Children of Jubilee
Page 20
Cana squinted up at Mrs. Osemwe.
“Was that a principle of Fredtown?” she asked.
“No,” Mrs. Osemwe said. “But it should have been.”
“Oh,” Cana said. “I’ll remember it, then.”
Mrs. Osemwe patted Cana’s head. Then she held up my phone, miraculously reassembled.
“Who wants to make the first call?” she asked.
EPILOGUE—ONE YEAR LATER
I kicked off my dusty boots and dived for the most comfortable chair in the living room.
“Dibs!” I yelled, just in case Enu or Edwy had any bright ideas about beating me to it.
“No fair,” Edwy groaned behind me. He put down his bucket with a heavy thud and began pulling off his own boots. “Enu and I worked twice as long as you!”
“You worked outside for twice as long as me,” I corrected, snuggling into the cozy chair. “It’s not my fault you haven’t learned to work on electronics equipment indoors yet.”
“I can’t believe we saved two planets from Enforcers, and I’m still picking up Zacadi pearls every day!” Enu grumbled.
But his words held no bite. It was a joking complaint, just as Edwy’s and my taunts were more for fun than anything else.
“Oh, stuff it,” I said. “You’re getting bigger muscles than ever, and you know we see you admiring yourself in the mirror every morning.”
“And you can ask to transfer to a different job any time you want,” Edwy added. “That’s the difference.”
We were back on Zacadi once again, but everything was different now. Our jobs were only part-time, after school—not full-time enslavement.
And we had chosen this.
After the Enforcers fled from Zacadi, a humanitarian group of Freds landed to help the small group of surviving Zacadians, as well as the remaining human prisoners. All the humans wanted to return to Earth, and the Freds sent them back right away. But the sick, starving Zacadians were in such desperate straits that they couldn’t run their planet on their own, so they agreed to an experiment: People from all over the universe would try to build a new civilization here, one where various intelligent species worked together.
I was the first volunteer.
“You can’t bear to be separated from your buddy Alcibiades, huh?” Enu had teased me, but I didn’t even bother responding, because he was busy signing up second.
Edwy signed up third.
None of us actually said it out loud, but I think we all knew: We couldn’t have gone back to the safe blandness of our lives in Refuge City after everything we’d gone through. We were Watanabonesets: We needed challenges.
The amazing thing was that, once they found out they could finally escape Cursed Town, our parents followed us to Zacadi as well.
Our mother stepped in the back door from the garden just then, holding a bucket full of tomatoes.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” she said. “I still need help picking green beans.”
We all groaned. We were all still getting used to having parents around, in our faces all the time.
The Freds who were in charge of helping everyone make a smooth transition assured us that what we were feeling was normal and natural for human teenagers—a category that even Edwy fit into now.
Just when I thought I couldn’t bear dealing with my parents for one more instant, they would look at us the way my mother was looking at us now: her face soft, her eyes glowing.
Our parents loved us. They always had. They’d sacrificed for us, even when they’d believed they’d never see us again.
I stood up and headed for the garden, a tangle of vines and greenery. It was a miracle how my mother had managed to coax life out of the dead Zacadi soil. She had done so well that she gave classes now in the town hall, helping other new citizens learn to grow their own food. In all our video chats over the years, she’d always seemed like such the lady of leisure, so it amused me to see her now with a constant rim of dirt under her fingernails.
But that wasn’t nearly as funny as what my father was doing now: The Freds had made him police chief of our new town.
Even he had protested that one: “But, but . . . don’t you know what I did back on Earth?”
“Yes,” the Fred who was handling job assignments told him. “We know you understand how the criminal mind works. You will be great at this.”
And . . . he was. So far the only crimes in our community had been on the level of little kids stealing apples from their neighbors’ trees, but my dad had solved those in nothing flat.
It was a big switch to have a father I could be proud of.
Out in the garden I grabbed a bag and began snapping beans off the vine. A head bobbed over the fence to the yard next door, disappeared, then came into view again.
“Hi—”
“Ki—”
“—an—”
“—dra!”
It was Rosi’s little brother, Bobo, jumping up and down and calling out to me every time he spied me over the fence. He did this a lot—he liked proving that he could handle the extra Zacadian gravity. And proving that we were friends.
A second later Rosi herself appeared in the neighboring backyard. She lifted Bobo in her arms.
“Sorry,” she said. “Is he bothering you?”
“I’m always happy to see Bobo,” I said, grinning at the little boy. I could have added a now, anyway, but none of that mattered anymore.
Bobo was the first person we’d tried to track down that day we were at the intergalactic court and Mrs. Osemwe had managed to convert my phone into a communication device capable of reaching other planets. We’d spent a tense and stressful hour calling people all over Refuge City, hearing accounts of children in jails, children beaten and barely alive. But Zeba had been the exact right person to leave Bobo with, because she and her parents knew a whole network of people who lived under the radar, outside the view of any authority.
Bobo had been sitting in a soup kitchen eating blueberry pie when we’d finally found him. He was fine.
But I saw the way Rosi still held him a little too tightly, even now. And I saw the way Bobo squeezed her shoulders. But then he began to squirm.
“Rosi!” he complained. “I want to run and bounce some more!”
“Of course you do,” Rosi said, giving him one last hug and then letting him jump to the ground.
“You could be with him all the time this summer if you start that teacher-training internship,” I told Rosi across the fence.
“I know,” Rosi said. She rolled her eyes, which reminded me that, like Edwy, she was a teenager now too. “I love Bobo and all the other kids—but that’s not what I want to do the rest of my life.”
“It isn’t?” I asked. “But you’re so good with little kids!”
“I kind of had to be, back in Fredtown, because Edwy and I were the oldest,” she said. “But I like other things too. . . . Did I tell you Alcibiades volunteered to teach me how spaceships work this summer?”
“Really? That’s great!” I exclaimed. An idea began forming in my mind. “So, say, ten years from now, when this place is all settled and boring, you and Alcibiades and I—and whoever else wants to go—we’ll be explorers across the universe, finding all sorts of new civilizations. You two fly the ship; I’ll be the communications officer. . . .”
“Sounds good to me,” Rosi said. “If we wait until Cana grows up too, she can be our translator.”
“I’ll be the security officer,” Enu said behind me.
“And I’ll be the spy,” Edwy said, sneaking out of the house alongside him. “Admit it—you’re going to need a spy.”
Rosi and I just laughed. But it wasn’t a bad plan.
“More picking, less talking,” Mom jokingly called out the kitchen window. “We’re having company for dinner tonight.”
“Zeba’s family?” I asked.
“And Udans,” Mom said.
To our great joy, we’d found out that he had survived the Enforcer invasion
of Refuge City as well, and my parents had begged him to join us on Zacadi. They didn’t treat him as an employee anymore, though—he was more like a favorite uncle now.
I guess the fact that he’d saved Enu’s, Edwy’s, and my life had changed everything.
Or maybe my parents had always cared about him—as much as they could, back on Earth, especially in Cursed Town. Maybe it was being on Zacadi that had changed everything.
It had changed how I saw Udans, anyway.
Enu, Edwy, and I were just handing over bulging containers of green beans to Mom when our doorbell rang.
“It’s Alcibiades,” Edwy said, glancing toward the front window.
“Oooh, Kiandra, I bet he’s here for you,” Enu teased.
I slugged him in the arm and opened the door.
“Do you want to go greet the newest arrivals?” he asked. “They’re landing in fifteen minutes.”
“Sure,” I said. I knew a lot of words in his language now, but as I headed out the door, I still switched on the automatic translator I wore around my neck. It prevented any misunderstandings from getting out of hand. It was kind of like how we could breathe the Zacadi air without much difficulty, but we still kept emergency packs around that mimicked Earth’s atmosphere, just in case any of us started having problems.
“Did you hear the council finally voted on our town’s name today?” Alcibiades asked.
“That took long enough!” I groaned. “How many meetings have they had about that? And let me guess—they still probably went with New Zacadi City.”
“No,” Alcibiades said softly. “They went with the human name.”
“You mean Jubilee?” I said, surprised. I tried it out. “So now we live in Jubilee City. . . . Are you sure you don’t mind? I mean, this is still your planet, and so much of your civilization is gone. . . .”
“No, it’s perfect,” Alcibiades said. “All my people agreed.”
After the last attack by the Enforcers, only sixty Zacadians remained. But the Fred-healers assured them there was no reason those sixty wouldn’t live to ripe old ages and someday have children of their own. The Zacadians were not going to go extinct.
“You like the name Jubilee City because . . . you want to celebrate surviving at all?” I asked.
“That, and we liked the other meaning your word can have,” Alcibiades said. His eyes slid up and down in a way that I’d learned to recognize as signaling happiness. “We liked the part about being freed from the mistakes of the past, and starting new.”
“This is new,” I said, looking around at all the half-built houses started on the new streets radiating out from ours.
I raised my hand to wave at Rosi and Bobo’s parents, sitting on the porch of the house next door. Then I remembered that Rosi’s father was blind, and I called out, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Alvaran.”
It was amazing that Rosi’s parents, who had been so injured in the war in their hometown all those years ago, could live side by side with my parents, who had become wealthy from the war. I wouldn’t say they were exactly best friends, but I had heard Rosi’s mother and mine call out greetings across the fence.
It was a start.
“Oh, and they announced the teachers for the new school year,” Alcibiades said. “Cana’s mom was on the list for helping out in the teenagers’ classroom.”
Cana’s mom had been a maid back on Earth, but everyone was discovering new skills on Zacadi.
“Good,” I said. “She’s smart like Cana. I bet she’ll know how to make it fun.”
Alcibiades and I reached the town square and joined a crowd gathering on the beginnings of a lawn. The spaceship had already landed, and the landing ramp was lowered. The first person stepped into the doorway, and Alcibiades and I gasped at the same time.
“What? Enforcers? They’re allowing Enforcers to come now?” Alcibiades asked. “Why would they do that?”
The creature had a face like a beetle, but as he walked down the ramp, I saw that the rest of his body was divided between fur and scales.
“Is he actually still an Enforcer, if he’s changed that much?” I asked under my breath.
The creature stumbled toward the crowd. For some reason, his gaze honed in on Alcibiades and me. He stopped right in front of us, while the rest of the crowd watched silently. He held up the translator hanging around his neck.
“I am a teenager,” he said, the words spilling out of the translator. “Is that what you are too?”
I thought about how much I’d feared and hated the Enforcers back on Earth and during my time as a prisoner on Zacadi. I thought about how much of my parents’ lives had been spent hating all the same people they’d hated during their war.
And then I thought about how this boy was too young to have committed any of the Enforcer crimes on Earth or Zacadi. He wasn’t to blame for anything his people had done, any more than I was to blame for anything my parents had done back on Earth.
“Yes, we’re like you, and you’re like us,” I told him. I forced the corners of my mouth up into a smile, and it felt genuine. It was genuine. “Welcome to Jubilee.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX is the author of many critically and popularly acclaimed YA and middlegrade novels, including the Children of Exile series, the Missing series, the Under Their Skin series, the Shadow Children series, and The Summer of Broken Things. A graduate of Miami University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for the Indianapolis News. She also taught at the Danville (Illinois) Area Community College. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Visit her at haddixbooks.com.
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Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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ALSO BY MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX
* * *
CHILDREN OF EXILE SERIES
Children of Exile
Children of Refuge
UNDER THEIR SKIN SERIES
Under Their Skin
In Over Their Heads
THE MISSING SERIES
Found
Sent
Sabotaged
Torn
Caught
Risked
Revealed
Redeemed
Sought (an eBook original)
Rescued (an eBook original)
THE SHADOW CHILDREN SERIES
Among the Hidden
Among the Impostors
Among the Betrayed
Among the Barons
Among the Brave
Among the Enemy
Among the Free
THE PALACE CHRONICLES
Just Ella
Palace of Mirrors
Palace of Lies
The Girl with 500 Middle Names
Because of Anya
Say What?
Dexter the Tough
Running Out of Time
Full Ride
Game Changer
The Always War
Claim to Fame
Uprising
Double Identity
The House on the Gulf
Escape from Memory
Takeoffs and Landings
Turnabout
Leaving Fishers
Don’t You Dare Read This,
Mrs. Dunphrey
The Summer of Broken Things
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Margaret Peterson Haddix
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ISBN 978-1-4424-5009-7
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