"I bet the rest of you were getting food somewhere else," she said.

"Not much," Alia said in a small voice, looking down. She looked back up at Nina, her eyes flashing. "7 thought you were good. I wanted to tell. But these guys"-she pointed at Percy, Matthias, and Mr. Talbot-"they said I had to wait until you told us everything. Until you told us that you were supposed to betray us to the Population Police."

"I did that tonight," Nina said wonderingly. She looked around again at the circle of people, the circle of light in the dark woods.

She remembered how panicked she'd been, running out to the woods only minutes earlier. She hadn't been thinking at all of saving her own life. She'd only wanted to save Percy, Matthias, and Alia.

But she hadn't cared that much about them back when she first met them, when she offered them a chance to escape, when she saw the fake policemen by the river.

"You gave me a lot of chances," she said to Mr. Talbot.

"I thought you deserved them," he said. "You didn't deserve what happened to you before."

Nina remembered the day she was arrested, how nobody had spoken out on her behalf as she glided for' ward in the dining hall. She remembered how much she'd trusted Jason, and then he had betrayed her. No, she hadn't deserved that. Nobody did. What she deserved was the way Gran and the aunties had loved her, the way they'd hidden her even though they might have been killed for it. But Alia, Percy, and Matthias hadn't deserved being betrayed, either. They hadn't deserved weeks in a dark prison cell, weeks sleeping outdoors on rocks and twigs and itchy leaves. But they'd endured all of that, willingly, for her. They'd agreed to endure all of that before they even knew if she was good or bad.

Nina's eyes filled up with tears, but they weren't tears of fear or panic or sorrow now. They were tears of joy.

"Thank you," she whispered, and the words seemed to encompass everyone in front of her-Percy, Matthias, and Alia, Mr. Talbot, even Lee and Trey. But the words were more powerful than that. Her whisper seemed to fly through the night, through the dark. Somewhere, far away, she could even imagine Gran and the aunties hearing her, too.

M*.

T.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

Nina stood beside Lee Grant, pulling corn from a row of stalks.

"Leave the small ears to grow," Lee cautioned. "We only need enough for the feast tonight."

"Only?" Nina laughed. "There'll be twenty people there!"

"Forty ears, then," Lee countered. "That's not much. Back home, when my mom was canning corn, we used to pick-"

"What? Forty million?" Nina teased.

In the days since she'd been caught, she'd been staying at Mr. Hendricks's house with Percy, Matthias, and Alia. But she'd spent a lot of time with Lee and already listened to dozens of "back home" stories. She didn't know what it was like at Harlow School for Girls, but at Hendricks, boys were not pretending so much to be their fake identities. They were telling the truth more.

Nina jerked another ear from a stalk.

"Anyway, forget forty ears," she said. "If you're figuring two per person, that's only thirty-eight. I don't think I'll

ever be able to eat corn again, not after the way you scared me in the garden last week, midbite."

"More for me," Lee said, clowning a selfish grab around all the corn they'd picked so far.

Nina wondered if this was how normal children acted-children who'd never had to hide. She guessed she'd have a chance to find out now. She, Percy, Matthias, and Alia were being sent on to another school, one where third children with fake I.D.'s mixed with firstborns and secondborns. That was why they were having a feast tonight, a combination of a celebration and a farewell.

"Given how things happened, Harlow School is prob' ably not the best place for you anymore," Mr. Hendricks had told Nina.

Nina had had another flash of remembering that hor-rific canyon of eyes, watching her walk to her doom.

"I... I think I can forgive the other girls," she had said. "Now."

"But are they ready to forgive you?" Mr. Hendricks asked. "No matter how much you reassure them, how much the officials reassure them, there will always be someone who suspects that you just got off, that you really were working with Jason. They haven't... grown up like you have."

And Nina understood. She wasn't the same lovesick, easily terrified child she'd been at Harlow School. That was why she liked talking to Lee now. He'd grown up a lot, too. The other boys looked up to him. They didn't even call

M*.

him Lee anymore. He was mostly L.G.-and they said it reverently.

Nina still called him Lee. She didn't like too many things changing.