Children of Exile

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I eased the screen away from the window and slid one leg over the windowsill, then the other.

  Immediately, hands grabbed me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Let me go!” I tried to scream. But one of the hands that held me in place wrapped itself over my mouth, muffling my words.

  “No, no, Rosi, it’s us!” a voice hissed in my ear.

  It was the mother’s voice. It was her and the father holding me.

  They began dragging me out of the room, and I let them. We had to have awakened Bobo, and I didn’t want him to see when they started slapping and scolding me. But as we reached the other room, they didn’t do any of that.

  Instead, they hugged me.

  “You’re safe! Thank God you’re safe!” the mother moaned.

  “We thought we’d never see you again,” the father wailed.

  I pulled back. I peered into their tear-stained faces.

  “You never acted like you cared this much about me before,” I muttered, too stunned to hold back the truth.

  “You weren’t what we expected,” the mother said. Maybe she’d been stunned into speaking the truth too. “You seemed so much like a Fred. Not anything like us. But today we understood. . . .”

  Had my fighting back made them think I was more like them than like the Freds?

  The father shook his head, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  “Before, we kept thinking about how we’d lost your childhood,” the father said. “Today, we could have lost you.”

  I wasn’t buying it. I narrowed my eyes at the mother.

  “You slapped me,” I said.

  “Just as my mother used to slap me when I was a smart-mouthed teen,” the mother said. “When I didn’t show her proper respect.”

  And how does that make it right? I wanted to protest. Just because you got hurt, I have to be hurt too?

  But the mother was already lowering her eyes, already admitting, “Maybe she shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I shouldn’t have either. I didn’t know how else to be a mother.”

  Did that make sense? Was that another reason the Freds had taken us away?

  The father still had his arm around my shoulder, hugging me against his warped barrel of a chest as though I was his most precious possession.

  “My eyes are actually green,” I told him, because I couldn’t let myself relax into the hug if it wasn’t meant for the real me, the real green-eyed Rosi. The one who started people fighting. The one who fought back.

  The father kept hugging me.

  “I know,” he said. “I figured that out on the first day. Dark eyes usually don’t go with your nose shape. And I could tell your mother was lying.”

  “But—why?” I asked. “Why would she do that? I thought that meant you hated people like me!”

  “He’s not like that,” the mother whispered. “I have green eyes too. Why would he have married me if he hated my eyes?” There was almost pride in her voice. Then it turned sad again. “But . . . I didn’t want him to worry. In the last war, most of the people who died looked like you and me.”

  I winced, thinking again of the fists beating me in the marketplace. Would I ever be able to forget the horror of that moment?

  To my surprise, I thought of something good about the parents and their differing eye color.

  “He protected you, didn’t he?” I asked the mother, remembering what the missionary had told me. “In the last war, the father was one of the dark-eyed people who tried to keep a green-eyed person safe. . . . He tried to keep you safe.”

  I was just guessing, but somehow I felt almost certain about this.

  The mother lifted her head high and nodded.

  “He did,” she said, and she definitely sounded proud now. “And he’ll protect you. . . .”

  The father’s face stayed dark and forbidding.

  “Now that you understand the danger, we can work together to keep you safe,” the father said. “We can hide you.”

  “And you’ll stay where you’re supposed to,” the mother added sternly. Her shoulders slumped again.

  I looked down at the rug that hid the hollowed-out space under the floor. Was that what they meant? What was the difference between being locked in a prison cell the rest of my life and hiding there?

  The prison cell had actually had more space.

  Just pretend to go along with this, I told myself. Wait until they go to bed, then grab Bobo and leave.

  But I remembered the tone in my father’s voice when he’d shown me the hiding place. He’d trusted me. I remembered the way the mother had held Bobo, how she’d buried her face in his hair. She loved him. Maybe she even loved me.

  “No,” I said, and I was surprised by the ringing authority in my voice. “I can’t just hide. I have to go away. With Bobo. I’ll take him someplace safe. Someplace we can grow up without fear or fighting.”

  “Don’t you see—the world just isn’t like that!” the mother said.

  “But shouldn’t it be?” I asked. “Where’s the next town? Where’s the nearest safe place? I mean, really—you two could come too!”

  Tears began rolling down the mother’s face.

  “No, we couldn’t,” the father said gruffly.

  “You might as well tell her,” the mother said, her voice choked.

  “In the war twelve years ago . . . the way we fought back . . . ,” the father began. “We weren’t just victims.”

  “We had to defend ourselves!” the mother interrupted. “We didn’t want to die!”

  The father let out a heavy sigh and shook his head.

  “We were branded war criminals,” he said. “We aren’t allowed to leave.”

  Even a day ago, I wouldn’t have been able to understand what they were talking about. But now I just kept staring into my parents’ eyes.

  “I—I fought back today too,” I whispered. “I . . . hit, and I punched and I kicked. . . .”

  “We did worse,” the father said simply.

  Did he mean that they’d maimed other people like they were maimed?

  Did he mean that they’d killed them?

  Just then, several loud booms sounded outside, then a rat-a-tat-tat that sent chills down my spine.

  “Gunfire,” the mother whispered, stiffening. “It’s starting all over again.”

  “Oh no,” I moaned. “What if the missionary’s still out there? Pastor Dan? The patrols . . . I heard they were going to shoot anyone out after curfew. . . .”

  “Those shots are coming from a different part of town,” the father assured me. “But . . .”

  Footsteps sounded from Bobo’s room, and a second later he appeared in the doorway.

  “I’m scared,” he wailed, his fists held tight and terrified against his face. “Make that noise stop!”

  And then he launched himself at me and clutched my legs for dear life.

  I reached down and swept him up into my arms. I patted his back.

  “There, there,” I murmured as he wept onto my shoulder. “Someone must have forgotten . . . forgotten that nobody should play such loud games at night.”

  I shot a defiant look over Bobo’s shoulder at the mother, because I was sure she would reach for him, sure she would try to take him from my arms and hug and comfort him herself.

  But she didn’t. She took a step back, giving me room. She and the father both had tears streaming down their faces.

  “We can’t . . . ,” the father began in a choked voice. His face twisted. “We can’t make our children live like this.”

  “You . . . you do have to take Bobo someplace safe, Rosi,” the mother whispered. “Even if it means we never see you again. Even if . . .”

  She broke off, because the father clutched her arm and shook his head, as if he’d just heard something we all needed to pay attention to. And then I heard it too: footsteps. Outside.

  Then someone knocked at the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Still clutching Bobo, I s
crambled for the rug hiding the hole in the floor. The father began helping me pull the rug aside and lift the floorboard. The mother raced for the door, calling, in a voice that trembled, “Wait, just wait, this latch is so tricky. . . .”

  Faintly, I heard a woman’s voice call back from outside, “No, please, be quick. . . .”

  The mother opened the door a crack, and then all the way.

  “What are you doing?” I cried. We didn’t even have the floorboard fully off the hiding place yet; there was no time to slip down out of sight.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” the mother called over her shoulder, even as someone in a hooded cape stepped into the house.

  The mother shut the door behind her, and the intruder dropped the hood of her cape.

  It was the maid from Edwy’s house.

  “Our neighbor, Drusa,” the mother said, a helpless tone in her voice. I wasn’t sure if she was telling the father or telling me. “From across the street.”

  I started to say, Oh, we’ve met. I might have even added the polite Fred-approved How nice to see you again. But the maid, Drusa, wasn’t waiting for pleasantries. She gripped the mother’s arm.

  “I saw your daughter come back,” she said. “I was watching. You’re going to have to send her away before anyone finds her here. I’m just asking . . . take my daughter too.”

  And then, from the folds of her cape, she eased out a little girl who’d been hiding there.

  It was Cana.

  Cana’s mother has only had her home for three days and she already wants to get rid of her? I thought. Cana? The sweetest child ever?

  Drusa placed her hands on Cana’s shoulders, and I understood.

  No, it’s killing this woman to send Cana away, I thought. But she thinks she has to do this for Cana’s sake.

  “That’s fine,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “Cana and I are friends, aren’t we, Cana?”

  Cana’s knowing eyes seemed to take in the tears still streaming down Bobo’s cheeks, the dark, gaping hole in our floor, the tense expressions on all the grown-ups’ faces. But she nodded.

  “It’s too much to ask,” the father said. “Adding another child to take care of puts Rosi in more danger. And Bobo, too.”

  I glanced quickly at Bobo and then Cana—what if they understood that the father was calling Cana dangerous?

  Cana’s expression hardened; Bobo’s lower lip trembled. But it had already been trembling.

  “In exchange, I’ll tell you the best place for your daughter to go,” Drusa said. “I’ll tell you where the Watanabonesets probably sent their son to be safe.”

  “What?” I exploded. “You mean Edwy? You told me Edwy was kidnapped! Were you lying? If I hadn’t thought Edwy was in danger, I wouldn’t have stood up in the marketplace, I wouldn’t have—”

  Drusa just gave me an even stare.

  “I don’t know what happened to Edwy,” she said. “The Watanabonesets told me to say he was kidnapped. And they were listening from behind the door, so I couldn’t say anything else without being fired. They were acting upset, but everybody’s been upset and worried ever since all of you children got home.”

  “We forgot how much worse it is to be in danger when our children are in danger too,” the mother said softly. “Our innocent children.”

  She was gazing down at Bobo. The innocent one. The favorite. Then her eyes met mine, and they seemed to go a little dead. But I saw this differently now—now that I’d faced danger myself and failed to protect Bobo. My memories of all her scowling shifted. All those times she seemed so mad at me, had she really just been scared? And she couldn’t hide it from me the same way she hid it from Bobo?

  I couldn’t think about any of that right now.

  “How can you not even know if Edwy was kidnapped or sent to safety?” I fumed at Drusa, “Why would his parents lie? Why—?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like in this town,” Drusa snapped back at me. “Nobody ever knows what’s true and what’s false. It’s too dangerous. Lies are the only protection anyone has. And lies don’t work against bullets when madmen roam the streets with guns.”

  I thought about the gunfire we’d heard, off in the distance. I thought about how I was going to have to go back out into the dark night, into that danger.

  “My daughter asks questions,” Drusa said. She’d evidently given up on trying to explain this town to me. “Cana thinks. She expects the world to be nice to her. And . . . I want her to grow up like that. Not like I did, trusting no one. Scared of everything. Believing nothing.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a thin sheet of paper. “I have a map. I copied it from one I found on Mr. Watanaboneset’s desk. Regardless of what actually happened to Edwy, if Mr. Watanaboneset thought he should send his son away to keep him safe, I want that for my daughter, too.”

  She handed me the map and I took it with numb fingers. I tucked it into my pocket, beside the key I’d found in the missionary’s Bible.

  “We’ll bundle up food for you to take,” the mother said, wringing her hands. “And maybe a change of clothes . . . You won’t be able to carry much. It won’t take any time at all to pack.”

  She’d barely said the word “pack” when the door smashed open, not even swinging on its hinges but falling flat to the floor. If any of us had been standing in front of it, we would have been crushed. I couldn’t make sense of the motion—there’d been so much noise. Had the hinges just exploded? On their own?

  In the next instant, a man with a gun appeared in the doorway.

  An Enforcer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Did he just shoot the door open? I wondered numbly. Kick it down?

  Either way, he had so much power.

  “You’re hiding a fugitive!” he screamed.

  He meant me. There was no avoiding it: He was going to recapture me. And he was going to punish my parents because he’d found me here. Maybe he’d even punish Drusa and Cana and Bobo.

  “No!” I said. “None of them are responsible for me being here! I came on my own. Arrest me, but don’t—”

  “Arrest you?” the Enforcer cried in a horrible, mocking voice. “You’re an escapee! I can do anything I want!”

  And then he aimed his gun at me.

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see anything but that gun.

  That’s why I missed seeing my mother and Drusa fling themselves at the Enforcer. I only saw them smash into him, knocking the gun to the side. It went off, a bullet tearing through the roof.

  These women aren’t rabbits, I thought. This is how mothers protect their young.

  “What’s happening? Who’s hit?” my father wailed, and my heart ached for him that he couldn’t see, he didn’t know.

  “We’re all fine,” I tried to tell him, but at the same time my mother cried “Help us hold him down!”

  My father leaped toward them. Bobo and Cana clutched my legs, making it impossible for me to move. Were the children screaming? Were the adults? Was I? All the noise jumbled together. Then I could make out Bobo’s voice.

  “I don’t like this game!” he protested. “I don’t want to play! Make it stop!”

  He still thought this was make-believe. He thought none of this was real. It was like his mind was protecting him from understanding what he’d seen.

  Just then my parents and Drusa pulled back from the Enforcer. My mother moaned, “Ohhhh . . . ,” and Drusa began repeating, “So it’s true. So it’s true. It was true all along. . . .”

  I couldn’t see what they were talking about, but I could tell that the Enforcer had stopped moving. Bobo and Cana were still clutching my legs, and Bobo had his face buried in my skirt. But it was unbearable not to know what the women were looking at, unbearable not to know what my father had touched before his hands jerked away from the Enforcer’s face. It was unbearable not to know what had happened. I inched forward, ready to push Bobo and Cana back if I saw anything that they shouldn’t.


  But Bobo got ahead of me. He thought the game was over; he thought the danger had been imaginary all along. He tiptoed close to the Enforcer, his mouth agape. He wore his fascinated expression, his “I’m about to ask questions” look. He stared at the place where the Enforcer’s face had been. Now it seemed to be covered by glossy black scales. And antennae. And a horned forehead.

  “Wow,” Bobo breathed. In awe. “Is that what everyone looks like under their skin? Does everyone have a face like a beetle underneath their regular face? I want to see my beetle face. Can you get a mirror?”

  He began tugging at the skin on his jaw, practically grunting with the effort.

  Our father put his hand against Bobo’s face, stopping him.

  “You don’t have a face like that,” our father said. “Humans just have one face. The only people with beetle faces underneath are . . .”

  Our mother finished for him in a whisper: “People from another planet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “What?” I said. “What?”

  My mind was so jumbled.

  This can’t be echoed in my brain, swirling around every thought. I’m just imagining this. Because of the trauma of this whole day, the trauma of every day since we came home . . . This can’t be true, because I’ve never encountered anything like this before, never even thought it was possible. . . .

  Except maybe I had.

  My mind jumped to the words I’d seen carved into Edwy’s airplane seat: “These people aren’t real either.” I’d forgotten about those words, dismissed them entirely once Edwy said he wasn’t talking about our real parents. I’d pretty much forgotten about the Enforcers too after I left the plane, before they became my jailers. But I should have been paying more attention. There were lots of things I should have noticed before it was too late.

  These people aren’t real either.

  Either.

  My mind couldn’t seem to grasp anything. The three adults—the three human adults—acted just as befuddled. My parents were sprawled sideways, motionless, as if they’d slipped into shock. Drusa kept murmuring, “So it’s true. It’s true. I always thought those were just rumors. Made-up stories. Lies . . .”