Among the Hidden

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Luke stifled his instinct to run. He turned around as slowly as he could. Guns had been outlawed for everyone but Government officials long before he was born. But he recognized the object pointed at him from books and Dad's descriptions. Dad had always talked about hunting rifles and shotguns, big guns to bring down deer or wolves. This gun was smaller. Meant to kill humans.

All that flashed through Luke's mind before he looked beyond the gun, to the man holding it. He was tall and fleshy, his expensive clothes only partially hiding his bulk. Luke had seen him only from a distance before.

"You're Jen's dad," he said.

"I didn't ask who I was," the man snapped. "Who are you?"

Luke exhaled slowly.

"A friend of Jen's," he said cautiously.

Only because he was watching very, very closely did he see the man lower the gun by a fraction of an inch.

"Please," Luke said. "I just want to know where she is."

This time the man clearly relaxed his gun hand. He circled around behind Luke and snapped off the computer.

"Jen says you have to park the hard drive before you do that," Luke said.

"How do you know about Jen?" the man asked. He narrowed his eyes.

Luke blinked. The man was bargaining, he realized, offering to negotiate. He wanted something from Luke before he would tell Luke anything about Jen. But what?

"I'm a third child, too," Luke said finally. The man's expression didn't change, but Luke thought he saw a flicker of interest in his eyes. "I'm a neighbor. I found out about her, and I started coming over, when I could."

"How did you know she was here?" the man said.

"I saw-" Luke didn't want to get her in trouble. "I saw lights when I knew everyone was gone. I guessed I-I really wanted there to be another third child for me to meet."

"So Jen was careless," the man said, with an edge to his voice that Luke didn't understand.

"No," Luke said uncertainly. "I was observant."

The man nodded, only to accept Luke's answer. Then he sat down in the chair by the computer desk, and rested the gun on his leg. Luke took that as a sign that the conversation might last long enough for him to find out something.

"Did Jen teach you how to disable our alarm system?" the man asked.

Luke saw no point in lying. "Yes. But I must have screwed up, since you came-"

"No," the man said. "If you'd screwed up, the security guards would have come. But I have it set so I'm automatically notified if the system's shut down while I'm away… Given the circumstances, I decided to investigate myself."

Luke longed to ask what "circumstances" he meant, but the man was already asking another question. "So what else did you and Jen do together?" the man said. Luke couldn't understand why he sounded so accusatory.

"Nothing," Luke said. "I mean, we talked a lot She showed me the computer. She-she wanted me to go to the rally, but I was too scared."

Too late, Luke thought to wonder if the man knew about the rally. Was Luke betraying Jen's confidence? But the man didn't seem surprised. He was studying Luke as intently as Luke had been studying him.

"Why didn't you stop her?" the man asked.

"Stop Jen? That' s like trying to stop the sun," Luke said.

The man gave Luke the faintest of smiles, one that contained no happiness. "Just remember that" he said.

"So where is she?" Luke asked.

The man looked away.

"Jen's-" His voice broke. "Jen is no longer with us."

"She-?"

"She's dead," the man said harshly.

Somehow Luke had known without wanting to know. He still stumbled backwards, in shock. He bumped into the couch and sagged into it.

"No," he said. "Not Jen. No. You're lying."

His ears roared. He thought crazy things. This is a dream.

A nightmare. I will make myself wake up. He remembered Jen talking a mile a minute, gesturing wildly. How could she be dead? He tried to picture her lying still, not moving. Dead. It was impossible.

The man was shaking his head helplessly. "I'd give anything to have her back," he whispered. "But it's true. I saw. They gave us… they gave us the body. Special privilege for a Government official." His voice was so bitter, Luke could barely listen. "And we couldn't even bury her in the family plot. Couldn't take a bereavement day off work. Couldn't tell anyone why we're going around with red eyes and aching hearts. No-we just had to pretend to be the same old family of four we'd always been."

"How?" Luke asked. "How did she… die?" He was thinking, if the car had wrecked, it wouldn't be so bad. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the rally. Maybe she just got really sick.

"They shot her," Jen's father said. "They shot all of them. All forty kids at the rally, gunned down right in front of the president's house. The blood flowed into his rose-bushes. But they had the sidewalks scrubbed before the tourists came, so nobody would know."

Luke started shaking his head no, and couldn't stop. "But Jen said there'd be too many people to shoot. She said there'd be a thousand," Luke protested, as if Jen's words could change what he was hearing.

"Our Jen had too much faith in the bravery of her fellow hidden," Jen's father said.

Luke flinched. "I told her I couldn't go," he said. "I told her! It's not my fault!"

"No," Jen's dad said quietly. "And you couldn't have stopped her. It's not your fault. There are plenty of other people who deserve the blame. They probably would have shot a thousand. Or fifteen thousand. They don't care."

His face twisted. Luke thought he had never seen such pain, not even the time Matthew dropped a sledgehammer on his foot. Tears began to spill down Jen's father's face.

"What I don't understand is-why did she do this, this Children's Crusade? She wasn't stupid. We'd been warning her about the Population Police all her life. Did she really think the rally would work?" he said.

"Yes," Luke assured him. Then, unbidden, the last words she'd spoken to him came back to him: We can hope-after she'd told him hope was worthless. Maybe she knew the rally would fail. Maybe she even knew she would probably die. He remembered the first day he'd met her, when she'd cut her hand to cover the drops of his blood on the carpet. There was something strange in Jen he couldn't quite understand, that made her willing to sacrifice herself to help others. Or to try to.

"I think at first she thought the rally would work," Luke told Jen's dad. "And then, even when she wasn't sure… she still had to go. She wouldn't call it off."

"Why?" Jen's dad asked. He was sobbing. "Did she want to die?"

"No," Luke said. "She wanted to live. Not die. Not hide. Live."

The words played over and over again in his brain: "Not hide. Live. Not hide. Live." As long as he held on to them, he felt like Jen was there. She'd just left the room for a minute, to get more potato chips, maybe, and soon she'd be back to lecture him again about how they both deserved a better life than hiding. He could believe it was her voice echoing in his ears.

But if he let go, let the words stop for a minute, he was lost. He felt like the whole world was spinning away from him, and he was all alone. He wanted to cry out, "Jen! Come back!"-as if she could hear him, and stop the spinning, and come to him.

As if from a great distance, Luke heard Jen's father heave a sigh and blow his nose in a businesslike way.

"You may not be ready to hear this," he said. "But-"

Dizzily, Luke raised his head and listened halfheartedly.

"When you logged into that chat room," Jen's father said, "a buzzer went off in a room in Population Police headquarters. They're monitoring the chat room very closely-they found it after the rally. I've managed to…uh, cover up things about Jen, but they'll trace your message back to our computer. The Population Police are backlogged right now, following leads from the rally, so I should have a day or two to come up with a plausible-sounding explanation. But if they investigate too carefully, you may be in danger."

"More than usual?" Luke said sarcastically.

Jen's dad took the question seriously.

"Yes. They will begin actively looking for you. They'll search every house around this one. It wouldn't take them long to find you."

A chill ran down Luke's spine. So he would die, just like Jen. Or not like her-she had gone bravely. He would be caught like a mouse in its hole.

"But if you'll let me," Jen's dad continued, "I can get you a fake I.D. You can be miles away before they come looking."

"You would do that for me?" Luke asked. "Why?"

"Because of Jen."

"But-how?"

"I have connections. You see"-Jen's dad hesitated-"I work for the Population Police."