Among the Enemy by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

him, close at his heels. The commander climbed stairs to a brick wall and stabbed a gloved finger at a button Matthias could barely see.
"Glorious future," the commander said into an inter^ com.
    There was a buzzing, and the commander opened a windowless door in the wall. A guard stood just inside the door.
"Commander," he said, managing a flustered salute. "I wasn't expecting you—usually nobody comes at night."
The commander slapped him so hard, the guard's head slammed back against the wall.
"You must be on alert always!" the commander snapped.
The guard said nothing, only bowed his head as if he'd fully deserved the slap, fully deserved the pain.
The commander began walking angrily down a long, vacant corridor. Matthias practically had to run to keep up. When they reached a door on the left side of the cor^ ridor, the commander slid a key from his pocket He looked down at the key, smiling, his anger gone. Then, almost reverently, he slid the key into the lock and turned the doorknob.
Even before the commander flipped on the lights, Matthias had the sense that he was standing before an enormous room. The darkness was that vast. When the lights flickered to life a second later, Matthias could only gape.
    In front of him lay a gigantic storeroom of food. Shelves filled with canned goods ran from the floor to the ceiling— and the ceiling was high overhead, seemingly as distant as the sky. Crates of apples, oranges, peaches, and potatoes were stacked as far as the eye could see. Cans of condensed milk and wheels of cheese towered above Matthias's head.
    To Matthias, who'd lived on crusts of bread from other people's garbage for most of his life, the sight before him was more dazzling than a roomful of diamonds.
    "Ooooh," Matthias breathed out. He wished fervently that Percy and Alia were still alive to see this marvel, to share this view with him. "How did you find all this?"
He was thinking that the Population Police must have caught some amazingly skillful smuggler.
"We didn't 'find' it," the commander replied with a chuckle. "Oh, no. We've been storing up food here for more than a decade. Since the droughts began. Of course, we've had to throw some food away as it rots."
"Throw it away?" Matthias repeated, uncomprehend-ingly. He looked back and forth between the commander and the mountains of food. When he peered closely, he could see signs of rot on some of the potatoes, bruises on some of the apples, the beginnings of mold on some of the cheese. "You just throw it out?" he said. "But... people are starving."
The commander shrugged.
"It's our food, not theirs," he said.
And something happened to Matthias in that moment, watching the commander shrug. He lost none of his grief, none of his anguish over his friends. But something changed inside him. He looked at the piles of food again, and it was like he was seeing it with new eyes.
    This is wrong, he thought. Letting food rot while people die of hunger. It's evil.
    He thought about all the awful things that had hap-pened that he felt responsible for. The tree falling, killing innocent children, and hurting Alia. Percy being shot. Mrs. Talbot being trapped. He'd never intended anything bad to happen. He'd been trying his hardest to keep every' one safe.
    But the Population Police did their evil deeds deliberately. The commander knew that people were dying, and he didn't care.
I am not like the commander, Matthias thought. We have nothing in common.
An ache grew in his throat and he wanted to sob, but he set his jaw and held it in. He'd been wrong to send Nina away, wrong to refuse to help her, wrong to let the commander treat him like a pet. He'd been wrong to think that everything ended when he lost Percy and Alia.
But those are mistakes I can fix, Matthias told himself. He breathed in the too-sweet smell of rotting food, and it was almost intoxicating. Empowering.
I can stop this evil, he thought.

    Chapter Twenty-Four

    It was so hard, walking out of the warehouse, not