Among the Betrayed

CHAPTER THREE

If morning came, Nina had no way of knowing it. She sat for hours, stiff and sore and heartbroken, huddled under the harsh light of the one bare bulb.

People always say that death's the worst thing that can happen to you, she thought.

It's not.

She wished the man had just killed her and been done with it. She could have died — well, not happily, but at least with something to clutch on to, something to believe in:

Jason loves me. Oh, Jason, my beloved, good'bye!

In the time since her arrest, she realized, she'd begun picturing herself and Jason as the kind of tragic, star-crossed lovers who inhabited Aunty Zenka's favorite books and TV shows.

Gran and the other aunties always made fun of Aunty Zenka for liking those books and shows.

"Oh, give me a break!" Nina could remember Aunty Lystra complaining one evening when Aunty Zenka was reading aloud by candlelight. "Why doesn't the beautiful, vivacious heroine just tell Jacques, 'Hey, you've got incur-able TB. Life's too short to hang around watching you die. Ciao!'"

"Because they're in love!" Aunty Zenka had protested. "And love is—"

"A load of garbage," Aunty Lystra finished for her. Aunty Lystra worked for the sanitation department. She was always comparing things to garbage.

Nina had felt sorry for poor, sentimental Aunty Zenka, who could get misty-eyed in the first seconds of one of her shows, with the first sentence of one of her books. But now Nina thought Aunty Lystra must be right. Aunty Lystra would think Nina had been a fool to trust Jason in the first place.

But he was so nice to me, Nina defended herself.

And he was so strong and handsome, and he knew so much….

For the first time Nina thought to wonder: How had he known so much? He'd known that the woods were a safe place to meet. He'd known about Harlow School for Girls. He'd known the exact right time of day to slip a note under the front door of the school, when the girls were walking to class. So a girl, not a teacher, would find his note.

Nina had been that girl. She lost herself, remembering. Two months ago, in the hallway at Harlow School, she'd scooped up a folded-over page that other girls had walked right past. She'd held the cream-colored, heavy-weight paper in her hand for a long moment, daydreaming about what it might be. She'd known it was probably nothing interesting, nothing that concerned her: a notice about electric rates, maybe, or a government edict about the size of spoons in the school kitchen. But as long as she didn't open it, she could imagine it was something exciting — like Cinderella's invitation to the prince's ball, perhaps. And since she was the one who'd picked it up…

The suspense had been too much. Nina had slid her fin-ger between the edges of paper, breaking the seal. Carefully she'd unfolded the page and read:

To all Harlow girls who are concerned about shadows:

Please join the like-minded students of Hendricks School for Boys for a meeting at 8 P.M… April 16, halfway into the woods between our schools.

Nina had never heard of Hendricks School. She had never been in the woods — any woods. Except for the day she came to the school, she'd never been outdoors at all. She was a little worried about the word "shadows." Did it mean what she thought it meant? Was this dangerous?

But Nina didn't really care. She knew instantly that she was going to that meeting. She would have gone if the note had said, "To all Harlow girls who are concerned about hammers." Or "fruit flies." Or "pencils." Or "prehistoric civilizations' development of canals and aqueducts" — the subject she'd just ignored in her last class. Nina felt like she'd been waiting her entire thirteen years to receive this invitation.

Convincing her friends was a little harder.

"We're not supposed to go outside," Sally said timidly when Nina whispered her secret after lights-out that night.

"Nobody ever said that," Nina argued, trying to keep her own panic out of her voice. If her friends refused to go, would she have the nerve to go alone?

"They never said, 'Don't brush your teeth with toilet water,' either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it," Nina's other roommate, Bonner, argued.

Sally was tiny and golden haired, and Bonner was tall and dark and big boned, practically burly. Since Nina was medium height and medium weight, with medium brown hair, she always felt like the link between the other two. When they walked down the hall together, Nina was always in the middle. When the other two disagreed, Nina was always the one who suggested a compromise. Having both the other two oppose her made Nina feel a little desperate.

"Look, they want to talk about shadows," Nina said. Even in the dark she could tell that both of her friends froze at the sound of that one word. Harlow School was full of secrets that everyone knew but almost never discussed. At the beginning of the school year, when Nina was still horribly homesick, she'd amused herself by imagining Aunty Rhoda, her most practical aunt, materializing in the dining hall at breakfast or lunch or dinner, and marching up to the front of the room to lay out the truth for everybody:

"Fact: Every single one of you girls is a'shadow child'—a third or fourth or maybe even fifth child whose very birth was illegal because the Government doesn't allow people to have more than two kids.

"Fact: All of you came here with fake I.D.'s certifying that you are somebody else, somebody the Government thinks has a right to exist.

"Fact: Anyone with half a brain could see you're all pre-tending. Half the time the blond, Swedish-looking girl forgets to answer to the name, Uthant Mogadishu. And she's not the only one. All of you cower at any mention of the Government. All of you tremble any time the door opens.

"Conclusion: So why don't you all just drop the little charade and talk about it? Tell one another your real names. Talk about your real families, not the pretend brothers and sisters and parents you've probably never even met. Compare notes on how you managed to hide, all these years, before you got a fake I.D. Console one another about the difficulties of coming out of hiding, instead of lying in bed each night sobbing silently, pretending you don't hear your roommates crying, too."

But of course Aunty Rhoda was miles away, and Nina wasn't brave enough to stand up and make that speech herself. Still, with Sally and Bonner, in the dark of their room at night, she'd dropped hints, and they'd dropped hints, too. All school year it'd been like following the trail of bread crumbs in the fairy tale — Nina had never learned very much at any one time, but by spring she knew that Sally had two older sisters and a house by the seashore and parents who were working with the Underground, attempting to overthrow the Government. And Bonner had a brother and a sister and a huge extended family of aunts and uncles who all lived in the same apartment building and took turns taking care of Bonner.

"They want to talk about shadows," Bonner repeated. "Right. So do the Population Police. What if it's a trap?"

"What if it isn't?" Nina hissed. "What if this is our only chance?" She prayed the other two wouldn't ask what it was a chance for — she'd never be able to explain. Maybe Sally and Bonner had never gotten to the point, in hiding, where they wanted to scream at the four walls around them. Maybe they hadn't read and reread and re-reread all the fairy tales where princesses were released from magic spells and evil enchantments. Maybe they'd never thought, even at Harlow,

Oh, please, there's got to be more. This can't be all my life is.

"Look, you can take your I.D. card with you into the woods," Nina said. "The Population Police can't do anything to you if you have your I.D. card. And we don't even have to talk to these boys. We can just hide behind the trees and watch them. Just come with me. Please?"

"Oh, all right," Bonner said grimly.

"Sally?" Nina asked.

"Okay," Sally said in her smallest voice. Nina knew that if there'd been even a glimmer of light in the room, she would have been able to see absolute terror in Sally's eyes.

For once Nina was glad for darkness.

So they'd gone into the woods, clutching their fake I.D.'s like lifelines. But they hadn't just hidden and watched. They'd met Jason and his friends. And Jason had told them a wonderful story about a girl not any older than them, Jen Talbot, who'd led a rally demanding rights for third children like them. Jen had been brave enough to tell the Government that third children shouldn't have to hide. Jen had died for her beliefs, but still, listen-ing to Jason's wonderfully deep voice praise Jen, Nina had wanted to be just like her.

But now that Nina had been arrested, it looked like Sally and Bonner had been right The woods had been dan-gerous. The three of them shouldn't have stepped foot outside Harlow School. Nina should never have met Jason, never have kissed him, never have fallen in love.

"No!" Nina found herself screaming again. "No, no, no, no, no.."