The Lost Code by Kevin Emerson

Author:Kevin Emerson [Emerson, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-05-21T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

“THERE ARE THREE GROUPS IN THIS GAME OF predator-prey.”

Sleep was too short. The sun seemed too bright, the air too humid.

“The following cabins will be the herbivores: Spider Monkeys, Lemurs, Koalas, and Tree Frogs.”

I had stumbled through breakfast, mostly head down. The bug juice, aqua-blue today, tasted like mint and the edges of plastic cups. I forgot to turn it down. There was a light fuzz to all of my movements. My shoulders were finally starting to ache with soreness from the hours of swimming.

“Spotted Hyenas and Arctic Foxes will be the omnivores. In the food web, you are the equivalent of skunks or raccoons.”

“You’re the skunks!” Paige shouted at us, her face painted with stripes of green and black. The Arctic Foxes cheered.

I glanced back to where the Foxes were sitting, and pairs of eyes immediately sharpened into glares at me. Mina had thought I was going to show up for polar bear swim. After the night with Lilly, it had never even crossed my mind. Now, I had jerk status with the whole Fox cabin. Mina leaned over to another girl, and they whispered and laughed and glared some more. Vaguely, my foggy brain considered that I’d never been at this level before, from unnoticed up to noticed and now to hated, but I was too tired to care.

“The CITs will be the carnivores, top predators. They are already inside the Preserve.”

Everyone buzzed around me. We were gathered on the far side of the boathouse, on a slope of ground with log-bench seats, like a little amphitheater. Behind the small stage where Claudia stood, the steel mesh net rose to the ceiling, enclosing the Preserve, a relic forest from before the Rise, its trees thicker and darker than in the rest of Eden, mysterious.

Inside were species of birds, mammals, and reptiles that existed nowhere else in this area anymore. There were some enclosures inside that were more like a zoo: with cougars, black bears, and coyotes. The large bird I’d seen the other morning had been confirmed as a robot. Apparently, years ago there had been a bald eagle, but it had been too sensitive even to the inside rad levels.

The Preserve was off-limits to the campers except for naturalist walks now and then, and for this: the two-hour game of predator-prey.

“In order to win,” said Claudia, “you have to survive and increase your population. At the end of the game, the teams in each category with the largest viable populations are the winners. Herbivores, you have your teams of ten.”

The younger cabins all erupted in cheers. All the teams had painted their faces like their cabin animal: little gaggles of whiskered creatures. Even though the youngest cabins, the Pandas and the Ocelots, didn’t get to play, these midlevel kids still looked young, like fresh meat.

Our cabin was split into two teams of five. I’d opened my eyes to everyone already up and working silently on face painting, but unlike the little kids’, ours didn’t look like animal designs so much as camouflage war paint: blotches of greens, smears of black, browns, grays.

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