We rode back into Refuge City feeling like triumphant heroes. Of course, Udans, Enu, and Kiandra had to explain to the rest of us exactly what it meant to be a triumphant hero, because it wasn’t something the Freds had taught us about.
But we were triumphant. And Udans had kindly told us that we’d all acted heroically, even if we’d all had moments of being scared.
“You think I am not scared sometimes too?” he asked.
“We know you are,” Enu said quickly. “But now we understand why.”
Because we couldn’t fit everyone in the cab of the truck, Enu and Kiandra rode up front with Udans, while Zeba, Rosi, Bobo, Cana, and I rode in the back, sitting on boxes arranged in a circle.
We didn’t mean to divide up based on who had been raised in a Fredtown and who hadn’t. But that was how it worked out.
The unconscious Enforcers were stowed in the secret compartment, under the box I sat on. They barely fit. But, still, there were four of them—maybe the space was slightly bigger than it had seemed when I was trapped there myself.
Udans had worried that alarms would go off when the Ref City scanners detected the Enforcers’ presence, and that reminded me that Rosi, Bobo, and Cana didn’t have the right papers either. But Kiandra assured us all that she could hack into the system and jam the city scanners. She made it sound easy.
I trusted Kiandra. But it was hard to forget about the Enforcers beneath my feet, all the way back to Refuge City.
As I might have expected, Rosi and Zeba hit it off famously.
“It’s nice to meet another twelve-year-old girl,” Rosi said hesitantly, smiling through the dirt on her face.
“Don’t worry—Kiandra’s all about girl power too,” I said. “She’ll tell you all about it.”
“Why would anyone talk about ‘girl power’ or ‘boy power’ when we’re all humans?” Rosi asked, at the same time that Zeba said, “Doesn’t talking about one person’s power imply that there would be someone else who might not have power? Isn’t that dangerous?”
Yeah, it was pretty clear that they were going to be friends.
But then Rosi turned to me and said, “I missed you.”
Bobo sidled up beside me and leaned his head on my shoulder, almost as if he were my little brother too.
“Yeah, so many times when we were walking, Rosi would say, ‘Think about how Edwy would jump over that log’ or ‘Can’t you be a brave big boy like Edwy?’ ” Bobo said. “I even made up a song about it: ‘Edwy, Edwy, Edwy, Edwy’s always the best. . . .’ ”
“I don’t think Edwy wants to hear you sing right now, Bobo,” Rosi said. Even in the dim light of the closed-in truck, I could see her face redden. “Remember, it’s not polite to sing while others are trying to talk.”
This was such a perfectly prissy Rosi thing to say, I almost laughed out loud.
Rosi still had dirt on her face, and her hair looked like she’d come through a cyclone. I’d seen her try to smooth it down, but after a week and a half of being a fugitive in the wilderness, she needed more help than that. She still looked almost nothing like the Rosi I’d been used to back in Fredtown.
But she looked absolutely beautiful. I even kind of understood now why Enu talked about how pretty girls were.
Cana leaned on my knee on the opposite side from Bobo.
“Do you still disagree with everything about the Freds?” she asked plaintively. “Don’t you ever miss Fredtown?”
“Sometimes I do,” I admitted. “But it wasn’t where we belonged. Things weren’t real there.”
“Are things real in Refuge City?” Cana asked in her wise little five-year-old-girl voice. “Were things real in Cursed Town?” I winced, because the name sounded so much worse coming from an innocent little kid. We probably shouldn’t have talked about Cursed Town in front of her and Bobo. But they’d been there. They’d seen what it was like. “Was it real when the Enforcers were chasing us?”
“Um . . . ,” I floundered.
“What Edwy means,” Rosi interrupted, “is that the Freds were kind of playing make-believe in Fredtown. They were pretending there weren’t any bad things in the universe we’d ever have to deal with.”
“But we will,” Zeba whispered.
“There are bad things out there we have to fix,” Rosi said firmly. “Edwy and his brother and sister—and Udans and Zeba—they all rescued us from some bad things by the border. And now we have to find a way to rescue all the other kids left behind in Cursed Town.”
I looked down at my feet. I knew that the Enforcers were right below, unconscious and defeated for now, but only for now. Our victory was a temporary one.
“Rosi’s wrong,” I said, and when she started to protest, I stared her down. “It’s not just the kids in Cursed Town we have to rescue—it’s all the people there. The grown-ups, too. And in all the other towns like it. We have to help all of humanity.”
Rosi started to giggle.
“Oh, Edwy,” she said. “Edwy, Edwy, Edwy. I never thought I’d hear you sounding so much like a Fred.”
“I don’t sound like a Fred,” I told her. “I’ve got bigger dreams than they ever did. Bigger goals. I want to help everyone.”
I wanted to hear what Rosi would say to that, but just then the truck abruptly shuddered to a halt. I almost fell over backward. The box under me skidded sideways. Rosi and Zeba slammed against the wall.
Someone hit the back door, and it began sliding open.
“Get out! Get out!” Kiandra screamed at us when there was still just a crack between the bottom of the door and the floor of the truck. “I just figured out how to monitor the Enforcers’ conversations on this device!” She held up one of the pocket-sized scanners the Enforcers had used. “They’ve got a tracker on us! They say the fact that four of their Enforcers were carried off—that means they’re entitled to take over Refuge City, too! We can’t let them find us with the captured Enforcers!”
I scrambled out, pulling Bobo along with me. Rosi carried Cana, and Zeba helped her down. Kiandra pulled the back door of the truck shut behind us. Then Enu pulled us all back toward the curb.
After the dim interior of the truck, I stood blinking in the bright lights of a typical Ref City street. I heard Bobo murmur, “Oh, cool!” Rosi and Cana just gazed around, their eyes huge with awe.
The truck pulled away from us.
“Wait—Udans is staying with the truck?” I asked.
“He said he has to get it far away from us, so the Enforcers won’t make the connection,” Kiandra whispered. “Oh, Edwy, he’s sacrificing himself for us. . . .”
Udans the kidnapper, I thought. The pirate. And now he’s been a hero twice in one day. . . .
“And for now Kiandra’s jamming every bioscan system she can, but we don’t know how long that will last,” Enu said. “We’ve got to find someplace to hide before the Enforcers get here, someplace that isn’t our apartment or Zeba’s soup kitchen. . . .”
The truck disappeared into traffic. All seven of us kids began blindly scrambling in the opposite direction, through the crowds. We’d gone barely a block when I noticed the people around me had stopped. They were all staring up at an enormous news screen on the side of the nearest building, with the words Emergency announcement! Emergency announcement! scrolling across it.
A booming voice cried out from loudspeakers all around us, “Due to a violent uprising near Refuge City, the Enforcers are being sent in to take control of all the formerly free zones, as covered in the terms of Agreement 5062. We repeat, the Enforcers are now in the process of taking control of the whole planet. . . .”
Everyone around me looked dazed. But I gathered the other six kids close to me.
“We’ll be okay,” I said. “Don’t worry! We’ll just tell everyone in Ref City that there’s a way to disable the Enforcers. We’ll tell the secret about the Enforcers’ faces and the masks, and they won’t be able to take over. We’ve just got to get the word out! Kiandra, can’t you take over that public announcement system?”
Kiandra’s eyes lit up, and she started to nod. But then she looked past me, back toward the screen.
“Too late,” she whispered, pointing.
On the screen, a row of Enforcers were marching into what I recognized as the outskirts of Refuge City. They looked almost exactly like the Enforcers we’d encountered out in the wilderness: same dark uniforms, same grim expressions.
But over their heads they all wore clear, bubble-shaped helmets—helmets that covered their vulnerable faces completely.
“They know what we did out in the wilderness,” Kiandra whispered. “They’ve already adapted.”
Around us people were weeping. People were screaming. People were bashing their heads against the nearest wall.
“Don’t people know that’s not a good idea?” Bobo asked in his innocent little-boy voice.
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t let him down, any more than I could have let Rosi down.
“They just don’t know what else to do,” I told Bobo. “But they’re going to be all right. Because we’re going to think of something better to do. We will. We’re going to fix everything.”
“We will,” Rosi whispered, as if all the disagreements we’d ever had were over.
It was like we’d been on the same team all along.