. “Yeah, Pretty Boy’s a mean one all right. But pliosaurs and plesiosaurs are the only vicious creatures we help proliferate, and that’s only to protect the lab.”
“Proliferate?” Shawn asked.
“Help multiply,” Chaz supplied. “Our main focus is herbivores.”
“OK,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around this new information. “Then why didn’t you kill that carnotaurus herd on the beach? They were definitely not herbivores.”
“It’s a lab rule,” Chaz said. “It all goes back to the ecosystem balance I mentioned before. No one likes spiders either, but if we killed them all, the bug population would take over. If we kill off all the carnivores, we throw the entire ecosystem off balance.”
“Wait a minute,” Shawn said, his brow wrinkled in confusion. “Didn’t you say this lab had been here since before the pandemic?”
“It has.” Chaz nodded. “Originally it was a top-secret testing centre for the dinosaurs. Scientists back then were interested in discovering what else the dinosaurs might be useful for besides entertainment. This lab has discovered thousands of uses for everything from the oils in their skin to their dung. Medicines, tools, food, you name it, dinosaurs provide it way better than cows or chickens ever could. Which is good, considering all those domestic animals are extinct now. Plus dinosaurs are exceptionally trainable if you start them as hatchlings, and they make pretty fabulous pets.”
“But what about the pandemic?” I asked. The pandemic was one of the main reasons the human race had been struggling to make a comeback for the last 150 years. The small portion of the population that had survived it had done so because they’d been blessed with immunity to a disease that should have been extinct for millions of years. And while that immunity did seem to be passed down from generation to generation, it wasn’t foolproof.
“Oh, that,” Chaz said, waving her hand dismissively. “All the dinosaurs we breed are genetically modified so they help eliminate the bacterial strain that caused the pandemic. I’m not sure how well you know your history, but all attempts at a vaccine have failed. But if the genetic modifications work like Boz thinks they will, we might be able to eradicate it completely in the next thirty years. Pretty awesome, right?” When we didn’t say anything, she went on, unperturbed. “Anyway, after the pandemic, the scientists that survived realised that if they didn’t step in, the fragile balance of life topside might implode completely. Without us, there might not be a viable ecosystem topside.”
“The dinosaurs make it impossible for the human race to survive topside, so who cares about the viable eco-whatever?” Shawn asked
“It’s not impossible,” Todd said. “It’s just not real easy.”
“The word you’re looking for is deadly,” Shawn muttered.
“That’s the thing,” Chaz said excitedly. “Boz has a plan for us to live in harmony with the dinosaurs. We already have quite a few scientists living in our aboveground facility. Boz says that evolution has proven it isn’t just survival of the fittest, but survival of the adaptable!”
“Wait a second,” Todd said, “I think I heard about a place like that. Some of the traders mentioned a settlement of scientists near the lake.”
Chaz nodded happily. “That was probably us. We trade with some of the tree people from time to time.”
“I thought we were all savages,” Todd said, his face tight with anger.
Chaz cringed. “Not everyone is as biased at Schwartz,” she said apologetically.
“I still think you’re all nuts,” Shawn said.
“We’re not,” Chaz countered, sounding slightly insulted. “We do some really amazing stuff here.” When we still didn’t seem convinced, she huffed and punched a new button on the elevator.
“What are you doing?” Todd asked nervously.
“Proving to you just how awesome this place is,” Chaz said. “We have some time to kill before Schwartz gets to the conference room anyway. We’ll hit the hatchery first, and then the breeding pens. The dorms and school aren’t that exciting.”
The elevator dinged, and we stepped out into the gigantic laboratory and my jaw dropped. It was one thing to hear about people breeding dinosaurs; it was a whole other thing to actually see it. Scattered around the room were large metal contraptions with glass domes and heat lamps. I peered inside the closest one. It was filled with five eggs the size of footballs, and the silver plaque on the side let me know that these were apparently ankylosaurus eggs.
“Those are really cool,” Chaz said from behind me, making me jump. “They have this fused armour built into their skin. Makes them nearly impossible to tranquilise. Real sweethearts, though, so you almost never have to. We used to have a male named Bubba who would let the little kids climb all over him like he was a jungle gym. He would do just about anything for a cookie.”
“I’m not sure if this is impressive or disgusting,” Shawn admitted as he turned in a slow circle.
We passed through the enormous hatchery and walked up a massive set of glass stairs. I looked back and calculated roughly one hundred incubators, each with at least three or four eggs inside.
Chaz punched a code into a large glass door. It buzzed and clicked open, and the smell that wafted through was enough to make me gag. Shawn and Todd immediately covered their noses with their hands. Chaz didn’t seem to notice.
We walked into the massive room of dinosaurs we’d caught a glimpse of earlier. With the soaring ceilings and gigantic windows, it was hard to believe we were really underwater. Row after row of oversized glass and iron stalls stretched as far as I could see, each one containing a different breed of dinosaur. We followed Chaz up a ramp that led to a walkway over the top of the cages. We had to manoeuver around teenagers in dirty overalls who were busy wheeling wheelbarrows full of a coarse grain, obviously on their way to fill the enormous feed troughs below. A few of them shot us interested looks, but everyone else seemed much too busy to care about us.
I looked down into the first stall. A small family of triceratops was inside, the female bellowing at three tiny greenish adolescents who head-butted one another and rolled around the floor of the cage. My heart lurched when I saw a small girl in among them, a wheelbarrow and pitchfork in hand as she worked at clearing out a mound of dinosaur poop almost as tall as she was.
Chaz waved down. “Hey, Joyce! How are the three musketeers doing today?” Joyce set down her pitchfork as the three young dinosaurs raced around her in an impromptu game of tag.
“Driving their poor mother crazy. I think we’ll move them to their own pen tomorrow.”
Suddenly Shawn was gripping my shoulder. “Did you see what was outside those windows?” he whispered.
“What?” I asked, turning to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around the entire enclosure. Outside, swimming in graceful arcs, were plesiosaurs. These had longer necks and smaller heads than Pretty Boy. Their bodies moved smoothly in the water, propelled by four muscular fins. They periodically opened their mouths in soundless calls, giving me a good view of their gleaming rows of teeth. I gulped, and hoped the glass was thicker than it looked.
Chaz turned back to us. “Oh, you spotted our audience. The elasmosaurs like the light the lab gives off. Did you know that some people believe that that particular breed was never actually extinct?” she asked, jerking her head at the long-necked plesiosaurs. “Before the pandemic hit, people claimed that there was a small family of them located in some lake in Scotland. The locals called them Loch Ness monsters or something. Can you believe it? Dr Schwartz said it’s really unlikely, but I would love to travel there someday to see for myself.”
Todd craned his head back, taking in the enormity of the space. “What I want to know is how you got all these dinosaurs down here. I know you didn’t squeeze them into that tiny glass elevator.”
Chaz laughed. She had a low chuckling laugh, and I thought that, under different circumstances, like ones where she wasn’t holding us prisoner, I might actually like her.
“We have gigantic freight elevators at entrances A and G,” she explained. Before she could go on, the crackle of a loudspeaker reverberated around the room. Everyone froze, looking up as though expecting the voice of God. However, it wasn’t the voice of God that came through the speaker. It was Schwartz. And he sounded furious.
“Chastity McGuire! Report to the conference room immediately!”
Chaz froze as everyone’s eyes turned to stare at us. It looked like our tour was over.
(#ulink_df0c3402-86ba-5f33-b945-fbd0d203764e)
“Your real name is Chastity?” Todd asked, his familiar smirk back in place.
“My name is Chaz,” she snipped as she hustled us off the walkway. “If anyone but Dr Schwartz called me Chastity, they’d get a black eye. Consider yourself warned.”
We reached another glass door and Chaz punched some numbers in quickly. It buzzed open and she pushed us inside. This room had lower ceilings and seemed to be some kind of office space. She hurried us down hallway after hallway until we finally reached conference room B. Inside was a fuming Schwartz.
“Did they enjoy your nice little tour of our top-secret facility, Chaz? You are officially demoted from your position as my assistant. I need someone who can follow a simple order when it’s given.”
Chaz’s face flushed red, but she set her mouth in a stubborn line and didn’t reply. She had guts. I liked her more for it.
“Relax, Dr Schwartz,” said a large man I hadn’t noticed before. His clothes had the pressed appearance of authority. His pale blue eyes were stern, but the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes betrayed that his face was more accustomed to smiling than frowning. “I’m sure Chaz didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I actually think it might be a good thing to give our guests a glimpse of the importance of our work.”
“Sir,” Dr Schwartz said stiffly, “you saw the girl’s map. Our safety here might be compromised.”
“And if it is?” the man replied with a carefree shrug. “We are not without protection. Before you jump to the grimmest scenario, let’s at least hear the girl’s story. And for heaven’s sake, untie them. They’re only children.”
Todd snorted. I had to agree. I hadn’t felt like a child in a long time. Regardless, Chaz stepped forward to untie us. She looked relieved and gave us an apologetic smile as she deftly unwound the rope.
“Take a seat, please,” the man said. “I am Dr Bartholomew Boznic, head paleontologist here at the Lincoln Lab, but everyone calls me Boz.” He was perched at a long glossy metal table set against another one of those floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the lake, complete with frolicking plesiosaurs. Their huge bodies slid past the glass, and some even pushed off it to launch themselves in the opposite direction.
“We didn’t tell anyone about your lab,” I said as I took a seat across from Boz. “I had no idea what was in the middle of this lake when I got the map.”
“That’s good to hear.” He smiled. “I’d hate to think that the Noah’s stealth bombers were winging their way here to destroy my life’s work as we speak.”
“The Noah doesn’t have stealth bombers,” Shawn protested, but then he paused, taking in Boz’s serious face and raised eyebrows. Deflated, he sank into the seat beside me. “Of course the Noah has stealth bombers,” he said flatly, “why am I even surprised?” I rolled my eyes. Even after watching Todd’s entire village get captured, and everything that Ivan had told us, it had taken Shawn forever to come around to the idea that the Noah wasn’t the saviour of humanity we’d always been told he was. I’d been an easier sell. Between my dad’s note and the revelation that villages like Todd’s existed, I’d very quickly come to terms with the fact that the world wasn’t what I’d always been told. Not that I could blame Shawn for taking a little longer. We’d both grown up believing that only one aeroplane existed, and that the aeroplane’s sole purpose was to deliver mail and supplies four times a year between compounds. Then the helicopters had shown up at Todd’s village, so Boz’s claim of stealth bombers was not all that far-fetched. Unfortunately.
“I can assure you that he does have stealth bombers,” Boz said seriously. “And if given the opportunity, he would use them. Our position with the current Noah is tenuous to say the least.”
“Tenuous?” I asked.
“He acts like we don’t exist, mainly because he can’t find us, and we act like he doesn’t exist. But I don’t want to talk about that now. What I want to know is where this remarkable map came from.” He had my dad’s map spread out before him, and I could tell he’d been studying it before we came in. I looked at Shawn and Todd, hoping for some guidance about how much to tell. Shawn just shrugged. Todd laced his fingers into the straps of the pack he was still wearing and stared in grim silence at the plesiosaurs outside the window. I decided to proceed cautiously. Boz seemed nice enough, but he and Schwartz worked together. And there was something about Schwartz that made my skin crawl.
“My dad sent it. Just like I told Schwartz before he tried to feed Shawn to that monster Pretty Boy.”
“It was an accident,” Schwarz sniffed. “The boy attacked me, and he lost his balance.”
Boz shot Schwartz a disapproving look, clearly skeptical of this explanation, and Schwartz seemed to shrink a bit.
“Our Dr Schwartz can be a bit overenthusiastic. I’m sorry you had to experience any unpleasantness, Miss, Miss – what’s your name, my dear?”
“Sky Mundy.”
Boz sat up as though his chair had electrocuted him, leaning forward to look at me over the top of his thin wire-framed glasses. “Are you any relation to Jack Mundy? The biologist in North Compound?”
I sat up too, nodding as my heart lurched with excitement and goose bumps broke out along my arms. This was it. “I’m his daughter.”
Schwartz’s lip curled in a barely detectable sneer, but Boz looked as though Christmas had just come early.
“I know your father.” He smiled, clasping his hands in delight. “He’s an old friend of mine from when we trained at the university back at East Compound.” I waited for Boz to mention the Colombe, but he did not. He had to be the member of the Colombe my dad was talking about, but I needed to be positive. Pulling my compass out of the neck of my still-damp tunic, I held it up for Boz to see.
“Does this mean anything to you?” I asked. Todd and Shawn leant forward as one, identical expressions of anxious anticipation on their faces. I wondered what my own face looked like. Hopeful? Terrified? Anxious? All of those feelings were racing through me as I held my breath, waiting to see if this was when I’d finally get the answers I so desperately needed.
Boz’s face broke out into a wide grin, and he pulled a nearly identical compass out of the collar of his shirt. “It does,” he said. I let out a huge sigh of relief as something loosened inside of me, and I felt as though I could really breathe for the first time since I had opened that note from my dad a lifetime ago. I grinned at Todd and Shawn. See, I wanted to say, I told you that there was something in the middle of the lake, that everything we went through to get here was worth it, but my smile faded as my eyes flicked over to where Schwartz still sat, glowering at me.
Boz followed my gaze and waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry about Dr Schwartz. He was also a member of the Colombe, but he and your father never really got along. He joined me when I escaped East Compound. The same escape,” he said sadly, “that killed your mother.” I nodded, pushing aside the empty feeling that hearing about my mom always seemed to trigger.
“Then I can tell you everything,” I said. “You are the person my dad sent me to find.”
“Really?” Boz said. “Why did your father send you after all these years?”
“I’m not sure where to even begin,” I said, overwhelmed by everything that had happened in the last few days. Boz just folded his hands and smiled encouragingly.
“Five years ago, my dad disappeared from North Compound, leaving me behind,” I began, quickly describing how I’d found my dad’s note and map, escaped North Compound, met Todd, and survived the takeover at the Oaks. I explained about meeting Ivan and the chaos when the marines tracked us to his house, separating us, and I wrapped up with meeting Chaz and Schwartz on the beach. Shawn chimed in to say that it was a good idea he’d decided to come along because I never would have made it without him, and Todd interjected to tell the story of me taking an impromptu dip in a spinosaur’s pond. Both comments earned them well-placed elbows in the ribs. Boz was an excellent listener, nodding and exclaiming, although he seemed saddened when I described the two dinosaurs that we had killed, and he scowled when we mentioned Ivan. Apparently paleontologists and dinosaur hunters didn’t quite see eye to eye.
“Well,” he exclaimed when I finished. “I’m sorry to hear that Jack went missing. I hope he’s alive somewhere out there, but he certainly never made it here.” Even though I’d known from the way Boz had reacted to my dad’s name that he wasn’t here, it still hurt to hear it said out loud.
“May I see the plug?” Boz asked.
I nodded, slipping off the compass and unhinging the hidden compartment. I handed it to Boz. He studied it before flipping it over, as though it might tell its secrets if he just looked at it long enough.
“Well?” Shawn asked. “Do you know what’s on it?”
“I don’t,” he admitted. “I haven’t talked to Jack Mundy in years. Why he would disappear and then send his daughter to see me is beyond my understanding.”
Todd huffed impatiently. “Well, can’t you plug that whatchama dinger into one of those techy devices so we can find out?” He jiggled his foot nervously as he watched the giant sea monsters cavorting behind Boz’s head.
“I think that sounds like a very good idea.” Boz smiled. “Dr Schwartz, grab me one of those techy devices. The XI 4000 should fit this.” Schwartz nodded stiffly and walked out.
“Now that he’s gone,” Boz said, setting down the plug in front of him, “are you absolutely sure that you weren’t followed here? This General Kennedy and his marines seem to have had no problem tracking you to Todd’s village.” His change of subject startled me, and I glanced over at Todd.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Like I said, we ditched everything from the compound that could have potentially held a tracker. Todd thinks they were tracking us the old-fashioned way, by following our trail. But –” I paused – “If they did, our tracks will just lead them to Lake Michigan and then disappear.” Boz nodded, seeming satisfied.
Schwartz returned with a large port and propped it up on a stand. Boz pressed his entire hand to the screen, and it hummed for a second, then turned on. Handprint entry, I thought, impressive. With practiced fingers, Boz slid the tiny plug into the port. A black screen appeared, followed by the revolving gold symbol of the ark. The screen blinked and there was my dad.
I leant forward hungrily, taking in the tiny image on Boz’s screen. My dad was wearing a stained and dishevelled lab coat, his brown hair sweaty and his face tight and anxious.
“This message is for Dr Bartholomew Boznic or Ivan Ironarm. You need to enter the ten-digit code we used to pass secret messages within the Colombe. If it is not entered in the next thirty seconds, this memory plug will lock down, corrupt itself, and destroy the hard drive of every piece of technology within two hundred feet.”
Boz looked startled at this and frowned.
“Do you know it?” I asked, my throat tight. If Boz didn’t know the code my dad was talking about, the plug would destroy the secrets it contained. If that happened, everything I’d been through, everything I’d dragged my friends through, would be for nothing. But even as my heart raced in terrified anticipation, I couldn’t help but stare at my dad. It had been over five years since I’d seen him, and in that time my memories of him had faded and blurred. Now everything came rushing back: the way his hair waved across his forehead, the crease between his eyebrows that showed he was worried, the way he used his hands when he talked.
“I think so.” Boz nodded. He quickly typed in a ten-digit number, and I held my breath. I wasn’t the only one. When the screen beeped, the room let out a collective sigh of relief. This time my dad sat at his desk, sweat shining on his forehead, and from the way the camera struggled to focus, I could tell that his hand was shaking.
“I found something,” he said, his words rushed and panicked. “It’s what I was worried about all those years ago when I first started the Colombe. I warned everyone that someday the Noah was going to do something drastic. I was right. He’s going to wipe out the dinosaurs, but it’s worse than I ever imagined. If I don’t make it to tell either of you this in person, then hopefully this plug will. We have to stop this.” My dad jumped as a loud banging came from behind him. His face went from frightened to terrified. The screen flickered, and a video icon appeared.
I didn’t realise I had tears running down my cheeks until Shawn used his sleeve to wipe them away. Boz reached up and clicked the icon.
The port buzzed and then a grainy video began, revealing a windowless room with six men sitting around a table. At the head of the table was our current Noah. He had the same gray-tinged hair and serious expression as his counterparts, and his eyes were dark and hooded behind thick-rimmed glasses. I was struck by how old he looked.
“What is this?” Todd asked.
“It’s some kind of meeting,” Schwartz snapped.
The Noah cleared his throat. “Today we have reached a monumental decision that will change our world forever.” He looked up from his papers to his audience. “Today, by a five-to-one vote, we made the decision to reclaim our world, eradicate the dinosaur pestilence that plagues us, and sacrifice the few for the many. After over a hundred and fifty years of fear, we will triumph.”
The Noah wasn’t wearing his customary smile, the one that said, trust me, everything will be OK. The one I’d seen him wear countless times in North Compound assemblies, the one designed to help the people of the compounds rest easy that supplies would be delivered and life would go on. Instead, his solemn face was all business and his eyes held a cool resignation. They were the eyes of a man who had set a course and was going to stick to it. Those eyes scared me.
Shawn’s hand was on my shoulder; squeezing it uncomfortably, and I wondered if his own stomach was tied in the same painful knot mine was. I bit my lip as the Noah went on. “The fortifications to our nation’s four underground compounds are progressing well,” the Noah said, “as we prepare to set the second phase of the Ark Plan, code name Flood, into place. We know that future generations will look back on this day and thank us for the decision we have made. Our temporary refuge underground has gone on long enough, and it is time for us to regain what is rightfully ours. Our efforts to eradicate the dinosaurs in the past have failed. But we have found the solution.”
The Noah looked straight at the camera. “We know that the dinosaurs of millions of years ago were destroyed by a meteor strike that made the earth’s surface uninhabitable. Modern technology has at last given us the tools to recreate this phenomenon. We have located enough nuclear weaponry to eradicate the dinosaur population completely.” The two serious men sitting next to him nodded solemnly.
Todd was on his feet, gesturing wildly at the screen, his voice quivering. “What is he talking about? Is that who I think it is? Can they do that?” I grabbed his arm and yanked him into the seat next to me.
“Our weapon specialists have developed strategic drop sites that will spare our compounds from structural damage, allowing the human race to survive underground, away from dangerous radiation. Our top scientists are taking samples and DNA from a large number of species and plants, and we feel confident that, when the dust settles, we will be able to rebuild our great nation from a clean slate. Today marks the beginning of a war. One we will win.”
The port clicked off, and the silence in the room was deafening. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what he had just said. Phase two of the Ark Plan? Code name Flood? Nuclear war? How could it be a war when only one side had weapons?
Boz’s face was white as a sheet as he stared at the blank screen in horror. Then he looked at us, his eyes wide and panicked. “They are going to kill us all.”
“What?!” Todd yelped, jumping to his feet again.
“They are going to blast our continent with bombs. Wipe the world clean, and start all over again,” Boz gasped.
“Why is no one else freaking out right now?” Todd’s voice echoed the disbelief I felt.
“There is no way anyone could be that stupid,” I said, hoping I could make it true.
“We always knew the current Noah was an extremist, but I never thought …” Boz shook his head sadly. “Does he not realise the catastrophic effects of wiping out millions and millions of years of evolution? Every animal will have to be re-created, every plant germinated in a lab, every bacterium grown on a petri dish. It’s impossible. The human race would continue to survive underground for a while, but what would be left of the world when they finally did venture aboveground?”
“These bombs would kill everyone who lives aboveground?” Todd asked in horror. “I know of at least three other villages within a month’s travel from the Oaks. All of those people are just going to be left to die? So the privileged compound moles can survive? That isn’t fair!”
“That might be the understatement of the century,” I said, feeling sick as I sat frozen in my chair, thinking about everything I’d learned about dinosaurs since coming topside. I kept seeing Ivan’s table in a jumbled heap on his floor after he’d demonstrated what would happen to our world without the dinosaurs, the rotten wood crumbled and scattered. Todd seemed convinced that humans could live alongside them. Chaz and these scientists took it one step further, even creating new dinosaurs. Although I wasn’t sure yet if I agreed with them, I knew I didn’t agree with the Noah that all dinosaurs should be destroyed.
Todd wasn’t done raging yet. “That isn’t a solution; that’s … that’s …” He stuttered, flailing his arms hopelessly as he searched for a word bad enough to encompass the Noah’s plan.
“Genocide,” Shawn said quietly. “The word you’re looking for, Todd, is genocide.”
“You are absolutely correct,” Boz agreed. “They are going to kill everything this lab worked so hard to preserve and foster. The years we’ve spent selectively breeding dinosaurs to even out the population numbers and stabilise the ecosystem. For nothing!”
“I wasn’t talking about the dinosaurs!” Todd yelled, slamming his hand down on the table.
“We all just need to relax a moment,” Boz said, sinking weak-kneed into his chair. Chaz slumped down into the chair next to me, and I jumped. I’d forgotten she was in the room.
“Why would the Noah have filmed this?” Todd asked as he paced back and forth in front of the long window like a caged animal. “It seems stupid. If this was supposed to be top secret, why document it?”
“My best guess,” Shawn said, “was that he was eventually going to show this to us.” When everyone gave him a strange look, he jerked his head at me. “To the people in the compounds, I mean. I’m betting that after it was all said and done, after the bombs had been dropped and everything wiped out, he would have sent this to the compounds along with an explanation. It would be considered of historical importance, wouldn’t it? The day the decision was made to wipe the world clean and start over again? Of course, he couldn’t let it get out before it had all happened or people might freak out.”
“So how did my dad get ahold of it?” I asked, thinking out loud. “This had to have been under lock and key.”
Boz ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked at us. “Your father was a brilliant man, Sky. If anyone could have hacked the Noah’s communication system, it was him.” I felt a faint surge of pride for my dad, but it washed away as Boz leant forward, his face concerned. “How long ago did you say your father disappeared?”
“A little over five years ago,” I said. “Why? Do you think maybe the Noah changed his mind since then? That this may be outdated information?”
“No,” Shawn said, shaking his head before Boz could respond. He stared at me. “Think about it, Sky. For the last five years, what have we been putting every spare ounce of manpower towards in North Compound?”
I felt the blood drain from my face as realization hit. “Topside fortifications,” I whispered. “Of course.” I turned to Boz and Todd, feeling numb. “For the last five years, at the Noah’s orders, we’ve been increasing the thickness of the concrete barrier that separated North Compound from the topside world.” I inhaled sharply as something else occurred to me, and I turned to Shawn. “The supplies. Remember at the last assembly we went to?”
Shawn nodded. “They talked about how we were going to have to lay up the key supplies we needed from the other compounds in case the mail plane ever couldn’t make it. This was why! The Noah wasn’t worried about the plane; he was preparing us for this.”
I turned to Boz. “We don’t have much time. When we escaped North Compound, we were about a month away from being done with topside fortifications. And that was almost a week ago.” Everyone fell silent as they took this new information in. The thump thump thump of Todd’s booted feet on the glass floor was the only sound in the room as he paced back and forth in front of the long windows, oblivious to the giant plesiosaur that was gliding across their surface. Chaz bit her fingernails, her eyes flicking nervously from Schwartz’s angry face to Boz’s thoughtful one and back again.
“So what now?” she finally asked, breaking the silence.
“Well,” Boz said, hefting himself to his feet. “We can’t just let the world end. We have work to do.”
(#ulink_54e08395-b5d2-5f8b-bedc-8725cb09f31f)
“So, um, this is it,” Chaz said as we walked into the small room I’d be sharing with her for the foreseeable future. It was three levels higher than the conference room, but still too far down for any sunlight to penetrate. It contained two twin beds, two small closets, and a lamp. One whole wall was glass and looked out into the lake. Were there any rooms in this place without a monster-infested view? Next door I could hear Shawn and Todd arguing over who would get which bed.
“It’s not much,” Chaz apologised as she attempted to push a pile of dirty clothes under her bed with a booted foot. “I can get you your own room if you want. I’m sure Boz could arrange it.”
Shaking my head, I walked over to press my hand against the cool glass of the window. “It’s great,” I said, turning to her with what I hoped was an acceptable smile. “Really.”
Chaz nodded, flopping down on her rumpled bed. After the shock had worn off from viewing the video, Boz had got himself together and begun giving orders. The first thing he did was swear us all to secrecy. The information would do nothing but cause chaos and panic if it got out, he said.
Todd had been the hardest one to convince. As soon as he heard that the big plan was to do nothing until further notice, he’d pitched a fit. Not that I could blame him. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the information overload, I would have joined him.
In the end he’d agreed to a compromise. We would let the lab’s head council discuss a course of action before he did anything. Although it wasn’t like we had any choice. Boz was incredibly kind about it, but he’d made it clear that leaving wasn’t an option.
I jumped as someone knocked loudly on our door.
“Come in!” Chaz called, not bothering to get up from her bed, where she was fiddling with a port screen. Todd stormed through the door, followed by a glum-looking Shawn. I shot him a questioning look, but he just shook his head and plopped down on the foot of my bed.
“How can you stand it?” Todd asked, pacing our small room like a caged animal. “Being underwater. It’s horrible. My skin is crawling, the air has no smell, and I feel like my head is going to explode.” He looked to Shawn and me for backup, but Shawn just shrugged apologetically.
“I feel at home for the first time in days,” he admitted. “This is like North Compound, but bigger and better because of all the windows.”
“I don’t get how anyone lives like this. It’s awful,” Todd said. Then he looked over at Chaz. “No offence.”
“None taken.” Chaz shrugged. Just then a long-necked plesiosaur, what Chaz had called an elasmosaurus, emerged from the darkness, yellow lamp-like eyes glowing, and I jumped instinctively away from the window.
“That is so creepy,” Todd breathed.
“You can say that again,” Shawn said as we watched the creature disappear back into the murk of the lake.
“Do you realise,” Todd said a moment later, breaking the silence, “that your dad might have just saved the entire world by getting that plug into Boz’s hands?”
“It hasn’t really sunk in,” I admitted. “I’m not sure how to wrap my brain around the Noah’s plan, let alone that my dad was the one who somehow stumbled upon it.” Even though my dad had hinted at the world being at stake in the letter he’d hidden inside his compass, I guess a part of me hadn’t really thought he was being literal. Kennedy and his marines coming after me made a lot more sense now.
“What’s scary,” Shawn said, interrupting my thoughts, “is that I can totally understand why the Noah thinks wiping the planet clean of dinosaurs is going to solve everything.” Todd and Chaz shot him identical disbelieving looks, and Shawn held up his hands defensively. “Let me finish,” he said. “I understand because if I hadn’t seen and experienced the topside world, hadn’t heard Ivan and Boz explain things, I probably would have thought his plan was great.”
“It’s not great,” Todd muttered.
Shawn rolled his eyes. “I know that now. I guess we’re just lucky Sky’s dad found out about all this.”
I smiled wryly. “So you really think he’s a hero?”
“I’d say he qualifies,” Chaz said.
“The thing is,” I confessed, “I’m a little disappointed.” But even as I said it, I knew disappointed wasn’t the right word. It didn’t encompass the dark emptiness I felt inside, the sense of loss that I wasn’t sure I’d ever shake.
“Because you’re stuck in an underwater lab, and they won’t give you the passcodes to get out?” Todd asked.
“Because the world as we know it might be ending in the not-so-distant future?” Shawn added.
“No.” I sighed. “Because part of me still believed that my dad might be here.”
“But, Sky,” Todd said hesitantly, shooting a worried look at Shawn. “You heard that General Kennedy guy; he said your dad was dead.”
I thought back to that moment in the woods where Kennedy had explained without remorse that he had murdered my father within hours of his escape, and shivered.
“I know what he said. But I’m still not sure if I believe it.” I saw the look of pity on their faces and flapped a hand at them. “Don’t look at me like that. I haven’t lost my mind. I just, I don’t know, I feel like I’d know in my gut if he was gone.”
“Well, my gut says waiting around down here for some council to vote on a plan is suicide,” Todd grumbled.
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Laura Martin
Non-stop action, terrifying dinosaurs and a race to save the world…‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. ‘Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?’Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for nearly wiping out the human race?Sky Mundy’s life has changed dramatically since she fled the underground compound where she grew up. She and her friends are now prey to dinosaurs and being pursued by marines but Sky is determined to follow a map left by her missing father. When the map leads to a hidden underwater lab, Sky is horrified to learn that scientists are still breeding dinosaurs. As she delves deeper into her father’s secrets, Sky uncovers a plan that will destroy the world, unless she can put a stop to it…
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is:
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © Laura Martin 2017
Cover artwork © Fred Gambino
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Laura Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008152925
Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008152932
Version: 2017-03-03
For all the teachers, librarians, and parents working to instill a love of reading in the hearts of the next generation. You are the true heroes of stories.
And to my mom, who first did that for me.
Contents
Cover (#ue5463868-e24b-5649-a23e-189fa96cb748)
Title Page (#u976bc773-bca3-54e2-889e-5c33fc5c7207)
Copyright (#u02ac8cb6-d4e4-59e9-9767-170653f2fad6)
Dedication (#uce8cb43f-35df-52d5-ab20-721841680a9b)
Map (#u0d38706f-ce60-58ee-aea5-72da782e32a7)
Chapter 1 (#u956b5e5c-4a17-5e70-8b0a-06005526fa4a)
Chapter 2 (#u8eaa9a23-fae0-5289-84fd-bfed5d18a163)
Chapter 3 (#u2bfa592b-5706-5a7b-9863-3ee5a296c672)
Chapter 4 (#u2158fb02-5ec6-5c3c-856c-fd993cc9d2be)
Chapter 5 (#u11401936-d28f-5f02-8b33-050cafa7b7a4)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_34bb4788-9c8f-5497-b246-5b2699cb2837)
This was a bad idea. Spectacularly bad, actually. It went against everything I’d learned in my short time topside, but all that didn’t change what we had to do. I glanced back down at my dad’s map, but it showed the same thing it had always shown. The only way to get to Lake Michigan was to leave the shelter of the trees and make a run for it – in the open. My eyes flicked up to take in the sprawling grassland in question, filled, as I knew it would be, with dinosaurs.
A large herd of what I thought had to be Dracorex hogwartsia was grazing close enough for me to count the spikes that bristled all over their bony heads, making them resemble the dragons of fairy tales they were named after. But these creatures were not the stuff of fairy tales or history books. At least not anymore. Behind the herd of dracorex was a grassland that used to contain houses, roads, cars, and everything else humans had used to stake their claim on this earth. All that was gone now. Which made sense, I guess, considering the dinosaurs were the ones who ruled things these days.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Shawn muttered, running a hand through his blond hair so that it stood up in sweaty spikes. “There’s no way we can make it to the lake without getting eaten.”
“What’s your point?” Todd asked as he swung his arms in lazy circles to stretch out his shoulder muscles.
“My point,” Shawn said, grimacing, “is that there has to be a way around this, a way that isn’t so exposed. We’ve always gone around the open areas. Except,” he amended, “for that time we almost became a T. rex’s lunch.” He paused a moment, stifling a shudder. “At least in the trees the only dinosaurs we encountered were little ones. Out there,” he said, gesturing in front of us, “there’s nowhere to hide, no trees to climb, and nothing to slow down those massive monsters.”
“We knew that the closer to Lake Michigan we got, the more open it was going to be,” I said flatly. His attitude shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d grown up with Shawn in North Compound, and unlike Todd, who’d grown up topside, being aboveground was still an uncomfortable and terrifying experience for both of us. I just hid it better.
“Yeah, but I didn’t think it was going to be this open,” Shawn grumbled, and I tried not to roll my eyes as I turned my attention back to the grassland. I’d read that dinosaurs liked to congregate near a source of water, but this was a little ridiculous. Herds of green-, brown-, and amber-coloured dinosaurs were scattered in every direction as far as I could see. To our left, a large group of stegosaurs grazed quietly in the knee-high scrub grasses, the sun reflecting off the wide flat plates that sat in single file down their sloping backs.
“Try to relax,” I said, even as the knot in my gut twisted a little tighter. “If we read the map correctly, the lake should be just on the other side of those hills.”
“Dunes,” Todd corrected. “Those things that look like hills are called dunes.”
“What’s a dune?” Shawn asked.
“Big mounds of sand,” Todd explained. “They border the lake.”
I glanced back out across the tall wavy grasses, silently wishing Shawn was right and there was another way. While the prospect of finally getting to the lake sent a thrill of excitement through me, Shawn’s reminder of our last dash into the open made my already edgy nerves buzz uncomfortably. After a lifetime underground, we hadn’t known any better than to run across an open meadow. It had been the first of many near-death experiences. The note and map my dad had left for me, urging me to take his compass and the small memory plug it contained to Lake Michigan, hadn’t said anything about how to actually survive topside. That part we’d had to figure out the hard way.
I tugged at my ponytail to free it from the snarled thorns of the bush. A few curly red strands got caught in the branches, and they fluttered gently in the wind. I snatched them and shoved them in my pocket. I wasn’t taking any chances. North Compound’s marines had found us twice now. We’d eliminated any chance that we were carrying a tracking device, so that left the old-fashioned way of finding us. By foot. Ever since we’d realised this, we’d gone out of our way to hide all traces of our movements. Hopefully it would be enough. I took a deep breath to calm my nerves. The tangy, earthy flavour of this topside world still felt foreign, but unfortunately, it did nothing to slow my hammering heart or shaking hands, so I balled them into fists and mentally commanded myself to get it together.
“Can we just get on with it?” I asked.
“Sure,” Todd said as he leant forward to stretch out his leg muscles.
Shawn scowled at Todd and then turned to me. “How are you so OK with potentially getting eaten alive?”
“Or trampled,” Todd added, adjusting his pack. “Don’t forget trampled.”
“If you were trying to make me feel better, you just failed miserably,” Shawn grumbled.
“I wasn’t.” Todd smirked. A week ago, that smirk would have fooled me. Now I could see the slight tension around his green eyes that gave away his own nerves. Seeing Shawn’s glowering face, Todd shrugged. “Look at it this way,” he said, gesturing to the massive dinosaurs. “If that many plant eaters are comfortable enough to feed, they don’t think there are any large predators around.”
“Yeah,” Shawn muttered. “But they could be wrong.”
“Just keep running no matter what happens,” Todd said. “Both of you are still too bad a shot to turn and fight if something comes after us.”
“Hey,” I protested. “You said this morning that we were getting better.”
Todd wrinkled his nose apologetically. “I was being nice.”
“You aren’t nice.” Shawn scowled.
Todd laughed. “You are improving. Especially since you had that lesson with Ivan. You might actually be a step above horrendous now.”
“Well, that’s something,” Shawn mumbled.
My heart clenched painfully. Ivan should have caught up with us by now. Either he hadn’t survived his encounter with the marines two days ago, or something had happened to delay him. I swallowed hard, trying not to imagine all the terrible things that could slow down someone as savvy at surviving topside as my grandfather.
Todd looked at both of us in turn. “Ready?” he asked. I nodded, and Shawn grumbled something unintelligible. Todd must have taken that as confirmation, because he sprang up from the bushes and sprinted into the open.
“Really?” Shawn said, clambering to his feet. “Not even a one, two, three? Or a ready, get-set, go?” He was still grumbling under his breath as we took off after Todd.
The feeling of being exposed intensified as we left the looming shelter of the trees. Todd flew through the waist-high grasses, his long legs eating up the distance with powerful strides. Shawn and I were not powerful or fast. Short and stocky, Shawn pumped his arms, his face already flushed a bright red as he struggled to keep up. I wasn’t sure what I looked like, but I doubted it was much better.
The herd of stegosaurus picked their heads up, bugling a warning to their young, who quickly found shelter under their parents’ tree-trunk-like legs. Their wary brown eyes and solemn faces studied us as we passed. If I hadn’t been sucking air as fast as I could get it, I would have let out a sigh of relief. Todd had been fairly certain that they wouldn’t stampede and squash us, but fairly certain and certain were two very different things.
The wind whipped across the grasses, making them sway and bend like waves, and I looked back to see the trees quickly disappearing behind us. Suddenly my foot caught on a rock and I flew forward. I hit the ground hard, my hands thrown out instinctively in front of me. They landed in something soft and slimy, and an awful smell met my nose. Before I could figure out what I’d just fallen into, I was scrambling to my feet and running to catch up with Shawn and Todd. Glancing back, I saw a gigantic pile of what looked like fist-sized brown balls in a slightly smashed pile. My stomach rolled as I realised that I was liberally coated in what had to be fresh dinosaur poop.
Todd slowed his pace a few minutes later, allowing Shawn and me to catch up enough to run on either side of him.
“See dead ahead?” he asked, pointing. I tried not to be too bitter that he wasn’t even breathing hard. Following his finger, I spotted several large circular depressions in the ground, each of them with a pile of white ovals in the centre.
“Are those nests?” I asked.
“Yup.” Todd frowned. “Not sure of what, though.”
“They’re everywhere,” Shawn huffed as he took in the huge nests that lay in almost every direction.
“It’ll take too long to go around. We have to go through,” Todd said. “Whatever you do, don’t touch the eggs. Somewhere around here are their parents, and the last thing we want is for them to think we’re messing with their babies.”
“Got it,” Shawn said, shaking his sweat-drenched hair out of his eyes.
Todd turned to me, his nose wrinkled. “Did you fall in dinosaur dung?”
I grimaced. “Do you even have to ask?” The smell radiating off me alone should have been clue enough.
Todd shook his head, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Follow me,” he called, shooting ahead of us again as we entered the nesting area. The ground underfoot turned to sand, and suddenly running was even harder than it had been before. As we flashed past the nests, I caught a glimpse of the large white eggs, each delicately speckled with brown.
“Jump!” Todd yelled, leaping suddenly into the air. I jumped, glancing down to see a strip of three nests, side by side, impossible to avoid. Shawn was not as quick, and I heard a surprised grunt followed by a shower of sand spraying across my back. I whirled in time to see him sprawl, face-first, into the middle of a nest. A sharp crack rang out as his head hit one of the eggs. The shell buckled in and started oozing a clear liquid. Shawn sat up quickly, but in his attempt to get to his feet again he bumped the broken egg, sending it clattering into one of its neighbours. It split in two and a slim brown creature flopped out, struggling to free itself from a gooey membrane.
I stared in wonder.
“Not good,” Todd said in my ear, and I realised I’d stopped running. He lurched past me and yanked Shawn out of the sandy nest. The little brown dinosaur opened its mouth in a wordless cry, its eyes sealed shut.
“Take your tunic off,” Todd barked at Shawn, his face drawn and pale.
“What?” Shawn asked, trying in vain to wipe the goo from the egg out of his hair. Todd didn’t wait – ripping Shawn’s pack and large bow off his back, he thrust them into my arms and then yanked Shawn’s tunic up over his head. Shawn yelped in protest, but Todd was already chucking it away from us. Shawn grabbed his pack from me just as the tiny dinosaur let out a high-pitched cry that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Run,” Todd commanded. Shawn slung his pack and bow over his bare shoulders, and we took off. The screech of the tiny dinosaur followed us as we weaved through nest after endless nest. The sound of an ear-piercing shriek from behind us forced me to turn my head. To our left, still not much more than dots in the distance, was a herd of rust-coloured dinosaurs. And they were coming straight for us, fast.
“What are those?” Shawn called.
“The parents,” Todd called, putting on a burst of speed. I hadn’t thought it was possible to run any faster, but I found a reserve of strength and pushed harder.
The sound of the advancing dinosaurs grew more deafening by the second, their angry shrieks reverberating up my spine and right into my brain. I craned my neck to look back again. They were predators. If their rows of gleaming teeth hadn’t made that immediately obvious, the fact that they were running on well-muscled back legs sealed the deal. But it was their eyes that had me doing a double take. Unlike most dinosaurs I’d encountered, whose eyes were along the sides of their heads, these sat in the front under lethal-looking spikes, almost human in their positioning.
Suddenly the sand was deeper than before, and I looked up to see Todd on all fours scrambling up a mountain. The dunes, I thought as I automatically mimicked his movements. The sand burned under my hands as I fought to keep up. For every step I took, I felt like I slid back down two, and within moments my eyes, nose, and mouth were full of grit. The sound of Shawn’s hoarse breathing behind me made it obvious that he wasn’t faring much better, and even Todd was gasping for the first time. Despite everything, that fact scared me most of all. If Todd was struggling, did we even have a chance?
Reaching the top of the dune, Todd launched himself off the peak, soaring a good ten feet before landing in the soft sand of the downhill slope. He immediately jumped again to land with a spray of sand another ten feet down. There was no time to think about it. I jumped. The wind tore at my clothes, and my stomach dropped as the dune rushed up to meet me. When my feet finally touched down, they sank into the soft sand just long enough for me to take off again. But in that second of flying, I felt wildly and amazingly alive.
My elation fizzled when I saw Todd scrambling up another dune even bigger than the first. Blinking the grit out of my eyes, I followed. I hadn’t thought it was possible for anything to be harder than that first dune. I’d been wrong. My muscles shook and cramped in protest as I forced them to do battle with yet another endless sand mountain.
When we finally made it to the top, I turned back in time to watch the dinosaurs crest the first dune. The entire herd hadn’t pursued us, presumably leaving the majority behind to defend the undisturbed nests. Not that it mattered. Even one of those beasts was more than our match. The handful still following us were much larger than I’d originally thought. At close to twenty feet from muscled tail to blunt snout, they were almost as big as the T. rex.
I looked ahead to see Todd and Shawn already halfway down the second dune, but before I took my own flying leap, I saw something that made me cry in relief. There, spread out as far as I could see, was Lake Michigan. My hand went involuntarily to the compass that hung around my neck. I’d made it. Almost. Three more dunes, smaller than the one I stood on, separated me from the lake and successfully delivering the data plug that, if my dad was right, meant the salvation of the human race. I leapt after Todd and Shawn.
The next two dunes were smaller, but our exhaustion made us clumsy and slow. Even Todd stumbled and slid backwards as we made our way up their hot, slippery surfaces. Luckily, the deep sand seemed to slow the smashed-faced dinosaurs down as well, and I heard their frustrated squeals every time we disappeared from sight over the top of a dune. Finally, we were climbing the last one.
Shawn was struggling more than me. The veins on his neck and forehead bulged, and sand stuck to his sweaty arms and shoulders like a mottled, grainy second skin. He looked to be on the verge of collapsing.
“We got this,” I encouraged him, grabbing his pack to keep him from slipping backwards again. “We’re almost there. The lake is just over the top of this dune.”
“Can’t. Breathe,” he gasped.
A triumphant roar sliced through the air as the dinosaurs crested the dune directly behind us. If we didn’t move, they’d be on us in seconds.
“Come on!” Todd shouted, and suddenly he was on the other side of Shawn. Together we hauled him up the dune. Instead of leaping off, we kind of tumbled and slid down the far side, sand spraying up to catch in my hair, tunic, and mouth.
We ran, arms churning, as we battled to make it to the water before the dinosaurs that were already sliding down the last dune. Even though the expanse of blue-gray water got closer and closer by the second, I knew we’d never make it. The dinosaurs were close enough that I could smell them now, a pungent mix of decay and old blood. This was where it was going to end.
(#ulink_3e219f6f-76dd-5ddd-91d5-fe8de70b9480)
When we were still a hundred yards away from the lake, I spotted the brown object floating on top of the water’s surface with two men standing inside of it. Sweat stung my eyes, but I didn’t notice. Boat, my exhausted brain provided for me, that’s a boat. I’d read about boats, of course, but I’d never seen one. Todd must have spotted it too because he immediately veered towards it. It flashed across my mind that those men could be marines, but in that moment I didn’t care. The pack of rust-coloured scales and flashing white teeth were mere feet behind us now.
The men in the boat were dressed in strange blue jumpsuits and had black guns pressed to their shoulders. As we approached, a flash of red erupted from each barrel, and I heard an angry shriek as a spray of sand pelted my back. The men fired again as we raced into the icy water. The cold was so shocking after the heat of the sand that it would have taken my breath away if I’d had any left to take. I sloshed through the shallow water, running until it was too deep, and then I instinctively paddled, pulling handfuls of water past me. Moments later my fingernails dug into the rough wood of the boat. One of the men grabbed the back of my tunic and heaved me up over the edge, while the other stood firing shot after shot into our would-be assailants.
Todd and Shawn landed on top of me as they too were hauled in. Managing to untangle myself from the boys, I struggled to my knees and peered out over the edge of the boat. The dinosaurs were slumped across the beach, their legs stuck out at all angles and their mouths hanging open. There had to be at least twenty of them, their eyes vacant.
I realised suddenly that the only sound I could hear was the water lapping against the side of the boat, and the silence seemed deafening after the earsplitting roars of moments before. The two men lowered their guns as Todd and Shawn pulled themselves to standing positions.
“Are they dead?” Shawn wheezed, running a trembling hand over his face. “Please tell me they’re dead.”
“Of course they’re not dead,” said one of the blue jump-suited men, as though this should have been obvious, leveling his serious grey eyes on us.
“They sure look dead to me,” Todd commented, spitting a gob of sand into the water. He shoved his hands into his hair and tousled it roughly, sending a mist of grainy sand over Shawn and me.
“They’re just tranquilised,” said the other man with the gun, turning to inspect us. I jumped as I realised that what I’d taken for a slimly built man was actually a girl not much older than me. Her closely cropped black hair stuck out in odd spikes and twists over laughing hazel eyes. Her easy smile was a sharp contrast to the man beside her, whose narrowed eyes held no hint of warmth or kindness. “Those guys won’t wake up for at least three hours, and they’ll have killer headaches when they do.”
“Tranquilised?” Shawn repeated. “Why would you tranquilise them instead of killing them?”
“Wasteful,” said the older man stiffly. “The carnotaurus numbers aren’t stable. Their last breeding season was a bad one. Those right there,” he said, pointing to five large dinosaurs slumped near one another, “are probably breeding females. Did you know that their name literally means meat-eating bull? The name came from those impressive horns. Beautiful creatures. Simply amazing. Their eyes face forward instead of off to the side like all the others, one of the reasons they’re such efficient hunters. Although,” he amended, “it’s extremely rare for that many of them to chase prey like that. They prefer to hunt alone. In fact, I’ve only seen that behaviour when they believe their young are threatened.”
I’d never heard someone talk about dinosaurs with such obvious admiration.
“You mean like if someone fell headfirst into a nest and cracked an egg open with his big head?” Todd grumbled, glaring at Shawn.
“Right,” Shawn said. “Because I meant to do that. It was loads of fun at this end. By the way, why did you rip my shirt off?” he asked as he attempted to scrape the layer of sand off his neck and shoulders that the lake water hadn’t already rinsed off.
“Because I was trying to avoid that,” Todd said, pointing to the beach full of not-dead dinosaurs. He shook his head in disgust. “Obviously it wasn’t enough. They were still able to track your scent.”
Ignoring the boys’ bickering, I studied the girl curiously. “Why do you care about the, what did you call them? The carnotaurus numbers?”
“That is a good question,” Todd said, looking from the man to the girl. “Who are you people?”
“Wait a second,” Shawn said. “You don’t know them, Todd? Why did you run towards their boat?”
“Did you see a better option?” Todd asked, eyebrows raised.
“Clearly savages,” the older man sneered, turning to the back of the boat, where a small black motor was perched. “I told you we shouldn’t have picked them up, Chaz. Don’t get too close, they probably have fleas.”
“Fleas?” Todd said in indignant disbelief. “And who are you calling savages?”
I put a restraining hand on him; now was not the time to insult the people who had just saved us.
“At least you don’t have to report their deaths now. Think of the mound and a half of paperwork you just avoided,” the girl said good-naturedly. “Besides, we’ll send a team back to attach tags and trackers before the carnotaurs wake up, so it isn’t a total loss.” The man huffed into his moustache and pulled a handle on the motor. It sputtered to life.
“We’ll drop you off a mile or so down the shoreline,” the man said coolly. “That way other members of the herd won’t be able to find your trail. Although I suggest you bathe the one who fell into the nest. The stench of a hatchling can linger for months if you don’t.”
“Months?” Shawn squeaked, looking pale.
“Actually,” the man said, wrinkling his nose, “you would all benefit from bathing. You smell like faeces.”
“That would be me,” I said, raising my hand. I couldn’t smell the dinosaur poop I’d landed in anymore, but I’d probably become immune to it. The man had called us savages, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. My green tunic and leggings were liberally stained and spotted with dinosaur dung, a film of wet sand still clung to my skin, and my red hair hung in wet tangled ringlets. Shawn and Todd didn’t look much better. Shawn was dripping wet sand onto the floor of the boat, shirtless, his hair smashed down on his head in dirty clumps. Todd had somehow ripped a large gash in the shoulder of his tunic so it drooped to the side, his bow and other gear a tangle of straps across his chest. In sharp contrast, the girl was immaculate in her crisp blue jumpsuit with its neat red badge on the upper shoulder that depicted the silhouette of a long-necked brachiosaurus.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Scientists.” The girl grinned. “We’ve been studying dinosaur populations around the lake since before the pandemic.” She extended her hand, and I shook it. “I’m Chaz, by the way, Chaz McGuire. This grumpy but brilliant man is Dr Steve Schwartz.” Dr Schwartz didn’t acknowledge his introduction as he fiddled with the puttering motor positioned at the back of the boat. I glanced around, taking in the small craft’s flat wooden hull. Narrow benches built into the sides of the boat were the only available seating, leaving the centre of the boat open with enough space for the five of us to move around comfortably. Lying open near Dr Schwartz’s feet was a blue duffel bag. Leaning over, I peered inside it to see equipment I was all too familiar with as the daughter of a biologist – small sample bottles, logbooks, and various bits of technology used to measure, catalog, and label scientific findings.
What had that girl, Chaz, said? That they had been studying dinosaurs since before the pandemic? How was that possible? The pandemic, set off by the resurrection of the dinosaurs over 150 years ago, had moved swiftly, decimating over 99 per cent of the human population within days and forcing the remaining survivors underground. Well, I amended, most of the survivors. Todd’s village, the Oaks, was proof that not everyone had found refuge underground. Yet this girl acted as though the pandemic had come and gone and they’d gone right on studying dinosaurs. It made no sense.
“Do you live in a tree village like Todd?” Shawn asked, the confusion in his voice echoing my own thoughts as he shrugged into the damp tunic Todd handed him.
Todd shook his head as he eyed the girl’s strange jumpsuit. “There aren’t any villages within miles of the lake. Too dangerous. They must be compound moles like you guys.”
“Not possible,” I countered. “There are only four compounds, and none of them are anywhere close to here.” They were in fact located on the northern, southern, eastern, and western corners of what used to be North America. And up until I’d met Todd, I’d believed that they were the last holdouts of the human race, used as safe houses for the survivors of the pandemic. Now I was faced with yet another person who apparently lived outside the Noah’s rule.
Chaz grinned while she watched this exchange, as though she was enjoying a private joke. “We aren’t affiliated with the compounds or any tree villages. Good guesses, though. Actually—”
“That will be enough, Chaz,” Schwartz said sharply, cutting her off midsentence. “You’re making me regret promoting you to my assistant. One more word and you’ll be back scooping out pens.”
Chaz cringed, and I cocked my head to the side as I considered what Schwartz had just said. What pens could Chaz possibly have to scoop? I glanced back at the bag of scientific equipment again. Who were these people? Before I could ask, Schwartz turned a lever on the motor, and the boat suddenly lurched forward. My feet went out from under me, and I yelped, toppling backwards into Todd, who hit Shawn. Someone’s elbow connected with my head as I landed hard on my back. The boat continued its surge forward, the bottom vibrating underneath me so hard my teeth clattered together.
“Thanks for that,” Todd called over the roaring motor as Chaz helped him to his feet.
“Sorry,” Chaz said cheerily as she extended her hand to me. “Schwartz isn’t really a people person.”
“You don’t say,” Shawn said wryly, shooting Schwartz a dirty look. Grabbing Chaz’s hand, I attempted to clamber to my feet, but my pack caught on something, bringing me up short. There was a sharp ripping noise, and I stood up as my pack tore open, and its hastily packed contents spilled out. As if in slow motion, I saw my father’s map fall. I’d been consulting it so frequently that I hadn’t bothered to tuck it back inside my compass for safekeeping. I lunged for the map but missed as it got picked up by the wind and tumbled across the floor of the boat. Moments before it was about to go airborne and out, a booted foot smashed down on top of it, successfully halting its escape. Sighing in relief, I grabbed for it. The boot didn’t move. I looked up into Schwartz’s annoyed face.
“What is a savage doing with a map?” he asked, bending down to retrieve it before I could protest. Schwartz’s expression went from annoyed to fearful as he surveyed the meandering line that led from North Compound to the centre of Lake Michigan. “Chaz, get your weapon out,” he snapped. “Don’t let them move.”
“What?” Chaz asked, looking just as confused as I felt. “You mean the tranquiliser gun?”
“Of course the tranquiliser gun. Don’t make me say it again!” Schwartz bellowed. Chaz scrambled to follow orders and whipped her large black gun up to her shoulder.
Dr Schwartz let the motor sputter out and die as he continued to study my map as though he’d seen a ghost. The boat bobbed up and down in the waves, and my stomach rolled sickeningly. I didn’t think I liked being on a boat.
“Tie them up,” he finally said, rolling my map up and storing it in the duffel bag at his feet. Shawn opened his mouth to protest, but snapped it shut as Schwartz picked up his own tranquiliser gun. One by one, we put our hands out and allowed ourselves to be tied.
“A tranquiliser probably wouldn’t kill you,” Chaz murmured under her breath to us as she tightened the ropes on Todd’s wrists.
“Gee, thanks,” Todd sniffed.
“Yeah, I’m sure something calibrated to drop a dinosaur would be really great for our health,” Shawn muttered with a murderous look at Schwartz. It wasn’t until Chaz had double-checked the ropes on our wrists that Schwartz walked up to stand in front of me.
“No one should have a map that leads directly to the lab,” Schwartz said, scowling. “Where did you get it?”
I pressed my lips together and looked down. Schwartz grabbed my shoulder roughly and shoved me backwards until the hard wood of the boat’s edge dug painfully into the backs of my knees. My jaw clenched. If he thought he was going to bully information out of me I wasn’t ready to give, he was wrong. I’d come too far, survived too much, to risk failing my dad and the mission he’d given me by trusting the wrong person now. Swallowing hard, I remained silent and met his angry glare with one of my own.
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” he said, leaning forward so I was forced to lean back further over the water. “Talk or you go overboard.”
I flicked my eyes back towards the shore; it wasn’t that far away. But with my hands tied together it might as well have been miles.
“Whoa,” Chaz said. “Dr Schwartz, sir, isn’t that a bit much? I mean, she’s just a kid.”
I felt the faintest tug of hope. Maybe Chaz wouldn’t let this guy do anything too drastic.
“So are you,” he sniffed. “Do as you’re told.”
“Yes, sir,” Chaz said, but she sounded uncertain. When I still didn’t say anything, Schwartz sighed and backed up a step, giving me some much-needed breathing room. My feeling of relief flitted away when he grabbed Shawn by the front of the tunic and shoved him against the opposite side of the boat. Shawn swayed dangerously backwards but his feet stayed firmly planted and Schwartz’s grip on him held him upright over the dark waves lapping against the boat. My heart felt like it had jumped into my throat, and I attempted to swallow it as I took in the obvious threat to my best friend’s life. It was time to talk.
“It’s from my dad,” I said. “A family heirloom. No importance.” It was a lie. The map was the most important thing I owned. But every instinct I had was screaming at me not to trust this man, and I was not going to tell him anything I didn’t absolutely have to.
Schwartz just stood there, his face unreadable as he studied me. I held my breath.
“Liar,” he said, but I barely heard him because over his shoulder I’d just seen an all-too-familiar look come over my best friend’s face. Before I could tell him not to, Shawn pulled back and clobbered Schwartz on the side of the head with his bound fists. Schwartz yelped, and as if in slow motion, I saw him lose his grip on the front of Shawn’s tunic. Shawn fought to keep his balance for a gut-wrenching heartbeat before toppling backwards and off the boat. He disappeared below the surface of the blue-black water, and I screamed, rushing forward even though I knew he was out of reach. A moment later, Shawn came up, gasping and thrashing as he fought to keep his head above the waves. With his hands still tied in front of him, he was forced to keep himself afloat with nothing but his legs as his heavy pack and gear dragged him down.
“He’s going to drown!” I gasped as Shawn’s head went under again. Panic dug its cold fingers into my heart. If I jumped in, all I would do was drown with him. In desperation, I attempted to rip at the rope binding my hands with my teeth, but it was no use. The next thing I knew, Schwartz had grabbed the back of my tunic and yanked me roughly away from the edge and onto the floor of the boat. He was shouting at me, but I was too lost in my fog of panic to hear him.
“Tell me who gave you that map,” he bellowed again, obviously deciding to use Shawn’s predicament to his advantage.
“She already did!” Todd yelled. “Can’t you see Shawn’s drowning?”
I stumbled to my feet in time to see Shawn struggle to the surface, grab a lungful of air, and go down again.
“He’ll get eaten before he can drown,” Chaz said, her lips pressed in a grim line. “Look.” Something in her voice cut through my panic, and Todd and I snapped our heads to follow her pointing finger.
“What is that thing?” Todd breathed. My heart stuttered to a terrified stop as I took in the creature swimming towards us. Its enormous head alone was almost as long as our boat and reminded me of an alligator with long yellow teeth jutting out from jaws that looked capable of crushing a human in one bite. Its massive body was serpentine and fluid as it cut through the water like a snake. A dark blue-black in colour, it blended almost seamlessly with the waves, and if Chaz hadn’t pointed it out, I might not have noticed it until it was upon us. But now that I had seen it, I knew it was going to haunt my nightmares. I had no clue what kind of plesiosaur it was, but it was one of the scariest things I’d ever seen. Which, considering everything I’d seen since coming topside, was really saying something.
“Get him out,” I begged as angry, helpless tears slid down my face. “Please.”
“Talk,” Schwartz said coldly.
“Sir!” Chaz said, dropping her gun to the floor of the boat as she lunged forward to make a grab for Shawn.
Schwartz shot a hand out to restrain her, his face pinched. “The safety of the lab is in jeopardy. Follow your orders.”
Words began pouring out of me, as though if I just said the right combination, I could save Shawn. Whether I trusted Schwartz didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but getting Shawn out of the water. Fast.
“My dad gave it to me. He told me to come here.” I choked, frantic. “He didn’t say why. Just get him out. Please!”
“Dr Schwartz?” Chaz said as Shawn spluttered back to the surface. “That’s Pretty Boy. It could capsize us.” Tearing my eyes away from Shawn, I saw the beast sink down into the murky water. Somehow not seeing it was scarier than seeing it had been.
Schwartz sighed. “Fine, we’ll finish this at the lab.” Leaning over, he grabbed Shawn’s tunic, and with Chaz’s help he hauled him back into the boat, where he flopped in an exhausted heap, gasping for air. Schwartz was just turning back to the motor when the boat lurched suddenly, almost toppling Todd into the water. Chaz grabbed him and threw him to the floor of the boat next to Shawn.
“Dr Schwartz!” she yelled. “He’s testing us. Please get this thing moving, or we’re all dead.” Schwartz’s face went white, and he grabbed the cord of the motor, giving it a firm yank. The engine snarled and died. He pulled at it again, and it gave another hopeful rumble before sputtering out. The plesiosaur emerged beside us, and if I’d had the inclination to reach out a hand, I could have pricked a finger on one of the teeth that was roughly the length of my forearm. What had Chaz called it? Pretty Boy? What a stupid name for one of the ugliest creatures I’d ever seen. It sized us up before bumping its head into the boat again, making it tilt violently. Its message was clear. It was going to toy with us first, terrify us, before swallowing us whole.
“Dr Schwartz!” Chaz yelled, going for her tranquiliser gun.
“Saying my name isn’t helping,” Schwartz snapped. “And don’t shoot it. It’ll drown if we tranquilise it.”
“Good! Drown it!” Todd shouted, but Schwartz ignored him as he gave the cord another yank. This time the engine spluttered to life. He cranked the handle, and we shot off across the water, the shoreline shrinking behind us as we headed towards the middle of the lake. Pretty Boy submerged again, and I waited for it to reemerge and chase us. It didn’t.
I sank down beside my soaked and shivering friend. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words sounded pitiful. Shawn had almost just been shot, drowned, and fed to a monster. Sorry didn’t really cut it.
“What was that thing?” Shawn gasped, his eyes not leaving the spot where Pretty Boy had disappeared, and I realised that in the struggle to stay afloat Shawn hadn’t seen the monster approaching.
“I have no idea,” Todd said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s the reason my mom said to never swim in Lake Michigan.” Shawn’s face went green, but before I could ask him if he was OK, he’d crawled awkwardly to the edge of the boat and puked. Not wanting to lose him overboard again, I grabbed the back of his drenched tunic with my still-bound hands and held on until he finally flopped back onto the floor of the boat, his eyes shut.
I bent over him, worried. “Shawn?” I asked, not sure if I should ask if he was OK. Clearly he wasn’t. Not that I blamed him.
“He’ll be fine,” Todd said. “Just give him a minute.” I nodded, unconvinced. Just then my canteen rolled against my foot and I looked down to see the contents of my pack scattered across the floor of the boat. Every now and then the wind would catch a packet of dinosaur jerky or a pair of socks and send them flying into the lake. My journal lay in the corner by Schwartz’s foot, its pages damp and flayed open in the wind. Eyeing Schwartz to make sure he wasn’t looking, I grabbed it and slid it into Todd’s still-intact pack. Todd saw what I was doing, and when Schwartz’s back was turned, we collected what little supplies were left and tucked them all into Todd’s pack. Shawn continued to sprawl on the bottom of the boat, showing no intention of moving despite the bumping and jarring he was getting as the boat skipped across the choppy waves.
“We’ll interrogate them back at the lab,” Schwartz called to Chaz, shouting to be heard over the slap of the boat’s hull on the water.
Todd leaned in so only Shawn and I could hear him. “What lab is that Schwartz guy talking about?” he asked. “Lake Michigan is huge. I doubt this thing has enough gas to make it across the entire lake.”
“The lab isin the middle of the lake,” Chaz said, making us jump as she crouched down in front of us, her giant black tranquiliser gun slung casually over her shoulder.
I unconsciously clutched my compass. Maybe the lab was what my dad had wanted me to find? After all, he had marked the centre of the lake as the location of a member of the Colombe, and how many things could be in the middle of a lake? The Colombe was the secret organisation my dad and mom had founded in an attempt to bring people aboveground again. My grandfather, Ivan, had explained that after the Noah had discovered the organisation, a few had escaped. Was one of them hiding in this mysterious lab? Five years’ worth of questions burned hot inside my chest, but after what had just happened to Shawn, I was worried that I wasn’t going to like the answers I got.
(#ulink_b5d26359-e82b-5204-865d-b8350bf2bb11)
“Home sweet home,” Chaz crowed later when Schwartz cut the motor down to a crawl. She stood up and stretched, a wide grin on her face. I glanced around in confusion. Surrounding us on all sides was a seemingly never-ending expanse of rolling waves with no land in sight. What was she talking about?
“Are you sure you should stop here?” Shawn asked, sitting up for the first time to peer nervously at the surrounding water. He hadn’t spoken since he’d thrown up, and his voice still sounded shaky. Not that I could blame him. The image of Pretty Boy swimming towards my best friend was one I wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon. It had been too loud to do any talking on the trip, and we’d spent what felt like an eternity huddled together on the floor of the boat trying to stay warm as the wind sliced right through our wet clothes.
“Of course I’m sure,” Chaz said. “Get ready to duck.”
“Duck?” Todd asked, glancing up at the sky. “I thought those went extinct years ago.”
Chaz snorted. “They did. Sorry, I meant duck your head. I forgot how hard it is for people to spot the boat dock the first time. Look dead ahead. See where those waves are crashing sort of funny?” I followed her pointing finger and blinked in surprise. About ten feet in front of us the waves were behaving oddly, seeming to hit an invisible object before careening back in the opposite direction. I squinted and then jerked back in surprise when my eyes finally made sense of what they were seeing. Rising from the water was a gigantic mirrored bubble, ingeniously camouflaged with reflective glass so that it melded with the shifting waves of the lake. If I hadn’t known exactly where to look, I could have passed within a foot of it and missed it. Before I could marvel anymore, our boat slid into a small circular hole in the side of the bubble, and into a network of floating wooden docks that spiraled out from a circular centre deck like the spokes on a wheel. Tied to the docks were other small boats like our own, as well as a few larger ones, but the most prominent feature of the entire space was the large glass box on the centre deck. The sound of the water lapping against the walls of the bubble echoed around us as Chaz tied up the boat, and we all got out.
“What is this place?” Todd asked.
“Entrance C,” Schwartz said briskly, leading us towards the glass box, where he pushed a few buttons on a side panel. Moments later a glass elevator emerged, dripping. It seemed so out of place surrounded by the water and waves.
“So this lab?” Shawn said as the doors slid open. “It’s …?”
“At the bottom of the lake,” Chaz grinned. “The place was built as a top-secret testing facility pre-Jurassic domination.”
“Jurassic domi-what?” Todd asked.
“Jurassic domination is the term we use for when the power shift occurred after the pandemic that decimated the human race,” Schwartz said stiffly as he grabbed my upper arm and manoeuvered me roughly into the elevator. Todd and Shawn followed with Chaz right behind. The elevator was cramped, and I found myself pressed against the cool glass wall, my bound hands smashed awkwardly in front of me. My wrists ached, and I twisted them in an attempt to ease the pressure without much success. Still being tied up seemed redundant at this point. We had nowhere to run, and after what had happened to Shawn, none of us was going to attempt to escape by swimming. Although I wasn’t so sure I’d make a run for it even if I had the opportunity. Schwartz and Chaz were my only shot at getting some answers, and after coming this far, I wasn’t going to leave without them. The elevator doors slid shut, and with a soft hum we were sinking. The docking area disappeared and the dark blue of Lake Michigan enveloped the elevator shaft.
Schools of silver-and-blue fish swam in dizzying swirls around the elevator as we sank. Larger, darker shapes were also visible, but they were too far away to see distinctly.
“Are those what I think they are?” Shawn asked, pointing to the hazy blobs.
Chaz turned to squint where he was pointing. “Yup, those are Pretty Boy’s buddies.”
“You seriously named that thing that almost ate Shawn?” I asked. “Why?”
Chaz shrugged. “We’ve named the big ones. Pretty Boy is a kronosaurus; they are particularly nasty. They can eat you in one bite. But I think I’d actually prefer to be eaten by one of them. It would be better than having an elasmosaurus nibble on you a while.” She didn’t seem to notice the look of absolute gob-smacked astonishment on our faces because she went on as though this were all completely normal. “We have regular old plesiosaurs and pliosaurs too.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “Let’s see, we have the nothosaurs, simolestes, and mosasaurs here. Oh, and a few dunkleosteus. Those suckers have jaws on them like you wouldn’t believe! Dr Schwartz gets the credit for all of them,” she said proudly. “If he hadn’t tweaked their genes, they couldn’t live in fresh water, or our climate for that matter. Most of them lived in the oceans originally.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. “Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?”
“Well, yes. Sort of,” Chaz said with a worried look at Schwartz. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” All I could manage was to shake my head at Chaz. Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for almost wiping out the human race? I swallowed the tirade of hot anger that bubbled inside me as I imagined them bringing back the very monster that had almost eaten my best friend just moments before.
“You made all those plesiosaurs? That’s just sick,” Shawn said, my own disgust reflected in his face.
“Swimming dinosaurs,” Todd sniffed. “I don’t care what fancy name you call them.”
“They aren’t technically dinosaurs. They’re swimming marine reptiles,” Chaz corrected.
“To savages, dinosaurs and plesiosaurs are nothing but something to eat. You are wasting your time with explanations, Chaz. So, yes, Todd was it? They are just swimming dinosaurs,” Schwartz sneered. Todd bristled.
“They protect this lab,” Chaz said with an apologetic shrug at Todd behind Schwartz’s back. “No one comes poking around plesiosaur-infested waters.”
We continued our steady descent in silence, and soon the sun no longer penetrated the water far enough for us to see the fish or the plesiosaurs. I shivered as the temperature in the elevator became markedly cooler.
Todd was starting to tremble too, but not from the cold. I noticed that his face was white and sweat was running down it. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he was the one who’d been thrown in the lake with Pretty Boy.
“Are you OK?” I asked, pulled momentarily from my thoughts about this mysterious lab and the monsters they’d created to protect it. “You look horrible.”
“I don’t like small spaces,” he said tersely, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Wonderful,” Schwartz drawled drily, “a claustrophobic savage.” He’d pulled a small port screen out of the duffel bag at his feet and studiously ignored us as he began typing something into it. I gave Todd’s shoulder an awkward pat with my bound hands. I wasn’t especially fond of the tiny space either. My ears were starting to ache and throb. Noticing my wince of pain, Chaz quickly explained how to clear our ears to relieve the pressure from our descent by holding our noses. A minute and one satisfying pop later and the stabbing pain in my head was gone. I made a mental note not to let that happen again. The elevator passed into the insides of a building, and I looked away from Todd to stare. The first floor we slid past was full of lab equipment.
“Whoa,” Todd said, letting out a low whistle of appreciation, and I nodded in mute agreement. This place was massive. Unlike North Compound’s confining walls of stone and concrete, these walls were made of glass, so you could see through all the rooms from one end to the other, making it hard to tell where one room stopped and another room started.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it,” Chaz said proudly. “This is just the research floor; wait until you see the rest of it.” The next floor the elevator descended through was covered in wall-to-wall troughs of plants under grow lights, reminding me of the underground chambers in North Compound where we’d grown turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Like the floor above, this one too seemed ten times bigger than even the large meeting auditorium back at North.
“Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Shawn.
“I am,” Shawn breathed.
The elevator didn’t give us long to gawk before dropping down into the biggest room I’d ever seen. All comparisons to North Compound disappeared as I pressed my hands to the glass and stared in wonder at hundreds of dinosaurs, all housed in enormous glass cages. Arching above the dinosaur pens was a tangled network of glass walkways, bustling with blue jump-suited people.
“No way.” Todd gasped. Shawn made a disbelieving choking noise, and I pounded him on the back with my bound hands.
“You keep dinosaurs down here?” I gasped.
“Of course,” Schwartz replied. “We run one of the top breeding programs in the world.”
“We run the only breeding program in the world,” Chaz muttered.
Schwartz glared at her before turning his attention back to us. “We have also tamed and trained some of the brighter species. We’ve gathered invaluable data from living in such close proximity. They act as message carriers, test subjects, and pets. You may not kill any of them,” he said, giving us a hard look. “Everyone who lives down here does so because they believe in the beauty and continuation of the dinosaur. Remember that.”
“But why?” I asked, dumbstruck.
“What do you mean why?” Schwartz sniffed.
I shook my head in amazement as I took in the hundreds of cages. “Why would you breed them? After what happened with the pandemic?”
“The ecosystem,” Chaz said. “When people brought the dinosaurs out of extinction one hundred and fifty years ago, no one thought about the impact these guys would have on the ecosystem if they ran wild.” She jerked her head at one of the cages. “They were supposed to just stay in zoos and wildlife preserves, right? Well, obviously, they didn’t. After the pandemic, these guys took over and a lot of other animals went extinct. It threw everything out of whack. Our lab has been trying to correct that with selective breeding and repopulation.”
Her explanation sounded like a more scientific version of Ivan’s table demonstration when we had been back at his house the night before the marines found us again. He’d been trying to explain to Shawn that if you removed all the dinosaurs, the carefully balanced world of predator and prey that we lived in would collapse. And while Chaz wasn’t talking about removing the dinosaurs entirely, she seemed to be making the same general point. Had things changed so much in the last 150 years that we now needed dinosaurs to keep the topside world functional? And if that was true, then what Chaz was saying about balancing out the dinosaur population made a lot of sense. I shook my head as I tried to process this bizarre concept. I had grown up in a compound where everyone talked about the time before the dinosaurs like it was this ideal utopia that could be reclaimed. But what if Ivan and Chaz were right and the dinosaurs were here to stay?
Before I could respond, the elevator continued its steady descent, and I craned my head back to get one last look at the cage of what had to be Parasaurolophus before it disappeared from sight. We passed through a floor that looked like a school, glass desks lined up neatly in glass rooms. The place seemed to go on forever, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that it was all underwater. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of it, I never would have believed it.
“So much glass,” Shawn marveled next to me, and I realised he was right. Glass had been something we’d had to scavenge and reuse over and over again in North Compound, as we were unable to manufacture it.
Chaz leant forward. “I’m not sure if you noticed while running from that pack of carnotaurs, but we have a lot of sand around here.” When neither of us said anything, she cocked her head to the side. “That’s how you make glass. You heat sand to really high temperatures. Didn’t you know that?” All I could do was shake my head in wonder as we passed through another floor, this one made up of small apartments.
Our elevator finally bumped to a stop, and we spilled out into a gigantic lab lit with harsh fluorescents. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the dark murk of Lake Michigan. A few scientists glanced up from their large stationary port screens as we entered, eyeing us with interest before turning back to their work. Schwartz gave Chaz a meaningful look before striding away to meet three lab-coated men huddled around a port screen. A small yellow dinosaur that only came up to my knee scurried past us and clambered nimbly up Chaz’s leg and onto her shoulder. Chaz dug a large dead beetle out of her pocket and handed it up to the little creature. It cooed happily.
“This is Pip.” She grinned as she passed up another treat. “She’s kind of the mascot for this floor of the lab. She was supposed to get released back into the wild, but she was so darn cute they decided to let her stay.”
“What is she exactly?” Todd asked, slightly less green now that we weren’t in the tiny elevator.
“Compsognathus,” Chaz said. “It’s Greek for dainty jaw. Dr Schwartz’s team was able to extract her DNA from a bone found in Germany. He’s one of the most brilliant paleontologists we have here at the lab.” The little creature was more bird than dinosaur, and I had to admit that Chaz had a point; she was sort of cute. Vibrant yellow with blue eyes that took up most of her pointed face; she lashed her long, thin tail delicately from side to side for balance as she surveyed us from her perch on Chaz’s shoulder.
“Ecosystem or no ecosystem, I can’t believe you’re still actively bringing new species back to life,” Shawn said, his fists clenched. Oblivious to Shawn’s anger in her preoccupation with Pip, Chaz nodded happily.
“Ten new species just last year. We have an above-ground facility where we release them. It’s really amazing.”
“Amazing is not the word I would use,” Todd said sarcastically.
“Spoken like a true savage,” Schwartz said drily as he rejoined our group. He turned to Chaz. “Dr Robinson is sending a team out to tag the carnotaurs we stunned. Please accompany him. I’ll escort these three to see Boznic.”
Chaz nodded and was turning to go when one of the men in lab coats trotted up, a worried look on his face. He whispered something quietly in Schwartz’s ear, and Schwartz scowled and nodded. With a resigned sigh he turned to Chaz, who had stopped to watch this interaction. “Change of plans. Escort them to conference room B. I’ll alert Boznic and meet you there after I deal with this.” With a curt nod to the man in the lab coat, Schwartz turned and followed him at a jog.
“Looks like you’re with me,” Chaz said as Pip hopped from her shoulder and scampered away. “Which,” she said confidentially, “is kind of shocking. I’m not sure if you noticed, but Schwartz isn’t my biggest fan. He only tolerates me because he owes my dad a favour.” She stared after Schwartz’s retreating form, her forehead scrunched in thought. With a shrug, she motioned for us to climb back into the elevator. Todd’s face still had a sickly green colour to it, and I saw him give the tranquiliser gun hanging by Chaz’s side an assessing look. Not wanting him to pull anything stupid, I gave his shoulder a shove with my own, and he stumbled forward into the elevator. Shawn followed us inside, a preoccupied scowl on his face. Despite the disturbing revelation that these people were breeding dinosaurs, I couldn’t help but feel a tingle of excitement. This had to be what my dad had put on his map. It just had to be. As soon as the doors slid shut behind us, Chaz pushed a few buttons and took the tranquiliser gun off her shoulder with a grin.
“I’ll make you a deal. If you promise not to deck me, I’ll put this thing away. Makes me twitchy pointing it at people anyway.” She shuddered and slung the large black weapon onto her back. “Besides, it’s about out of battery anyway, and running away is impossible now that you’re down here.”
“What do you mean impossible?” Todd asked, eyeing the panel on the side of the elevator speculatively.
“Well, you saw how touchy Schwartz was about you guys finding out about this place. It’s because no one knows about us – not the Noah, not the compounds, not anybody,” Chaz explained. “We’re top secret.”
“I thought the Oaks was top secret too,” Todd muttered darkly, and I winced. His village had been captured when the Noah’s marines somehow tracked me and Shawn all the way from North Compound.
When I’d left the compound with nothing but my dad’s compass and a poorly drawn map, I’d never expected that the Noah would send General Kennedy and his marines after me. Why would the Noah, the man who controlled all four of the compounds, waste his time on a twelve-year-old girl? The whole idea was mind-boggling, but it was one I’d had to come to terms with.
In fact, there were a lot of things about the world that I’d had to adjust to after coming topside. For one, that people like Todd existed: people who lived outside the Noah’s control and the compound’s protection. For my entire life, I’d thought survival topside was impossible due to the dinosaurs. Now I was face-to-face with yet another example of that lie. Chaz and the rest of the people in the lab were obviously not descendants of the people the original Noah had shepherded underground over 150 years ago. Which meant that, like Todd, they’d never believed the Noah was the great saviour of the human race like Shawn and I had. It was simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating.
“What?” Todd cried, and I focussed back in on the conversion. Chaz had continued talking while I’d been lost in my own thoughts, and from the look of horror on Todd’s face, I’d missed something big.
“Like I said,” Chaz shrugged. “We’re always short-handed, and lab kids start working early. It’s not that great a job really. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a step up from mucking out stalls, but Dr Schwartz isn’t the most personable guy.”
“We noticed.” Shawn scowled. “About the time he tried to feed me to a sea monster.”
“Well, in his defence, you did hit him,” Chaz said. “I don’t think he really would have thrown you overboard.” Shawn shuddered and Chaz smiled apologetically. “Yeah, Pretty Boy’s a mean one all right. But pliosaurs and plesiosaurs are the only vicious creatures we help proliferate, and that’s only to protect the lab.”
“Proliferate?” Shawn asked.
“Help multiply,” Chaz supplied. “Our main focus is herbivores.”
“OK,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around this new information. “Then why didn’t you kill that carnotaurus herd on the beach? They were definitely not herbivores.”
“It’s a lab rule,” Chaz said. “It all goes back to the ecosystem balance I mentioned before. No one likes spiders either, but if we killed them all, the bug population would take over. If we kill off all the carnivores, we throw the entire ecosystem off balance.”
“Wait a minute,” Shawn said, his brow wrinkled in confusion. “Didn’t you say this lab had been here since before the pandemic?”
“It has.” Chaz nodded. “Originally it was a top-secret testing centre for the dinosaurs. Scientists back then were interested in discovering what else the dinosaurs might be useful for besides entertainment. This lab has discovered thousands of uses for everything from the oils in their skin to their dung. Medicines, tools, food, you name it, dinosaurs provide it way better than cows or chickens ever could. Which is good, considering all those domestic animals are extinct now. Plus dinosaurs are exceptionally trainable if you start them as hatchlings, and they make pretty fabulous pets.”
“But what about the pandemic?” I asked. The pandemic was one of the main reasons the human race had been struggling to make a comeback for the last 150 years. The small portion of the population that had survived it had done so because they’d been blessed with immunity to a disease that should have been extinct for millions of years. And while that immunity did seem to be passed down from generation to generation, it wasn’t foolproof.
“Oh, that,” Chaz said, waving her hand dismissively. “All the dinosaurs we breed are genetically modified so they help eliminate the bacterial strain that caused the pandemic. I’m not sure how well you know your history, but all attempts at a vaccine have failed. But if the genetic modifications work like Boz thinks they will, we might be able to eradicate it completely in the next thirty years. Pretty awesome, right?” When we didn’t say anything, she went on, unperturbed. “Anyway, after the pandemic, the scientists that survived realised that if they didn’t step in, the fragile balance of life topside might implode completely. Without us, there might not be a viable ecosystem topside.”
“The dinosaurs make it impossible for the human race to survive topside, so who cares about the viable eco-whatever?” Shawn asked
“It’s not impossible,” Todd said. “It’s just not real easy.”
“The word you’re looking for is deadly,” Shawn muttered.
“That’s the thing,” Chaz said excitedly. “Boz has a plan for us to live in harmony with the dinosaurs. We already have quite a few scientists living in our aboveground facility. Boz says that evolution has proven it isn’t just survival of the fittest, but survival of the adaptable!”
“Wait a second,” Todd said, “I think I heard about a place like that. Some of the traders mentioned a settlement of scientists near the lake.”
Chaz nodded happily. “That was probably us. We trade with some of the tree people from time to time.”
“I thought we were all savages,” Todd said, his face tight with anger.
Chaz cringed. “Not everyone is as biased at Schwartz,” she said apologetically.
“I still think you’re all nuts,” Shawn said.
“We’re not,” Chaz countered, sounding slightly insulted. “We do some really amazing stuff here.” When we still didn’t seem convinced, she huffed and punched a new button on the elevator.
“What are you doing?” Todd asked nervously.
“Proving to you just how awesome this place is,” Chaz said. “We have some time to kill before Schwartz gets to the conference room anyway. We’ll hit the hatchery first, and then the breeding pens. The dorms and school aren’t that exciting.”
The elevator dinged, and we stepped out into the gigantic laboratory and my jaw dropped. It was one thing to hear about people breeding dinosaurs; it was a whole other thing to actually see it. Scattered around the room were large metal contraptions with glass domes and heat lamps. I peered inside the closest one. It was filled with five eggs the size of footballs, and the silver plaque on the side let me know that these were apparently ankylosaurus eggs.
“Those are really cool,” Chaz said from behind me, making me jump. “They have this fused armour built into their skin. Makes them nearly impossible to tranquilise. Real sweethearts, though, so you almost never have to. We used to have a male named Bubba who would let the little kids climb all over him like he was a jungle gym. He would do just about anything for a cookie.”
“I’m not sure if this is impressive or disgusting,” Shawn admitted as he turned in a slow circle.
We passed through the enormous hatchery and walked up a massive set of glass stairs. I looked back and calculated roughly one hundred incubators, each with at least three or four eggs inside.
Chaz punched a code into a large glass door. It buzzed and clicked open, and the smell that wafted through was enough to make me gag. Shawn and Todd immediately covered their noses with their hands. Chaz didn’t seem to notice.
We walked into the massive room of dinosaurs we’d caught a glimpse of earlier. With the soaring ceilings and gigantic windows, it was hard to believe we were really underwater. Row after row of oversized glass and iron stalls stretched as far as I could see, each one containing a different breed of dinosaur. We followed Chaz up a ramp that led to a walkway over the top of the cages. We had to manoeuver around teenagers in dirty overalls who were busy wheeling wheelbarrows full of a coarse grain, obviously on their way to fill the enormous feed troughs below. A few of them shot us interested looks, but everyone else seemed much too busy to care about us.
I looked down into the first stall. A small family of triceratops was inside, the female bellowing at three tiny greenish adolescents who head-butted one another and rolled around the floor of the cage. My heart lurched when I saw a small girl in among them, a wheelbarrow and pitchfork in hand as she worked at clearing out a mound of dinosaur poop almost as tall as she was.
Chaz waved down. “Hey, Joyce! How are the three musketeers doing today?” Joyce set down her pitchfork as the three young dinosaurs raced around her in an impromptu game of tag.
“Driving their poor mother crazy. I think we’ll move them to their own pen tomorrow.”
Suddenly Shawn was gripping my shoulder. “Did you see what was outside those windows?” he whispered.
“What?” I asked, turning to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around the entire enclosure. Outside, swimming in graceful arcs, were plesiosaurs. These had longer necks and smaller heads than Pretty Boy. Their bodies moved smoothly in the water, propelled by four muscular fins. They periodically opened their mouths in soundless calls, giving me a good view of their gleaming rows of teeth. I gulped, and hoped the glass was thicker than it looked.
Chaz turned back to us. “Oh, you spotted our audience. The elasmosaurs like the light the lab gives off. Did you know that some people believe that that particular breed was never actually extinct?” she asked, jerking her head at the long-necked plesiosaurs. “Before the pandemic hit, people claimed that there was a small family of them located in some lake in Scotland. The locals called them Loch Ness monsters or something. Can you believe it? Dr Schwartz said it’s really unlikely, but I would love to travel there someday to see for myself.”
Todd craned his head back, taking in the enormity of the space. “What I want to know is how you got all these dinosaurs down here. I know you didn’t squeeze them into that tiny glass elevator.”
Chaz laughed. She had a low chuckling laugh, and I thought that, under different circumstances, like ones where she wasn’t holding us prisoner, I might actually like her.
“We have gigantic freight elevators at entrances A and G,” she explained. Before she could go on, the crackle of a loudspeaker reverberated around the room. Everyone froze, looking up as though expecting the voice of God. However, it wasn’t the voice of God that came through the speaker. It was Schwartz. And he sounded furious.
“Chastity McGuire! Report to the conference room immediately!”
Chaz froze as everyone’s eyes turned to stare at us. It looked like our tour was over.
(#ulink_df0c3402-86ba-5f33-b945-fbd0d203764e)
“Your real name is Chastity?” Todd asked, his familiar smirk back in place.
“My name is Chaz,” she snipped as she hustled us off the walkway. “If anyone but Dr Schwartz called me Chastity, they’d get a black eye. Consider yourself warned.”
We reached another glass door and Chaz punched some numbers in quickly. It buzzed open and she pushed us inside. This room had lower ceilings and seemed to be some kind of office space. She hurried us down hallway after hallway until we finally reached conference room B. Inside was a fuming Schwartz.
“Did they enjoy your nice little tour of our top-secret facility, Chaz? You are officially demoted from your position as my assistant. I need someone who can follow a simple order when it’s given.”
Chaz’s face flushed red, but she set her mouth in a stubborn line and didn’t reply. She had guts. I liked her more for it.
“Relax, Dr Schwartz,” said a large man I hadn’t noticed before. His clothes had the pressed appearance of authority. His pale blue eyes were stern, but the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes betrayed that his face was more accustomed to smiling than frowning. “I’m sure Chaz didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I actually think it might be a good thing to give our guests a glimpse of the importance of our work.”
“Sir,” Dr Schwartz said stiffly, “you saw the girl’s map. Our safety here might be compromised.”
“And if it is?” the man replied with a carefree shrug. “We are not without protection. Before you jump to the grimmest scenario, let’s at least hear the girl’s story. And for heaven’s sake, untie them. They’re only children.”
Todd snorted. I had to agree. I hadn’t felt like a child in a long time. Regardless, Chaz stepped forward to untie us. She looked relieved and gave us an apologetic smile as she deftly unwound the rope.
“Take a seat, please,” the man said. “I am Dr Bartholomew Boznic, head paleontologist here at the Lincoln Lab, but everyone calls me Boz.” He was perched at a long glossy metal table set against another one of those floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the lake, complete with frolicking plesiosaurs. Their huge bodies slid past the glass, and some even pushed off it to launch themselves in the opposite direction.
“We didn’t tell anyone about your lab,” I said as I took a seat across from Boz. “I had no idea what was in the middle of this lake when I got the map.”
“That’s good to hear.” He smiled. “I’d hate to think that the Noah’s stealth bombers were winging their way here to destroy my life’s work as we speak.”
“The Noah doesn’t have stealth bombers,” Shawn protested, but then he paused, taking in Boz’s serious face and raised eyebrows. Deflated, he sank into the seat beside me. “Of course the Noah has stealth bombers,” he said flatly, “why am I even surprised?” I rolled my eyes. Even after watching Todd’s entire village get captured, and everything that Ivan had told us, it had taken Shawn forever to come around to the idea that the Noah wasn’t the saviour of humanity we’d always been told he was. I’d been an easier sell. Between my dad’s note and the revelation that villages like Todd’s existed, I’d very quickly come to terms with the fact that the world wasn’t what I’d always been told. Not that I could blame Shawn for taking a little longer. We’d both grown up believing that only one aeroplane existed, and that the aeroplane’s sole purpose was to deliver mail and supplies four times a year between compounds. Then the helicopters had shown up at Todd’s village, so Boz’s claim of stealth bombers was not all that far-fetched. Unfortunately.
“I can assure you that he does have stealth bombers,” Boz said seriously. “And if given the opportunity, he would use them. Our position with the current Noah is tenuous to say the least.”
“Tenuous?” I asked.
“He acts like we don’t exist, mainly because he can’t find us, and we act like he doesn’t exist. But I don’t want to talk about that now. What I want to know is where this remarkable map came from.” He had my dad’s map spread out before him, and I could tell he’d been studying it before we came in. I looked at Shawn and Todd, hoping for some guidance about how much to tell. Shawn just shrugged. Todd laced his fingers into the straps of the pack he was still wearing and stared in grim silence at the plesiosaurs outside the window. I decided to proceed cautiously. Boz seemed nice enough, but he and Schwartz worked together. And there was something about Schwartz that made my skin crawl.
“My dad sent it. Just like I told Schwartz before he tried to feed Shawn to that monster Pretty Boy.”
“It was an accident,” Schwarz sniffed. “The boy attacked me, and he lost his balance.”
Boz shot Schwartz a disapproving look, clearly skeptical of this explanation, and Schwartz seemed to shrink a bit.
“Our Dr Schwartz can be a bit overenthusiastic. I’m sorry you had to experience any unpleasantness, Miss, Miss – what’s your name, my dear?”
“Sky Mundy.”
Boz sat up as though his chair had electrocuted him, leaning forward to look at me over the top of his thin wire-framed glasses. “Are you any relation to Jack Mundy? The biologist in North Compound?”
I sat up too, nodding as my heart lurched with excitement and goose bumps broke out along my arms. This was it. “I’m his daughter.”
Schwartz’s lip curled in a barely detectable sneer, but Boz looked as though Christmas had just come early.
“I know your father.” He smiled, clasping his hands in delight. “He’s an old friend of mine from when we trained at the university back at East Compound.” I waited for Boz to mention the Colombe, but he did not. He had to be the member of the Colombe my dad was talking about, but I needed to be positive. Pulling my compass out of the neck of my still-damp tunic, I held it up for Boz to see.
“Does this mean anything to you?” I asked. Todd and Shawn leant forward as one, identical expressions of anxious anticipation on their faces. I wondered what my own face looked like. Hopeful? Terrified? Anxious? All of those feelings were racing through me as I held my breath, waiting to see if this was when I’d finally get the answers I so desperately needed.
Boz’s face broke out into a wide grin, and he pulled a nearly identical compass out of the collar of his shirt. “It does,” he said. I let out a huge sigh of relief as something loosened inside of me, and I felt as though I could really breathe for the first time since I had opened that note from my dad a lifetime ago. I grinned at Todd and Shawn. See, I wanted to say, I told you that there was something in the middle of the lake, that everything we went through to get here was worth it, but my smile faded as my eyes flicked over to where Schwartz still sat, glowering at me.
Boz followed my gaze and waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry about Dr Schwartz. He was also a member of the Colombe, but he and your father never really got along. He joined me when I escaped East Compound. The same escape,” he said sadly, “that killed your mother.” I nodded, pushing aside the empty feeling that hearing about my mom always seemed to trigger.
“Then I can tell you everything,” I said. “You are the person my dad sent me to find.”
“Really?” Boz said. “Why did your father send you after all these years?”
“I’m not sure where to even begin,” I said, overwhelmed by everything that had happened in the last few days. Boz just folded his hands and smiled encouragingly.
“Five years ago, my dad disappeared from North Compound, leaving me behind,” I began, quickly describing how I’d found my dad’s note and map, escaped North Compound, met Todd, and survived the takeover at the Oaks. I explained about meeting Ivan and the chaos when the marines tracked us to his house, separating us, and I wrapped up with meeting Chaz and Schwartz on the beach. Shawn chimed in to say that it was a good idea he’d decided to come along because I never would have made it without him, and Todd interjected to tell the story of me taking an impromptu dip in a spinosaur’s pond. Both comments earned them well-placed elbows in the ribs. Boz was an excellent listener, nodding and exclaiming, although he seemed saddened when I described the two dinosaurs that we had killed, and he scowled when we mentioned Ivan. Apparently paleontologists and dinosaur hunters didn’t quite see eye to eye.
“Well,” he exclaimed when I finished. “I’m sorry to hear that Jack went missing. I hope he’s alive somewhere out there, but he certainly never made it here.” Even though I’d known from the way Boz had reacted to my dad’s name that he wasn’t here, it still hurt to hear it said out loud.
“May I see the plug?” Boz asked.
I nodded, slipping off the compass and unhinging the hidden compartment. I handed it to Boz. He studied it before flipping it over, as though it might tell its secrets if he just looked at it long enough.
“Well?” Shawn asked. “Do you know what’s on it?”
“I don’t,” he admitted. “I haven’t talked to Jack Mundy in years. Why he would disappear and then send his daughter to see me is beyond my understanding.”
Todd huffed impatiently. “Well, can’t you plug that whatchama dinger into one of those techy devices so we can find out?” He jiggled his foot nervously as he watched the giant sea monsters cavorting behind Boz’s head.
“I think that sounds like a very good idea.” Boz smiled. “Dr Schwartz, grab me one of those techy devices. The XI 4000 should fit this.” Schwartz nodded stiffly and walked out.
“Now that he’s gone,” Boz said, setting down the plug in front of him, “are you absolutely sure that you weren’t followed here? This General Kennedy and his marines seem to have had no problem tracking you to Todd’s village.” His change of subject startled me, and I glanced over at Todd.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Like I said, we ditched everything from the compound that could have potentially held a tracker. Todd thinks they were tracking us the old-fashioned way, by following our trail. But –” I paused – “If they did, our tracks will just lead them to Lake Michigan and then disappear.” Boz nodded, seeming satisfied.
Schwartz returned with a large port and propped it up on a stand. Boz pressed his entire hand to the screen, and it hummed for a second, then turned on. Handprint entry, I thought, impressive. With practiced fingers, Boz slid the tiny plug into the port. A black screen appeared, followed by the revolving gold symbol of the ark. The screen blinked and there was my dad.
I leant forward hungrily, taking in the tiny image on Boz’s screen. My dad was wearing a stained and dishevelled lab coat, his brown hair sweaty and his face tight and anxious.
“This message is for Dr Bartholomew Boznic or Ivan Ironarm. You need to enter the ten-digit code we used to pass secret messages within the Colombe. If it is not entered in the next thirty seconds, this memory plug will lock down, corrupt itself, and destroy the hard drive of every piece of technology within two hundred feet.”
Boz looked startled at this and frowned.
“Do you know it?” I asked, my throat tight. If Boz didn’t know the code my dad was talking about, the plug would destroy the secrets it contained. If that happened, everything I’d been through, everything I’d dragged my friends through, would be for nothing. But even as my heart raced in terrified anticipation, I couldn’t help but stare at my dad. It had been over five years since I’d seen him, and in that time my memories of him had faded and blurred. Now everything came rushing back: the way his hair waved across his forehead, the crease between his eyebrows that showed he was worried, the way he used his hands when he talked.
“I think so.” Boz nodded. He quickly typed in a ten-digit number, and I held my breath. I wasn’t the only one. When the screen beeped, the room let out a collective sigh of relief. This time my dad sat at his desk, sweat shining on his forehead, and from the way the camera struggled to focus, I could tell that his hand was shaking.
“I found something,” he said, his words rushed and panicked. “It’s what I was worried about all those years ago when I first started the Colombe. I warned everyone that someday the Noah was going to do something drastic. I was right. He’s going to wipe out the dinosaurs, but it’s worse than I ever imagined. If I don’t make it to tell either of you this in person, then hopefully this plug will. We have to stop this.” My dad jumped as a loud banging came from behind him. His face went from frightened to terrified. The screen flickered, and a video icon appeared.
I didn’t realise I had tears running down my cheeks until Shawn used his sleeve to wipe them away. Boz reached up and clicked the icon.
The port buzzed and then a grainy video began, revealing a windowless room with six men sitting around a table. At the head of the table was our current Noah. He had the same gray-tinged hair and serious expression as his counterparts, and his eyes were dark and hooded behind thick-rimmed glasses. I was struck by how old he looked.
“What is this?” Todd asked.
“It’s some kind of meeting,” Schwartz snapped.
The Noah cleared his throat. “Today we have reached a monumental decision that will change our world forever.” He looked up from his papers to his audience. “Today, by a five-to-one vote, we made the decision to reclaim our world, eradicate the dinosaur pestilence that plagues us, and sacrifice the few for the many. After over a hundred and fifty years of fear, we will triumph.”
The Noah wasn’t wearing his customary smile, the one that said, trust me, everything will be OK. The one I’d seen him wear countless times in North Compound assemblies, the one designed to help the people of the compounds rest easy that supplies would be delivered and life would go on. Instead, his solemn face was all business and his eyes held a cool resignation. They were the eyes of a man who had set a course and was going to stick to it. Those eyes scared me.
Shawn’s hand was on my shoulder; squeezing it uncomfortably, and I wondered if his own stomach was tied in the same painful knot mine was. I bit my lip as the Noah went on. “The fortifications to our nation’s four underground compounds are progressing well,” the Noah said, “as we prepare to set the second phase of the Ark Plan, code name Flood, into place. We know that future generations will look back on this day and thank us for the decision we have made. Our temporary refuge underground has gone on long enough, and it is time for us to regain what is rightfully ours. Our efforts to eradicate the dinosaurs in the past have failed. But we have found the solution.”
The Noah looked straight at the camera. “We know that the dinosaurs of millions of years ago were destroyed by a meteor strike that made the earth’s surface uninhabitable. Modern technology has at last given us the tools to recreate this phenomenon. We have located enough nuclear weaponry to eradicate the dinosaur population completely.” The two serious men sitting next to him nodded solemnly.
Todd was on his feet, gesturing wildly at the screen, his voice quivering. “What is he talking about? Is that who I think it is? Can they do that?” I grabbed his arm and yanked him into the seat next to me.
“Our weapon specialists have developed strategic drop sites that will spare our compounds from structural damage, allowing the human race to survive underground, away from dangerous radiation. Our top scientists are taking samples and DNA from a large number of species and plants, and we feel confident that, when the dust settles, we will be able to rebuild our great nation from a clean slate. Today marks the beginning of a war. One we will win.”
The port clicked off, and the silence in the room was deafening. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what he had just said. Phase two of the Ark Plan? Code name Flood? Nuclear war? How could it be a war when only one side had weapons?
Boz’s face was white as a sheet as he stared at the blank screen in horror. Then he looked at us, his eyes wide and panicked. “They are going to kill us all.”
“What?!” Todd yelped, jumping to his feet again.
“They are going to blast our continent with bombs. Wipe the world clean, and start all over again,” Boz gasped.
“Why is no one else freaking out right now?” Todd’s voice echoed the disbelief I felt.
“There is no way anyone could be that stupid,” I said, hoping I could make it true.
“We always knew the current Noah was an extremist, but I never thought …” Boz shook his head sadly. “Does he not realise the catastrophic effects of wiping out millions and millions of years of evolution? Every animal will have to be re-created, every plant germinated in a lab, every bacterium grown on a petri dish. It’s impossible. The human race would continue to survive underground for a while, but what would be left of the world when they finally did venture aboveground?”
“These bombs would kill everyone who lives aboveground?” Todd asked in horror. “I know of at least three other villages within a month’s travel from the Oaks. All of those people are just going to be left to die? So the privileged compound moles can survive? That isn’t fair!”
“That might be the understatement of the century,” I said, feeling sick as I sat frozen in my chair, thinking about everything I’d learned about dinosaurs since coming topside. I kept seeing Ivan’s table in a jumbled heap on his floor after he’d demonstrated what would happen to our world without the dinosaurs, the rotten wood crumbled and scattered. Todd seemed convinced that humans could live alongside them. Chaz and these scientists took it one step further, even creating new dinosaurs. Although I wasn’t sure yet if I agreed with them, I knew I didn’t agree with the Noah that all dinosaurs should be destroyed.
Todd wasn’t done raging yet. “That isn’t a solution; that’s … that’s …” He stuttered, flailing his arms hopelessly as he searched for a word bad enough to encompass the Noah’s plan.
“Genocide,” Shawn said quietly. “The word you’re looking for, Todd, is genocide.”
“You are absolutely correct,” Boz agreed. “They are going to kill everything this lab worked so hard to preserve and foster. The years we’ve spent selectively breeding dinosaurs to even out the population numbers and stabilise the ecosystem. For nothing!”
“I wasn’t talking about the dinosaurs!” Todd yelled, slamming his hand down on the table.
“We all just need to relax a moment,” Boz said, sinking weak-kneed into his chair. Chaz slumped down into the chair next to me, and I jumped. I’d forgotten she was in the room.
“Why would the Noah have filmed this?” Todd asked as he paced back and forth in front of the long window like a caged animal. “It seems stupid. If this was supposed to be top secret, why document it?”
“My best guess,” Shawn said, “was that he was eventually going to show this to us.” When everyone gave him a strange look, he jerked his head at me. “To the people in the compounds, I mean. I’m betting that after it was all said and done, after the bombs had been dropped and everything wiped out, he would have sent this to the compounds along with an explanation. It would be considered of historical importance, wouldn’t it? The day the decision was made to wipe the world clean and start over again? Of course, he couldn’t let it get out before it had all happened or people might freak out.”
“So how did my dad get ahold of it?” I asked, thinking out loud. “This had to have been under lock and key.”
Boz ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked at us. “Your father was a brilliant man, Sky. If anyone could have hacked the Noah’s communication system, it was him.” I felt a faint surge of pride for my dad, but it washed away as Boz leant forward, his face concerned. “How long ago did you say your father disappeared?”
“A little over five years ago,” I said. “Why? Do you think maybe the Noah changed his mind since then? That this may be outdated information?”
“No,” Shawn said, shaking his head before Boz could respond. He stared at me. “Think about it, Sky. For the last five years, what have we been putting every spare ounce of manpower towards in North Compound?”
I felt the blood drain from my face as realization hit. “Topside fortifications,” I whispered. “Of course.” I turned to Boz and Todd, feeling numb. “For the last five years, at the Noah’s orders, we’ve been increasing the thickness of the concrete barrier that separated North Compound from the topside world.” I inhaled sharply as something else occurred to me, and I turned to Shawn. “The supplies. Remember at the last assembly we went to?”
Shawn nodded. “They talked about how we were going to have to lay up the key supplies we needed from the other compounds in case the mail plane ever couldn’t make it. This was why! The Noah wasn’t worried about the plane; he was preparing us for this.”
I turned to Boz. “We don’t have much time. When we escaped North Compound, we were about a month away from being done with topside fortifications. And that was almost a week ago.” Everyone fell silent as they took this new information in. The thump thump thump of Todd’s booted feet on the glass floor was the only sound in the room as he paced back and forth in front of the long windows, oblivious to the giant plesiosaur that was gliding across their surface. Chaz bit her fingernails, her eyes flicking nervously from Schwartz’s angry face to Boz’s thoughtful one and back again.
“So what now?” she finally asked, breaking the silence.
“Well,” Boz said, hefting himself to his feet. “We can’t just let the world end. We have work to do.”
(#ulink_54e08395-b5d2-5f8b-bedc-8725cb09f31f)
“So, um, this is it,” Chaz said as we walked into the small room I’d be sharing with her for the foreseeable future. It was three levels higher than the conference room, but still too far down for any sunlight to penetrate. It contained two twin beds, two small closets, and a lamp. One whole wall was glass and looked out into the lake. Were there any rooms in this place without a monster-infested view? Next door I could hear Shawn and Todd arguing over who would get which bed.
“It’s not much,” Chaz apologised as she attempted to push a pile of dirty clothes under her bed with a booted foot. “I can get you your own room if you want. I’m sure Boz could arrange it.”
Shaking my head, I walked over to press my hand against the cool glass of the window. “It’s great,” I said, turning to her with what I hoped was an acceptable smile. “Really.”
Chaz nodded, flopping down on her rumpled bed. After the shock had worn off from viewing the video, Boz had got himself together and begun giving orders. The first thing he did was swear us all to secrecy. The information would do nothing but cause chaos and panic if it got out, he said.
Todd had been the hardest one to convince. As soon as he heard that the big plan was to do nothing until further notice, he’d pitched a fit. Not that I could blame him. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the information overload, I would have joined him.
In the end he’d agreed to a compromise. We would let the lab’s head council discuss a course of action before he did anything. Although it wasn’t like we had any choice. Boz was incredibly kind about it, but he’d made it clear that leaving wasn’t an option.
I jumped as someone knocked loudly on our door.
“Come in!” Chaz called, not bothering to get up from her bed, where she was fiddling with a port screen. Todd stormed through the door, followed by a glum-looking Shawn. I shot him a questioning look, but he just shook his head and plopped down on the foot of my bed.
“How can you stand it?” Todd asked, pacing our small room like a caged animal. “Being underwater. It’s horrible. My skin is crawling, the air has no smell, and I feel like my head is going to explode.” He looked to Shawn and me for backup, but Shawn just shrugged apologetically.
“I feel at home for the first time in days,” he admitted. “This is like North Compound, but bigger and better because of all the windows.”
“I don’t get how anyone lives like this. It’s awful,” Todd said. Then he looked over at Chaz. “No offence.”
“None taken.” Chaz shrugged. Just then a long-necked plesiosaur, what Chaz had called an elasmosaurus, emerged from the darkness, yellow lamp-like eyes glowing, and I jumped instinctively away from the window.
“That is so creepy,” Todd breathed.
“You can say that again,” Shawn said as we watched the creature disappear back into the murk of the lake.
“Do you realise,” Todd said a moment later, breaking the silence, “that your dad might have just saved the entire world by getting that plug into Boz’s hands?”
“It hasn’t really sunk in,” I admitted. “I’m not sure how to wrap my brain around the Noah’s plan, let alone that my dad was the one who somehow stumbled upon it.” Even though my dad had hinted at the world being at stake in the letter he’d hidden inside his compass, I guess a part of me hadn’t really thought he was being literal. Kennedy and his marines coming after me made a lot more sense now.
“What’s scary,” Shawn said, interrupting my thoughts, “is that I can totally understand why the Noah thinks wiping the planet clean of dinosaurs is going to solve everything.” Todd and Chaz shot him identical disbelieving looks, and Shawn held up his hands defensively. “Let me finish,” he said. “I understand because if I hadn’t seen and experienced the topside world, hadn’t heard Ivan and Boz explain things, I probably would have thought his plan was great.”
“It’s not great,” Todd muttered.
Shawn rolled his eyes. “I know that now. I guess we’re just lucky Sky’s dad found out about all this.”
I smiled wryly. “So you really think he’s a hero?”
“I’d say he qualifies,” Chaz said.
“The thing is,” I confessed, “I’m a little disappointed.” But even as I said it, I knew disappointed wasn’t the right word. It didn’t encompass the dark emptiness I felt inside, the sense of loss that I wasn’t sure I’d ever shake.
“Because you’re stuck in an underwater lab, and they won’t give you the passcodes to get out?” Todd asked.
“Because the world as we know it might be ending in the not-so-distant future?” Shawn added.
“No.” I sighed. “Because part of me still believed that my dad might be here.”
“But, Sky,” Todd said hesitantly, shooting a worried look at Shawn. “You heard that General Kennedy guy; he said your dad was dead.”
I thought back to that moment in the woods where Kennedy had explained without remorse that he had murdered my father within hours of his escape, and shivered.
“I know what he said. But I’m still not sure if I believe it.” I saw the look of pity on their faces and flapped a hand at them. “Don’t look at me like that. I haven’t lost my mind. I just, I don’t know, I feel like I’d know in my gut if he was gone.”
“Well, my gut says waiting around down here for some council to vote on a plan is suicide,” Todd grumbled.
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Laura Martin
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детские приключения
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Non-stop action, terrifying dinosaurs and a race to save the world…‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. ‘Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?’Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for nearly wiping out the human race?Sky Mundy’s life has changed dramatically since she fled the underground compound where she grew up. She and her friends are now prey to dinosaurs and being pursued by marines but Sky is determined to follow a map left by her missing father. When the map leads to a hidden underwater lab, Sky is horrified to learn that scientists are still breeding dinosaurs. As she delves deeper into her father’s secrets, Sky uncovers a plan that will destroy the world, unless she can put a stop to it…