Among the Free (20 page)

“Shut up!” someone else yelled. “Aren't the signs evidence enough?”

And then lots of people in the crowd began shouting at each other and arguing. Some of the security guards at the front started to reach for their guns, but then they glanced at the camera and shrugged, as if to say,
It's not our problem what people say. Who can stop them?

Luke took a step back from the microphone. He shook his head dizzily, trying to understand what was happening. He'd lost the crowd's attention. But he couldn't tell if that was because most of them believed him or because
most of them were on Oscar's side. He could do his trick of closing one eye and then the other, and the sides seemed to jump back and forth.

Oscar's side is winning . . . no, mine . . . no, Oscar's . . .

“Ah, the lovely sounds of free speech,” Philip Twinings said beside him.

“They're just arguing,” Luke said, still dazed. “The whole crowd is fighting.”

“Yes, but they're using words, not bullets,” Philip said. “So much better than the stupefied silence of the past few hours. Or the past thirteen years.”

“You opposed the Population Police, then,” Luke said. “Why didn't you say so? Why did you let all those speakers blame third children, all morning long?”

Philip Twinings sighed. His ancient eyes seemed to hold decades' worth of pain.

“I did sabotage the microphone, last night,” he said. “But this morning—I was afraid. Things seemed to have changed. I was in exile for a very long time. I didn't want to go back. And—I was only one person.”

“Sometimes one person is enough,” Luke said.

“Yes,” Philip said. “And sometimes it takes a kid to show adults the truth.”

Luke started to tell Philip, “You did help me—you made sure I got a chance to talk. You risked your life too.” But he broke off because the crowd's uproar had reached a fever pitch. A group of men seemed to have come to a conclusion.

“We'll just get Oscar out here! He'll tell you!” Luke heard one of them shout.

“You do that! I want to hear what he has to say for himself!” someone else hollered back.

Luke watched the men rushing back toward the Population Police headquarters.

“Perhaps you should leave, young man,” Philip said softly. “For your own safety.”

“Are you leaving?” Luke asked.

“No. Of course not.”

“Neither am I,” Luke said.

He remembered way back in the fall, after the Grants had died, how he'd longed for a day of truth, when he and his friends could stand up proud and tell the whole world their true names, their true stories. He hadn't revealed his name, but he'd told everything else. No matter what happened, he was glad he'd done that. He had no intention of hiding again, of cowering back in the stables, dreading every approaching footstep. He was done with that life.

Jenny whinnied behind him, and he went to stand beside her and stroke her mane.

“It's all right, girl,” he said. “Don't be afraid. I'm not afraid anymore.”

He understood now how the old woman in Chiutza had been able to look so peaceful facing the gun; how Jen could have gone off so bravely to her rally. They'd made their choices. They'd been free.

And now so was he.

The mob that had rushed into the Population Police headquarters came rushing back out.

“He's gone!” the men were yelling. “Oscar ran away!”

Out of the corner of Luke's eye, he saw the three former Population Police officials scrambling away from the screening committee table. He saw them slipping into the shadows, sneaking out the back door. He saw the security guards walking away from their posts. He saw the Oscar supporters in the crowd shrugging or slumping—giving up.

It was over.

L
uke's friends showed up that afternoon, while he was with a crowd pulling down the signs opposing third children. The words
THEIR FAULT
came off in his hands, and he was tearing them to bits when he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“Need some help with that?”

He whirled around to find Nina, Trey, and Mr. Talbot standing there, and they ran to him, hugging and exclaiming.

“Where were you guys?” he asked. “I kept looking for you—”

“When the Population Police fell, we all went to Mr. Hendricks's house. We kept thinking you'd join us there. We didn't think there was anything else to worry about,” Nina said apologetically.

“But we turned on the TV this morning and heard the speeches and saw the signs—we came as fast as we could,” Mr. Talbot said. “We just didn't know what we could do.”

“Then we turned on the radio in the car and heard this
crazy kid telling his life story,” Trey said. “You were great, Lee—you really were.”

The fake name sounded more jarring than ever, after everything Luke had been through. He looked around at the people tearing down the signs; at the noisy, still-arguing crowd; at Philip and Simone and Tucker standing before the cameras interviewing people again.

“I'm free now,” he said. “You can call me Luke.”

He remembered how baffled he'd been all along, trying to understand freedom. In the beginning, all he'd wanted was a chance to run across his family's front yard or ride in the back of the pickup truck to town, the way his brothers did. He'd seen how the Chiutzans acted like freedom just meant getting to shoot anyone they wanted to shoot; how Eli and the others in his village thought they were free because they were ready to die. He'd watched the people celebrating at Population Police headquarters as if freedom were just a matter of getting free food.

But he understood now that freedom was more than that. In one sense, he'd been free all along.

“Is it safe to talk like that?” Mr. Talbot asked, glancing around anxiously. “Have you heard—did they catch Aldous Krakenaur?”

“No,” Luke said. “He escaped with Oscar.”

“Then he could come back,” Trey said. “He could get the Population Police back together, consolidate his power again—”

“We're making sure that doesn't happen,” Luke said. He
pointed at a bunch of people gathered around a table someone had pulled out onto the grass. “That group is talking about writing a new constitution to guarantee everyone's rights.” He pointed to another table at the other end of the yard. “They're talking about how to distribute food fairly until the next harvest.” He watched a man and two women setting up another table nearby. “I'm not sure what they're going to talk about at that table, but
this
is our new government. The people.”

His friends stared at him in amazement.

“Good grief,” Mr. Talbot said. “We've gone from ideologues to idealists.”

“Don't you think it will work?” Luke asked.

Mr. Talbot peered around at the crowd. Luke could see how he might be doubtful: Most of the people at the tables were pretty young; they were dressed in ragged clothes and had shaggy hair. They didn't look like a government.

But Mr. Talbot grinned.

“This is the best chance we have,” he said. “Maybe I'll go check out that constitution they're working on . . . ”

He wandered off, and Nina and Trey settled in with Luke, pulling down the signs. The adhesive Oscar's supporters had used was very strong; it was difficult erasing every trace of every hateful word. But Luke and his friends were persistent, working side by side.

“So I'm the only one who didn't go to Mr. Hendricks's house?” Luke asked.

“All our friends are there—and lots of other third children
who didn't have anywhere else to go. Your brother's there too,” Nina said. “His leg's still in bad shape, but Mr. Talbot said he was in charge of protecting the younger children if anything happened.”

If anything happened . . .
Luke shivered, thinking about how easily Oscar's plans could have succeeded. How easily, even now, the new freedom could be stifled if people didn't guard it carefully, didn't use it wisely.

“Mark's disappointed that he never got to come back here and work undercover,” Nina said. “He says he missed all the fun.”

“Fun?” Luke snorted. “Right. I would have traded places with him in a heartbeat. He could have ridden Jenny for me. He could have stood up on that stage.”

“No,” Nina said, “he couldn't have. It had to be one of us.”

A third child, she meant. In the end, only a third child could have stopped Oscar.

“Weren't you scared?” Trey asked, scrubbing at the shadowy backing left by the sign. “Admitting you were a third child in front of that huge crowd—in front of the whole country, really—”

“Of course I was scared,” Luke said. “But I had to do it, you know?”

He looked at his two friends, and he knew they understood. They had also taken some terrifying chances. They had also risked their lives for freedom. It made the job of tearing down signs seem simple by comparison. Luke wondered if this was how it would be for the rest of their
lives: that any other dangers or challenges they might face would pale in comparison to what they'd survived as kids.

We'll have a “rest of our lives” now,
Luke thought, surprising himself.
We will.
He'd never dared to think that far ahead before. But now he gazed back out over the vast crowd again, and he could almost see everything he wanted to happen, stretching out far into the future.

He could see his family rushing through the crowd to find him—having seen him on TV, they wouldn't be able to sit at home, waiting, anymore. And instead of whisking him off home to try to keep him safe, they would decide to stay and help. He could see his dad telling the new government how to deal with farmers, his mother telling them about factory workers.

He could see Matthew getting to raise hogs again. He could see himself playing football with Mark again—Mark's leg finally fully healed—and maybe with Jen's older brothers, Brownley and Buellton, as well, when they came back safely to the Talbots' house.

He could see old, abandoned fields reclaimed, resplendent with new crops. He could see roads and bridges and houses all over the country repaired and rebuilt, all the warped framework set right, all the broken windows replaced.

He could see Oscar Wydell and Aldous Krakenaur and all the other Population Police officials caught and tried and sentenced, so none of them could haunt his nightmares ever again.

He could see Mr. Hendricks and Mr. and Mrs. Talbot working in the new government. Maybe one of them would be the new leader—a leader chosen by the people, not just forced into office through brute strength. Maybe someday he or Nina or Trey might even campaign to be elected, and then lead the country that had once said they had no right to exist.

He could see Nina taking care of her grandmother and aunties the way they'd once taken care of her. He could see Trey becoming a college professor someday, and Matthias becoming a minister, and Percy an engineer, and Alia, little Alia—well, maybe someday she'd be a doctor like Mrs. Talbot.

He could see all the timid, odd third children he'd known at Hendricks School getting a chance to lead ordinary lives—or maybe extraordinary lives. Maybe one of them would become a great inventor or a great writer or a great philosopher or . . . who could say what they might be capable of now?

He could see Smits reclaiming Population Police headquarters as the Grant house again, turning it into a home for children who'd lost their families. And he could see the boy on crutches, the one who'd been beaten by the Population Police, helping out.

He could see himself as a grown man with a farm of his own, married with children of his own—maybe two, maybe three, maybe more. He would take his wife and children and go back for Sunday dinners with Mother and
Dad and Matthew's family and Mark's family. And they'd all sit at the same table, all together.

He could see himself and his friends gathering each year at a memorial for Jen and all the other third children who'd died in the rally. He could see himself staying longer than everyone else, bending down over the memorial so he could touch the cold stone and whisper to the ghostly memory of a girl who would never grow up, who had sacrificed everything for her beliefs:
Jen, we did it. Everyone's free now.

He didn't know if any of those things would really happen.

But they were all possible now.

Here's a look at Margaret Peterson Haddix's book
Found,
which launches her new series, The Missing.