I took Enu’s arm.
“Don’t hit anyone else,” I told him. Then I amended: “I mean, not unless you have to. Do you need a wheelchair, or are you okay to walk?”
“Walk,” Enu mumbled. “Need to walk off . . . daze . . .”
Enu kept blinking and stumbling, veering side to side. I had to hold on tight.
“Feel . . . so weird,” Enu groaned. “Can’t get my eyes to work right. . . . Are we . . . safe here?”
I considered that.
“I think we are. For now. It’s the rest of humanity we’re worried about. And the Zacadians.”
“The slimy tentacle creatures?” Enu mumbled. He looked around, confusion on his face. “Didn’t we escape them? In my nightmares I kept running and running and running. . . .”
It was hard to tell what he remembered of the Zacadians curing him, and Alcibiades carrying us to the spaceship. Maybe he thought all of it was just a nightmare. But there wasn’t time to explain everything right now. And he was so groggy, I wasn’t sure he’d understand anyway.
“Just stick with me,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” Enu and I never got mushy, but I couldn’t help it now. I gave his arm a squeeze. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”
The two of us stepped out into the hall, right behind Alcibiades, Edwy, Rosi, and Cana. I almost wanted to giggle, the way all of us shifted into innocent-looking saunters once we were out in the open.
Well, that was the way Cana and Rosi walked all the time, but it was fake for the rest of us.
Just as fake as Enforcers or Freds who look like humans, or a hospital room on this planet that looks like my room at home . . .
I was working toward something with that thought, but I was still a little groggy myself. It was a struggle just to concentrate on walking and helping Enu along.
The hallway was bland and boring and long. Alcibiades dropped back to walk alongside Enu and me.
“I thought there’d be signs somewhere, telling how to get to the intergalactic court chambers,” he whispered. “My grandparents, my aunts and uncles—they said that’s how government buildings were, back when Zacadi had government buildings. They said if I ever got to plead our case, that’s what I should look for. . . .”
“Alcibiades, were you born in that prison cell?” I asked. “Had you lived your whole life there?”
“Pretty much,” he said grimly.
That explained why his eyes were darting about so desperately now, why he seemed to have to try so hard to hide his complete befuddlement.
“I know what to do,” I said, trying to sound confident.
The next time we reached a doorway leading into another hospital room, I poked my head inside. My gamble paid off: A healer stood on duty in a little alcove. She seemed to be going through medical records for the very ancient man lying in the hospital bed in the room beyond.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I am so sorry to bother you. My friends and I have been summoned to speak in the intergalactic court chambers, but we got completely turned around. I don’t know how we ended up here in the hospital wing.” Oops—not a convincing lie if she noticed that Enu was behind me wearing a hospital gown. But who knew how she actually saw any of us. If my eyes made my brain think she was human, did she see me and think we were covered with Fred fur? Maybe she didn’t even see us as wearing clothes.
Stop thinking about that, or about how differently Freds see things. . . .
I decided to act as though I thought I was telling the truth, and maybe that would convince her. I pasted on a fake smile.
“Could you just give us directions to the court chambers, and we’ll be out of your way?” Edwy added, right at my elbow. He finished with a smile that was just as sickly sweet and mock-sincere as mine.
For a kid raised in Fredtown, he was an amazing liar.
“Well, of course,” the healer said, beaming kindly back at us. “You poor things. I know it takes months to get an appointment to speak to the court, and they only summon the most important speakers. . . . How stressful it must be to have gotten turned around today of all days. Here. I’ll print you a map.”
She typed a few commands into the computer before her. I concentrated on not letting my face show how distressed I was by her words: It takes months to get an appointment. The healer Enu had punched had probably planned to explain that to us too. No wonder she’d finally agreed to let us go—she thought we were only going to sign up for the chance to go before the court someday far in the future.
But we had to find a way to speak to the court today. We’d already wasted enough time.
A paper came chugging out of the side of this healer’s computer, and she handed it to me.
“The X is where we are now, and if you head on down the hall, you’ll turn at the collection of red balloons. . . .” The healer pointed out landmarks on the map. “You see how everything is linked in the court complex—it’s really simple to get around.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Rosi said, adding her own glowing smile.
The healer went back to her medical records, and all six of us kids continued down the hall.
Alcibiades waited until we were several steps away from the healer before he whispered, “It’s like she didn’t suspect a thing! Are Freds stupid? Is that the problem?”
“Not stupid—innocent,” Rosi whispered back. “It would never occur to her to lie, so she couldn’t even consider that we might be lying.”
“The Freds back in Fredtown always knew when I was lying,” Edwy countered ruefully.
“That’s because your Fred-parents and teachers had been around you enough to understand that lies were possible,” Rosi told him. But there was no barb to her words—she almost sounded nostalgic.
“See? I trained them!” Edwy said. “They should thank me!”
“But what are the Freds on the court like?” Alcibiades asked. “I’ve only ever dealt with Enforcers and my fellow Zacadians—and now you humans. How are we supposed to convince species we don’t know anything about that the Enforcers must be stopped?”
“Rosi, Cana, and I know all about the Freds,” Edwy bragged.
“Freds,” Enu said darkly, as if he was just starting to put his thoughts back together. “Hate Freds.”
“They really do mean well,” Rosi said, as if that could convince us to forgive them.
We kept walking, all of us lost in our own thoughts. We turned at the red balloons, and faced another long hallway. But at least the doors we passed now looked less like hospital rooms and more like business offices.
“Can we trust anything we see around us?” I asked. “If Alcibiades looks like a green-eyed human to us, and we look like nine-tentacled Zacadians to him, then—”
“I don’t see all of you as having nine tentacles,” Alcibiades interrupted. “Females always have more—usually eleven or twelve by the time they’re grown.” He pointed first to Cana, then to Rosi, then to me. “You have five, you have ten, and you have, um, your full twelve.”
Just the way he said “twelve” made me blush. I guess while I was seeing him as a really, really hot human, maybe he was seeing me as a really, really hot Zacadian.
Then Cana piped up, “Is it magic? The way all of us see other people differently?” She studied Alcibiades. “I think you have purple eyes, not green.” She tilted her head and said solemnly, “I like purple.”
So whatever causes this takes our preferences into account? I thought. And, being raised in Fredtown, Cana never learned the prejudice about green eyes being best?
“It’s not magic,” Edwy said. “It’s not elaborate disguises, either, like what the Freds used back in Fredtown.”
“Or what the Enforcers used on Earth and Zacadi,” I muttered. “If you looked hard enough, you could tell those were fake. But this . . .”
I sneaked another glance at Alcibiades. He looked completely human. Completely, amazingly human.
“Yeah,” Edwy agreed. “I asked my healer how the system works here. He sa
id the air in the intergalactic court complex has genetically altered microbes in it, and those microbes circle around us and filter the light that gets into our eyes, which changes what we see.”
That must be the “protocols” the Enforcers who met our spaceship were talking about, I thought. They meant that that microbe air flowed into our spaceship, too, because we were at an intergalactic-court docking station.
I had to hold back a shiver thinking about those Enforcers. But if they’d turned us over to the Freds who healed us, were they as bad as the Enforcers we’d encountered on Earth and Zacadi?
Or is there still more about the intergalactic court that I don’t understand?
Beside me, Rosi clapped a hand over her mouth in horror.
“Are you saying those microbes read our minds?” she asked.
“No, just our reactions,” Edwy said. “At least, that’s what the healer told me.”
Could we believe that?
“So if I get close enough to Alcibiades and his specialized microbes—sorry, Alcibiades—will I see everything the way he does?” I asked. As I spoke, I moved closer to him, practically pressing my head against his. To my great disappointment, I did not suddenly see my brothers and the two girls with multiple tentacles. Everyone and everything looked the same as before.
“I tried that with my healer, too, and it didn’t work,” Edwy said. “These are really, really advanced microbes. It takes years of training to know how to shut them off, even for a minute.”
“Can we walk faster, and worry about all of this later?” Alcibiades asked.
I squinted—just in an instant he’d moved far ahead of the rest of us. I wanted so badly to be able to see the tentacles that were really propelling him forward. The harder I watched, the more his human-looking legs blurred together. But I couldn’t make myself see them as tentacles.
“Do you think they have guards standing outside the courtroom?” Cana asked, stretching her legs to try to keep up. “Do you think those guards are Enforcers? Why would they let us in to say bad things about other Enforcers?”
How could a little kid like her be asking about magic one moment, and figuring out the holes in our plan the next?
“Lie,” Enu said, still weaving unsteadily. “We have to lie.”
Cana didn’t immediately counter, But lying is wrong! We’re not supposed to lie! Here are fifty principles of Fredtown about why people shouldn’t lie! And I felt an odd pang, as though I was sad that Cana had grown up, that Cana had been corrupted. I’d seen her change just in the time I’d known her.
“I wish we still had some of those exploding pearls,” Edwy said.
“I bet I could find some,” Alcibiades said.
He reached up to one of the glowing lights that lined the hallway and twisted the base of the orb. The light went out, and he pulled out what looked like a large grain of sand.
“Back home we call this a pearl tenth,” he said. “It’s a tenth of a normal-size Zacadi pearl.”
Rosi all but began clapping.
“How did you know that would be there?” she asked.
“Every bit of territory under the jurisdiction of the intergalactic court runs on Zacadi pearls,” Alcibiades said.
“We didn’t have that on Earth,” I said.
“And either we didn’t have them in Fredtown, or they were always hidden,” Edwy said. “Zacadi pearls were something else the Freds didn’t tell us about.”
Alcibiades shrugged.
“Didn’t you say humans were just probationary members of the court before the Enforcers came?” he asked. “That’s why you didn’t have them. Believe me, the intergalactic court wouldn’t have given them to us Zacadians, either, if the pearls hadn’t come from our planet. But having access—that’s one of the biggest benefits of being full members of the court. Didn’t you know that?”
He sounded proud and bitter and sorrowful, all at once.
Because if Zacadi pearls are that important to the intergalactic court, I thought, doesn’t that mean that all their territories are dependent on the Enforcers using slave labor to mine them?
What if the Freds already knew what was happening on Zacadi—and Earth—and just didn’t care? What hope did we have then?
The rest of the group ran to the next light, to help Alcibiades collect another tenth of a pearl. And my feet made me follow along.
My feet, at least, had hope.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Edwy, it turned out, was good at spying.
As we got close to the area of our map labeled INTERGALACTIC COURT CHAMBERS, he began holding us back at every doorway and intersecting hallway, and then tiptoeing forward only after one of us could peek out and make sure the coast was clear. Finally we reached a corner that led to a pair of imposing stairways. By bending low and looking up, we could just barely see that the stairways joined again two flights up, in front of an arched doorway guarded by men in dark uniforms.
This was the entry to the intergalactic court.
Edwy held the rest of us back.
“I’ll tiptoe over to hide under that banister and count the guards,” he whispered.
“No, I should do it,” Cana said. “I’m the smallest, and if they catch me, I’ll just say I’m lost. They’ll believe me.”
She smiled up at us, and it was horrible, but we let her go.
She put her thumb in her mouth before she stepped around the corner, and instantly looked even younger than five.
She seemed to be making no attempt whatsoever to crouch down or hide.
“Hey! Hey! Who are you? This is a prohibited zone! You don’t have authorization to be here!” a gruff voice yelled almost instantly from above.
I froze, but Cana just turned her head slowly and gazed innocently up the stairs. She took a few casual steps up, as if she was only trying to see who had called out to her.
“My mommy is in the in-ter-guh-lac-tic court,” she said, pronouncing each syllable separately, as if she were proud she could say such a big word. “I was in her office, and I got bored waiting.”
“Well, you need to go back! Now!”
This was another voice, even sterner and gruffer.
“Okay,” Cana said. Even from the side, I could see how innocently she blinked her eyes. “I didn’t mean to break any rules.”
But when she stepped back down, she kept walking forward, instead of turning around. She scuffed the toes of her shoes against the marble floor; she danced and skipped. She looked like a carefree, careless kid.
I heard footsteps on the staircase and caught my breath. Alcibiades, Edwy, Enu, Rosi, and I all clung together, poised to run if we had to—either to dart out and rescue Cana, or to flee to save ourselves.
“Kid!” The voice rang out way too close. “To go back to your mommy’s office, you have to turn around! Go back the way you came! Not the long way around. Now get out of here! Scram!”
I couldn’t see the yelling guard. But I imagined him poised halfway down the stairs, his gun pointed at Cana.
Cana turned and stared up the stairs again. Her eyes stayed wide and innocent.
“Ooooh,” she breathed. “I didn’t know what you meant before.”
“That way!” The guard must have pointed, but Cana was slow about spinning on her heel and trudging back toward us. She clasped her hands together behind her back like a little kid who was in no hurry to get anywhere.
Only when she reached the wall where the rest of us were hiding did her expression change from innocent and aimless to tense and excited.
“The guard didn’t suspect anything!” she announced.
“Shh,” I warned her. I pressed my ear against the wall, listening.
For a moment nothing happened. Then there were footsteps. Footsteps headed up the stairs, not farther down.
“And it’s pretty clear that that guard was an Enforcer or some similar species,” Rosi muttered. “Any Fred or Fred-like creature would have helped a lost little kid get back where she belonged.�
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“Well, it’s good for us that the guard didn’t care,” Edwy said.
“You mean guards,” Cana corrected. “There were six of them in front of the doors at the top of the stairs.”
“Guards,” Enu grunted. “Hate guards. Want to—”
“No punching unless you have to, remember?” I grabbed his arm just in case he planned to dart out and attack the guard immediately.
Enu clutched his head.
“So . . . confused. You’ll tell me when it’s time to punch, right?” he asked, and for a moment it was like we were little kids again, totally relying on each other.
“Don’t worry. I will,” I said.
“On to the next part of the plan, then,” Alcibiades said grimly.
Cana began jumping up and down, just as merrily as when she was pretending for the guards.
“Oh, but I already did the next step.” Cana whispered, but it still sounded like she was crowing with joy. “When I put my hands behind my back, I dropped one Zacadi pearl tenth after another. So now we’re ready for the fun part.”
I’m not sure whose jaw dropped the farthest in astonishment.
“Wow, Cana,” Edwy said. “If you ever want to be a criminal mastermind like my father—like Enu’s, Kiandra’s, and my father—then—”
“She does not want to be a criminal mastermind,” Rosi snapped. “She only wants to be sneaky for a good cause. Right, Cana?”
“Oh, right,” Cana agreed.
“Well, let’s hope it works,” Alcibiades said, in a way that made me see him as incredibly ancient again, even though all his features were so young and handsome. He still had old, sad eyes.
“Does everybody remember their assigned role?” I asked.
The others nodded.
Rosi and Alcibiades crouched side by side by the corner. We’d decided they would be best at this part. They divided up what was left of the Zacadi pearl tenths we’d gathered.
“One, two, three . . . go!” Rosi whispered, even as both she and Alcibiades arced their arms back.
And then both of them launched their arms forward and threw one pearl tenth after another.
Children of Jubilee Page 17