Among the Betrayed

tack.

'I could have given everything away when the Population Police saw me,' she said. 'Since I didn't know you'd made an I.D. card for me, I was about to scream and run. Then they would have known—'

'You thought those guys were Population Policemen?' Percy asked incredulously. 'Population Police would have known to look for runaways. Those guys were just local cops. Minor league. They probably hate the Population Police as much as we do.'

Nina tried to absorb this news. 'But—' 'Look, the Population Police wouldn't tell anyone else that someone had escaped from their prison. It'd be like. . like a blow to their pride. They like everyone to think that they're invincible, impossible to beat. So it's just Population Policemen looking for us. And if they ask the local cops, the local cops won't tell them about seeing two girls on the northbound road out of the city. That's why we're safe,' Matthias said.

Nina wondered how he could sound so sure. 'We lived on the streets before,' Alia said softly. 'In the city. We know how things work.'

Nina tried to imagine it. No wonder the other three had always looked so grubby. But how had they managed it? How had they gotten food? How had they avoided being arrested years ago?

'Who took care of you?' Nina asked. 'God took care of us,' Alia said. 'We prayed to him and he took care of us. Just like we prayed in prison and he sent us you to get us out.'

Nina had heard of God before. Gran, for one, had prayed back home, even though Aunty Lystra made fun of her for it. 'That's one thing the Government's right about,' Aunty Lystra had said. 'If there were a God out there who really cared about us, do you think we'd be living like this?' 'This' seemed to encompass everything from the leaky roof to the weevils in the flour to the long line at the store for cabbage.

'You believe what you want to believe, and I'll believe what I want to believe,' Gran always answered. 'I, for one, see a few miracles around here.'

Nina had liked the way Gran's eyes rested on her when she said that. Even when Nina was too tiny to understand the word 'miracle,' she'd liked it, liked the way Gran talked about God.

But she didn't understand how God could take care of three little kids alone on the streets.

'I'm thirsty,' Percy announced, with a warning glance toward Alia. 'Let's go find some water and explore a little.'

The other three scrambled up. Nina pulled her boots back on and followed, thinking hard.

They hadn't told her everything, after all. And so she hadn't said a word about her past, either.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The days that followed the kids' arrival in the woods were strangely like a holiday. The sun shone down on them — just warm enough, not too hot — and they had fun hiking around, exploring. They slept under the stars each balmy night. Nina did not exactly forget Jason's betrayal and the nightmare of prison, but all the horrors she'd experienced seemed far in the past. She worried less and less about being caught again. When she opened her eyes each morning to see gently waving branches and a mosaic of maple leaves against the sky, it didn't seem possible that she could be imprisoned in a dark underground room ever again.

For their part, Percy, Matthias, and Alia seemed per-fectly happy to treat their time in the woods as one long vacation. They didn't talk about prison; they didn't talk about their lives before prison. They climbed trees; they skipped rocks in the stream; they drew pictures in the dirt with twigs.

Then one morning Nina reached her hand into the food bag for breakfast and closed her fingers on — nothing. She reached farther down, her stomach suddenly queasy with hunger. She brought up a small, battered box of cereal and an empty peanut shell. She laid those on her knees and reached in again.

Nothing. Truly nothing. Not even a moldy biscuit crumb remained in the sack.

'We don't have any more food!' Nina gasped. The others paused in the midst of their own meals. Percy held a half-eaten oatmeal bar up to his mouth; Alia froze with an apple against her lips. Matthias kept chewing his cereal. 'What?' he said, his mouth full.

'We're out of food!' Nina repeated. 'What you're eating now — that's all we have!'

'So is your garden ready?' Percy asked casually. 'You said you could grow a garden here.' Nina gaped at him.

'I didn't… I meant…' What had she promised, in desperation, back in prison when they were planning their escape? Were the others really counting on her to provide all their food? Why hadn't they mentioned it before now? 'I — Alia, give me the seeds from that apple.'

Obediently Alia dug her fingernails into the middle of the apple and handed Nina three grimy brown seeds. Nina scratched in the dirt by her feet and dug three holes, side by side. She placed a seed in each hole. Then she patted dirt back over the seeds until they were hidden from sight. 'There,' she said. 'At least we'll have more apples.' 'How long does it take?' Percy asked.

Nina stared down at the dirt, hoping something might happen right away. She suspected it took longer than a few minutes for an apple tree to grow. Probably a lot longer. And for an apple tree actually to produce apples…

'I don't know,' she said miserably. She had a feeling it might take days, weeks, months. Years. 'I don't know anything about growing food,' she confessed. 'I just thought we could.. figure something out once we got here. This is better than being in prison, isn't it?'

'They fed us in prison,' Alia said in a small voice.

'And they were going to kill us,' Nina countered harshly.

Alia looked down at the ground. Percy and Matthias looked at each other. Nina couldn't stand to see them exchanging glances once again.

'Look, I'm just a kid,' she pleaded. 'I don't know any-thing about anything. My gran and the aunties — they always took care of me. Then when I got to school — well, it wasn't like they really wanted us to think for ourselves there. There was always food, three times a day. We didn't have to know where it came from.'

The other three didn't say anything for a moment. In the silence, Nina could hear the wind shifting direction in the trees.

'You never told us about your gran and the… the aun-ties?' Alia finally said. 'You didn't tell us about your school.'

'I didn't know if I could trust you,' Nina admitted. 'I'm a third child. An illegal.'

'We thought so,' Percy said.

Silence again. Then Matthias added softly, 'So are we.'

Nina held her breath. The last time she'd confessed to being an illegal child, and heard someone else confess the same to her, it had led to Population Police arresting her at breakfast. She stared hard at the trees around her, as though any one of them might be hiding a Population Police officer, just waiting for the right moment to grab her. But nothing happened. No one moved.

'It's funny, isn't it,' Nina said. 'The reason they made third children illegal was because of food. There wasn't enough after the drought and the famines. But someone always found food for me when I was illegal. Now I've gone through two different fake I.D.'s, and I've run out of food. I'm legal now — I've got a card to prove that I'm legal — and I'm going to starve to death. We're all going to starve.'

She knew now why the last few days had seemed like such a vacation. It had been a vacation — from reality. None of them had wanted to face the truth: It wasn't enough to escape from the Population Police. It wasn't enough to have fake I.D.'s. They were still doomed. It was easier to swing in the trees and skip rocks than to think about the fact that they had nothing to keep them alive once the food sack was empty.

'Nobody's going to starve,' Percy said. 'We'll figure out something. Don't you know any way to find out how to grow a garden?'

Nina started to say no, but then she remembered how she'd thought of a garden in the first place.

'There's a kid,' she said. 'At the boys' school. Lee Grant. He was the one who knew about gardens. If we could find him…'