Among the Free by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Knowing this, Nina tries to juggle keeping an emotional distance while retaining her humanity by helping them when she can. Found homeless on the streets, they are practically destined to die of neglect. Here, she meets three shadow children named Alia, Percy, and Matthias who are between six and ten years old.

Indecisive, she is sent to a communal cell. A high-ranked officer whom she calls The Hating Man delivers her an ultimatum: she can convince three other shadow children to expose themselves and turn themselves in in exchange for her life, or be executed on the spot. Nina awakes in a cell in the Population Police’s barracks. She is ultimately taken away by the Population Police after Jason reveals that she is a shadow child, having been a spy for the Population Police the entire time. Soon, she sets her sights on finding other shadow children living under false identities, entrusting Jason to help her. While at Harlow, she falls in love with Jason Barstow from the nearby Hendricks School for Boys. Pitying her incomplete existence, her aunts and grandmother saved up enough money to buy a fake identification card, and form the fake name “Nina Idi.” They enroll her at Harlow School for Girls, a state-run school ostensibly attended by only legal children. Because the Population Police search constantly and ruthlessly for shadow children, Elodie was effectively imprisoned in her family’s house for her young life.

Born as Elodie Luria, she once lived in a boring but comfortable home with her grandmother and her three surviving aunts, her parents having been taken by the government after breaking the population law. The novel first contextualizes Nina Idi and the path she took to gaining her name. As her parents’ third child, Idi’s existence is illegal, and she struggles to survive by determining whom and whom not to trust, navigating a near-apocalyptic American society where wealth is concentrated in the hands of very few. Straying from the series’ typical point of view of Luke Garner, it follows a female protagonist Nina Idi, a shadow child who was arrested by the Population Police and betrayed by her friend at the end of the previous novel, Among the Impostors. The third book in the Shadow Children series, it chronicles the lives of a few children in a dystopian future America, in which a fascist government is installed to control overpopulation.

Among the Betrayed is a 2002 young adult speculative fiction novel by American author Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Among the Free by Margaret Peterson Haddix