Among the Betrayed

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  What if . . . what if he doesn’t care about my parents’ names because he already knows them? What if he already knows about Gran and the aunties? Is that why he never asks?

  Nina frantically tried to remember if she’d ever breathed a word about any of her family to Jason. She hadn’t, had she? Talking to Jason, she’d wanted to seem exotic and desirable. A grandmother and a bunch of old-maid aunts didn’t really fit that image.

  The hating man was done pacing. He whirled on his heel, put his face right up against Nina’s. They were eye to eye, nose to nose.

  “You cannot play around with the Population Police, little girl,” he said. “That’s how people die.”

  Nina quivered.

  The man stalked out and slammed the door behind him.

  Nina sat alone, terrified, in the luxurious interrogation room. The table in front of her was loaded down with bowls of food. She’d been eating ravenously during their conversation. Perhaps because it was the middle of the night, instead of midday, the foods were snacks, not a real meal, mostly things Nina had never tasted before: popcorn, peanuts in their salty shells, orange cheese crackers, raisins in delicate little boxes. Nina was still starving—she was always starving, she couldn’t think of a single time in her entire life when she’d had her belly completely full. But she couldn’t bring herself to eat another bite, not with the hating man’s threat echoing in her ears. Still, she found herself reaching out for the bowl of peanuts. She watched her own hands lift the bowl and pour its contents down the front of her dress, making a bag of her bodice. She cinched her belt tighter, holding the peanuts in at her waist. She’d barely finished when the guard opened the door.

  “He’s done with you early, I hear,” the guard growled. “Back to the cell with you.”

  Nina stood slowly. None of the peanuts fell out. She crossed her arms and held them tightly at her waist, keeping the belt in place. She took a step, and then another, and nothing happened. The peanut shells tickled, but Nina didn’t care.

  I’m stealing food from the Population Police! Nina thought. I’m getting away with it!

  Walking back to her cell, Nina did not feel like a girl who’d nearly betrayed her parents, whose beloved Gran and aunties might be in danger. She did not feel like an illegal child, with no right to live. She did not feel like a lovesick, silly teenager who’d been betrayed by the boy she’d fallen for. She did not feel like a potential traitor to her own kind.

  She felt giddy and hopeful, crafty and capable. All because of the rustle of peanut shells under her dress.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nina kept stealing food.

  Invariably, during every meeting with the hating man there came a time when he’d leave the room briefly—to confer with the guard, to go to the bathroom, to get a new pen. And then Nina would grab whatever food was nearest and stuff it down her dress, in her socks, wherever she could. She took apples, oranges, biscuits, raisins. She took dried bananas, unshelled walnuts, cereal boxes, oatmeal bars still in their wrappers. She stole another of the bags the guard brought black bread in, and took to carrying it around with her, tied under her dress, so she could swipe even more food each time.

  The problem was, she didn’t know what to do with the food she stole.

  She was hungry. She could easily have eaten it all herself. But once she was back in her jail cell with the other three, her stomach squeezed together at the thought of eating so much as a crumb of the stolen food. What if they heard her chewing? How could she eat such delicacies while they were starving, right there beside her? (How could she eat any of the Population Police’s food when the other three were starving?)

  She did think about sharing. That was probably why she’d reached for the bowl of peanuts in the first place, because she felt so guilty about not taking the rolls for Alia. But how could she explain where she’d gotten all that food?

  An evil thought crept into her mind one night when the guard shoved her back into her cell and she saw the other three cuddled together. Nina sat down beside them and leaned into Alia, and Alia squirmed away in her sleep, closer to Matthias. The ground was wet and hard, and Nina was freezing. Everything seemed hopeless; Nina didn’t care what happened to anyone else as long as she got warm, as long as she got dry clothes, as long as she got out of jail. I could use the food, she thought. Like a bribe. I could tell them they can have as much as they want to eat, as long as they tell me their secrets. No—I’d dole it out, a peanut at a time, a raisin at a time, with every one of my questions. Who’s “Sa-”? Where’d you get your I.D.’s? Who else should have been arrested with you?

  Nina didn’t do it. She just kept stealing food she couldn’t eat, couldn’t give away, couldn’t use. She felt like she’d been in prison forever and she would stay in prison forever. She saw nothing ahead of her but more nights sleeping in damp, filthy clothes on cold, hard rock, more days trying to overhear the others’ whispers, more randomly spaced trips to the hating man’s room, where he yelled at her and gave her food she could not eat, only steal.

  Then one day he cut her off.

  “You have twenty-four hours,” the hating man barked at her. “That’s it.”

  Nina stared back at him, her brain struggling to comprehend. She’d practically forgotten that twenty-four hours made a day—that there were things such as numbers and counted-off hours in the world.

  “You mean . . . ,” she said, more puzzled than terrified.

  “If you do not tell me everything I need to know by”—he looked at the watch on his wrist—“by ten-oh-five tomorrow night, you will be executed. You and the three exnays.”

  Nina waited for the terror to come, but she was too numb. And then she was too distracted. Mack, the guard, was pounding at the door to their meeting room. The hating man opened it, and Mack stumbled in, slumping against the table. Nina saw he still clutched the ring of keys he always used to get her in and out of her cell. His long arms hit the wood hard. Then his fingers released, and the keys went sliding across the table and onto the floor.

  “Poi—,” Mack gulped. “Poisoned . . .”

  The hating man sprang up and grabbed a phone, punching numbers with amazing speed. “Ambulance to the Population Police headquarters immediately!” he demanded. “One of our guards has been poisoned.”

  He dragged Mack out into the hall, Mack’s feet bouncing against the floor. “Stay with me, Mack,” the hating man muttered. “They’re coming to help you.”

  “Unnhh,” Mack groaned.

  Both of them seemed to have forgotten Nina. Nina looked down and saw the guard’s key ring on the floor, just to the left of her chair. All the keys stuck out at odd angles. Slowly, carelessly, as if it were nothing more than just another stray peanut shell, Nina bent down and picked up the whole ring.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Nina slipped the ring of keys around her left wrist and pushed it up her arm—farther, farther—until the ring stayed in place on its own. The points of the keys bit into her arm, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation. It woke her up.

  I have keys.

  I have food.

  I have twenty-four hours.

  I need a plan.

  The hating man strode back into the room. Nina didn’t have the slightest idea how long he’d been gone. Maybe she’d been sitting there fingering the keys through her sleeve for hours.

  “I can’t believe this!” the man fumed. “Mack’s—I’ve got someone else with Mack now. I’ll take you back to your cell. Come on! I want to get back here as soon as I can. . . .”

  Nina stood up, feeling the full weight of the food bag tied around her waist, the pinch of every individual key around her arm. As slowly as she dared, she circled the table toward the hating man. He grabbed her arm—her right one, fortunately—and pulled.

  “Don’t know what this world’s coming to,” the man muttered as they came to the door from the luxurious hallway into the rest of the prison. Nina held her breath. Would he realize now that
he needed Mack’s keys?

  No—he was pulling keys of his own out of his jacket pocket, jamming a key into the lock, jerking the key around, jabbering the whole time. “Mack’s a good, honest man, got kids of his own—I don’t know why . . .”

  They were at another door. The man unlocked this one, too, with barely a pause.

  Down the stairs, through another door—the man hustled Nina all the way. Nina was daring to breathe again. Then they reached the door of Nina’s cell.

  The hating man stopped, stared at his key ring.

  “Wouldn’t you know it!” he grumbled. “I’m missing this key. I’ll have to go back for it.”

  He glanced around toward the door they’d just come through. The disgust and impatience played over his face so clearly, Nina felt like she could read his mind: Now I’ll have to go all the way back upstairs, take this nasty girl with me, then come back down here into this muck. Yes, that had to be what he was thinking. He even raised his foot distastefully to look at the mud on the bottom of his polished shoe. And I don’t want to have to think about this useless kid anymore, I just want to go check on poor Mack—

  “Tell you what,” the hating man said. “I’m not even going to put you in the cell. I’ll just leave you in this hall. There isn’t anyone else in this wing right now anyway, and that door will be locked tight. . . .” He spoke as though it were Nina, not he, who might worry that she wouldn’t be imprisoned well enough. “The morning guard can put you back in your cell when he comes through on his eight A.M. rounds.”

  He was already going back through the other door. “Can’t be helped,” he muttered, and shut the door in Nina’s face.

  Nina stood beside the solid metal door and put her finger over the keyhole. One of the keys on Mack’s key ring fit into that hole. She was sure of it. If the hating man had put her back in her cell, the keys would have done her no good; the door of the prison cell couldn’t be unlocked from the inside.

  But she had keys to all the doors between her and the interrogation room, with its windows to the outside.

  She had keys, she had food—she could escape.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nina blindly poked keys into the keyhole, searching for the right one. The only light in the hallway was a dim, dirty bulb, several yards away, so she had trouble just keeping track of which keys she’d already tried and which keys she hadn’t. It was also hard trying to keep the rest of the key ring from banging on the metal door while she was turning each individual key. She was sure she had to work silently. But why? Surely the hating man was already upstairs, hovering over the poisoned Mack. And he’d said there were no other prisoners down here. Except Percy, Matthias, and Alia, of course.

  Percy, Matthias, and Alia.

  It was strange, but Nina had not thought about them even once since that first moment her fingers closed around the guard’s key ring. She’d forgotten they existed. All she’d thought about were the keys, the keyholes, her own life.

  Percy, Matthias, and Alia.

  Thinking about them now made Nina drop the whole ring of keys. It clattered to the stone floor and slid several inches. The sound seemed to bounce all around in Nina’s ears, as though she’d dropped a thousand keys on a thousand floors. She half wished one of the three kids—Percy, Matthias, or Alia—would pound on their cell door, yell out, “Hey! What’s going on out there?”

  Because then Nina would have to talk to them, have to face them, have to look into their eyes while she decided, Should I ask them to come with me?

  But none of them pounded on the door, none of them called out to her. She shouldn’t have expected them to. If they had even heard the noise of the keys through the heavy wood door, they probably just assumed it was a guard making a little more racket than usual. Whether they heard the noise or not, they would have stayed cowering together in their little corner of the cell. In prison it was foolish to call attention to yourself.

  In prison it was foolish to think about anyone but yourself.

  Nina still didn’t bend over to pick up the keys. Not yet.

  Ever since the hating man had told her, days ago, “Here’s the deal,” she’d been avoiding any decisions. She’d lain down in filth, she’d stumbled along behind the guard, she’d sat with her head bowed while the hating man harangued her. But she hadn’t done anything to harm Percy, Matthias, and Alia. She hadn’t exactly done anything to help them, either—she’d sat precisely in the middle of a perfectly balanced scale.

  But now it was time to tip the scale. She had to choose.

  If Nina left on her own, without a single look back, she’d be sending Percy, Matthias, and Alia to their death. Hadn’t the hating man said he was going to kill them all if he didn’t get the information he needed by ten o’clock the next night? In her heart of hearts Nina knew that that “if” helped only her—if Percy, Matthias, and Alia were still in their jail cell tomorrow, he’d kill them.

  But I don’t have that much food, Nina thought. It’d be harder for four kids to hide out, traveling to safety, than just one. And Alia’s so little. She probably can’t walk very fast at all, and I need to walk as far as possible tonight, before anyone discovers I’m gone. One way or another, those kids are going to die. Taking them with me would just mean that I die, too.

  Nina thought about Jason betraying her, about all her friends just staring when the Population Police came to arrest her. Nobody helped me! she wanted to yell at that small, stubborn part of herself that refused just to pick up the keys and go. But then she thought about Gran, Aunty Zenka, Aunty Lystra, and Aunty Rhoda, four old ladies who could have enjoyed the few small luxuries they could afford on their old-age pensions. They’d kept working instead, at mindless, drudgery-filled jobs, and diapered and coddled a small child in their off hours. She thought about her own mother, a woman she’d barely met, hiding her pregnancy, traveling secretly to Gran’s house, sending money whenever she could. It would have been easier for everyone if they’d gotten rid of Nina right from the start.

  But it would have been wrong.

  Nina sighed, letting out all the damp, unhealthy prison air she’d been breathing. Then she bent down and scooped up the keys. She turned around and walked to a different door, fumbled for a different key. Amazingly, she found this one on the first try. The solid wood door creaked open.

  “Alia? Percy? Matthias?” she called. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Six eyes bugged out at Nina. She had thought she’d lost all awareness of time, but she could feel seconds ticking away—useful, possibly lifesaving seconds—while the others stared speechlessly at her.

  “Huh?” Percy finally said.

  “I stole a lot of food,” Nina said. “Then somebody poisoned the guard, and he dropped his keys, and the hating man didn’t see me pick them up, and he was in a hurry, so he didn’t bring me all the way back to the cell, he just wanted to get back to Mack as soon as possible. Mack’s the guard. Anyway, I have the keys, and nobody knows it, so we can escape. Come on!”

  Another long pause. They didn’t seem to understand.

  “Did you poison the guard?” Alia asked in a small voice.

  “No—I don’t know who poisoned him. I don’t care. All that matters is that it made him drop his keys, and now I have them, and I’m running away. And you guys can come, too, if you come now.”

  “Maybe it’s a trick,” Percy muttered.

  “Maybe it’s a test,” Matthias muttered back. He stood up and walked over to Nina. “Why should we trust you?” he asked.

  Nina’s jaw dropped. She’d expected them to be delighted, grateful, eager to leave immediately. She’d never dreamed that they might question her offer.

  “Why should you trust me?” she repeated numbly. “Because . . . because you’re sitting in this horrible prison cell, licking water off the wall and peeing in a corner. And tomorrow, if you’re still here, the Population Police are going to execute you. You don’t exactly have to
ns of choices here. I’m your only chance.”

  Percy and Alia came to stand beside Matthias, like reinforcements.

  “She has a point,” Percy whispered to Matthias. “But . . .”

  Nina was losing patience. This was entirely backward. They should be pleading with her, not her with them.

  “And I’m a nice person,” she argued. “Really I am. You don’t really know me because I haven’t been myself here in prison, because . . .” She couldn’t say “because I was trying to decide whether or not to betray you.” “Never mind. But you can trust me. I promise.”

  Percy looked at Alia. Alia looked at Matthias, who looked back at Percy.

  “Okay. We’re coming,” Matthias announced.

  “Well, good,” Nina said, unable to resist a hint of sarcasm. “Glad that’s decided.” She turned back toward the other door, rattling the key ring in her hand.

  “What’s your plan?” Percy asked.

  “Plan?” Nina repeated.

  “Didn’t you say some guard had been poisoned?” Percy asked. “How are you going to avoid all the other guards, who’ll be scared and angry and looking for someone to blame?”

  “Um—,” Nina said.

  “And where are we running away to?”

  Nina felt stupid. Just as the keys had made her forget Percy, Matthias, and Alia, they’d also made her forget all logic. She couldn’t just run away from prison. She had to run to someplace else.

  She thought about Gran and the aunties’, but it was too dangerous. And at Harlow School—everyone there knew she’d been arrested. Nobody would dare to help hide her. She swallowed hard.

  “Do you know any place safe?” she asked quietly.

  Again the other kids did their three-way look, this time Alia peering at Percy, Percy peering at Matthias, Matthias peering at Alia. It was probably a good thing that most of the time Nina had spent with the other kids had been in darkness, because that look would have driven her crazy.

  Maybe it still would.