Among the Betrayed

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Terrified, Nina turned to run. But something clawed at her arm, something held on to her leg. She tumbled forward, sprawled across the ground.

"Let go of me!" she roared, though it must have been a vine tangled around her ankle, must have been a branch scratching against her arm. Nina tried to scramble up, but it was too late. The flashlight shone in her eyes; when the hating man's voice came again, it was practically in her ear.

"Nina, Nina, Nina," he said. "It's all over now."

Nina struggled to sit up. It was Percy who was holding onto her arm, Matthias who was holding onto her leg.

They had betrayed her, too. They were turning her in to the hating man.

Alia stepped up beside the boys, smiling at Nina. Nina's eyes swam with tears. Not Alia, too. Nina couldn't take the thought that Alia had betrayed her as well.

"No," Nina moaned. Then she screamed, "No!"

Nina didn't care who heard. Behind the hating man she could see the shapes of perhaps a dozen people, all with flashlights shining right at her. Their faces were completely in shadow, impossible to make out.

Alia leaned into the circle of light with Nina.

"You're safe now," she said happily. "You passed the test."

Nina shook her head violently, not wanting to believe the evidence in front of her eyes.

"Alia, run," Nina whispered. She wasn't sure which she wanted more — for the little girl to be safe, or for Alia merely to prove that she was scared, too, and hadn't helped betraying Nina. Alia didn't move. Nina hoped she just hadn't heard. "Alia, you have to escape. That man is from the Population Police. He's the hating man!"

"No, he's not," a familiar voice called out from the shad-ows. "He only pretends to work for the Population Police. He's Mr. Talbot. Jen Talbot's dad." Lee Grant stepped forward and bent down beside Nina. "Remember who Jen Talbot is?"

"Of course I do," Nina snapped. "She's the hero for the cause of third children everywhere. Jason used to tell us about her all the time. But…"

She wondered suddenly if that was a lie, too, if there'd never been a Jen Talbot, or if she hadn't been a hero. Dazedly Nina looked around at the faces circling her. Everyone came forward, crowding close. Percy and Matthias lifted Nina up to see, instead of holding her back. Lee and Trey and a few other Hendricks School boys stood in a clump off to the right.

The hating man — Mr. Talbot? — cleared his throat.

"It's true, what Lee said," he began. "I am a double agent working for the Population Police, but only in order to double-cross them. Back in the spring I faced a dilemma. A boy at Hendricks School for Boys told the Population Police he knew of several shadow children at the school who were using fake identities and pretending to be legitimate. If this boy managed to convince the Population Police that he was telling the truth, I knew several children would die. Thanks to young Lee Grant over there, as well as some quick-thinking administrators, we managed to foil his plan.

"But this boy — Jason, as you all know — said he had an accomplice at the girls' school. Nina Idi. You. We arrested you as well. But the longer I spent interrogating you, the more convinced I became that you were truly innocent and actually knew nothing of Jason's plan. But I couldn't be entirely sure, and it was a matter of life and death that I be absolutely, one hundred percent certain."

"Yeah. My life. My death," Nina grumbled, still too dazed to think straight.

'And many others'," Mr. Talbot said. "You knew the truth about dozens of kids."

Every girl at Harlow School, Nina thought.

And lots of boys at Hendricks. I knew they were all former shadow children. Did everyone really think that I might betray them?

'About the same time, a Population Police informer in the capital had turned in three kids who were involved in manufacturing fake I.D.'s, — Percy, Matthias, and Alia. I fig' ured they were safer in prison than out on the streets, for the time being. Their protector, Samuel Jones, had been killed in the rally for third-children rights in April."

"That's who 'Sa—' was. You almost said his name once," Nina said, almost to herself.

"He took in third children," Alia whispered. "When our parents abandoned us. He raised us. He took care of us."

"I thought you said God took care of you," Nina scoffed. She sounded just like Aunty Lystra at her most skeptical.

"Who do you think Samuel was working for?" Alia said.

Nina kept shaking her head, as if she could deny everything she heard.

"Percy and Matthias had promised Samuel to stay away from the rally to protect Alia," Mr. Talbot said. "So they alone were spared, and they alone were still around to be betrayed. Then later, in prison, they agreed to help me give you a test, to see which side you were really on. If you had betrayed them, we would have known you couldn't be trusted. If you protected them… we'd save you."

Nina gasped, finally beginning to make sense of his words. If the hating man didn't really believe in the Population Police's cause — if he was a double agent working against them — then everything was backward.

"So, if I'd double-crossed them, trying to save my own life… you would have killed me?" Nina asked.

"Yes," Mr. Talbot said.

Nina thought about how close she'd come to betraying the others, how miserable she'd been in prison, how will' ing she'd been to do almost anything to save herself.

"I didn't do it," she said. "I could have, but I didn't."

"But you didn't refuse to betray them, either," Mr. Talbot said. "You weren't committing yourself either way. We had to add a more dangerous part to the test."

Nina couldn't figure out what he meant. Then she remembered the guard, Mack, sprawling across the table, his ring of keys sliding right toward Nina.

"You let us escape," Nina accused, as if it were a crime. "You let me get the keys and have a way out, and made me think I was figuring out everything on my own. Why, I bet… I bet Mack wasn't even sick."

Mr. Talbot chuckled. "No, but he put on a good act, didn't he?"

"And then" — Nina was still putting everything together—"the other three kids knew that I might offer to help them escape. Why wasn't that enough? Why didn't you trust me then?"

She thought about the past — was it weeks? — of sleeping outside, of living on stale, moldy food or dirty raw vegetables. Could she have avoided all that?

"We still weren't sure about you," Percy said in his usual logical tone. "It was possible that you were only taking us along because you were scared to go on your own. You might have just been using us."

Nina remembered how unconcerned the others had been when they ran out of food, how little they had cared about making plans for the future. No wonder. They were waiting on her. Waiting on her to prove herself.

"When we met the policemen by the river—," she said.

"That was part of the test," Mr. Talbot said. "Those weren't policemen. They were people working with our cause."

'And I passed that test?" Nina asked.

"Sort of," Mr. Talbot said. "You didn't try to turn the others in. But we still weren't sure of your motives."

Nina shivered, thinking about how closely she'd been watched all along. Every time she complained about their rocky, uneven "beds" in the woods. Every times she griped about the dirty vegetables.

"I bet the rest of you were getting food somewhere else," she said.

"Not much," Alia said in a small voice, looking down. She looked back up at Nina, her eyes flashing. "7 thought you were good. I wanted to tell. But these guys" — she pointed at Percy, Matthias, and Mr. Talbot—"they said I had to wait until you told us everything. Until you told us that you were supposed to betray us to the Population Police."

"I did that tonight," Nina said wonderingly. She looked around again at the circle of people, the circle of light in the dark woods.

She remembered how panicked she'd been, running out to the woods only minutes earlier. She hadn't been thinking at all of saving her own life. She'd only wanted to save Percy, Matthias, and Alia.

But she hadn't cared that much about them back when she first met them, when she offered them a chance to escape, when she saw the fake policemen by the river.

"You gave me a lot of chances," she said to Mr. Talbot.

"I thought you deserved them," he said. "You didn't deserve what happened to you before."

Nina remembered the day she was arrested, how nobody had spoken out on her behalf as she glided for' ward in the dining hall. She remembered how much she'd trusted Jason, and then he had betrayed her. No, she hadn't deserved that. Nobody did. What she deserved was the way Gran and the aunties had loved her, the way they'd hidden her even though they might have been killed for it. But Alia, Percy, and Matthias hadn't deserved being betrayed, either. They hadn't deserved weeks in a dark prison cell, weeks sleeping outdoors on rocks and twigs and itchy leaves. But they'd endured all of that, willingly, for her. They'd agreed to endure all of that before they even knew if she was good or bad.

Nina's eyes filled up with tears, but they weren't tears of fear or panic or sorrow now. They were tears of joy.

"Thank you," she whispered, and the words seemed to encompass everyone in front of her — Percy, Matthias, and Alia, Mr. Talbot, even Lee and Trey. But the words were more powerful than that. Her whisper seemed to fly through the night, through the dark. Somewhere, far away, she could even imagine Gran and the aunties hearing her, too.