Children of Jubilee

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  No need to finish the rest of the sentence.

  No. The answer was no.

  I tried to hold my breath, tried not to let out any oxygen I’d managed to trap in my lungs before breaking the window. But it was too late. My vision began to slip into darkness.

  And then something hit me on the head.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Alcibiades saved me. He saved all of us humans.

  He was still alert enough to realize that emergency breathing packets were falling from the ceiling, like hundreds of emergency oxygen masks on airplanes. Watching the members of the court snatch up the packets and press them against their arms—or legs or tentacles or, well, whatever—he snatched up a handful and pressed one against his own face, one on my shoulder, one on Cana’s wrist, one on Enu’s neck, and the last two on Rosi’s cheek and Edwy’s forehead.

  They all worked.

  “Okay, I hope you all understand that we were not trying to kill anyone, because of course that would have killed us as well, and nobody would do that,” Rosi said, scrambling toward the podium to try to explain.

  “If you have to blame somebody, blame me,” I said, stepping past her.

  I dared to look out at the crowd, and it seemed as though the Enforcers and the other stern-looking creatures were gathering to storm toward us. Then the fuzzy creatures—the Freds, and others who looked similar—formed a line along the railings. What good would that do? The Enforcers and their friends ran toward the Freds, and I expected them to break through easily. I braced to fight. Even if it was an unwinnable battle, I planned to go down swinging.

  But the Enforcers bounced back as soon as they reached the Freds.

  Could it be that the Freds were actually more powerful than the Enforcers?

  “Why did you ever let the Enforcers have any power?” I started to scream at them.

  But as I watched, something happened to the creatures before me. The air seemed clearer than ever. Maybe it was because the original air in the chamber had vanished completely, along with all the genetically altered microbes that had changed my vision. Now some of the fuzzy creatures seemed to lose parts of their fur, with beetlelike scales showing through instead. And some of the beetlelike creatures—the ones I’d taken for more Enforcers—seemed to grow fur on their arms, their stomachs, their foreheads. In seconds, almost all the creatures before us—both the ones protecting us and the ones who’d seemed intent on attacking us—displayed a mix of traits, scaly and fuzzy all at once.

  And now all the creatures began screaming the way I’d expected them to when I showed the video: “No!” “It’s not possible!” “This can’t be!”

  And then there was an overwhelming roar of lots of creatures screaming variations of the same words: “I can’t be seen like this!”

  In a panic they all began running from the room. Half beetles and creatures holding on to their patchy fur careened into one another, recoiling at every touch between fuzz and scaly carapace. None of them seemed interested in attacking or defending anyone now; they were all too intent on escape.

  And then the huge room before us was empty and silent, only us humans and Alcibiades left behind. I had to look closely to make sure none of us had started exchanging traits—that none of us humans had suddenly grown fur or scales, and that Alcibiades hadn’t grown a foot or a hand at the end of one of his slimy tentacles.

  We hadn’t. None of us looked any different than we had back on Earth or Zacadi, except for the total bafflement on everyone’s faces.

  “What was that all about?” Enu asked. He clutched my arm. “Did we just win or lose?”

  “I don’t think they were running off to get help for Zacadians or humans,” Alcibiades said glumly. “So whatever happened to all of them, we lost.”

  His tentacles slumped. Even in prison I hadn’t seen him looking so defeated.

  “Nonsense,” a voice said behind us. “Don’t you understand that you just proved your point exactly?”

  We all spun around. A mint-green Fred stood before us, completely covered in fur except for a small missing patch on one wrist—the kind of defect you might see on a stuffed animal that was carried around too much.

  “You succeeded completely,” the Fred told us briskly. “Which is not always the same thing as winning.”

  Rosi’s eyes widened.

  “Mrs. Osemwe?” she exclaimed.

  And then she flung herself at the Fred-woman, wrapping her arms around the creature in a giant hug.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Edwy tugged on Rosi’s arm, trying to pull her back from the Fred.

  “Rosi, no,” he cried. “You’ve gone delirious. Or crazy. Or something. You think this is Mrs. Osemwe, the principal of our school back in Fredtown? She always looked human, remember? Because she was wearing a costume? And the Freds were lying to us all along, and . . .”

  “Lying Freds?” Enu said, clenching his hands into fists again and peering hopefully in my direction.

  I shook my head at him, but it was a reflex more than anything else.

  “I. Don’t. Understand,” I said.

  Rosi stayed in the Fred-woman’s arms, but turned her face to peer back at the rest of us.

  “Cana, Bobo, and I saw what Mrs. Osemwe really looked like when we were running away from Cursed Town,” she said. “Remember, Cana?”

  Cana peeked around toward the Fred-woman’s back.

  “That was just a hologram of Mrs. Osemwe,” she said suspiciously. “Not real.”

  “This is the real me,” the Fred-woman said. “I couldn’t travel to Earth—er, well, I chose to believe I couldn’t travel to Earth. I refused to even consider taking that risk. But I’m here now. I came to petition the court weeks ago, but I wasn’t clever enough to figure out a way to get them to hear me.”

  Cana ran over and threw her arms around both Mrs. Osemwe and Rosi. The little girl tilted her head back, looking up at mint-green fur.

  “Can you fix everything now?” Cana whispered.

  “No,” Mrs. Osemwe said. “Because the six of you already have. This is what’s happening on Earth and Zacadi, this very moment.”

  She reached out and gently took my phone from my hand. She swiped a hand—or was it a paw?—across the screen, tapped in a few commands, then pointed the phone at the same blank wall I had used earlier.

  “Earth’s on the left,” she said. “Zacadi is on the right.”

  She didn’t need to tell us, because I recognized both scenes on the wall: the broad, open streets of Refuge City, the windswept wasteland of Zacadi. But the action on each side was similar: In each scene, Enforcers in dark uniforms ran toward what appeared to be some sort of space portal, which zapped them away. I didn’t fully understand until I saw other Enforcers running onto spaceships as well. And then the spaceships took off.

  On both planets, the Enforcers were running away. And they were so desperate to flee, they were using every method they could.

  Enu stumbled over and touched the wall, as if that would help him understand.

  “Is this real?” he asked. Now the scenes of retreating Enforcers flickered across his stunned face. “Is it true?”

  “Yeah,” Edwy agreed. “The intergalactic court accused Kiandra of faking her video—how do we know you’re not faking this?”

  Oh, my brothers, I thought. You’re so much alike.

  We Watanabonesets were all alike—I wanted to know the same thing.

  But Alcibiades also flung his tentacles toward the wall and the Zacadi scene, as if he could shove the departing Enforcers away even faster. As if that would help him believe too.

  Mrs. Osemwe raised the phone, temporarily aiming the scenes from our home planets onto the ceiling.

  “Let me insert an additional app and energy boost into this phone, and I can prove this to you,” she said. “You can contact anyone you’re concerned about back on your home planets.”

  “Bobo,” Rosi whispered, even as tears sprang to her eyes. “I can reach
Bobo? Finally?”

  “Our friend Udans,” I added. And then I surprised myself by adding, “And my parents.”

  “Anyone who was imprisoned with me,” Alcibiades said, his face stony. “Any Zacadian who’s left at all.”

  Mrs. Osemwe nodded sadly.

  “This will take a few moments,” she said. “But I’ll work as fast as I can.”

  She shut off the images glowing from my phone and laid it down on the podium.

  “Can you answer questions while you work?” Rosi asked. “What changed? How did we make that happen?”

  “Why are the Enforcers running away?” I asked. “Did the intergalactic court believe us after all?”

  “What happened to the court, anyway?” Alcibiades asked. “Why were they so upset about how they looked?”

  “And why did they change so much after we broke the window?” Cana asked.

  Mrs. Osemwe glanced toward Edwy.

  “Go ahead,” she said wearily. “I’m sure you have about fifty questions too.”

  Edwy flashed her his saintliest smile.

  “Believe it or not, I know how to take turns now,” he said. “You can answer everyone else’s questions first.”

  Mrs. Osemwe raised an eyebrow in surprise, then patted him on the back. Then he surprised me by hugging her as well.

  “Where to start?” Mrs. Osemwe muttered, even as she returned to working on the phone. “I suppose you need to know the background. . . . We discovered recently that long before our first interactions with humans or Zacadians, all the peoples represented on the intergalactic court were descended from the same ancient species.”

  “Freds and Enforcers are the same?” Edwy exploded.

  Mrs. Osemwe tilted her head to the side.

  “Believe me, it was a surprise to us, too,” she said wryly. “But the scholarship is impeccable. Unimpeachable. We began the same, but took vastly different paths as we spread across the galaxies.”

  “But—but—the way you and the Enforcers look . . . ,” Enu stammered. “It’s like comparing a Tyrannosaurus rex and, I don’t know, baby chicks.”

  “Which human scientists discovered are also related to each other,” Mrs. Osemwe said approvingly. “Young man, that is the perfect analogy. I can tell you must be a whiz at school.”

  Enu and I both stifled giggles. I’m pretty sure Mrs. Osemwe didn’t see, because she bent low over the phone.

  I’m also pretty sure Enu had had no clue that dinosaurs and birds were related. But at least his confusion was wearing off, and he was making sense again.

  “The difference,” Mrs. Osemwe continued, “is that the Enforcers’ and Freds’ common ancestor had a trait that we’ve never found in unrelated species. There’s nothing like it on Zacadi”—she dipped her head apologetically toward Alcibiades—“but you humans might see a resemblance to one type of Earth creature. The chameleon.”

  “Chameleons can change how they look,” Cana said, as if she were reciting facts in school. “My teacher said some people think it’s to hide from other animals that might eat them. And other people think it’s to keep from getting too hot or cold, or to send a message to other chameleons. . . . Can you change the color of your fur any time you want, Mrs. Osemwe?”

  “Not exactly,” Mrs. Osemwe said, smiling gently at the little girl. “Chameleons can change back and forth pretty quickly. For Freds and Enforcers, what we look like reflects our entire life.”

  “Those court people changed instantly!” Edwy said, pointing out into the empty chambers, where we’d watched everyone morph from human appearance to a wide variety of fur and scales.

  “Because you were seeing them change to their truest forms,” Mrs. Osemwe said.

  “Everything else we ever saw of them was a costume, right?” Rosi asked. “Or an illusion. Or what Edwy was telling us about, where microbes in the air distorted our view.”

  “Until we broke the window,” Alcibiades bragged.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Osemwe said. She looked down at the bare, furless part of her arm. “When everything about how we live our lives is reflected in our appearance, we had to learn how to . . . hide sometimes, to have any privacy at all.”

  “So when we saw everyone there at the end, when they all screamed and panicked and ran away—that was almost like they thought we’d seen everyone naked, right?” Edwy asked.

  I decided not to point out that he’d failed to wait for Mrs. Osemwe to answer everyone else’s questions first.

  “Yes, that would be the comparable human experience,” Mrs. Osemwe said. “Except that it was even worse for the Freds and the Enforcers and the others here in the courtroom. It was like they were naked and every bad thing they’d ever done was written on their skin. In giant letters.”

  “I didn’t see any writing,” Enu said. Which probably gave Mrs. Osemwe a better idea of how Enu always did in school.

  “You mean the fur or scales—those are just symbols?” Cana asked.

  “Not just symbols, but yes, that’s how it works,” Mrs. Osemwe said. “When I was a child, my little brother was annoying me one day, and I pinched him. He was too little to talk yet, so he couldn’t tell anyone. But one patch of my fur fell out, and my parents knew instantly that I’d done something wrong.”

  “If I’d been a Fred kid, I would have been totally furless by the time of my first birthday!” Edwy said.

  “So that bare space on your arm—that’s from something you did as a little kid?” I asked. “And that’s the only bad thing you ever did?”

  “No, no,” Mrs. Osemwe laughed. “That was just my baby fur affected—like how you humans have baby teeth and adult teeth. We start over as adults. Freds practice as kids and then work very hard as adults to preserve their full fur. It’s a point of pride. Just as the Enforcers pride themselves on being tough and . . . emotionless.”

  I thought about this system. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to know instantly, just by looking at someone, if they were kind or mean.

  That’s sort of how people in Cursed Town saw the world, believing that whether or not someone had green eyes determined whether they were good or bad, I realized. They wanted humans to be that simple.

  But it didn’t really work that way for humans. For humans, all of that was a lie. Even when humans tried out genetic alterations to get the “right” eye color, they’d just had more to fight about.

  The system Mrs. Osemwe was talking about was real—how Freds and Enforcers looked really did reflect how they behaved.

  “So the Enforcers are proud of being mean?” Rosi asked. Her voice shook, as if this idea frightened her.

  “They are proud of being strong,” Mrs. Osemwe corrected. “They interpret the symbols differently. They think fur is a sign of weakness. And stupidity. Naïveté. Which . . . maybe sometimes it was.”

  “But everyone worked together on the intergalactic court,” I said, and for some reason my voice came out too loud, and every bit as shaky as Rosi’s. “The Freds and the Enforcers—and all the other species that were like the Freds, and all the other species that were like the Enforcers—they all made decisions together. They agreed on things. To let the Freds take human children away, and then to send them back. To—”

  “To let the Enforcers destroy my planet and steal the Zacadi pearls. And enslave my people and work them to death,” Alcibiades interrupted. He slashed one tentacle through the air in a way that made me think of a judge pounding a gavel and pronouncing a guilty sentence.

  Mrs. Osemwe dropped her head. Her hands stilled. I saw that she’d disassembled my phone, but hadn’t started putting it back together again. It was in so many tiny pieces, I didn’t see how it could ever work again.

  “We were wrong,” Mrs. Osemwe whispered. “We never understood humans or Zacadians. Both your species—you have such capacity for good, and such capacity for evil. Freds and Enforcers . . . we always believed you could only be one thing.”

  “The Enforcers are evil,” Enu growled. “You actual
ly thought the Freds were good?”

  “We tried,” Mrs. Osemwe said. She spread her arms like she wanted to hug us all. “We saw all the pain on Earth, and we thought we could help.”

  “You made my parents’ pain worse,” Rosi said. I’d never seen her speak so unflinchingly, so . . . unkindly. And yet it didn’t seem as though she wanted to cause Mrs. Osemwe pain. She just wanted her to know the truth.

  “And did you think that anything the Enforcers did on my planet would help the Zacadians?” Alcibiades asked incredulously.

  “We trusted the Enforcers to report to us about everything on Zacadi,” Mrs. Osemwe said. “We shouldn’t have, but we thought if we looked too closely, it would . . . hurt us, too. It would make us lose our fur.”

  And suddenly I understood.

  “But in the intergalactic court, the Freds and the Enforcers rubbed off on each other,” I said. “Being around the Enforcers made the Freds make decisions that weren’t entirely kind. And being around the Freds made some of the Enforcers a little nicer. None of you were purely one-sided anymore. Even the Enforcers who met us when our spaceship landed were nicer than the ones we ran away from on Zacadi.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Osemwe said. Meticulously she put together two pieces of my phone that seemed almost too small to matter. “Everyone in the intergalactic court complex changed in some way. And in the Fredtowns we built for the human children, we found that they rubbed off on us too, and even though we thought we were being entirely kind and generous in raising them, they changed us too, in ways we didn’t expect.” She touched the bare patch on her arm. “This wasn’t because of anything I did wrong, necessarily. It was because I came to understand humans. And . . . discovered that some of my most badly behaved students could also be among my favorites.”

  Edwy grinned as though she’d complimented him personally.

  Oh—maybe she had. Yeah, that seemed about right: Edwy was probably the worst-behaved kid in his Fredtown school.

  “But why would any of that make the Enforcers leave Earth?” Enu asked. “Or Zacadi?”

  “Because we Freds and the other species like us were always more powerful than the Enforcers and their ilk,” Mrs. Osemwe said. “Living in peace gives a culture more space and freedom to develop its technology. We had the power, but we told ourselves it was nobler not to use it. You children forced us to see ourselves and our actions as they really are. And once you’ve seen the truth, you can no longer live a lie.”