Among the Betrayed

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The days that followed the kids' arrival in the woods were strangely like a holiday. The sun shone down on them — just warm enough, not too hot — and they had fun hiking around, exploring. They slept under the stars each balmy night. Nina did not exactly forget Jason's betrayal and the nightmare of prison, but all the horrors she'd experienced seemed far in the past. She worried less and less about being caught again. When she opened her eyes each morning to see gently waving branches and a mosaic of maple leaves against the sky, it didn't seem possible that she could be imprisoned in a dark underground room ever again.

For their part, Percy, Matthias, and Alia seemed per-fectly happy to treat their time in the woods as one long vacation. They didn't talk about prison; they didn't talk about their lives before prison. They climbed trees; they skipped rocks in the stream; they drew pictures in the dirt with twigs.

Then one morning Nina reached her hand into the food bag for breakfast and closed her fingers on — nothing. She reached farther down, her stomach suddenly queasy with hunger. She brought up a small, battered box of cereal and an empty peanut shell. She laid those on her knees and reached in again.

Nothing. Truly nothing. Not even a moldy biscuit crumb remained in the sack.

"We don't have any more food!" Nina gasped. The others paused in the midst of their own meals. Percy held a half-eaten oatmeal bar up to his mouth; Alia froze with an apple against her lips. Matthias kept chewing his cereal. "What?" he said, his mouth full.

"We're out of food!" Nina repeated. "What you're eating now — that's all we have!"

"So is your garden ready?" Percy asked casually. "You said you could grow a garden here." Nina gaped at him.

"I didn't… I meant…" What had she promised, in desperation, back in prison when they were planning their escape? Were the others really counting on her to provide all their food? Why hadn't they mentioned it before now? "I — Alia, give me the seeds from that apple."

Obediently Alia dug her fingernails into the middle of the apple and handed Nina three grimy brown seeds. Nina scratched in the dirt by her feet and dug three holes, side by side. She placed a seed in each hole. Then she patted dirt back over the seeds until they were hidden from sight. "There," she said. 'At least we'll have more apples." "How long does it take?" Percy asked.

Nina stared down at the dirt, hoping something might happen right away. She suspected it took longer than a few minutes for an apple tree to grow. Probably a lot longer. And for an apple tree actually to produce apples…

"I don't know," she said miserably. She had a feeling it might take days, weeks, months. Years. "I don't know anything about growing food," she confessed. "I just thought we could.. figure something out once we got here. This is better than being in prison, isn't it?"

"They fed us in prison," Alia said in a small voice.

'And they were going to kill us," Nina countered harshly.

Alia looked down at the ground. Percy and Matthias looked at each other. Nina couldn't stand to see them exchanging glances once again.

"Look, I'm just a kid," she pleaded. "I don't know any-thing about anything. My gran and the aunties — they always took care of me. Then when I got to school — well, it wasn't like they really wanted us to think for ourselves there. There was always food, three times a day. We didn't have to know where it came from."

The other three didn't say anything for a moment. In the silence, Nina could hear the wind shifting direction in the trees.

"You never told us about your gran and the… the aun-ties?" Alia finally said. "You didn't tell us about your school."

"I didn't know if I could trust you," Nina admitted. "I'm a third child. An illegal."

"We thought so," Percy said.

Silence again. Then Matthias added softly, "So are we."

Nina held her breath. The last time she'd confessed to being an illegal child, and heard someone else confess the same to her, it had led to Population Police arresting her at breakfast. She stared hard at the trees around her, as though any one of them might be hiding a Population Police officer, just waiting for the right moment to grab her. But nothing happened. No one moved.

"It's funny, isn't it," Nina said. "The reason they made third children illegal was because of food. There wasn't enough after the drought and the famines. But someone always found food for me when I was illegal. Now I've gone through two different fake I.D.'s, and I've run out of food. I'm legal now — I've got a card to prove that I'm legal — and I'm going to starve to death. We're all going to starve."

She knew now why the last few days had seemed like such a vacation. It had been a vacation — from reality. None of them had wanted to face the truth: It wasn't enough to escape from the Population Police. It wasn't enough to have fake I.D.'s. They were still doomed. It was easier to swing in the trees and skip rocks than to think about the fact that they had nothing to keep them alive once the food sack was empty.

"Nobody's going to starve," Percy said. "We'll figure out something. Don't you know any way to find out how to grow a garden?"

Nina started to say no, but then she remembered how she'd thought of a garden in the first place.

"There's a kid," she said. 'At the boys' school. Lee Grant. He was the one who knew about gardens. If we could find him…"

Nina explained how she and her friends had met with the group from the boys' school. Somehow the whole story came tumbling out this time — how she and Bonner and Sally had thought they were so big, meeting guys in the woods. How she'd fallen in love with Jason. How he'd betrayed her.

The other three were silent for a long time after she finished.

"So can you trust this Lee Grant or not?" Percy asked. "Was he working with Jason?"

"I don't know," Nina said, miserable again. "He seemed okay. But…" She didn't finish the sentence:

Jason seemed okay, too. I thought he was a lot better than okay. How can I trust my own judgment ever again?

"One of us will have to sneak into the school and find this Lee, and see if we can trust him," Matthias said.

"Maybe he could even give us some food from his school," Nina said. "Maybe they feed the boys better than they feed the girls."

She felt more cheerful now. Everything could work out. She waited for Percy or Matthias to volunteer to be the one to sneak into the boys' school. Matthias was closer to Lee Grant's age — if Matthias pretended to be a new student, he'd be more likely to get placed in the same classes as Lee. But Nina thought Percy was smarter — he would know what to do, how to trick Lee into telling him everything.

But neither Percy nor Matthias spoke up. Surprised, Nina looked from one boy to the other — and discovered they were both staring at her.

"Well?" she said. "Which one of you is going to do it?"

Percy waited a while longer, then shook his head in dis' gust, as if he couldn't believe Nina hadn't figured everything out.

"You're the only one who knows what this Lee Grant looks like. You're the only one he knows, the only one he'd be likely to trust. It's got to be you," he said.

"But I'm a girl!" Nina said. "It's a boys' school!"

"You can tuck your hair up in my cap," Percy said. "You can wear Matthias's clothes. You can pretend."

Nina gawked at him. She imagined herself in Matthias's ragged shirt and patched jeans, standing amidst the Hendricks boys in their fancy clothes. She'd be noticed in an instant, thrown out in a flash.

"You don't understand," she said. "I'm not like all of you. I've never had to… to live by my wits. If anyone stops me, I won't know what to say. That's why. ." At the last minute, she managed to stop herself from spilling every-thing.

That's why I didn't know what to do when the hating man asked me to betray you. That's why I almost did betray you.

Instead she finished lamely, "That's why someone else should go instead of me. You can't trust me."

"We trust you," Alia said softly.

How could Nina disagree with that?