Margaret Haddix: Among the Enemy

At first he found only splinters. The floor was made of rough wooden planks that hadn't been sanded and didn't fit together well. The gaps between the planks were so wide that Matthias began to fear an entire book of matches could be hidden between two planks and Matthias would never know. So he fell into a pattern of sweeping his entire hand across a plank (carefully, trying to avoid the splin-ters), then wedging his fingers down between the cracks before moving on to the next plank.

That was how he discovered the secret latch.:

Matthias didn't know what it was when his fingers brushed it, tucked away on the underside of one of the planks. But it was the first thing he'd touched that wasn't wood, and it puzzled him: Who would put a round, hard knob underneath a floor? He felt all around it, pushing it from side to side. When he pushed it to the right, something clicked.

And then the floor rose up before him.

Matthias was so stunned, it took him a few minutes even to wonder how he could see the floor moving. There was a light. Under the floor. He blinked a few times, and the sight before him began to make sense. He'd found the latch for a trapdoor, leading, to an underground room.

Matthias slid over to the trapdoor opening — for it was i actually just a small square that had moved, not the entire 'floor — and peered down. A ladder led down to a tidy room illuminated by one dim lantern. A row of cots stood at one end of the room, and he could just barely make out a sink at the other end. Cots. A sink.

"I think I just found us a place to stay for the night," he said aloud to Percy and Alia. 'And then you'll both be fine in the morning. Okay?"

His voice sounded strange and croaky in the dark night. Neither of his friends answered.

He pulled Alia toward him and began struggling to carry her down the ladder. He laid her as gently as he could on one of the cots and covered her with a blanket he found on the floor.

"I'll try to find some food for you as soon as I take care of Percy," he told her.

Her only response was a moan. The bandage Percy had fashioned for her had fallen off somewhere in the woods, so the wound on her head was exposed, all seepy and puffy-looking. A few strands of her hair were plastered to the wound, and Matthias felt faint at the thought of hav-ing to pull them away, hurting her even more.

"I'll be right back," he promised her. n He went back up the ladder. He tried carrying Percy down the same way he had Alia: over his shoulder. But Percy was nearly as tall and heavy as Matthias himself, and Matthias couldn't work out the proper arrangement of arms and legs. Halfway down the ladder, Matthias fell, and Percy landed right on top of him on the packed-dirt floor. Percy let out a roar of agony.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," Matthias apologized, but even the fall didn't awaken Percy.

Matthias struggled to his feet. Ignoring the pain in his own legs and spine, he dragged Percy over to a cot near Alia's. Percy left a trail of blood behind him.

How much blood can somebody lose and still live? Matthias wondered.

"I'll stop the bleeding now," he promised Percy. "Right after I shut the trapdoor. When the trapdoor's shut, no one can find us down here. We're safe. I think there's some food down here — oh, yes! I see some bread over there on a shelf. I'll soak that in water and feed it to you and Alia. And I can tear up some of these blankets for bandages…."

He wanted so badly for one of his friends to finish his list of blessings for him with And God loves us. Then he would be able to believe that the underground room was a safe place, that nobody would find them there, that his friends' wounds would heal. But his voice trailed off into silence, and no one answered him, no one at all.

Matthias did everything he could for his friends, but there was so much he didn't know. Could Percy's leg heal even if Matthias didn't take the bullet out? What did it mean that Alia flickered in and out of consciousness and seemed barely aware even when she was awake?

"They'll both be fine tomorrow," he told himself firmly. He managed to choke down a bit of bread and water him^ self, then blew out the lantern and curled up on a cot between his two friends.

He woke, hours later, to the sound of Alia crying. He lit the lantern and crouched by her cot.

"Shh," he murmured. "I'm here."

Alia stared up at him.

"Why doesn't it stop hurting?" she asked. "It feels like my head cracked in half, and every time I move, it cracks open some more." She flinched, as if just the act of talking was painful.

"Shh. Go back to sleep" was the best comfort Matthias could offer. He wished he had some aspirin, butmaybe even that wouldn't be enough for her.

He lay back down on his own cot, but sleep was impossible now.

What can I do, God? he prayed desperately. How can I help Alia? How can I save Percy?

He got up and took the lantern around the room, searching more thoroughly than he'd searched the night before. The cupboards and shelves over the sink contained an amazing quantity of food: bread and potatoes, apples, even a hunk of cheese. But that was all there was.

“Why did they even have this room?” he muttered to himself. It must have been hard work digging out this huge space. Why hadn’t the cabin’s owners just built a larger cabin?

Because they had something to hide. .

Matthias walked slowly around the room, stopping every few paces to tap his foot on the dirt floor. Then he felt carefully along the walls.

He found what he was looking for behind one of the cabinets over the sink. The wood wall swung away, revealing a safe with a combination lock.

Percy was the smart one, and Alia was the one with a sixth sense for picking locks. But neither of them could help Matthias now. At least he had determination on his side. He turned the numbered lock slowly, listening for clicks. A hope had begun to grow inside him. Maybe the seventeen "rebels" in the cabin had been smuggling medical supplies. Sometimes people did that. Once, Matthias remembered, a man had come and asked Samuel if they could use his tunnel to store some stolen medicine.

"You'd be helping people, old man," the smuggler had said. "The people who are going to get this medicine would die without it. The Government certainly isn't doing anything for them."

Samuel had asked the man for a few days to think it over. Matthias remembered watching Samuel sit and pray and think. Finally he told the smuggler no.

"What about the people the medicine was intended for?" Samuel had asked. "What happens to them when you steal their medicine? What if they die? It's not my place to decide who lives and who dies, whose life has the greater value."

"But — those people are Barons. They're rich. They have everything they need!" the smuggler had argued.

"Maybe not," Samuel had said. "Not if they're unwilling to share with the poor. They need love, and they need compassion, and they need to know God. Stealing from them won't give them any of those things."

The smuggler had left shaking his head at Samuel's foolishness. Matthias thought maybe the smuggler had offered Samuel money too — money to feed himself and Percy and Alia. Matthias hadn't really understood. If this safe contains medicine, he told himself, still turning the lock, I'm giving it to Percy and Alia. I don't care who else was supposed to have it.

The lock clicked one final time, and Matthias jerked on the safe door. It actually opened an inch or so.

Medicine, medicine, medicine. ., Matthias chanted to himself as he swung the safe door farther out.

Flat white plastic cards fell out on the ground.