In Over Their Heads

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  FORTY-ONE

  Ava

  “But—I saw them,” Ava gasped. “In that FOR ROBOT ACCESS ONLY room, I saw your family’s entire lives. They were happy. Healthy. Complete.”

  “Decades ago,” Lida Mae snapped. “Centuries past.”

  “Who did this to them?” Nick asked.

  “We’uns did it to ourselves, all right?” Lida Mae said fiercely. She stood with her hands on her hips, her feet firmly planted. “The past few years, it’s all been me scavenging for parts. It’s what my family told me to do. I’ve preserved their minds, their . . . their spirits. I can still hear what they tell me. I still feel them near me. They aren’t gone.”

  “But why . . . ?” Eryn began. “How . . . ?”

  Lida Mae kept staring down at the pile of broken parts.

  “Our personalities—our, our souls . . . ,” she went on. “All that was based on humans who lived in this area, centuries ago. That was what made us so much more like humans. But we are mechanical beings. Our parts wear out. We couldn’t build a factory to build new parts without drawing attention to ourselves and this area. So, as our bodies broke down, we had to make do. Like people in this area had to make do in ages past. Eventually we had only enough working parts for one body. Mine. And even that . . .”

  Lida Mae pulled back her coat and sweater, revealing a hole in her dress and a section of her rib cage underneath—the robot version of a rib cage, anyway. The ribs showed up as starkly white, caught in Eryn’s flashlight beam. They had no skin covering them.

  Ava looked away, toward Jackson. Normally, this was the kind of thing that could send him spiraling down into a faint; normally, neither of them could bear thinking about robotic bodies falling apart. It was bad enough looking at Lida Mae’s exposed ribs, let alone at the pile of parts on the floor. Those robotic bodies in front of them hadn’t just fallen apart; they’d been destroyed. Plundered.

  The color had drained from Jackson’s face. But at least he wasn’t falling over.

  Neither was Ava.

  “But . . . there are dozens of spare robots out in that room back there,” Nick said, pointing back toward the way they’d come. “They’re just sitting there. Standing there . . . lying there . . . whatever. Is it that you couldn’t take parts from robot babies and children to put in adult robot bodies? Or that you didn’t know how to cover your own ribs?”

  “It would be wrong—dead wrong—to take parts from anyone else’s body without permission,” Lida Mae snarled, as if Nick had suggested mass murder. “Our job is to protect those robots, not steal from them.”

  “Okay . . . ,” Eryn murmured. She sounded dazed. Her hair stuck up like she’d just come through a tornado, and she had a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

  Maybe Ava herself looked just as disheveled.

  From far away, down a rock hallway and outside the cave, she heard a helicopter land.

  “I . . . I guess we should have listened to you, Lida Mae,” Ava said. “We’ve wasted time we didn’t have. You should have told us this before we took off running. . . .”

  “Would you have listened to me?” Lida Mae asked. “I was working up to letting you know what my family and I were like. I was seeing how much I could trust you. I showed you the walkie-talkie made of walnut shells to hint at how our technology wasn’t what you were used to. But the blizzard came before I reckoned you were ready to know much more. If I’d told you everything back at the cave entrance, would you have believed me?”

  No, Ava thought.

  She glanced at Jackson again. He was swaying. He wasn’t going to take control. Eryn and Nick didn’t know enough to do anything, and Lida Mae was too angry. And of course the adults were all unconscious.

  Or in pieces, if you counted the adults of Lida Mae’s family.

  “I said I was sorry,” Ava said. She noticed that she didn’t actually sound sorry. It couldn’t be helped. “Let’s just hide here until the robot-network people leave.”

  “And leave all those babies and children out there in plain sight, without anyone to protect them?” Lida Mae protest. “No.”

  “Maybe the robot officials won’t even come this way,” Nick suggested. “Didn’t you say this cave is hundreds of miles long? This is just one branch from the main path. . . .”

  Suddenly Jackson clutched his head.

  “They’ve found me!” he cried. “Before, it was just a general pinging I heard, but now . . . They know exactly where I am!”

  “Turn yourself off!” Eryn screamed at him.

  “It’s too late!” Jackson moaned. “Even if we shut the door, they’ll burrow into this room. . . . They already know. . . .”

  Has he caved completely? Ava wondered, in agony. Has he given in and responded to the all-call?

  No—Jackson kept shaking his head and moaning. He was still fighting back.

  “I’m going out to protect the babies and children,” Lida Mae said, hastily buttoning up her coat again as she rushed for the door. “I’ll scare off those officials.”

  Scare them? Ava thought. How?

  The idea seemed almost laughable. Now Ava understood: Lida Mae was just a scarecrow of a girl in an old dress. She didn’t even have all her skin. Who knew what parts she might be missing inside?

  Ava’s family would have just pitied Lida Mae, not worried about her, if they hadn’t been so desperate to keep their own secrets.

  Someone besides just Lida Mae needed to deal with the robot officials.

  “I’ll go with you,” Ava decided. “Because it’s my fault we ended up here.” This time she did sound sorry. She put her hand on her brother’s arm. “Jackson, you come, too. You’ll have to stay conscious long enough to have your signal lead the officials away from this room, and away from the room with all the babies and children. And . . . you’re strong. You can fight them off.”

  Tremors shook Jackson’s body, but he managed to nod his head. Yes. He was agreeing to go too.

  “Nick and Eryn, you can stay here and be safe,” Lida Mae said. She pointed to a screen mounted in the wall. “If you fiddle with the knobs on that security-camera monitor, you can watch and hear what happens anywhere in the cave.”

  “Humans . . . have to . . . be safe,” Jackson muttered. “Must . . . protect humans.”

  “Exactly,” Ava agreed. The desire to take care of humans—to protect them, to put their needs above her own—was still there, deep within her soul, absolutely basic to her design. It was the one thing she couldn’t fight or change. But why would she want to? Nick and Eryn were part of her family. Her desire to protect them wasn’t any different, in the end, from her desire to watch out for Jackson or to take care of Mom and Dad.

  Or maybe it was more like the instinct to protect helpless pets.

  Nick and Eryn stood before her, their eyes wide and glazed, their expressions stunned. For a moment it seemed like Ava, Jackson, and Lida Mae could just walk away and shut the door before Nick and Eryn’s slower human reflexes even registered what was going on.

  Then Nick grabbed Eryn’s arm and stepped forward.

  “No!” he cried. “We’re going, too! We want to help you!”

  He really is a good stepbrother, Ava thought. A good brother, period.

  She looked at Jackson, who gave a minuscule shrug, as if to say, Doesn’t matter either way. They’re not in any danger from the robot officials. It’s only us robots in danger right now.

  “All right,” Ava said, as if she were being generous. Maybe she even sounded like a mother indulging a spoiled child. “Leave your backpacks here so they don’t weigh you down if we have to run. And . . . stay behind us. Don’t do anything crazy.”

  She caught Jackson’s eye again, and it was a frightening how clearly she could tell what he was thinking: Really, what are a couple of puny humans capable of anyway?

  FORTY-TWO

  Nick

  “For the record,” Eryn whispered in Nick’s ear, “there was no way I wanted to stay in that scary corpse room for
robots. I wouldn’t want to be alone anywhere in this cave. But it would have been nice to speak for myself.”

  “Sorry,” Nick muttered back. “I kind of panicked.”

  For a moment it had felt like the others might have walked away and shut the door and left Nick and Eryn behind with the unneeded wheelbarrows and the unconscious and broken-down adults . . . and nobody would have cared. It wouldn’t have mattered to any of them.

  Nick was afraid of what they were headed toward. But he was also afraid of being irrelevant to whatever awaited them.

  If something goes wrong and humans don’t survive this time around, he thought, would the robots just go on by themselves? Would they be . . . just as happy that way?

  “Never mind,” Eryn said, nudging his shoulder in a forgiving way. A We’re in this together way. She shined her light a few paces ahead, to where Ava, Jackson, and Lida Mae were walking together. “I’m still trying to figure everything out. Don’t you think there’s something we’re still missing?”

  We’ve seen instructions to kill every robot, Nick thought. We’ve seen that robots can change their own programming. Ava and Jackson enhanced their hearing and sight, and Jackson gave himself superhuman strength. Mom and Dad and Brenda and Michael shut themselves down so they wouldn’t have to answer an all-call. Lida Mae turned out to be some folksy, backwoods robot with a pile of broken relatives, not a human at all—just based on some old-timey human. Robot network officials are coming to find us.

  What else did they need to worry about?

  The edge of Eryn’s flashlight beam caught the first crib off to the side.

  Oh, yeah, Nick thought. And then there are those rows and rows of creepy robot babies and kids, like they’re just waiting to come back to life. . . .

  Nick decided he shouldn’t depend on Eryn to control what he could see. He pulled out his own flashlight as well and switched on the light. But he kept his beam away from all the babies and kids lying and standing motionless off to the left.

  Ahead of him Jackson stumbled and fell to one knee.

  “No, Jackson, you’ve got to keep fighting it!” Ava shrieked at him. “Hold back the all-call! Don’t answer!”

  Nick and Eryn ran to catch up.

  “Should he shut himself off?” Eryn suggested. “Now that he’s not in the room with our parents and Lida Mae’s, uh, family—”

  “This is an even worse place for him to stop!” Lida Mae snapped. “He’ll lead the officials right to these children!”

  “He could shut himself down and we could carry him somewhere else in the cave,” Nick suggested. “And then he could reboot, and the robot officials would go there to find him.”

  “What if we can’t reboot him fast enough? And the officials still come here?” Lida Mae asked. “No, we’ve got to go on. Jackson, keep fighting! Keep them out of your head!”

  “They want my memories too, not just Dad’s,” Jackson moaned. “The . . . the police who saw me before are out there too. What if they’ve figured out everything about me? What if they know I’m . . . illegal?”

  Big problem, Nick thought.

  “Here, we’ll help you walk,” Nick said, trying to pull Jackson up by his armpits. The papers Nick had hidden in his coat pocket rustled together, and Nick thought, Yeah, no time to worry about that on top of everything else.

  But . . . should Nick worry about the robot officials finding the papers in his pocket? Should he act now and hide the papers somewhere they’d never be seen?

  Should he ask the others what they thought?

  Ava, Eryn, and Lida Mae all reached out to help Jackson up.

  “Come on, Jackson,” Ava begged. “You’re so strong now. We need your muscles. Remember that. Keep thinking about how to help, how we need you to stay strong. . . .”

  Jackson’s extra strength must have somehow made his body denser and heavier, too, because he felt like a dead weight in Nick’s arms. He didn’t seem to be helping at all, even to hold his head up.

  Oh no. Oh no . . . , Nick thought.

  “He’s gone,” Lida Mae said.

  Jackson had passed out yet again.

  FORTY-THREE

  Jackson

  Jackson woke to a tangle of cords and wires coiled near his body, and Ava and Lida Mae screaming, “Come on! Reboot! Now!”

  He felt the same disorientation he always felt, coming out of a faint. He felt the whisper of a bag against his wrist: Oh yes, the bag for the electronics parts that Dad bought for me, before he shut himself down . . . The cords Ava and Lida Mae were using on him were probably the very same ones that Jackson had used to connect himself to Dad. Jackson felt a little proud that he’d managed to hold on to the bag through everything else that had happened.

  Everything that happened . . .

  Jackson turned his head ever so slightly. His hair rustled against rock, and he could see rows of cribs looming above him. Behind the cribs, he could see rows of toddler feet.

  So I’m flat on the ground and still in the room with the babies and kids who are being kept in storage until . . . until . . .

  Probably Ava and Lida Mae knew what all those babies and kids were waiting for, but Jackson didn’t. He couldn’t find the answer even in his father’s memories.

  But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that Jackson hadn’t gotten far, if he was still in this storage room. Did that mean he’d been able to reboot instantly, and it didn’t really matter that he’d passed out?

  Jackson listened hard.

  “If we . . . ,” Nick began.

  “Should we . . . ?” Eryn started to suggest.

  Jackson tuned out his stepsiblings’ murmuring and Ava’s and Lida Mae’s screaming. Beyond that—but not far beyond—he could hear the tramping of multiple feet.

  Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or was the barest hint of flashlight glow starting to crawl across the rock ceiling above him? How long had Jackson been out?

  Too long, he thought grimly.

  “They’re coming,” he moaned. “Getting . . . close.”

  Ava stopped screaming and whirled around. Jackson had dared to hope that his eyes and ears were untrustworthy and he was imagining things. But she clearly heard the footsteps and saw the light too.

  “No,” she muttered. “No, no, no . . .”

  She reached down and grabbed Jackson’s leg and began pulling him toward the narrow passageway.

  “It’s too late,” he groaned. “No time left for that. Got to . . . think . . .”

  The pinging in his brain intensified, as if the robot-network signal had gotten stronger. Maybe the officials were carrying some mobile hot spot with them, and the closer they got, the harder it would be for Jackson to resist the all-call.

  You have to keep resisting, he told himself. Do it for Mom and Dad and Ava and . . .

  The footsteps he’d been hearing got louder and louder, seeming to sound in cadence with the words in his head. Resist, resist, resist, resist . . . became You can’t resist forever; you’re bound to crack sometime . . .

  And then the footsteps stopped.

  “What is the meaning of this?” a man’s voice demanded.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Eryn

  The meaning of what? Eryn wondered. Which “this” is he asking about?

  Eryn shot her flashlight beam toward the narrow passageway, where the first of a line of men and women in dark suits and uniforms had emerged. As far as she could tell, they all carried flashlights, so they probably didn’t have enhanced vision.

  And none of their flashlight beams stretched as far as the first row of cribs and motionless children.

  If we act nonchalant, maybe they won’t figure out anything, Eryn thought. Maybe we can totally fool them . . .

  “Oh, were you guys worried about us or something?” she asked, doing her best to sound carefree and unconcerned. “We read about kids going through rites of passage in the old days, out in nature, and we decided it would be a mark of, uh, humanity to
go out into the wilderness ourselves. But we’re not in any danger. We’ve got a good cave guide.” She gestured toward Lida Mae. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Your stepbrother’s lying on the ground,” the suited man in the front of the line said.

  Oops, Eryn thought. Then it hit her: If they know how we’re related, what else do they know?

  “Jackson got tired,” Nick said, in what Eryn saw as a valiant effort to help her out. “He’s taking a break. That’s all. Some kids just aren’t as good at hiking as others.”

  Nick also took a step toward the narrow passageway, as if he understood that they had to keep the robot officials confined in a small area, as far away as possible from the rows of cribs and motionless robot children.

  The robot officials had stopped spilling out of the passageway for a moment. But now they went back to moving forward.

  Oh no, Eryn thought. No, no, no, no . . .

  “How was it that all of you could come into this cave?” Ava asked. “I thought there were signs saying no one was allowed in. And don’t robots have to follow the rules?”

  Not a bad strategy, Stepsis, Eryn thought. Put them on the defensive. Make it seem like they’re the ones breaking the rules. And . . . make it seem like you, Jackson, and Lida Mae are all human.

  Maybe it would work. Maybe the adults would just get confused.

  “We are all officials with a sworn duty to rescue human children in perilous situations,” the man in the front said. “That overrides any danger to us. And any compulsion to obey KEEP OUT signs.”

  Of course, Eryn thought. She’d never understood before how awful it could be that people wanted to protect her.

  The man in the front was practically stepping on Eryn’s toes now, because he kept moving forward to let other robots out of the passageway behind him.

  A woman in an EMT uniform eased past Eryn and bent down beside Jackson. She lifted his wrist as if she planned to take his pulse. Jackson jerked his arm back.

  “Leave him alone!” Ava snarled.

  “He just needs rest!” Lida Mae added.