Alcibiades was screaming the same thing. Then my ears blanked out again for a moment, and I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you run and run and run and try your very hardest, but you don’t make any progress at all. There were too many Zacadians in our way, too many humans reaching toward the hole in the wall or trying to crawl toward it by squeezing under the gap I’d created in the prison bars.
Alcibiades grunted something beside me, and a moment later I heard the translator in Cana’s hand scream out, “I promise!” And then everything changed. The Zacadians around us seemed to be shoving us forward, lifting us toward the hole in the wall, even as they rose up and blocked the stream of humans struggling toward the hole themselves. In seconds my knees met rock, and I started climbing and climbing and climbing. And then I popped my head up into fresh air and shadowy moonlight.
Oddly, there seemed to be two sets of shadows creeping toward me from two different directions.
Oh, right, this planet has two moons, which means two light sources to cast shadows.
Off to my left, a long, straight silhouette stood silent and motionless in the night sky, framed by a half-risen moon.
The spaceship, I told myself, breathing a sigh of relief. And it’s not even that far away.
To the right, the shadows were jumbled, constantly shifting. Fearfully, I forced my eyes to follow the shadows to their source: figures also framed by a rising moon, but not still or silent. These shapes were chaotic and loud and streaming toward us.
These were Enforcers. Holding guns.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“Go! Go! Go! Go!” I screamed, even as I scrambled out of the hole and yanked Edwy and Rosi up behind me. “Cana, hide your light! All of you—stay low, and maybe they won’t see us—maybe they can’t shoot—”
Already I could see the flaw in my thinking. I was screaming about the wrong danger. Why would the Enforcers shoot when they had the power to take over our bodies and make us do anything they wanted? This was hopeless.
My body didn’t seem to know that. I kept reaching down into the hole, kept tugging on arms and legs and hands and feet. I wasn’t going to give up until I had to. Edwy, Rosi, and Cana joined me crouched in the rubble at the edge of the hole, reaching down for Enu and Alcibiades behind us.
“Are there Enforcers surrounding the spaceship?” Alcibiades gasped at me. At least, the voice coming out of the translator seemed to be gasping.
I risked a quick, darting glance over my shoulder toward the spaceship.
“No, all the Enforcers are on the other side of us,” I hissed back to him. “Coming from where we were always sent out to work—do they have barracks there?” What good were my descriptions, when he’d never seen my brothers and friends and me being sent out to work?
Alcibiades grunted and panted, but the translator didn’t supply any words for his sounds. Maybe his strength was flagging; maybe he’d gone nonverbal on me. The Zacadians below him made panicky moans and groans, and the translator evidently judged that worth decoding. I heard a jumbled “Plan B, then?” “Do we have to?” “It is better to die with valor and for a cause . . .”
“Um, did someone say ‘die’?” I asked, my voice shaking with fear. “Can’t we stop and think and maybe—”
Alcibiades slithered out of the hole, his last tentacle erupting from the small space with a pop! In one motion he scooped up Edwy, Rosi, Cana, and me alongside Enu. I’d never gotten a good count of how many tentacles Alcibiades had, so maybe he could have clutched us with one tentacle apiece. But I found myself upside down and face-to-face with Enu, our foreheads pressed tightly together as Alcibiades slid toward the spaceship.
“Are you okay?” I whispered to Enu. “Feeling any better?”
Even in the moonlight I could see the angry flush to Enu’s face. He rolled his head to the side, and we were squeezed so closely together that his motion rolled my head to the side as well. Now I was staring straight at the Enforcers running toward us.
“Who cares if I’m still sick or not?” Enu hissed. “That monster’s using us like a shield, blocking the Enforcers from shooting him. We’re all going to die!”
Was Enu right?
It felt like we were in a video game, with the Enforcers running after us, carrying guns. Every video game Enu played was set up this way, with good guys fighting enemies. Sometimes there were two sets of enemies, and that made things even trickier.
Enu had played a lot more video games than I ever had. Was he right, that both the Enforcers and Alcibiades were our enemies?
I started trying to squirm away from Alcibiades.
He roared at me then. “No! You have to help!” came grunting out of the translator, which Cana evidently still carried in her hand. Another roar, and then “As long as we’re all pressed together, that confuses their weapons, and they can’t take control of our bodies!”
Okay, then, I thought, and stopped squirming.
“But their bullets can still hit our bodies, right?” Enu argued. “Bullets don’t care what a body’s made of. . . .”
Alcibiades and the translator stayed silent.
Right now Alcibiades’s life counts for more than any of us humans, I thought. He knows how to fly that spaceship. We don’t. Maybe he does need us as shields.
The thought froze me in place. Alcibiades kept slinking forward.
Behind us the Enforcers were gaining ground. They were just a few meters back from the hole we’d crawled from. Two or three of the ones at the very front raised guns to their shoulders. I cowered and winced, so I could only see through the slits of my eyelids.
But then tentacles began spilling out of the hole in the ground: One Zacadian after another began slithering out and shakily standing upright.
“No, no—it’s dangerous out here! You all need to stay safe!” Rosi screamed back at them, just as Enu screamed, “Stop! Stay back! There’s not room on the spaceship for everyone!”
Two different viewpoints. Two different reactions.
Was this the true difference between being raised in a Fredtown and on Earth?
I didn’t know what to say or do. That was an Earth reaction too.
One of the Zacadians who had emerged from the hole fell to the ground, and another instantly popped up to take its place.
I jerked on Enu’s arm.
“They’re protecting us!” I screamed in his ear. “They aren’t coming up to get on the ship! They’re sacrificing themselves so we can escape!”
“Are you sure?” Enu asked, as if this was too incredible to believe. He struggled against Alcibiades’s grip, lifting his head and chest so he could see better.
Something went zinging over my head. A bullet.
“That was close,” I whispered to Enu, but something was wrong. He didn’t answer. His body slumped suddenly, his head thudding against mine. Even in the unbelievable Zacadi overnight chill, I felt a warm trickle against my arm.
Enu had been shot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“Help! Stop! We have to—Enu—”
I couldn’t gather the words to explain what I’d seen, what I was struggling to understand. I felt an arm on my neck—Rosi pulling my head down so I wouldn’t be hit too.
“Why didn’t you do that for Enu?” I snarled, though maybe what I really meant was, Why didn’t I do that for Enu?
I sobbed into Alcibiades’s slimy back. The wind whistled through my hair.
“First aid!” Edwy screamed in my ear. “Do you know first aid? Does anyone?”
“Apply pressure on the wound!” Rosi screamed. “Stop the bleeding!”
I turned my head, and I saw that she couldn’t reach Enu; only I could.
“I’m only good at computers,” I muttered. “Computers and technology and . . .”
Edwy shoved my elbow, and my hands pressed into the blood.
The wound was on Enu’s shoulder, not his head.
Even I knew shoulder wounds were survivable. They could be.
&
nbsp; I pressed my hands as hard as I could against Enu’s shoulder as Alcibiades kept rushing forward, jolting us over the barren landscape. I could hear the gunfire behind us; I could hear the screams and shouts of the Enforcers and the groans and wails of the falling Zacadians.
And then Alcibiades slammed against hard metal, opened a door. He grabbed the Zacadi pearl Cana was hiding—the one we’d been using for light—and shoved it into a slot above the door. I heard a hum: The spaceship was powering up, coming back to life. Cana, Rosi, and Edwy scrambled upward, along a ladder that fell before us from a metal cylinder. I tugged on Enu’s blood-soaked shirt.
“You’ll have to carry him!” I screamed at Alcibiades. “Enu needs help!”
Maybe the translator made my words intelligible to Alcibiades; maybe he spat back a reply. I didn’t hear any of it.
“Get out of the way!” I screamed at Cana, Rosi, and Edwy, because they were all reaching down, all trying to grasp Enu’s limp body. And they were all so small; they were accomplishing nothing but putting themselves in danger too.
Maybe my mind blanked out a little, because suddenly we were all rising—oh, Alcibiades had hit some lever that carried the ladder up into the spaceship with us on it. The door shut below us—were we finally safe?
The six of us lay in a pile on some metal floor.
“Enu,” I said, shaking my brother’s shoulder. “Enu, wake up. Someone has to take care of you—”
“The pearls!” Alcibiades screamed at me, the sound coming from the translator and his mouth almost simultaneously. “We have to have the rest of your Zacadi pearls to get us out of here! Both of them! Now!”
“Oh, but I only have one left,” I said, patting my pocket. I was momentarily confused that Alcibiades didn’t know this.
Oh, right, it wasn’t like there was time to explain that I couldn’t steal all the pearls we needed . . . not when my brothers and Rosi had to be cured and there were all those other prisoners begging for help and then the Enforcers were chasing us. . . .
“We wouldn’t have any left if I hadn’t missed with that one throw,” I tried to explain. “So maybe . . .”
There was no point in continuing to talk. I hadn’t figured out Alcibiades’s features exactly, but my best guess was that his expression now would translate into a human face with eyes widened with extreme horror.
He roared so loudly I had to cover my ears. But the translator’s voice broke through anyway:
“Then we don’t have enough fuel to take off!” it wailed at me. “We can’t go anywhere!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Two things happened at once: I heard a pinging beneath us that might have been the Enforcers’ bullets hitting the side of the spaceship.
And Cana pressed the translator into Alcibiades’s tentacles.
“Didn’t you say there’s a pearl inside that makes this work?” she asked.
Alcibiades’s eyes widened again. He grabbed the translator and smashed it against the floor. With one tentacle, he scooped something from the wreckage—a pearl. Another tentacle slithered toward me.
I already had my pearl out of my pocket, held out to him.
Alcibiades grabbed the pearl from my hand. Then he slammed both pearls into a compartment high over our heads, higher than any of us humans could have reached. A control panel rose out of the floor, and Alcibiades began running tentacles across the screen, his motions so smooth and fast that my vision blurred.
Or maybe the blurring effect was from the spaceship lifting so rapidly, spinning up and up and up.
I stopped hearing any bullets hitting the spaceship.
And Alcibiades said that’s all the Enforcers have to attack us with here on Zacadi; once we’re in space we’ll be out of range. . . .
I hoped Alcibiades was right.
We all began to float.
“This is much better than the way we left Fredtown,” Edwy called as he bounced gently off the ceiling.
“Or Earth!” Rosi reminded him.
Both their voices were full of fake cheer, like they were trying hard to stay hopeful.
Then Cana added, “We’ll be able to get help for Enu really soon, Kiandra,” and I had to choke back sobs.
Enu was floating away from me. Little droplets of blood spun around him in a horrifying dance.
Would blood even clot in space? I wondered. Or do wounds just bleed and bleed and . . .
“How soon?” I snapped at Alcibiades. “How long will it take to get to the planet where the intergalactic court meets? Or—any other planet where Enu could get help?”
Alcibiades kept his head bent over the control panel, his tentacles flying. I grabbed one of them and asked my question again.
Now Alcibiades looked up, nothing but puzzlement on his face.
Right. Without the translator, he didn’t understand.
“Cana, did you learn enough of the Zacadian language that you can be our interpreter?” Rosi asked, tapping the younger girl on the shoulder as she floated by. “Can you ask Alcibiades how soon we can get Enu to a doctor?”
“I’ll try,” Cana said.
Painstakingly, she began to moan and grunt. The sounds went on and on, indecipherable. Alcibiades seemed to be trying to listen, but then he only shrugged helplessly, gave a single grunt, and turned back to the control panel, which he held on to with a single tentacle.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Cana bit her lip.
“I think that was, ‘I’m doing the best I can,’ ” she reported. “But I could be wrong.”
I reached for Enu, but he was too far away.
“Isn’t there a way to create fake gravity on a spaceship?” I asked desperately. “A way to tie Enu to the wall so he won’t keep floating—and bleeding? A way to . . . to know that everything is going to be all right?”
“Everything is going to be all right,” Rosi said quickly. “We’ll figure out a way to talk to Alcibiades without the translator. He’ll help us figure out how to help Enu. He’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
But I couldn’t believe a word she said, because she’d been raised by Freds.
And Alcibiades was a totally alien creature.
And Enu, my brother Enu, who’d been with me for my entire life, was just as likely to die as he was to live.
CHAPTER FORTY
For a long time I was worthless. Rosi was the one who snagged Enu by the foot and pulled him over to one wall, strapping him in somehow to hold him in one place. Edwy took his shirt off and tore it into strips, then tied the strips around Enu’s shoulder as makeshift bandages. Cana found a blanket somewhere and tucked it around Enu.
“Now he can sleep while we fly,” she announced. “My Fred-mommy always said sleep is good when you’re sick or hurt.”
Then the three younger kids began using other blankets to corral all the blood droplets into one section of the ship—its toilet, maybe? The Zacadian equivalent of a toilet?
“Want to race for the ones over there?” Edwy called to Rosi and Cana. He pointed toward the droplets that had floated the farthest away.
Is this just a game to you? I wanted to scream at them. Don’t you understand? Enu could die! All of us could die!
Maybe Edwy was just trying to keep Cana from seeing what serious danger we were in. Maybe that was something he’d learned from the Freds. But that made me mad too. The Freds had never understood Enu or me. Being raised by Freds meant Edwy, Rosi, and Cana couldn’t fully understand either.
Enu would understand everything, if he ever woke up again. He and I understood each other; we’d always been alike. It had always been just the two of us against the world—the two of us against our parents, the two of us against nasty nannies and the indifferent school, the two of us against Udans.
Udans . . .
I gasped, because I hadn’t thought about Udans in days. We’d left him behind on Earth in danger, protecting us, and I’d all but forgotten him.
Maybe Rosi forgot Bobo, too, and Edwy
forgot Zeba. . . .
No, right this minute Rosi was floating past me, calling back over her shoulder as her hair bushed out from her head, “You know, if Bobo were here, he would love helping catch all the blood. He’d have a million questions about zero gravity and if the blood looks like this inside our bodies, too. . . .”
I kicked off against a ridge on the wall that had undoubtedly been designed for creatures with tentacles, not hands and feet. That floated me back toward Alcibiades. I wrapped my leg around the post holding up the control panel so I didn’t just bounce backward. Alcibiades was no longer flailing his tentacles about wildly; now he was just staring at the screen filled with indecipherable symbols.
When I touched the frame of the control panel, reddish dirt came off on my hand—I guess the spaceship had been abandoned for so long that this layer of dust had grown into a hardened casing. But the dirt gave me an idea.
Painstakingly, I used my finger to draw two circles in the dust. I added an arcing line between them, and a question mark over the line. I hoped Alcibiades would understand that I was asking, How long before we get to the planet of the intergalactic court?
To help out, I drew another circle off to the side, with arrows around it to show it spinning. Then I wrote beside that:
1?
2?
3?
Wouldn’t Alcibiades understand that I was showing his planet making a complete rotation, that I was asking about the number of days we had to travel?
Alcibiades stared helplessly; then a wave of motion shivered through his whole body. It seemed like a shrug.
Of course. Why would Alcibiades understand my symbol for a question mark? Or for numbers? Or even arrows?
Alcibiades and I were from different planets. We were different species. Just because the translator had made it seem like we could communicate easily before, that didn’t actually mean anything. For all I knew, maybe he wasn’t even taking us to the intergalactic court.
And yet, when I stared into his eyes—which had finally stopped rolling up and down—I felt like we did understand each other.
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