CHAPTER SEVEN
I peered around frantically, because I hadn’t seen or heard anyone approaching us; Enu, Edwy, and Rosi hadn’t called out any warnings.
The phone had been yanked straight up, and I could see it hovering right over my head, but no hand held it. It was just suspended in midair.
“Run!” Enu gasped.
But before any of us could move, a wide beam of light spun toward us. Was it possible to brace yourself to be vaporized?
It took me a moment to realize: This wasn’t that kind of light. This light caught us in its glow, but it didn’t hurt us; it didn’t destroy us.
Enu banged into the outer edge of the glow and fell to the floor.
“The light is . . . a cage,” Rosi whispered. “We’re trapped.”
I could see her clearly now: the rips in her tuniclike dress, the tear streaks on her cheeks, the desert dust still layered in her dark hair. I remembered that she was a wanted fugitive, that the Enforcers had condemned her to a life in prison for supposedly starting a battle in Cursed Town. She was actually innocent of anything except wanting to help Edwy—and escaping from the Enforcers twice.
It was hopeless to think that the Enforcers wouldn’t figure out who she was—or that they wouldn’t figure out who all four of us were. But I still moved to the edge of the light and screamed, “Let us go! We haven’t done anything wrong!”
“Our parents could bribe—” Enu began, but I held a finger to my lips and he stopped.
“When we don’t come back, Ze—” Edwy started.
My hand shot out and slammed over his mouth.
“Don’t say any names,” I warned. “I’m sure they can hear everything we say.”
Edwy pushed my hand away.
“I won’t say names, but she’ll help,” he said. “And if she goes to her parents, they will too.”
Rosi silently mouthed a single name: Bobo. The tears welled in her eyes again.
“He’s safe,” I whispered.
I wanted to say I was absolutely certain that Bobo, Zeba, and Cana would stay safe, that the identity blocking I’d done would keep them protected. But just talking about them would endanger them. Unless . . .
“I hope they catch those other kids we were with, too!” I said, throwing all my bitterness and fear into my voice. “After they betrayed us and said they wanted to help the Enforcers—I hate them!”
Rosi’s eyes widened and her tears flooded out now. She didn’t understand my doublespeak, the way having me say the other kids were on the Enforcers’ side might help them if there were caught. I guess her Fredtown childhood hadn’t prepared her for interpreting even blatant lies. But Edwy gripped her shoulder, and I saw: He understood.
So stop stereotyping and thinking all the Fredtown kids are alike, I told myself.
What if all the Enforcers weren’t alike either? All we needed was to convince even one of them to let us go.
“Please!” I called out into the darkness again. “Set us free!”
Caught in the light, I could barely see what was happening beyond. But none of the Enforcers out in the street turned around. The Enforcers on the balcony above finished beating the woman and little boy and moved out of sight.
“They can’t hear us,” I said in disgust, sagging to the floor beside Enu.
“But before, you said . . .” Enu squinted at me in confusion. “Does this mean we can say anything we—”
“Oh, I’m sure somebody’s eavesdropping on us,” I said. “Even recording us. But the Enforcers out there, the people out there—they can’t.” I gestured toward the street. “There’s some sort of soundproofing that goes along with this special light. I bet . . . I bet that’s why we couldn’t hear the people on the balconies screaming. The ones the Enforcers were beating. That was soundproofed too.”
Enu gazed vacantly at me. But Edwy crouched beside me.
“You’re figuring out how this works,” he said quietly. “Can you figure out how to escape?”
“Um . . .”
I wanted to live up to his faith in me. I looked down at the floor. Could Enu dig a tunnel out with his bare hands?
No, as soon as we opened any part of the floor, the light would seep down into the hole. We need darkness. We need . . .
Just then, the light around us jerked to the side and then rose into the air. Incredibly, we rose with it. My mobile phone, out of reach a moment earlier, clunked me on the head. It was falling, falling. . . .
I thrust out my hand and grabbed the phone just before it could fall past my feet.
“That’s evidence against you,” Edwy hissed.
“It’s evidence against the Enforcers, too,” I whispered stubbornly back to him, as I tucked the phone into my shorts pocket once again.
I’m not sure I was being logical. Maybe it just felt good to hold the phone in my hand. Maybe it made me feel like myself again, to have it in my pocket.
The light beam we were trapped in lifted us past the broken windows of the Emporium of Food and out into the street. It shifted shape: One moment it felt like we were in a globe of light; the next, improbably, we were in a square. Our square of light settled into place a good nine or ten meters above the ground. Peering out into the darkness around us, I could see others above and below and beside us: people lying on the ground, then lying in midair nine meters up, then again eighteen meters up, then maybe twenty-seven or thirty. . . . Maybe to all of them—to the ones who were conscious, anyway—it seemed like they were the ones trapped in squares of light, and we were trapped in darkness.
Either way, we were all trapped.
Just moments earlier I’d been thinking about how Refuge City had never needed a prison or a jail. Not in its entire history. Not under human rule. But the Enforcers had taken over mere hours ago, and they’d already set up the first prison: an odd one with invisible bars.
And Enu, Edwy, Rosi, and I were locked inside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Enu battered his shoulders against the sides of the square of light. He jumped up and down, as if that was a way to break through. On alternate bounces, he raised his arms high over his head and shoved his hands against the ceiling.
The other three of us just watched. If he couldn’t break out with all his muscles, none of the rest of us could either.
Finally he collapsed to the floor of our bizarre prison cell.
“This is hopeless,” he moaned. He narrowed his eyes to slits. “It’s all your fault, Kiandra. You knew it was dangerous to turn your phone on. You told me it wasn’t even safe to watch TV, and yet you linked to the Internet? I told you you were addicted!”
“I didn’t link to anything!” I protested. “All I did was hit record! You idiot, don’t you know it’s possible to turn on the video function on a phone without linking to the Internet?”
I felt guilty enough without Enu blaming me too.
“This is my fault,” Rosi whispered. She slumped to the floor with the rest of us. “I’m the one who insisted we had to do something.”
“You think the Enforcers have some device to detect any time they’re being recorded?” Edwy asked. “You think that’s how they figured out we were there?”
I liked that he wasn’t just sitting around moaning and groaning and regretting things that couldn’t be changed, like Enu and Rosi were.
I also liked that his analysis made it seem even more likely that Zeba, Bobo, and Cana were safe, and would stay safe.
“That’s what makes the most sense to me,” I told Edwy.
“Or the Enforcers were just playing with us all along, like a cat does with a mouse,” Enu muttered. “Like, they tracked us from the moment we got out of Udans’s truck, and they just didn’t bother scooping us up until now.”
Don’t say Udans’s name, I wanted to snarl at Enu. Don’t let Rosi know how likely it is that the Enforcers could snatch up the other three kids too.
But I also wanted to say, Don’t talk about cats and mice.
For the
past several years, Enu and I had lived on the top floor of one of Refuge City’s swankiest apartment building. We’d never had to worry about mice. The only mice I’d ever seen had been in science-experiment videos and at pet stores, during that brief phase when I was a stupid little girl who thought having a cuddly animal around would give me someone to love. (Or . . . someone who would love me.) It turned out that Enu was allergic to everything with fur, so I’d ended up with a salamander for a week. Not exactly cuddly, not even fun, just a nuisance to remember to feed. So I took it back. After that, we never had anything but virtual pets. And I let Enu convince me that it was more interesting to see how quickly we could get the virtual three-toed Samutis and the virtual four-eyed Gonzas to die, rather than keeping them alive and happy.
Yeah, Enu and I had messed-up childhoods.
But real cats and real mice . . . the only reason either of us knew anything about them was because of our parents’ stories about their own childhoods back in Cursed Town. The war had started in Cursed Town when I was only a baby; I’d barely turned one when our parents had had Udans smuggle us into Refuge City. I had no memory of my mother or father hugging me, of either of them tucking us into bed at night. I knew my parents’ faces only from computer screens, from their remote calls after the war ended and Cursed Town got sporadic Internet connection again.
When I was little, I loved those calls. I’d reached for my parents’ faces on the screen, and I’d hung on to their every word about a delightful, rustic place that sounded so different from big, noisy, overwhelming Refuge City. I sobbed every time one of those calls ended.
Then I found out what had really happened in Cursed Town—all the killings, all the betrayals, all the deceit. I found out about my own parents’ guilt, buried deep beneath innocent stories about picking flowers in the meadow and roasting marshmallows over an open flame.
Now I despised my parents. I hated everything about them, everything about Cursed Town. Everything I’d ever longed for and loved as a small child.
And the war in Cursed Town had been the final straw for humanity. It was the reason the Freds had come in and started taking away human babies.
So, indirectly, it was the reason the Enforcers were here now. It was the reason Enu, Edwy, Rosi, and I were locked in this bizarre cage with hundreds of others.
Everything was my parents’ fault.
So, okay, now that you’ve figured that out—what are you going to do about it?
Nothing. There was nothing any of us could do.
Rosi had started crying again, and Edwy patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
“We’ll be fine,” he told her. “Everyone will be fine. Things will work out. You’ll see.”
I guess lying ran in our family.
I put my hands over my ears and huddled against the wall. I didn’t think I could sleep—how was that even possible at a time and in a place like this? But at least I could pretend.
Just as I touched it, the wall of our prison cell quivered. It slid forward; in fact, the whole cell slid forward and up. The cells around us moved too. It was like all the cells were on a conveyor belt now—or maybe a roller coaster. Enu loved roller coasters, and Refuge City’s amusement parks had a lot of them. There had been a time when I always went with him. I recognized this creaky inching forward from all those hot summer days when we sat in a roller-coaster car creeping up a steep hill.
I braced myself for the inevitable plunge.
“They’re taking us somewhere!” Edwy cried excitedly. “Maybe it’s, like, a courtroom! And they’ll let us explain. . . .”
“Only one of us should do the talking,” Rosi said.
Maybe she was wilier than I’d thought. She clearly meant that if only one of us spoke, there was no danger of us getting our stories crossed.
“Kiandra, it should be you,” Edwy said.
His green eyes glowed, wide and trusting.
Wait a minute—am I the one he trusts the most?
Automatically I glanced at Enu, because surely he would protest. Surely he would say, I’m the big brother. I’m the biggest. Those Enforcers will regret messing with me!
But Enu had his head down, like he was studying his shoelaces. Or trying not to vomit.
Maybe Enu was even more terrified than I was?
We kept rising, higher, higher, higher. After only a few moments we were looking down on the skyscrapers of Refuge City. They were so far below, their lights were muted and dim. Panic bubbled in my gut. Every human instinct I had screamed that this was wrong. Nobody should be able to look so far down through nothingness. When you were a hundred stories up in the sky, you needed a real floor below you. You needed a hundred floors beneath you. Ones that were completely solid and visible. Not see-through.
Beside me, Enu began to gag.
“Don’t look,” I told him. “Close your eyes.”
I couldn’t bear to turn my head the other direction, to see how Edwy and Rosi were faring. I had to keep looking straight out, or I would vomit.
Suddenly our prison cell jerked to a stop. I’d thought we’d gone higher than any skyscraper, but I was wrong. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a man standing on what appeared to be yet another balcony, on the highest floor of some building I didn’t recognize.
Or, no—it was an Enforcer. The faint outline of his bubble-shaped helmet glinted in the moonlight. He held his body so stiffly, so unnaturally, that it seemed he wasn’t used to existing in a human shape. Or maybe he wanted to seem entirely imperious, entirely unapproachable.
Another prison cell hovered between us and the Enforcer. I could just barely make out the shapes inside the cell of a woman and a man clutching a baby and a toddler. I couldn’t hear any sound coming from that prison cell, but you could tell the two children were wailing; you could tell the parents were throwing themselves prostrate before the Enforcer and begging for mercy.
The Enforcer didn’t seem to hear them either. He jerked his arm to the right, and the prison cell ahead of us spun off in that direction.
And then it vanished.
“Will that—will that happen to us?” Edwy stammered. “Kiandra, Enu, please, you have to—”
Whatever Edwy was begging us to do was lost as our prison cell jerked forward, and Edwy slammed against the wall.
Now we were the ones directly in front of the Enforcer on the balcony.
“Please,” I moaned. Without even thinking about it, I’d cupped my hands into a prayerful pose. “Please don’t—”
The Enforcer slashed his arm to the left.
It was left, not right! My brain screamed. Maybe that’s better?
But our prison cell spun away just as quickly as the other one had.
How was I supposed to prepare to be vaporized?
Strangely, my last thought was, Our mother and father will be so sad when they hear that all their children died.
And then the light around me vanished, and so did everything else.
CHAPTER NINE
We didn’t die.
At least, I didn’t think we’d died.
I opened my eyes to more darkness, and to the disorienting sense that I might have been unconscious for five minutes or five years—there was no way for me to tell.
On either side of me, Enu and Edwy were stirring. I heard groans. Was it just them, or was Rosi there on the other side of Edwy, waking up too?
I lifted my head to look, and then I was the one moaning in misery. The movement woke up my nerve endings; my head felt like it had been battered against solid concrete for hours on end. For all I knew, maybe it had been.
So the Enforcer didn’t want us dead; he just wanted to make us wish we were dead?
I was stubborn. I made myself sit up anyway.
My head was so woozy I almost passed out again. But wherever we were now, we still had moonlight. I could see another dim shape beyond Edwy’s groaning body. Rosi was turning her head side to side, passing her hand in front of her face, just as slow and
logy as the rest of us.
I had to prop myself up on my elbows to keep from falling. My arms felt bloated and heavy; it felt like I was moving elephant legs. I glanced back, the motion making my head throb harder. But my arms looked like they always did, as skinny as ever.
“What happened? Where are we?” Edwy groaned.
“Not . . . not in Refuge City anymore,” I mumbled back to him. There weren’t any buildings in sight. We weren’t lying on concrete or asphalt. “Are we . . . back in the desert?”
Painstakingly, I drew my fingers toward the palms of my hands. But my fingertips didn’t brush against sand. They inched across hard, crusted-over dirt. Dirt so solid, not even a single blade of grass poked through.
“We’ve got to go back,” Rosi moaned. “We have to get back to Refuge City and find . . . the others.” She turned her head toward me, and I could almost see her deciding that she wasn’t worried about Enforcers hearing her now. “Bobo will be so scared. . . .”
“How are we going to do that when we don’t even know where we are?” Enu demanded. “When we’re out here totally alone?”
Maybe only I could hear the panic in his voice. Maybe Edwy and Rosi thought he was just being mean.
“The Freds told us people can navigate by the stars at night,” Rosi whimpered. “If anyone knows what to look for . . . That’s what I tried to do out in the desert. . . .”
I expected Enu to erupt: The stars? That’s stupid! That only works if you know what direction you want to go! And if we don’t know where we are, we don’t know which way it is back to Refuge City! But before he could speak, I said quickly, “Or I could use the GPS on my phone. We don’t have to worry about the Enforcers finding us now, since they’re the ones who sent us here.”
Eagerly, I pulled out my phone. I kept myself propped on one arm—I seemed to need that. Still, if anyone could operate a phone one-handed, it was me. I pressed my thumb against the screen to bypass the security code, and then clicked into a mapping app.
The screen stayed blank, searching for a connection.
I struggled to keep breathing normally.
“I guess maybe we’re too far out,” I said finally. I kept my hand curved around the phone like it was a security blanket. I tried to keep my voice nonchalant, like I really didn’t care. “I guess it’s too far to the nearest cell tower, or . . .”
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