Among the Free (16 page)

L
uke turned to the people sitting around him. He wanted to tell them,
Listen—we're in big trouble.
But everyone else was clapping and cheering.

“We're back now, broadcasting live from the former Population Police headquarters,” Philip Twinings was saying up on the stage. “We're ready to begin our accounting of the Population Police era. We'll be broadcasting as long as people are willing to talk.”

The crowd cheered again.

They're doing what Oscar suggested,
Luke thought, still horrified.

But what could be wrong with people telling their stories? What evidence did Luke have that Oscar was under Aldous Krakenaur's control? What could Luke do about it, anyhow? Who would listen to him?

Luke sat, paralyzed, letting the voices from the stage wash over him. A man talked about how the Population Police had refused to replace his grain when he accidentally
spilled it. A girl talked about how the Population Police had confiscated the strawberries she grew in her own backyard. A woman talked about how much she missed her husband when he enlisted in the Population Police to earn food for his family. Luke started to relax a little.

This is just people telling how awful the Population Police were,
he thought.
This won't bring them back into power. Maybe I'm wrong about everything. Maybe I misunderstood what Oscar and Krakenaur meant.

He kept listening, the stories as soothing as a balm. The worse the horrors the speakers described, the better Luke felt.

Nobody would want the Population Police back in power after hearing this,
Luke thought again and again, during tales of beatings, maimings, cruelty, contempt.

One boy painstakingly hobbled up to the stage, almost losing his balance. The crowd grew silent as they watched him slowly mount the steps, his upper body supported by crutches, his legs twisted and practically useless.

“The Population Police did this to me,” he said into the microphone Philip Twinings held out to him. His eyes, caught in the bright light from the camera, were wide and terrified. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. “I joined up because my family was starving. They assigned me to shovel manure. I thought I was being . . . helpful. I suggested a better way to shovel, and they . . . they attacked me. I almost died. I would have died . . . if the
rebels hadn't found me . . . if they hadn't fed me and nursed me. You can . . . look at me and see . . . what the Population Police did to our country.”

He moved away from the microphone and began his slow descent down the stairs.

He worked for the Population Police shoveling manure?
Luke thought.
He was in the stables, then. That's the boy I always wondered about, the one who asked for a bigger shovel. The one who disappeared. This is what happened to him.

Luke watched the boy leaning down, lowering first his crutches, then the weight of his whole body, from one step to another. He seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if he didn't quite trust the crutches or his legs to hold him up.

He would be an ally,
Luke thought.
He was in the stables with me. He knows what the Population Police are capable of. I could tell him about Oscar and Krakenaur.

Luke stood up and began fighting his way through the crowd, toward the stage. The mood of the crowd seemed to have changed under the onslaught of sad stories. Instead of having people call out, “You there! Come dance with us!” or “Sing along!” the people Luke passed now muttered, “Watch it! You stepped on my foot!” or “Stop shoving!”

Luke ignored the complaints; he didn't want to waste any time finding the boy on crutches. When someone said, “Stop shoving!” he moved to the side and dodged around. But as he neared the stage, the crush of people
began to seem impenetrable. Every time he tried to dart between people, the gap would suddenly close. He moved to the right; he moved to the left; he tried a diagonal approach toward the stage. Nothing worked. A line of bodies always blocked him.

“Excuse me,” he finally said to a man who would not move out of the way. “I'm trying to get through.”

“Nobody's allowed through,” the man growled.

“But I'm trying to get to a . . . friend,” Luke said, stretching the truth a little because it sounded so comforting to have a friend. “He was up on the stage just now. I want to talk to him.”

“Nobody's allowed through,” the man repeated, as if Luke had simply been too stupid to understand the first time. “We're protecting the people who go on stage.”

Luke looked around and realized that the line of people blocking him from the stage wasn't just a random, accidental formation. These people were security forces. Bodyguards. All of them were tall and muscular, with stern expressions. They only needed black uniforms, and they'd look just like Population Police prison guards.

“Why?” Luke asked. “I thought everybody was free now.”

The guard looked at Luke as though he were crazy.

“Would
you
be brave enough to go up there on the stage and talk about the Population Police, knowing that some of the Population Police officials are still on the loose? Knowing they might be out there in that crowd, hiding,
even now?” he asked. “People are still scared. And they should be. Free doesn't mean safe.”

“Oh,” Luke said. “I guess not.”

He stood on tiptoe to look past the guard's shoulder: He caught a quick glimpse of the boy with the crutches disappearing around the back of the stage.

“Look,” Luke tried again, “I just want to talk to that kid over there. I promise I won't do anything to him. I wouldn't hurt anyone. I just—”

“Sorry,” the guard said. “Rules are rules.”

“But who made the rules?” Luke asked, trying not to sound desperate. “I thought the government was gone, I thought there weren't laws anymore—”

“Listen, kid, there's a new government now. Get lost!” The man shoved Luke away, and Luke's head slammed into the face of the person behind him; his body struck the shoulder of another man. This set off even more indignant complaints: “Ouch! You could have broken my nose!” and “Hey! Watch where you're going!”

“Sorry,” Luke said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . . ”

He struggled back through the crowd, to a vantage point where he could see where the boy with the crutches had gone. But it was too late.

The boy had disappeared once more.

L
uke sat back down in the crowd again. He couldn't concentrate on the people on the stage, though, because his mind was racing.

It really doesn't matter that I couldn't get to the boy on crutches,
he thought.
How did I think he would help? What could he do? What could I do? Maybe I just misunderstood what I heard. Maybe I'm just misinterpreting everything. What do I know, anyway?

Around him, people were stirring angrily. Luke realized it had been a long time since he'd heard anybody clap or cheer. Periodically someone would shout out, “You said it!” or “I'm with you on that!”

Now everyone knows how bad the Population Police were,
Luke thought.
They can't hide behind their own propaganda anymore. They could never come back into power.

But that thought didn't cheer him. As he tuned in to the discussion on the stage again—a girl talked about how a Population Police guard had slapped her once; a man told about watching his son die of hunger—he took no more
pleasure in the sad stories. The sorrow and despair and regret seemed to waft out over the crowd, infecting everyone. Luke saw several women crying. He thought about all the sad people he'd encountered since leaving home nearly a year ago: the frightened boys at Hendricks School, so desperate for a leader that they trusted someone who betrayed them. Smits Grant, who had to hide his grief over his brother's death. Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, who lost their daughter and had no way of knowing what happened to their two sons. The people of Eli's village, who lost their homes and their dignity and their will to live.

“That's wrong! Just wrong!” the people around Luke were shouting now.

“It's not enough to be free,” a man on the stage was saying. “We must also have revenge.”

“You tell it!” a woman shouted behind Luke.

“Yes!” erupted from elsewhere in the crowd.

The man waited for the jeers and whoops to diminish. He held up his hand for silence.

“And yet . . . ” he said slowly, and the words seemed to hang in midair. Some of the people around Luke were listening so closely for the man's next words that they seemed to be holding their breath.

“I don't believe any of this was the Population Police's fault,” the man finished.

Luke expected the crowd to explode with outrage. Of course it was the Population Police's fault! Who else had controlled the food supply? Who else had paid the salary
of the guards who slapped young girls, who beat young boys until they could barely walk?

But the crowd stayed silent. They waited for the man's next words.

“The Population Police promised my village a food shipment last month,” the man said, his voice hushed. Luke had to strain to hear. “They were eager to send it to us; they were happy to provide. They had no reason to want us to suffer. But the day came for the shipment to arrive and . . . ” The man held out his empty hands, palms up. “Nothing. We called Population Police headquarters. The food had been sent, right on schedule. The reason we never received it? It was stolen.”

The crowd gasped. Somewhere near the back, a lone voice cried out, “Who stole it?”

The man was shaking his head, overcome with sorrow. He buried his face in his hands for a moment, trying to regain his composure. Then he raised his head again and stared out at the crowd.

“Illegal third children,” he said. “A band of them swept out of the fallow fields, attacking the trucks of food. They were like bandits, preying on innocent citizens, stealing innocent citizens' food.
That
is why the Population Police had to become so harsh, why they had to crack down so cruelly.
That
is why the food they promised us never showed up.
That
is why the Population Police never got a chance to govern as they wanted.”

Boos and hisses began to spill out of the crowd.

“This guy is crazy,” Luke said to the man sitting next to him, who seemed to be booing particularly loudly.

“What do you mean?” the man said, shooting Luke a nasty look. “He's the first person I've heard talk sense.”

“He's the first person who's said
why
the Population Police failed,” another man said.

Then Luke heard the boos and hisses differently. They weren't directed at the man on the stage. They weren't directed at the Population Police. They were directed at third children.

They were directed at
him.

“Boo, illegals!”

“Blame the illegals!”

“It's their fault! It's their fault!” the crowd began to chant.

The two men sitting near Luke kept looking at him, because he wasn't joining in the chant. He scrambled to his feet and backed away from them. The boos were ringing in his ears. He tried to run, but the crowd was packed too closely together: He bumped into elbows, hips, shoulders, knees.

And then, out of breath and panting with panic, he reached the back of the crowd.

“Well, uh, we have another speaker coming up now,” Philip Twinings was saying into his microphone, trying to regain control of the crowd. “Perhaps he'll have a different perspective.”

Luke turned around, feeling one last glimmer of hope.
He had to feel hopeful, because the only other alternative was to give up, to give in to despair.

So the Population Police are out of power and I'm still illegal?
he wondered.
It's still all my fault that people starve?
He remembered how devastated he'd been all those months ago, when Jen had explained the reason for the Population Law. Back then, he'd had to struggle so hard to believe that the law was wrong, that he still had a right to exist.

He watched another man step up to the microphone.

“I met an illegal third child, once,” he said. “It was hardly human, I'd say. It stole food every chance it got. It—”

The man kept talking, but Luke couldn't hear him anymore. The microphone seemed to have given out.

Philip Twinings took the microphone from the man.

“We—,” he shouted, and the microphone came back on for one brief moment, in a screech of feedback. “We seem to be having some technical difficulties. We'll break for the night and resume in the morning.”