Children of Exile Read online

  I reached the front door and eased the latch open. I inched the door apart from the doorframe.

  The hinges creaked and I froze, straining my ears to listen for snores.

  Still there, still angry . . .

  I stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind me.

  Edwy was waiting in the shadows.

  “I was about to give up,” he whispered.

  “I had to make sure everyone was asleep,” I whispered back.

  “You would,” Edwy said.

  At first I took that as an insult—Edwy acting disgusted that I was careful and meticulous, just as he was always disgusted back in Fredtown when I did my homework properly and made him look bad for scrawling down any old answer.

  I almost turned around and went back into the house. But then he stepped out of the shadows and his eyes glinted for a moment in the dim moonlight. And there was something in his gaze that I’d never noticed before—admiration? trust?

  Whatever it was made me step up beside Edwy. But I also put a finger to my lips.

  “We shouldn’t talk unless we have to,” I whispered.

  Edwy nodded. He handed me a pair of socks and pantomimed putting them over his shoes.

  Oh, to muffle the sounds of our footsteps . . .

  Edwy was good at being sneaky. He had a lot more practice at it than I did.

  I slipped the socks over my own shoes. I thought about how Fred-mama would have fretted about holes growing in the socks, about wasting precious resources.

  It’s not a waste if this helps protect Bobo and the other kids, I thought with a firmness that surprised me. I felt like I was talking back to Fred-mama from a distance of thousands of kilometers.

  Edwy and I crept forward, through the near-total darkness, along the street full of tumbledown houses. We reached the creek and turned right, the opposite way from downtown.

  “Nobody lives near the creek, so I think it’s safe to talk now,” Edwy whispered.

  I could have said, So what are you showing me? I could have said, Why couldn’t this have waited until tomorrow? I could have said, Have you ever heard of a parent slapping a child? Have you ever heard of anyone treating someone differently just because of the color of her eyes? But Fred customs required a clearing of the air after any insult or slight, and somehow I couldn’t let go of every bit of Fredtown behavior.

  “I’m sorry the . . . my . . . the adults never thanked you for bringing the suitcases,” I said. “I’m sorry they acted so mean about your family.”

  Edwy shrugged, a motion I could barely see in the darkness.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “They were right. My family did steal your suitcases. I just stole them back.”

  I gasped. But Edwy grinned, his teeth gleaming white in the moonlight.

  “Edwy, that’s not funny!” I said. “You need to tell someone! I know you wouldn’t want to tattle, but you shouldn’t have to live in an environment like that! You have a right to—to—”

  “Rosi, Rosi, Rosi,” Edwy said, still grinning. I didn’t know if he meant to sound like my Fred-parents or not, but it made my heart ache a little. “We’re not in Fredtown anymore. Who would I tell? I mean, who else? I just told you.”

  My heart seemed to skip a beat. Edwy meant that he’d chosen me as his confidant, as the person he trusted to help him right a wrong. He was treating me like a grown-up, like a Fred.

  I felt the burden of responsibility. How could either of us fix a problem like this?

  How could we fix anything about our hometown when we didn’t understand what had happened here?

  “Every child has the right to grow up in safety and security, without fear and without lies,” I said numbly, quoting another principle of Fredtown.

  “Yeah, well, if nobody lies to us and nobody tells us the truth either, that just leaves us—what was that word the man on the plane used? It leaves us stupid,” Edwy said. “It makes us dumb, stupid idiots.”

  I cringed, hearing him say those words.

  “Ignorant,” I corrected him. “Just because we don’t know things, that doesn’t mean our brains don’t work. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn what we need to know.”

  Edwy just looked at me.

  “Either way, do you think we’re safe and secure here?” he asked.

  Fredtown customs required being optimistic and looking on the bright side and making the best of things. But somehow, sneaking around in the dark seemed to give me permission to tell Edwy the truth. It wasn’t just the darkness that scared me.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “That’s what I think too,” Edwy whispered back.

  What could I say to that? For a while we walked along the creek without speaking. The path seemed oddly overgrown. The moon kept disappearing behind the roiling clouds in the sky, and for long moments we could only feel our way tentatively, grasping for tree trunks and branches.

  “I gave up on the fishing this afternoon,” Edwy finally whispered. “Why bother doing something you know you’re going to fail at?”

  “Because you can never know for sure,” I argued. “Because—”

  “Rosi, listen,” Edwy said, and something in his voice silenced me. In the darkness, when I wasn’t looking directly at him, he sounded almost as young as Bobo. I could relate to him the way I had when he was younger and we were best friends.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  Edwy nodded impatiently.

  “Anyhow, this afternoon, I knew it was too soon to go home, because then everyone would know I’d given up,” he said. “So I started looking around. I wanted to see everything in this town with my own eyes.”

  I could respect that. I didn’t remind him it fit with the Fredtown principle about paying attention so you’d learn something every day.

  “I saw the places where all the houses are nice and you could just tell that everybody had a lot of money,” he said. “Even if they stole it.”

  Maybe he was trying to make me laugh. But I didn’t.

  “I saw places where the houses were poor and falling down, and the people walking around didn’t even seem to own shoes,” he said.

  Like where Bobo and I live, I thought. I hadn’t realized I should be grateful that at least we had shoes.

  “And then I saw . . . this,” Edwy said.

  He took my shoulder and aimed me away from the creek and the sheltering line of trees.

  All I could see was darkness. I put my hands out in front of my face and felt only empty air.

  “Edwy, there’s nothing here,” I said.

  “We’re walking on ash now,” he said. “Feel it.”

  He took my arm and—with more gentleness than I would have thought him capable of—pulled me down into a crouch so I could touch my fingers to the ground.

  It did feel like ash beneath my fingertips. Old, cold, dead ash.

  “Wait for the moon to come back out,” Edwy whispered. “You’ll see. The ash, the burned place—it goes on and on. . . .”

  I shivered just at the tone of his voice. The glow of the moon was muted, right at the edge of a cloud. Very slowly, the cloud began to slip away, releasing more light. I saw hillocks and shadowy bumps ahead of us.

  “There was a house that burned back in Fredtown, remember?” I told Edwy. “Someone forgot to blow out a candle. But the family was safe because they had smoke detectors. And we started having Fire Safety Day at school every year after that.”

  I wondered if my house here had smoke detectors. Probably not. I would have to talk to the mother and the father about that.

  “One house in Fredtown burned,” Edwy said. “And the family rebuilt it right away. My Fred-dad was the architect, so I heard all about the plans. That was a long time ago. I bet you can’t even remember which house it was now.”

  He was right. I couldn’t.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to see until the moon’s all the way out, but probably a hundred houses burned here,” Edwy said. “And it was a long ti
me ago here, too, because some of the ruined houses have trees growing out of the middle of them. And it doesn’t look like anybody has tried to rebuild.”

  I stood up. The moon was still half hidden, but there was enough light now that the hillocks and bumps ahead of me were transformed into fallen beams and collapsed, half-burned walls. We were in a wasteland, a cemetery of old, dead, decaying houses.

  “What happened to all the people who lived here?” I asked. “Did they leave after their houses burned, and they never came back?”

  “Or,” Edwy whispered, “did they all die?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  What Edwy was suggesting was too horrible to think about. People didn’t die in fires. They had smoke detectors. They had fire departments. They had family escape plans that they practiced each year on Fire Safety Day.

  At least people in Fredtown had had all that.

  “If there were a hundred houses here,” I said, “that would have been hundreds and hundreds of people. . . .”

  I’d had trouble holding back a shiver before. Now my whole body trembled.

  Edwy put his arm around me, just like he would have done when we were little.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “Maybe I don’t know anything.”

  He waited, like he expected me to agree that he was both ignorant and stupid.

  I couldn’t speak.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said. “Maybe I should have kept it to myself.”

  I drew in a choked breath. I thought of Bobo, sleeping so innocently back at the parents’ house.

  “No, no, I think I needed to know.” I swallowed hard. “We both need to know what to protect the other kids against.”

  “What if we can’t protect anyone?” Edwy whispered. “Not even ourselves?”

  I jerked away from him.

  “We can,” I said. “We have to. We’ll find out everything, and then we’ll . . . we’ll move everyone back to Fredtown, if that’s what it takes. We’ll keep all the kids safe. Including ourselves.”

  I didn’t even recognize my own voice. I sounded fierce and strong. And tough. It wasn’t very Fred-like of me.

  Edwy took a step back.

  “Rosi . . . ,” he began. Then he flinched and grabbed my arm and pulled me down low against the ground.

  “Someone’s coming,” he whispered in my ear.

  We smashed ourselves flat against ash and dirt. A log—which maybe had once been a ceiling beam—lay between us and the sound of footsteps off in the distance.

  “I don’t know why we had to come way out here,” a man’s voice complained. “Nobody’s watching us. Everybody I know is too busy changing diapers and listening to babies cry, now that we’ve got the children back.”

  “Don’t you remember anything from before?” a second man asked. “From the last time? We were so close to succeeding!”

  “Yeah, and it was those Freds who stopped us,” the first man answered. “We don’t have to worry about them anymore.”

  My heart gave a little leap of dismay. I didn’t know what these men were talking about. They spoke as carelessly and cruelly as the men who’d brought us from Fredtown, but I’d seen those men leaving with the plane. Like they were supposed to. These men seemed to be from my hometown; they’d said, “We’ve got the children back.”

  And, listening in the darkness, I could hear that there was a difference in the way these men pronounced their words. A different accent. The men on the plane had made their words into weapons, sharp and cutting and so different from the gentle way Freds talked. But the mother, the father, these men—really, everyone I’d encountered in my hometown—they all spoke as if they had burrs or thistles in their mouths. Something painful they had to talk around.

  What happened the “last time,” when these men were “so close to succeeding”? Was it something dating back twelve years?

  I couldn’t be sure. But if the Freds had stopped them before, I was almost certain I would want the Freds to stop them now.

  “The trick is to achieve victory in one fell swoop,” the other man said. “Before the enemy knows what’s happening.”

  “And that’s why we’re meeting out here,” a third voice said, in a way that seemed to settle the argument. “So the enemy has no warning.”

  For a moment I could hear nothing but the thud of footsteps. Were the three men going to find us? Should we start crawling away?

  The footsteps veered off to the right. I heard the creak of a door opening and closing. I started to sit up, but Edwy pulled me back down.

  “Shh,” he hissed. “There’s more coming. Can’t you hear them?”

  Now I did. Was this a larger group? Or just louder? It was hard to separate out the sound of individual footsteps, but I guessed there might have been five or six people headed our way now.

  “Have you seen how those kids look at you?” A voice floated toward us. “Especially certain ones. The enemy’s children. It’s like they’re not afraid of anyone or anything.”

  “They’ve got no respect,” someone else said, like he was agreeing.

  “We’ll show them,” a voice replied. “They’ll learn to fear us.”

  Someone else laughed, in a way that shot chills through me.

  “We can’t let them hurt anybody,” I whispered to Edwy.

  Edwy replied by putting his hand over my mouth. When I could hear the footsteps veer to the right, just like the last time, Edwy slid his hand away.

  “We can’t let them find us here,” he whispered.

  “Should we tell our parents?” I asked. I remembered that Edwy’s parents were, by his own admission, thieves. I remembered that my own mother had slapped me. “Should we get the police?”

  “Have you seen any police since we got here?” Edwy hissed at me.

  I remembered the mob scene at the airport when our plane landed. I remembered being afraid that someone could be trampled to death.

  If there hadn’t been police there then, where would they be?

  Could a town function without anyone enforcing rules?

  “There was a shack still kind of half standing out there in the middle of a lot of other junk,” Edwy whispered. “I bet that’s where they’re meeting. You go home and be safe. I’ll go listen to what they say, and I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

  “Edwy, I’m not going home to be safe while you’re still here in danger!” I whispered back to him.

  “But—I want you to be safe,” Edwy said.

  “We’ll go over there and listen together,” I said.

  For a moment Edwy just stared at me; then he frowned and nodded.

  “Come on, then,” he said, his voice rough.

  We tiptoed over the fallen beam and crept forward, stepping gingerly. Edwy took my arm again and I almost told him, No, that doesn’t make sense. If one of us falls, we’ll just pull the other one down, too. But it was nice not to feel totally alone in the darkness and the wreckage. I kept my mouth shut.

  The moon came fully out from behind yet another cloud, and I could see a shadowy heap in front of us. This must have been the shack Edwy was talking about. But it seemed to be surrounded by random boards and beams and other garbage. I wondered how we could pick our way through to the shack without making noise. Or tripping and falling and getting hurt.

  Just then something cracked beneath our feet. Both of us froze.

  For a moment it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Then the door of the shack swung open, spilling light out onto the ruins. It was only a dim glow—from candlelight, probably—and I let out a silent, shaky sigh. Edwy and I were in no danger from such a weak, distant light.

  Then someone in the shack switched on a flashlight. The beam shot off into the distance, off to the north. But whoever was controlling the flashlight beam began rotating it, turning it toward us.

  And Edwy cried way too loudly into my ear: “Run!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  We raced toward the
creek path, scrambling over logs and burned beams, tripping and immediately pulling each other back up.

  Was someone chasing us already—closing in on us—or were we just hearing the echoes of our own footsteps? Everything seemed too loud: our feet slapping against the ground, twigs snapping underfoot, my own breathing rasping in and out, my own pulse thudding in my ears.

  “Put your hands up over your face so you won’t get scratches!” Edwy hissed at me. “So they can’t identify us that way!”

  He thought we could escape. He thought we should worry about getting scrapes and scratches on our faces, which would be noticeable tomorrow.

  I’d always thought Edwy was so gloomy and pessimistic, but I felt grateful to him for being able to think so hopefully, even as we ran. Even though I was certain we were about to be caught, I put my hands up, and a second later began to feel branches and leaves and twigs slashing them.

  “Good call,” I tried to mutter to Edwy, but was rewarded with a mouthful of leaves.

  I angled my hands differently, spread my fingers wider, and kept running.

  The moon went behind a cloud again, and I was torn between gratitude that now we were harder to see and fear because now I couldn’t see either. The loss of moonlight did make me notice dimmer lights up ahead, off to the side of the creek.

  “That’s the start of the houses that people still live in,” Edwy whispered in my ear. “Your street is the third one in. We’ll split apart there—you sneak home as quietly as you can, and I’ll make some noise so we’re sure they keep following me instead.”

  “Edwy, no,” I objected, trying not to pant. “I don’t want you in danger either.”

  Edwy didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I hoped he was coming up with a safer plan. We reached the third street in, and suddenly he turned and yelled into the darkness behind us: “You can’t catch me!”

  “Edwy!” I protested.

  “Too late to complain about my plan now,” he said. He shoved me toward my street. “Now go! Fast! Don’t waste the chance I just gave you!”

  I was so mad at Edwy.

  Fredtown customs would have required me to stand there and talk out my anger until it was gone—and until I’d convinced him to work with me on a totally different plan, one that was safe for both of us. But he was already several steps ahead of me, crashing noisily into the creek. Crashing noisily on purpose.