Among the Imposters (13 page)

But how was Luke supposed to reach him?

Thirty One

Luke crept back down to the first floor with only the vaguest plan in mind. He needed Mr. Talbot’s phone number. He needed a phone. The school office should have both.

The school office was locked.

Luke stood before the ornate door for what felt like hours. The door had a glass panel at the top, so he could see in easily. He could make out the shape of a phone on Ms. Hawkins’s desk. He could see old-fashioned file cabinets behind it. Surely there was a file in there with Luke’s name on it—his fake name, anyway. Would Mr. Talbot’s phone number be listed in there, because he was the one who’d brought Luke to the school? Luke thought so. But it did no good unless Luke could get into the files. And no matter how much he jiggled the knob of the office door, the door held firm.

Desperately, Luke kicked it. But the door was thick, solid maple wood. Nothing flimsy at Hendricks. Even the glass was probably— Glass. Luke couldn’t believe how stupid he was being.

He slammed the glass panel with his textbook, and a satisfying spiderweb of cracks crept across it. He hit it again, a little lower, smashing that portion of the panel.

‘And Jason thinks books are useless,” Luke muttered to himself. “Take that!”

Luke covered his hand with part of his pajama sleeve and pushed through the bottom of the glass. Only a few shards fell to the ground. The rest of the panel stayed in place. It was high-quality glass. Anything cheap would have shattered completely, and fallen to the ground with an enormous clatter.

Luke reached on through, until he could touch the knob from inside. He turned it—slowly, slowly—until he heard the click he’d been waiting for. He eased the door open and raced to the filing cabinet.

With only the dim light from the hall, Luke couldn’t read any of the labels on any of the files. He had to carry them out to the door to see whose they were.

The first batch he pulled had Jeremy Andrews through Luther Benton. He replaced them and moved further back in the file. Tanner Fitzgerald through—yes, there it was. Lee Grant.

Luke was surprised by the thickness of his file, considering how short a time he’d been at Hendricks. The first set of papers were school transcripts from other schools— evidently the ones the real Lee Grant had attended, before he died and left his identity to Luke. There were pictures, too, seven of them, labeled,
KINDERGARTEN, GRADE ONE, GRADE

~o... all the way up to grade six. Strangely, the photos really did look like Luke. Same sandy hair, pale eyes, worried look. Luke blinked, thinking he’d been fooled. But when he opened his eyes, the resemblance was still there. Had the real Lee Grant looked that much like Luke?

Then Luke remembered something Jen had told him once, about changing photos on the computer.

“You can make people look older, younger, prettier, uglier—whatever you want. If I wanted to make my own fake I.D., I probably could,” she’d bragged.

But Jen had wanted to come out of hiding with her identity intact. She hated the thought of fake I.D.’s.

Staring at the faked pictures, Luke could understand. It was all too strange. He knew he should be reassured by how thoroughly his records had been doctored. But it frightened him instead. There was no sign of the real Luke Garner. Probably even his family would forget him eventually

Luke didn’t have time for self-pity. He turned the page, hoping his admission papers would be next.

They weren’t. Instead, there was some sort of a daily log. Luke read in horrified fascination:

April 28—Student withdrawn, surly during entrance interview. Refuses to look interviewer directly in eye. Refuses to

answer questions. Sullen behavior. Hostility believed connected to dissociation with parents. Can assume high risk of repeated attempts at running away. Treatment to commence immediately.

April 2.9—Sullenness continues. Attempts at interaction rebuffed. Teachers report disinterest, hostility.

The log continued in that vein, with an entry for every day Luke had been at Hendricks. There was repeated mention of therapy and treatment, and its success or failure. But Luke had had no entrance interview. He’d had no therapy, no treatment, no attention from the school officials at all. Obviously, this was another faked record.

But who had faked it? And why?

Thoroughly baffled, Luke turned the page. And there was the thick sheaf of his entrance papers.

Mr. Talbot was listed in the second column of the sixteenth page, as an emergency contact.

Luke grabbed the phone and started dialing.

Thirty Two

A
woman’s sleepy voice answered.

“Is Mr. Talbot there?” Luke asked. “I need Mr. Talbot.”

“It’s three in the morning!” the woman hissed.

“Please,” Luke begged. “It’s an emergency. I’m a friend of—” He barely managed to stop himself from saying, “Jen’s.” Mr. Talbot’s phone was probably bugged by the Population Police. Maybe the school’s phone was now, too. Luke didn’t know But he tried again. “Mr. Talbot is a friend of my parents’s”

There was only dead air in response. Then a man’s voice, just as sleepy as the woman’s.

“Hello?”

It was Mr. Talbot.

Luke wanted to spill out everything, from his first confusing day at Hendricks, to Jason’s treachery, to the oddness of the file Luke still held on his lap. If only he could explain all his problems, surely Mr. Talbot could solve them all. But Luke had to choose his words carefully.

“You told me to blend in,” he accused, hoping Mr. Talbot

would remember. “I can’t. You have to come get me.”
And four other boys,
he added silently, as if Mr. Talbot were actually capable of telepathy. If only Luke could just say, flat out, “You need to get four more fake I.D.’s for these friends of mine. And you’ll need to protect their families, too.” But Luke couldn’t think of any code that would clue in Mr. Talbot, without clueing in the Population Police as well.

“Now, now,” Mr. Talbot said calmly, sounding like an elderly uncle dispensing wisdom. “Surely school isn’t that bad. You need to give it more of a chance. Is this finals week or something?”

Luke couldn’t tell whether Mr. Talbot really didn’t understand, or whether he was acting for the sake of the bug.

“That’s not the problem!” Luke almost screamed. “It’s— it’s like a problem I had before.”

“Yes, problems do seem to repeat themselves,” Mr. Talbot said, still sounding untroubled. “Usually, there’s some root cause. You need to attack that first.”

Was Mr. Talbot speaking in code? Luke hoped so.

“It’s all very well to say that,” he protested. “But the problems are multiplying. There are four others, now, I have to think about And they can’t wait until the, um, root cause is fixed. This is an emergency. You have to help.”

Luke was proud of himself. He couldn’t be any clearer than that, not using a potentially bugged phone. Surely Mr. Talbot would understand.

“You children can be so melodramatic,” Mr. Talbot said irritably. Now he sounded like a man ripped from sleep at three in the morning for no good reason. “I have every confidence that you can deal with your problems by yourself. Now. Good night.”

“Please!” Luke pleaded.

But Mr. Talbot had hung up.

Thirty Three

Luke stared at the phone. He’d tried so hard. It wasn’t fair that he didn’t even know if he’d succeeded or not.

No. He knew. He’d failed.

He’d heard the careless tone in Mr. Talbot’s voice. Luke couldn’t fool himself into thinking it was all an act, with each word carrying double meaning. It was three in the morning. He’d awakened Mr. Talbot out of a dead sleep. How could he possibly have understood what Luke needed?

Luke dropped the phone and put his face down on Ms. Hawkins’s desk. The file he’d been holding on his lap spilled onto the floor, dumping out papers filled with lies. He didn’t care. He didn’t care that anyone walking by would catch him where he wasn’t supposed to be. He was past caring about anything.

Had Jen ever reached this point, planning the rally?

Luke remembered the last time he’d seen her, the night she’d left for the capital. She’d seemed almost unearthly, as if she’d already passed out of the realm she shared with

Luke. And she had. He was still in hiding, and she was about to risk her life to be free.

It was simpler for you,
Luke accused silently.
You weren’t confused.

It was hard having a dead hero for a best friend.

I just can’t live up to you, len,
he thought.
I’m not you.

He wasn’t Lee Grant, either. Slowly, just to get rid of them, he began picking up the faked papers and stuffing them back into the file. Moving like someone in a dream, he put the phone back on the desk and the file back in the filing cabinet, and shut the drawer. He walked out of the office and pulled the door closed behind him, making no effort whatsoever to hide the broken glass.

H&d have to run away, that’s all there was to it. He could take the other four with him. They’d just have to take their chances. They could head to the city.

Luke had lost all track of time, now. Before he woke the others and terrified them out of their wits, he decided, he’d peek outside and see how much time they had left before daylight.

He went to the door they always used, the one that led to the woods and had once led to his garden. He tried to turn the knob, but his hand must have been weak with exhaustion. His fingers slipped right off. He gripped the knob again, and tried harder.

The door was locked. Locked from the outside.

Panicked, Luke ran to the front door, the one he’d come through with Mr. Talbot that first day.

It was locked, too.

What kind of a school kept its students locked in, at night?

No school. Just prisons.

Luke rushed around trying every door he could find, but it was hopeless. They were all locked. And none of them had glass panels for him to break.

Finally he sank to the floor outside his history classroom.

We’re trapped,
he thought.
Trapped like rats in a hole.

Luke was not the least bit surprised when he heard footsteps coming down the hall. He hardly dared look up. But it wasn’t Jason or someone from the Population Police standing over him. It was his history teacher, Mr. Dirk.

“Back to bed, young man,” Mr. Dirk said. “I appreciate your dedication to history, but studying through the night is strictly prohibited. I’m afraid I’ll have to give you—”

“I know, I know,” Luke said. “Thro demerits.”

Under Mr. Dirk’s stern gaze, Luke resignedly trudged back upstairs.

Thirty Four

Luke was overcome by guilt when he woke up the next morning. How could he have slept away so many hours? He’d had to come back to his room because Mr. Dirk was watching. But he could have sneaked out later. Why hadn’t he at least warned the others?

Some rational side of his mind argued: What good would a warning do when they couldn’t escape?

Around him, his other roommates were complaining about the exams they faced that day. One or two of them had books open on their beds and were studying as they got dressed. It seemed unreal that anyone could care about exams at a time like this.

Fearfully, Luke looked over at Jason’s bed. It was empty. The sheets were rumpled the same way they’d been last night. The pillow still held an indentation. But Jason was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s Scott?” Luke asked. His voice trembled despite his best efforts to sound casual.

His question was met with blank stares.

“Don’t know,” one boy finally mumbled, and went back to studying.

At breakfast, Luke sat with Jason’s gang, but Jason was still missing. Luke peered around the table at the four boys Jason had betrayed: Antonio/Samuel, who had flashing dark eyes and a quick laugh; Denton/Travis, who knew hundreds of riddles; Sherman/Ryan, who talked with an accent Luke had never heard before; and L’atrick/’lyrone, who had once claimed he got his fake I.D. by “the luck of the Irish.” Luke couldn’t have said he really knew any of them well. But it was agony to sit there watching them eat their Cream of Wheat, making jokes, totally unaware that they were doomed. Luke tried to lean over and whisper in Patrick’s ear, “You’re in danger—I need to tell you—” But Patrick only brushed him away with the words, “Quit it, lecker. You’re bugging me.” And then all the others stared at Luke. How many of them were on Jason’s side, working for the Population Police?

Luke didn’t dare give his warning out loud.

Breakfast time slipped away, with Luke’s panic only growing. His thoughts ran in circles. He should go hide, by himself, if he couldn’t save the others. But he couldn’t just abandon the others. He had to save them. But how?

“If you’re not going to eat your breakfast, I will,” Patrick said when Luke’s was the only bowl that wasn’t empty.

Silently, Luke passed over his food.

“Hey, thanks,” Patrick said, with a huge grin. “You’re the greatest.”

If only you knew...,
Luke thought miserably

Just then, the dining hall door banged open.

“Population Police!” a booming voice called out.

Luke froze. He’d known this was coming, but it still didn’t seem possible. He tried to yell, “Run!” to Patrick and the others, but he opened his mouth and nothing came out His legs were frozen, too. He could only sit and watch and listen in horror.

A huge man stepped into the room. Medals covered his olive green uniform. He clutched a sheaf of papers in his fist.

“I have a warrant here for the arrest of illegals who have compounded their crime by the use of falsified documents,” he announced.

Luke closed his eyes, in agony. It was all over. He’d failed at everything. He hadn’t saved the others, and he hadn’t saved himself. He’d never done anything for the cause. He was going to die before he’d had a chance to accomplish a single thing.

The police officer peered at the papers in his hand. He cleared his throat.

“The sentence for those in violation of Population Law 3903 is death. The sentence for falsification of documents by an illegal citizen is death by torture, Government’s choice.”

One of the autistic boys was crying. Luke could hear him across the room. Everyone else sat in deathly silence. Luke hoped that he’d at least have the chance to apologize to the other four. The police officer continued.