The Ark Plan by Laura Martín Page A

that suit you’re wearing?”
    â€œI know how to use it,” I said. I did know how. You put it on, and it made it harder for dinosaurs to see you. I didn’t think they had instructions beyond that.
    â€œDo you know what this button does?” He flicked a button on my right shoulder, and the suit started to constrict around me like a balloon deflating. I gaped at it in surprise.
    â€œHow did you know how to do that?”
    â€œJust do. A side effect of being brilliant. Should we get going again?”
    I bit back my retort and nodded. He was right. The farther we got from the compound, the better.
    â€œShawn?” I asked as I readjusted my pack on my back. “Why do you think the marines bothered to come after us?”
    He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I was kind of surprised by that too.”
    â€œI know stealing supplies is illegal, but it still seems extreme. Don’t you think?” I swallowed hard, remembering the marine who had made it back to the compound hatch, but not in one piece. I hoped he’d survived.
    â€œMaybe,” Shawn said. “But you know the marines will do everything and anything to ensure the continuation of the human race. Maybe they thought we stole something more than a few supplies?”
    â€œMaybe,” I said, fingering the compass that sat around my neck. Something about the whole situation was bothering me, but I forced myself to focus on the lush forest around me instead. In this world, themarines were the least of our worries. I looked around at the dappled green light that filtered down through the thick canopy of leaves. It seemed so peaceful, but I knew that it hid deadly predators. We needed to be on high alert if we had any hope of surviving. Still, when Shawn was preoccupied with his pack, I ran my hand down the bark of the nearest tree trunk, soaking in its rough texture. I needed to reassure myself that this was really happening. I was a little worried that I was going to wake up and find myself back in my room in the Guardian Wing. Everything had happened so fast that I hadn’t really processed what it would mean to come topside. And now that I was actually here, it seemed unbelievable. I glanced up from my musings to find Shawn giving me a strange look, and I immediately stopped petting the tree. My face flushed red, and without another word, I glanced at my compass and headed north.
    It turned out that we weren’t very good at hiking. After spending all twelve years of our lives walking on smooth tunnel floors, we found ourselves on uneven earth for the first time. Rocks, tree branches, and animal holes seemed to come out of nowhere. We both fell. A lot. To make matters worse, our thin compound shoes didn’t do much to protect our feet, so that we might as well have been walking barefoot. Blisters weregrowing on top of blisters, and I was pretty sure there was at least one hole in my right shoe. I chose not to look. There was nothing I could do about it. My only consolation was that Shawn looked just as bad as I did. Maybe worse.
    I tried to stay alert to noises, but there were just too many sounds swirling around us to concentrate. Our feet crunched over the forest floor, and although at first I enjoyed the chirping birds and buzzing insects, before long it was nothing but deafening background noise. Dinosaurs were everywhere, but luckily since the trees we walked through grew practically on top of one another, they were all smaller species. I recognized a lot of them, noting in my head which ones were plant eaters and which weren’t. Shawn kept his stun gun out, but the dinosaurs only stared at us curiously, scurried away, or ignored us entirely. They’d probably never seen a human before, and since we were too big to eat, we were ignored. It was going to be a different story as soon as the trees started thinning out.
    The forest was also a refuge for a lot of the animals that had managed to survive the