The Guardians are a crew. So they're not from the Rulers. Which means they can't punish you the way the Rulers can. The Guardians can't send you to the Hydro–Farm. They can't send you Outside, either.

If you mess up what the Book Boys write, they hurt you.

If you sign the Book Boys tag, they kill you.

The Rulers don't allow any fighting between the crews. So what the Guardians do is against the Rules. They get caught too—every once in a while, you would see it. On the Info–Board. That's where they announce the Crimes and Punishments.

Everybody knows the Crimes.

Everybody knows the Punishments.

But nobody knows who the Guardians are. And the Rulers never name a crew—all they do is give the person's Index Number and say what they did and what happened to them. If you know them, if you know them by their number, then you might know their crew. But that's the only way you could know.

But even if you know, you are not allowed to say—that's against the Rules, to acknowledge a crew. That's what the Book Boys do that makes the Rulers hate them so much—when the Book Boys write on the walls, they use a person's name, not their Index Number. And when they name someone, they name their crew too.

Nobody knows why they are called the Book Boys. Everybody knows some of them are girls. But not which girls, of course. The Book Boys are invisible. That's how they gather the news. Whatever they write is the truth, so they have to be everywhere the truth is.

Whispers say that some of the Book Boys are Outside—the Rulers sent so many of them Outside that there's a whole colony of them. When the Book Boys write something about Outside on the walls, maybe that's where they get it.

That's probably bogus—nobody ever came back from Outside, so how would they know?

But nobody really knows—not for sure.

The Turf crews are always writing on the walls. They don't give you the news, like the Book Boys. They just write their names, or the name of their crews, or stupid stuff…like saying they own one of the Tunnels. No crew could ever own a Tunnel. Not in the Charted Zone anyway. And outside the Charted Zone, no one would care.

Even their crew names are stupid—the names don't tell you anything about them the way other crew names do. Like the Golden Dragons…that's one crew's name. It doesn't tell you anything, that name. It doesn't mean they are all skin/shade band 70, like some people are. And they're not giant lizards either—everyone knows the giant lizards can only live Outside, where there is light coming down on you even without the generators. At least that's the way it was before the Terror—that's what the Book Boys say. In blue. If it's written in blue, it has to be true…everybody knows that.

The Turf crews fight each other. That's what they do. All the time. You can watch it happening…not the fighting so much, but the score…you can see it on the walls. One Turf crew will say they own something. Another crew will cross out what they wrote. That goes on for a while, one crew slashing over what another crew writes. On and on. Until, finally, one crew writes something and it stays there.

But it never stays there too long.

People say the Turf crews did the same thing before. Outside, before the Terror. But that's too stupid to believe. I mean, why would they kill each other over something they could never have? That's as stupid as them saying they own a Tunnel.

Everybody learns the Big Rules first. That's because if you break one of the Big Rules, you go to the Hydro–Farm…if you're lucky. There are other Rules too. So many Rules, you could never learn them all. You're supposed to ask if you don't know. You can't ask the Rulers—nobody has ever seen one of the Rulers. But in every Tunnel there are little pockets all along the walls. Just little indentations, not deep enough to be caves. Inside there is a person and a desk. On the desk is a computer. You ask the person if there's a Rule about something. They check the computer, and they tell you the Rule. Then they give you a piece of paper. The paper says the Rule was just explained to you. You have to sign the paper with your Index Number. Then your Index Number goes into the computer and the Rulers know you asked.

It's funny, the way they do it. If you have a Truth Question, you have to pay for the answer. You have to ask a Messenger, and they ask one of the Sages. You have to pay for that. I think it's a hundred credits, but I don't know for sure—I never asked a Truth Question. But if you ask a Rules Question, you get paid. Every time you ask a Rules question, you get two credits. Not open credits—you have to tell them which tunnel you want the credits for. But, still, for each question, you get that much. They pay you, right after they put your Index Number into the computer.

The people who explain the Rules to you are called Bureaucrats. There are lots of them. They come in every skin/shade, but they all look alike. No, I don't mean that…they really don't. They all have the same look, that's what I mean.

The Bad Babies were babies against the Rules. They were born against the Rules. There is a Rule about sex. You can't have sex until Year 13 if you are a boy. And not until Year17 if you are a girl. There are reasons for this, I know. There are reasons for every Rule. That's the first Rule—that there are reasons for every Rule. Good reasons. Reasons for our own good.

I asked a Bureaucrat about the reason for a Rule once. He told me that was against the Rules, asking for reasons. But he gave me the two credits after I signed the paper, because even though I didn't ask a Rules question, I got a Rules answer.

Anyway, the Bad Babies came from girls under Year 17—so they must have had sex when it was against the Rules, before they were allowed.

At first, the Rulers would punish the girls. If a girl had a Bad Baby, she would have to go into one of the Medical Tunnels and get fixed. After that, they couldn't have any more babies, not even good ones.

The Book Boys wrote that fixing the girls didn't make them stop. They had sex even when they couldn't have babies. The Book Boys wrote it in blue, so it had to be true.

But they couldn't have sex by themselves. I mean, they could…but it wouldn't make babies. For a while, the Rulers had no one to punish for that. If a boy was in his Year i5 and a girl was too, and if they had sex, only the girl would be breaking the Rules.

So the Rulers changed the Rules. They are allowed to do that—it's for our own good. After that, if you helped someone break a Rule, it was the same as if you broke it yourself.

But the Bad Babies kept happening.

You can't keep the truth from the Rulers. If they want to know something, they send you to one of the Synapse Squads. They put this metal band around your head and ask you the questions. Then they just look at the pictures and they know the truth.

But everybody knows this doesn't work on girls.

So when a girl would get pregnant before she was allowed, the Rulers would make every boy she knew go to a Synapse Squad. And they would find out the truth.

But sometimes, they couldn't find the father of the Bad Baby. No matter how far they looked, they couldn't find the boy who was guilty.

The Rulers never give up. They couldn't find the answer Out, so they looked In. They checked the Bad Baby's own spray. And that's when they found out that, sometimes, the father of the girl was also the father of the girl's baby. The father was the father, that's what the Book Boys wrote. In blue.

This was a dilemma. The fathers were old enough to have sex, but the daughters were not. And after they changed the Rules, the fathers would be guilty too. But children belong to their parents—they own them. Everybody knows that.