Among the Brave sc-5

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  In the light, Trey could see everything. The disks that he’d knocked together were weights, meant to be attached to barbells. Rows of weight-lifting apparatus lined the far wall, but they’d all been torn apart. Pulleys hung oddly, benches were ripped from the frames — the room looked like a cyclone had hit it. Trey looked away, up a long staircase. Mrs. Talbot was standing at the top.

  And Mrs. Talbot was. . beautiful.

  Trey had seen very few women in his life. If he didn’t count girls, he’d actually known only one: his mother, who’d had frown lines etched around her mouth, worry lines carved into her brow, disappointment mirrored in her eyes. Trey’s mother had worn shapeless dresses and mismatched, holey sweaters, one on top of the other, in a constant battle to stay warm. It seemed like she’d always had gray, lifeless hair; Trey had even wondered if she’d once been a gray-haired little girl.

  Mrs. Talbot’s hair was red — so bright and vibrant Trey was almost surprised he hadn’t been able to see it in the dark. Her face was smooth and unlined. Even the fright of finding an intruder in her basement had apparently only given her skin a healthy-looking glow. And her body had curves. . Wasn’t she somebody’s mother? Mothers weren’t supposed to look like that, were Trey?

  Trey blushed, but couldn’t stop staring.

  “So what do the Grants want me to do?” Mrs. Talbot was saying. “I can be ready to leave in five minutes. I already have the car packed. How soon do Trey think Trey can get George out?”

  “Ma’am?” Trey said, then blushed all the harder because “mat am” seemed much too matronly a term for this woman. “Trey didn’t — I mean — I can’t—”

  Mrs. Talbot’s hand seemed to tighten on the flashlight. “Did the Grants send you to help me or not?” she said sharply.

  “I want to help you,” Trey said. “Honest I’ll do my best. But — I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  Trey felt the weight of his words settling on his shoulders. It was like he’d lifted one of the barbells lying by his feet He’d just promised to help Mrs. Talbot — what would that mean? And if he was going to take responsibility for her, where was it supposed to end? Was he also responsible for helping Mr. Talbot? For Nina and Joel and John? For Lee and Smits?

  It was so much easier to think only of his own needs, his own life. But how could he not help?

  “Oh,” Mrs. Talbot said, and seemed to sag against the doorframe. For the first time, Trey realized that she was terrified, that she’d probably been even more panicked by the uniformed men than Trey was. This was her home, after all. It was her husband who’d been taken away in handcuffs. “Didn’t the Grants give you any instructions at all?” she asked forlornly.

  “The Grants are dead,” Trey said brusquely. It seemed like he’d be lying if he didn’t tell her now. “Trey were killed last night, at a party, by a man named Oscar. I was there. I saw it all.”

  Trey’s memory flashed the whole strange scene at him once again: women in glittering ball gowns, men in tuxedos hiding guns, champagne in fluted glasses, and a huge chandelier cut loose and plunging down….

  “Dead?” Mrs. Talbot repeated. “Dead?” Her eyes flooded with tears, and she sank down to the top step of the stairs. “Oh, my friends,” she murmured.

  “Trey owed you money,” Trey said. Amazingly, he was still holding the stack of papers he’d taken from Mr.Grant’s desk. He waved the whole sheaf of papers at Mrs. Talbot now, as though that would remind her that the Grants had not been just friends. “Trey owed you and Mr. Talbot two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Mrs. Talbot shrugged, like money didn’t matter.

  “So many deaths,” she muttered, and Trey remembered that the Talbots’ daughter Jen — another illegal child — had died too. What if Mrs. Talbot started sobbing now, or wailing, or going into total hysterics? Trey really wouldn’t know what to do then. But Mrs. Talbot only sniffed once, in a dignified way. Then she began speaking quietly, looking not at Trey, but at the blank wall opposite her.

  “George said there was danger,” she said. “We sent the boys away to boarding school in September. Just in case.”

  Boys? Then Trey realized that for Jen to be an illegal third child, she’d had to have had siblings. Trey must have been brothers.

  “And George and I, we had drills. What if Trey come for him in the middle of the night? What if Trey come for him during breakfast? What if, what if, what if? I did everything right. Just like I was supposed to. I hid in our secret room. For hours. You know what I did in there? I was painting my toenails.” Mrs. Talbot looked down at Trey and grinned, ever so slightly. “My little way of saying, hey, you can’t scare me. But after — after I came out, the plan was always for me to go to the Grants’ house for help. If I hadn’t checked the TV, I’d be at the Grants’ by now. And what would I have found there?”

  Trey tried not to think about the scene of destruction he’d left

  “What did you see on TV?” he asked. “That stopped you from leaving?”

  “Huh?” Mrs. Talbot said. “Oh. Riots. Trey said there was rioting in the streets, so I thought, might as well wait until morning to leave.”

  Riots? Trey and his friends had seen nothing like that on their trip from the Grants’ house to the Talbots but it had been the middle of the night. The riots must have started during the day, after Mr. Talbot was arrested, while Mrs. Talbot and Trey were hiding. Riots, Trey thought A strange emotion began growing inside him. Hope.

  Maybe this is it. It’s beginning. Maybe riots were what the resistance leaders had planned, to get the Government to change the Population Law. Maybe third children aren’t even illegal anymore. Maybe the riots have already worked.

  Trey’s friend Lee had been determined, for as long as Trey had known him, to change the Government, so third children could be free from hiding, free from using fake identities if Trey ever wanted to go out Before Lee, Trey had had another friend, Jason, who had said he’d wanted the same thing. But Jason had been lying, and that had been enough to make Trey wonder if he could ever trust anyone.

  But maybe now, maybe with the riots… Trey remembered another fact that gave him even more hope: Mr. Talbot was a double agent Publicly, he said he opposed third children. He worked for the Population Police, a group that had been created solely to catch third children and the people who hid them. But secretly, under cover, Mr. Talbot sabotaged his employer, rescuing illegal children and giving them fake I.D.’s. Maybe if the Population Law had been eliminated, the Government had decided to arrest everyone who worked for the Population Police. So of course Mr. Talbot would have been arrested too. Maybe Trey and Lee and their other friends would just have to testify about Mr. Talbot’s true beliefs, and they’d be able to rescue him. Maybe Trey could help Mrs. Talbot after all.

  Then Trey remembered something else.

  “They told about the riots on TV?” he said incredulously. “That’s impossible. They’d never tell about something like that.”

  Trey himself had never seen a television. But he’d heard his father say that it only broadcast propaganda. “Think they’d ever let a TV anchor say anything bad about the Government?” Trey’s father had taunted his mother once. “Think they’d ever say anything that didn’t make it seem like our country is paradise itself?”

  Riots didn’t belong in paradise.

  Mrs. Talbot snorted.

  “Well, not on regular TV, of course,” she said. “The Baron channels.”

  “What?” Trey said. He’d always known that the Government allowed some people to have special privileges. The Barons, as Trey were called, were rich while everyone else was poor. Trey had so much food Trey could afford to throw it away — while everyone else scrambled to get dry crusts or pretended that moldy cheese was perfectly fine. Trey lived in fine mansions, while everyone else crowded together, entire families in a single room.

  Trey hadn’t known that the Barons even had their own TV channels.

  “You can’t expect us to tru
st the regular broadcasts,” Mrs. Talbot said defensively “We Barons need. . information that other people don’t.”

  “But how do Trey do that?” Trey asked. He tried to remember how television signals were transmitted. “How can the signals go to some TVs and not to others?”

  “Some sort of special cable, I guess,” Mrs. Talbot said with a shrug. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  She seemed relieved to be talking about something ordinary, like TV, instead of death and danger and foiled plans. Trey stood up and began climbing the stairs.

  Surreal, he thought. This entire day has been so surreal I don’t even know what to be afraid of anymore.

  He followed Mrs. Talbot out the basement door and down a long hallway. Trey reached a huge room full of wide couches and coffee tables. It had probably been an extraordinarily beautiful room originally, but, like the basement, it was a mess now. Only the enormous screen covering a large portion of one wall seemed intact Mrs. Talbot stepped over ripped cushions and picked up a black remote control from one of the coffee tables. She hit a button on the remote, and the screen seemed to come to life, with gray and black and white dots dancing across the surface. It was a fascinating sight, like some of the bizarre artwork Trey had seen in books.

  “See?” Mrs. Talbot said. “The regular stations are off the air. So what else is new.” She flipped through the channels, bringing up momentary darkness, then more patterns of random dots. “Now here’s the first Baron channel.”

  She hit another button, and the screen filled up with a serious-looking man.

  “…continues in virtually all parts of the city,” he was saying. “Our advice to you would be to remain at home until further notice. In other news—”

  Suddenly the man’s voice broke off and his face disappeared, replaced by more of the dots. Trey glanced over at Mrs. Talbot, but she hadn’t changed the channel. She was standing there looking as stunned as Trey felt.

  “That’s odd,” Mrs. Talbot muttered. “They’re usually so reliable.”

  She hit a few more buttons, zipping though channels. None of the stations appeared to be broadcasting. Then suddenly another man’s face appeared, first wavering, with rolling black lines, then solidifying and filling the entire screen. Mrs. Talbot gasped, but Trey was staring so intently at the TV screen that he barely heard her.

  “Good evening, fellow citizens,” the man on TV said. He was wearing a luxurious black jacket, with gold trim on the collar and over the sleeves. “I am delighted to inform you that the old, corrupt Government of General Terus has fallen to the will of the people. General Terus was placed under arrest at seven thirty this evening. I assure you that my squads will restore peace throughout the land quite soon. I am fully in control and I pledge to all of you, my loyal citizens, that I will live up to the trust you have always placed in me. I—”

  Trey missed the next few words, because Mrs. Talbot had begun frantically flipping through the channels again. The man in the gold-trimmed uniform was on every station.

  “—peace and prosperity—”

  “—work together—”

  “—true to the cause I’ve always believed in—” With the moments of silence between changing channels, Trey could hardly make sense of the man’s message. It didn’t matter. He’d heard enough. Enough to make him delirious with joy.

  “It happened,” he muttered. Then he screamed, “It happened! I’m free! All third children are free!”

  Mrs. Talbot was looking at him strangely. Of course. She wouldn’t have known that he was an illegal third child with a fake I.D. Trey didn’t care. He wouldn’t have to care ever again about who knew the truth.

  “Young man,” she said, almost sternly. “Don’t you know who that is?” She pointed at the TV.

  Trey stopped shouting long enough to glance at the televised man. He had white hair, a mustache, dark eyes, thin lips. And he didn’t look the slightest bit familiar. Trey was pretty sure he’d never seen so much as a picture of him.

  “No,” Trey said. “But who cares? General Terus is gone.”

  “Oh. you should care, all right,” Mrs. Talbot said. “That nian”—and she pointed at the TV screen again, almost accusingly, and her voice shook—”that man is Aldous Krakenaur.”

  “Who?” Trey said.

  “The head of the Population Police,” Mrs. Talbot said.

  And then she bent her head down and began to sob.

  Chapter Five

  Trey went numb.

  Euphoria to horror in one second will do that to a guy, he thought, and was almost relieved that some part of his brain was still available to think.

  He’d always thought he was a pessimist — he’d never fully believed in Lee’s rosy dreams of freedom for all third children. But even Trey had never imagined news this bad.

  ‘Are you sure?” he asked Mrs. Talbot.

  She stopped sobbing just long enough to give him a withering look

  “Well, maybe. .” Trey was searching for some reason to still hold on to some hope. “Maybe he won’t be any worse than General Terus. I mean, General Terus wanted all third children dead. This guy — what’s he going to do? Kill us twice?”

  Mrs. Talbot wiped her eyes and glared at Trey.

  ‘Aldous Krakenaur is insane. He hates third children beyond all reason,” she said. “He was always complaining that General Terus didn’t devote enough resources to hunting them down. And now — now there’ll be house-to-house searches. Traffic stopped on every street. Identity records scoured for fakes, again and again. No third child will be able to survive.

  Mrs. Talbot’s words chilled Trey so thoroughly that he almost missed her whispering, at the end, “Maybe it’s good that Jen is already dead.”

  On the TV screen, Aldous Krakenaur was smiling.

  …. And together, we will make our country great again,” he said.

  Mrs. Talbot threw the remote straight at the screen. The pass shattered and sparks flew. Then the screen was dark and dead, finally matching the rest of the destroyed room.

  “Why did you do that?” Trey complained. “Now we won’t know what’s going on.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Mrs. Talbot said. “I know too much already.”

  She collapsed onto the nearest couch and stared vacantly at the broken TV Trey remained standing, awkwardly. He wasn’t exactly adept at interpersonal relationships under the best of circumstances. What in the world was he supposed to do now?

  He closed his eyes briefly, and everything he’d witnessed that day seemed to replay in his memory. Mr. Talbot coming to the door, failing to recognize Trey….

  Or did he recognize me after all? Was he really just trying to warn me away — me and the rest of my “team”? The thought made Trey feel a little better, even though the warning hadn’t helped. There hadn’t been time to do anything before Mr. Talbot was whisked away…

  A new thought occurred to Trey

  “Mrs. Talbot?” he said. “I don’t blame you for being upset and all over Aldous Krakenaur. I mean, I’m glad you don’t want him in control. But isn’t this good for your husband? I mean, he works for the Population Police, and Aldous Krakenaur’s in charge of the Population Police…. Mr. Talbot was taken away before the Government changed. Wouldn’t Aldous Krakenaur set him free7 Maybe this Krakenaur guy’s already heard about what happened to Mr. Talbot and already sent him home. Maybe Mr. Talbot’s on his way here, right now.”

  Slowly Mrs. Talbot turned her head to stare up at Trey.

  “AJdous always hated George,” she said. “The only thing that kept George in power at the Population Police headquarters was his friendship with General Terus.”

  “Mr. Talbot was friends with the president?” Trey’s voice actually squeaked, he was so amazed.

  “He pretended to be friends,” Mrs. Talbot said. “But now if General Terus is gone. . Trey probably arrested George this morning so he wouldn’t warn the president what was coming.”

  “Well, he can’t warn him
now — looks like the coup is over,” Trey said. “So maybe they’ll set Mr. Talbot free because there’s no point in holding him any longer.”

  Mrs. Talbot went back to staring at the broken TV.

  “You’re just a little boy, aren’t you?” she said in an eerily calm voice, as if nothing really mattered anymore. “All the thirds — so naive. So sheltered. Don’t you know? The only way they’re going to release George is in a coffin.”

  Trey gulped.

  “No Trey aren’t,” he said, arguing with more conviction than he felt. “You can rescue him. I’ll — I’ll help.”

  What was he saying? What if Mrs. Talbot took him up on his offer?

  “I don’t know where they’re holding him,” Mrs. Talbot said, still in the same dead voice.

  “Then find out,” Trey said. He wanted Mrs. Talbot to stop acting so strange. He wanted her to take control and fix everything. “Don’t you have any friends in the Population Police?” he asked. “Anyone you can trust?”

  At first, Trey thought Mrs. Talbot hadn’t heard his question. Then she slowly answered, “I don’t trust a single soul in this country right now. I don’t even trust you. How do I know you weren’t lying to me about the Grants?”

  “Because I wasn’t,” Trey said frantically. “Because — why would I want to lie?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Talbot said. “I don’t care.” She stood up abruptly, seeming to shake off her stupor. “I’m leaving. Good — bye.”

  She brushed past him. Trey felt like he was being abandoned all over again.

  It’s just like when Mom left me…. He shut out the thought immediately.

  “Wait!” he yelled after Mrs. Talbot “Where are you going?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she called back over her shoulder.

  “Can I — can I go with you?” It was humiliating even to ask. But no more humiliating than being abandoned in silence.

  “No,” Mrs. Talbot said. She paused in front of the door that led to the basement and on out to the garage. “But I will give you some advice. Don’t hang around here for long. When governments fall… Well, Trey won’t leave this place empty. Spoils of war and all that” She looked around, as if noticing the mess for the first time. She reached out to a nearby shelf to touch a delicate crystal vase that had miraculously escaped destruction. Trey decided it must have some sentimental value. Maybe Mr. Talbot had given it to her years ago, and she couldn’t bear to leave it behind.