Among the Free

Chapter Thirty

Luke backed away from the security guard in horror. The guard was still sneering, his mouth wide and distorted, his teeth glistening and sharp. Luke turned and fled, shoving his way back through the crowd. For the second time that morning, he raced back to the stables, desperately seeking a safe haven from his fears. His hands shook as he unlatched the door to Jenny's stall. This time he simply flung himself onto the floor of her stall, not car-ing about the straw, not caring about the muck. What was there left to care about anymore?

Jenny whinnied anxiously and nudged his back with her nose.

"It's all a setup," Luke mumbled. "It always was. The people talking on stage — they're signaling all the rest of the old Population Police officials. They're brainwashing the crowd. It's all very carefully controlled. They'd never let me up there."

Luke remembered how he'd thought he was safe as long as the crowd hated the Population Police. He hadn't realized how easily hate could be spread, how easily it could be turned toward a new target. With three more days of speeches, the crowd would be ready to burn third children at the stake. They wouldn't care how many former Population Police officials helped them do it.

Jenny nudged him again, as if she were trying to make him get up.

Luke rolled over on his back.

"Forget it. I'm not going anywhere," he told her. "I'm giving up. There's nothing I can do."

Jenny whinnied once more, and shoved her head against the door to her stall. Luke saw that he'd neglected to latch the door after he'd rushed in.

"What? Is that bothering you?" Luke asked harshly. "You scared you might actually have a little freedom? Scared you might have to make some choices?"

His eyes blurred as he remembered how thought he'd been free too, only the day before, and how he'd worried that freedom meant having too many choices. Now he didn't feel like he had any.

"Okay, okay, I'll fasten that," Luke told Jenny. "It wouldn't be fair for a horse to have more freedom than I do."

But as he stood up, Jenny moved away from him. She nudged her gate open and stepped out of her stall. Maybe it was all Luke's imagination, or maybe it was just a trick of the eye in the dim light of the stable, but she seemed to look back at him with a mixture of wonder and hope in her eyes.

"Hey, girl, don't go too far," Luke said. "It probably wouldn't be safe for you to go out and mix with the crowd. They're not in a very friendly mood."

Yet he could imagine the horse stepping daintily through the crowd, unscathed. Even fired up by the speeches, even filled with hate, surely the crowd would be able to look at Jenny with awe, to see the beauty in her stride.

And then, strangely, he began to imagine himself on Jenny's back, riding across the lawn. He saw the crowd falling silent, the speeches cut off, everyone watching him and Jenny. He pictured Jenny leaping… He gasped.

"Do you think we could?" he asked Jenny hoarsely. "Do you suppose that's the way to…?"

He played the scene over and over again in his head. Somehow it mixed with other scenes and sounds he had witnessed. He saw the woman back in Chiutza staring him in the face and declaring, "I have a choice." She hadn't said that when she was free, when she knew the Population Police were going to be out of power. She'd said it when Luke had broken into her house, when she had every reason to believe she could be killed for her defiance.

And he remembered the last time he'd ever seen Jen, the night before she left for her rally. The last words she'd spoken to him were, "We can hope" — even though she had to have known then that her rally was doomed.

Even when I was in hiding, I made my own choices, Jen seemed to be whispering in his head. I chose the possibility of freedom over everything else.

Luke thought about how Oscar seemed to care about power more than anything else.

He thought about his friends and what they valued. Trey believed in words and books and knowledge. Nina savored memories of her grandmother and the "aunties" who had raised her, and she tried to live up to their vision of her. Percy, Matthias, and Alia, three kids Luke had met through Nina, believed in God and in trying to do the right thing.

And me, what do I believe in? What do I care about the most?

He'd come such a long way from being the little kid cowering in the attic, when he thought it didn't matter what he cared about, what he believed in, what he wanted.

But I've had to make choices all along. At home, at Hendricks School, with the Grant family, when I was hiding out at Mr. Hendricks's house, when I was working undercover for the Population Police, in Chiutza. .

He could imagine Jen goading him: Enough with the reminiscing, Luke. Save the nostalgia for another time. Are you going to do this or not?

He gave his answer out loud. "Jen, this is my decision, not yours. It's maybe the most important decision of my entire life. Let me think for a minute."

He walked over to the stable door and poked his head out, so he could see the vast crowd fanning out from the stage. It seemed bigger than ever. How many of those people are already so dead-set against third children that they could never change their minds? Luke wondered. How many don't care one way or another? How many of them maybe.. possibly.. potentially. . could be on my side? It was like one of those tricky math problems he'd had to do back at Hendricks School, involving percentages and probability. He'd never been any good at that kind of math, and this time his life might depend on figuring the probability right.

What percentage of the crowd didn't boo third children last night? He wondered. He didn't know. He couldn't know. Math problems didn't allow for leaps of faith, but sometimes that's what you had to take in real life.

"Hope you're good at jumping," he muttered to Jenny, and went to get her saddle.