A few days later, Mrs. Talbot announced that Mr. Talbot was certain to make a full recovery.
“He’s sitting up and speaking coherently,” she raved. “It’s a miracle.”
And Trey just nodded, as numb to joy as he was to fear and pain.
That evening, Mrs. Talbot stopped Trey in the hallway outside Mr. Talbot’s room.
“He wants to see you now,” she said.
“M-me?” Trey stammered. “Are you sure he didn’t want Lee?”
“Nope,” Mrs. Talbot said, shaking her head with just a trace of her old playfulness. “He asked for you by name.”
Trey followed Mrs. Talbot into Mr. Talbot’s sickroom. Mr. Talbot’s bruises had turned a sickly shade of yellow, but he could open his eyes now. Where it wasn’t bruised, his face looked pale even against the white pillowcase.
“I — don’t remember some things,” Mr. Talbot rasped. “But I remember — you came to see me that last day. You were at my door when they were already in my house, ready to take me away. Why? Why were you there? What was so… important?”
“The Grants,” Trey said. “They—” He broke off. He couldn’t tell a man who’d just barely escaped death that two of his closest friends were dead.
“Theo told me about them,” Mr. Talbot said. He slumped against his pillows. “That was all?”
“No,” Trey wanted to say. “We were terrified and we wanted you to take care of us. To make everything better.” But he knew that wasn’t possible now. Mr. Talbot wasn’t the all-powerful, all-knowing operator anymore. He was a defeated, seriously injured man huddled in a bed in a tiny cottage. And if the Population Police found him now, he’d likely be killed.
“I was going to give you the papers I found in Mr. Grant’s secret office,” Trey said instead, with a shrug.
This news transformed Mr. Talbot. He sat up straight, as if he’d just been miraculously cured.
“You were? Do you still have them?” he asked.
They had transferred the papers from the truck into his flannel shirt, then into his first Population Police uniform, then into the second one when he took a shower and changed back at Nezeree. But he hadn’t really looked at them since that first day back in the limousine. He supposed they were still tucked into the uniform, along with the warden’s fax, everything crumpled on the floor in his bedroom, kicked into a corner to be forgotten.
“I guess,” he said.
“Can you bring them to me now?” Mr. Talbot asked eagerly.
“Sure,” Trey said.
He went and got them. He smoothed out the wrinkles and fold marks and handed the papers to Mr. Talbot.
“They’re just financial records,” They said dully. “Mr. Grant owed you money when he died.”
“No,” Mr. Talbot said. “They’re codes. Each of these numbers represents a third child with a fake I.D. Grant thought I was just running a black-market business on the side…. He thought we were laundering money; even he never knew the truth. But if Krakenaur had found this… if the Population Police had been able to decode this… there would have been no hope for any of us.”
Trey gazed down at the documents with new respect. He remembered how he’d wanted to put them in the knapsack, which the Population Police confiscated and the mob tore apart. He remembered how he’d thought of using them to bargain with the Population Police for Mark’s release. He remembered how he’d considering leaving them back at the Nezeree prison. It seemed like a miracle that he’d managed to bring them safely to Mr. Talbot.
“I brought these from your house,” he said, holding out the rest of the papers. ‘And there are more out in the truck. Are these codes too?”
“No. That one’s just a grocery list,” Mr. Talbot said, pointing. “And this was a math worksheet my daughter did when she was a little….. .“ His face softened. They looked down at the row of numbers, with the name “Jen” written crookedly on them. “Thank you for bringing this to me,” Mr. Talbot murmured.
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.”