Zeba watched Kiandra carefully.
“Is she sick?” Zeba asked.
“No!” Kiandra insisted.
“Yes!” Enu countered. “She never leaves our apartment!”
Kiandra stared back at him with great dignity.
“Maybe I just didn’t have a reason to, until now,” she said. “Did you ever think of that?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
We found Udans beside his truck.
He was still in the parking lot behind his hotel, double- checking the lock on the back of his truck. He gasped when he saw Enu, Kiandra, and me.
“No,” he said firmly. “Your parents would not want you in this part of the city. You must go home immediately.”
“Not until you help us,” I said.
Udans glanced around. The blacktop we stood on was crumbling, and weeds grew up through the cracks. The back of the hotel building was covered with graffiti. Somewhere, not that far away, we could hear a siren.
Udans jerked on the lever at the back of the truck. The door rolled open.
“We’ll talk inside the truck,” he said. “Where no one will see that you’re here. Then I’ll drive you back to your apartment.”
Enu and Kiandra looked at each other and shrugged. They followed Udans into the cargo area of the truck, with me right behind them. I turned around to give Zeba a hand up too.
“I don’t know her,” Udans said. “She can stay outside.”
“You’d make a young girl wait outside, alone, in this neighborhood?” Kiandra asked. “Udans, I’m ashamed of you.”
“She’s trustworthy,” I said.
Udans frowned but stood aside to let Zeba scramble up.
“Hurry it up,” he said. “Your father doesn’t like it when I’m late with his supplies from the city.”
“You’re not taking him much this time, are you, Udans?” Enu asked, glancing around.
It was true—the back of the truck was only half full of boxes and crates. That meant that the cover to the secret compartment below the floor, where I’d hidden, should have been in plain view. But even knowing it was there, I still had to squint and study the floor carefully just to make out the outlines of the cover. The cracks around it seemed barely more noticeable than any of the other cracks in the floorboards.
“Ever since the Enforcers took over Cursed Town, it’s been tough to convince our suppliers in Ref City that they’ll be paid,” Udans said, even as he pulled the back door of the truck shut, hiding us from view. He hit a switch that turned on an overhead light, which made everyone look a little ghostly. “So my job is harder than ever. You might tell your father that. Put in a good word for me.”
I saw my opening.
“We’ll tell him you’re the greatest person ever, if you help us,” I said. “See, I have this friend back in Cursed Town who’s in danger. Really, it’s three friends—my friend Rosi, her brother Bobo, and another kid, Cana. I just need you to find them and smuggle them here to Ref City.”
Udans gaped at me.
“You mean Rosi the escaped criminal?” he asked. “That Rosi?”
“She’s not actually a criminal,” I began.
Udans began shaking his head.
“You think I’d get involved with rescuing her?” he asked. Maybe it was a trick of the wavering light, but it seemed like he had started to tremble. “Don’t you know what she did?”
“Yes—she asked people to help rescue me,” I said. My voice came out sounding too emotional. I cleared my throat. “I owe her.”
“Then that’s a debt you’ll never be able to pay,” Udans said. He appealed to Kiandra and Enu. “The two of you need to talk some sense into this boy before the next time I come back to Ref City. You know no one can change anything in Cursed Town.”
“We don’t think Rosi is in Cursed Town anymore,” Kiandra said. “We think she’s on her way toward Ref City with the two little kids.”
“But she doesn’t know about the border,” I added. “We think she might be following the same route you did, bringing Enu and Kiandra to the city all those years ago.”
“Then they’re all as good as dead,” Udans said.
“You don’t even sound sorry about that,” Zeba protested.
Udans gazed at her with hard eyes.
“If I sat around feeling sorry about things I can’t change—things I couldn’t ever have changed—I’d have died of grief years ago,” he said. “You have to make the best of things.”
That last part sounded like something a Fred would say. But they would have made the phrase “make the best of things” sound optimistic and hopeful. Coming out of Udans’s mouth, the words sounded more like giving up.
How could I get so confused about what Freds would think and what Udans would think?
I shook my head and cleared my throat.
“That’s all we want—to make the best of things,” I said, trying to sound decisive. “And that means you need to rescue Rosi.”
“I won’t,” Udans said. “That would be like asking for certain death.”
“It wasn’t certain death smuggling me across the border,” I said. “You survived that.”
“That’s because the Enforcers weren’t in power then,” Udans said. He reached back for the door, as if he thought the conversation was over.
“I bet you’d do it for money,” Enu sneered. “What if Edwy here offered you money? What’s your price?”
Was Enu trying to help me or not?
“You little snot,” Udans said, pulling himself to his full height, his head practically scraping the ceiling. He and Enu stood nose to nose. The ugliness that had lain between them yesterday was back. “Do you know what my life was like when I was your age? Believe me, I didn’t have any Daddy Deep Pockets sending me money. And you dare to imply that there’s something wrong with me, because I want enough money to live on? Enough money to eat?”
“Can we just get back to talking about Rosi?” I asked. I glanced around frantically in the dim light. My gaze finally lit on a crowbar hanging on the wall. I pulled it down and began prying at the cover over the hidden compartment in the floor.
“Hey! Hey! Don’t do that!” Udans said, reaching for the crowbar. “Certain secrets need to stay secret!”
It was too late. I already had the cover halfway up.
“See, all you have to do is hide Rosi and Bobo and Cana down there,” I said. “Nothing will happen!”
I pulled the crowbar back, so Udans couldn’t grab it. Enu lifted the cover the rest of the way up.
“Sweet!” Enu cried. “What do you normally use that space for, Udans? What are you smuggling that our father doesn’t know about?”
“Nothing!” Udans said. “I am an honest man! You see, that space is totally empty!”
He bent down, trying to shove the cover back over the hidden compartment. He sprawled so desperately across the floor, something fell out of his pocket.
Keys. It was a set of keys.
Kiandra laughed and scooped them up.
“Did you lose something, Udans?” she asked, dangling the keys from her fingertips. “What if I just handed these over to Edwy and let him go rescue his friend himself?”
“You—you cannot—” Udans sputtered.
Part of my brain—the Fred-trained part—was frozen in horror: How can Kiandra taunt Udans like that? How can she be so mean?
But there was another part of my brain, the part that had always resisted all my Fred training. That part of my brain was gloating along with Kiandra: We have the truck keys! Udans will never help us! Why don’t we just help ourselves?
I glanced down, my eyes falling on the crowbar in my hands. Udans was scrambling to his feet, ready to lunge for Kiandra.
While he was off-balance, perched on one knee at the edge of the secret compartment, I shoved the crowbar against his shoulder. Udans fell over backward, into the compartment.
“Quick!” I yelled at Enu and Zeba.
I slid the cover bac
k over the compartment, smashing Udans down. I jumped on top of the cover, and a second later Enu and Zeba joined me. Kiandra began sliding boxes over it. In no time at all, the secret compartment was hidden again. I had no doubt that Udans was screaming, down in the secret compartment, but we couldn’t hear him.
Zeba took a shaky breath and slumped against the wall.
“What have we done?” she asked.
“What we had to,” Kiandra told her. She held up the keys. “Who wants to drive?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Is it okay to do a bad thing for a good reason?” Zeba whispered to me.
We were sitting in the cab of Udans’s truck. Enu was behind the steering wheel, with Kiandra beside him, her head bent over her laptop. She was navigating, telling him the best route for getting out of Refuge City.
That left Zeba and me crammed against the passenger-side door, and Zeba whispering about right and wrong.
“I don’t know about bad things and good reasons,” I said. “I just know we have to rescue Rosi.”
“But Udans . . . ,” Zeba began.
“He’ll survive,” I said. “We’ll let him out of the secret compartment after we rescue Rosi. Everything will be fine.”
Zeba was quiet for a minute.
“My dad says that’s how the Freds thought,” she said. “The ends justified the means. They thought it was okay to steal all of us kids away from our parents, if that made us grow up as nicer people. So that humans weren’t a danger to the universe. They thought it was worth the . . . the ‘moral ambiguity.’ My dad says that’s what it’s called, when there’s not a clear right or wrong answer.”
“Rescuing Rosi isn’t like that,” I said. “I know it’s right. Everything about it is right.”
“But . . .” Zeba leaned closer, so she could whisper directly into my ear. “Is that what your brother and sister think? Is that why they’re doing this? Can you really count on them to do the right thing when we get to the border?”
I stole a sidelong glance at Enu and Kiandra. Kiandra was mumbling, “Right turn here, then get into the left lane . . .” Enu was waving at people on the sidewalk and calling out, “Yeah, that’s right, look at me, you suckers! You have to walk, but I’ve got wheels!”
I peered out the window, and the bustle and noise of Refuge City was as overwhelming as ever. Even with the sun high in the sky now, the city’s lights blazed brightly—as if the people of Refuge City thought they could outshine the sun.
This is where I belong, I told myself, trying out the sentence in my head as if I still didn’t believe it. This is where I belong because . . .
Because with all the lights and noise and bustle, you didn’t have to listen to the thoughts in your own head. Unless there was some girl beside you who kept asking questions about right and wrong.
It wasn’t just her question about what we’d done to Udans that bothered me. There was something else, too.
I sighed.
“Zeba, you don’t have to come with us,” I told her. “This might be dangerous. You don’t even know Rosi. It’s not your responsibility to help her.”
“It is my responsibility to help her,” Zeba countered. “It’s my responsibility to help you. That’s something I do know.”
“Just because you were raised by Freds to do the right thing?” I asked. “Just because your parents here on Earth are the type of people who run a soup kitchen? Zeba, you are doubly doomed to be a do-gooder!”
“Don’t you think I ever make my own decisions?” she asked fiercely.
“Do you?”
“Um . . . I don’t know,” Zeba said. She flashed me a trembling smile. “I’m trying to.”
Beside me Kiandra chanted, “Left lane, left lane . . .”
Enu zoomed past an oncoming car and onto a highway.
“Did you see those mad skills?” he congratulated himself. “Oh man, this is so much better than driving in a video game!”
“So . . . have you ever driven a real car or truck before?” Zeba asked. “Should I have asked that before I got into this truck with you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Enu crowed. “Look how good I am at this! Who says video games don’t teach you anything?”
He swerved around a slower-moving car.
“You do realize, if you crash, we could die for real, don’t you?” Zeba asked.
“Killjoy,” Enu muttered. “How about you just go back to looking pretty?”
“Enu!” Kiandra exploded. She started to elbow him, then seemed to remember that that could lead to him swerving once again.
“Kidding, kidding,” Enu said. “Edwy, you were right. Your friend Zeba isn’t just pretty. She’s also an awesome basketball player. We’ve got hours before we’ll get to the border. Zeba, how about we tell Kiandra and Edwy the play-by-play of how the game went?”
“I think I’ll focus on researching everything I can about the border,” Kiandra said.
“Good idea,” I agreed. I leaned over so I could see her laptop screen too.
“Edwy, you’re making it so I can barely breathe,” Kiandra complained. “How about I just read anything interesting out loud?”
But I’d already caught a glimpse of an awful paragraph: Since arriving on Earth, the Enforcers have made the border around Cursed Town the most impenetrable barrier in the universe. The Enforcers’ new bioscans make it impossible to smuggle any life-form across the border. Their sensors can detect the presence of even the tiniest microbe.
I pointed at the laptop screen.
“Kiandra, how are we going to get around that?” I asked, my panic welling up.
She shoved her elbow into my ribs. It was almost as if I’d gotten the dig she’d wanted to give Enu.
“Edwy, do you really believe everything you read?” she asked. “This is what the Enforcers are telling humans. I need to see what the Enforcers are telling each other.”
Her fingers flew over the laptop keys. I was careful not to crowd her, but I could see flashes of words: Accident report . . . Malfunction report . . . Engineering update . . .
She leaned her head back and practically cackled.
“You’re so lucky you’ve got a brilliant sister,” she told me. “I’ve got the perfect plan!”
Zeba caught my eye and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Is it the perfect plan for rescuing Rosi? Or is it just the perfect plan for Kiandra to show how brilliant she is?
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
We stopped a few kilometers back from the border to let Udans out of the secret compartment.
This was a compromise Zeba had urged on us.
“Having Udans in the truck won’t help us unless he’s the one handing his travel papers over to the border guard,” she said. “And since he won’t do that—and we’re not even going through an official border crossing—all we’re doing is putting his life in danger.”
“He deserves to have his life in danger if he won’t help us!” Enu muttered.
“Udans isn’t your puppet,” Zeba said. “Udans has a right to make his own decisions.”
“Is this what it was like all the time, living in Fredtown?” Enu asked me. “People always telling you what they thought was the right thing to do? Without any sense of humor at all?”
“Yes!” I told him.
“I don’t know how you survived it,” Enu muttered.
Maybe I truly was his mini-me.
But Enu was the one who stopped the truck behind a towering rock formation. He was the one who found a rope. So when Zeba pried the cover off the secret compartment and Udans sprang out, Enu and I tackled him, and Kiandra tied the rope around Udans’s wrists and ankles.
I couldn’t have done this by myself, I thought. I really did need Enu’s and Kiandra’s and Zeba’s help.
“You will regret this!” Udans screamed. “Listen to me—don’t do this crazy thing! Let me drive you back to Refuge City where you’ll be safe! None of you understand what the world’s like—you’ve all been too shel
tered! If you do this, you’ll die!”
Zeba shivered at that, but Enu just said, “Kiandra, can you find a cloth so we can gag his mouth, too? So he’ll shut up?”
Kiandra ripped off the bottom of her shirt and tied it around Udans’s mouth. But he still grunted and squirmed and tried to kick as all four of us kids eased him down from the truck.
“Think about how strong you seemed, when it was you kidnapping me,” I said to Udans. “Now that it’s you against four of us, you’re not so strong, are you?”
“Is this really about revenge?” Zeba asked me quietly.
“No, no . . . ,” I muttered.
We half carried, half dragged Udans over to a signpost that pointed the way to Refuge City. Enu tied the ends of the rope to that signpost.
“This way, even if we don’t make it back for you, someone will see you and rescue you,” Zeba said. “You’ll be safe, no matter what.”
“Zeba, we’re all going to be safe,” Kiandra said confidently. “I’ve got the perfect plan, remember?”
“The Freds thought they did too,” Zeba murmured, and Kiandra glared at her.
“We’ll be back soon,” I assured Udans. “Never fear.”
Udans was still squirming and struggling when we drove away. I watched him in the rearview mirror until his tan clothes and brown face blended in with the tan and brown of the drought-stricken landscape around us.
Rosi, Bobo, and Cana have been out in the wilderness for a week and a half, I thought. What if the greatest danger to them wasn’t Enforcers, but . . . thirst and starvation? What if they’re already dead and this is all for nothing?
Maybe Enu and Zeba were thinking similar thoughts, because they both fell silent as we approached the border. Kiandra lowered her head closer and closer to her laptop, as if that was all she wanted to see.
“Almost there, almost there,” she murmured. “Okay, stop!”
Enu hit the brake, and the truck shimmied and skidded on the dusty road.
“The border is immediately ahead of us,” Kiandra said.
It just looked like more dry, flat land ahead, no different from the dry, flat land behind us. No—there was a small shimmering in the air, like the haze that shows up on an intensely hot day. But like a heat mirage, the shimmering didn’t seem to stay in one place.