Trey stared—the extra prisoner in the truck was, indeed, Mr. Talbot. Trey hadn’t recognized him before because he was so battered. Both his eyes were swollen shut and surrounded by huge purple bruises, his lip was split in several places, his breathing was shallow and raspy.
But suddenly it all made sense. Mr. Talbot had been a double agent within the Population Police. So had the liber group. Of course they were connected. Of course Mr. Talbot had been the liber leader. Jonathan Sabine must have been trying to mount a rescue mission for his leader that day back at the Talbots’, and he’d mistaken Trey for another member of the group. That mistake had saved Trey’s life.
But someone inside the liber group must have betrayed Mr. Talbot, the Sabines, and all the others who were dead now.
Nina was feeling for Mr. Talbot’s pulse.
“I don’t know—shouldn’t his heartbeat be stronger than this?” she asked.
“Average resting adult heart rate is fifty to a hundred beats per minute,” Trey said. “But an elite athlete in really good shape could have a rate as low as twenty-eight to forty.”
Lee and Nina started laughing. Trey stood stunned for a minute, then realized it was hilarious he’d been able to spit that out, on cue, in the midst of everything else that was going on.
Thanks, Dad, he thought. You really did teach me some useful information.
Then they were all serious again. Nedley scrambled up onto the truck and felt Mr. Talbot’s other wrist.
“He’s not an elite athlete,” Nedley said. “I don’t think this is a good pulse.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Nina asked.
“I know a place we can go,” Nedley said. “place where someone can take care of him. And where the rest of us will be safe. As safe as possible, anyway.”
“But can we get there without being caught?” Trey asked. “And can we trust… everybody?” He couldn’t help glaring right at the chauffeur, who had driven off and abandoned Trey back at the Talbots’ house.
Nina seemed to understand what he meant.
“Trey, we didn’t want to leave you behind,” Nina said gently. “I—’m so sorry I pushed you out of the car. We got scared when we saw Mr. Talbot taken away, but we were going to come back for you as soon as it was safe—we were watching through the trees. But when we saw the Population Police officer find you on the porch … How is it that you weren’t killed?”
Trey tried to understand how it must have looked to them.
“The officer who found me was working with the resistance group,” Trey said. “Just like Mr. Talbot. Just like Nedley here.”
“And me,” the chauffeur said. “I too had been fighting behind the scenes. Mr. Talbot had sent me to the Grants’ house to keep an eye on all of you. I don’t believe I did my job very well.”
“It wasn’t your fault that Mr. Talbot was captured,” Nina said soothingly. “It wasn’t your fault the Population Police took over the Grants’ house.”
Trey tried to understand.
“So you were working for Mr. Talbot,” he said to the chauffeur. “Why didn’t you tell us that after Mr. and Mrs. Grant died?”
“Would you have believed me?” the chauffeur asked.
Trey doubted that he would have. He’d felt so confused then. Everything had been in turmoil.
“I thought I could just take you to Mr. Talbot and everything would be all right,” the chauffeur said.
The chauffeur was an adult, but Trey realized that he’d been every bit as stunned as Trey was to see the Population Police officials swarming over the Talbots’ property. He’d felt every bit as helpless. And, like Trey, he’d made a few wrong choices along the way.
“We thought it was lucky that the chauffeur had seen where Lee’s family lived. We thought we were saving Lee. But when we got back to the Grants’ house, the Population Police were there too,” Nina said. “We were arrested for breaking and entering, just for driving through the front gates. We didn’t know …”
“We didn’t know anything,” Lee said.
“We still don’t,” Joel muttered.
Trey had almost forgotten that the younger boy was there.
‘All right, all right, enough with the rehashing,” Nedley said. “We need to go to our safe place now. I know a back way. How about if I drive?”
Trey settled into the back of the truck with his friends, and Nedley slipped behind the wheel. He drove down a rutted path Trey never would have noticed.
Trey leaned over and whispered in Lee’s ear: “What if Nedley can’t be trusted? What if he’s taking us into greater danger, instead of to safety?”
Lee just shrugged. There really wasn’t anything they could do, not with Mark’s leg broken and Mr. Talbot unconscious. And, for that matter, Lee and Nina and Joel and John and the chauffeur all looked pale and shrunken, as if they couldn’t have jumped from the truck if their lives depended on it.
“Did they feed you in prison?” Trey asked.
Lee shook his head.
“Not much,” he said. “Gruel once or twice. Maybe every third day.”
They’d gone almost a week with barely any food at all—no wonder they just sat and stared blankly, as if they didn’t have enough energy to register the sight of the trees zipping past them, the branches whipping around the truck.
Trey tensed his muscles and stared ahead, ready to defend them all if need be.
But when they emerged from the trees, Trey relaxed immediately.
A large, windowless building stood directly ahead of them, like a welcoming fortress. It was one of only two places Trey had ever felt at home.
They were back at Hendricks School.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
NEDLEY parked the truck in front of Mr. Hendricks’s cottage. Mr. Hendricks rolled out in his wheelchair immediately. His eyes were focused on the Population Police insignia on Nedley’s black shirt.
“I told you before!” he shouted. “You’ve already taken all my able-bodied workers. I have nothing more to—” He broke off, his glance finally taking in the rest of the truckload of people. Relief and joy played over his expression, but then he seemed to rein in his emotions, and he just stared in silence.
Of course. He didn’t know what was going on or what he could safely say.
“Relax, old man,” Nedley said. “I’m bringing people back to you. And everyone here can be trusted.”
Then Mr. Hendricks rolled joyously forward, calling out, “Lee! Nina! Joel! John! I thought I’d never see any of you again. And—” He was looking around, looking worried. His gaze finally settled on Trey. “Trey?” he asked hesitantly. “In uniform?”
“It’s a long story,” Trey said.
“I have George, too,” Nedley said. “But he’s not in very good shape. Is your nurse still here?”
Mr. Hendricks didn’t answer, just turned his head and yelled back toward the house, “Theodora! It’s George!”
A woman came running out of the house—a woman with bright red hair streaming out behind her. Mrs. Talbot.
She was peering toward the cab of the truck, as if she expected Mr. Talbot to be in the driver’s seat, in control. She didn’t gaze into the truck bed until she’d looked everyone else in the face. She did a double take when she got to Trey.
“You!” she said. “You said you’d help me. And I—I didn’t believe you….”
She was crying even before she reached down and cupped Mr. Talbot’s battered face in her hands. He moaned softly in his sleep.
“Somebody help me get him into the house,” she commanded. “He’ll need fluids, and I want to make sure there are no internal injuries.”
Trey stared at her, amazed at the transformation.
“In addition to being a giant pain in everyone’s neck,” Mr. Hendricks chuckled, “Theodora is a very talented doctor.”
“You’ll need to look at my brother’s leg, too,” Lee said.
“And his burns,” Trey said.
“I’m fine,” Ma
rk growled.
In the end, Trey, Nedley, and Mrs. Talbot worked together to carry Mr. Talbot into the house. All the others limped and hobbled in on their own. Mr. Hendricks bustled around serving vegetable broth and toast.
“You’re sure nobody followed you? You couldn’t be tracked here?” he muttered under his breath to Nedley.
“I don’t think so,” Nedley muttered back. “But who’s sure of anything right now?”
Trey wasn’t as hungry as the others, but when he sat down on one of Mr. Hendricks’s couches, he found himself dozing off, then jerking awake as soon as the nightmares started.
“When was the last time you got any sleep, young man?” Mrs. Talbot asked.
“Sleep?” Trey said as if it was a foreign word he’d never heard before. “Um, the night before last, I guess.” He’d slept on the floor of the barn, back at Mark’s family’s farm. It seemed several lifetimes ago.
“Go in the back bedroom then, and lie down,” Mrs. Talbot said.
“But—” Trey wasn’t sure he could trust himself to sleep ever again.
“Doctor’s orders,” Mrs. Talbot said. “You’re safe now. You’ll be hallucinating soon if you don’t get some good sleep. And change out of that horrible uniform—it’s giving me the creeps!”
Trey obeyed all of her commands, because it was easier than resisting. He lay on the bed, but every time he closed his eyes he saw a different horror: The Nezeree warden looming over him, yelling, “Give me my fax!” The mob swarming around him screaming, “Food! Food! Give us food!” The Population Police official back at the Grants’ house, demanding, “Give me your I.D. card.”
I don’t have an identity card anymore, Trey thought. The Nezeree warden surely knows now that I’m an enemy. How much longer before we’re caught?
Mrs. Talbot knocked on his door and came into the room holding up a white tablet and a glass of water.
“Sleeping pill,” she said. “You probably need it.”
“Is Mr. Talbot okay?” Trey asked.
“I’m hoping he will be,” she said. “Thanks to you. I—I’m stunned. I didn’t think anyone could save him.”
Trey swallowed the pill.
“I didn’t either,” he admitted.
And then he slipped into the deepest sleep of his life, one without dreams of any kind.
When he woke up it was dark outside, and the house was quiet. And Trey was starving. He found an ordinary shirt and pants waiting at the foot of his bed, and he put them on. Then he crept out of his room and down the hall.
All his friends were clustered around the fireplace in the living room.
“I told him to go on without me, but Trey said, ‘No!’” Mark was saying. “And before I could say anything else, he jumped out into the crowd and shouted, ‘Gimme! Gimme! Hey, wait, some of the food rolled under the truck!’ He tricked the crowd into moving the truck back on its wheels. And then, cool as a cucumber, he tricked them into running away from the truck, then picked me up, just like Superman, and—”
“You’re making it sound easy,” Trey objected. “You aren’t telling how scared I was.”
Mark turned to look at him.
“You didn’t look scared to me,” he said.
Is that how all heroic epics work? Trey wondered. They only tell about the bravery and leave out the fear?
“Have some popcorn,” Lee said, but he was looking at Trey in awe.
Trey grabbed a handful.
“I want to hear about your adventure, Mark,” he said. “How you and Nedley set up our escape at Nezeree.”
“Oh, that,” Mark said modestly. “There’s not much to tell.”
“Tell it anyway,” Trey said.
Mark shrugged.
“My leg hurt so bad I could hardly think,” he said. “I’m not sure I was even really awake when you got out of the truck. So, the next thing I know, this scary-looking Population Police officer’s sitting next to me. I guess I was delirious, because I just started moaning, ‘Liber, liber’—because it saved me that other time, you know? And this officer, Nedley, starts looking at me and looking at me—”
“I was scared to death you were a setup, and you were trying to trick me into betraying myself,” Nedley said from the couch behind them. Trey glanced back—Nedley had also changed out of uniform into civilian clothes.
‘And Nedley starts saying, ‘Shut up! Quit that!’ And I knew it really meant something to him. So I asked for his help,” Mark said.
“Don’t tell the story like that,” Nedley laughed. “What he said was ‘Quit pretending you’re a bad guy. I need your help, and I need it now!’ I was so surprised I almost drove the truck right into the infirmary wall.”
“I didn’t say that, did I?” Mark asked.
“Sure did,” Nedley said, chuckling. “And then Mark was the one who came up with the idea to make it look like he was kidnapping everyone. He thought nobody would shoot at us if there was a chance of ‘innocent’ Population Police guards being hit.”
“They shot at us anyway,” Trey said. He stared into the fire, with its ever-changing flames.
“Well, yeah,” Mark admitted. “But maybe not as much as they would have otherwise.”
“So I took Mark on into the infirmary, and they set his leg and cleaned out his wounds,” Nedley said. “They weren’t gentle, either. They aren’t, with prisoners. But then five minutes later, Mark’s out hopping from truck to truck in the prison parking lot, cutting the tires. I would have laughed myself silly, watching him, if I hadn’t been so scared we were going to get caught.”
“I can’t believe it worked,” Mark said.
“I can’t believe you got us and Mr. Talbot out of prison,” Lee said.
“That was thanks to Jonas Sabine,” Trey said. “He planned it all.”
They were all silent then, and Trey knew that the others had heard about the Sabines.
“Jonas was a good man,” Mr. Hendricks murmured softly. “He was my friend.”
“Maybe they haven’t executed him yet,” Trey said. “Maybe they’re still interrogating him—”
“No, they announced his death on TV,” Mr. Hendricks said heavily. “On the regular channels. The Population Police are trying to discourage all dissent by showing what happened to Jonas. It was—it was a horrible death.”
“God rest his soul,” Mrs. Talbot said. “God help us all.”
And somehow this was the scariest thing of all, to hear Mrs. Talbot sounding so solemn and reverent She’d changed since the last time Trey had seen her, when she’d bragged about polishing her fingernails, when she’d smashed expensive sculpture just for spite.
I’ve changed, too, Trey thought. We all have.
But what did that mean about their futures?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FOR a week, Trey and his friends lived like invalids. They ate, they slept, they lay around. Sometimes they watched television, but it was almost always Aldous Krakenaur making glorious speeches in front of a cheering crowd. Sometimes Trey felt feisty enough to jeer back at the screen, “Oh yeah, and what are you not showing us? How many people starved today?” Mostly they all sat in silence, trembling before Krakenaur’s shouting image, until someone got up the gumption to snap the television off.
Trey knew his friends needed the time to heal and recover. Maybe he did too. He found himself reacting oddly to the bits of news that dribbled in. It was two or three days before he asked Mr. Hendricks anything about his fellow classmates at school.
“I know they wouldn’t be outside making noise,” Trey said. “But—they’re all okay over there, aren’t they?”
Mr. Hendricks sighed heavily.
“No,” he said. “After the Government fell … after the Population Police took over … they closed down all the schools. Temporarily, they said. They came and took away all my students for work camps. They took away the able-bodied teachers, too—.”
Trey could do nothing but stare at Mr. Hendricks in horror.
“I guess my wheelchair saved me,” Mr. Hendricks said. “That and the garden Lee had all the students plant back in the spring.”
And then Trey understood that everyone was gone, that the Population Police had left Mr. Hendricks behind to die. They didn’t know that Mr. Hendricks had plenty of food to survive the winter—plenty, even with nine extra people around.
But Trey said nothing more to Mr. Hendricks. He just went and sat down to watch more television with Lee.
A few days later, Mrs. Talbot announced that Mr. Talbot was certain to make a full recovery.
“He’s sitting up and speaking coherently,” she raved. “It’s a miracle.”
And Trey just nodded, as numb to joy as he was to fear and pain.
That evening, Mrs. Talbot stopped Trey in the hallway outside Mr. Talbot’s room.
“He wants to see you now,” she said.
“M-me?” Trey stammered. ‘Are you sure he didn’t want Lee?”
“Nope,” Mrs. Talbot said, shaking her head with just a trace of her old playfulness. “He asked for you by name.”
Trey followed Mrs. Talbot into Mr. Talbot’s sickroom. Mr. Talbot’s bruises had turned a sickly shade of yellow, but he could open his eyes now. Where it wasn’t bruised, his face looked pale even against the white pillowcase.
“I—don’t remember some things,” Mr. Talbot rasped. “But I remember—you came to see me that last day. You were at my door when they were already in my house, ready to take me away. Why? Why were you there? What was so … important?”
“The Grants,” Trey said. “They—” He broke off. He couldn’t tell a man who’d just barely escaped death that two of his closest friends were dead.
“Theo told me about them,” Mr. Talbot said. He slumped against his pillows. “That was all?”
“No,” Trey wanted to say. “We were terrified and we wanted you to take care of us. To make everything better.” But he knew that wasn’t possible now. Mr. Talbot wasn’t the all-powerful, all-knowing operator anymore. He was a defeated, seriously injured man huddled in a bed in a tiny cottage. And if the Population Police found him now, he’d likely be killed.