Children of Jubilee

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  My voice trembled. But, strangely, none of the others seemed to be listening. They all had their heads tilted back; all three of them gazed up as if they were taking Rosi seriously, and seeking guidance from above.

  Enu laid a shaking hand on my shoulder and pointed off into the distance, toward the sky.

  “Am I just seeing double?” he asked. “Tell me I’m just seeing double. My eyes haven’t adjusted yet. . . .”

  “Or did the Enforcers bring an extra moon with them?” Edwy asked. “Or is that their spaceship hovering overhead, and it just looks like the moon? There can’t be two!”

  Two moons? What were they even talking about? I wanted to make fun of them for hallucinating, for trusting their own groggy eyes so soon after waking. They were probably both still dreaming.

  But I looked up, and they were right. Two moons hung low in the sky, both somewhere between half and full, both so luminous and bright that I could see the pockmarks on their faces. The pockmarks weren’t the same; the moons weren’t identical. They weren’t mirrored images, either. So Enu was wrong about the double vision.

  And both moons were definitely moons, not spaceships.

  So . . . next theory? I wondered.

  Rosi cleared her throat.

  “Or,” she whispered, “do those two moons mean . . . we’re on another planet, in another solar system? Again?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “The Enforcers could send us to another planet that easily?” Enu asked numbly. “Just with a swipe of the one guy’s arm?”

  “Rosi, didn’t you say Mrs. Osemwe told you there were different ways to travel between planets?” Edwy asked. “When all of us Fredtown kids came back to Earth, we thought we were just on an airplane, but they were fooling us. That means . . .”

  I stopped listening to Edwy and his theories. I didn’t even bother asking who Mrs. Osemwe was.

  We’re not in Refuge City anymore. We’re not even on Earth.

  I couldn’t stop staring at the two moons.

  “How are we ever going to get back to Bobo now?” Rosi wailed.

  My brain skipped ahead to other questions: How can we survive in a place that can’t even grow grass? Where there aren’t any buildings or cities? Where there’s no way to walk or drive or ride back to Refuge City—not without a spaceship? Or . . . whatever the Enforcer used?

  I made myself stand up. I wanted to get away from the others’ moaning and groaning—and from the questions in my own mind. But if propping myself up into a seated position had been hard, standing felt a hundred times more precarious. My legs wobbled; my knees threatened to buckle. I felt again like I was on an amusement-park ride—the centrifuge type, the kind that made your limbs feel unbearably heavy.

  “Gravity,” I grunted. “I think this is a planet with stronger gravity.”

  I fell over, bashing my knee against a clod of dirt.

  A moment too late Edwy reached out to catch me.

  “Oh, weird,” he said, watching his own arms draw back in slow motion. “Sorry, Kiandra. I thought I could help.”

  I’d seen video of astronauts walking on the moon—Earth’s moon, I mean. They leaped and bounced, even in heavy-looking spacesuits. Because the moon has less gravity than the Earth. But this was the opposite effect. I felt pinned to the ground.

  Was it possible the air was thicker too?

  “Are you hurt?” Rosi asked.

  “Just my pride,” I muttered.

  Rosi shot me a confused look—oh, yeah, kids raised in Fredtown probably didn’t get the concept of pride. But then she tilted her head to the side and said, “It makes sense that this planet would have stronger gravity, if it can hold on to more moons than Earth can. And don’t they both look bigger than Earth’s moon? Or is that just because they’re low in the sky right now?”

  My hands itched to look this up online, to see if she was right or not.

  “School stuff,” Edwy snorted. “That’s the kind of thing teachers would want us figuring out.”

  “Yeah,” Enu agreed. Of course my two school-hating brothers would be in solidarity on this. “Why does that matter? Who cares?”

  “I’m trying to figure out everything I can,” Rosi said in a small voice, as if the two boys had hurt her. “Maybe figuring out one thing can lead to figuring out other things. Like . . .”

  “Why are we here?” I finished for her. “Why did the Enforcer send us here?”

  “We’re not going to find that out lying around on the ground talking,” Enu scoffed. “If the light is gone, I bet we aren’t trapped in a cage anymore. Which means . . .”

  He rose to a crawling position, then stood and took a cautious step away from the rest of us. Enu would tell anyone who listened what a great athlete he was, but on this planet even he moved like an overweight gorilla.

  “See?” he said. He waved—or, more accurately, slow-motion flopped—his arms in front of him. He reached farther out than where the boundaries of our light cage had once stood. “We can escape.”

  “Because probably the whole planet’s a prison,” I muttered. I swayed, feeling light-headed all over again. Instantly I wanted to take back my own words.

  What if I was right? What if this planet was a prison?

  Or worse—a graveyard?

  Enu took another step forward. Suddenly, as if he’d triggered it, a beam of blinding light shot toward us from a single pole we hadn’t been able to see before, off in the distance. I heard a door scrape open behind us.

  “Took you long enough to wake up,” a deep, evil-sounding voice complained. “And three of you are as scrawny as eels. . . . Are you children? They sent us children? What good is that?”

  “We’re good kids,” Rosi said faintly.

  The evil voice broke off for an evil chuckle; then it replied, “I’ll beat that out of you.”

  The light we were caught in swung past us, like a guard tower’s searchlight. For only a moment the glow struck the shadowy figure in the doorway of what appeared to be a concrete box. The creature was gargantuan, and it was hard to say which were more threatening: his bulging muscles or the guns and grenades he wore strapped across his chest and hips.

  If this planet was a prison, this creature was our prison guard.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “He’s not wearing a helmet,” Edwy whispered.

  The guard’s face was in the shadows, but there was enough of a glow around him to see that this was true: He had no protective bubble surrounding his head.

  Instinctively, my hand clenched around the clod of dirt I’d hit my knee on. Back in the desert, back on Earth, we’d had our short-lived victory against the Enforcers because they hadn’t learned to wear helmets yet. From his hiding place in a cave, Udans had managed to throw rock after rock at the small cluster of Enforcers sent out to chase Rosi. He’d knocked open the masks that made them look human; that had knocked them unconscious, because they couldn’t breathe in Earth’s atmosphere without a mask or a helmet.

  Could I use this clod of dirt the way Udans had used a rock? Or, if I couldn’t, could I transfer it quickly enough to Enu and let him throw it?

  Would he think to take the stronger gravity into account before he sent the clod sailing off toward the prison guard’s face? What were the odds that he could hit the guard in the right section of the mask—before the guard shot us all?

  No, maybe, probably not, the chances against it are about infinity to one. . . .

  How could I even think about Udans’s feat without also thinking about how that had probably sealed his fate?

  Could I think about any of that without falling over in grief?

  The guard let out another evil chuckle, a sound like the tolling of doom.

  “I can hear you, you know,” he said.

  He didn’t seem the least bit worried about anyone hurling anything at his face.

  “My brother, this little boy—he just . . . he just likes to think out loud,” I said quickly. “He talks all the time about every
thing he sees.”

  I wanted to elbow Edwy, to get him to start babbling senselessly: The sky is dark; this planet has two moons; I’m wearing a blue shirt. . . . It was a lesson I’d learned from hacking: The best way to cover your tracks was to create lots and lots of tracks, too many for anyone to follow.

  Would it be too obvious if I started babbling like that?

  Before I could decide, the guard snorted, a sound at least as awful as his chuckles.

  “Swatting away little gnats like you can be so annoying,” he growled. “So I’ll tell you: This planet has an atmosphere that both your species and mine can breathe. None of us need masks or helmets. Not you or me. Or, I should say, the atmosphere doesn’t harm me, and it is only minimally poisonous to humans. So you won’t die until after you’ve served your purpose here.”

  I shivered, but Edwy was incredibly bold.

  “What is our purpose here?” he asked.

  “Hey! I ask the questions!” the guard shouted. He swiped an arm to the right, and Edwy’s head slammed into me—exactly as if he’d been punched on the side of his face and he’d had no chance to brace himself for the impact.

  Edwy rubbed his face.

  “How’d he do that from way over there?” he mumbled.

  Edwy’s head jerked back, his head bouncing off Rosi’s shoulder this time. Now it was like he’d been punched in the nose.

  “Anyone else got any questions?” the guard taunted.

  “N-n-no,” Rosi stammered. She put her arms around Edwy and whispered, “Please, Edwy, don’t ask anything else. This isn’t a Fred-teacher. He isn’t going to be nice.”

  That was the understatement of the century.

  I remembered how much my older brother hated anyone telling him what to do. I swiveled toward Enu, but he was just standing there frozen, as terrified as I was.

  The guard yawned. I heard his jaw crack. Or whatever Enforcers had instead of jaws.

  “It’s ten hours to sunrise,” he said. “Overnight temperatures out here this time of year can dip down to—oh, I don’t know what primitive numbering system you humans use. Think of the coldest temperature you’ve ever heard of, and then imagine it a hundred times worse. If you can. I don’t care if you all freeze to death out here tonight, but central command gets touchy about spending time and effort to send prisoners out here if I don’t get some work out of them.”

  “We’re prisoners?” Rosi murmured. “And you’re going to make us work? For you?”

  Edwy lunged toward her, as if he wanted to take whatever invisible punch was headed her way for asking questions. But the guard didn’t do anything to beat her up from a distance.

  Maybe he didn’t even recognize her words as questions.

  Maybe he thought she was just accepting reality.

  “Into your cage,” the guard said. “Now.”

  And then I felt the oddest sensation: It was like somebody else’s brain took over my body. My legs unbent; my torso rose; my sandaled feet rolled into position. I felt the heels, then the balls of my feet, then my toes propel me forward, left foot, then right, then left again. I wanted to look down to see how my feet were moving without my control, but I couldn’t bend my neck. Somebody else—the guard?—was forcing my eyes to stay trained straight ahead, looking only toward the doorway of the concrete box.

  Did my limbs feel like elephant legs to whoever was moving them now?

  The guard stepped to the side as we neared the door. I wanted so badly to turn my head and stare at him, to see close up if any part of his body was vulnerable, if there was any place we could kick or punch to overpower him. There were four of us and only one of him—wasn’t that an advantage?

  But I couldn’t turn my head any more than I could bend my neck. My head stayed facing forward; my legs kept marching, out of my control.

  I couldn’t do anything except what the Enforcer wanted me to do.

  And think, I reminded myself. I can still think.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The doorway we entered led to dark, squalid stairs. The steps were uneven—haphazard, even—and it was terrifying not to have any control over how fast we climbed down. My brain screamed, I’m going to trip! I’m going to fall! But I couldn’t open my mouth to beg, Please! Let us go slower! I couldn’t even groan. My vocal cords were just as frozen as my mouth, as my tongue, as my neck.

  We reached the bottom and there was no light here. I couldn’t see Enu ahead of me; I was incapable of turning my neck to see Edwy and Rosi behind me. I couldn’t even call out to make sure they were there. My legs kept propelling me forward. Then, abruptly, my body pivoted to the left. I heard a clanging behind me.

  “Good night,” the guard’s voice taunted from high above us.

  And then suddenly I tumbled to the ground, my face hitting Enu’s heel.

  “Get off me!” he yelled, shoving me away. “Let me go!”

  “Enu, stop!” I cried. “I’m not doing anything! The Enforcer just . . . gave us back control of our own bodies!”

  “Finally!” he grunted.

  “I never want that to happen again,” Edwy moaned behind me. “That was awful. I couldn’t even control my own body enough to sneeze, and I needed to sneeze so bad. . . .”

  “So sneeze now,” Enu growled at him.

  “I . . . can’t,” Edwy said. “Don’t need to anymore.”

  “Is everyone okay?” Rosi asked.

  I slid my hands over my arms and legs, as if I needed to reassure myself they were truly mine again. I was a little surprised that they didn’t feel any different than usual. I even seemed to have adjusted to the stronger gravity of this planet. Or, at least, the gravity seemed like a minor problem now, compared with the Enforcer’s power over us.

  “How did the Enforcer do that?” I asked.

  “How do we fight it?” Edwy countered.

  “Maybe if we negotiate . . . ,” Rosi began.

  “No, we fight,” Enu said. “We fight this to the death. We kill every Enforcer we can.”

  “How are you going to do that when just one Enforcer can make all four of us walk down into a dark cage any time he wants?” I asked.

  Instantly I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth. Because that question lingered in the darkness. No one answered me. Nobody could.

  “Maybe we should just get some sleep,” Rosi finally said. “Maybe we can figure out something in the morning. Should . . . should we all huddle together for warmth?”

  “I guess so,” Edwy agreed.

  Enu and I didn’t say anything, but we all scooted close together. My head sagged onto Enu’s shoulder; he leaned against my arm. I couldn’t quite remember it, but this might have been how we’d slept when we’d first arrived in Refuge City as toddlers, torn away from our parents and the only home we’d ever known.

  Edwy and Rosi leaned against my other side. I thought about how much better it had made me feel to have Cana’s hand in mine, back in the basement in Refuge City.

  “We need to make sure our hands don’t get cold either,” I said, lacing the fingers of my right hand in Enu’s left, my left hand in Edwy’s right.

  And this is how desperate we all were: My brothers let me hold their hands.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The buzzing of an alarm woke us. We were still surrounded by total darkness, so I had no way of knowing if morning had arrived or if the guard was waking us up in the middle of the night. But I’d barely had a chance to stretch out my stiff arms and legs when suddenly my body stood up, seemingly entirely on its own.

  “Wha—” Enu began, before his voice was silenced and he shoved away from me and rose to his feet as well.

  Okay, pay attention, I told myself. The Enforcer didn’t take us over all at once. So maybe . . . it takes a lot of effort? A lot of energy?

  My body began moving toward the wall. I could hear Enu, Edwy, and Rosi shuffling alongside me. Then suddenly the top half of my body plunged forward, bent over at the waist. My chin and mouth landed in something
slimy and cold. My mouth opened, my teeth chewed, my throat swallowed the nastiest food I’d ever tasted.

  Cold porridge? I thought. Gruel?

  I only knew those terms from stories. Back when Enu and I were little, one of our worst nannies had always threatened to feed us gruel. But even she had never done it.

  Now here we were, all four of us gobbling down disgusting swill, burying our faces in it to eat like horses. Or pigs.

  The minute I have control again, I told myself, I’m going to scream out, “We’re humans, not animals! Humans use silverware! Or chopsticks! We’re civilized!”

  My tongue licked the bottom of the rough wooden tray.

  I could get a splinter! I wanted to scream. I could cut my tongue and start dripping blood everywhere!

  My tongue kept licking the wood, hunting down the last nasty, crusted-on grain.

  Then my waist unbent; my spine straightened up. I could feel a line of slobber and gruel slithering down my chin, and all I wanted to do was wipe it off. But my elbow wouldn’t bend. I concentrated hard, and . . .

  I managed to swing the fingers of my right hand ever so slightly to the left.

  Of course, this was pointless if whatever force controlling my body wouldn’t let me lift my hand to my face.

  But it’s good to know, I thought. This proves the Enforcer doesn’t control everything. Right now all he cares about is making me walk.

  And making me feel like I didn’t have control.

  The four of us climbed the stairs, and Rosi, who was in the lead, pushed the door open. Through a thick haze I could see the first rays of sunrise shining on a vast, empty plain: nothing but dirt and rock. Even with more light than the night before, I couldn’t see a single blade of grass, a single sign that anything grew here.

  Or that anyone lived here.

  “The mines,” a voice sounded beside me. “Where you’ll work the rest of your lives.”