Margaret Haddix - Among the Brave

Mrs. Talbot gazed over his shoulder, tears in her eyes. They felt like he was intruding on a private moment.

Maybe, back home, Mom acts this way when she comes across papers I wrote, he thought Just because she’d sent him away, it didn’t mean she didn’t miss him.

It didn’t mean she didn’t love him.

“What are you going to do with the papers now?” They asked, to distract himself from the lump in his throat. “The ones with the secret codes, I mean?”

Mr. Talbot’s expression turned stony again.

“Destroy them,” he said. “We’ll burn them in the fireplace, so there’s no danger of the Population Police ever finding them.”

“We can make a ceremony of it” Mrs. Talbot said.

“But-,” Trey said.

“But what?” Mr. Talbot said.

“Ceremonial defiance — I like that” “But—,” Trey said.

“But what?” Mr. Talbot said.

Trey could only shake his head. He couldn’t quite figure out why he wanted to object Except he didn’t think miracles should be destroyed.

Isn’t it enough to know that the Population Police won’t ever get those papers? he asked himself.

Mrs. Talbot borrowed a spare wheelchair from Mr. Hendricks and wheeled Mr. Talbot out into the living room. Mr. Hendricks rounded up everyone else. Lee lit a fire in the fireplace.

Mrs. Talbot held the papers high over her head.

“Aldous Krakenaur, eat your heart out,” she proclaimed gleefully. “Here are one hundred children who are safe from you forever."

“Nobody will ever know who they are,” Mr. Talbot intoned solemnly from his wheelchair.

Trey watched Mrs. Talbot lower the papers toward the flames. The words Nobody will ever know who they are, echoed in his head.

“Yes they will,” he muttered to himself.

Mrs. Talbot gently placed the first page in the fire. The flames began to lick at the edges. In seconds, the codes would be nothing but ash.

Trey sprang up from the couch and grabbed the paper out of the fireplace. The flames continued to eat away at the edges, hungrily working toward the all-important numbers in the center of the page, hungrily working toward Trey’s fingers. He dropped the paper to the carpet and stomped out the fire.

Everyone was staring at him, speechlessly. Mrs. Talbot, who’d been about to put the next page in the fire, stood frozen, her arm stopped mid-reach.

“They’ll know,” Trey said. “The kids will. Even if every trace of their old identities — every paper record — is destroyed, they’ll still know who they are. Lee, who are you? Really?”

“I’m—” Lee began, and stopped.

Mark finished for him.

“He’s Luke Garner,” Mark said. “And even if he spends the next fifty years pretending to be Lee Grant, he’ll still be Luke Garner. My brother.”

He thumped his cast on the floor for emphasis.

“And you, Nina,” Trey said. “Do you think of yourself as Nina? Or—”

“Elodie,” Nina whispered. “Underneath it all, I’m still Elodie.”

“And Joel and John, you’ve gotten new fake names twice. Do you still remember who you began as?”

Silently, as timid as mice, the two younger boys nodded.

“And I,” Trey said, “am not Thavis Jackson. I’m braver than I used to be, I’ve done things now that I never would have dreamed of before. But I’m still Thahern Cromwell Torrance. I always will be.”

It was terrifying and thrilling, all at once, to say his name aloud. Trey turned to address the grown-ups.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “You’ve been wonderful helpers, but you don’t know what it’s like to be a third child. An illegal. The Population Police want to destroy us, to erase us from the earth. But—” He grabbed the remaining papers from Mrs. Talbot’s hands and shook them. “If anyone can defeat the Population Police, it’s us. It’s our lives at stake. We need these names, so we can unite all the third children. So we can resist their evil. Together.”

A stunned silence filled the room, then Mr. Talbot muttered sadly, “He sounds just like Jen.”

Trey remembered that Jen and her friends had died in their quest for freedom.

Somehow that fact didn’t scare him now.

Mr. Hendricks cleared his throat.

“Trey, I admire your sentiment,” he said. “Thuly I do. And your courage. You’ve already accomplished an incredible feat, saving your friends. But the Population Police have taken over everything now. George here spent years assembling his resistance movement, and it’s all gone now; I fear that the only ones left are in this room tonight. So, your little speech was certainly impassioned and noble— but not very realistic.”

“The game is over,” Mrs. Talbot said. “We lost.”

Trey looked from face to face, trying to gauge the emotions of his friends and the adults he’d grown to admire. These were the bravest people he’d ever met. But they all looked terrified.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked. “Hide out here forever?”

“What else can we do?” Mr. Hendricks asked.

They did mean to keep hiding, he realized. After everything that had happened, the most they felt capable of was to huddle in an out-of-the-way cottage and pray they were never discovered.

“I, for one, have had enough of hiding,” Trey said, amazed at the words he heard coming out of his own mouth. But they were true. “The Population Police are not invincible. They have mobs attacking them.” He remembered the sentry on the bridge. ‘Their own officers desert and steal their food. With all those televised speeches and cheering crowds, Aldous Krakenaur would have you believe that he’s wildly popular and totally in control. But he hasn’t consolidated his power. His organization is. disorganized. He’s vulnerable now. If we hide out and wait and bide our time, maybe we’ll miss the biggest chance of our lifetimes.”

“Again, pretty words,” Mr. Hendricks said. He had an edge to his voice now. “But what do you propose to do?”

Trey didn’t know. He felt like he’d talked himself out onto a limb, and was about to faIl flat on his face. Maybe his words were just words after all; maybe they were meaningless.

And then, he did know what he had to do.

“I joined the Population Police,” he said. “I can go back. I can watch and listen and… and sabotage them. Like Mr. Talbot did. And I can find others to help me.”

‘You’d be gambling that we managed to fool the warden back at Nezeree,” Nedley said. “And that there’s not a price out on your head because of your connection to the Sabines.”

“I can join again under another identity. In disguise. Nobody paid any attention to me as Thavis Jackson except the warden. I’d just have to avoid him and Nezeree. I can get another identity, can’t I?” Trey directed this question at Mr. Hendricks.

After a brief pause, Mr. Hendricks nodded.

“It’s a hard life,” Mr. Talbot said. “Dangerous. The most likely outcome is death.”

He stared into the fire, and Trey knew that he wasn’t just watching the flames. He was remembering all his friends and trusted colleagues, now dead. He had been beaten nearly to death himself

“I know,” Trey said. “But I have to try. Will—” He swallowed hard. “Will anyone come with me?”

The question hung in the air like smoke, and for a moment Trey feared that no one would answer it. He didn’t want to go alone. But he would if he had to.

Then Nedley stepped forward.

“I’m in,” he said. “I’m not much for waiting around; I’m ready for another adventure. If it’s the death of me, so be it.”

Lee was nodding too.

“Being in prison scared me,” he said. “Some things are… worse than death. But I stood back and let a friend be the brave one once before. This time, I’m going with Trey.”