Free The Icarus Project by Laura Quimby

books around, trying to see behind them. “It should be on the other side of the shelves.”
    “How do we get to it?” I asked.
    Kyle shoved the books back. His face twisted up in concentration. “There has to be a trigger. Some way to get behind the wall.”
    “A secret panel?” Excitement filled me. This was a puzzle—like a real-life video game. “How do we find the trick to opening it?”
    “See anything that looks strange or out of place?” Kyle asked.
    I studied the room again. Totally normal. It even had a fake fireplace.
That
was it. “The fireplace is gas. It’s not real,” I said. “Randal seems like he would have a
real
fireplace, with wood. Not a fake one. Unless he didn’t have a choice.”
    I shifted the items on the mantel, but the fireplace didn’t budge. I flicked a switch on the wall and the flames in the hearth jumped to life. “See? Gas. Makes lighting a fire a cinch,” I said. I turned off the artificial flames and kept looking. But nothing budged.
    “Wait—the switch,” I said. “There are two of them.” One turned on the fire. But what about the other one? Kyle reached over and flipped the switch.
    Silently, the fireplace swung forward, revealing a secret door and a small opening.
    My heart raced. “This is it!” I couldn’t believe it. “We’ve found a secret room!”
    “Hurry up. We don’t have much time.”
    Kyle and I slipped through the small door and into Randal’s secret room.
    This was more like what I had expected. There was a giant polar bear rug on the floor, its mouth wide in a vicious roar. A huge stuffed tiger was mounted on a giant log suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room. Randal had displayed a collection of his kills. Tiny golden plaques labeled the trophies: caribou, snow leopard, and an arctic fox.
    One wall was covered with shelves filled with strange fossils. There were also dozens of sharp teeth and claws. Dad had told me once that a lot of rich collectors buy up fossils from different dig sites and keep them as souvenirs. Randal had his own treasure trove.
    But the fossils weren’t the main attraction. A table about the size and shape of a Ping-Pong table dominated the space. On top of it was a huge model of a miniature world: a winter wonderland. In this snowy landscape, tiny people wore fur coats and were surrounded by dozensof tiny animals. The fake snow glittered. There was a glassy water area with ice floes and polar bears and seals swimming and resting on the chunks of floating ice. At first I thought the model was cute. Maybe creating miniatures was Randal’s hobby. But then I saw the creatures with curved tusks. The woolly mammoths. This landscape was from the past—a reenactment of a long-ago world populated with giant beasts.
    “Weird. I guess Randal has a lot of time on his hands,” Kyle said.
    “Wait—look at this sign.” There was a hand-painted sign at one end of the table. It read “Clark’s Mammoth Park.”
    “He has a great imagination.” Then Kyle asked the question we both were thinking. “You don’t think this is meant to be a real park? Do you?”
    “It seems more like a fantasy.” I reached down and ran my finger over the icy water and stroked the back of a majestic polar bear. “There are no more mammoths. They don’t exist.”
    “Yeah, but this whole station is a fantasy.”
    I was still admiring the model of the Arctic when I said, “Maybe that’s what Katsu was talking about with the DNA.”
    “What do you mean?” Kyle looked at me dumbfounded. “What DNA?”
    “DNA is a map, a blueprint of an organism’s makeup,” I said.
    “Duh, I know what it
is,
but what would Katsu want it for?”
    Dad and I had watched
Jurassic Park
like a million times. We had even watched the sequels.
Jurassic Park
was his favorite movie. It was about scientists who collected dinosaur DNA that had been trapped in amber. They used the DNA to create live dinosaurs for a zoolike park where people could come and