It was five a.m. now, and I was staring at a sign that said SOUP KITCHEN.
Without waking up Enu—or, more important, Kiandra—I’d had to rely on my own computer skills to find any information about other kids raised by Freds who were now in Refuge City. Maybe the Freds hadn’t taught me very good computer-research skills; maybe they had tried and I just hadn’t listened. Whatever the reason, I’d had to search and search and search. And I’d found only one clue: a mysterious online posting that said, Seeking: Refuge City kids who want to talk about how to adapt to our new homes.
That had to be from some kid or kids who had a new home because their last home was with Freds. Didn’t it?
What else could it be?
The last part of that post said, If you meet this description, come to 9405 Bull Wallow Road and ask for Z.
It sounded like the setup for a prank. Maybe the kind of prank I might have pulled back in Fredtown. Like, I might walk into this 9405 Bull Wallow Road and get a pie in the face. If there had been any other lead online—or if I’d been patient enough to wait until Kiandra woke up so I could ask for help, and if she’d found something—I would have ignored this posting.
But as it was, I’d left the apartment and walked straight to 9405 Bull Wallow Road.
And . . . it was a soup kitchen. Whatever that was.
Probably just someplace that serves soup, I told myself. That’s okay. I had a long walk, and I’m hungry.
Soup for breakfast was a little unusual, but I didn’t care.
A broken shutter banged against the window frame of the next building over, and I shivered. The area around Bull Wallow Road did not look like any of the other glitzy, shiny new areas I’d seen everywhere else I’d been in Refuge City. It didn’t look like Fredtown, either. It looked old and broken-down and shadowy.
It looked a lot like the worst areas I’d seen in Cursed Town.
It’s just . . . not quite sunrise yet, I told myself. That’s all. This area will look fine once the sun’s up.
That gave me the courage to knock at the door of the soup kitchen.
“Come on in!” someone yelled from inside. “Coffee’s almost ready! So’s breakfast!”
I pushed my way in to find a long, narrow room full of rickety tables and mismatched chairs. Most of the chairs were empty, but a few contained hunched-over shapes—old men? Old women? It was hard to tell. They all seemed to be gray-haired and grizzled and snoring.
I looked around for the person who’d yelled “Come in!” I caught a flicker of movement from the far end of the room—it was a man standing behind a counter.
“Are you hungry?” the man asked gently.
“No,” I said, because suddenly I wasn’t.
“That’s fine,” the man said, but he sounded like he didn’t believe me.
“I’m here to see Z,” I said.
His friendly expression tightened.
“Do you know her?” he asked. “Does she know you?”
Her? I thought. She?
“No,” I admitted, because I didn’t think I could bluff my way through this one. “I just saw something she posted online. I wanted to . . . talk about adjusting to our new homes.”
Now the man spoke through clenched teeth.
“I don’t really think that’s—” he began.
But a door banged behind him, and a short girl with reddish-brown pigtails pushed past him.
“Is it—” she began eagerly. Her gaze fell on me and she looked confused. “Oh. I thought . . . I don’t know you.”
The man put his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“We can ask him to leave, Zeebs,” he said. “We have a standing arrangement with the police, if anyone causes a disturbance here . . .”
This was so annoying.
“I’m not causing a disturbance!” I insisted. “This girl—Zeebs?—she pretty much invited me here, saying to come here and ask for Z if I wanted to talk about adapting to my new home. I’m just doing what she told me to do!”
The girl narrowed her eyes at me. They were so light, they were almost gold.
“Prove you grew up in a Fredtown,” she whispered.
I sighed.
“A founding principle of Fredtown,” I said. “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. Another one: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And another one: No one is to be called an enemy. And . . .”
I hoped the girl didn’t notice I was mostly going for the short ones. She was making me nervous. And I had tried really, really hard the whole time I lived in Fredtown not to memorize anything.
And . . . what if different Fredtowns had had different founding principles?
The girl took a step away from the father and closer to me.
“Daddy, it’s okay,” she said. “He may not have grown up in the same Fredtown as me, but he did grow up in a Fredtown.”
“And you think that makes him trustworthy?” he asked doubtfully.
“Yes,” the girl said.
She stepped out from behind the counter and put her hand on my arm, guiding me toward one of the tables in the corner, away from any of the gray, hunched-over people.
“Daddy, we’ll just be sitting right over here,” she said. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
The man frowned but didn’t stop us. He went back to making coffee.
The girl and I sat down on opposite sides of the small table, and suddenly I felt a little tongue-tied. For much of the past year I hadn’t even been able to talk to Rosi without making her mad, and she and I had known each other our whole lives.
“Are you sure you don’t want to have me prove I live in Refuge City now?” I asked. “Because that’s what you were looking for, right—other kids from Refuge City?”
“I was looking for other kids who grew up in Fredtowns,” she said firmly. “Other kids my age. But . . . if you had to, how would you prove you live in Refuge City?”
I thought about that one. As far as I could tell, Refuge City didn’t have precepts or founding principles. Unless it was one of the things Udans or Enu had told me: Why think about unpleasant things you can’t do anything about? And, The past has nothing to do with us. And, That’s just how life goes. There’s nothing you can do.
But what if I was wrong, and the girl didn’t recognize any of those?
Suddenly I knew what I should say.
“I like your freckles,” I told her. “But . . . I’m not going to say anything about the fact that your skin is paler than mine. I’m not even going to notice it. Uh-uh. Can’t even see it.”
The girl laughed.
“That is how everybody acts in Refuge City!” she agreed. “They talk about how people look all the time. But they’re scared to say anything about the color of people’s skin. Even though really everyone now is just various shades of brown. Because that’s one of the things that people used to fight about all the time.”
I hadn’t known that.
“Skin color?” I asked. “Really? They fought about that? Why? Who cares?”
The girl shrugged.
“My parents say it’s all because of history. History we never learned in our Fredtowns.” She stuck out her hand and shook mine. “I’m Zeba.”
“Edwy,” I told her. “It’s good to be around someone who remembers what it was like to be raised by crazy Freds!”
Zeba bit her lip and pulled her hand back.
“I never thought they were crazy,” she said. “It’s not crazy to be . . . idealistic.”
“You’re like my friend Rosi, then,” I said. “That’s what she believed too. Back in Fredtown, she always thought that the Freds were right. And . . . that I was wrong.”
And even though I’d told myself that was what I was looking for—someone like Rosi, someone who’d explain things to me in a Rosi kind of way—my heart sank a little.
Maybe I’d really wanted to find someone who would see everything the same way I did.
Zeba toyed with the rubber band at the end of one of her braids.
“Some would say my real parents and the Freds aren’t a whole lot different,” she said. “Daddy and Mama—they came to Refuge City twenty years ago when it was mostly just a processing center for refugees from all the wars. Before all the fancy buildings. Before all the rich people came. My real parents like to help people, just like the Freds do. But . . . they’re angry.”
“Angry?” I repeated numbly. “Your parents are angry?”
I had a hard time imagining anyone who was like the Freds being angry.
Zeba nodded, her braids thumping her shoulders.
“They say the Freds never understood human nature,” she whispered. She glanced over her shoulder, back toward the man in the kitchen. “They say taking every kid away and then bringing us back twelve years later made all of Earth into a powder keg. And . . . I think they’re mad that even good people like them had their kids taken away. My parents call themselves humanitarians. All they’ve done their whole lives is help people. They think that they—and everyone else like them—should have been allowed to keep their own children all along. They say it’s not fair that they were punished for what other humans did.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking at her. Powder keg? Humanitarians? These were new words for me, new thoughts. I’d been wrong: Talking to Zeba wasn’t like talking to Rosi. Rosi and I were connected. Zeba was a stranger. I didn’t understand her; she didn’t understand me.
“But do your parents think the Freds were right to take kids away from some people?” I asked. “From bad people?”
Zeba tilted her head. Now her braids looked crooked.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Should kids be forced to grow up with parents who maybe don’t even love them? Who don’t raise them in a loving way? Who might even teach them bad things?”
I thought about my own parents, who were thieves. Who’d let me think I’d been kidnapped. Who’d sent me away.
But only to get me away from Cursed Town, I told myself. They think I’m getting a good education in Ref City.
It was weird how much I longed to defend my parents. I wanted to ask Zeba, How bad is too bad? Do parents have to be perfect, or else?
What if it’s a lot harder for some people to be good than it is for others?
I couldn’t say those words out loud.
“Why did you put that thing online?” I asked Zeba instead. “Why did you ask kids to come here if they wanted to talk about adjusting to their new homes?”
Zeba looked down at her hands, neatly folded in her lap.
“Mama and Daddy say, in the current political climate it’s best not to say too much about Freds or Fredtown,” she explained. “They say people want to forget all that. But kids raised by Freds want to help people. It’s what we grew up with. Lots of places in Refuge City, no one wants to help anyone. I thought if kids came to the soup kitchen, they could help poor people, and it would make them feel . . . needed. Right again. Normal. Useful.”
I jerked back, my knee jarring against the table.
“So you were just looking for kids to help you and your parents in their . . . their business?” I accused.
“Our soup kitchen isn’t a business,” Zeba said. “It’s a charity. We give out food for free. People need this soup kitchen or they would starve, because there’s corruption—the money these old people should get to live on goes into building newer and fancier sports arenas and, and—”
Her father suddenly appeared behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Zeba, is it time to ask this boy to leave?” he said. “If he’s starting to get violent and yelling at you, then—”
“I’m not yelling!” Okay, I did kind of yell that. And maybe I’d been a little loud saying that thing about her parents’ business.
I realized that some of the sleeping old, gray people had awakened and were staring over at us, blinking in confusion. I lowered my voice.
“Anyhow, I am definitely not being violent,” I told Zeba’s father. “I just proved I was raised by Freds, remember? Freds didn’t let us learn anything about violence!”
I thought guiltily about the video games Enu had taught me, and the way I’d learned to cheat on the basketball court. Then I pushed that out of my mind and looked back at Zeba. She had tears glistening in her gold eyes now, but I was too mad to care.
“I thought you said your parents were ‘humanitarians,’ ” I snapped at her. “I thought you said they liked to help people. And this is how they treat people like me? Is it because I was raised by Freds? Is it because I’m from a different Fredtown than yours? What’s the problem?”
Zeba’s father let his shoulders sag. His hand clenched on Zeba’s shoulder.
“I—” he began. “I’m sorry. I never realized how hard it would be, having an almost-teenage daughter. I just want to protect her. And you kids from Fredtowns, you don’t have any sense of the dangers around you. It’s like Zeba is defenseless.”
“Daddy, I can take care of myself,” Zeba said. She sounded embarrassed.
“Anyway,” Zeba’s father said. “Let me begin again. I’m Michael.” He reached out and shook my hand. “I’ve been given to understand that there were twelve Fredtowns associated with kids from Refuge City, because the Freds preferred to raise children in smaller communities. Which Fredtown were you in? Are you friends with any of the other kids I’ve met through Zeba? Friends with any of the other kids who have already started volunteering here?”
Ugh. So Zeba had been right—other kids raised by Freds had wanted to work in this soup kitchen. They still wanted to help other people and live by Fred principles even though they were back on Earth.
I suddenly felt like shocking this smug, Fred-like man. Udans, Enu, and Kiandra wouldn’t have approved, but I intended to enjoy telling him where I was really from.
“Actually,” I said, “I didn’t grow up in any of the Fredtowns connected to Refuge City. My Fredtown was the one with kids from Cursed Town. And when I went home from Fredtown, that’s where I went first. Cursed Town. That’s where I belong.”
Zeba’s father surprised me by letting go of Zeba’s shoulder and wrapping his arms around me instead, in a giant hug.
“You survived! You escaped! Then there are still refugees getting out of Cursed Town! Hallelujah!” he cried. “Tell me—how did you get away from the fighting?”
This man was every bit as crazy as a Fred.
I pulled away from his hug.
“Um . . . the Freds kidnapped me the day I was born, just like everyone else kidnapped by a Fred,” I muttered. “It was the last day of the war, and—”
“No, I don’t mean twelve years ago,” Zeba’s father said impatiently. “I mean last week when the fighting started again and they imposed martial law. But you escaped?”
I didn’t know what “martial law” meant. I barely understood the word “fighting.” But I twisted up out of my chair and faced the man. I grabbed the front of his shirt.
“There was fighting in Cursed Town last week?” I asked. “People got hurt there last week?”
The man’s expression softened. His eyes filled with an expression I recognized from every single time my Fred-parents had ever glanced at me. Sympathy. Pity. Sorrow.
“Yes,” he whispered. “There was fighting in Cursed Town last week. And people were hurt. People were killed.”
“Rosi,” I said. “Rosi, Rosi, Rosi, Rosi . . .”