Totally grossed out but morbidly curious, I leaned forward. On the back of Ari’s neck was a tattoolike line of numbers. It was a date. The year was this year, and I thought the month was this month, but I wasn’t sure. Funny how time drags when you’re being held captive.

I thought, Eew. Then, Poor Ari. Then, This might be another trick, another way for them to yank my chain.

“What do you mean, we all do?” I asked suspiciously.

His eyes, looking like the familiar kid-Ari eyes, met mine. “All of us experiments have built-in expiration dates. When someone’s time is pretty close, it shows up on the back of their neck. Mine showed up a couple days ago. So my time is soon.”

I looked at him, appalled. “So what happens on that date?”

He shrugged and stood to start wheeling me forward again. “I’ll die. They would have exterminated me with the others, but my time is really close anyway. So they cut me a break. Because, you know, I’m Jeb’s son.”

His voice cracked as he said that, and I stared straight ahead down the hall.

This was a new low, even for mad scientists.

45

45

I don’t know if you guys ever tour top-secret evil science labs, like for school field trips or something. But I got a tour that day, and if I had had to write a school paper about it, my title would have been, “Scarier and Far Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine (even if you have a totally twisted imagination).”

I mean, we’d grown up here. (I thought.) Plus, we’d seen some horrific stuff at the Institute in New York. (I thought.) So it’s not like devastating freaks of nature were new to me. But Ari brought me down halls and up and down in elevators, and we explored parts of the School I’d never seen, never knew existed. And let me tell you, the flock and I looked like Disneyland cast members compared with some of the things I saw.

They weren’t all recombinant life-forms. Some were “enhanced” but not combined with another species.

I saw a human baby who wasn’t even walking yet, sitting on the floor, chewing on a plastic frog while a whitecoat wrote a long, complicated, unintelligible mathematical problem on a wall-sized whiteboard.

Another whitecoat asked, “How long did this take Feynman to solve?”

The first whitecoat said, “Four months.”

The baby put down the frog and crawled over to the whiteboard. A whitecoat handed her a marker. The baby wrote a complicated, unintelligible answer on the whiteboard, something with a lot of Greek squiggles in it.

Then the baby sat back, looked at the whiteboard, and started to gum the end of the marker. The other whitecoat checked the answer. He looked up and nodded.

The first whitecoat said, “Good girl,” and gave the baby a cookie.