Children of Jubilee Read online

  I turned my head toward Cana.

  “I think I like your friend Alcibiades,” I whispered. I didn’t add that I liked him a lot better when I didn’t actually have to look at him. I didn’t have the breath for that and, well, even I knew how to be a little diplomatic.

  The horrified grunts and groans turned into a wave of sounds that seemed a lot more like cheering.

  When I turned my head back toward the cage full of slug creatures, two more had slithered up beside Alcibiades. They were also reaching tentacles toward me, and I instinctively jerked back.

  Alcibiades spoke, and the translator kicked in simultaneously this time: “Don’t be afraid. It appears that you have the Zacadi flu. But we can heal you. It won’t hurt.”

  Maybe the translation device was glitchy. Or “healing” was code for “sliming.” All three slug creatures rubbed tentacles on my arms, legs, and—ugh, ugh, ugh!—face, and it was like being bathed in raw egg. But oddly, my skin seemed to absorb the slime almost instantly.

  The throbbing in my head disappeared. I sat up and didn’t feel even a moment of dizziness. I propped my arms behind me, and not a single muscle gave off a twinge of achy protest.

  “You are immune now,” Alcibiades told me, the translator making sense of his words instantly. “You will never suffer from the Zacadi flu again.”

  I stared into his face—or at least I tried to. It was possible that his eyes were located on the very top of his head.

  “I—thank you,” I said. “I feel better than I have in weeks. But . . . what is the Zacadi flu? I’ve never heard of it.”

  I heard the rumble of the translator along with my words, but it was getting easier and easier to tune that out when I was speaking, and tune out everything but the translator when Alcibiades and his fellow slugs spoke.

  “Zacadi—that is our planet,” Alcibiades said. “Did no one tell you?” He seemed to be gazing down at Cana, a frightful movement that meant his eyes slid downward until they were roughly where the jaw would be, on a human.

  Part of me was still marveling at how Alcibiades had cured me. But, evilly, I was also wishing I could get Enu and Alcibiades together, to see how much big, tough Enu would shriek in terror at the slip-sliding eyes and slithering tentacles.

  “Cana, did you not tell your friends everything, like I suggested?” Alcibiades asked. The translator made him sound like a stern schoolmaster.

  “I tried,” Cana said. “But they didn’t always listen very well. I think they were all too tired from working too hard all day.”

  And we didn’t believe you, I thought guiltily.

  “Ah, I can understand that level of exhaustion,” Alcibiades said, and even before the translator kicked in, I could hear the weight of sorrow in his voice. He looked directly at me now, his eyes rolling back to the middle of his head. “Our planet is Zacadi, and we are known as the Zacadian people. We are . . . interconnected with our planet . . . and because the Enforcers destroy our planet as they take away our Zacadi pearls, we are dying off.”

  “Zacadi pearls?” I asked.

  Alcibiades pointed to the pebble glowing in Cana’s hand.

  “Our . . . energy source,” he said. “Our life force.”

  “The Enforcers are taking them away, and that’s killing you?” I asked.

  “It’s not that, exactly, but . . .” Alcibiades’s eyes slid in Cana’s direction again. “Cana, perhaps you and Melos and Arkan can work on your Zacadian language lessons, while I tell Kiandra everything I’ve already told you,” he suggested gently.

  “Okay,” Cana said. She fiddled with the translator for a second, then handed it to me. “You can use this. I’ll practice without it.”

  She sat down at the other end of the prison bars. The two other slug creatures—no, Zacadians—who’d slimed—er, healed—me slithered toward her with softly bellowed greetings. Apparently Cana had set the translator to work only within a narrow range, because it didn’t provide an interpretation. Alcibiades waited until all of them had started a pattern of back-and-forth grunting and groaning before he spoke again.

  “It is a long and sad story,” he said. “It is hard for me to gauge the age and maturation levels of alien creatures. You do not look much bigger than Cana. When do your people become adults?”

  “Trust me, I’m close enough,” I said.

  I think I was learning to interpret Zacadian facial expressions; Alcibiades looked doubtful.

  But he sighed and curled his tentacle-like legs beneath him. We stared at each other from opposite sides of the prison bars.

  “Then I will tell you the entirety of the truth, which I did not tell Cana,” he said, and I thought I could detect the weight of grief in his voice again. “We Zacadians invented the Zacadi flu ourselves. To kill our very own brothers and sisters. But, I swear, we never knew where it would lead.”

  “Which is . . . ,” I prompted.

  His eyes did not seem so foreign anymore. They only seemed sad.

  “Every other Zacadian who ever lived is dead now,” he whispered. “Every Zacadian . . . except the ones in this prison cell. And soon we will be dead too. Our entire species will be extinct. And it will be our own fault.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “But how . . . ?” I began.

  Alcibiades held up one of his upper tentacles, and I was pretty sure the motion was like a human holding up a hand to indicate, No, no, let me talk now. You just listen.

  “I am ashamed to tell this story,” he whispered.

  “Yes, my people—humans, those of us from Earth—we have a lot to be ashamed of too,” I said.

  Alcibiades bowed the blob at the top of his body that seemed to correlate to a human head.

  “Then perhaps you can understand that we are not like the Enforcers?” he asked. “Enforcers do not feel shame, and when they came here, well . . .”

  “Then maybe this is all their fault, not yours?” I asked, with an eagerness that made me sound almost as young as Cana. It felt as if convincing Alcibiades that his people had actually done nothing wrong would make humans seem less guilty too.

  “But that is not true,” Alcibiades said with another heavy sigh.

  “Please, can you just start at the beginning?” I asked.

  “The beginning . . . ,” Alcibiades repeated. “My people and my planet were rich and proud and happy. The Zacadi pearls—even you have seen that they are a marvel, correct?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And all you know is that they give light and never burn out,” Alcibiades said with a shrug.

  “Well, I suspected that there was more to them, but we only had the one, so we were afraid to experiment much.” I paused. “Are you sure they never burn out? What I remember from science class—is that even possible? Perpetual energy machines are just fantasies, aren’t they?”

  “Maybe Zacadi pearls can burn out, but no Zacadian has lived long enough to witness such a thing,” Alcibiades conceded.

  “Do they just occur naturally on your planet?” I asked. “Or did your people invent them?”

  “Our people have many stories about where they came from, and why they are buried in our soil,” Alcibiades said. “Do those stories even matter now? Call them a gift of nature. No Zacadian remembers a time when the pearls were not part of our lives.”

  “Limitless energy, always available,” I said. “You live on a lucky planet.”

  “The planet may still be lucky, but we are not,” Alcibiades murmured.

  “What changed?” I asked. “You were rich and proud and happy and then . . .” It seemed really rude to point out that he and all his people were confined to a prison cell now, with no possessions whatsoever, as far as I could tell.

  A shudder passed through Alcibiades, unsettling every tentacle.

  “My people advanced quickly to the point of space exploration,” he said. “We had so much power and energy at our disposal—spaceships were toys for us.”

  “What’s wrong with that?�
�� I asked.

  “When I told Cana this story, she said it sounded like toddlers getting their own cars,” he said. “Then she had to explain what a car was. My people skipped that stage of development and went straight to airplanes and flying.”

  “Cana meant toddlers would crash cars, right?” I said. “So . . . did your people have a lot of spaceship accidents?”

  I’m pretty sure the look Alcibiades gave me was both baffled and indignant. But it was a little hard to interpret such an alien creature’s face, with such constantly rolling eyes and rippling, slimy skin. It may have been that his actual mouth was located where a human stomach would be, but I couldn’t even be sure of that.

  “No, of course we didn’t have lots of spaceship accidents,” Alcibiades said. “Our technology wasn’t flawed. Just our . . . souls.”

  “What do souls have to do with spaceships?” I asked.

  Alcibiades drew away from me. He peered at the translator in my hands as if he didn’t trust it.

  “Spaceships meant we encountered other civilizations,” he said slowly, as if giving the words time to sink in. “Before we were ready. We were too . . . chaotic and undisciplined. Do you know the primary rule of the intergalactic court regarding primitive civilizations? There must be no interference on any planet until and unless that planet’s intelligent-life species develops space travel. That is because encountering other civilizations before one is ready is too disruptive, too disorienting. We weren’t ready to choose.”

  “Choose?” I echoed. “Choose what?”

  “Surely you know that the intergalactic court preserves a balance between the two types of advanced civilizations present in the universe,” Alcibiades said.

  “It does?” I asked.

  Alcibiades recoiled again.

  “Your people have ventured out into space, correct?” he asked. “Apart from being enslaved on my planet?”

  “Ye-es,” I mumbled. “Probably the leaders of my planet know all about the intergalactic court. But I am a thirteen-year-old girl who . . . Oh, never mind. Don’t tell me how ignorant I am. Teach me what you know.”

  I swear Alcibiades’s expression was admiring now.

  “Ah, so your people—even their youth—are capable of wisdom,” he murmured.

  He made a sound that might have been the equivalent of humans clearing their throats before launching into a long speech.

  “One category of civilizations represented on the intergalactic court is best embodied by the people popularly known as Freds,” Alcibiades said. “The peace lovers. The kind ones. The gentle saints. The ones who want to do nothing but help.”

  I was about to protest, but Alcibiades kept talking.

  “The Enforcers and the others like them make up the second type of civilization,” Alcibiades. “They are grim and austere, and they began in chaotic violence. But as mature civilizations, they exercise iron control over themselves. And over others. They limit their violent impulses to enforcing the rules of the intergalactic court. They still enjoy violence, but they only indulge their love of violence in the service of keeping the universe peaceful.”

  I leaped to my feet and grabbed the prison bars before me.

  “You’re saying the intergalactic court knows about everything the Enforcers do?” I ask. “They know my friends and I are stuck here as slaves? They know we’re slowly being starved and worked to death? They know your people are going extinct? And they approve of that?”

  Tremors flowed through Alcibiades’s entire body. Maybe he was crying. The mound of his fellow Zacadians quaked behind him. Maybe they were all sobbing.

  “The—the Enforcers tell us they have full authorization to do what they do here,” Alcibiades stammered. “No other species has come to tell us otherwise. So why should I doubt them? What my people did . . . we got greedy and started selling our Zacadi pearls far and wide. And then we fought over the Zacadi pearls, and one group of Zacadians invented the Zacadi flu to kill off their enemies, who wanted the pearl profits for themselves. We destroyed our entire planet.”

  “Okay, maybe the individuals who did those things deserved punishment,” I told Alcibiades. “But were babies involved in the killing? Were little children?” I was getting dangerously close to crying myself. I almost veered into explaining how wrong it was that the so-called saintly Freds chose to save baby Edwy but left one-year-old me behind on dangerous Earth. So how were the Freds any better than the Enforcers?

  Instead I pointed at Cana, still obliviously practicing grunts and groans while the slug creature on the other side of the bars from her patted her head gently with one of his tentacles.

  “Does that little girl from my planet deserve to die in this alien place because my parents murdered some of their neighbors more than a decade ago?”

  Alcibiades stared at me through the bars as though the translator had broken down. As though he couldn’t understand anything I’d said. But I could hear the mechanical grunts and groans and clicks resounding after every single one of my words—it seemed like my question had been translated.

  Then the ripples flowing up and down on Alcibiades’s head smoothed out.

  “No,” he finally whispered. “She does not deserve to die. Neither do you. Neither . . . do I.”

  He began wrapping tentacles around the same bars I held, as if he needed the support to stay upright.

  “If the Freds let Cana die, they’re as guilty as the Enforcers,” I said. “The entire intergalactic court is at fault. They’re all evil.”

  Alcibiades still had an expression on his face that looked like astonishment.

  “Yes,” he said. “But what can we do about it?”

  I stared at the bars between us, and the way my tightly gripped hands were surrounded above and below by his tentacles.

  No—not just surrounded. Accompanied. Linked. The bars and our completely different anatomy didn’t really separate us that much. We were connected too.

  “We work together,” I said. “To save all the Zacadian and human lives we can.”

  Alcibiades’s face rippled again, but only once before the motion subsided and his expression froze in place again. Maybe it was like a human raising a single eyebrow.

  “My people are still good at spaceships,” he said. “What are your people good at?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “You’re delusional,” Enu said. “You were hallucinating.”

  Cana and I were back in our prison cell, back with the other three. It was evening again, and Enu, Edwy, and Rosi had just come marching back down the stairs and collapsed at our feet. Maybe I should have given them a moment to untangle their arms and legs and sit up before I’d started excitedly telling the story of meeting Alcibiades and making a plan to escape.

  But it felt like every moment that passed without doing something was a waste.

  “Do you still feel sick?” Rosi asked.

  She made an effort to shove herself up from the floor and reach a hand toward my forehead, as if to feel for a fever. I jerked away, and she almost toppled over.

  Maybe she would be next to be deemed too unhealthy to go out to work. Maybe she had the Zacadi flu already.

  Then Alcibiades and the others would cure her, I told myself. Then she could help me and Alcibiades and the others down here in the prison. . . .

  And then the Enforcers would give us even less food. Alcibiades had explained how that worked too. None of his people were considered healthy enough to work anymore, so they were given only starvation rations. And their cell was kept locked, day and night, so they had no hope of escaping on their own.

  I thought about one of the other facts that he’d told me that he hadn’t shared with Cana: The reason the Enforcers came to the Zacadians’ prison cell every night—but not to ours—was to check for dead bodies to be removed. That wasn’t necessary in our prison cell. Not yet.

  But someday, if we don’t escape soon . . .

  I pushed that thought out of my mind.

&nb
sp; “I feel fine,” I told Rosi, sounding much harsher than I intended. “Never been better.”

  “Kiandra, you’re a skeleton,” Enu said. He stood up, towering over me, using his height like a weapon to beat me down. “It’s your own fault. You should have eaten more back on Earth, when you had the chance, instead of skipping meals to work on your computer all day. And now . . . And now . . . you’re not even making sense!”

  He was almost yelling. Tears stung at my eyes. How were we ever going to be able to unite with the Zacadians against the Enforcers if I couldn’t even talk my own brother into working with me?

  “I think he’s only mad and being mean because he’s worried about you,” Rosi offered. “Back in Fredtown, sometimes when Edwy was mean to me, my Fred-mama would say—”

  “Stop talking about the Freds!” Enu commanded.

  He was shaking.

  “Enu, are you sick?” I asked.

  “Sick of being here,” he said. “Sick of knowing there’s nothing we can do to get away. Sick of those Enforcers using my muscles—the muscles I worked so hard to build—and now I can’t even punch that Enforcer who stands at the top of the stairs every morning and stares at me all day; I can’t even fight the urge to dig and dig and dig, all day long, I can’t even—”

  “Enu, we all feel that way,” Edwy said. And it was odd: He sounded calm and rational. Like he was the older brother, the more mature one, and Enu was a little kid throwing a tantrum. “So why don’t you listen to Kiandra?”

  “Because I can’t let her get my hopes up again!” Enu screamed. “Because . . . you want to tell me about some crazy aliens and their fantasy spaceship? If those, those animals you think you saw have some old, broken-down spaceship somewhere, I’m sure the Enforcers have something bigger and fancier and faster. Something that could shoot us out of the sky in an instant. . . . It’s no good!”

  “Except the Enforcers didn’t use a spaceship to send us here, remember?” I countered. “That’s not how they got here either. They think of spaceships as old technology. Alcibiades says the Enforcers have been here so long, and the Zacadians have just been prisoners for so long, that the Enforcers stopped worrying about anyone escaping in a Zacadian spaceship ages ago. They’ve gotten lazy. They—”