It should have felt good to stretch my legs after sitting in the truck for so long. But the sidewalks of Refuge City were crowded, and, oddly, I seemed to be the shortest person around. So my views tended to be of:
One man’s or another’s bulging belly, pressed uncomfortably close to my face;
A woman’s purse, right before it clipped my ear;
Udans’s back, which I tried to keep in sight at all times.
If I’d been, say, seven—or maybe even eight or nine—I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from whining, Udans! Wait for me! If I’d been even younger, I might have lost all dignity and begged, Please! Let me hold your hand so I don’t get lost! But I was twelve, and I was Edwy the Amazing, Edwy the Awesome, the one all the little kids back in Fredtown had always looked up to.
So I darted around purses and bellies, and once or twice I even ducked under someone’s elbow. I told myself Udans was probably glancing back over his shoulder all the time to make sure I was still with him. Just . . . not ever when I was looking.
Then came a moment when a woman in a towering hat—who seemed to have an entire garden growing on her head—stepped between Udans and me.
When I zipped around her, narrowly missing trouncing on the pointy toes of her red shoes, Udans had vanished.
I whipped my head back and forth, scanning the crowd ahead, catching glimpses of black-and-white checkered purses, men’s shirts with gaping buttonholes, and then, when she stepped past me again, garden-hat lady. She didn’t dodge my feet; her spiky heel stabbed right into the little-toe area of my right sneaker.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” I jumped up and down, clutching my brutalized foot.
Garden-hat lady didn’t even turn around.
But an arm darted out of a nearby doorway. I recognized Udans’s bulging muscles and the sleeve of his dark gray T-shirt. He grabbed me and pulled me into the doorway.
“Did you see that?” I asked him. “Who does that? I think my toe’s broken. Maybe even severed. Don’t people here know not to walk on other people’s feet?”
“Young man,” Udans began. He crouched down, so he could speak directly into my ear, almost as if he were sharing a secret. “You are not the son of the richest man in Refuge City, the way you were the son of the richest man back in your hometown. You can’t expect special treatment.”
I jerked away from him.
“ ‘Special treatment’?” I repeated. “Being able to walk around without anyone stepping on your toes should be, like, a basic right! No one deserves to have his toe speared like that. The Freds always said . . .”
I stopped myself because, yikes! Had I really been about to quote the Freds? They probably did have about fifty different founding principles that would apply to this situation—they usually had at least fifty different founding principles they tried to apply to any situation, and at one time or another, I’m sure, they’d quoted every single one at me. They could come up with fifty different reasons it was a bad idea to brush my teeth for two minutes and fifty-eight seconds instead of the full three minutes.
But I didn’t quote Fred principles.
Also—Udans jerked back when I spoke the word “Freds,” as if it frightened him.
When I stopped talking, he murmured, “That’s right. It would be wise to say as little as possible about them.”
This is how my brain works: I suddenly had the desire to run down the street yelling, “Freds! Freds! Freds! Freds! Freds!” just to see what happened.
But Udans’s next words stopped me. He said:
“Anyhow, we’re here. Are you ready to meet your brother and sister?”