The Liberty Box

by C. A. Gray

“Thanks,” I mumbled, feeling a wave of relief wash over me as the train arrived.

  “Where are you going, Miss Brandeis? Can I call you Kate?”

  I needed to lose this girl. She’d draw attention to me, and if there were any agents on the train that was the last thing I needed.

  “I’m afraid I can’t talk about it,” I said quickly. “I’m on assignment.”

  “Oh,” she murmured, her eyes widening. “Of course! I understand! Are you hunting down traitors to the government then?”

  “I can’t discuss it,” I said sharply, swiping my ID card to board the train. Fortunately I hadn’t taken it off yet when I fled my apartment.

  “Oh,” said the girl again, this time sounding offended. Normally I’d feel badly about this, but at the moment I couldn’t muster any such emotion. “Of course, I don’t want to bother you.”

  I ducked my head down as I boarded, keeping my eyes to the ground. The girl didn’t board after me, nor did she call goodbye, so great was my offense.

  There were a few other people on board but most of the evening crowd had already gone home. I plastered myself against a window, turning my face away and resting one elbow on the seat in front of mine to cover even my profile with my hand.

  It took ten minutes to reach the stop near the grassy knoll. By the time we did, only one other person was left in my compartment, and he was in the back. I got off, and as soon as the train vanished, I sprinted through the outskirts of the city, across the grassy open area and toward the forest.

  I reached the forest without incident, my muscles throbbing. They haven’t found me yet. I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m safe. But the words wouldn’t sink in. I had never felt less safe in my entire life.

  Most of the trees in the forest were half dead. I needed to get still deeper, and hopefully find water. I paused long enough to catch my breath, suddenly realizing how thirsty I was.

  Then I heard a dog barking in the distance, and froze.

  Go, Kate, go!

  I knew it couldn’t be the dogs that had tracked me near my apartment, but the sound stimulated me to action anyway. Summoning my strength, I leapt over protruding roots as mulch squished between my toes. Brambles caught the blue silk dress I had worn in the broadcast earlier that day, ripping it to shreds. Within minutes of running through the forest, I bled freely from more wounds than I could count, but I barely noticed. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins, throbbing at my temples, urging me forward. There would be time enough to assess the damage later.

  I stumbled, fell to my knees, and gave a little cry. The impact jarred hot tears from my eyes.

  “Don’t!” I commanded myself fiercely, gasping. My lungs felt like they were on fire. “Don’t you dare think, Kate! Get up!”

  Suddenly I realized that I was talking to myself in Will’s voice.

  I wasn’t a strong person; that was Will. He was always so black or white about everything, so capable.

  Once when the two of us went camping for the first and only time in our relationship, we got lost on our way home and caught in a deluge. We had no food or water left, I was getting a nasty cough, and now the only clothes I had with me were soaked through.

  “Go back to my truck,” Will had told me, “get my coffee mug. Rain water is drinkable; we can make a funnel from the leaves to collect it. Then you go back to the truck and get out of those clothes and turn the heater on full blast so they dry out.”

  “But what about food?” I protested, shouting over the downpour. “We have to get out of here!”

  “We can’t see to figure out where we are while it’s raining anyway,” Will reasoned. “And if we drink enough water it’ll trick our stomachs into thinking we’re full for awhile. If I only had a bigger container…” Then his eyes lit up and he said, “I know! We can use the tarp for the tents. We’ll hang it up with some rope between the trees and make a big bowl, and we can dip the mug in as many times as we want.” He ran back with me to the truck, grabbed the tarp, some rope, and the mug, and told me, “Sit tight, turn on the heat full blast and I’ll be back with some water soon.”

  He was. We both drank our fill, and I dried out and warmed up. Will was still sopping wet by the time the storm ended and we packed up and drove off. But with his uncanny sense of direction, he recognized trees and shrubs or I don’t even know what landmarks, and pretty soon we were home.

  I told him I never wanted to camp again, and he rolled his eyes at me.

  “I got us home, didn’t I?” he’d said.

  If Will were here, he certainly would have figured out how to survive out here for as long as we needed to. He’d have learned to hunt and live off the land, and built us shelter, or he’d have somehow figured out how to get out of the country undetected.

  Will would have taken care of me. He always took care of me.

  I gritted my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut. Once the dam broke, I knew it would be a flood—and that I definitely did not have time for.

  “Get up, Kate,” I hissed to myself again. “Keep moving!”

  I tried to pull myself to my feet again, but my knees trembled and buckled, and my legs simply refused to obey. I paused just long enough to listen for the barking in the distance, but it was gone. For all I knew, it had been someone out walking his dog, and might have had nothing to do with me at all.

  Well, I thought, this is as good a place to spend the night as any.

  I looked down at my body—the dress was ripped to shreds, along with my flesh. I might as well be sleeping in my underwear. That was the last straw: I started to cry. Ignoring the hot tears rolling down my cheeks, I wondered if there was anything at all I could do to get water and to get warm. Finally I concluded that there wasn’t.

  Through the canopy overhead, I could just make out the distant stars winking down at me placidly… just as if the last twenty-four hours hadn’t changed my world forever. I closed my eyes, pretended I could feel Will’s warm, strong arms around me, and immediately fell asleep.

  ***

  I was eleven.

  I waited my turn outside a heavy steel door while one after another of my classmates went in for their examination. Most of them seemed to expect that it would be something like a recitation of their arithmetic lesson. A few of them whispered encouragement to those of us who were still waiting as they exited the room, “It’s really easy! They just want you to describe McCormick, like what it looks like here! No, I’m sure it’s not a trick question…”

  “Kathryn Brandeis,” called my examiner, who also happened to be my English teacher. She was a severe looking woman, and she looked even more intimidating than usual now.

  I stood up and meekly slipped past her, bracing myself for what I would find when I got inside. The room was as bare and stark as any on the McCormick campus, and I stood facing a row of five scary-looking adults. The one in the middle I’d never seen before: he was an old man with a heavily lined face. Next to him sat Mr. Santiago, who gave me a tight smile of greeting. I tried not to shiver. The other three were my teachers, and my English teacher made the sixth. She bade me sit down in a high backed wooden chair, and unbuttoned the top of my collar so that she could sneak electrodes down my shirt. Then she put a few on my forearms (“to measure your sweat” was what Maggie said), and my temples. I felt like a rat in a science experiment.

  “Hello Kathryn,” said the old man in the middle, consulting something in a file before him, presumably about me. “How are you liking McCormick?”

  “Very well,” I lied.

  “Are you? And what do you think is the most important thing you have learned here?”

  I thought. The most important? Was there only one right answer and everything else would disqualify me? “To always obey authority,” I finally said.

  The old man raised his eyebrows, his face impassive. “Always?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you always obey, Kathryn?”

  I hesitated—just for a split second, but long enough for visions of
the flashlight under Maggie’s covers at night and our conversations to flood back to me. “Yes, I do.”

  Mr. Santiago leaned forward. “What do you think of our Republic, Kathryn?”

  “I—” I tried to tune in to the words in my head, but I couldn’t hear them over my own pounding heart. I have to calm down. “I think it’s… the greatest nation on earth.” I knew those were the wrong words. They sounded fake even to me.

  My government teacher leaned forward. “Could you expand on that, please?”

  My mouth went dry. “I… think the Potentate has our best interests at heart. And the Tribunal too. They are generous and take care of us, and we are…” What was that word I’d heard, the one that meant lots of money? It was that very first day when I heard the voices in my head for the first time ever… “Prosperous!” I said at last. “We are prosperous!”

  The government teacher smiled, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  My English teacher, still standing over me and reading a computer readout with what must have been my nervous system responses, bit her lip and frowned. Then she looked at me and said, “Kathryn, would you please describe this room?”

  I opened my mouth, prepared to rattle off exactly what Maggie had told me to say, when I stopped. “This room?”

  “Yes, please.” She smiled.

  “Not…” I faltered, and thought I might burst into tears on the spot. “Not McCormick in general?” Maggie had told me exactly what McCormick campus was supposed to look like to the properly brainwashed—but that was all she’d told me.

  “This room,” said my English teacher again.

  That was it. I was done for. I could feel my shoulders visibly deflate. “It’s… big and white, and has a thick red carpet,” I guessed feebly, “and… and…”

  I couldn’t stop it anymore. The lump in my throat burst from my lips in a sob, and then it was all over. I buried my face in my hands and cried for the first time since I’d arrived in this horrible place. “Please don’t kill me!” I begged. “Please don’t…”

  “Kill you?” repeated my English teacher, shocked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you know what I’m talking about, you horrible bunch of—pig faced liars!” It was the most vicious insult I could think of at the moment, and it felt good to say it. I jumped up and tore the electrodes off my forearms and out from under my shirt, tossing them onto the chair. “There!” Snot dripped from my nose and tears still gushed from my eyes, but I didn’t bother to stop them. I was well beyond caring.

  I turned to storm out of the testing room, when the old man in the center called after me, “We have not dismissed you, young lady!”

  ***

  When I awoke, I wasn’t totally sure where I was, or when I was. Was it only yesterday that I ran away? Or had it been several days now?

  I tried to think of what my next move ought to be, but all I could think about was how parched my throat was.

  No headache, though, I thought. This meant I wasn’t dehydrated. Yet.

  You probably are, Will’s practical voice contradicted me, it’s just not severe enough yet to cause a headache. You’d still better find water fast. When I didn’t stand right away, imaginary Will commanded sternly, Get up, Kate. Time to get moving.

  The dizziness hit me as soon as I stood up, and I staggered to the side, reaching out to grab a branch to steady me. My feet felt like lead, and my head like cotton. My arms trembled as they propelled me along by way of the branches that jutted out into my path.

  *

  Maggie whispered to me under the covers in our shared dorm room. She held a flashlight under her chin, casting her face in shadow. I fought to keep my eyes open—I was so tired. So very very tired…

  *

  Will knelt down on one knee, his angular features illuminated by candlelight. He held a small maroon velvet box out to me—and I knew, my heart in my throat, what was inside before he even opened it. I could hardly breathe—

  *

  I woke on multiple occasions in the forest, only half-conscious, but cognizant enough to know that I was shivering, and my head throbbed. Sometimes I still stumbled on my feet. Sometimes I lay in the mud, the hazy world coming in and out of focus.

  *

  Alec pushed open the vent and crept into our dorm room. The mysterious Alec—after all the months of Maggie telling me about him, here he was in the flesh. In our room.

  I panicked. If the monitors found him in there, we’d all be sent to special projects that very night…

  *

  Alec. The boy who had finally told me what was really going on in the Republic and why… I think he was Maggie’s boyfriend? Or co-conspirator anyway. She talked about him all the time, and they’d disappeared together. What happened to him? Was he caught and killed too?

  The forest floor seemed to spin, and rushed up to meet me.

  *

  I stared at the crook of my elbow under the harsh lights of my bathroom vanity, prodding the little white scar over and over again.

  It can’t be. It can’t be. No, no, no, no…

  Chapter 12: Jackson

  I kept to the shadows as I made my way through the city, avoiding people when I could and avoiding eye contact when I couldn’t. Fortunately I knew how to cover my tracks, just in case anybody was watching. I looked for abandoned buildings as I went, peeking in windows to see what I could scavenge.

  I was parched and hungry. I had no water or weapons of any kind, and presently I gave up hope of finding running water without attracting attention. I’d have to improvise.

  After what felt like hours making my way through a concrete jungle, at last I spotted the edge of a forest. I breathed a sigh of relief. On numerous occasions growing up, Grandfather had abandoned me in the forest of Frjósöm with no tools of any kind, and told me to survive.

  I had. The forest became my home.

  With renewed energy, I crept up to a cracked and dirty window in what looked like an abandoned warehouse. Debris littered the concrete floor inside, but I saw what looked like it might be a piece of pex tubing. Furtively I glanced to my right and to my left. The entrance to the warehouse was too exposed, so instead I pried shards from the window until I’d created a hole large enough to crawl through without slicing my skin open. I hoped.

  It was pex tubing. Silently I rejoiced, scouring the rest of the debris for anything I might be able to use as a knife. Then I remembered the glass in the window. I’d have to hold it carefully to keep from slicing my hand in half… but I spotted piece of cloth, stained with oil and covered in dust. I grasped the glass with the cloth, and sawed off a piece of the tubing. Then I whittled down one edge of the tube to a taper.

  Bam. Homemade spile. I tucked it into the cargo pants I’d worn on the ship, grateful for all the pockets.

  Some weapons would be nice. What I wouldn’t give for a hunting rifle, or a bow and arrow.

  I crept back into the alley behind the warehouse, consciously expanding my awareness. I knew chances were slim of finding a gun or a bow and quiver or even a knife… but “if it is a weapon you need, then a weapon you will find—provided you have the eyes to recognize it when you see it, Jackson.”

  Grandfather had said this to me when I was ten. That was the first time he set me loose in the forest of Frjósöm with only the clothes on my back. I’d been terrified, and begged him not to leave me—but he shook his head and told me with supreme confidence, “The solutions are always there, son. They just might not look the way you expected.”

  Sure enough, presently I found a thick rubber band lying in a moldy crack in the alley, and because it never saw direct sunlight, it actually hadn’t rotted. It would do. I severed the end of the rubber band with the shard of glass, hoping to stumble upon a wishbone-shaped stick or something when I reached the forest. But inside of one abandoned house protected only by a tattered screen door, I saw a right angle metal harness for a curtain hanging limply from a wall.

  Fortunately I found
the wall rotted, so I had no trouble pulling it free. I tied the rubber band through the holes on each end. And just like that, I had a slingshot. I tucked it into the pocket containing my spile.

  Now to find myself some dinner.

  ***

  Three sunsets and three sunrises passed. My belly felt full and I’d found a stream, so I didn’t have to use my spile anymore. There must have been other hunters somewhere in the forest, too, because I’d discovered the shaft of an arrow with the arrowhead still attached. That allowed me to abandon my jagged shard of glass, and instead use the arrowhead to clean my game. Much easier.

  But what now? I’d dashed cousin Jennifer a letter before I’d gotten on the cargo ship to tell her I was coming, and to wait for me. Surely she was wondering where I was by now… or maybe she’d assumed I’d changed my mind and had chosen not to come. Or even that something had happened to me on the way over.

  I tried to tell myself that this was for the best. If I’d seen my stepfather at the funeral, I really don’t know what might have happened.

  Well. Yes I did.

  I sighed, sitting on a boulder beside my stream and snacking on the remainder of the dried jerky from my last kill.

  The truth was, I had an even bigger problem than missing my mom’s funeral, or not knowing where I was at the moment. I knew I’d find my way to a harbor sooner or later, and I’d manage to buy or barter my way on board.

  My problem now was, once I got back to Iceland, what would I live for?

  I smirked at myself for being so dramatic. But the fact was, ever since I was a kid, I’d envisioned the Republic as this magical place where all my dreams would come true. My mother’s letters had made it sound that way, and my aunt and uncle had too. I’d grown up practically worshiping Grandfather, mastering every lesson he could teach me—but I’d always had some vague idea that what he taught me were skills I could use when I got to the Republic. Somehow that had been the point of it all. I’d just figured I’d come to the Republic and—what? Leave my mark somehow? Make a difference? Change the world in this land of “endless opportunity?”