Among the Free

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “They’re true believers,” Krakenaur had said. “They’d understand that.”

  What would Krakenaur’s followers understand better than hating third children?

  Luke slumped down to the floor, his chin thudding against his knees, horrible realizations flooding over him. He hadn’t been able to understand anything for the past twenty-four hours; now he didn’t want to. He saw all too clearly how everything worked. Aldous Krakenaur had been overthrown, but Oscar wanted Krakenaur’s old followers—the other Population Police officials—to follow him instead. Maybe he didn’t think he could keep control without them. That was why he’d been willing to negotiate with Krakenaur. So Oscar and Krakenaur had agreed on a signal to let the Population Police officials know that Oscar wasn’t completely against them, that he’d still let them have some power if they supported him. And the signs could do that, making them think Oscar hated third children too.

  Does he? Luke wondered. Does he really think third children are the reason people starved?

  Luke remembered how easily Oscar had lied about being a Baron, how he had managed to convince both Luke and Smits that he was on their side.

  Oscar doesn’t care, Luke thought. He doesn’t care if third children are the enemy or not, just as long as blaming them helps him. He’s like the boy back in Chiutza, who didn’t really believe anything, who chose sides based on who would fill his belly.

  Luke picked at the straw beneath his feet, tearing the shafts apart down to their hollow core.

  It’s probably not even real to Oscar. It’s probably just a code to use. But real people are going to be hurt.

  Jenny whinnied anxiously, as if it bothered her to see Luke slumped over in the muck.

  “What do you care? You’re just a horse,” Luke muttered. “You didn’t even want to be free when I opened your gate. I do. I’ve wanted freedom ever since Jen told me what it was. And now everyone else is free. But I’m not. Third children aren’t ever going to be free.”

  He kicked at the muck, his despair giving way to anger. A glob of manure flew up and hit Jenny in the leg. She whinnied again.

  “I know, I know—it’s not your fault. Sorry, girl,” Luke apologized. “But what else am I supposed to do?”

  Stop Oscar. It was like Jen’s ghost was back again, talking in Luke’s head. Stop him before he has total control.

  “Oh, yeah, right. And how am I supposed to do that?” Luke had a vision of himself hunting Oscar down, tapping him on the shoulder, then mumbling, Hey, would you mind using some other code to attract your followers? The whole third-child theme hits a little close to home for me. Okay? And then he could picture Oscar punching him, casting him aside, throwing him into prison for the rest of his life.

  Out loud, Luke moaned, “The Population Police were right about one thing. I am just a worthless stableboy, wallowing in the muck. I can’t do anything.”

  You’re not worthless. Nobody’s worthless. Do what I did.

  It was Jen’s voice in his head again.

  “What, get myself killed?” Luke muttered bitterly.

  No! I mean, you should go public with this.

  Luke could have argued with that, too. He could have complained that Jen had planned her rally for months, while he had no time at all. He could have mentioned that she had had forty others marching with her, while he had no one: He was alone except for a horse and the ghost he argued with in his head. He could have pointed out that even with all her preparation, all her planning, all her calculations, and all her supporters, her rally had still been a tragic failure.

  But the word “public” had given him an idea. Maybe, just maybe . . .

  Luke stood up and brushed off the straw sticking to his clothes. He took a deep breath, then walked out of the stall, out of the stables, back out to the crowd gathered around the stage. He positioned himself carefully near a group eating muffins in the sunshine. The group consisted of three men and two women, and none of them seemed to be paying much attention to the people speaking up on the stage. One of the women was licking butter off her fingers. One of the men was demonstrating how he could toss a muffin in the air and catch it in his mouth.

  Luke steadied himself with another deep breath.

  Not everybody in the crowd was booing third children last night, he told himself. Not everybody joined in the chant.

  “Hi,” he said, forcing himself to smile and make eye contact with all five muffin-eaters.

  “Want some?” the woman with the butter on her fingers asked. “We got extra, and if I have to watch Boris catch another muffin in his mouth, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Thanks,” Luke said, taking one of the muffins she held out to him. He bit into it, but he was too nervous to really taste it. “This is all kind of weird, don’t you think? I mean, all those signs that somebody put up overnight. Don’t they look like what the Population Police tried to make us believe? I thought the Poppies were gone.”

  All five muffin-eaters looked at him doubtfully.

  “Well . . . ” one of the men said finally. “Those people up on stage have been saying the Population Police were kind of unfairly accused. Framed, you know? A lot of things we blamed them for, it was really the illegals’ fault. I reckon if they’re allowed to say that up on stage, and on TV and everything, there must be some truth to it.”

  “But the Population Police said lots of things on TV that weren’t true!” Luke protested.

  The muffin-eaters were all staring at him now. His voice had maybe soared a little too high, sounded a little too bitter.

  “We don’t really know that, do we?” one of the other men said. “It’s hard telling what was going on, with all those illegals running around stealing things.”

  “I know one thing,” the woman with the buttery fingers said with a shrug. “These muffins are real good. Those people can talk all they want to up there, as long as they’re giving us all this great food.”

  The rest of the group nodded agreement, and Boris popped another muffin into his mouth.

  “But where did the food come from? Who’s providing it? Who put those signs up? And how can you possibly believe—” Luke broke off, because his voice was arcing toward hysteria. He panted, trying to regain control of himself.

  “You ask too many questions,” the woman said, looking like she regretted offering him any of their food. “Go away. You’re bothering us.” She turned her back on him. The rest of the group glared at him until he backed away.

  They’re just five people, and there are hundreds of others here, Luke told himself. Try somebody else.

  For the next few hours, Luke went from person to person, from group to group. Some people shoved him away angrily; others just shrugged and ignored him. Only a few bothered to listen, and even they seemed to be keeping one ear on the rants from the stage, even as Luke whispered, “It doesn’t make sense, does it? How many third children could there be in the whole country? They were illegal—how could they have had so much power over the entire Population Police?”

  It took such courage for Luke to approach yet another person after each rejection. Meanwhile, up on the stage, the rants were becoming more rabid.

  “The Population Police wanted to do their best for the people of our nation. The illegals only thought about themselves. . . . ”

  “Every third child must have been born with an extra gene for greed . . . for lawlessness . . . for hate. . . . ”

  “If only we could rid our country of the illegals once and for all . . . ”

  Finally Luke sagged in despair against a tree trunk. Even if people listened to him, he could reach only a few at a time, while the speakers on the stage spewed their hatred at the entire crowd—and the entire country through the TV broadcast. It was like Luke was in a sinking ship, with water pouring in through dozens of holes, and all he had to bail with was a teaspoon.

  You’ll have to go up on the stage yourself then, Jen’s ghost argued in his head. Tell everybody what you have to s
ay.

  “Noooo,” Luke moaned. He couldn’t do that. There was no way he could stand in front of all those people, all those cameras.

  Then you’ll let them turn the whole crowd against third children all over again, once and for all? You’ll let Oscar and Aldous Krakenaur win? You’re willing to go back into hiding, to cower in an attic the rest of your life? That is, if they don’t find you, if they don’t kill you and your entire family . . .

  “All right!” Luke snapped, and he knew he looked like a total lunatic, standing by a tree arguing with empty air.

  Before he could let himself change his mind, he shoved his way back into the crowd, back toward the stage. This time when he reached the line of security guards blocking the stage, he said, very fast before he lost his nerve, “Please-you-have-to-let-me-through-I-want-to-be-one-of-the-speakers-on-the-stage.”

  The security guard standing before him laughed.

  “You think you can just waltz up there, just like that? We’ve got a three-day backlog of people waiting to talk. You really think you’ve got something to say that anyone wants to hear? You go over there, talk to those people. They’ll interview you, decide if you’ve got anything worth saying.”

  The guard pointed over to a table set up in the building that used to be the Population Police garage. Behind the table sat three men, who stared out cold-eyed at the crowd. Luke recognized all three of the men. They used to come into the stables when he worked there, asking for the very best horses.

  All of them had once been Population Police officials.

  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 caring 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Luke sat atop Jenny’s back, high off the ground. He’d never actually ridden a horse before, just cleaned out their stalls and groomed them and fed them and led them around. His imagination hadn’t allowed for how wobbly and unsteady he’d feel on horseback, as if any minute now Jenny might simply dart out from underneath him and let him go crashing to the ground.

  “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you, girl?” Luke asked nervously.

  It would help if he could hold on with both hands, but he’d gotten sc
ared that the security guards would recognize him. So he had the quilt draped over his head, with his left hand clutching it tight at his throat. That left just his right hand for grasping the reins. He flicked them, the way he’d seen the Population Police officers do.

  “Let’s do this, okay?” he said, trying to sound authoritative and strong, as if it mattered that he could fool a horse.

  Jenny glanced back at him doubtfully, then took a few halting steps forward. Maybe it did matter how forcefully he gave his commands.

  “You’re going to have to go faster than that,” Luke said, and flicked the reins again.

  This time Jenny took him seriously, and she lunged forward, out the stable door. It was all Luke could do to hang on. Making his plans, he’d imagined Jenny galloping gracefully across the lawn, the crowd parting easily before her, everyone struck dumb with awe. What actually happened was that he had to duck to keep from being knocked off by tree branches, and then he had to yank his leg away from someone who tried to grab him. And then it looked like Jenny’s hooves were going to land right on top of a little girl, but the girl’s mother snatched her away at the last minute. And everyone was screaming, screaming so loudly that it terrified Jenny and she raced through the crowd even faster, causing even more narrow misses.

  And then, suddenly, it was time for the leap.

  Jenny was a smart horse—she tried to veer to the side, alongside the stage, rather than make the dangerous jump. But Luke urged her onward. He let the quilt go flying off behind him, and he took hold of the reins with both hands, holding them firm and steady, not letting Jenny face any direction but straight ahead. She tensed her muscles and sprang up, and for one terrible moment Luke was certain that he’d slide off backward and land right at the feet of the line of security guards. He grabbed onto the horn of the saddle, and he must have pulled on the reins at the same time, because Jenny slid to a halt as soon as her hooves landed.