Children of Refuge

  I turned around to look, through the apartment doorway. The elevator doors parted, revealing a girl standing there, looking around. It wasn’t Kiandra. It was Zeba.

  “You followed me?” I asked, puzzled.

  “You ran out of the soup kitchen in such a panic,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Of course I’m not all right!” I yelled at her. “My friend is missing!”

  Enu put his hands on my shoulder.

  “Dude, get ahold of yourself,” he said. “Go get changed. Whoever this Rosi is, you can look for her after the game. It’ll probably turn out she’s not even missing. She’s just not talking to you right now. Girls do that sometimes. Especially the pretty ones.” He gave a teasing grin. “I didn’t know there was some babe you were sweet on—”

  I shook his hands off my shoulder.

  “She is missing, and I’m not going to the game!” I insisted.

  Finally, finally, Kiandra’s door creaked open.

  “What is wrong with the two of you?” she demanded. “Yelling again?” Her sharp eyes fell on Zeba. “And you have friends over?”

  “Hi, I’m—” Zeba started to say, stepping forward with her hand outstretched. But Kiandra ignored her, and so did I.

  “This is an emergency,” I told Kiandra, rushing to her side. I grabbed her laptop from the couch as I passed it, and I flipped the screen open to face her. “You’ve got to help me! Log on now!”

  Kiandra yawned.

  “And people always say girls are overdramatic,” she muttered, rolling her eyes in Zeba’s general direction. She turned her attention back to me. “Squirt, I don’t know what your problem is, but did you ever think that maybe I already have plans for the day? Why would what you want automatically be more important than what I want?”

  “See, Kiandra’s not going to help you,” Enu said. “You should have known she’s too mean for that. But today that’s good, because now you’ll go to the basketball game with me.”

  He took two quick steps across the room and grabbed the back of my sweatshirt hood, tugging me toward the door. I jerked away from him.

  “What? You want me to beg?” Enu asked. “Edwy, we need you to have enough players.”

  What was wrong with Enu and Kiandra? No kid had ever gone missing in Fredtown—of course not—but if anyone had, everyone in town would have instantly dropped everything and searched and searched and searched until the kid was found. Back in Fredtown everyone in town would drop everything and come to the rescue if a kid so much as scraped a knee.

  Enu and Kiandra wouldn’t even listen to me. Not really.

  Who would have thought I’d ever miss anything about Fredtown?

  “I’m trying to find a missing friend, and you think I’m going to stop just to play a game?” I asked Enu. His eyes held so much surprise, I thought, Well, what else would he expect? Haven’t I just been playing games ever since I got to Ref City? Even when I knew Rosi might be in danger?

  I remembered the grainy video I’d seen, the punch landing in Rosi’s stomach. This was different. Now I knew something awful had happened to her.

  “And all you care about is your basketball team having enough players?” I kept ranting to Enu. “Find some other warm body to sit on the bench for you!”

  “Look, if you help Edwy,” Zeba said to Kiandra, “I’ll take Edwy’s place in that basketball game.”

  Enu snapped his attention back to the doorway, where Zeba was standing.

  “You’re a girl!” he said.

  “Girls can play basketball too!” Kiandra snarled at him.

  Would you all just stop talking about basketball? And what girls can or can’t do? I wanted to explode. We have to look for Rosi!

  But I saw something in how Kiandra straightened up, glaring at Enu.

  Maybe, maybe . . .

  “I will help Edwy,” Kiandra decided, lifting her chin defiantly. “So . . . oh, sorry, Enu, looks like you really will have to let a girl play on your team.”

  Had Kiandra maybe wanted to play with Enu and his friends sometime, and he hadn’t asked her because she was a girl? How crazy would that be?

  “But—” Enu began.

  “Or if you’ve got some other friend you want to ask instead, I don’t mind,” Zeba said, Fred-like generosity in her voice.

  “Enu doesn’t have any other friends he could ask, or he wouldn’t have asked Edwy in the first place,” Kiandra said. She leaned back against her doorway and grinned. She was enjoying this moment way too much.

  Can’t we just focus on Rosi? I wanted to scream. But . . . it kind of seemed like I needed to get Enu to accept Zeba on his basketball team first.

  Enu looked Zeba up and down. If it’d been me, I would have stood up straight and tried to look taller—and scrappier, because I’d learned that that mattered in Ref City. But Zeba only gave him a kind, friendly, Fred-like smile.

  “Are you as good as Edwy is at cheating?” Enu asked, and I cringed.

  “No,” Zeba said, shaking her head firmly. “I don’t cheat. That would be against the rules.”

  Growing up in a Fredtown really had ruined her.

  “But she’s got a great jump shot,” I said quickly, making up something, anything, as well as I could. “It’s, like, a thousand times better than mine.”

  Zeba’s pale eyebrows shot up.

  “Edwy, that’s not—” she began.

  Before she could finish on the word “true,” I quickly added, “And she’s a great team player. Everything Zeba does is for the greater good.”

  I waggled my eyebrows at her, hoping she’d start thinking about some Fred founding principle that gave us permission to tell white lies. I couldn’t come up with any, but Zeba seemed like someone who’d paid a lot more attention to her Fred-parents and Fred-teachers than I had.

  I just hoped she didn’t think about the Fred founding principle that went, For every good reason there is to lie, there is usually a better reason to tell the truth.

  Zeba cleared her throat.

  “I didn’t want to brag,” she said. “But I am a pretty good basketball player.”

  I did a double take, and Zeba kept smiling. Whoa. Maybe she had just been planning to say, Edwy, that’s not something you would know, because you’ve never seen me play. Maybe she really was a great basketball player. Maybe it was like how Rosi was better than me. Not just because she was taller—but because she was more coordinated, too.

  Maybe Zeba was like that as well.

  Oh, Rosi, you go missing and now I’m even willing to admit that you’re better at most sports than I am. . . .

  “Okay, then,” I said out loud. “Zeba can borrow my basketball gear. Why don’t you two get out of here so you’re not late to the game? And so Kiandra can start helping me find Rosi?”

  It seemed to take forever to dig out my orange basketball shirt for Zeba to wear, even though it was in a heap on top of my dresser. It seemed to take another forever for Enu and Zeba to leave. As soon as the door closed behind them, Kiandra leaned against it with a grin on her face.

  “Okay, that was fun,” she said.

  “And now you’re going to help me—” I began, tugging on Kiandra’s arm, tugging her toward the kitchen table, where she’d put down her laptop.

  But she shook me off.

  “What? You believed me?” she asked. “No—I was just messing with Enu. I’m going back to bed. That’s what I’m doing today.”

  She stepped past me, like it wouldn’t even matter if I protested. Maybe she didn’t expect me to protest. Maybe the whole time I’d been living with her and Enu, she’d gotten the impression that I could be easily brushed aside. That I could be distracted with basketball and video games.

  That was how I’d been acting for the past week and a half.

  As far as she knew, I’d just gone back to bed and fallen right to sleep last night.

  I remembered what I’d yelled at her in the middle of the night: Nobody gave me a c
hoice going to Fredtown! Nobody gave me a choice going to Cursed Town! Nobody gave me a choice coming here!

  But I faced a choice now. I could let Kiandra walk right past me, and I could act like a typical Ref City kid, too cool to get upset about much of anything.

  Or I could try everything I could to get Kiandra to help me. I couldn’t be sure that she would help me. But I could make sure that I tried my hardest.

  I grabbed Kiandra’s arm again, and this time I didn’t let go.

  “You have to help me,” I said. “Because I won’t leave you alone until you do. I’ll be the most annoying kid brother ever. I won’t let you sleep. I won’t let you eat. I’ll just stand around forever saying, ‘Find Rosi. Find Rosi. Help me find Rosi. . . .’ You think girls are so important? She’s a girl! And she needs a lot more help than getting into a basketball game!”

  Kiandra blinked sleepily at me and looked down at my hand on her arm. She rubbed her eyes.

  “Who’s this Rosi again?” she asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Rosi didn’t exist.

  At first that was what it seemed like, from everything Kiandra found online. The Rosi Alvaran who showed up in the official records seemed to be a hardened criminal, a constant troublemaker. A rabble-rouser.

  That wasn’t at all the Rosi that I knew.

  In the official records, it looked like Rosi had purposely started a battle in Cursed Town, then arranged for her coconspirators to smuggle her out of prison.

  “This girl is amazing!” Kiandra kept saying, flipping through official-looking websites. “There’s a reward for her capture? And it doesn’t matter if she’s caught dead or alive?”

  That word, “dead,” stabbed at me, and for a moment I couldn’t even breathe, let alone answer Kiandra.

  “And look—there’s commentary about her from all over the planet,” Kiandra went on. “All over the galaxy, really. She’s famous! Or infamous—which is even cooler. What was she trying to do when she started everyone fighting in that marketplace? Did being raised in Fredtown make her hate humans? Was she secretly an alien trying to get humans to violate the rules, so Enforcers would have to invade?”

  “Rosi didn’t hate anyone,” I insisted. “She’d never want people to fight. And she wasn’t an alien. She isn’t.”

  “Kiddo, until last night you didn’t even know that the people who raised you were aliens,” Kiandra said, glancing up from her laptop long enough to frown at me. “Excuse me for not trusting your opinion.”

  “I know what I’m talking about!” I said. “I always knew there was something wrong with the Freds. I just didn’t know what it was. There was never anything wrong with Rosi.”

  My vision blurred, a problem I’d been having constantly since Kiandra had started helping me. I blinked hard.

  “I don’t care what other people are saying about Rosi,” I told Kiandra. “I just want to know where she is. And if she’s okay.”

  Kiandra narrowed her eyes at me, thought for a moment, and went back to typing.

  “Aha!” she said. “I thought I could find a translation app for this. . . . Could it really be that I know how to do something that no news agency in the entire galaxy has figured out?”

  “Translation app?” I repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s no audio with that videotape of your friend Rosi in the marketplace,” Kiandra explained. “But I know an app that’s pretty good at reading lips in videos without sound. . . . Yeah, here it is.”

  She turned the laptop toward me so I could see the screen too. It showed the scene of the Cursed Town marketplace again. Kiandra had frozen the video at the exact moment when Rosi, with Bobo on her back, climbed up onto the table. As soon as Rosi began to shout, I heard a robotic voice call out, “Everybody! Listen!”

  “That’s not how Rosi sounds,” I objected.

  “I didn’t say this app reproduces her exact voice,” Kiandra said. “It isn’t scanning her vocal cords. But it can tell her exact words.”

  She rewound the video, starting over. Rosi appeared to scramble down and then back up onto the table in the Cursed Town marketplace.

  “Everybody! Listen!” the robotic voice said again, perfectly matched to the movement of Rosi’s lips. This time Kiandra let the video keep playing, with the robot voice continuing to speak Rosi’s words. “A boy has gone missing. Maybe he’s even been kidnapped. It’s Edwy Watanaboneset. He’s twelve, the same age as me. Please help. Please, we’ve got to organize a search. . . .”

  Kiandra stopped the video. Rosi stayed frozen on the screen, a man’s fist mere centimeters away from punching into her stomach.

  “This girl risked getting beat up just because she was worried about you?” Kiandra asked. “Because she wanted to rescue you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “I . . . I guess so,” I told Kiandra, as soon as I could trust my voice. It still came out husky and vulnerable. I tried to cover by imitating some of Enu’s swagger. “What can I say? People love me.”

  To my surprise Kiandra threw out an arm that caught me right in the shoulder and knocked me back against the couch.

  “Do not be like that,” she commanded. “Your friend here is in serious trouble, and it looks like it was all because she cared about you.”

  That was exactly what I’d been trying to avoid thinking.

  Kiandra stabbed her finger on the laptop keyboard, and the video advanced: the fist landing in Rosi’s stomach, her pitching forward, hands grabbing her and throwing her to the ground.

  I couldn’t watch.

  “But that doesn’t make sense!” I insisted. “Why is this my fault? I’m sorry I couldn’t get word to Rosi that I wasn’t exactly in any danger when Udans kidnapped me—or let her know that I’m perfectly safe here in Ref City. But when Rosi was in that marketplace, it’s not like she was telling people, ‘Hey! Let’s go to war! Let’s fight a battle because of Edwy!’ She was just asking for help!”

  “How long did you spend in Cursed Town?” Kiandra asked, as if I’d said something incredibly stupid.

  “Like, barely a day,” I protested.

  “Yeah? Well, five minutes should have been enough for you to see that those people are seriously messed up,” Kiandra said. “Couldn’t you tell that people hate our family, because our father has so much power? Just saying our last name—Watanaboneset—it’s like that Rosi girl was asking to get beat up!”

  I remembered how Rosi’s parents in Cursed Town had looked at me, the one time they’d met me. Rosi’s brother, Bobo, had told them my last name, and Rosi’s dad had muttered, That pack of thieves.

  At the time I’d thought, Hey, that’s kind of cool! My family is notorious! Rosi’s parents are afraid of me!

  But maybe this was the answer to what I’d wondered back in Cursed Town: how my dad could get away with stealing other people’s possessions. Maybe he didn’t get away with it, not really. Maybe it seemed like he did, because he never had to give anything back—maybe he always had so much power that people were too scared to go up to him and say, Hey! That’s mine! You can’t take things that actually belong to me! But that didn’t mean that there weren’t any. . .

  Consequences, I told myself, landing on the one word that the Freds had probably said to me the most, every single time I misbehaved in Fredtown.

  There had been consequences for my father stealing other people’s possessions. And one of those consequences had been Rosi getting punched in the stomach.

  “Yeah, okay, I can see why people might hate our mom and dad,” I admitted to Kiandra.

  “It’s not just our mom and dad,” Kiandra muttered. “It’s everyone related to them, even distantly. Remember that awful story our father told about our ancestors, our ‘noble tribe’ of mighty men? About how we’re better than other people, because we have green eyes? It was stories like that—attitudes like that—that made people hate us. That made—”

  I was not going to sit there listening to her
talk about ancient history.

  “Okay, okay.” I stopped Kiandra, shoving her away. “I get it. People have hated our family—our tribe—for generations. But why is it a crime for Rosi just to say my name? Why would anyone blame her? Why would they arrest her, after other people beat her up? When I was in Cursed Town, it didn’t even seem like they had a police force, let alone a prison!”

  I didn’t think I had to say, Or else wouldn’t our own father have been sent to prison for stealing things that didn’t belong to him?

  Kiandra clicked through screenfuls of information.

  “I don’t think there ever was much of a police force in Cursed Town,” she said. “Nobody really enforced any laws. Except, you know, our dad making sure nobody stole anything back from him. He enforced his own rules, and that was as much law as there was. It’s not like Ref City, where people know that if they step out of line, they’ll get kicked out.”

  “Kicked out?” I repeated. “Don’t people have a right to a fair trial? Aren’t there judges and juries and elected officials who—”

  Kiandra snorted, and I saw how much I sounded like a Fred.

  “Sure, and everyone skips through daisies on the way to city council meetings,” she said. She bumped her shoulder mockingly against mine. “I guess when the United Nations started Ref City, the plan was to work toward democracy and self-rule. Ref City is a lot better than Cursed Town. But, see, things are different now, all over the planet. All of humanity had to agree to follow a bunch of new rules, in order to get you and the other little kids back from the Freds.”

  I thought about objecting to Kiandra calling me a little kid. But I wanted to hear what she was going to say next.

  “And one of those rules,” she said, “was that if fighting broke out in any community, these really nasty aliens called Enforcers could come in and stop the fighting. After the fighting in Cursed Town, the Enforcers came in. And now they’re allowed to stay forever. They’re allowed to do anything they want to keep the peace.” She looked me up and down. “I don’t think it was a good trade.”