The Liberty Box

by C. A. Gray

  “This isn’t my cousin Jennifer’s house.” I didn’t really know that for sure, but it didn’t look residential to me at all.

  “I’m afraid we need to ask you a few questions first,” said Agent Dunne. He got out of the car and gestured for me to do the same.

  I thought about making a break for it, but I decided to wait. First, I needed to know what was going on.

  The inside of the building looked as bleak as the outside, with stark white walls, fluorescent lights, and perforated ceiling panels. Nobody greeted us at the reception area upon entering, but another man in a charcoal suit exactly like Agent Dunne’s fell into step beside him, in front of me. He didn’t ask any questions or acknowledge me in any way, so I had the impression that Agent Dunne must have alerted him somehow that we would be coming.

  This did not make me feel better.

  “In here,” barked the second man, opening a heavy door that made a sucking noise as he pulled it open. He gestured with his other hand for me to enter the room. I hesitated for a moment before allowing myself to pass through it. Every door I went through was another door I’d potentially have to fight my way back out of. But at last, my curiosity won, and I followed.

  The room felt like a stark white box, intended to hold its contents and nothing else: a plastic maroon recliner sat beside a metal pole. A sort of shelf protruded from the metal pole, and there was a small screen at the top of it, like the one in the town square.

  “Have a seat,” said Agent Dunne.

  “Why?” I asked warily, digging my heels into the floor as a reflex, unconsciously learned from many turf wars against rival tribes in Frjósöm. It was useful on the soft earth of the forest floor, giving me traction if I decided to spring into action—but it did me little good on the unforgiving linoleum. “What is this?” I demanded.

  “This room is what we call the Liberty Box,” the other agent told me.

  I gave a short laugh, and demanded, “Isn’t that an oxymoron? Liberty in a box?”

  “The Republic cannot have undocumented visitors,” the other agent replied. I glanced at the tag on his suit: Agent Jaffa. “We must know who is in our country at all times. Documentation is what makes freedom possible.”

  “But I already told you who I am and where I’m from…”

  “We must have a record of you,” Agent Jaffa informed me, placing a hand on my shoulder as he guided me to the chair. I glanced at the hand before I budged, and sized him up. I was bigger than this guy; I could throw him to the ground with no effort at all.

  Wait just a little longer, I told myself. I knew something was very wrong, but too many puzzle pieces still weren’t adding up. I wanted to know what kind of record of me he wanted, to see if I could figure out why. So I sat.

  Agent Jaffa rooted around in the shelf attached to the pole and withdrew round white stickers with a metal prong on them and cords trailing behind. He reached forward, like he intended to place them on my head.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, recoiling.

  “The Republic cannot have undocumented visitors,” he repeated, like he was reading a script, “we must know who—”

  “You said that. What are those things?”

  “They are called electrodes,” Agent Dunne told me. “We track who is in the country, where, and when, by brain wave patterns. As long as you are here, we will need to identify yours. It’s standard procedure.”

  The prickling on the back of my neck mounted to a full-scale warning. Brain waves?

  I remembered something Grandfather once told me: “Above all else, Jackson, you must guard your mind—for that is where your toughest battles are won and lost.”

  And now these strange men wanted access to my brain waves?

  I’d had enough. I leapt to my feet and backed away from Agent Jaffa. “Why? What do you plan to do with them once you identify them?”

  “Simply keep track of you,” said Agent Dunne. He didn’t move, but I saw the muscles in his body tense the moment I leapt up, like he too anticipated a fight. “As long as you are not doing anything illegal, surely you should not object to this.”

  “I’m afraid I do object,” I growled, my hands balling into fists.

  “If you refuse to cooperate, then we will be forced to deport you immediately,” Agent Jaffa told me.

  “I just traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to attend my mother’s funeral,” I said, my voice low. “And I am going to be there.”

  Agent Dunne sighed. “Then you leave us no choice,” he said, pulling something else out of the cart attached to the pole. It was a wide plastic tube with some yellow liquid inside. It didn’t look like any sort of weapon I’d ever seen, but I knew a threat when I saw one. “You brought this upon yourself,” he scolded me mildly. “Just remember that.”

  Agent Dunne advanced on me with the syringe. I grabbed the wrist that held the yellow liquid and twisted, forcing him to the ground. He screamed, and I let him go just as Agent Jaffa lunged at me, fists swinging. I blocked him with my forearm and sidestepped, allowing his own momentum to carry him crashing into the door. I could have killed them both easily, or at least knocked them unconscious, but I didn’t want to cause any lasting damage if I didn’t have to. Shoving Agent Jaffa out of the way, I lunged for the door. But before I could escape through it, and three more agents entered, crowding into me in the tiny box. They all looked essentially the same: same build, same charcoal suits, same hard jaw and expressionless faces.

  At five against one, I’d have to do some real damage if I wanted to escape. Which meant I’d be a fugitive from the law within hours of entering the country.

  Well. Can’t be helped.

  The first one tried to pin me, and I sidestepped him, flipping him over my knee and using his own legs to take out another. I raised an arm to block a punch from the third when I realized, half a second too late, that Agent Dunne had recovered himself behind me. I sensed the needle approaching my neck and pivoted out of the way, but not quite fast enough.

  I felt a sharp pain in my neck, like a bee sting.

  Thrashing backwards, I slammed an arm into the hand holding the needle to my neck, and a jolt of pain staggered me as the needle ripped my flesh. Then the room swirled, and a curtain of darkness descended upon me as my knees buckled. I slumped to the floor.

  Chapter 10: Jackson

  The room came into focus slowly at first. I blinked and tried to move my limbs, but for some reason they wouldn’t move more than a few centimeters. Finally my mind registered the ropes lashing my limbs to the maroon chair inside the Liberty Box.

  How long have I been unconscious? There was no way to tell; no windows in this room to allow me to read the sky. No clocks. No other human beings who might be wearing the same or different clothing, looking bleary or exactly the way I remembered them.

  I wiggled my facial muscles and felt something stuck to my forehead. The electrodes. I heard a beeping noise in the background, and through the fog in my head, I realized what it must be: the little screen attached to the pole directly behind me, recording my brain waves.

  I’d been overpowered. I could hardly believe it.

  I’d trained with Grandfather and his other apprentices since I was eight, every weekend and summer when I came home from school. I’d fought and won against rival tribes, despite being outnumbered—sometimes up to seven to one. But these agents just took me down.

  What was that yellow liquid?

  And why in the world did they want my brain waves this badly? They knew nothing about me. I was a foreigner, I had no ties to anyone in this country, and so far as I knew I hadn’t harmed anyone since I’d arrived.

  Then I remembered what Agent Dunne had asked me in the car. What do you see? What do you see? What do you see? They seemed like very strange questions. Was I supposed to lie and say the country was prosperous and the people looked healthy? Was that why I was being punished?

  I thought of the newscasts, and the rapt faces of the citizens around me
. Of all the stories of the government taking care of its citizens, and the government eliminating those who protested against it… not that unusual for a dictatorship, though. Most dictators don’t tolerate alternate opinions.

  Still, there was something wrong with the abject adoration of the people. Their behavior seemed fake somehow, and yet not faked. They were sincere, but… not.

  As if they were puppets.

  Then I pictured Kate Brandeis. Whatever was wrong with all those people around me, the citizens interviewed on the newscast, and with Jillian—she didn’t have it. She had the air of someone who had awakened from a dream.

  I strained against the bonds on my wrists and legs. Focus, Jackson. What do you know? I went through the list in my mind.

  I could snap the bonds that held me, easily. I could rip off the electrodes from my forehead and make a break for the door. But these agents already had my brain waves recorded, and could presumably track my every move now. I could take down three or four of them at once, but clearly I was outnumbered. If they snuck up on me, dragged me back here, and injected me again with whatever that yellow serum was—then what?

  Also, I suspected some kind of a connection between the odd way the people behaved and the brain wave tracking system. Whatever was wrong with the rest of the citizens would soon be wrong with me, too—unless I did something to prevent it.

  I didn’t know how far and wide these tracking systems went, but if I got far enough outside the city, perhaps I might be able to evade detection. But that still left the problem of how I was to get out of here in the first place.

  Then, unbidden, one of Grandfather’s lessons came floating back to me.

  “I have already taught you, Jackson, have I not, how much power you have over your own body? Life on a minute by minute scale requires two things: blood and oxygen,” said Grandfather. “But you do not need as much of either as you think you do. All that is required is that your vital organs still receive adequate amounts of these two critical ingredients.

  “Do you believe that you have voluntary control, for instance, over the beating of your heart?”

  I smiled at him knowingly. I was sixteen at the time, and after eight years of training with Grandfather, I knew this was a trick question. He’d already taught me to descend so deeply into meditation that I fell into an almost trance-like state. He’d taught me to very nearly read minds. He’d taught me to see with my eyes closed by sensing disturbances in the air currents.

  So of course it seemed impossible for me to control my heartbeat with my mind.

  And of course, it must be possible—or he wouldn’t have asked the question.

  Grandfather smiled back at me. “Your task for today, and for however many sessions are required, is to slow your breath and your heart rate by the force of your will, to the point where you can mimic death.

  “I will be back in an hour to see how well you have done.”

  Through a vague haze almost like a tunnel, I felt Agent Dunne jostle my shoulders.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey!” He slapped me.

  “Is he dead?” asked Agent Jaffa.

  Someone pressed the edge of my wrist where the pulse was. Then he dropped my wrist and pressed the artery in my neck.

  “Is he breathing?” Agent Jaffa asked again.

  I sensed Agent Dunne close to me, leaning in, feeling for my breath. Agent Dunne sighed on my neck.

  “Dead,” he said, and swore. “Just like that? How did that happen?” Jaffa didn’t bother to reply, so Dunne went on, mostly to himself, “Stroke or something? But he’s not even thirty. Did we overdose him?”

  “On the vaccine? That’s not possible,” scoffed another voice I hadn’t heard before.

  “Get him out of here then,” said a third voice.

  “What do you want us to do with him? He’s a foreigner, no family, nobody knows he’s here.”

  “Just bury him out back,” the voice declared. “I’ll send up a body bag.”

  Some time later—it might have been ten minutes, or it might have been ten hours—someone lifted my feet and slipped them inside a sack. Then they lifted me bit by bit—“Careful! Geez, this guy must be two hundred and fifty pounds!”—and slid me carefully inside. It took me no effort to stay limp, with my heart rate so low and my breath so shallow. I couldn’t have moved right then if I’d wanted to.

  They zipped up the bag and hoisted me up roughly, one of them carrying my shoulders and the other carrying my feet. I swung from my hips in time to the clack clack clack of their shoes on the linoleum floor.

  Finally, with a great heave, the two men launched me, and I went flying through the air, colliding with the thud of soft earth and uneven stones. I was still mostly unconscious, far too weak to cry out—but the impact revived me.

  “Bury him in the morning,” said one of them, as the voices and the footsteps receded.

  I waited, breathing with intention and stimulating my heart rate to catch up. I felt power return to my limbs with the increased blood flow, and suddenly noticed how stuffy it was in that bag. Then I started to count: one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand… up to one hundred and twenty. I figured I’d already waited long enough before that, and didn’t hear anyone in my immediate vicinity anyway. The agents had to be gone by now.

  I wiggled one finger out the hole left at the top of the zipper track, and as slowly and softly as I could, I inched it down, down, down, low enough that I could sit up. Then I crept out, careful to stay low to the ground, just in case someone was still watching.

  It was dark now. I lay beside a trash bin and a bunch of other bags that looked just like the one I’d crawled out of. I tried not to think about what that meant, and kept to the shadows.

  With any luck, Agents Dunne and Jaffa didn’t input my brain waves into their control system.

  After all, I thought with a grim smile, why bother to track a dead man?

  Chapter 11: Kate

  I hid behind the trash bins in the alley behind my apartment for what felt like an eternity, darting from one Dumpster to another when the footsteps got too close. A web of interconnected alleys blossomed behind my complex like the backside of a veneer. I’d never even noticed it before. The shadows grew long, eventually swallowing me whole.

  “She’s got to be here somewhere,” growled one of the agents.

  Of course they’d know I had to be here. My car was in the drive, and I’d left the lights on with my suitcase open and half-packed in the middle of the living room. Stupid. Will would scold me if he were here. He’d never have been so sloppy.

  “She might be visiting a neighbor,” said another agent. He sounded far away, but the alley carried their voices to me like an echo.

  “Rand checked all the neighbors already,” returned the other agent.

  “Her parents are in town, right? She’s grief-stricken. It would make sense for her to go to them.”

  “Not on foot,” returned the other. “Not without turning off the lights. She left in a hurry.”

  “She’s in shock. She’s probably not thinking straight.”

  There was a pause. Then the first agent said in a softer voice: “Send someone to Kate Brandeis’s parents’ house if you haven’t already.” There was static, and then the person on the other end of the receiver replied, “On it.”

  On it. It was exactly the sort of thing Will would say. Short and to the point.

  Suck it up, Kate, I snapped at myself before the tears could come. This is not the time.

  A rat crawled over my foot, and I bit my lip to keep from screaming. Why had I left my apartment barefoot?

  “I don’t think she’s out here,” said one of the agents. His voice was much farther away now. I shivered, breathing through my nose so that I wouldn’t have to inhale the fumes of refuse emanating from the Dumpsters. “What would she be running for, anyway? She’s the face of the nationwide newscast. We’ve never had any reason to suspect her.”

  “We never had reason
to suspect her fiancé, either,” said the other, pointedly.

  My blood ran cold. That was practically a confession.

  They did it. They killed him.

  “Get some search and rescue dogs,” said one of the agents finally, his voice too calm. I knew from the lower volume that he was speaking into the receiver again. “If she’s here, they’ll find her.”

  My heart flew to my throat. How long would it take for the search and rescue dogs to arrive?

  How much of a head start will I have if I start running now?

  I decided I’d have to risk being seen; staying put just became even more dangerous. I crept out and ran away from the voices as silently as I possibly could. Barefoot, it turned out, had been a good idea after all… at least for this purpose.

  I don’t know for how long or how far I ran. My feet ached as they pounded on the cold concrete, and the muscles in my legs throbbed. My lungs burned and I felt lightheaded from lack of oxygen. I couldn’t remember ever running this much in my entire life.

  Finally, after what felt like hours, the gloom and cave-like chill of the alley gave way to a railway station. The bullet trains came every ten minutes, and the one that came here made a loop—the far side of which opened up into an exposed grassy area, beyond which lay a forest.

  If I was lucky, the train would arrive before the dogs did.

  I reached the station and stood behind a large concrete column, as if that would protect me. I kept my head down, praying to go unnoticed.

  “Miss Brandeis!”

  I opened my eyes to see a woman about my own age, dressed in rags but bearing a government ID on a lanyard around her neck. Only people with government IDs were allowed to ride the bullet trains. I glanced at it and saw that she was a secretary to somebody or other.

  “I am absolutely your biggest fan,” the girl breathed, “and you’re just as pretty in person!”