Among the Brave Read Online Free PDF Page A

him. Hope.
     
    Maybe this is it. It’s beginning. Maybe riots were what the resistance leaders had planned, to get the Government to change the Population Law. Maybe third children aren’t even illegal anymore. Maybe the riots have already worked.
     
    Trey’s friend Lee had been determined, for as long as Trey had known him, to change the Government, so third children could be free from hiding, free from using fake identities if Trey ever wanted to go out Before Lee, Trey had had another friend, Jason, who had said he’d wanted the same thing. But Jason had been lying, and that had been enough to make Trey wonder if he could ever trust anyone.
    But maybe now, maybe with the riots ... Trey remembered another fact that gave him even more hope: Mr. Talbot was a double agent Publicly, he said he opposed third children. He worked for the Population Police, a group that had been created solely to catch third children and the people who hid them. But secretly, under cover, Mr. Talbot sabotaged his employer, rescuing illegal children and giving them fake I.D.’s. Maybe if the Population Law had been eliminated, the Government had decided to arrest everyone who worked for the Population Police. So of course Mr. Talbot would have been arrested too. Maybe Trey and Lee and their other friends would just have to testify about Mr. Talbot’s true beliefs, and they’d be able to rescue him. Maybe Trey could help Mrs. Talbot after all.
    Then Trey remembered something else.
    “They told about the riots on TV?” he said incredulously. “That’s impossible. They’d never tell about something like that.”
    Trey himself had never seen a television. But he’d heard his father say that it only broadcast propaganda. “Think they’d ever let a TV anchor say anything bad about the Government?” Trey’s father had taunted his mother once. “Think they’d ever say anything that didn’t make it seem like our country is paradise itself?”
    Riots didn’t belong in paradise.
    Mrs. Talbot snorted.
    “Well, not on regular TV, of course,” she said. “The Baron channels.”
    “What?” Trey said. He’d always known that the Government allowed some people to have special privileges. The Barons, as Trey were called, were rich while everyone else was poor. Trey had so much food Trey could afford to throw it away—while everyone else scrambled to get dry crusts or pretended that moldy cheese was perfectly fine. Trey lived in fine mansions, while everyone else crowded together, entire families in a single room.
    Trey hadn’t known that the Barons even had their own TV channels.
    “You can’t expect us to trust the regular broadcasts,” Mrs. Talbot said defensively “We Barons need. . . information that other people don’t.”
    “But how do Trey do that?” Trey asked. He tried to remember how television signals were transmitted. “How can the signals go to some TVs and not to others?”
    “Some sort of special cable, I guess,” Mrs. Talbot said with a shrug. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
    She seemed relieved to be talking about something ordinary, like TV, instead of death and danger and foiled plans. Trey stood up and began climbing the stairs.
     
    Surreal, he thought. This entire day has been so surreal I don’t even know what to be afraid of anymore.
     
    He followed Mrs. Talbot out the basement door and down a long hallway. Trey reached a huge room full of wide couches and coffee tables. It had probably been an extraordinarily beautiful room originally, but, like the basement, it was a mess now. Only the enormous screen covering a large portion of one wall seemed intact Mrs. Talbot stepped over ripped cushions and picked up a black remote control from one of the coffee tables. She hit a button on the remote, and the screen seemed to come to life, with gray and black and white dots dancing across the surface. It was a fascinating sight, like some of the bizarre artwork Trey had seen in books.
    “See?” Mrs. Talbot