Among the Impostors

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “I’ll work harder next term,” Luke started to say. “I didn’t even start going to your class until last week—”

  “Hush,” Mr. Dirk said.

  Luke fought the urge to giggle. It was so ridiculous that, after surviving the Population Police raid, he was getting in trouble because he had forgotten the names of a few dead guys most people had never heard of.

  Mr. Dirk walked past his classroom. Luke started to protest, but Mr. Dirk was walking briskly now. Luke had to hurry to keep up. Mr. Dirk walked right up to the front door and turned the knob.

  “Isn’t it locked tonight?” Luke wanted to ask. But he was beginning to understand that Mr. Dirk wasn’t going to scold him about ancient history. He kept his mouth shut.

  The door opened easily. Luke and Mr. Dirk stepped outside together.

  Tiers of steps lay before them in the twilight. Luke remembered his trepidation climbing these very stairs, his first day at Hendricks. They didn’t seem quite so imposing now, probably because he was at the top looking down, instead of the bottom looking up.

  “Where are we going?” Luke couldn’t resist asking.

  For an answer, Mr. Dirk put a finger to his lips.

  They climbed down the steps and walked along the expansive driveway. June bugs sang, far off in the distance. They made Luke homesick. Back on the farm, his dad and brothers were probably just coming in for supper after a hard day of baling. Mother would just be getting home from the factory.

  It didn’t seem right that Luke had just had one of the most terrifying days of his life, and his own family would never know.

  “Watch your step,” Mr. Dirk said.

  Luke had been so lost in thought, he hadn’t even noticed that they had turned, and were now standing in front of a small cottage. No—not a cottage—the small scale had fooled him. This building had turrets and arches like a castle, but was nestled so neatly behind lilac bushes and rhododendron and forsythia that Luke could have walked right past without seeing it at all.

  “Ring the bell,” Mr. Dirk instructed. He turned to go.

  Luke was swept with panic.

  “Wait!” he cried. Mr. Dirk was hardly a comforting figure, but at least he was familiar. Luke didn’t like being abandoned in a strange place, without explanation.

  “I trust you can find your way back on your own, when you are finished,” Mr. Dirk said, and disappeared into the shadows.

  There was nothing for Luke to do but press the doorbell.

  “Come in,” a deep voice called from inside.

  Luke gave the door a little push. It was made of the same kind of heavy wood as all the doors at Hendricks. It barely moved. Timidly, Luke edged it open and stepped inside.

  A dim room lay before him. Prisms hung from old-fashioned lamps. Wood-framed couches curved between oddly shaped tables cluttered with dozens of framed pictures. Luke didn’t even notice the man in the wheelchair until he cleared his throat.

  “Welcome, young man,” the man said. He was older than either Luke’s parents or Mr. Talbot. He had thick white hair that swelled above his forehead like a snowbank. He wore crisp khaki pants and a pale blue shirt—the same kind of Baron clothes Luke had almost become accustomed to wearing himself. “Would you care for a drink? Bottled water, perhaps?”

  Luke shook his head, baffled. Questions swarmed in his mind.

  “George,” the man called.

  Mr. Talbot stepped into the room from the back part of the house.

  Luke’s knees went weak with relief. Finally! Someone who could explain.

  “Mr.—” Luke began.

  But Mr. Talbot shook his head warningly. He waved a long bar in front of Luke’s chest and his legs, then behind his back. Finally he leaned back and announced, “He’s clean. No bugs.”

  “I hate all this technology, don’t you?” the man in the wheelchair said, leaning back as though Mr. Talbot’s announcement had freed him to relax. He stirred a cup he held in his hand. Luke thought he caught a whiff of something like the chicory coffee his parents had sometimes drunk as a special treat. “But now I can introduce myself. I’m Josiah Hendricks. You know my friend here, I presume.”

  Luke could only nod.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Mr. Hendricks said. “No need to stand on ceremony.”

  Luke noticed that Mr. Talbot, always so much in charge every other time Luke had seen him, obeyed instantly. Luke quickly sank into an armchair as well.

  Mr. Hendricks sipped his drink.

  “You are an inquisitive young man,” he said to Luke. “You wish some explanations. No?”

  “Yes,” Luke said eagerly. He looked over at Mr. Talbot, expectantly. But Mr. Talbot was staring pointedly at Mr. Hendricks.

  “Once I was a very rich man,” Mr. Hendricks said. “I spent my money foolishly—who doesn’t when they have more money than they know what to do with? There is a long and not particularly attractive story about how I spent my younger days. But suffice it to say that I was given reason to develop compassion by the time of the Great Famines.” He looked down quickly. Luke saw for the first time that both of his pants legs hung empty below the knee. “I am not disguising anything for you tonight,” Mr. Hendricks said softly.

  Luke shifted uncomfortably in his chair. What was he supposed to say? Evidently, nothing. Mr. Hendricks went on with his tale.

  “You know the Government was considering letting the ‘undesirables’ starve, do you not?” Mr. Hendricks asked. “When there is not enough food, who deserves to eat? The blind girl? The deaf boy? The man missing his legs?”

  The anger in his voice was unbearable. Luke stumbled over his own tongue, ready to say anything to move the story along.

  “Jason—I mean, the one taken away this morning—he told me about that. At school.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Hendricks said. He seemed lost in thought, then roused himself to continue. “My family—and I—spent millions on bribes, to convince the Government to have a heart. They left the disabled alone. And passed the Population Law instead.” He frowned, stirring his coffee. “And how compassionate had I been? I saved my own kind, knowing that others would likely be killed. So I set up the schools. As penance.”

  “Mr. Hendricks foresaw what others did not,” Mr. Talbot said. “He understood that hundreds of illegal children would be born, and hidden. And he knew they’d need safe places to go if they were able to come out of hiding.”

  “But I thought your schools were for autistic kids, kids with phobias, the ones who—” Luke stopped. “Oh,” he said.

  Mr. Hendricks chuckled.

  “So my charade fooled you?” he asked. “Who can tell if a child rocks because he has autism or because he is terrified out of his wits? Who can tell if agoraphobia is caused by oddities in the mind or lifelong warnings, ‘Going outdoors is suicide’? In the beginning, yes, I accepted children whose problems stemmed from other causes. I nurtured a reputation as a schoolmaster who would take on any troubled child. And when the first illegal children began emerging, they came here, too.”

  Luke tried to grasp it all.

  “So everyone’s an exnay? And everyone knows?” he asked. “The teachers, Ms. Hawkins in the office, the nurse, all the other boys—”

  “Oh, no.” Mr. Hendricks shook his head emphatically. “My charade is complete. I don’t even know for sure which boys are which. I don’t want to know. There is the possibility of—”

  “Torture,” Mr. Talbot said grimly.

  “Those I don’t know, I can’t betray,” Mr. Hendricks said. “And I hire only employees who seem uniquely capable of ignorance. Teachers so enamored of their academic disciplines that they can’t even recognize the students who sit before them for an entire year. Administrative staff whose incompetence is of such towering magnitude that they can’t input records into computers, won’t notice when files are faked or replaced. . . . There’s a certain charm to my system, is there not?”

  Luke remembered how Jason’s portable phone had disappeared
, how the doors had been locked, how the files under his four friends’ new fake names had magically appeared.

  “But someone knows,” he insisted. “There has to be someone who oversees it all.”

  Mr. Hendricks shifted in his wheelchair.

  “Oh, yes. I have my compatriots. Mr. Dirk, as you probably suspect, has been useful upon occasion, although his knowledge is limited. I will tell you no other names.”

  Luke should have felt relieved to finally get an explanation. For that matter, he should have been ecstatic to have an adult at Hendricks acknowledge his existence. But all he could think about, suddenly, was how lonely and isolated he’d felt his first few weeks at Hendricks, how invisible. How low he’d sunk, that he’d almost looked forward to Jason picking on him each evening. He felt a surge of anger.

  “You think you’re so great,” he said before he could stop himself. “Don’t you know how it feels to be an exnay? And then you just abandon us, among people who don’t care. Or can’t care. It’s a wonder we don’t all run back into hiding.”

  “Oh, no,” Mr. Hendricks said, seeming totally unruffled by Luke’s outburst. “You were never abandoned. I can assume you have never been deep-sea diving, correct?”

  Luke shook his head, and resisted the urge to roll his eyes as well.

  “But you understand the concept?” Mr. Hendricks didn’t wait for a reply. “When a diver resurfaces, he has to go gradually, so his body can get accustomed to the change in pressure. Children coming out of hiding need that, too. They need places to adjust to the outside world. Somewhere that their extreme fear of the outdoors does not seem out of place. Somewhere that they can act antisocial and not stand out. Somewhere—well, like Hendricks. And then when they’re ready, they move on.”

  “You mean—leave?” Luke asked, his voice squeaking in spite of himself.

  “Yes,” Mr. Talbot said. “And Mr. Hendricks and I agree: The events of the past twenty-four hours prove that your time has come. You’re ready to go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Huh?” Luke said. He had not anticipated that turn in the conversation at all.

  Mr. Hendricks leaned forward.

  “My schools had never been infiltrated before,” he said, with a sharp glance at Mr. Talbot.

  Mr. Talbot frowned apologetically.

  “The Population Police have always pretended that it’s impossible for an illegal child to get a fake I.D.,” Mr. Talbot added. “But after the rally—” His eyes clouded. Luke could see the effort he was making to continue without emotion. “After the rally, all the rules changed.”

  “So you see, we never expected betrayal,” Mr. Hendricks said. “In the beginning, yes, we tiptoed and looked over our shoulders. And, fortunately, we kept habits of . . . strong security. But we were not prepared for the Population Police to plant impostors in our midst, to gather names, to encourage indiscretion.”

  Luke frowned.

  “But Jason—he said there’d been raids before. He said—”

  Mr. Talbot had a sarcastic smile on his face. Mr. Hendricks raised one eyebrow.

  “My dear boy,” Mr. Hendricks said. “He lied.”

  Luke grimaced. He didn’t like them acting like he couldn’t figure that out on his own. But he’d learned a lot from Jason. What was true and what was false? He remembered one of Jason’s other explanations: You can’t be too nice to an exnay . . . exnays need the kind of friend who can toughen them up. Like I did for you. Luke remembered how many times Jason had made him claim to be an idiot, do push-ups until his arms collapsed, make a total fool of himself. Jason hadn’t been trying to toughen Luke up. He’d been trying to break him down.

  But it hadn’t worked.

  Luke didn’t know why. He felt breathless, thinking about what could have happened. Suddenly he was mad at Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Talbot, sitting there looking so condescending.

  “Why didn’t you know Jason was an impostor?” Luke said. “You should have. He acted so different from everyone else.”

  “Yes, and so did you,” Mr. Hendricks replied quickly. “Should we have suspected you of working for the Population Police, just because you liked going outside?”

  Luke blinked.

  “Yes, we knew,” Mr. Hendricks said. “Just as we knew Jason, as you call him, was forming a club of former hidden children. We’d never seen that happen before, and frankly, we viewed it as a positive development. Until you showed us the truth.”

  Luke remembered how frustrated and frightened and alone he’d felt, only the night before.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I tried, but nothing worked. Mr. Talbot deserves all the credit.”

  “You stopped the infiltrator and knocked him out. Then you took him to the nurse who, under the school’s protocol, had to alert me,” Mr. Hendricks said. “She thought he was just another former hidden child, going through some very unusual trauma. But when he muttered, “my phone, my phone”—she got suspicious. We locked all the doors and made a search of the entire school building.”

  So that’s what Jason had muttered to the nurse, Luke thought. He was kind of glad now that he hadn’t heard. He had felt panicked enough, as it was.

  “Once we confiscated his phone,” Mr. Hendricks continued, “we found out that the last number he called was the Population Police. Meanwhile, your call made George here suspicious—”

  “Without spilling everything for the bugs on my phone, thank you very much,” Mr. Talbot said. “Because of your warning, I had time to double-cross the Population Police’s efforts. So we arrested two traitors, instead of six former hidden children. A good trade, in my mind.”

  Luke felt dizzy. No matter how many explanations Mr. Talbot and Mr. Hendricks gave him, other questions sprang up in his mind like so many weeds. Both men were watching him.

  “Nina,” Luke said finally. “Nina was the other traitor.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Talbot said.

  Luke thought about how, just for a second, he’d mistaken Nina for Jen that first night out in the woods. He’d wanted to like Nina so badly. He’d liked the way she’d laughed. But she’d been a traitor, too.

  “What will happen to them?” Luke asked. “Jason and Nina, I mean.”

  Mr. Talbot looked away.

  “Sometimes it’s better not to know,” he murmured.

  That meant they were going to be killed, Luke thought. Killed or tortured to death, which was even worse. He shivered. Was it his fault? Was there some way he could have saved the other exnays without destroying Jason and Nina? No—they were the ones who had chosen betrayal.

  “This is a cruel business,” Mr. Talbot said. “Don’t dwell on it.”

  In a corner of the room, an old-fashioned clock ticked quietly. Luke gathered his thoughts for his next question.

  “But why did the Population Police believe you instead of Jason? If he’d wanted to, that officer could have arrested us all,” Luke said. He remembered how careful Mr. Talbot had had to be, ever since the rally, for fear that someone might connect him with Jen. “I thought you were out of favor at Population Police headquarters right now. No offense, of course,” he added quickly.

  Mr. Talbot shrugged, as though being out of favor was as insignificant as a mosquito bite.

  “I had the evidence on my side,” he said. “They like evidence. And I have to say, it was a stroke of brilliance to computer-enhance that Christmas picture, to substitute your face over Jen’s.” He kept his voice even, saying Jen’s name, but Luke noticed that Mr. Hendricks bowed his head, reverently, as though giving in to a moment of silent mourning. Had Mr. Hendricks ever even met Jen? Luke didn’t know, but he found himself lowering his head as well.

  “Jen would have liked that,” Luke said. “Using her picture to fool the Population Police.” He swallowed what might have been a giggle. Jen would have been very amused.

  “And what better way to remember those we love than by doing what they like?” Mr. Hendricks asked.

  Mr. Ta
lbot nodded, silently. Mr. Hendricks took over the explanation.

  “And, young man, you do not realize the power of the name you have been given. Lee Grant. Your father—the father listed on your school records—is a very important man in our society,” he said.

  “But he’s not my father,” Luke said, more forcefully than he intended. “I’ve never even met the man. And I’m not Lee Grant.”

  Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Talbot exchanged glances. Luke wondered if they were deciding he wasn’t so ready, after all.

  “But you know how to pretend to be Lee Grant,” Mr. Hendricks said. “That is what matters.”

  Luke shook his head impatiently. He’d suddenly had it with all this double-talk. None of this was real, not the way planting potatoes was, or growing beans. It was easier to be a farmer, to know by looking whether your crops were good or not. Still, another question teased at the back of his mind.

  “Why did they do it?” he asked. “Jason and Nina—why did they betray their friends? Their fellow exnays?”

  “They were never your friends,” Mr. Hendricks said harshly. “They came to Hendricks and Harlow schools with one purpose, and one purpose only: to seek out and betray all the former hidden children they could. They preyed upon all the exnays’ secret desire to speak their real name, because the Population Police needed the real names to complete the betrayal. Jason and Nina had never been hidden children. They were just plants. Impostors.”

  “But the Population Policeman said they were illegals with false documents—” Luke said.

  “The Population Police can lie, too,” Mr. Hendricks said grimly. “It suits the Government’s purposes to say they are arresting third children rather than traitors.”

  Luke tried to absorb this. Nina, who spoke so passionately about the third children’s cause; Jason, who talked about protecting exnays at Hendricks—they had never been in hiding themselves? They only wanted to harm the ones who trusted them most?

  This was a level of evil Luke never could have imagined before, back on the farm.

  And now Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Talbot wanted him to go to another new place, someplace even more challenging than Hendricks?