Among the Free

'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 any' more. 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.'

Luke hadn't even noticed that it was dusk now, that a full day had passed while he'd been sitting there in the crowd listening to stories. Around him in the hovering darkness, people were standing up, breaking out of their trances. Most of them were grumbling about being hun^ gry, and they began streaming back toward the main building, heading for the kitchen and dining room.

Luke was hungry too. He hadn't eaten anything since the scrambled eggs that morning. He could remember being handed a doughnut after he'd discovered the man guarding the secret room, but he'd been too distracted to bring the doughnut up to his mouth, to chew, to swallow. Maybe he'd dropped the doughnut; maybe someone had taken it from his hand and he hadn't even noticed. He looked wistfully toward the bright lights coming from the dining-room windows. He could imagine hot soups, toasty breads. But there was no way he could join the crowd getting food. Not now.

Hungry and cold, Luke stomped back to the stable and fed the horses. He found his quilt still in Jenny's stall and he curled up in it.

'It was just two men talking bad about third children. Nobody else mentioned us,' he whispered to Jenny. She turned around and looked at him with her sympathetic horse eyes, but she didn't stop chewing her oats. Even in the dim light of the stable, Luke could see her strong teeth chomping the oats to bits.

'Maybe it wasn't really that many people in the crowd booing,' he told the horse. 'Maybe it just seemed like a lot because I was scared. And everybody still hates the Population Police. As long as they hate the Population Police, I'm okay.'

Jenny seemed to have a skeptical look on her face, but what did she know? She was just a horse chewing oats. Luke closed his eyes and burrowed deeper into the straw, which he'd neglected to clean. He didn't care. He slipped into a fitful sleep and immediately began to dream: Jen was there, and she was yelling at him.

Luke! Wake up! You've got to wake up!

It's nighttime. Supposed to . . sleep. . in the nighttime, he mumbled back in the dream. He curled up even more tightly in his quilt cocoon.

No, Luke! I mean it! Jen screamed again. WAKE UP!

She began tugging on the end of his quilt, trying to spin him out of it. And then he did wake up a little, just enough to realize that Jenny the horse was standing on one corner of the quilt, the force of her weight pulling it away from Luke.

'Hey, girl,' Luke muttered sleepily. 'Whose side are you on, anyway?'

He yanked the quilt away and fell back asleep.

When he woke up for real, hours later, sunlight was streaming in through the skylights, but he felt cold, stiff, and lightheaded with hunger. He hadn't had Jenny's body heat to warm him: The horse was standing against the wall at the other end of the stall.

'What? Are you mad because I didn't clean your stall last night?' Luke asked. 'Or were you listening to those speeches yesterday? Don't tell me you blame third children for everything too.'

His voice caught a little; this morning he wasn't even capable of making a stupid joke to a dumb old horse. Jenny just stared at him, in the steady way of horses, and he thought he heard an echo of his dream: Luke! I mean it! WAKE UP!

'I've got to get something to eat before I go totally nuts,' Luke muttered to himself.

He put out food for the horses again, scrubbed his face, changed his clothes. By the time he stumbled out of the stable, he felt better. The warnings of nightmares and ghosts seemed silly in the glare of such a bright, sunlit day.

He started to veer toward the kitchen and dining hall immediately, but he could hear the boom of amplified voices off in the distance. Philip Twinings and the other TV people must have managed to fix the microphone and whatever else was broken. Luke could tell by the crowd gathering on the lawn that the interviews were beginning again.

I'll just go listen to a speech or two, Luke told himself just to make sure. .

As he moved toward the crowd, he could tell that more had changed overnight than just a microphone repair. Someone had posted signs along the wall behind the stage, in full sight of the entire crowd and anyone who might be watching on TV Luke began walking more slowly, each step filled with dread. Finally he was close enough to read the signs.

One showed a baby with a number three on his chest, with a caption underneath: he's the reason you were STARVING.

Another showed a sullen group of teenagers, with the Words BEWARE THE SHADOWS.

Others showed families with three children. They were labeled the worst criminals of all and it's all their fault.

They were the signs from the secret room.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It took every ounce of self-control Luke possessed not to scream out, N000000. . , not to run up to the wall and tear down every single sign, one after the other. As it was, he made a kind of whimper, deep in his throat, and suddenly all the people around him were peering at him suspiciously.

'Sorry,' Luke muttered. 'I'm. . It's. . nothing. Don't mind me.'

He turned and fled, back to the stable, back through the door, back into Jenny's stall. He threw his arms around her neck and buried his face against her hide.

'It doesn't matter,' he muttered into her mane. 'Even if I tried to tear down those signs, the guards would stop me. They'd lock me up. Just like the Population Police would. Nothing's changed.'

He was just talking, complaining, all but crying into Jenny's mane. But was it true? Had nothing changed? Even with the Population Police gone?

Luke thought about how the signs looked, all glossy and bright, the colors gleaming in the sunlight. They didn't look like signs that had been lying around in a dusty storeroom, left over from an old regime. They looked brand-new.

What if they hadn't belonged to the Population Police? What if they'd been created on someone else's orders? Like… Oscar's?