The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

  Yet I couldn’t pretend not to notice her mood, either.

  “You okay?” I finally asked.

  “I’m fine.” She paused, feet crunching on the dirt as the tree line grew closer. I waited. “I’m really mad, actually.”

  “No, really?” I joked. “You hide it so well.”

  For a second I wasn’t sure if the sarcasm would lighten the mood or make her angrier. “He can be such an arrogant jerk sometimes!”

  “He’s only acting this way because he loves you. He’s trying to protect the relationship.”

  “Believe me, that is not his primary motivation!”

  “It’s not?”

  “No! This is not about you. He’s acting like it’s about you right now, but the real issue—” She sighed, like she was searching for words. Finally she said, “When Will and I met, and for most of our relationship, we had this dynamic. I was the ‘damsel in distress,’ and he was the ‘knight in shining armor.’ Those were our roles, and it worked well for both of us.” She shook her head, and went on, “I’m different now. What Will fell in love with was a weak woman he could control. But I wasn’t the real me. I was just… a confused and brainwashed shell! And he was the one who could solve all my problems. Now I’m becoming who I really am, or trying to anyway… someone self-sufficient, and even opinionated, for once in my life! Will doesn’t know how to relate to me anymore. He just wants me to be who he thought I was.” She shook her head. “Yes, he’s a little jealous of you. But the real issue is that you’re the one helping me to grow up. That’s what he doesn’t like about you—you’re the one who believes in me, and encourages me. He never has!”

  A red light flashed in my mind. Danger. Danger. Change subject fast. “Be aware of your footsteps,” I told her, dropping my voice.“If you come down on the balls of your feet carefully, you can distribute your weight better and make less noise. We don’t want to scare the animals away.”

  “Okay,” she whispered back, dropping her voice too. But then she went on, “Will doesn’t respect me, and he doesn’t want to respect me, even if I earned it. God forbid I ever have a good idea, or learn how to do anything useful!”

  I was going to have to respond to this, I realized. She wouldn’t let me just drop it. I tried to think of the most innocuous comment I could possibly make. “You and Will have both been through a lot of trauma, and you didn’t go through most of it together. Of course that will change you both. In some ways you’ll have to get to know each other again on the other side of it, I would imagine.”

  She glanced at me. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Look, what I’m going to teach you depends on focus and being in the moment. I think you’re not quite there right now.”

  She gave a staccato half-laugh. “Well, I’m not sure what I can do about that.”

  “Emotions follow thoughts. You’re in control of your thoughts, Kate. Remember that for years you believed whatever lies were sent through the airwaves. It can be just as dangerous to let your emotions control your thoughts now.”

  She stared at me for a minute. “You can be really annoying sometimes, you know that?”

  “Only because I won’t let you be a victim,” I said. “And isn't that what you just said you liked about me?”

  After a long pause, she laughed, relenting. “All right, fine. How do I change my thoughts, then, sensei?”

  “That’s actually the crux of what I’m trying to teach you: becoming aware of the things that you’re thinking about, and determining two things: whether the thought is truth or a lie, and whether it serves your ultimate goal in the moment. Even a true thought might not be worth dwelling on.”

  “Will is being a jerk: true or false?” Kate asked, smirking to herself. Then she replied to herself, “True. Does thinking about the fact that Will is being a jerk serve my goal at the moment?” She looked at me, her eyes dancing. “It depends. If my goal is staying focused, then no. If my goal is venting to you so I feel better, then absolutely!”

  I laughed. “Touché. And are you feeling better yet?”

  The smile evaporated. “Yes. But only because you’re here and he’s not.”

  I decided not to touch that one. “Are you up for a little more meditation before we start hunting? The less distracted we are, the better.”

  She shrugged. “You’re the boss.” We weren’t in a clearing so she headed for a large tree and sat down with her back against it.

  I chose a tree opposite hers and settled myself on the ground too. “It’s okay for your mind to wander,” I reminded her. “Every time you catch it, though, just consciously pull your awareness back to your breath; to the sensation of the ground beneath you, and the tree at your back.”

  I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when I heard it. It was about a hundred and fifty yards away. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was big.

  “Kate,” I whispered.

  “Oh, thank goodness, I thought you were gonna make me sit here all day!”

  “Shh. Grab your bow.”

  “What?”

  She’d started to stand up but froze when I said this. I grabbed my bow and arrows, and pointed at hers. She moved toward it in slow motion, probably to minimize the sound. I approached her softly, and when she’d hoisted her bow to her shoulder and retrieved an arrow, I pointed in the direction of the animal. I leaned in, breathing softer than a whisper, “Let’s move close enough that you can see it. When you can, this is what you do.” I demonstrated nocking an arrow, raising the bow to my face, and pulling the string back far enough that my hand touched my mouth. She mimicked what I had done, but dipped her elbow too low. I tapped it lightly, pointing up. She obeyed, raising it. Her arm was too far from her face, so I breathed, “Touch your mouth with the hand steadying the arrow… there you go.”

  It would have been easier to position her myself, but no way in hell was I doing that.

  “Okay, relax the string,” I breathed, “and follow behind me as softly as you can. I’ll stop as soon as I get a visual.” I started to move toward the creature.

  But something didn’t feel right. The creature we approached was heavy, but its footfalls were not sharp enough for cloven hooves. I nocked an arrow in my bow too, just in case, listening to its movements. The feet were softer, padded…

  Then I saw it. A black bear.

  I held up my arm to stop her as soon as I realized what it was, but it hadn’t seen us yet. I raised my bow.

  “Where is it?” Kate whispered. I pointed, and she sucked in a breath and swore.

  The sound of her breath did it: the animal turned its head and fixed its gaze upon us.

  “Arrow up!” I said, not bothering to whisper anymore.

  Kate obeyed, trembling.

  “Hand to your mouth! Release!”

  Her arrow sailed over the bear’s head when he was twenty yards away. Kate screamed, and I fired my arrow, grabbing her and pulling her out of the way of its lunge a second later.

  My arrow penetrated deep into the bear’s eye socket, one of the only parts of his skull where I knew it was thin enough for my arrow to penetrate. He fell hard. I felt Kate trembling in my arms and let go immediately.

  “I’m sorry!” she whispered, horrified.

  “Don’t be. I didn’t know there were bears around here or I wouldn’t have led you after it.”

  She sank to her knees, dropping the bow. Finally she closed her eyes and whispered, “Will is right. I am weak.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Is that truth, or a lie?” I said sharply.

  She opened her eyes and looked at me, like she was waiting for my answer.

  I prompted again, softening my tone, “The statement is that you are weak, on the basis of what just happened. Truth or a lie?”

  She shook her head. “Truth?” But it was a question.

  “Look at the facts. You’ve never shot a bow and arrow before. The very first time you ever tried was at a bear w
ho was twenty feet from ripping out your intestines. So you missed, and went into shock, which by the way is what you’re feeling right now. It’s just adrenaline, it’ll pass. If you heard that story about someone else, would you conclude that she was weak?”

  She bit her lip. “No?”

  “No. So your conclusion was false. Reject it.”

  I thought my tone was still a bit sharp, but Kate’s eyes shone at me. I looked away. This was so, so not a good situation. I need to be a jerk, and fast.

  But nothing came to me. Finally I settled for disgusting; it was as close as I could get. “Come on. I’ll show you how to skin and clean it when you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready,” she told me, standing up. She was still trembling, but trying to hide it.

  Kate threw herself into the gory task vigorously, like she was trying to compensate and convince either me or herself that she was tough after all. We didn’t speak, except when I said, “Cut here,” or “scoop these out,” or “strip away the fascia—there you go.” I saw her grimace a few times, but she breathed through it like a champ, and kept going.

  Once we got down to just cutting up the bear meat and packaging it to take back to camp, Kate finally asked timidly, “So, were there any ladies in your life back in Iceland?”

  I laughed, caught off guard by the question. “A few.” I felt her watching me. I knew why she was asking. “Nobody who was ever really special to me, though.”

  “No?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Nobody I cared for the way I always felt I should care for the person I’d spend my life with. I’m still looking for that girl. Though it’s kind of on back burner at the moment.” I gestured at our present location.

  She laughed, and then hesitated, very intently not looking at me. “What kind of a girl are you looking for?”

  Careful. I paused for a long moment and considered how to phrase this. “A girl who… knows who she is and what she wants. Who lives for something bigger than herself. A partner who can stand with me, side by side, working toward a common goal we both believe in.”

  “What goal?”

  “I never knew the answer to that question before.” I paused, remembering Nick’s speech, and the faces of the people back on the grid: so empty and hopeless. “But I think I do now.”

  Chapter 9: Kate

  It was dusk when the team returned from the grid carrying canvas bags, backpacks, and suitcases filled with materials. Jackson and I had roasted the bear meat and made shish kebab vegetables dipped in bear fat and seasoned with local herbs. Jackson told me how to prepare the vegetables while he tended to the meat.“You always have to have some kind of oil when you’re cooking. It protects your food from being charred to a crisp,” he told me. “I know it looks gross right now, but just trust me.”

  I did what he said, and the meal turned out delicious. Despite the prevailing negative mood of the explorers, several of them even commented on the meal with grudging admiration.

  “Kate did most of it,” Jackson said, even though it wasn’t true. Still, I felt pretty pleased with myself. I glanced at Will to see his reaction to this—almost all of our meals together over the past two years had been take out, because I’d told him when we met that I didn’t cook. But Will ate without comment, and rarely met my eyes.

  “So,” said Molly, scooting over to where I sat eating bear meat with my fingers. “Nick says we got most of what we needed. You and Rachel I think are the only ones who know how to knit, so after dinner we hoped you could teach nine of us? That’s how many pairs of knitting needles we found.”

  “You have tons of stuff in those bags, though; what’s the rest of it?” I asked.

  Molly made a face. “Rachel and Violet didn’t seem to understand the concept of getting only what we could carry on our backs from here to Beckenshire. They insisted on bringing everything they thought we might possibly need, and because we were on a tight schedule I don’t think they even looked at most of what they were grabbing—they just distributed the weight among the rest of us. We’ll end up having to leave most of it here, but Nick said not to argue with them while we were still on the grid because we didn’t have the time. You know how they are.”

  I rolled my eyes and nodded. Violet, Sam, and Rachel definitely seemed like more of a liability than anything else.

  “The plan,” Molly went on, “is to knit five faraday cages tonight, full ski masks. Alec found a house that has a netscreen connection, but it’s abandoned and relatively secluded… so Nick thinks even though if anybody sees the hunters with the ski masks they’d probably alert the agents, it’s not likely they’d be seen at all. So I convinced him to go for full protection.”

  “Who is going?” I asked, pulling a root vegetable off the stick with my teeth. It tasted a bit like a yam.

  “Will and Jean of course. They think they’ve come up with the script or code or whatever it is they need to execute, but of course you know that already.”

  I didn’t, actually. Will hadn’t spoken to me all day. But I didn’t correct her. “Who else?”

  Molly’s face darkened, and she said, “Nick, Alec, and Jackson. The best hunters. For protection.”

  I glanced at Jackson, who was engrossed in conversation with Pete. “Does Jackson know that yet?”

  Molly nodded. “Nick told him when they got back. He thinks they only need three bodyguards—at a certain point, more hunters become a liability because it’s more likely they’ll be seen. But the only way Jackson could safely go with the team is if we knit full ski masks, so there’s no chance the control centers might detect his brain waves, and so nobody could recognize him. Same with Will, really. So it was the only way.”

  I bit my lip. “So you really think the ski masks will be enough to prevent detection?”

  “God willing,” Molly gave me a weak smile. I squeezed her hand.

  Everyone was still eating, so I approached the pile of loot the teams had brought back from the grid out of curiosity. Quite a few of the bags contained wire, wire cutters, yarn or sweaters that could presumably be reduced to yarn—but a few suitcases contained only books of every imaginable genre. There were romance novels, mysteries, hardback self-help books, what looked like horror, cookbooks that would do us no good at all out here with no utensils, and textbooks on everything from astrophysics to history.

  Rachel sat near the pile, so I called to her, “Why did you bring all these?”

  We weren’t on the best of terms, so she stared at me for a few seconds. Then she said resentfully, “Everything about our lives is miserable out here. At least when we have some time to kill, I thought we could have a little entertainment.”

  I held up one of the textbooks and raised my eyebrows. “You mean like ‘Electromagnetic Principles’?”

  “I didn’t have time to vet them,” she retorted, turning back to her meal.

  Idly, I opened the textbook, flipping through its yellowed pages. I stopped when I saw the drawing of a circuit. I blinked at it, thinking of my brother Charlie.

  When Charlie was about twelve and I was eight, I remembered watching a movie on the netscreen when suddenly it went white and fuzzy.

  “Charlie!” I’d screamed, and heard him cackle—confirmation that somehow he was the culprit.

  He’d emerged from his bedroom, looking mischievous and holding a homemade circuit mounted on a perf board in one hand, and a textbook in the other. I think it might have been the exact same textbook I held now.

  “Put it back!” I demanded.

  Instead, Charlie grinned at me gleefully. “Try the other netscreens!”

  I did, running from one to the next, and found all of them equally useless, to my mounting irritation.

  “I made a jammer!” he’d crowed. “Jams all the netscreen signals within a hundred foot radius!”

  A jammer… I flipped to table of contents. One chapter was called “Frequency Jammer Basic Principles.” I flipped to it, and saw
a diagram that made absolutely no sense to me, but with a list of materials beside it, and a step-by-step guide.

  Is it possible?

  I closed the book and approached Will for the first time all day. He glared at me as I sat down, but I ignored his expression and flipped it open to the diagram.

  “Can we make this?” I thrust the picture under his nose.

  He barely glanced at it. “What?”

  I bristled. “Well, look at it and maybe you’ll know.”

  He glanced at the page again, but in such a way that suggested he wasn’t seeing it. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Kate.”

  “You told me that thoughts are electromagnetic energy. Right? So doesn’t that mean that human thought has a particular frequency?”

  He looked up at me, startled. Then he shook his head. “Yeah, but what—”

  “And that means the signals from the control centers have to work on that frequency, right? You’ve disrupted it before, so doesn’t that mean you already know what the frequency is?”

  He sighed. “Get to the point, Kate.”

  I jammed my finger at the diagram more forcefully this time. “If we know the frequency of the control center signals, then we can create a local signal jammer, can’t we? Charlie used to make them to disrupt netscreens, so why couldn’t we do it with control center signals?”

  Again, I must have spoken louder than I’d intended, because most of the group stopped talking to look at us. Apparently I raised my voice a lot when speaking to Will.

  “Wait, wait,” said Molly, “What are you suggesting, Kate?”

  I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself. “We don’t know for sure if the faraday cages will work, right?”

  “We’re almost positive they will if they’re ski masks,” said Will.

  “Well, you may be able to use ski masks for this raid, but as soon as you have to do something more visible, then those will get you killed almost as surely as the government picking up your brainwaves!” I retorted, and then turned back to Molly. “If we can create signal jammers—which shouldn’t be that hard, my brother made them when he was twelve!—then we’d have discreet protection, and we’d be protected from control center influence too, which the faraday cages can’t do for us, right?” I glanced at Jackson and added, “At this point I can definitely say it’s going to take awhile for us to really master Jackson’s mind control teaching. Having a switch we can carry in our pockets to protect us can be a shortcut to that!”