Free When We Wake by Karen Healey

could do with some education. Not
everything
has changed for the better.”
    I rolled off the bed and snapped Koko open. “Sounds like a plan. Prepare yourself for a musical awakening.”
    When Marie came in with a tray of sliced apples and carrot sticks, I was showing Bethari pictures of my family while we worked our way through the Red Album.
    For the first time in a lifetime, I was truly happy.

CHAPTER FIVE
Hello, Goodbye
    We gave Bethari a ride to school the next day.
    “I was thinking,” she said, even before she scrambled into the car. “You should try out for stunt squad! I bet you’d make a great flyer.”
    “For what?”
    “The cheerleading team! I’m a flyer, too, but I’m a bit tall. You’d love it! It’s like your free running thing, only you do the tumbles in the air.”
    I made a face. The tumbles she was talking about were the tricks everyone associated with parkour: big, flashy movements that I, unfortunately, didn’t have the strength or conditioning to pull off. I could fit through tiny gaps like no one’s business, but I wasn’t going to be doing spinning fan kicks anytime soon. “I’m a free runner mostly, not a tricker. Elisa M has cheerleading?”
    “Elisa M has nearly everything,” Bethari said. “Except amazingboys and girls who want to experience all that I have to offer. For that, I go extracurricular.”
    “Don’t screw the crew?” I asked.
    “Good phrase! Yeah. You’re going to get lots of offers, you know. Have you seen the stuff about you on the tubes?”
    Hurfest’s interview had turned me off tubecasts for a couple of days, but I’d peeked afterward. It had gone past politics now. There were people judging my fashion sense, rating my hotness level, and wondering if dating me would be necrophilia. “A little bit,” I admitted.
    “Everyone
loves
you. Watch out for the famers.” She saw my expression and went on before I could ask. “People who sort of harvest celebrity by hanging out with people who are famous. Famous plus farmers, famers, see?”
    “Got it. Not everyone loves me, though. There’s Australia for Australians, and—”
    “Ugh, those drongles! Actually, that might be even a good thing, you know? Them ranting at someone coming back from the
dead
might just wake people up to how stupid the No Migrant policy is.”
    She’d told me a little bit about the policy last night, among her other efforts to fill me in on some of today’s politics, but I hadn’t gotten it all straight in my head yet.
    “So, it’s no migrants at all, right?”
    “That’s right. Short-term visas only—study visas, or for, you know, holidays and stuff, if you’re rich enough to afford the air-fuel tax. No one gets residency, no one gets citizenship.”
    “But people try to come anyway?” I asked. It seemed like inmy time, every third story on the news was about the refugee crises and illegal immigration. Every second story had been about the climate. Bethari had shown me some of that stuff on the ’casts here, too, but it was quieter.
    I’d assumed that was because the problems weren’t so bad.
    “Oh, they try,” Bethari said. “Usually they get caught and stuck in one of the refugee camps in the North.”
    “Like a detention center?”
    “Like a camp,” Bethari said patiently. “Tents, shared toilet blocks, no unsupervised access to food or water. Surrounded by barbed wire and fully armed soldiers. They’re breaking Australian law by coming. So they end up in huge prisons.”
    “I didn’t see anything about that on the tubes!”
    Bethari shot a wary look at Zaneisha, who was impassively navigating behind a laden tram. “It’s on the media lockout list,” she said quietly. “A few years ago, a guard smuggled some footage out that showed the conditions in the camps, interviews with the residents, that kind of thing. Every ’caster who played it—and some of the ones who even
linked
to it—was subject to massive fines or voluntary shutdown for three