Chapter Eighteen
Trey slid down the duct backward, dragging the Population Police uniform behind him. It was slow going, because he had so little room to maneuver, and because he was terrified of making any noise. More than once the buttons of his flannel shirt scraped against the metal duct, and then he froze, horrified at the thought that someone might be about to rip the duct apart, screaming out, ‘Aha! You! We know everything now! You’re not Travis Jackson! You’re about to die!”
No, they’ll just think that the Grant house has mice, Trey comforted himself. They’ll put out poison, and I can avoid that.
Trey knew he wasn’t thinking very rationally. But he kept inching onward, feet first That began to bother him. He wished he had eyes on his toes. What if he was about to kick out another brass grille? What if he were about to slide out into another room — one less innocuous than the bathroom? What if he was at this very moment slipping past some sort of opening that anyone could see? Trey kept turning his head and looking back over his shoulder, but that gave him a terrible crick in his neck, and he could barely see past his own body anyway. And there seemed to be nothing but darkness ahead.
He kept going.
When it seemed as though he had been crawling backward for hours, he hit a metal wall where he’d expected open air. Was he disoriented, crawling crooked? No — the wall extended on, straight and smooth, totally blocking his path. Had he reached a dead end? How could a duct just end like that? He didn’t let himself panic. He stretched his legs out, tapping experimentally in all directions with his toes, and discovered that the metal walls he’d expected to find were missing to his left and right. Suddenly it all made sense: He’d reached a fork in his path, the place where the duct leading to the bathroom branched off from some main line. This was his route to the rest of the house.
"Right or left? Which will it be?” he muttered to himself He tried to picture the ductwork in relationship to the floor plan of the entire house. He thought the left fork led toward the front door, and so was probably useless, but that was mostly just a guess. He moved his feet toward the right and began painstakingly turning the corner. Then he stopped, mid-turn.
"Stupid,?" he said under his breath. “Don’t you know you can go face first now?”
He retreated, shoved his feet the opposite direction down the duct, and soon was crawling forward, feeling his way with his hands and fingers instead of his feet and toes. He still couldn’t see anything ahead of him, but the change made him feel better.
I ought to challenge Lee and the other boys to a heat duct race as soon as we get back to school, he thought I’d beat everyone.
He was almost enjoying crawling through darkness.
Heroism by hiding, he thought. Now, that I can handle. I’ll have to change my motto. What would it be in Latin ? — Virtus, I think. for “heroism,” and latente for “hiding….”
That was when he saw the light.
At first it was just a gray shadow up ahead, a slight variation on all the endless blackness. But as he scurried forward, trying harder than ever to crawl silently, the brightness grew. Soon he could see a whole patterned grid of light in the duct in front of him. And he could hear voices.
“Unacceptable! Unacceptable, I tell you!” a man sputtered.
The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but at first Trey couldn’t place it. It wasn’t Mr. Talbot or Mr. Hendricks or any of his teachers at school. It wasn’t the screaming man from the uniform room. What other men’s voices had Trey ever heard?
Cautiously, he moved toward the light and peeked out a grille that was even larger and fancier than the one in the bathroom. He was looking down at a dark-haired man sitting at a huge desk. Rows of uniformed Population Police officers sat before him, like schoolchildren being scolded. Trey jerked back quickly, afraid one of them might look up at the wrong time. He rested his cheek against the cool metal of the duct, and listened to the pounding of his heart What if they’d already seen him? What if they could hear his heartbeat too?
But nobody screamed out, “Hey! There’s a boy hiding behind that grille!” Nobody yelled, “Capture him!” Gradually, Trey’s terror ebbed, and he could listen again.
“We are in charge now!” the man continued his tirade. “I am in charge now!”
And suddenly Trey knew who the man was. Trey had heard his voice only once before, on television, at the Talbots’ house. Trey was eavesdropping on Aldous Krakenaur, the head of the Population Police, and now, the head of the entire country.
And unless Aldous Krakenaur decided to send all his men away, letting Trey crawl on past, They was trapped there, a mere sneeze or a cough away from being discovered by his worst enemy.
Chapter Nineteen
Of course, thinking about sneezing or coughing instant1y made Trey want to do both. He thought about crawling backward, maybe even all the way to the bathroom where he’d started. But his fears about buttons raffling against the duct had multiplied tenfold. He didn’t think he was physically capable of moving right now. He lay paralyzed, listening in terror.
“Don’t you understand that we are everything now?” Krakenaur lectured. “I appropriated this house because it was the only building in the entire country suitable to the grandeur of my Government, the glory of my vision.
And because the Grants were dead and couldn’t object, Trey thought. He wondered if any of the Population Police sitting so obediently before their leader knew the truth. He felt a little more daring just to be able to think defiant thoughts.
“So I arrive today, ready to rest and savor the accomplishments of my first few glorious days in office. And what do I discover? Ragamuffins trampling my front yard, tracking dirt into my glorious entry hall. Prisoners in the basement — where is the glory and dignity and vision in that? I want a headquarters worthy of my honor!” He seemed to be pounding his fist on the desk to punctuate that last sentence.
There was a shocked silence, as if none of the officers knew how to respond. Trey felt equally stunned.
Prisoners in the basement... prisoners in the base……. Had Krakenaur just told Trey exactly where to find his friends? What other prisoners could there be?
Now the officers were mumbling among themselves.
“You issued the order to take new recruits,” someone said resentfully.
“But surely there’s a back entrance?” Krakenaur spat out “Or some hut nearby that we could appropriate for processing purposes?”
Nobody answered. Trey wondered if the officers were nodding obediently or looking dubious.
“And it’s not like there are hundreds of prisoners in the basement,” someone else muttered. “There’s just one.”
One? Trey’s heart sank. Then it was probably just Mark down there. Where could Lee and the others be?
Another officer was adding in a soothing voice, ‘Anyhow, we’re just keeping that prisoner here until we finish our interrogation. Then we’ll dispose of him. It won’t be more than a few more hours.”
Trey gulped so hard he feared the entire roomful of men could hear him. A few more hours… Trey didn’t have time to wait for Krakenaur to finish browbeating his officers and dismiss them all. He would have to crawl past them and go rescue Mark now.
Trey stared at the pattern of light coming in through the fancy grille as though he could will it into darkness. Wait a minute — maybe he could. It probably looked dark to the people outside right now. He just had to make sure they didn’t see a changing pattern of skin, hair, flannel shirt, dark pants…. Carefully, he spread out the shirt of the Population Police uniform on the bottom of the duct. Then, very quickly — so quickly he didn’t have time to think about the danger — he lifted the shirt so it covered the entire grille from the inside.