Children of Jubilee

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Both of us were scared.

  And both of us still had hope that everything would work out.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  When you’re not on a planet, there’s no such thing as day or night. I felt like I’d lost seconds, minutes, and hours, too. We had times of sleeping and times of waking. We had times of checking on Enu, and nothing to comfort us but the proof that he was still drawing shallow breaths, in and out. He was still alive.

  Beyond that, the only thing we had to measure time was our growing hunger.

  Not long after Rosi, Edwy, and Cana managed to corral the last of the floating blood, Alcibiades let himself sail up from the control panel and reach for a compartment overhead.

  It was empty.

  Alcibiades let out a distraught roar and clapped a tentacle over his mouth. He gazed despairingly at me, and I understood what he was upset about: He’d expected to find food in that compartment, and there was none. Maybe, as the Enforcers were taking over Alcibiades’s planet and enslaving all his people, some desperate Zacadian had raided this ship for one last meal. Maybe the Enforcers themselves had taken away the food because they didn’t want the Zacadians escaping.

  “Never mind,” I said. “We’ve been starving for weeks. We can last a little while longer, until we get to the intergalactic court.”

  Now I sounded like someone raised by Freds. I hoped Alcibiades heard the comforting tone in my voice even if he couldn’t understand the words.

  But the hunger made us dim and vague. Alcibiades knew how to give us water—either there was a tank on board that hadn’t been tainted, or the spaceship had some way to recycle the air and pull out hydrogen and oxygen to make liquid. (This occurred to me only after I’d taken many, many sips from a spigot on the wall.) But that left me thinking, It’s only something like three days that people can live without water. It’s much longer that people can live without food. But . . . how long? And does it matter that I got food on our last day on Zacadi, but Enu, Edwy, Rosi, and Cana didn’t? Does it matter that Enu is wounded and lost a lot of blood? Does that mean he needs food more than the rest of us?

  Does it matter that Alcibiades is a different species and may need food more often than we do? Or . . . less often? Or . . .

  I’d fall asleep, wake up, and go back to thinking, How long can people go without eating? Does Enu need food more because he’s injured? Does Alcibiades, because he’s a foreign species?

  We stopped talking much to one another, because what was there to say?

  I wanted to apologize to Alcibiades for not doing anything while his fellow Zacadians bravely stood between us and the Enforcers—while the Zacadians died for us. I wanted to apologize to Cana for turning her into a liar, letting her assure the other human prisoners that we’d come back for them, that we’d rescue them, too.

  But what did that matter, when the six of us who’d made it to the spaceship were probably going to die too?

  Strangely, I began thinking more and more of my parents. When their hometown had exploded in war, they’d thought only of saving their own children. They hadn’t tried to help anyone else, unless I counted Udans, their employee. (Did I count Udans? Did they?) I understood my parents better now. Escaping from prison, I’d thought only of rescuing my brothers and friends. I’d lied to convince other people to help us, and then I’d abandoned them completely. What my parents had done was cruel; what I’d done was cruel. They’d been in an unbearable, unwinnable situation, and so had I.

  But there’s still hope for me; there’s still time. Isn’t there? If we make it to the intergalactic court, we can get help for everyone we left behind—if anyone’s still alive.

  Wasn’t there still hope?

  I couldn’t talk about this with anyone else, because I might say there wasn’t hope. I couldn’t do that to Edwy, Rosi, and Cana.

  So I communicated with the three of them mainly by grunting, just as I did with Alcibiades. After a while, maybe I even started to lose the ability to think in anything but grunts, because my thoughts became even more disjointed, more like Food . . . water . . . Enu . . . Alcibiades . . . help . . . parents . . . forgive . . . help . . .

  And then one morning (afternoon? Evening? Night? Who knew?) I suddenly heard a booming voice fill the spaceship with a roar and grunts and groans and moans.

  “Is that . . . a Zacadian talking to us?” I asked weakly, barely able to lift my head to listen. “We’ve traveled all this time and we’re still close enough to Zacadi that communications come in that way?”

  “Maybe it’s just . . . prerecorded,” Edwy groaned to me as he floated vacantly past.

  It took me a minute to understand—he thought it was just a voice that went along with the ship. Maybe one of us had accidently jarred a lever that triggered a routine, automatic response.

  But Alcibiades didn’t react as though what we were hearing were automatic or routine. He’d been floating above me, his tentacles streaming listlessly around him in a way that made him appear more than ever like a jellyfish. But now he suddenly jerked to attention. He shot a tentacle out and shoved off against the area I thought of as the ceiling of our compartment (though of course there really was no up or down anymore.) That zipped him over to the control panel, and he began flapping tentacles across the screen just as urgently as he’d done when we were blasting off.

  “Ah—oog—an—oo!” he screamed, and somehow it occurred to me that he might be saying something like “Don’t shoot!”

  I shoved off the wall and flailed toward him.

  “Please! Help us! We’re in desperate need! One of us is injured!” I shouted, just in case whoever we were talking to would be friendlier to humans than Zacadians.

  The voice roared back, a tidal wave of grunts and groans. And then, surprisingly, it switched to the language I could understand, even though the words came out oddly accented:

  “We repeat: You are in intergalactic-court territory now. No one is allowed to enter or leave without permission. Your incursion into this zone will be treated as an enemy attack unless you explain your presence instantly. Countdown to destruction begins now. . . .”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I don’t know what Alcibiades said, but I could hear him groaning and moaning as I screamed, “We’re five innocent humans and one innocent Zacadian! Our only crime was to exist! Ask the Enforcers why we had to escape to here! And . . . ask the Freds! They care a lot about three of the children on our ship, even if they don’t care about the rest of us!”

  Silence from the voice. I could hear only Cana squeaking out, “What’s ‘destruction’ mean?”

  She didn’t know that word, but evidently she understood enough to react. Tears trembled in her eyelashes.

  “There’s a little girl on this spaceship who’s only five!” I screamed, tilting back my head to put more power behind my voice. “That’s five in human years, which is almost nothing at all. I don’t care what you think about the rest of us, but you can’t destroy a child like that—you can’t . . . you can’t. . . .”

  My voice gave out.

  It felt like an eternity passed before the mechanical voice sounded again. It spoke the Zacadian language first, so I had to watch Alcibiades to see if there was any hope. Shivers rolled through his body, but were they hopeful or despairing?

  Finally I heard the language I could understand:

  “We will let you land. We will take you into observational quarantine.”

  “Thank you—but my brother will need medical treatment right away!” I answered. “And we all need food!”

  Alcibiades gave a long moan—was he making a different request? Asking for directions?

  Then, suddenly, at the end of his moan I no longer heard it as a moan. I heard words that made sense.

  “As I said, I can land more easily if I have the ability to communicate with my shipmates.” The words seemed to come straight out of Alcibiades’s mouth.

  I clutched one of his tentacles.

  “
What did you just ask for?” I cried. “To be granted—”

  “Alcibiades! We can understand you perfectly again!” Cana squealed.

  He stared at Cana and me in wonder.

  “They made it so you learned my Zacadian language?” he asked in astonishment. “They could implant that in your brain even from so far away?”

  “No, they just made you speak human.” I shook my head. “How can you do that?”

  Rosi tapped me on the shoulder.

  “I think he’s hearing us in his language and we’re hearing him in ours,” she said, and actually laughed. “Isn’t this great? I think I’m going to like the intergalactic court!”

  “Especially if they have ice cream sundaes,” Edwy said in a croak. I realized it had been a long time since I’d heard him speak. But he quickly sounded like himself again. “Ice cream sundaes and cookies and cakes and puddings . . . yikes, even spinach sounds good to me right now!”

  We were all as giddy as Edwy as we prepared to land—well, we all were except for Enu. I went over and grabbed his hand and whispered, “We made it! Someone who knows what they’re doing can help you now!”

  His hand was still warm. His pulse still throbbed weakly beneath his skin. He was going to be okay.

  “I thought this moment would never come,” Alcibiades marveled as he hunched over the control panel. “I was writing our story in the ship’s computer system, so whoever found us would know. . . . Now we can tell our story directly to the intergalactic court.”

  “To Freds on the intergalactic court,” Cana said.

  My eyes met Edwy’s and Rosi’s, over Cana’s head. Edwy stopped crowing about cookies and cakes.

  “At least we had enough fuel to get here after all,” I said, not willing to let go of our gleeful moment.

  “We had enough to get here going super slow,” Alcibiades said. “We would have been here in five minutes, not five days, if we’d had that other Zacadi pearl.”

  Five days. That was how long we’d gone without food. No wonder I felt faint.

  That was also how long Enu had gone without medical treatment.

  “But we made it,” Rosi said firmly. “Did you know Kiandra managed to get every single one of the Zacadi pearls herself?”

  “I owe you my life,” Alcibiades said, in a deeply resonant voice that sounded nothing like his Zacadian grunts and groans or the translator’s robotic tone. It didn’t fit at all coming from a creature that looked like a mutant cross between a slug, an octopus, and an oversize jellyfish.

  “We owe you our lives,” I muttered, embarrassed. A vision rose up in my mind of our frantic fleeing: Alcibiades carrying us, his fellow Zacadians streaming out of the prison and falling before the Enforcers’ gunfire . . . “We owe you and all the other Zacadians who . . . who . . .”

  Before I could say more, the booming voice came back: “We have you locked into our guidance system, overriding your controls. Please strap yourselves in for landing.”

  “Hey, we did okay floating around during takeoff!” Edwy joked.

  “That’s because Alcibiades was flying us then,” Cana said, blinking up adoringly at the tentacled creature.

  “Wouldn’t seat belts be a little more important during a landing?” Rosi asked. “Because we’re hitting the ground? And returning to gravity?”

  “What you would call ‘seat belts’ in this spaceship are designed to be wrapped around tentacles, but here, I’ll help you adapt,” Alcibiades said.

  He started by tying Enu in more securely, then reached out tentacles to help the rest of us.

  Nine. I finally counted his tentacles, and that was how many he had.

  We glided smoothly down to the ground, and I began to feel an odd, unfamiliar tugging on my body. Was the gravity of the intergalactic court’s planet even more intense than gravity on Zacadi, or was I just unaccustomed to any gravity after five days in outer space?

  I felt light-headed, as though all the blood in my body was rushing toward my feet.

  Why hadn’t Alcibiades told us to strap in upside down?

  Because what would he understand about human bodies? I reminded myself.

  Our spaceship descended faster and faster. The forces acting on my body pulled my eyes into slits and drew the skin of my face back toward my ears. I stopped being able to see or hear.

  And then everything was still. We stopped moving.

  “Help my brother first,” I moaned, as soon as I could string words together again. My vision was still spotty. My hearing, too—I couldn’t really tell if Alcibiades, Edwy, Rosi, and Cana were calling out similar pleas. I couldn’t see how Enu was doing. But I dizzily lifted my head from the padded wall behind me and raised my voice, as if that would make the authorities of the intergalactic court hear me better. “He’s injured, and the landing might have reopened his wounds, and . . .”

  And then people in uniforms were streaming onto the spaceship. I saw them only in flashes, barely distinct as I tried to blink my vision back to normalcy. So it took me a moment to realize:

  They all looked human. Completely human.

  “You’re . . . you’re from Earth?” I gasped, as a woman untied me from the wall. “Like us? The intergalactic court hired humans to serve as medics?”

  “Of course not,” the man behind her practically snarled. “You’re in intergalactic court territory. The protocols apply, even in the docking port area.”

  “The . . . protocols?” I repeated stupidly.

  “Everybody here sees everybody else as being a member of his or her own species,” the woman said. “No matter what anyone really is. It’s like how you can hear your own language, even though I’m speaking mine.”

  I’d known that odd detail about the intergalactic court. Supposedly, that made everyone understand each other better, to see everybody on the court as the same. I remembered telling Edwy that information way back on Earth, and acting like he was an idiot for not knowing.

  “But . . . what are you really?” I asked. “What planet are you from?”

  “Want to see?” the man taunted. He ran his fingers over my eyelids. When I opened my eyes again, the human faces of the man and woman before me had melted away, revealing hard, scaly beetlelike heads.

  “Nooo . . . ,” I moaned.

  Frantically I looked past the man and woman bent over me, to the other uniformed creatures flooding onto the spaceship.

  Every single one of them was an Enforcer.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  “No, no, no, no—” My vision slipped back into seeing the man and woman beside me as human, but I shoved their hands away. “You can’t—this isn’t fair. We can’t plead our case to Enforcers. You have to—”

  “But it’s Enforcers who meet all unauthorized visitors,” the man growled. “That’s the setup.”

  “Then send us to your diplomats,” I begged. “Give us a fair hearing. Please—”

  “I think this counts as recalcitrant behavior, don’t you?” the woman muttered to the man.

  The man nodded, and I felt a prick against my arm. And then everything went black.

  When I woke up again, I was in a dark, shadowy room. The ceiling above me arced in an oddly familiar way, and I automatically reached out my left arm as though I knew a bedside light was going to be right there.

  It was. I pressed a button, and I was surrounded by a warm glow illuminating a familiar bedside table and a familiar jumble of electronic devices and cords. And beyond it, a familiar room with rainbow bottles of nail polish on the dresser and shorts and T-shirts strewn about the floor.

  It appeared that I was back on Earth, back in Refuge City, back in my ordinary bedroom. The only clue that I hadn’t just dreamed the past five days—or the past five weeks—was a tender bruise in the crook of my right elbow, the kind of bruise left behind by an IV.

  “What is going on?” I demanded. “Enu? Edwy? Are you—”

  My door cracked open almost instantly. But it wasn’t either of my brothers who a
ppeared in the doorway. It was a gray-haired old woman with a soft, kind human face.

  “This is more trickery, right?” I snarled at her. “You’re fooling me again, making me think I’m back home. These mind games—do you think you’re going to break me? Are you really an Enforcer too?”

  “An Enforcer? No, of course not,” the woman said, distress flowing over her gentle features. “Don’t you like your special room?”

  I shook my head hard, which sent jagged bolts of pain searing through my body. The woman patted my face, which somehow took the pain away.

  “Be still, be at peace,” she murmured.

  “Not when even the room around me is a lie,” I protested.

  The woman’s gentle eyes actually held tears of sympathy now.

  “Oh dear, I’m so sorry you feel that way,” she began. It was hard not to believe she was sincere. “We thought the familiar scene would be comforting. We went to great trouble with the authenticity. We had images specially beamed from Earth for you. But maybe humans raised on Earth aren’t . . . Oh, never mind. Is this better?”

  She pressed something on the wall, and the electronic devices, the nail polish, and the jumble of clothes disappeared. So did the arched ceiling. Suddenly I appeared to be in a sterile hospital room.

  “Yes, it is better,” I said. “Because this is really what I’m surrounded by. Right?”

  The woman nodded. I looked down at the long tunic I was wearing, which seemed to be wavering between looking like a hospital gown and my favorite T-shirt from home—a slouchy purple jersey with a ripped pocket.

  “And my real clothes are . . . ?” I began.

  The woman sighed.

  “You’re still wearing the clothes you arrived in,” she said. The hazy look around my shirt disappeared, and I saw the blue T-shirt and khaki shorts I’d been wearing since I left Earth. Somehow they seemed cleaner and newer.

  “Of course we disinfected and reconditioned them,” the woman said. “Your medical condition didn’t require anything else. But if you want to change, we could—”