CHAPTER TWENTY
Why think about unpleasant things you can’t do anything about?
Don’t ask questions like that ever again.
The past has nothing to do with us.
That’s just how life goes.
There’s nothing you can do.
My brain would not shut down. It still wanted to figure out something I could do. It kept racing through the same path of thoughts as if eventually the path would lead somewhere new.
Kiandra had kicked me out of her room. Enu had given me strict orders not to make another sound the rest of the night. Now I was back in my own room, back in my own bed, back with a racing mind that wouldn’t let me sleep. Kiandra and Enu and the computer had just given me more to think about, more to keep me awake.
Rosi, wherever you are back in Cursed Town—has anyone told you that Freds are aliens? How did you handle the news? What did you decide to do about it? Is there anything anyone can do?
Okay, that was new. This was the first time my brain had started acting like it could communicate directly with Rosi, across the many, many kilometers that separated us.
I ached to talk with Rosi.
For the past week and a half I’d managed to distract myself every time some thought of her had entered my brain. It was like I’d boxed up everything about her in some imaginary vault. But now it was like that vault had sprung a leak.
Or just cracked open completely.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Rosi. The way she looked at me. The way, even when she was mad at me, she still worried about me.
The Freds always looked at you that way too, my brain reminded me.
But there was a difference. It was like the Freds had to look at me that way. They were adults. They were Freds. They just weren’t capable of looking at kids with disgust or hatred in their eyes.
With Rosi it was different. It was like . . . like she chose to care about me.
But that had never stopped her from being furious with me. Back in Fredtown she’d constantly gotten mad at me for asking questions.
No, not for asking questions, my conscience forced me to admit. For being rude to the Freds in how I asked the questions.
But once we were back in our parents’ hometown, in Cursed Town, she had asked rude questions too. That day when she found me fishing—because my parents were punishing me—she, not I, had been the one to ask, Doesn’t it seem like every adult we’ve ever known is hiding something?
It had seemed like that. And she was right: Everyone had been hiding something.
The Freds had been hiding the fact that they were aliens.
Our real parents had been hiding the news of the war that had ended the day Rosi and I were born.
My real parents had also hidden the fact that they were going to send me to Refuge City. They’d hidden that news practically right up until the moment they did it.
They’d hidden the news that I had an older brother and sister, too.
And they’d hidden the fact that they were essentially prisoners trapped in Cursed Town, never allowed to leave.
Was that everything? Were those all the secrets Rosi and I had missed?
Oh, Rosi, I thought. What if we’d been able to find answers together? Would you right now be explaining to me how all of this makes sense? How it fits with a saintly, Fred-logical way of seeing the universe?
I would never in a million years have admitted this to Rosi, but without her I was totally confused. I couldn’t make sense of anything I’d discovered.
Freds are aliens. Humans who are alive right now have been in wars. War isn’t something that only happened centuries and centuries ago, before humans were civilized. There’s an intergalactic court out there somewhere that, that . . .
My brain made a little leap. This was like standing before a box of dumped-out puzzle pieces and suddenly seeing how two of the pieces fit together.
On the so-called “plane” that had brought Rosi and me and the other kids from Fredtown to Cursed Town—an “airplane” that I now knew was actually a rocket ship—there had been men who’d ordered us around and were mean to the Freds. Those men weren’t Freds, but something had been a little off about them, too. In fact I’d been so certain something was wrong with them that I had scratched words into my seat on the plane—er, rocket ship—saying that they weren’t real. That day, that was all I’d been able to manage.
What if those men had been from the intergalactic court? They’d waved around a decree telling the Freds they couldn’t come on the “plane” with us. What if that decree was from the intergalactic court too?
Didn’t “intergalactic court” sound like some group that would tell people from lots of different planets what to do?
“Ro—” I actually started to call out for Rosi, as if she were right there and could confirm that what I’d figured out was right.
I paused, remembering how mad Enu would get if I woke him again. I listened hard, but all I could hear was the distant hum of our refrigerator, out in the kitchen.
“Never mind,” I muttered.
I focused on the refrigerator hum, thinking maybe it would lull me to sleep.
No luck. I couldn’t even shut my eyes without them popping right back open a second later.
I slipped out of bed again and started pacing. My room wasn’t that big—I could go only five steps in any direction before I had to turn around and walk back the other way. I might have managed six steps before turning around if it hadn’t been for the TV where Enu played his favorite video game, the one about destroying spaceships.
Spaceships. Rocket ships. Same thing.
Another puzzle piece fell into place. Maybe.
What if it’s not just a coincidence that that game is about spaceships? I wondered. What if Enu and Kiandra—and all the other kids who were too old to be kidnapped by the Freds . . . What if they all hate us younger kids so much that they wish they could have destroyed the rocket ships that brought us home?
I gagged. I had to stop pacing for a moment and hold on to the wall.
I remembered the video clip of how much Refuge City had celebrated the news that the human children would be coming home.
Then I remembered that Enu had called the spaceship video game “old.” He’d had it for years.
That video game wasn’t about humans hating humans. It was about how much humans wished they could have destroyed the spaceships that had brought Freds and other aliens to Earth in the first place.
I stopped gagging. But I kept hanging on to the wall.
Humans wanted to kill Freds and other aliens, but they could only pretend to do it, in a game, I realized.
Humans had flying cars and computers and athletic domes that seemed to float above the ground. Freds had the ability to make themselves look like an entirely different species. They had spaceships that could look like airplanes. They had the ability to trick human children into thinking they were on Earth, when they were really on an entirely different planet. They had the ability to steal every human child born on Earth for twelve years, and humans hadn’t been able to stop them until . . . well, I guessed it wasn’t until the intergalactic court got involved.
Freds were superior to humans.
In my mind I could hear Rosi arguing, Well, yes. Of course. Freds are peaceful and kind. And humans were still fighting wars just twelve years ago. . . .
“Oh, stuff it, Rosi,” I said aloud, and in that moment I didn’t care if Enu heard and woke up and got mad.
But would Rosi still argue that Freds were so great?
In my mind I saw the celebrations in the video clip of when Refuge City got the news that all the human children were coming back to Earth. I saw all the confetti swirling in the air. I saw all the pain the Freds had caused, being undone.
“You’re not that special after all, Rosi,” I whispered. “Neither am I.”
She and I had been the oldest kids in our Fredtown, the only ones removed from Cursed Town the very day the w
ar ended, the day we were born. But I knew now from my online research that there had been lots and lots of Fredtowns: at least one for every village and town and city on Earth. Refuge City had gotten its kids back too. Refuge City was a lot bigger than Cursed Town; there were probably dozens of twelve-year-olds like Rosi and me who had come back here. Maybe I’d even passed some of them on the street. Like me, they were probably just lying low. Not talking about Freds or Fredtown, because it stirred up lots of bad memories for everyone older than us.
I let go of the wall and reached for the doorknob.
If I couldn’t talk to Rosi right now, at least I could find and talk to some other kid my age who’d been raised by Freds.
He or she could help me figure things out just as well as Rosi would.
Anyone raised by Freds would want to help.
Right?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was five a.m. now, and I was staring at a sign that said SOUP KITCHEN.
Without waking up Enu—or, more important, Kiandra—I’d had to rely on my own computer skills to find any information about other kids raised by Freds who were now in Refuge City. Maybe the Freds hadn’t taught me very good computer-research skills; maybe they had tried and I just hadn’t listened. Whatever the reason, I’d had to search and search and search. And I’d found only one clue: a mysterious online posting that said, Seeking: Refuge City kids who want to talk about how to adapt to our new homes.
That had to be from some kid or kids who had a new home because their last home was with Freds. Didn’t it?
What else could it be?
The last part of that post said, If you meet this description, come to 9405 Bull Wallow Road and ask for Z.
It sounded like the setup for a prank. Maybe the kind of prank I might have pulled back in Fredtown. Like, I might walk into this 9405 Bull Wallow Road and get a pie in the face. If there had been any other lead online—or if I’d been patient enough to wait until Kiandra woke up so I could ask for help, and if she’d found something—I would have ignored this posting.
But as it was, I’d left the apartment and walked straight to 9405 Bull Wallow Road.
And . . . it was a soup kitchen. Whatever that was.
Probably just someplace that serves soup, I told myself. That’s okay. I had a long walk, and I’m hungry.
Soup for breakfast was a little unusual, but I didn’t care.
A broken shutter banged against the window frame of the next building over, and I shivered. The area around Bull Wallow Road did not look like any of the other glitzy, shiny new areas I’d seen everywhere else I’d been in Refuge City. It didn’t look like Fredtown, either. It looked old and broken-down and shadowy.
It looked a lot like the worst areas I’d seen in Cursed Town.
It’s just . . . not quite sunrise yet, I told myself. That’s all. This area will look fine once the sun’s up.
That gave me the courage to knock at the door of the soup kitchen.
“Come on in!” someone yelled from inside. “Coffee’s almost ready! So’s breakfast!”
I pushed my way in to find a long, narrow room full of rickety tables and mismatched chairs. Most of the chairs were empty, but a few contained hunched-over shapes—old men? Old women? It was hard to tell. They all seemed to be gray-haired and grizzled and snoring.
I looked around for the person who’d yelled “Come in!” I caught a flicker of movement from the far end of the room—it was a man standing behind a counter.
“Are you hungry?” the man asked gently.
“No,” I said, because suddenly I wasn’t.
“That’s fine,” the man said, but he sounded like he didn’t believe me.
“I’m here to see Z,” I said.
His friendly expression tightened.
“Do you know her?” he asked. “Does she know you?”
Her? I thought. She?
“No,” I admitted, because I didn’t think I could bluff my way through this one. “I just saw something she posted online. I wanted to . . . talk about adjusting to our new homes.”
Now the man spoke through clenched teeth.
“I don’t really think that’s—” he began.
But a door banged behind him, and a short girl with reddish-brown pigtails pushed past him.
“Is it—” she began eagerly. Her gaze fell on me and she looked confused. “Oh. I thought . . . I don’t know you.”
The man put his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“We can ask him to leave, Zeebs,” he said. “We have a standing arrangement with the police, if anyone causes a disturbance here . . .”
This was so annoying.
“I’m not causing a disturbance!” I insisted. “This girl—Zeebs?—she pretty much invited me here, saying to come here and ask for Z if I wanted to talk about adapting to my new home. I’m just doing what she told me to do!”
The girl narrowed her eyes at me. They were so light, they were almost gold.
“Prove you grew up in a Fredtown,” she whispered.
I sighed.
“A founding principle of Fredtown,” I said. “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. Another one: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And another one: No one is to be called an enemy. And . . .”
I hoped the girl didn’t notice I was mostly going for the short ones. She was making me nervous. And I had tried really, really hard the whole time I lived in Fredtown not to memorize anything.
And . . . what if different Fredtowns had had different founding principles?
The girl took a step away from the father and closer to me.
“Daddy, it’s okay,” she said. “He may not have grown up in the same Fredtown as me, but he did grow up in a Fredtown.”
“And you think that makes him trustworthy?” he asked doubtfully.
“Yes,” the girl said.
She stepped out from behind the counter and put her hand on my arm, guiding me toward one of the tables in the corner, away from any of the gray, hunched-over people.
“Daddy, we’ll just be sitting right over here,” she said. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
The man frowned but didn’t stop us. He went back to making coffee.
The girl and I sat down on opposite sides of the small table, and suddenly I felt a little tongue-tied. For much of the past year I hadn’t even been able to talk to Rosi without making her mad, and she and I had known each other our whole lives.
“Are you sure you don’t want to have me prove I live in Refuge City now?” I asked. “Because that’s what you were looking for, right—other kids from Refuge City?”
“I was looking for other kids who grew up in Fredtowns,” she said firmly. “Other kids my age. But . . . if you had to, how would you prove you live in Refuge City?”
I thought about that one. As far as I could tell, Refuge City didn’t have precepts or founding principles. Unless it was one of the things Udans or Enu had told me: Why think about unpleasant things you can’t do anything about? And, The past has nothing to do with us. And, That’s just how life goes. There’s nothing you can do.
But what if I was wrong, and the girl didn’t recognize any of those?
Suddenly I knew what I should say.
“I like your freckles,” I told her. “But . . . I’m not going to say anything about the fact that your skin is paler than mine. I’m not even going to notice it. Uh-uh. Can’t even see it.”
The girl laughed.
“That is how everybody acts in Refuge City!” she agreed. “They talk about how people look all the time. But they’re scared to say anything about the color of people’s skin. Even though really everyone now is just various shades of brown. Because that’s one of the things that people used to fight about all the time.”
I hadn’t known that.
“Skin color?” I asked. “Really? They fought about that? Why? Who cares?”
The girl shrugged.
“My parents say it’s all because of history. History we never learned in our Fredtowns.” She stuck out her hand and shook mine. “I’m Zeba.”
“Edwy,” I told her. “It’s good to be around someone who remembers what it was like to be raised by crazy Freds!”
Zeba bit her lip and pulled her hand back.
“I never thought they were crazy,” she said. “It’s not crazy to be . . . idealistic.”
“You’re like my friend Rosi, then,” I said. “That’s what she believed too. Back in Fredtown, she always thought that the Freds were right. And . . . that I was wrong.”
And even though I’d told myself that was what I was looking for—someone like Rosi, someone who’d explain things to me in a Rosi kind of way—my heart sank a little.
Maybe I’d really wanted to find someone who would see everything the same way I did.
Zeba toyed with the rubber band at the end of one of her braids.
“Some would say my real parents and the Freds aren’t a whole lot different,” she said. “Daddy and Mama—they came to Refuge City twenty years ago when it was mostly just a processing center for refugees from all the wars. Before all the fancy buildings. Before all the rich people came. My real parents like to help people, just like the Freds do. But . . . they’re angry.”
“Angry?” I repeated numbly. “Your parents are angry?”
I had a hard time imagining anyone who was like the Freds being angry.
Zeba nodded, her braids thumping her shoulders.
“They say the Freds never understood human nature,” she whispered. She glanced over her shoulder, back toward the man in the kitchen. “They say taking every kid away and then bringing us back twelve years later made all of Earth into a powder keg. And . . . I think they’re mad that even good people like them had their kids taken away. My parents call themselves humanitarians. All they’ve done their whole lives is help people. They think that they—and everyone else like them—should have been allowed to keep their own children all along. They say it’s not fair that they were punished for what other humans did.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking at her. Powder keg? Humanitarians? These were new words for me, new thoughts. I’d been wrong: Talking to Zeba wasn’t like talking to Rosi. Rosi and I were connected. Zeba was a stranger. I didn’t understand her; she didn’t understand me.