Among the Free

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Luke sat back down in the crowd again. He couldn't concentrate on the people on the stage, though, because his mind was racing.

It really doesn't matter that I couldn't get to the boy on crutches, he thought. How did I think he would help? What could he do? What could I do? Maybe I just misunderstood what I heard. Maybe I'm just misinterpreting everything. What do I know, anyway?

Around him, people were stirring angrily. Luke realized it had been a long time since he'd heard anybody clap or cheer. Periodically someone would shout out, "You said it!" or "I'm with you on that!"

Now everyone knows how bad the Population Police were, Luke thought. They can't hide behind their own propaganda anymore. They could never come back into power.

But that thought didn't cheer him. As he tuned in to the discussion on the stage again — a girl talked about how a Population Police guard had slapped her once; a man told about watching his son die of hunger — he took no more pleasure in the sad stories. The sorrow and despair and regret seemed to waft out over the crowd, infecting every' one. Luke saw several women crying. He thought about all the sad people he'd encountered since leaving home nearly a year ago: the frightened boys at Hendricks School, so desperate for a leader that they trusted someone who betrayed them. Smits Grant, who had to hide his grief over his brother's death. Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, who lost their daughter and had no way of knowing what happened to their two sons. The people of Eli's village, who lost their homes and their dignity and their will to live.

"That's wrong! Just wrong!" the people around Luke were shouting now.

"It's not enough to be free," a man on the stage was say' ing. "We must also have revenge."

"You tell it!" a woman shouted behind Luke.

"Yes!" erupted from elsewhere in the crowd.

The man waited for the jeers and whoops to diminish. He held up his hand for silence.

'And yet. ." he said slowly, and the words seemed to hang in midair. Some of the people around Luke were listening so closely for the man's next words that they seemed to be holding their breath.

"I don't believe any of this was the Population Police's fault," the man finished.

Luke expected the crowd to explode with outrage. Of course it was the Population Police's fault! Who else had controlled the food supply? Who else had paid the salary of the guards who slapped young girls, who beat young boys until they could barely walk?

But the crowd stayed silent. They waited for the man's next words.

"The Population Police promised my village a food shipment last month," the man said, his voice hushed. Luke had to strain to hear. 'They were eager to send it to us; they were happy to provide. They had no reason to want us to suffer. But the day came for the shipment to arrive and.." The man held out his empty hands, palms up. "Nothing. We called Population Police headquarters. The food had been sent, right on schedule. The reason we never received it? It was stolen."

The crowd gasped. Somewhere near the back, a lone voice cried out, "Who stole it?"

The man was shaking his head, overcome with sorrow. He buried his face in his hands for a moment, trying to regain his composure. Then he raised his head again and stared out at the crowd.

"Illegal third children," he said. "A band of them swept out of the fallow fields, attacking the trucks of food. They were like bandits, preying on innocent citizens, stealing innocent citizens' food. That is why the Population Police had to become so harsh, why they had to crack down so cruelly. That is why the food they promised us never showed up. That is why the Population Police never got a chance to govern as they wanted."

Boos and hisses began to spill out of the crowd.

"This guy is crazy," Luke said to the man sitting next to him, who seemed to be booing particularly loudly.

"What do you mean?" the man said, shooting Luke a nasty look. "He's the first person I've heard talk sense."

"He's the first person who's said why the Population Police failed," another man said.

Then Luke heard the boos and hisses differently. They weren't directed at the man on the stage. They weren't directed at the Population Police. They were directed at third children.

They were directed at him.

"Boo, illegals!"

"Blame the illegals!"

"It's their fault! It's their fault!" the crowd began to chant.

The two men sitting near Luke kept looking at him, because he wasn't joining in the chant. He scrambled to his feet and backed away from them. The boos were ringing in his ears. He tried to run, but the crowd was packed too closely together: He bumped into elbows, hips, shoulders, knees.

And then, out of breath and panting with panic, he reached the back of the crowd.

"Well, uh, we have another speaker coming up now," Philip Twinings was saying into his microphone, trying to regain control of the crowd. "Perhaps he'll have a different perspective."

Luke turned around, feeling one last glimmer of hope. He had to feel hopeful, because the only other alternative was to give up, to give in to despair.

So the Population Police are out of power and I'm still illegal? he wondered. It's still all my fault that people starve? He remembered how devastated he'd been all those months ago, when Jen had explained the reason for the Population Law. Back then, he'd had to struggle so hard to believe that the law was wrong, that he still had a right to exist.

He watched another man step up to the microphone.

"I met an illegal third child, once," he said. "It was hardly human, I'd say. It stole food every chance it got. It—"

The man kept talking, but Luke couldn't hear him any' more. The microphone seemed to have given out.

Philip Twinings took the microphone from the man.

"We—," he shouted, and the microphone came back on for one brief moment, in a screech of feedback. "We seem to be having some technical difficulties. We'll break for the night and resume in the morning."

Luke hadn't even noticed that it was dusk now, that a full day had passed while he'd been sitting there in the crowd listening to stories. Around him in the hovering darkness, people were standing up, breaking out of their trances. Most of them were grumbling about being hun^ gry, and they began streaming back toward the main building, heading for the kitchen and dining room.

Luke was hungry too. He hadn't eaten anything since the scrambled eggs that morning. He could remember being handed a doughnut after he'd discovered the man guarding the secret room, but he'd been too distracted to bring the doughnut up to his mouth, to chew, to swallow. Maybe he'd dropped the doughnut; maybe someone had taken it from his hand and he hadn't even noticed. He looked wistfully toward the bright lights coming from the dining-room windows. He could imagine hot soups, toasty breads. But there was no way he could join the crowd getting food. Not now.

Hungry and cold, Luke stomped back to the stable and fed the horses. He found his quilt still in Jenny's stall and he curled up in it.

"It was just two men talking bad about third children. Nobody else mentioned us," he whispered to Jenny. She turned around and looked at him with her sympathetic horse eyes, but she didn't stop chewing her oats. Even in the dim light of the stable, Luke could see her strong teeth chomping the oats to bits.

"Maybe it wasn't really that many people in the crowd booing," he told the horse. "Maybe it just seemed like a lot because I was scared. And everybody still hates the Population Police. As long as they hate the Population Police, I'm okay."

Jenny seemed to have a skeptical look on her face, but what did she know? She was just a horse chewing oats. Luke closed his eyes and burrowed deeper into the straw, which he'd neglected to clean. He didn't care. He slipped into a fitful sleep and immediately began to dream: Jen was there, and she was yelling at him.

Luke! Wake up! You've got to wake up!

It's nighttime. Supposed to . . sleep. . in the nighttime, he mumbled back in the dream. He curled up even more tightly in his quilt cocoon.

No, Luke! I mean it! Jen screamed again. WAKE UP!

She began tugging on the end of his quilt, trying to spin him out of it. And then he did wake up a little, just enough to realize that Jenny the horse was standing on one corner of the quilt, the force of her weight pulling it away from Luke.

"Hey, girl," Luke muttered sleepily. "Whose side are you on, anyway?"

He yanked the quilt away and fell back asleep.

When he woke up for real, hours later, sunlight was streaming in through the skylights, but he felt cold, stiff, and lightheaded with hunger. He hadn't had Jenny's body heat to warm him: The horse was standing against the wall at the other end of the stall.

"What? Are you mad because I didn't clean your stall last night?" Luke asked. "Or were you listening to those speeches yesterday? Don't tell me you blame third children for everything too."

His voice caught a little; this morning he wasn't even capable of making a stupid joke to a dumb old horse. Jenny just stared at him, in the steady way of horses, and he thought he heard an echo of his dream: Luke! I mean it! WAKE UP!

"I've got to get something to eat before I go totally nuts," Luke muttered to himself.

He put out food for the horses again, scrubbed his face, changed his clothes. By the time he stumbled out of the stable, he felt better. The warnings of nightmares and ghosts seemed silly in the glare of such a bright, sunlit day.

He started to veer toward the kitchen and dining hall immediately, but he could hear the boom of amplified voices off in the distance. Philip Twinings and the other TV people must have managed to fix the microphone and whatever else was broken. Luke could tell by the crowd gathering on the lawn that the interviews were beginning again.

I'll just go listen to a speech or two, Luke told himself just to make sure. .

As he moved toward the crowd, he could tell that more had changed overnight than just a microphone repair. Someone had posted signs along the wall behind the stage, in full sight of the entire crowd and anyone who might be watching on TV Luke began walking more slowly, each step filled with dread. Finally he was close enough to read the signs.

One showed a baby with a number three on his chest, with a caption underneath: he's the reason you were STARVING.

Another showed a sullen group of teenagers, with the Words BEWARE THE SHADOWS.

Others showed families with three children. They were labeled the worst criminals of all and it's all their fault.

They were the signs from the secret room.