Kenny Wright Read online

“Everything will be okay, Sammy. Promise.”

  “But you totally agree that Mom’s new idea is ridiculous, right? I could die of embarrassment!”

  “I hope not,” says Maddie. “I’d miss you. Big-time. And yeah, her plan is a little out there…”

  “Maddie, it’s so far ‘out there’ it might as well be on Mars with that robot rover. They could dig up red rocks together!”

  Okay, now here’s the worst part: My mom told me that this wacko thing she wants me to do is all part of her “most important experiment ever.”

  Yep. I’m just Mom’s poor little guinea pig. She probably put lettuce leaves in my lunch box.

  MOM’S “TAKE A Robot to School Day” idea is so super nutty she couldn’t even say it out loud in front of Genna Zagoren, a girl in my class who has a peanut allergy which is why my best buddy Trip, can never eat his lunch at Genna’s table. More about Trip later, too. Promise.

  Anyhow, it’s time to begin Mom’s big, super-important experiment: me and a walking, talking trash can going to school. Together.

  “Just pretend he’s your brother” is what my mom says.

  “I don’t have a brother.”

  “You do now.”

  Can you believe this? I can’t.

  As for the robot? I don’t think he’s really going to blend in with the other kids in my class except, maybe, on Halloween.

  He’s already wearing his costume.

  “Good morning, Samuel,” E says when we’re out the front door and on our way up the block to the bus stop. “Lovely weather for matriculating.”

  “Huh?”

  “To matriculate. To enroll or be enrolled in an institution of learning, especially a college or university.”

  I duck my head and hope nobody can tell it’s me walking beside Robo-nerd.

  “We’re not going to college,” I mumble. “It’s just school.”

  “Excellent. Fabulous. Peachy.”

  I guess Mom is still working on E’s word search program. I can hear all sorts of things whirring as the big bulky thing kind of glides up the sidewalk. The robot chugs his arms back and forth like he’s cross-country skiing up the concrete in super-slow motion. Without skis.

  I notice that E is lugging an even bigger backpack than I am.

  Maybe that’s where he keeps his spare batteries.

  ACCORDING TO MY mother—whose name is Elizabeth—the robot’s name, E, stands for Egghead, which is what a lot of people call my mom, Professor Elizabeth Hayes, PhD, because she’s so super smart (except when she does super-dumb stuff like making me take a talking robot to school for anything besides show-and-tell).

  My dad, Noah Rodriguez, says the name E stands for Einstein Jr. because the robot is such a genius. Ha! Would a genius go to school without wearing underpants? I don’t think so.

  My sister, Maddie, thinks E is a perfect name all by itself and stands for nothing except E.

  I kind of like Maddie’s idea. Even though Maddie doesn’t go to school, she’s so smart it’s almost impossible to fight or argue with her about anything. Trust me. I’ve tried.

  But the more time I spend with E, the more I think I know what his name really means: ERROR!

  “Remember, Samuel,” E says when we reach the bus stop, “always wait for the school bus on the sidewalk. Do not stand, run, or play in the street.”

  A lot of my friends from the neighborhood are already at the corner. Most of them are gawking at the clunky machine with the glowing blue eyeballs that’s following behind me like an obedient Saint Bernard.

  “What’s with the bright blue eyeballs?” I mumble. “Are those like freeze-ray guns?”

  “Let’s form a straight line, children, away from the street,” E chirps. And get this—E can smile. And blink. (But you can hear the mini-motors clicking and purring inside his head when he does.)

  “I make these suggestions,” E continues, “in an attempt to enhance your school-bus-boarding safety.”

  Everybody stops gawking at E and starts staring at me.

  None of the kids are smiling. Or blinking.

  E is definitely the biggest ERROR my mother has ever made—worse than the time she designed a litter-box-cleaning robot that flung clumps of kitty poop all over the house.

  “What is that thing?” asks Jackson Rehder, one of the kids who ride the bus with me every morning.

  “Another one of my mother’s ridiculous robots,” I say, giving E the stink eye.

  “What’s his name?”

  “E. For Error. Just like in baseball.”

  “I’m sorry, Samuel,” says E. “You are mistaken. You are imparting incorrect information. Your statement is fallacious.”

  Great. Now the stupid robot wants to argue with me? Unbelievable.

  Stick around. This should be fun.

  ALL MY LIFE, we Kidds have lived on the sea. Then, one day, we almost died under it.

  The four of us were crammed inside a two-person mini-sub (what the US Navy calls a DSV, or Deep Submergence Vehicle), our newest piece of high-tech treasure-hunting gear. We’d purchased it at an auction with the half-million-dollar reward we collected on our last adventure.

  My big sister, Storm, was convinced we needed the submarine to help us in our continuing quest to bring home the two most important treasures in the world: our missing mom and dad.

  See, Storm doesn’t dive, because the last time she climbed into a rubber scuba suit, some mean old geezer on a yacht called her a “shrink-wrapped whale.” Obviously, that little comment wasn’t his best idea, because the next time he went to take his fancy yacht for a spin, the fish-head-in-your-bedsheets smell was getting pretty bad. Nobody messes with Storm.

  We still needed Storm’s photographic memory if we wanted to go back to the pair of sunken Spanish galleons off the coast of Florida that our father, the world-famous treasure hunter Dr. Thomas Kidd, had dubbed the Twins. That was why we were packed like sardines in the DSV.

  Unfortunately, Mom and Dad weren’t with us.

  The ships’ cargo holds were loaded down with treasure—enough to finance Kidd Family Treasure Hunters Inc. for as long as it took to figure out some way to help our parents, who—on top of being world-class treasure hunters—were neck-deep in dangerous CIA business.

  So finding those ships was crazy important.

  But Tommy had lost the treasure map that took us to the Twins the first time. Well, if we’re being honest, he accidentally used it as a napkin for a greasy slice of pizza, then crumpled it up and tossed it into a trash barrel. A trash barrel he and one of his assorted girlfriends used later for a beach bonfire.

  So it was pretty much gone for good.

  “This sub is awesome!” said Tommy, who’s seventeen and the closest thing we have to adult supervision. “The four of us can dive as a family without messing up our hair.”

  “Or breathing,” added Beck, who was squished up against a porthole.

  “Change your heading to two hundred and sixty-three degrees, Tommy,” said Storm, navigating from memory. “The sunken vessels will be dead ahead.”

  “Aye, aye,” said Tommy.

  But when he nudged the control stick forward, the ship didn’t budge.

  We kept drifting downward.

  Sinking deeper.

  And deeper.

  “Um, how far down can this thing go without popping a gasket?” I asked.

  “Forty-five hundred meters,” said Storm. “That’s fourteen thousand seven hundred and sixty-four feet, for those of you who skipped the math chapter on metric conversions.”

  “Maybe we should go back up to The Lost,” suggested Beck. “And, oh, I don’t know—read the operating manual?”

  “Yeah,” said Tommy. “That’d be a good idea. Make all preparations for surfacing. Secure the ventilation. Shut bulkhead flappers.”

  Yep. Tommy sure sounded like a real, live submarine commander.

  Too bad we kept sinking.

  “Uh, those controls aren’t working, either,�
� Tommy finally said after nothing he flipped or poked worked.

  “So, basically,” I said, “all we can do is keep going down? To the bottom of the sea?”

  Tommy nodded. “Basically.”

  That was when our engines cut out.

  “We’ve lost power,” Storm reported matter-of-factly. “If you have a favorite prayer, now would be a good time to start reciting it.”

  Remember how Tommy said that thing about the sub making it easier for us to dive as a family?

  Well, it looked like it might help us die as a family, too!

  WE KEPT DRIFTING down.

  “Good-bye, cruel world,” said Storm, who’s sort of known for blurting out whatever is on her mind whenever it happens to be there. “Tell Neptune to stick his forked trident in our butts, because we’re done. It’s all over but the crying—except, of course, I refuse to do it.”

  “Hey, hang on,” said Tommy. “We’re the Kidds. We live for dangerous adventures like this. Death-defying explorations are the Krazy Glue that holds us together. Sure, sometimes we get down, but we always get back up. And we’re never, ever defeated!”

  Yes, my big brother was being a rock. Or a blockhead.

  I mean, seriously, we were in deep trouble—like almost-all-the-way-down-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean deep.

  “You know, Tommy,” said Beck, “you kind of remind me of Dad. Bucking us up like that. It’s sweet.”

  Tommy gave her his dimpled grin. “Thanks, Beck.”

  “It’s also kind of tragic,” added Storm. “Especially given the timing. However, since we still have a few hours of oxygen left, we have plenty of time to contemplate our coming deaths while ruminating on the things in life that we’ll miss the most. For me, it’s a toss-up: Mallomars or Krispy Kremes?”

  “Oh, tough call, Storm,” Beck said. “I have to give it to the classic Mallomar, though.”

  “What about Mom and Dad?” I said. “That’s what I’ll miss.”

  Pirates in Cyprus had kidnapped our mother. Our father had been missing ever since we battled a terrifying tropical storm off the coast of the Cayman Islands. I had, with our uncle Timothy’s help, sent a fake e-mail from “Dad” to “his” kids, but that hadn’t completely convinced everyone he was still alive.

  Storm set her jaw. “Dad is already dead, Bick. You need to accept that fact and move on.”

  “Where’s he going to move to?” said Beck. “We’re squished inside here like Pokémon trapped inside a Poké Ball!”

  “Storm’s right,” said Tommy with a sigh. “Dad’s waiting for us, down below in Davy Jones’s locker.”

  “Okay—who is this guy Davy with the locker, anyway?” asked Beck. “Some gym class reject?”

  “Look, you guys,” I shouted, probably wasting way more oxygen than I should have. “Dad is not dead! Just because he disappeared off the deck of The Lost in the middle of a hurricane-sized storm doesn’t mean anything.”

  Storm stared at me. “Except that he’s dead.”

  She slumped her shoulders and then proved that she’s not always as cold as she pretends to be: She just collapsed to the floor in despair.

  She landed so hard that the whole vessel shook.

  And the submarine started sinking even faster.

  Okay, by now you’ve figured out that we didn’t actually die at the bottom of the sea. I mean, this is just the prologue. Narrators never die in the prologue.

  (But Beck says it’s okay if I do. She’ll take over for me. Gee, thanks, sis.)

  So how did we survive?

  Well, when we hit the ocean floor, it was like somebody kicking an ornery vending machine.

  Suddenly all the lights on the control panels flickered to life. The stone-cold-dead engines fired up.

  “Excellent. We bottomed out hard enough to jump-start all the systems,” explained Storm.

  Tommy pulled back on the control stick and we headed to the surface.

  “Why don’t we come back for the treasure the old-fashioned way?” I suggested. “Let’s put on our scuba gear and dive for it.”

  “Fine,” said Beck. “It’ll beat being stuck inside this bobbing barrel with your barracuda breath!”

  We all laughed.

  I don’t think any of us had been happier since maybe the last Christmas we spent with Mom and Dad together in Pago Pago.

  That is, until we sliced through the foamy breakers at the surface.

  Because another—very large, very menacing—submarine was up there waiting for us.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781473505636

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  Young Arrow

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  London SW1V 2SA

  Young Arrow is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © James Patterson, 2015

  Illustrations by Cory Thomas

  Excerpt from House of Robots copyright © James Patterson, 2014

  Illustrations in excerpt from House of Robots by Juliana Neufeld

  Excerpt from Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile copyright © James Patterson, 2014

  Illustrations in excerpt from Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile by Juliana Neufeld

  James Patterson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain by Young Arrow in 2015

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9780099596356