Children of Exile

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I looked out the window into darkness—the stars the only points of light, millions and millions of kilometers away. Light-years away. Back in Fredtown I’d always loved gazing at the night sky; I’d loved imagining myself as an astronaut zooming off into space. But now the stars made me feel lonely. Fredtown and my Fred-parents seemed so far away.

  What would the entire town do without its children?

  What would our hometown and our real parents be like, after so many years without us?

  The lump in my throat came back, and the stars blurred. I allowed one silent, lonely tear to slide down my cheek.

  Everything will be okay once we’re actually home, I told myself, just as I’d told Bobo, just as I’d been reassuring panicky children all day.

  I imagined how we’d land at the airport, and kind grown-ups—maybe not Freds, but people like them—would gently escort us into some sort of waiting area. They’d speak to us in soft voices and feed us the kinds of food you get when you’re sick or in need of particular comfort: chicken noodle soup, soft rice, ice cream. Invalid food. And then, quietly and in an orderly manner, they’d call for each set of siblings to meet their parents, to be welcomed and hugged and loved. . . .

  Somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

  Hastily, I brushed away the one tear on my cheek—though maybe now there was more than one. I turned my face away from the window, toward whoever had touched me.

  It was Edwy.

  In the darkness, his face was shadowed, his eyes hidden. I knew it was him by the shape of his head, by the fact that he was the only kid on the plane who was nearly the same height as me.

  “Whatever happens,” he whispered, “whatever our parents and home are like, you can’t believe any lies. You and me, we’ve got to think for ourselves.”

  “That’s what the Freds taught us,” I whispered back.

  “No—” Edwy shook his head, as if my answer had annoyed him.

  Yeah, well, pretty much everything you’ve done for the past year has annoyed me, I wanted to say. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to ruin this moment—Edwy actually talking to me seriously, like we always used to.

  Both of us went silent for an instant, and then Edwy said, “You’re not dumb, Rosi. You’re smart. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you different.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I said. In spite of myself, a bit of sarcasm had crept into my voice. To make up for it, I added, “You’re smart too, Edwy,”

  That was probably was the kindest thing I’d said to him in a year. Of course, it was practically the only thing I’d said to him in a year.

  “We’ll watch out for each other, right?” Edwy said.

  I thought about how he’d gotten Cana to spy on the Freds for him back at the town hall. I thought about how he’d vandalized his airplane seat instead of helping the little kids. I thought about how he’d let me face the whiskered, mean laughing man all by myself.

  But I still said, “Of course.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  We were landing.

  “Look out your windows, everyone,” I called, straining against my seat belt so I could raise my head high and project my voice as far toward the front of the plane as possible. “That’s home!”

  “It looks like Fredtown!” someone called.

  “Maybe they turned the plane around in the middle of the night and just flew us back to Fredtown!” someone else cried hopefully.

  I could see where that might lead.

  “It’s not Fredtown,” I called, trying to make my voice as Fred-calm and Fred-firm as possible. “But it does look a lot like Fredtown. So we’ll all feel at home at home.”

  Some of the kids giggled, which was exactly what I’d intended. I thought about adding a few more awkward “at homes” along with an “er, I mean . . . ,” and acting really goofy and comical to drive them into genuine belly laughs. But I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I felt too homesick for Fredtown myself.

  Did our hometown look that much like Fredtown from the air? I couldn’t tell yet if it really was that similar, or if this was just what any town would look like from above. There was a patterned grid of streets and green, leafy trees, and the roofs seemed to be made of the same kind of reddish tile as back in Fredtown. But maybe all roofs, everywhere, looked like that from above.

  And then we were lower to the ground and all I could see was the runway—the runway with a huge crowd beside it, surging toward us.

  They’re waiting for us, I told myself. They’re eager to see us.

  That should have made me feel welcome and loved, but my stomach jumped nervously, in a way that had nothing to do with the plane’s wobbly flying.

  The crowd seemed to be coming too close. The plane veered first to the left, then to the right; then it touched down. Before the plane even came fully to a stop, I could see hands reaching up against my window—pounding on our window, actually.

  I turned my back to the window, to block Bobo and Aili from seeing out.

  I was too late.

  “I’m scared,” Bobo told me, his fists pressed against his chubby cheeks. “Those people . . .”

  “Must not understand the safety rules around planes.” I finished Bobo’s sentence briskly, before he ended with something worse. “I’m sure whoever runs the airport will tell them how they’re supposed to behave.”

  I remembered the landing procedure I’d imagined: the calm, orderly disembarking, the peaceful waiting in a quiet room where we’d eat chicken noodle soup.

  I could hear people screaming outside, “We want our kids! We want our kids now!”

  Someone will calm them down, I thought. If nothing else, that whiskery man who’d been so mean to me would probably be mean to those people, too. It was probably part of his job to keep them away from us until they asked nicely.

  I was kind of glad I was at the back of the plane, and Mr. Mean Whiskers and all the other grown-ups were up near the door.

  It’s like they’re guarding it, I told myself. Guarding us.

  The plane jerked to a stop. Nobody came out from the grown-ups’ sectioned-off compartment at the front. The pounding on the windows and the sides of the plane got louder and louder, fiercer and fiercer. Could an airplane’s windows actually break just from being hit by bare fists? I glanced out the window beside me, and faces were pressed against the glass—twisted, furious faces, so transformed by rage that they didn’t even look human.

  Airplane windows are too strong to break, I told myself, trying to hold on to calm, cool Fred-logic. And of course our parents are human. Only humans can have human children.

  Bobo and Aili were sobbing again, totally terrified, but the screams from outside were so loud that I couldn’t even hear the boy and girl right beside me. Probably every other kid on the plane was sobbing and shrieking and afraid too. I remembered what Fred-mama had told me right before we left Fredtown: You’re going to have to watch out for Bobo and all the other little kids! Please, please, take care of them all . . .

  I scooped Bobo up in my arms—there was no way I was leaving him behind, so close to the window-pounding and the scary faces—and I moved toward the aisle. Aili grabbed my leg, her grip so tight that I could feel her fingernails through my dress and tights. She pressed her face against me so hard that her big red hair bow dug into my stomach.

  “I’m just going up to the front of the plane to get all the other kids to calm down,” I told her, in a voice that trembled way too much to be soothing. “That’s where the door is. Don’t worry, no one can get in except through the—”

  In the next second, I noticed for the first time that there was a door at the back of the plane, too—a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. I noticed it because it was shaking. I couldn’t quite separate the sound of fists hitting that door from all the other banging and screaming and crying around me, but I could almost feel the pounding like something inside me.

  And then that back door to the plane sprang open, and a crowd of grow
n-ups—a mob—spilled into the plane.

  I pulled back from the aisle and turned sideways so Bobo couldn’t see around me. I hoped.

  The mob of grown-ups streamed toward us, up the aisle, their greedy hands snatching children from the nearest seats. The chant “We want our kids! We want our kids now!” dissolved into cacophony, a disorienting blur of sound. It took a woman and a man shouting right beside my ear as they passed before I understood what had changed. Now all the grown-ups were calling out individual names.

  “Lila!” the woman screamed. “Lila, Lila, Lila, Lila!”

  The man yelled, “Breto? Gustine? Rechi?”

  Were all the grown-ups calling for their own children?

  “Aili?” a different man shouted in my ear.

  My first thought was, Hide her. Protect her. Don’t let her be taken away. Not like this.

  I looked down to where Aili was clinging to my leg, her fingers glued to my tights and dress, her fingernails digging deep, her mouth open in a howl of fear. And maybe my glance betrayed her; maybe the man had seen photographs and recognized her. Suddenly his big hands were scooping Aili up, yanking her away.

  Aili howled louder, a soaring cry of sheer terror.

  I shifted Bobo’s weight entirely to my left side and reached out with my right arm to hug Aili’s shoulders. To comfort her. And pull her back.

  “Stop!” I told the man. I tried to speak as loudly as possible. Could I make myself heard over the screaming? “You’re scaring her! Children need calm, they need gentle explanations, they need . . .”

  I looked straight into the dark eyes of the man who was holding Aili. His eyes narrowed cruelly. He pulled Aili out of my grasp and then even farther away, out of my reach.

  Bigger and stronger and older should never use force to overpower smaller and weaker and younger, I thought.

  But there was no way that I could say that and make myself heard, because the man was screaming at me, “This is my daughter! It’s none of your business what I do to her!”

  “But—,” I said.

  The man shoved my shoulder—fortunately, the right one, not the one that Bobo was cowering against. Bobo and I both fell against the top part of the seat behind us. An armrest dug into my leg, and I cried out.

  Aili was still howling, her arms and legs flailing uselessly. Powerlessly. The man jerked her even farther away from me and, using her body almost like a shield, cut his way through the crowded aisle back toward the door. The red bow from Aili’s hair fell to the floor, and it was instantly trampled. And then, in the jumble of darting eyes and screaming mouths and other flailing children, both the man and Aili vanished from my sight.

  I should have gone after Aili right away. I should have rescued her. I should have made myself heard—somehow. No one was stopping me.

  Except that Bobo was clutching my shoulder and screaming just as hysterically as Aili. And if I waded into the crowd after Aili, wouldn’t that just terrify him more?

  I am my brother’s keeper, I remembered. I am always my brother’s keeper.

  And he was younger than Aili. That made him even more vulnerable.

  I looked back at Bobo’s contorted, screaming face, and then at the mob of grown-ups stomping and lurching down the aisle, many of them now carrying wailing children.

  This was chaos.

  My ears rang with all the screaming—rang so badly, I couldn’t even hear. The louder everyone screamed and cried, the more my head went silent. I remembered how horrifying our leave-taking from Fredtown had been, with the mean whiskered man and the other “hired muscle” people shoving us onto the plane. But that had been peaceful and orderly compared with this. That was the worst that Fredtown had to offer, the worst I’d ever encountered.

  This was a stampede. This was a riot.

  This was dangerous.

  “Here,” I said to Bobo as I gently slid us both down to the floor, down to the area between our seats and the ones in front of them. I wedged him against the side of the plane, using my own body as a wall to protect him from even seeing the chaos and the angry faces of the riot.

  “We’ll be safe here,” I told him. “We just have to hide. That’s all.”

  Who did I want that for the most? Him or me?

  I tucked both our knapsacks around him like a blanket. Then I began to sing him a lullaby from when he was really tiny: “Sleep, little baby, for you are safe / Sleep, little baby, for you are loved . . .”

  I couldn’t hear my own voice, but the more I sang, the more I could remember how our Fred-parents had always sung that lullaby. Bobo curled against me, his face buried against my chest. He’d stopped shaking with sobs. Maybe he’d even stopped sobbing.

  As long as I kept singing, I could tune out the screaming and the pounding feet behind me. But if I stopped to take a breath, I could hear it all again. The floor quaked beneath us, and I dared to glance around. I could only take in pieces of what I saw: grasping hands, screaming mouths, angry eyes . . .

  Someone could get seriously hurt from all that trampling, I thought. The image of a boot smashing down on Aili’s fallen red bow came swimming back into my mind. Children were more fragile than bows. More breakable. I didn’t want to think it, but my brain added, Someone could get killed.

  I looked back at the mashed curls on Bobo’s head and went back to singing “Sleep, little baby, sleep, sleep, sleep . . .”

  Then someone grabbed my shoulder.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I whirled around and found myself staring into a ruined face. I say “ruined” because that was how I saw it first: like a burned-down house, like a wrecked car. Something that couldn’t be repaired. The eyelids sagged and the bags under the eyes sagged; the skin of the cheeks seemed to have melted and then, oddly, frozen into rivulets and channels. The left side of the mouth drooped. This was a face that could never smile, only frown. A face whose owner must have been sad forever.

  “I found you,” a voice croaked, and it took that for me to realize: This was a woman’s face.

  I saw that the woman was wearing a dress, or what had once been a dress. Perhaps the sporadic gray blobs down the front of it had originally been sprigs of flowers many washings ago. Or maybe it was just dirty.

  “Bobo, Rosi—is there something wrong with you that you were left behind?” the woman asked. “Is there something wrong with my children?”

  “My” children, I thought. “My.”

  Could this be our mother?

  And her first thought was that there might be something wrong with us?

  I straightened my back.

  “I was protecting Bobo,” I said. “Keeping him safe. And calm. He’s only five. This is scary for him.”

  I sounded like Edwy claiming that some rule he’d broken was unfair anyway. I sounded cowardly.

  My Fred-parents would want me to protect Bobo. Wouldn’t my real mother want the same thing?

  The woman grunted.

  “Five is old enough to . . .” She shook her head and glared, as if it was my fault she’d started to say something she didn’t want to. “I thought maybe you hadn’t even come. I thought the plane was empty. . . . Stand up, both of you.”

  I glanced past the woman, toward the aisle. Surprisingly, I couldn’t see anyone running or screaming or grabbing just then. Were Bobo and I the last ones left on the plane? Had all the other children of Fredtown been taken away?

  Had I failed them all, trying to protect Bobo?

  I obeyed the woman’s orders and unfolded my legs. I shoved our knapsacks to the side and pulled Bobo up with me. We both stood up straight, in the tiny space between the airplane seats.

  I towered over the woman, and she took a step back. Surprise registered in her gaze so strongly that even the sagging eyelids couldn’t hide it.

  “Why, you’re already full growed,” she said.

  Grown, I wanted so badly to correct her. Even more, though, I wanted her to catch her mistake and correct herself. And then maybe she’d laugh, and
it would turn out that that face could smile after all, and she’d explain, I’m sorry! I’m just so giddy about seeing you, I can’t think straight. My children! I love you!

  But the frown stayed on her face. Her hooded eyes stayed cold.

  I decided that if she kept speaking with bad grammar, I wouldn’t let myself hear it. I’d translate it to proper grammar in my head.

  “You’re older than the pictures they sent,” she said. “Those were only black-and-white, and we couldn’t tell. . . . I missed everything. All your growing-up years. Those . . . those other people . . . they raised you complete.”

  Like it was all my fault. Like I had kept her from seeing newer pictures of me. Like I had run away from home as a newborn, just to spite her.

  “I’m only twelve,” I said, defensive again. “And, like I said, Bobo’s only five, so . . .”

  The woman knelt down and reached out her hand to touch Bobo’s face. Bobo looked up at me, checking for what he should do. I gave the barest of shrugs. I should have said, It’s all right. You’re safe now, or Be a good boy and hug your mama. But I couldn’t squeeze any words past the sudden lump in my throat. Especially not those.

  “We still get to raise Bobo,” the woman murmured. She twisted so she seemed to be speaking only to Bobo. “Oh, your father’s going to be so proud of you. So happy to meet you.”

  Wouldn’t he be happy to meet me, too?

  Bobo’s gaze darted back and forth between the woman and me, his eyes asking, Shouldn’t the scary part be over? Should I still be afraid? Aren’t you going to protect me from her?

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  “Everything’s okay, Bobo,” I said gently, even though it felt like a lie on my tongue. “This is our real mother. We’re going home with her.”