George Talbot/Jen’s Dad Character Analysis

She ran to a phone, Luke following breathlessly. She dialed. Luke watched in amazement. He’d never talked on a phone. His parents had told him the Government could trace calls, could tell if a voice on a phone was from a person who was allowed to exist or not.

“Dad—” She made a face. “I know, I know. Call the security company and get them to cancel the alarm, okay?” Pause. “And might I remind you that the penalty for harboring a shadow child is five million dollars or execution, depending on the mood of the judge?”

She rolled her eyes at Luke while she listened to what seemed to be a long answer.

“But you’re a third child, too,” Luke protested. “A shadow child. Right?”

He suddenly felt like it might be easy to cry, if he let himself. All his life, he’d been told he couldn’t do everything Matthew and Mark did because he was the third child. But if Jen could go about freely, it didn’t make sense. Had his parents lied?

“Don’t you have to hide?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jen said. “Mostly. But my parents are very good at bribery. And so am I.”

“Haven’t you learned? Government leaders are the worst ones for breaking laws. How do you think we got this house? How do you think I got Internet access? How do you think we live?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said, fully honest. “I don’t think I know much of anything.”

“They shot her,” Jen’s father said. “They shot all of them. All forty kids at the rally, gunned down right in front of the president’s house. The blood flowed into his rosebushes. But they had the sidewalks scrubbed before the tourists came, so nobody would know.”

“Did she really think the rally would work?” he said.

“Yes,” Luke assured him. Then, unbidden, the last words she’d spoken to him came back to him: We can hope—after she’d told him hope was worthless. Maybe she knew the rally would fail. Maybe she even knew she would probably die. He remembered the first day he’d met her, when she’d cut her hand to cover the drops of blood on the carpet. There was something strange in Jen he couldn’t quite understand, that made her willing to sacrifice herself to help others. Or try to.

“I only work at Population Police headquarters. I don’t agree with what they do. I try to sabotage them as much as I can. Jen never understood, either—sometimes you have to work from inside enemy lines.”

“Before [the famines], our country believed in freedom and democracy and equality for all. Then the famines came, and the government was overthrown. There were riots in every city, over food, and many, many people were killed. When General Sherwood came to power, he promised law and order and food for all. By then, that was all the people wanted. And all they got.”

Luke squinted, trying to understand. This was grown-up talk, pure and simple.

Luke felt a strange sense of relief, that it wasn’t truly wrong for him to exist, just illegal. For the first time since he’d read the Government books, he could see the two things being separate.

“I’m doing this for you, too, Jen,” he whispered, too softly for Jen’s dad or the bug to hear over the car’s hum. “Someday when we’re all free, all the third children, I’ll tell everyone about you. They’ll erect statues to you, and name holidays after you…” It wasn’t much, but it made him feel better. A little.