Zeck saw the shoes. He saw Dink put something into the shoe in the darkness, when most kids were asleep. But it meant nothing to him, except that these two Dutch boys were doing something weird.

Zeck wasn’t in Dink’s toon. He wasn’t really in any toon. Because nobody wanted him, and it wouldn’t matter if they had. Zeck didn’t play.

Which made it all the more remarkable that Rat Army was in second place—they won their battles with one less active soldier than anybody else.

At first Rosen had threatened him and tried to take away privileges—even meals—but Zeck simply ignored him, like he ignored other kids who shoved him and jostled him in the corridors. What did he care? Their physical brutality, mild as it might be, showed what kind of people they were—the impurity of their souls—because they rejoiced in violence.

Genesis, chapter six, verse thirteen: “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”

Didn’t they understand that it was the violence of the human race that had caused God to send the Buggers to attack the Earth? This became obvious to Zeck as he was forced to watch the vids of the Scouring of China. What could the Buggers represent, except the destroying angel? A flood the first time, and now fire, just as was prophesied.

So the proper response was to forswear violence and become peaceful, rejecting war. Instead, they sacrificed their children to the idolatrous god of war, taking them from their families and thrusting them up here into the hot metal arms of Moloch, where they would be trained to give themselves over entirely to violence.

Jostle me all you want. It will purify me and make you filthier.

Now, though, nobody bothered with Zeck. He was ignored. Not pointedly—if he asked a question, people answered. Scornfully, perhaps, but what was that to Zeck? Scorn was merely pity mingled with hate, and hate was pride mixed with fear. They feared him because he was different, and so they hated him, and so their pity—the touch of godliness that remained in them—was turned to scorn. A virtue made filthy by pride.

By morning he had forgotten all about Flip’s shoes and the paper that Dink had put into one of them the night before.

But then he saw Dink step out of the food line with a full tray, and walk back to hand the tray to Flip.

Flip smiled, then laughed and rolled his eyes.

Zeck remembered the shoes then. He walked over and looked at the tray.

It was pancakes this morning, and on the top pancake, everything had been cut away except a big letter “F.” Apparently, this had some significance to the two Dutch boys that completely escaped Zeck. But then, a lot of things escaped him. His father had kept him sheltered from the world, and so he did not know many of the things most of the other children knew. He was proud of his ignorance. It was a mark of his purity.

This time, though, there was something about this that seemed wrong to him. As if the letter “F” in the pancake was some kind of conspiracy. What did it stand for? A bad word in Common? That was too easy, and besides, they weren’t laughing like that—it wasn’t wicked laughter. It was…sad laughter.

Sad laughter. It was hard to make sense of it, but Zeck knew that he was right. The F was funny, but it also made them sad.

He asked one of the other boys. “What’s with the F Dink carved into Flip’s pancake?”

The other kid shrugged. “They’re Dutch,” he said, as if that accounted for any weirdness about them.

Zeck took that solitary clue—which he had already known, of course—and took it to his desk immediately after breakfast. He searched first for “Netherlands F.” Nothing that made sense. Then a few more combinations, but it was “Dutch shoes” that brought him to Sinterklaas Day, December sixth, and all the customs associated with it.

He didn’t go to class. He went to Flip’s tidily made bed and unmade it till he found, under the sheet and next to the mattress, Dink’s poem.

Zeck memorized it, put it back, and remade the bed—for it would be wrong to put Flip at risk of getting a demerit that he did not deserve. Then he went to Colonel Graff’s office.

“I don’t remember sending for you,” said Colonel Graff.

“You didn’t,” said Zeck.

“If you have a problem, take it to your counselor. Who’s assigned to you?” But Zeck knew at once that it wasn’t that Graff couldn’t remember the counselor’s name—he simply had no idea who Zeck was.

“I’m Zeck Morgan,” he said. “I’m a spectator in Rat Army.”

“Oh,” said Graff, nodding. “You. Have you reconsidered your vow of nonviolence?”

“No sir,” said Zeck. “I’m here to ask you a question.”

“And you couldn’t have asked somebody else?”

“Everybody else was busy,” said Zeck. Immediately he repented of the remark, because of course he hadn’t even tried anybody else, and he only said this in order to hurt Graff’s feelings by implying he was useless and had no work to do. “That was wrong of me to say that,” said Zeck, “and I ask your forgiveness.”

“What’s your question,” said Graff impatiently, looking away.

“When you informed me that nonviolence was not an option here, you said it was because my motive is religious, and there is no religion in Battle School.”

“No open observance of religion,” said Graff. “Or we’d have classes constantly being interrupted by Muslims praying and every seventh day—not the same seventh day, mind you—we’d have Christians and Muslims and Jews celebrating one Sabbath or another. Not to mention the Macumba ritual of sacrificing chickens. Icons and statues of saints and little Buddhas and ancestral shrines and all kinds of other things would clutter up the place. So it’s all banned. Period. So please get to class before I have to give you a demerit.”

“That was not my question,” said Zeck. “I would not have come here to ask you a question whose answer you had already told me.”

“Then why did you bring up—Never mind, what’s your question?”

“If religious observance is banned, then why does Battle School tolerate the commemoration of the day of Saint Nicholas?”

“We don’t,” said Graff.

“And yet you did,” said Zeck.

“No we didn’t.”

“It was commemorated.”

“Would you please get to the point? Are you lodging a complaint? Did one of the teachers make some remark?”

“Filippus Rietveld put out his shoes for Saint Nicholas. Dink Meeker put a Sinterklaas poem in the shoe and then gave Flip a pancake carved with the initial ‘F.’ An edible initial is a traditional treat on Sinterklaas Day. Which is today, December sixth.”

Graff sat down and leaned back in his chair. “A Sinterklaas poem?”

Zeck recited it.

Graff smiled and chuckled a little.

“So you think it’s funny when they have their religious observance, but my religious observance is banned.”

“It was a poem in a shoe. I give you permission to write all the poems you want and insert them into people’s wearing apparel.”

“Poems in shoes are not my religious observance. Mine is to contribute a small part to peace on Earth.”

“You’re not even on Earth.”

“I would be, if I hadn’t been kidnapped and enslaved to the service of Mammon,” said Zeck mildly.

You’ve been here almost a year, thought Graff, and you’re still singing the same tune. Doesn’t peer pressure have any effect on you?

“If these Dutch Christians have their Saint Nicholas Day, then the Muslims should have Ramadan and the Jews should have the Feast of Tabernacles and I should be able to live the gospel of love and peace.”

“Why are you even bothering with this?” said Graff. “The only thing I can do is punish them for a rather sweet gesture. It will make people hate you more.”

“You mean you intend to tell them who reported them?”

“No, Zeck. I know how you operate. You’ll tell them yourself, so they’ll be angry and people will persecute you and that will make you feel more purified.”

For a man who didn’t recognize him when he came in, Graff certainly knew a lot about him. His face wasn’t known, but his ideas were. Zeck’s persistence in his faith was making an impression.

“If Battle School bans my religion because it forbids all religion, then all religion should be forbidden, sir.”

“I know that,” said Graff. “I also know you’re an insufferable twit.”

“I believe that remark falls under the topic of ‘The commander’s responsibility to build morale,’ is that correct, sir?” asked Zeck.

“And that remark falls under the category of ‘You won’t get out of Battle School by being a smartass,’” said Graff.

“Better a smartass than an insufferable twit, sir,” said Zeck.

“Get out of my office.”

An hour later, Flip and Dink had been called in and reprimanded and the poem confiscated.

“Aren’t you going to take his shoes, sir?” asked Dink. “And I’m sure we can recover his initial when he shits it out. I’ll reshape it for you so there’s no mistaking it, sir.”

Graff said nothing, except to send them back to class. He knew that word of this would circulate throughout Battle School. But if he hadn’t done it, then Zeck would have made sure that word of how this “religious observance” had been tolerated would spread, and then there really would be a nightmare of kids demanding their holidays.

It was inevitable. The two recusants, Zeck and Dink, both of whom refused to cooperate with the program here, were bound to become allies. Not that they knew they were allied. But in fact they were—they were deliberately stressing the system in order to try to make it collapse.

Well, I won’t let you, dear genius children. Because nobody gives a rat’s ass about Sinterklaas Day, or about Christian nonviolence. When you go to war—which is where you’ve gone, believe it or not, Dink and Zeck—then childish things are put away. In the face of a threat to the survival of the species, all these planetside trivialities are put aside until the crisis passes.

And it has not passed, whatever you little twits might think about it.