My room was silent and dark and still, but my heart thudded frantically. My body seemed to think I needed to be on high alert. Enu’s one line kept repeating in my head: The past has nothing to do with us. The past has nothing to do with us.
Was that something the Freds would actually disapprove of? Or was that one of the philosophies they lived by?
Just . . . not one they spelled out, the way they did with every single other founding principle and guiding precept?
They’d never told us about the war in Cursed Town.
They’d never explained why Rosi and I—and all the other kids younger than us—had been taken away.
They’d never told us about our ancestors. They hadn’t told us my father’s version of the story or Kiandra’s version.
They’d never even told us their own history.
Did they think the past mattered?
It was a new sensation, not knowing what the Freds thought about something. The whole time I’d been growing up in Fredtown, they’d always talked and talked and talked. They’d always sounded so certain: Edwy, this is the right way to treat other people, with respect. . . . Edwy, your education is important, so you need to do your homework. . . . Edwy, you need to set worthy goals, so you contribute something of value to the society around you. . . . Their ideas were pounded into my brain. No matter how little attention I’d paid, I hadn’t been able to avoid memorizing every word of their stupid platitudes.
How could I not know what they thought about the past?
“Rosi,” I whimpered, and it was shameful to be twelve years old and sound that pathetic and desperate. But Rosi would have known the Freds’ viewpoint. If she were here, I could ask her, and I would know what I wanted to think: the opposite of whatever the Freds believed.
Rosi wasn’t here. Rosi was back in Cursed Town. And, unlike my parents, she didn’t live in a house with a phone or a computer, where she could link in and talk to me here.
I made myself lie back down, but it was like my thoughts and questions had developed claws. They kept scratching at me, painfully. I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep ever again.
I got up and walked into the living room. A tiny light gleamed in the darkness—the sleep-mode indicator on Kiandra’s laptop.
Was there anything I could look up, any answer I could find online?
Without even turning on a light, I scooped up Kiandra’s laptop and sank into the couch. I brought the laptop back to life, and the screen glowed at me.
I typed into the first search engine I could summon: What do Freds believe about the past?
The screen filled with tiny print—some professor’s theories about blah-blah this and bluh-bluh that. Every word seemed to be at least six syllables long. Rosi probably would have stuck with it, stumbling her way through the thicket of nonsense, actually puzzling out its mysteries. But I stabbed my finger at the escape key.
I tried again with a different search, simply the word Freds.
Now the screen flooded with answers: thousands—no, millions—of results. Even a three-year-old would have been able to tell me I’d made my search too broad, but I didn’t care. I clicked on the top link, figuring there had to be some reason it was the most popular. In Fredtown that would have meant it led to the most useful site.
Something like a comic strip came up. It was actually kind of funny, in a twisted way: It showed people with dead eyes and the names FRED1, FRED2, FRED3, etc., stamped across their foreheads. The Fred-zombies stole babies. They put the babies in rocket ships and flew them off into outer space.
“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “As if the Freds would actually be cool enough to fly in a rocket ship. Sheesh.”
I flipped to the next site, some sort of news story in tiny print.
“Snooze City,” I murmured.
I was about to click out of it, but evidently I’d triggered the start of a video clip with the news story. An anchorwoman was standing in front of the biggest party I’d ever seen, in what looked to be the heart of Refuge City. People were dancing in the streets, blowing on noisemakers, setting off fireworks, and throwing handful after handful of confetti into the air.
“Here we are getting the reaction to the good news that all the human children will be returned to Earth next week,” the anchorwoman said. “This is the party of the century! The party of the millennium! No—of all time! Our children are coming home!”
“What?” I whispered. “Returned to Earth? And . . . human children?”
How could there be any other type of children besides humans? Did they just mean “human,” not “animal”?
The clip restarted. I scrolled down, actually reading the words of the news story. This had to be a joke. An exaggeration. A parody.
I flipped over to the next link that came up from my search, and then the next one, the next one, the next one. I let the laptop slip off my lap. I ran into Kiandra’s room.
“Why didn’t you or Enu tell me?” I wailed. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? How could I have not known until now that Freds were aliens? And that for my entire life until two weeks ago they kidnapped every single baby born on Earth?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Kiandra didn’t answer. I slammed my hand against the light switch on the wall, and she squinted in the sudden brightness. She pulled the covers over her face.
“How could you wake me up in the middle of the night to ask that?” she groaned, from beneath her blankets and sheets. “Turn off the light. Go away.”
“How come you never told me?” I demanded, pulling her covers back, away from her face.
Kiandra winced, blinked once, and seemed to accept that I wasn’t going away.
“Why was it my job?” she asked. “I never even met you until last week! I never asked for a little brother!”
That stung. But if she thought I’d get all hurt and teary-eyed and go away, she didn’t know me very well.
“You’re the one who wants to be the truth squad on everything!” I told her. “Our father says our ancestors were mighty travelers, you say they were poor, thieving nomads . . . that was, like, hundreds of years ago! Isn’t what happened just twelve years ago more important? Isn’t what happened last week more important? When I guess I traveled on a rocket ship from another planet and I didn’t even know it? Because the Freds made us think it was just an airplane flight?”
“How was I supposed to know you were too stupid to know you’d been on a rocket ship?” Kiandra countered. She bunched up the edge of her blanket and sheet in her fists like she was about to throw them at me.
“You might have asked!” I snarled. “I’m your brother! You could have pretended you cared what happened to me, where I’d been, what my life was like, how I was adjusting to Ref City. . . .”
I was dangerously close to sounding like a Fred: Families are important, and we have to watch out for one another, take care of one another. . . . I stopped talking, but the Fred reasoning kept going in my brain: Everyone is his or her brother’s keeper. Everyone is his or her sister’s keeper.
Kiandra sat up and glared back at me.
“Did you ever wonder how it felt to me that the Freds didn’t think I was worth rescuing?” she said. “I was one when you were born. Enu was three. Mother and Father sent us here when the war broke out, but we were shuffled from one bribed nanny to another. We didn’t really have anyone who cared about us, unless you count Udans, and I don’t. You’ve seen how much attention the school pays to us. How nobody’s here for us even now. Did you ever look at the school website, where it says we have loving houseparents available to help us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—to guide us through a smooth transition to maturity?” She sounded like she was quoting. As if she’d memorized words I’d never even looked at. “But we really don’t, because it’s all lies?”
I took a step back. But then I locked my knees so she wouldn’t see how badly they wanted to quiver.
“Um,” I said weakly. “I thought you and Enu liked f
ooling our parents, and not really having to go to school.”
“What other choice do we have?” she asked. “Who could get us into any kind of reputable school? Udans? When we’re refugees from Cursed Town?”
“But—” I began.
“You think it’s just about money, right?” she interrupted. Her voice was raw. “I bet you think everything should be fine for us, since our parents have so much. But let me tell you—there’s not enough money in the world to make someone from Cursed Town respectable.”
I hadn’t been thinking about money. I’d been on the verge of quoting some Fred principle about how everyone deserved a good education. Or how everyone was equal.
But people in Ref City didn’t think that way. Kiandra and Enu didn’t think that way. How could I ever understand?
I remembered how my brother and sister had sounded the first day, describing our scam school. Maybe it was like how I used to brag back at the Fredtown school, I only spent five minutes on my homework last night! Rosi, did you really spend an hour? That must mean I’m smarter than you! When actually I was a little scared I was going to fail and be put back with the eleven-year-olds.
Bravado. That was what you called it, how Kiandra, Enu, and I all acted, most of the time. It was a way of lying and keeping secrets for all three of us.
But my waking her up in the middle of the night had scraped away Kiandra’s bravado.
“You know the fighting in Cursed Town was, like, the last straw, don’t you?” Kiandra asked. “What the people in Cursed Town did—that’s the reason Freds came to Earth in the first place and started taking away babies. So that’s why Cursed Town is the most hated place of all.”
I hadn’t known that. Who would have told me?
“And those Freds were supposed to be such saints,” Kiandra sneered. “So compassionate and caring . . . They said their hearts were filled with wanting the very best for the human race. But how could that be? When they thought Enu and I were already so damaged at one and three that they left us behind? And they thought that only unscathed newborn human babies—babies like you—were worth saving?”
I had never looked at it that way. I would never in a million years have guessed that Kiandra might be jealous of my growing up in Fredtown.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I interrupted. “It wasn’t a good thing to be taken to Fredtown. You got to grow up in Ref City!”
She kept glaring at me. Her words still rang in my ears: We were shuffled from one bribed nanny to another. We didn’t really have anyone who cared about us. . . . Nobody’s here for us even now.
“Anyhow, none of that is my fault!” I protested. “Nobody gave me a choice going to Fredtown! Nobody gave me a choice going to Cursed Town! Nobody gave me a choice coming here!”
“How many choices do you think I got?” Kiandra yelled back. “Oh, I know—do I paint my fingernails purple or blue? Do I wear a red dress or an orange one? That’s all Ref City expects of me! What is my life for?”
“I’m here in Ref City now too,” I reminded her. “What is my life for? Do you think I know?”
Once again I had Fredtown answers crowding my mind. I could have told her one of the Freds’ huge founding principles was this quote from some old guy named Albert Schweitzer: The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. If Rosi had been here with us, she could have lectured Kiandra for hours about her purpose in life.
I pressed my lips together so none of those words would slip out. Especially not Rosi’s name.
Enu burst into the room just then.
“What’s wrong with you guys?” he asked. “The one night I go to bed early because of the big game tomorrow, you two decide three a.m. is a good time to start shouting?”
“Blame him,” Kiandra said, pointing my way. “Our little brother the genius just now figured out that he lived most of his life with aliens.”
Enu looked at me with what might have been a flicker of interest.
“Really?” he said. “You honestly never knew that? Didn’t you ever notice how much the aliens stank?”
“Freds don’t stink!” I protested automatically, almost as if he’d insulted me. I could imagine how much Rosi would laugh at the thought of me defending Freds.
I couldn’t stand Freds. But it wasn’t fair to say that they smelled bad. Because they didn’t. They didn’t smell any different from anyone else.
But they were aliens. Aliens! From another planet! And Fredtown was on a completely different planet. . . .
The news still seemed to be sinking in.
Maybe dull, boring, rule-bound, safe Fredtown had been a slightly more interesting place than I’d ever suspected.
Maybe if the Freds had ever answered any of my questions truthfully, their answers would have been kind of interesting too.
How was it possible that I’d lived with Freds my entire life, and I’d never noticed that they weren’t even human?
“Did you ever see a Fred?” I asked Enu, and then Kiandra, too. “Did you ever smell one?”
Kiandra sniffed.
“How would we know?” she asked. “Rumor was, the Freds who came here to steal babies always looked exactly like humans. They were in disguise. That’s probably why some ignorant people”—she shot a glance at Enu—“started saying you could smell them.”
“If you think about it, how do we even know that you’re not really some Fred-child sent here to take over our planet?” Enu challenged me. “How do we know that you’re really human?”
“Because I look like you!” I said, and it was weird, how panicked my voice sounded. What would Enu do if he talked himself into the idea that I was a Fred? “Kiandra says I’m your mini-me!”
“Freds could have faked that,” Enu said, “if they can fake looking human.”
Something clicked in my brain.
“Tug on my face,” I told Enu.
“What?”
He sounded so surprised, I decided he’d never really thought I was a Fred. Maybe he didn’t have that much imagination. Or maybe . . . maybe he had started thinking of me as his little brother.
But I took a step toward Enu and tilted my chin up.
“You pull on my face, see if it comes off,” I said. “Because . . . one time in Fredtown, I kind of . . . kicked at my Fred-father’s jaw. I was just goofing around. But the way I hit him, it made something happen to his face. . . .”
“What happened to his face?” It didn’t surprise me that Kiandra was the one who asked, the one who actually sounded curious, while Enu backed away from me.
“It was like for just an instant I could see . . . fur,” I said. “Bluish fur. But he turned away from me, and it was over so fast that I was never really sure. . . .”
I didn’t tell them the rest of the story, which was that I’d gone to Rosi for help figuring out exactly what I’d seen, and she’d gotten mad at me. She’d accused me of just wanting to get her into the same kind of trouble I was in.
It was true that I was always in trouble in Fredtown. But I swear, I hadn’t wanted to make problems for Rosi. Not then, anyway. I’d just wanted answers.
My mind darted away from the memory, just like it’d been darting away from just about every memory I’d had of Rosi ever since I’d gotten to Ref City.
“Look,” I begged Enu, grabbing his hand and slamming it up against my face. “Pull. Prove to yourself that I’m human.”
He shoved me away instead.
“I know you’re human,” he mumbled. “I was just messing with you.”
Kiandra pulled her tablet computer out of the folds of her bedding. She had spare computers stashed around the apartment the same way Enu had spare video games everywhere.
“Look,” she said, typing something quickly and then holding the tablet out to me. “This is what Freds really look like, out of their disguises.”
The picture on the screen was blurry and distant. I saw a creature with fur—blue? Green? Turquoise? The longer I looked,
the more trouble I had deciding how to describe it. I also couldn’t quite tell how many eyes and noses and mouths I was seeing. The undisguised Fred looked . . . soft. That was all.
“How do you know that’s a real Fred?” I asked Kiandra. “Why didn’t I find any images like that when I was searching before? Is that the best picture you can find? It’s awfully fuzzy.”
“It’s something about how the light hits their fur—supposedly they’re hard for humans to see clearly,” Kiandra said. “That is the best picture out there. That’s why, on the intergalactic court, things are set up so that each planetary species sees every other species as some version of themselves. Our human representatives look around and see nothing but other humans. I guess the Freds look around and see every other species looking like Freds. It’s like how the United Nations used to arrange to have simultaneous translations so that people from every nation heard the people of every other nation just speaking their language.”
I almost dropped the tablet. Kiandra, with her advanced sense of what was best for electronics, pulled it out of my hands.
“There’s an entire—what’d you call it—an intergalactic court?” I repeated numbly. “So are there more species besides just Freds and humans? Why isn’t everybody talking about this all the time? Why aren’t we constantly sending out rocket ships from Ref City to, to . . . ?”
I wanted to say, Why didn’t humans built a rocket ship to rescue me and the other kids from Fredtown? Why didn’t humans get revenge on Freds by turning around and kidnapping Fred-kids?
But I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as Fred-kids.
There were evidently a million things I didn’t know.
Kiandra snapped the cover over the face of the tablet.
“Humans haven’t exactly had a good experience, interacting with alien species,” she muttered. “It’s like, everybody would just rather not think about it. Or talk about it.”
Enu flashed me the confident smile he used on the basketball court.
“Why think about unpleasant things you can’t do anything about?” he asked. “Why waste time on that, when you can play video games or basketball, and just have fun?”
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