Under Their Skin (9 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

When Nick came back holding three shovels he'd borrowed from the Winowskis, Mom and Eryn were crouched down by the huge snow pile beside the mailbox. They seemed to be trying to hollow out the inside of the pile by hand.

“Finally!” Mom said, grabbing one of the shovels and driving its blade into the very heart of the snowdrift. “A faster method!”

“We're building an igloo before we shovel the driveway,” Eryn told Nick. She leaned closer and whispered, “Mom says she'll tell us everything inside the igloo. Where it's ‘safe.'”

Eryn rolled her eyes, which Nick could tell meant,
Yeah, Mom is acting totally nuts. But I'm playing along because how else are we going to find out anything? You play along too.

“O-kay,” Nick said. He thought about pointing out
that even if they succeeded in hollowing out the snowdrift, that would give them a snow cave or fort, not an igloo. An igloo involved making blocks of snow and piling them up into a dome. He'd learned that back in the days when he'd wanted to be a great explorer.

But building an actual igloo would take longer than just hollowing out a snowdrift, so he kept his mouth shut. He handed Eryn a shovel and aimed the blade of the third shovel at a spot a foot or so away from Mom.

The consistency of the snow had changed since earlier in the day. Now it was wet and heavy and hard to lift. But Nick and Eryn and Mom shoveled doggedly.

Is this just another example of Mom trying to psych us out?
Nick wondered.
Is she just trying to wear us out so we forget we have lots of questions?

Nick knew neither he nor Eryn would forget.

Finally they'd hollowed out enough space in the snowdrift so all three of them could fit inside. At least, they could all three fit if they drew their knees up to their chins and huddled together.

Mom sat in the middle.

“Now,” Eryn said.

Mom looked side to side, from Eryn to Nick and back again.

“I'm endangering you,” she said. “In 2014, ten kids across North America died in hollowed-out snowdrifts just like this one. In 2015, the number was—”

“Mom,” Nick said. “We'll be fine.”

“You
promised
,” Eryn said.

It felt like they were ganging up on Mom. In an unfair way.

That didn't make Nick want to stop.

Mom sighed.

“Ava and Jackson are . . . sort of an experiment,” Mom said. “That's all.”

“That's
all
?” Eryn exploded, recoiling so much that her head bashed into the packed snow behind her. “You make us dig an entire igloo just to tell us that? You hang up the phone on us and act like you're handling state secrets just because of an
experiment
?”

“Um . . . they're kind of an illegal experiment,” Mom whispered.

“You'd marry someone who's carrying out an illegal experiment?” Nick asked.

“Yeah, you always act like we
deserve the death penalty if we so much as drop a candy wrapper on the ground and don't pick it up,” Eryn agreed. “You tell us we have to follow
every
rule and law. Michael must have
spent years building Ava and Jackson. If they're illegal, he must have broken the law
every single day
he went to work.”

“Don't forget about Ava and Jackson's mom,” Nick chimed in. “Michael must have spent a lot of time building the robot mom, too. He had plenty of time to realize he was doing something wrong. And he did it anyway.”

The color drained from Mom's face, leaving her almost as pale as the snow behind her.

“You . . . you could tell that Brenda was a robot too?” she asked.

“Brenda's the mom's name?” Eryn asked.

Nick didn't need that detail worked out.

“Well, yeah, we could tell she was a robot,” he said, putting a sarcastic spin on his words. “People with wires hanging out of their stomach tend to make me think that.”

“Why did she have wires hanging out of her stomach?” Mom asked. Her voice came out so faintly she seemed to be struggling to make a sound at all.

“Diagnostics,” Eryn said. “She was doing diagnostics on Ava and Jackson.”

“Oh,” Mom said. “
That's
what Brenda was trying to tell me.”

She buried her face in her hands, a movement that looked like total despair.

Nick had never seen his mom in despair. She was all about looking on the bright side; seeing the glass as half-full, not half-empty; overcoming every obstacle along the way. Normally she made it sound like Nick and Eryn should be able to succeed on grit and brains and effort alone.

“If the two of you saw . . . ,” Mom murmured. “Who else might have been watching?”

“We were peeking through a little crack between the bottom of the blinds and the top of the window frame,” Nick said, because he was almost starting to feel sorry for Mom. “Nobody else was with us.”

“Hold on,” Eryn said, her hands splayed out, slamming against the wall of snow before her. She didn't sound like she was feeling sympathy for anyone. “Mom, do you even
care
about how betrayed Nick and I feel because of you and Michael lying to us? Or are you just worried about your precious Michael getting caught?”

“You don't understand,” Mom said, lifting her head only a little to peek toward Eryn. “It's not that simple.”

“We
want
to understand, but you won't tell us anything,” Eryn complained. “What do we have to do? Threaten to go to the police?”

Would Eryn actually do that?
Nick wondered.

“No!” Mom cried, her voice ringing with real fear. “I'll tell you. It's just—it's a long story . . . . You see, for centuries, humans made a series of very bad choices—”

“Don't go all the way back to the beginning of time and try to bore us to death!” Nick interrupted.

Eryn whipped out her cell phone.

“La, la, la,” she said, with fake breeziness. “Nine-one-one is such an easy number to dial. . . .”

“Stop!” Mom said the panic escalating in her voice. “Look, I'll show you how serious this is. I . . .”

Oddly, she stopped talking to unzip and unbuckle her parka. It was warmer inside the snow cave than outside, but it wasn't like anyone would be sweating. Only, Mom didn't stop with the parka. She also started fumbling with the buttons on her red blouse. And then she reached inside her blouse and pulled out . . .

Wires. Now the same kind of wires dangled from Mom's stomach that had dangled from the robot mom's.

“I'm a robot too,” Mom said in a pained voice. “Every adult you know is. And everyone else over the age of twelve.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Eryn ran.

She didn't plan it; it just happened. One minute she was sitting there in the claustrophobic snow cave staring at the inexplicable tangle of wires spilling out of her mother's body. The next minute she was crashing her way out of the snow cave and speeding across the snowy yard. She was on the porch before she knew it, slamming against the front door, twisting the doorknob. . . .

Miraculously, both she and Mom had forgotten to lock the door.

Mom's not really Mom,
Eryn reminded herself.
Mom's a robot.

Maybe Mom had always been Mom before, but something had just happened today where she'd been replaced by a robot? A robot impostor?

Eryn ran away from those thoughts too.

Without even pulling off her snow boots—a huge
violation of one of Mom's rules—Eryn dashed through the living room and sprinted up the stairs. She turned the corner into her own room and flung herself across her bed.

“Not true,” Eryn moaned. “Not, not, not, not . . .”

She might as well have been Jackson, stuck on the word
can't.

She'd been horrified by the sight of the wires and circuitry hidden in his back—and the sight of all his inner electronics exposed, head to toe. She'd been horrified by the wires poking out of Ava's back, out of Ava and Jackson's mother's stomach. But this was so much worse. Those three people—er, robots—were nothing to Eryn. This was her own
mother.
The image of Mom with wires sticking out of her was seared on Eryn's eyeballs; it might as well be branded on her brain. She would never stop seeing it.

Dimly, Eryn heard a clatter downstairs and then on the staircase. And then Nick and Mom were rushing into her room.

“Eryn?” Nick called. “Eryn?”

Eryn couldn't tell if he'd come to console her or if he expected her to console him.

“Oh, honey,” Mom wailed. “It's okay.”

Eryn curled up into a very small ball on the bed, as far away from Mom as she could get. Nick circled the bed and huddled beside her.

Mom stopped running toward them. She had at least put her stomach back together before coming upstairs. She looked perfectly normal now, except that she was still wearing her coat indoors and, like Eryn's, her boots were dripping all over the floor.

Mom held her out hands flat in front of her, a calming
I come in peace
type gesture.

Wait. Was there something written on the palm of Mom's right hand?

Eryn hunched her head down lower and squinted. It looked like Mom had written “
Please
don't say anything about Ava and Jackson. Our lives depend on it.”

And Mom always accused
Eryn
of being melodramatic?

Eryn kept squinting.

“Eryn, honey, I know this was a huge shock for you,” Mom said, in the same kind of soothing tone Eryn would expect lion tamers to use. “I know you're just reacting in the manner of a typical tempestuous preteen. I can only imagine what you're feeling right now. But there is a lot more at stake than your own adolescent trauma. I never
intended for you to see . . . what you saw. It was just the exact right combination of temperature changes and, and other forces there in our snow cave. . . .”

What was Mom talking about, that she never intended Eryn to see what she saw? Mom had deliberately unzipped her parka. Mom had deliberately unbuttoned her blouse. Mom had . . . well, whatever it took to get all those wires to burst out of her stomach.

Eryn winced, seeing the horrifying scene in her head all over again.

Mom winked at Eryn. Not a blink—a
wink
. It wasn't a jaunty, happy-go-lucky,
we're sharing a fun little secret
wink, either. It was a desperate, beseeching,
please, please, please don't ruin everything
wink.

“You
will
be told everything,” Mom said, her voice still as smooth and soothing as cream. “But there's a procedure we have to follow now, a process. You two will have to swear to follow the proper guidelines for dealing with the top-secret information you'll have access to.”

Were they going to be sworn in to the CIA? The FBI? The NSA?

There aren't robots who look exactly like humans in any of those agencies, are there?
Eryn wondered.

Of course there were, if Mom was telling the truth
about every adult being a robot. Still, Eryn couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of anything right now. If Mom wasn't really Mom—and wasn't even human—then everything else Eryn believed or thought she knew was suspect too.

“What if we don't swear to that?” Eryn asked. “Or what if we make the promise but break it?”

“You don't want to know what would happen to you then,” Mom said, and there seemed to be genuine sorrow and fear in her voice.

Of course, up until about five minutes ago, Eryn had believed Mom was a genuine human being, too.

“What happens next is—” Mom began, but then she broke off because the doorbell sounded downstairs.

For a second all three of them froze. The doorbell sounded again.

Mom stepped to the side, leaving a clear path out of Eryn's room.

“I'll let the two of you answer that,” she said.

TWENTY-SIX

I bet it's some RoboCop police force,
Nick thought.
I bet they're here to round up Eryn and me for finding out too many robot secrets.

That was a ridiculous idea. He wanted to laugh, but it was like his brain kept whispering to him,
This isn't a joke. This is real. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap . . .

He couldn't have managed a chuckle if his life depended on it.

He and Eryn descended the stairs almost as if they were robots themselves. Step. Down. Step. Down. Step.

Eryn robotically scraped open the door.

A bunch of kids Nick had seen around the neighborhood were standing on the front porch. They were all holding sleds: Flexible Flyers and discs and foam boards and the inflatable rafts that looked more like something you'd take into the ocean.

“Since you're new in the neighborhood, we thought
maybe you hadn't found the sledding hill yet,” a boy standing in the front said. He was just a little taller than Nick, with dark skin and dark hair smashed down under a red knit cap. “Want to go sledding with us?”

“Um,” Nick said.

He couldn't think about sledding right now. All he could think was,
Is that boy a robot too?

Mom had said everyone over the age of twelve was a robot. It wasn't like Nick could just ask this kid—or any of the kids—to whip out an ID card showing their ages. But . . .

But I've seen this kid waiting at the junior high bus stop,
Nick thought.
That means he's in the seventh grade, at least. He could be thirteen.

Nick found his gaze straying toward the boy's midsection, the part of the body where Nick had seen Mom and Michael's supposed ex-wife reveal a jumble of wires. This boy had on one of those Columbia coats with a waterproof layer on the outside and a fleece layer inside. Was the boy's body layered too, looking perfectly human on the outside but full of wires and circuits inside?

Nick glanced past the boy, back to the other kids. Some were shorter; some were taller. Any of them could be eleven or twelve or thirteen—it was too hard to tell.

Wait. Mom said everyone over twelve was a robot,
Nick thought.
That doesn't automatically mean that everyone twelve and under
isn't
a robot. It could be that there's not a single actual human being standing on our porch. It could be that there's not a single other actual human being on the entire planet except Eryn and me.

How do I even know for sure that Eryn's not a robot too?

Nick thought he might faint.

“Th-thanks for inviting us,” Eryn said. Apparently she was still capable of thinking about sledding right now. And of remembering that someone needed to give an actual answer. “But we were already outside for hours, shoveling and, and building a snow cave and all. I think we're just going to stay inside now, drinking hot chocolate. Maybe another time?”

Eryn sounded like she herself might pass out or vomit. But she was saying all the right words.

The boy in the red knit cap shrugged.

“Sure,” he said. “Another time. Or, if you guys warm up for a while and then want to come out, just let us know. Here. This is my cell number. I'm Milo.”

Milo scrawled something on a piece of paper he took from his pocket and handed it to Eryn.

Eryn blushed.

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

Hello?
Nick wanted to shout at her.
Don't go falling in love or anything! He's a robot!

Somehow Nick felt sure of that now.

“Okay,” Milo repeated, his eyes on Eryn's face. Then he darted his gaze toward Nick. “Later, dude.”

The cluster of kids with sleds began turning around and stepping down off the porch. Mom came up behind Eryn and Nick and gently eased the door shut after a mumbled “Bye, kids.”

Then Mom gathered Eryn and Nick into another hug. This one didn't seem quite as desperate as the one she'd given them out on the front porch. But it was still intense.

“In case you didn't figure it out, that was a test,” Mom said. “You both passed.”

“They were all robots, weren't they?” Eryn asked. “I think there's a way to tell. Something about the eyes . . .”

Nick noticed that Mom didn't answer.

“Who set up that test?” he asked. “And what would have happened if we'd failed? Are there still more tests ahead? More ways for us to fail?”

Mom's face looked as pale as she'd looked in the
snow cave, when she'd seemed to match the color of the snow.

“Maybe it would be best for you just to listen,” she said. “And not ask any more questions.”

Eryn's wrong about what marks somebody as a robot or not,
Nick thought.
It's not the eyes. It's saying stuff like that.

How could any human being
not
ask questions at a time like this?