Lost in the Jungle Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES, AND INCIDENTS ARE EITHER THE PRODUCT OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR USED FICTITIOUSLY, AND ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, BUSINESS ESTABLISHMENTS, EVENTS, OR LOCALES IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: NYE, BILL, AUTHOR. | MONE, GREGORY, AUTHOR. | ILUZADA, NICHOLAS, ILLUSTRATOR.

  TITLE: LOST IN THE JUNGLE / BY BILL NYE & GREGORY MONE; ILLUSTRATED BY NICHOLAS ILUZADA.

  DESCRIPTION: NEW YORK: AMULET BOOKS, 2018. | SERIES: JACK AND THE GENIUSES; 3 | SUMMARY: WHEN JACK AND HIS GENIUS FOSTER SIBLINGS, AVA AND MATT, DISCOVER INVENTOR HANK WITHERSPOON IS MISSING, THEY TRAVEL DEEP INTO THE AMAZON JUNGLE, OVERCOMING STRANGE CREATURES, A RAGING RIVER, AND SOME VERY CLEVER FOES TO FIND THEIR FRIEND AND PROTECT HIS BIG IDEA.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2017057274 | ISBN 978-1-4197-2867-9 (HARDBACK) | eISBN 978-1-68335-252-5

  SUBJECTS: | CYAC: SCIENCE—FICTION. | SCIENTISTS—FICTION. | RAIN FORESTS—FICTION. | AMAZON RIVER REGION—FICTION. | GENIUS—FICTION. | ORPHANS—FICTION. | BROTHERS AND SISTERS—FICTION. | ADVENTURE AND ADVENTURERS—FICTION. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY. | JUVENILE FICTION / SCIENCE FICTION. | JUVENILE FICTION / ACTION & ADVENTURE / GENERAL.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC PZ7.1.N94 LO 2018 | DDC [FIC]—DC23

  TEXT COPYRIGHT © 2018 BILL NYE

  JACKET AND INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT © 2018 NICK ILUZADA

  BOOK DESIGN BY CHAD W. BECKERMAN

  PUBLISHED IN 2018 BY AMULET BOOKS, AN IMPRINT OF ABRAMS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PORTION OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED, STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, MECHANICAL, ELECTRONIC, PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING, OR OTHERWISE, WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER.

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  AMULET BOOKS® IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF HARRY N. ABRAMS, INC.

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

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  TO ALL THE REAL-WORLD FOSTER CARE FAMILIES OUT THERE WHO WOULD’VE DONE A WONDERFUL JOB WITH AVA, JACK, AND MATT.

  1

  THE MAN IN THE PURPLE MASK

  The three of us spread out across the ruined lab. When we’d left the night before, the space had been in perfect condition. I’d even swept the floors. But now, early the next morning, the huge room was a disaster. Mechanical birds were lying shattered on the ground. The insides of the self-driving car had been ripped out. Wires spilled from the hood like electronic spaghetti. Even our robotic pizza chef, Harry, was busted. Cables hung down to his wheels. Water was spreading across the floor from a small crack in the twenty-foot-deep submarine test tank.

  Across the room, Matt was leaning over a keyboard, scanning a monitor. “Who could have done this?” he asked.

  Ava was sitting on the floor, carefully pulling a drone into her lap like it was a bird with a busted wing. “And why?”

  Before I could offer a guess, a window exploded high above us.

  Glass rained down on the self-driving car. A black cube bounced off the curved roof of the vehicle and plunked onto the floor. Then it rolled. For a second I thought it might be a grenade. I imagined grabbing the explosive and heroically tossing it high into the air before anyone was hurt. But when it stopped, I realized it was just a camera.

  Matt ran over to me and pointed up. The lab was ten stories tall, and the center of the huge space was wide open, but a series of rooms extended out from the walls on platforms. They stretched from the ground floor to the ceiling like spiral stairs, and one of the rooms was puffing out clouds of vapor through a hole in a window. A thin black rope was dangling all the way from the platform to the floor. “Is that the biosphere?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Matt whispered, “and someone’s in there.”

  “Duh,” Ava replied.

  “Maybe it’s Hank?”

  A spark flashed inside the room. A man cursed and shouted.

  “That’s not Hank,” Ava said.

  Our friend Hank, otherwise known as Dr. Henry Witherspoon, owns the lab. He lets us work there, too, and takes care of us. Well, sort of, anyway. We hadn’t seen or heard from him in three weeks. That was a really long time for him to be gone, especially without sending us a single e-mail or even a quick text. Honestly, I would’ve settled for an emoji. But Hank’s an unusual guy, and he probably had a great explanation.

  Oh, and there’s no way he’d wreck his own lab. Especially not the room we were staring up at now. The glass-walled biosphere was one of his favorite spots. About half the size of our apartment, the space was a miniature ecosystem, sealed off from the outside world and the rest of the lab. Nothing but light went in or out. The air inside cycled through about twenty different plants and miniature trees, and the water evaporated and condensed as it flowed along a miniature stream that circled the interior. A hidden pump, powered by sunlight, kept the water moving. Sure, the “Do Not Enter” and “Caution” signs were painfully tempting, but not one of us had ever been inside the room.

  Not even me.

  Honestly.

  Except for that one time. Which is kind of how I knew so much about the inside.

  Matt grabbed my shirt just above the elbow. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, still whispering. “Hank would’ve told us he was back.”

  This wasn’t quite true. Hank showed up and disappeared without warning all the time. But I didn’t challenge my brother. I glanced at Ava. She wasn’t moving. Matt himself didn’t actually look ready to go. But neither of them really wanted to lead the way, either. I’m always the one who goes first. “Fine,” I said quietly. “I’ll go check it out.”

  Matt reached over to a small worktable and grabbed a hammer. Ava shot him a look. “Really?” she mouthed.

  My brother, who had the muscles of an athlete but the fighting skills of a toddler, deflated like a popped balloon. Hammer or no hammer, he wasn’t going to fight anyone. None of us were. He carefully replaced the tool, and we crossed the lab floor as quietly as ninjas.

  Now, about this laboratory. It’s a little odd. Okay, more than a little. There’s a giant water tank for testing submarines and robotic boats and suits that let you stay underwater without air tanks. The glass-encased Mars room is a near-perfect copy of the landscape on the Red Planet. All kinds of vehicles and robots and enough computers to satisfy two classrooms full of kids are scattered around the place. And that’s just the ground floor. Each of the platforms that wind up toward the ceiling supports its own miniature lab. The biosphere used to be on the fourth platform, but Hank redesigned it and moved it up a few floors.

  The first time Hank let us into his lab, I had no idea how he got from one platform to the next. The giant catapult capable of launching department store mannequins fifty feet in the air suggested he had some exciting plans, but he developed a much easier way up. And the rope dangling from the biosphere’s platform suggested that the intruder hadn’t found it.

  Ava grabbed the rope and gave it a gentle tug. “At least he didn’t use Betsy,” she said.

  Betsy wasn’t a kid. Or a pet. My sister liked to name her inventions, and Betsy was a motorized device, about the size of a blender, that let you fire a long cable up to rooftops or balconies and then whisked you right up like Batman. Don’t tell her I said that, though, because she hates superheroes. And look, Betsy was amazing. Totally. Even if I had sprained my finger trying to use her the week before. But this wasn’t the time for Be
tsy. We needed to be quiet. And safe.

  “I’d rather go the normal way,” I said.

  Ava flicked a red rubber toggle switch hidden behind a painting of a lighthouse. Two dozen metal steps popped out of the wall with a faint whoosh. They weren’t connected to each other, only to the wall, and there was no railing, either. Hank had covered each one with a thin square of rubber after Matt had tripped and banged his knees on the metal edges about a dozen times. Naturally, for this reason, I called the squares “Matts.” Ava liked the joke. My brother? Not so much.

  We hurried up the Matts, and I stopped at the first platform to listen. Whoever was up there in the biosphere wasn’t trying very hard to be quiet. Once or twice he shouted another curse . . . but I couldn’t quite understand the swear. I flicked the switch for the stairs to the next platform, and we kept moving quietly and carefully, winding clockwise around the interior walls as we ascended. Each platform had its own focus. One was all about growing and harvesting cells. The second was a robotics workshop. Then there was a clean room for experiments that couldn’t be contaminated with all the miniature bugs and microbes that crawl around the normal world, a tiny greenhouse, a 3-D printing shop, and, finally, the biosphere.

  We stopped on the platform below, outside the 3-D printing room. On the wall next to me was a painful reminder of one of the geniuses’ most successful pranks. There was a hook and a hanger and a sign above them that read “Invisibility Cloak.” I’m too ashamed to explain. But the supposed cloak wasn’t there, anyway, so we’ll move on.

  Something splashed in the room above. If either my brother or my sister had suddenly decided this whole strategy was a bad idea, and that we should turn back and call for help, I wouldn’t have protested. But no one was ready to run, so I reached out and flipped the switch. We waited as the steps whooshed out of the walls, then crept up.

  The intruder muttered. Then he began to hum a tune. A pop song. I turned back to my siblings and pointed to one of my ears, hoping they might recognize it. But this was pointless. Neither of them listened to real music. Matt only liked the symphonies of old dead guys, and Ava once told me there was already too much noise in her head to crowd it with tunes. “Never mind,” I mouthed.

  A sign on the foggy glass read “Do Not Enter!”

  I pushed through the swinging door and held it open with my foot. A man wearing a baseball cap and a thin purple ski mask that covered his face below the eyes stared back at me. He was about Hank’s height and wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a dark blue lab coat. His eyes were gray, his eyebrows thin and raised high in surprise. His arms and legs were packed with wiry muscles, and he was wearing an awesome pair of black basketball high-tops. If he hadn’t just broken into our lab, I might have complimented him.

  He froze.

  We froze.

  Then he yanked the lab coat up over his head, crouched down with his knees to his chest, and pulled it closed around his legs. Behind me, Ava made a noise. Not a giggle, exactly. But close. Why? Because the intruder had just fallen for the same trick they’d used on me a few weeks before. My siblings are ridiculously smart. Geniuses, really. Ava can build just about anything, and Matt knows more science than Wikipedia. So when I happened to walk past an unfamiliar lab coat hanging on a hook one day, and the sign above it read “Invisibility Cloak,” I guessed they’d made another major discovery. How was I supposed to know that it was a joke, and that they were only pretending not to see me as I snuck around the lab the next few days, borrowing various small items I wasn’t necessarily supposed to borrow? The whole time they were laughing quietly to themselves. And it wasn’t until I tried to grab a few hard candies from Ava’s secret drawer that she let me know she could see me.

  Now it was my turn. “We can see you,” I said. “It’s just a coat.”

  Slowly, the man’s head popped out. “I’m not invisible?” he asked.

  “Nope, you’re not invisible,” Ava said. “Who are you? What are you even doing here?”

  “And what are you doing to our lab?” Matt added.

  “You wrecked everything!” Ava said.

  The man stood, then grasped his right arm just below the shoulder. “Where is it?” he asked. His voice was muffled by the mask.

  “Where is what?”

  “The thumb drive.”

  “What thumb drive?” Ava asked.

  “The one that carries Hank’s most important work!”

  What was he talking about? And what was a thumb drive? The man stepped forward. He glowered. “The police are on their way,” I lied. “So you might as well get out of here.”

  A creature splashed in the artificial river at his back, and the man gripped his arm again. Then he rushed at me. Someday I’m going to be a black belt in one of the martial arts. Jiu-jitsu, maybe. Or kung fu. Whichever one requires the least training. Until then, I’m kind of at a disadvantage, because I have the reaction time of a garden slug. Before I knew what was happening, the man had wrapped me in a headlock. “Where’s the thumb drive?” he asked again.

  “We really don’t know what you’re talking about!” Ava yelled back. “Please, let him go.”

  My brother was strangely quiet. The man clamped down harder on my head. My ears hurt. He yelled at them to back down the stairs as he dragged me out of the room.

  “You’ll never get out through the front,” Matt said. “The police will be here before you even reach the street.”

  My head was aching, and the intruder definitely didn’t wear underarm deodorant. His armpits smelled like potatoes. “Let me go,” I mumbled. He twisted my head again.

  “The drive,” he said. “Now.”

  Neither my brother nor my sister responded.

  The intruder let go of my head, then stood me upright and gripped the back of my shirt in one hand and the back of my belt in the other. He pushed me forward. I looked out. The ground floor was forty feet down. The no-railing thing really felt like a major design flaw. One easy shove and I was going to sail right off the platform and splatter like a water balloon on the polished concrete.

  “Tell me where it is or we’ll see if he can fly.”

  Finally, Matt spoke up. “Hank keeps it with him!”

  “Matt!” Ava yelled. “How could you tell him?”

  The man loosened his grip on my shirt. But I was still only a half step away from the edge. Trying to break away was too risky. “He keeps it with him?” the intruder asked. He sounded genuinely surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he always has it on him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “Honestly.”

  Somewhere in the distance we heard sirens.

  “They’ll be here soon,” Matt lied.

  The intruder threw me back against the wall, away from the ledge. He hurried back inside the biosphere and slammed the door. Inside, we heard more glass shatter.

  Ava yanked the handle. “It’s jammed!”

  Matt was already dashing down to the next level.

  “Don’t run away!” Ava called out.

  “I’m not,” he yelled back.

  My sister pulled at the door again.

  “Hey,” I said, “were you really going to let him push me over the edge?”

  She shrugged. “You would’ve been fine. Hank installed those automatic cushions. The motion sensors would have noticed you as you dropped. That would trigger the cushions to inflate, and then you’d hit one and bounce.”

  “I’d bounce?”

  “Right.”

  Bouncing off a cushion after a forty-foot drop didn’t seem super safe. But I was okay now, and Matt was charging up the stairs with a 3-D printer on his shoulder. Behind my back, I crossed my fingers, hoping he wouldn’t trip. Amazingly, he steered his size thirteen sneakers up the steps without a glitch. But why was he carrying the printer in the first place?

  Holding the machine just below his right shoulder like a shot put, he rotated to his right, ready to throw.

>   “Wait!” Ava cried. “Which one is that?”

  “It’s the Yuko,” Matt said.

  “Oh, go ahead. That one never works.”

  Matt hurled the cube at the door, punching a hole in the glass. He reached through and pulled out a metal crowbar that had been jammed through the handle.

  Inside, we saw that the window had been kicked out. All three of us leaned through and stared down. The man was running across the roof of the neighboring apartment building. The jump down was maybe eight feet. Another pile of shattered glass was spread out on the blacktopped roof below. The smart move would have been to ask Matt to lower me down carefully. So I planted my foot on the bottom of the opening and leaped.

  My heels crunched down on the glass as I landed in a crouch with one hand forward. For a second there, I felt like Iron Man. Only without all the cool gear.

  “Jack, what do you think you’re doing?” Matt called down.

  Think? The lab was our responsibility. One way or another, we had to catch the intruder. So I didn’t think. I jumped, and then I ran. Across the roof of the building next door, over a hip-high wall, and onto the next roof a few feet below. Ahead of me, the intruder knocked over an old television antenna and hurdled a chimney like he was a contestant on an obstacle course show. Then he yanked open a rectangular aluminum trapdoor in the roof and, without looking back, dropped through. I heard him curse again. Or at least the way he said it reminded me of a curse. But the word itself sounded foreign.

  At the trapdoor, I leaned over the edge and peered through the opening. The intruder had jumped down into a closet stuffed with coats and boxes, but there was a ladder, too. I could hear his hurried footsteps racing down the stairs.

  An old lady screamed.

  I climbed down the ladder. My foot caught on a fur coat and I tumbled out onto a carpeted landing at the top of two flights of stairs. A cloud of dust puffed up. I sneezed, then hurried to my feet. Leaning over into the stairwell, I could see the intruder’s hand grasping the wooden railing as he raced down. The old lady screamed again. The intruder was almost down to the street. The air stank of boiled cabbage and chocolate. Either the residents were cooking up a strange feast or the man had a gas problem.