Among the Betrayed (2 page)

People always say that death's the worst thing that can happen to you,
she thought.
It's not.

She wished the man had just killed her and been done with it. She could have died—well, not happily, but at least with something to clutch on to, something to believe in:
Jason loves me. Oh, Jason, my beloved, good-bye!
In the time since her arrest, she realized, she'd begun picturing herself and Jason as the kind of tragic, star-crossed lovers who inhabited Aunty Zenka's favorite books and TV shows.

Gran and the other aunties always made fun of Aunty Zenka for liking those books and shows.

“Oh, give me a break!” Nina could remember Aunty Lystra complaining one evening when Aunty Zenka was reading aloud by candlelight. “Why doesn't the beautiful, vivacious heroine just tell Jacques, ‘Hey, you've got incurable TB. Life's too short to hang around watching you die. Ciao!' ”

“Because they're in love!” Aunty Zenka had protested. “And love is—”

“A load of garbage,” Aunty Lystra finished for her. Aunty Lystra worked for the sanitation department. She was always comparing things to garbage.

Nina had felt sorry for poor, sentimental Aunty Zenka, who could get misty-eyed in the first seconds of one of her shows, with the first sentence of one of her books. But now Nina thought Aunty Lystra must be right. Aunty Lystra would think Nina had been a fool to trust Jason in the first place.

But he was so nice to me,
Nina defended herself.
And he was so strong and handsome, and he knew so much. . . .

For the first time Nina thought to wonder:
How
had he known so much? He'd known that the woods were a safe place to meet. He'd known about Harlow School for Girls. He'd known the exact right time of day to slip a note under the front door of the school, when the girls were walking to class. So a girl, not a teacher, would find his note.

Nina had been that girl. She lost herself, remembering. Two months ago, in the hallway at Harlow School, she'd scooped up a folded-over page that other girls had walked right past. She'd held the cream-colored, heavy-weight paper in her hand for a long moment, daydreaming about what it might be. She'd known it was probably nothing interesting, nothing that concerned her: a notice about electric rates, maybe, or a government edict about the size
of spoons in the school kitchen. But as long as she didn't open it, she could imagine it was something exciting—like Cinderella's invitation to the prince's ball, perhaps. And since
she
was the one who'd picked it up . . .

The suspense had been too much. Nina had slid her finger between the edges of paper, breaking the seal. Carefully she'd unfolded the page and read:

Nina had never heard of Hendricks School. She had never been in the woods—any woods. Except for the day she came to the school, she'd never been outdoors at all. She was a little worried about the word “shadows.” Did it mean what she thought it meant? Was this dangerous?

But Nina didn't really care. She knew instantly that she was going to that meeting. She would have gone if the note had said, “To all Harlow girls who are concerned about hammers.” Or “fruit flies.” Or “pencils.” Or “prehistoric civilizations' development of canals and aqueducts”—the subject she'd just ignored in her last class. Nina felt like she'd been waiting her entire thirteen years to receive this invitation.

Convincing her friends was a little harder.

“We're not supposed to go outside,” Sally said timidly when Nina whispered her secret after lights-out that night.

“Nobody ever
said
that,” Nina argued, trying to keep her own panic out of her voice. If her friends refused to go, would she have the nerve to go alone?

“They never said, ‘Don't brush your teeth with toilet water,' either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to do it,” Nina's other roommate, Bonner, argued.

Sally was tiny and golden haired, and Bonner was tall and dark and big boned, practically burly. Since Nina was medium height and medium weight, with medium brown hair, she always felt like the link between the other two. When they walked down the hall together, Nina was always in the middle. When the other two disagreed, Nina was always the one who suggested a compromise. Having both the other two oppose her made Nina feel a little desperate.

“Look, they want to talk about shadows,” Nina said. Even in the dark she could tell that both of her friends froze at the sound of that one word. Harlow School was full of secrets that everyone knew but almost never discussed. At the beginning of the school year, when Nina was still horribly homesick, she'd amused herself by imagining Aunty Rhoda, her most practical aunt, materializing in the dining hall at breakfast or lunch or dinner, and marching up to the front of the room to lay out the truth for everybody:

“Fact: Every single one of you girls is a ‘shadow child'—a
third or fourth or maybe even fifth child whose very birth was illegal because the Government doesn't allow people to have more than two kids.

“Fact: All of you came here with fake I.D.'s certifying that you are somebody else, somebody the Government thinks has a right to exist.

“Fact: Anyone with half a brain could see you're all pretending. Half the time the blond, Swedish-looking girl forgets to answer to the name, Uthant Mogadishu. And she's not the only one. All of you cower at any mention of the Government. All of you tremble any time the door opens.

“Conclusion: So why don't you all just drop the little charade and talk about it? Tell one another your real names. Talk about your real families, not the pretend brothers and sisters and parents you've probably never even met. Compare notes on how you managed to hide, all these years, before you got a fake I.D. Console one another about the difficulties of coming out of hiding, instead of lying in bed each night sobbing silently, pretending you don't hear your roommates crying, too.”

But of course Aunty Rhoda was miles away, and Nina wasn't brave enough to stand up and make that speech herself. Still, with Sally and Bonner, in the dark of their room at night, she'd dropped hints, and they'd dropped hints, too. All school year it'd been like following the trail of bread crumbs in the fairy tale—Nina had never learned very much at any one time, but by spring she knew that
Sally had two older sisters and a house by the seashore and parents who were working with the Underground, attempting to overthrow the Government. And Bonner had a brother and a sister and a huge extended family of aunts and uncles who all lived in the same apartment building and took turns taking care of Bonner.

“They want to talk about shadows,” Bonner repeated. “Right. So do the Population Police. What if it's a trap?”

“What if it isn't?” Nina hissed. “What if this is our only chance?” She prayed the other two wouldn't ask what it was a chance
for
—she'd never be able to explain. Maybe Sally and Bonner had never gotten to the point, in hiding, where they wanted to scream at the four walls around them. Maybe they hadn't read and reread and re-reread all the fairy tales where princesses were released from magic spells and evil enchantments. Maybe they'd never thought, even at Harlow,
Oh, please, there's got to be more. This can't be all my life is.

“Look, you can take your I.D. card with you into the woods,” Nina said. “The Population Police can't do anything to you if you have your I.D. card. And we don't even have to talk to these boys. We can just hide behind the trees and watch them. Just come with me. Please?”

“Oh, all right,” Bonner said grimly.

“Sally?” Nina asked.

“Okay,” Sally said in her smallest voice. Nina knew that if there'd been even a glimmer of light in the room, she would have been able to see absolute terror in Sally's eyes.
For once Nina was glad for darkness.

So they'd gone into the woods, clutching their fake I.D.'s like lifelines. But they hadn't just hidden and watched. They'd met Jason and his friends. And Jason had told them a wonderful story about a girl not any older than them, Jen Talbot, who'd led a rally demanding rights for third children like them. Jen had been brave enough to tell the Government that third children shouldn't have to hide. Jen had died for her beliefs, but still, listening to Jason's wonderfully deep voice praise Jen, Nina had wanted to be just like her.

But now that Nina had been arrested, it looked like Sally and Bonner had been right. The woods had been dangerous. The three of them shouldn't have stepped foot outside Harlow School. Nina should never have met Jason, never have kissed him, never have fallen in love.

“No!” Nina found herself screaming again. “No, no, no, no, no . . .”

T
he hating man came back. Nina stared at him coldly, her eyes like slits, her chin held high.

“You're the one who lied,” she said. “Why should I believe you? You can say anything you like. But I know. Jason wouldn't betray me.”

The hating man wouldn't meet her gaze. He glanced to the other side of her jail cell.

“Why haven't you eaten?” he asked.

For the first time Nina noticed a tray of food just beyond her feet. Two thick crusts of black bread, a smear of synthetic butter on each, were stacked on a plate with a small, wormy-looking apple. It was no worse than the food she'd eaten at Harlow, or at home.

“I wasn't hungry,” Nina said defiantly, and it was true. But now that she looked at the food, her stomach rumbled.

“Right,” the man said with a disbelieving snort. “Hunger strikes aren't terribly effective when you're condemned to die anyway.”

He spoke so casually that it was all Nina could do not to gasp. So it was true. They were going to kill her. Fine.
But they couldn't make her die hating Jason.

The man rocked back on his heels and squinted at Nina, like a naturalist studying an interesting bug. For a while the Government had been big on the idea that everyone should eat insects, so they'd shown a lot of bug shows on TV. Nina had never thought to feel sorry for the bugs being studied.

“So,” the man said. “Is Nina Idi your real name?”

No!
Nina wanted to scream. It would feel so good to tell the truth now, at the end. Nina had always loved her real name, Elodie. Elodie Luria. When she was really little, Aunty Zenka had even made up a song about Nina's name: “You're just like a melody . . . Our little Elodie.” Elodie was a fairy-tale name, a princess's name. When Gran and the aunties had scrimped and saved and finally gotten enough money to buy Nina a fake I.D. on the black market, Gran had come home and laid out the I.D. card on the table like a golden prize. Nina had tiptoed over and read the name, with all the aunties and Gran circled around like the good fairy godmothers at Sleeping Beauty's christening. Then Nina had begun screaming.

“Nina Idi? That's my name now? That's like . . . like Ninny Idiot! You want me to be a Ninny Idiot?” Even screaming, Nina had felt ashamed. That little rectangle of plastic was her ticket to freedom. It represented twelve years of Aunty Lystra wearing glasses she couldn't see through anymore, twelve years of Aunty Rhoda wearing the same coat, twelve years of Gran darning socks so many
times the socks were more darn than sock. Twelve years of all of them living on stale bread and thin broth. Still, Nina couldn't help feeling that the precious card was her death sentence instead of her reprieve. If she wasn't Elodie anymore, if she was supposed to be this strange new person, Nina Idi, then she wasn't Aunty Zenka's little melody, she wasn't Gran's little sweetiekins, she wasn't the one beloved ray of sunshine in an apartment full of tired old women. She wasn't anybody at all.

Somehow, amazingly, Gran and the aunties had recognized Nina's screaming as fear, not brattiness. They'd all crowded around her, hugging her, comforting her, “You'll always be our special girl, no matter what. Even when you're away at that school . . .”

And just hearing that word, “school,” Nina had understood that Nina Idi really was killing Elodie Luria. Elodie could exist only in Gran's apartment. Nina was the one who was going to leave.

But now if Nina Idi was about to die, wouldn't she rather die as Elodie?

It was so tempting.

“That's not a tough question,” the man chided her. “Are you Nina Idi or not?”

“You're the one who arrested me,” Nina snapped, just to buy some time. “Don't
you
know my name? Maybe you didn't even arrest the right person!”

The man turned around.

“Guard?” he called toward the door. “A chair?”

Minutes later a guard appeared with a solid wood chair that the man slid into. He leaned back in it, obviously enjoying the greater comfort. Nina still huddled on the cold concrete floor. The guard left, locking the door behind him.

“I decided this conversation might be worth continuing longer than I wanted to spend squatting on your putrid floor,” the hating man said, as if it were Nina's fault her jail cell was dirty. He leaned toward her, resting his chin on his hands, his elbows on his knees. “Now. Surely you realize my question wasn't as stupid as you imply. After all, the other criminal we arrested yesterday morning, Scott Renault, was masquerading as Jason Barstow, pretending to be an illegal third child who'd gotten ahold of a fake I.D.
Supposedly
he was trying to trick other illegals with fake I.D.'s into revealing their true identity so he could report them to the Population Police. Got all that? His story, of course, is ludicrous. Everyone knows that in this great country of ours it's impossible for an illegal to get a fake I.D. No law-abiding citizen would defy our beloved Government so flagrantly.”