Among the Brave

“And George and I, we had drills. What if Trey come for him in the middle of the night? What if Trey come for him during breakfast? What if, what if, what if? I did everything right. Just like I was supposed to. I hid in our secret room. For hours. You know what I did in there? I was painting my toenails.” Mrs. Talbot looked down at Trey and grinned, ever so slightly. “My little way of saying, hey, you can’t scare me. But after — after I came out, the plan was always for me to go to the Grants’ house for help. If I hadn’t checked the TV, I’d be at the Grants’ by now. And what would I have found there?”

Trey tried not to think about the scene of destruction he’d left

“What did you see on TV?” he asked. “That stopped you from leaving?”

“Huh?” Mrs. Talbot said. “Oh. Riots. Trey said there was rioting in the streets, so I thought, might as well wait until morning to leave.”

Riots? Trey and his friends had seen nothing like that on their trip from the Grants’ house to the Talbots but it had been the middle of the night. The riots must have started during the day, after Mr. Talbot was arrested, while Mrs. Talbot and Trey were hiding. Riots, Trey thought A strange emotion began growing inside him. Hope.

Maybe this is it. It’s beginning. Maybe riots were what the resistance leaders had planned, to get the Government to change the Population Law. Maybe third children aren’t even illegal anymore. Maybe the riots have already worked.

Trey’s friend Lee had been determined, for as long as Trey had known him, to change the Government, so third children could be free from hiding, free from using fake identities if Trey ever wanted to go out Before Lee, Trey had had another friend, Jason, who had said he’d wanted the same thing. But Jason had been lying, and that had been enough to make Trey wonder if he could ever trust anyone.

But maybe now, maybe with the riots… Trey remembered another fact that gave him even more hope: Mr. Talbot was a double agent Publicly, he said he opposed third children. He worked for the Population Police, a group that had been created solely to catch third children and the people who hid them. But secretly, under cover, Mr. Talbot sabotaged his employer, rescuing illegal children and giving them fake I.D.’s. Maybe if the Population Law had been eliminated, the Government had decided to arrest everyone who worked for the Population Police. So of course Mr. Talbot would have been arrested too. Maybe Trey and Lee and their other friends would just have to testify about Mr. Talbot’s true beliefs, and they’d be able to rescue him. Maybe Trey could help Mrs. Talbot after all.

Then Trey remembered something else.

“They told about the riots on TV?” he said incredulously. “That’s impossible. They’d never tell about something like that.”

Trey himself had never seen a television. But he’d heard his father say that it only broadcast propaganda. “Think they’d ever let a TV anchor say anything bad about the Government?” Trey’s father had taunted his mother once. “Think they’d ever say anything that didn’t make it seem like our country is paradise itself?”

Riots didn’t belong in paradise.

Mrs. Talbot snorted.

“Well, not on regular TV, of course,” she said. “The Baron channels.”

“What?” Trey said. He’d always known that the Government allowed some people to have special privileges. The Barons, as Trey were called, were rich while everyone else was poor. Trey had so much food Trey could afford to throw it away — while everyone else scrambled to get dry crusts or pretended that moldy cheese was perfectly fine. Trey lived in fine mansions, while everyone else crowded together, entire families in a single room.

Trey hadn’t known that the Barons even had their own TV channels.

“You can’t expect us to trust the regular broadcasts,” Mrs. Talbot said defensively “We Barons need. . information that other people don’t.”

“But how do Trey do that?” Trey asked. He tried to remember how television signals were transmitted. “How can the signals go to some TVs and not to others?”

“Some sort of special cable, I guess,” Mrs. Talbot said with a shrug. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

She seemed relieved to be talking about something ordinary, like TV, instead of death and danger and foiled plans. Trey stood up and began climbing the stairs.

Surreal, he thought. This entire day has been so surreal I don’t even know what to be afraid of anymore.

He followed Mrs. Talbot out the basement door and down a long hallway. Trey reached a huge room full of wide couches and coffee tables. It had probably been an extraordinarily beautiful room originally, but, like the basement, it was a mess now. Only the enormous screen covering a large portion of one wall seemed intact Mrs. Talbot stepped over ripped cushions and picked up a black remote control from one of the coffee tables. She hit a button on the remote, and the screen seemed to come to life, with gray and black and white dots dancing across the surface. It was a fascinating sight, like some of the bizarre artwork Trey had seen in books.

“See?” Mrs. Talbot said. “The regular stations are off the air. So what else is new.” She flipped through the channels, bringing up momentary darkness, then more patterns of random dots. “Now here’s the first Baron channel.”

She hit another button, and the screen filled up with a serious-looking man.

“…continues in virtually all parts of the city,” he was saying. “Our advice to you would be to remain at home until further notice. In other news—”

Suddenly the man’s voice broke off and his face disappeared, replaced by more of the dots. Trey glanced over at Mrs. Talbot, but she hadn’t changed the channel. She was standing there looking as stunned as Trey felt.

“That’s odd,” Mrs. Talbot muttered. “They’re usually so reliable.”

She hit a few more buttons, zipping though channels. None of the stations appeared to be broadcasting. Then suddenly another man’s face appeared, first wavering, with rolling black lines, then solidifying and filling the entire screen. Mrs. Talbot gasped, but Trey was staring so intently at the TV screen that he barely heard her.

“Good evening, fellow citizens,” the man on TV said. He was wearing a luxurious black jacket, with gold trim on the collar and over the sleeves. “I am delighted to inform you that the old, corrupt Government of General Terus has fallen to the will of the people. General Terus was placed under arrest at seven thirty this evening. I assure you that my squads will restore peace throughout the land quite soon. I am fully in control and I pledge to all of you, my loyal citizens, that I will live up to the trust you have always placed in me. I—”

Trey missed the next few words, because Mrs. Talbot had begun frantically flipping through the channels again. The man in the gold-trimmed uniform was on every station.

“—peace and prosperity—”

“—work together—”

“—true to the cause I’ve always believed in—” With the moments of silence between changing channels, Trey could hardly make sense of the man’s message. It didn’t matter. He’d heard enough. Enough to make him delirious with joy.

“It happened,” he muttered. Then he screamed, “It happened! I’m free! All third children are free!”

Mrs. Talbot was looking at him strangely. Of course. She wouldn’t have known that he was an illegal third child with a fake I.D. Trey didn’t care. He wouldn’t have to care ever again about who knew the truth.

“Young man,” she said, almost sternly. “Don’t you know who that is?” She pointed at the TV.

Trey stopped shouting long enough to glance at the televised man. He had white hair, a mustache, dark eyes, thin lips. And he didn’t look the slightest bit familiar. Trey was pretty sure he’d never seen so much as a picture of him.

“No,” Trey said. “But who cares? General Terus is gone.”

“Oh. you should care, all right,” Mrs. Talbot said. “That nian”—and she pointed at the TV screen again, almost accusingly, and her voice shook—”that man is Aldous Krakenaur.”

“Who?” Trey said.

“The head of the Population Police,” Mrs. Talbot said.

And then she bent her head down and began to sob.

Chapter Five