The Eden Conspiracy: Book 2 of The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

  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 wi
ll 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!”

  The group fell silent, and it seemed like they were considering my idea. Finally Nick said, “It sounds like it has potential, Kate, but we have supplies for the faraday cages now, and we can’t afford to waste any more time.”

  “Well, I think double protection sounds like a great idea!” Molly interjected.

  I whirled on Will again. “Will it work or won’t it?”

  He stared at me like he’d never seen me before. Finally he said grudgingly, “It might. But it’s a moot point, because Nick’s right. We have neither the supplies nor the time to build them.”

  I slammed the book shut and leapt to my feet, tucking it under my arm as I hurried away.

  “Kate!” Nick called after me, “We need your help with the knitting!”

  “I’ll be at the stream when you’re all done eating, come find me!” I shouted back.

  For now, all I knew was I needed to be alone.

  The moon rose high in the sky, and I sat by the stream, clutching the book to my chest. I’d intended to read it more thoroughly, but instead I realized I needed to figure out my next move.

  If Will had backed me up then they all would be on my side, but as usual, he didn’t. I knew this was a good idea, though. And if Will hadn’t been so mad at me he would have seen it too. Maybe he already did see it, and he was just being stubborn.

  So I could go on the grid by myself tomorrow for a brief raid to get the supplies the book in my arms told me I’d need, and then try to follow the instructions myself.

  But who am I kidding. I’m not capable of building a circuit. I don’t know the first thing about circuits, or science of any kind.

  So that left only one other option I could think of: tonight, after we all finished knitting ski masks for the raid team, I could knit myself an extra one and not tell anyone about it. I was fast enough. Then I could go try to find Charlie tomorrow, and he could make the jammer.

  That is stupid, Kate.

  It was Will’s voice in my head, but… much as I hated to admit it, he was right. The second I entered society I’d either be a target because I’m Kate Brandeis, the Face of the Republic, or I’d be a target because I was wearing a ski mask.

  Jackson’s voice came back to me this time. Identify the thought, Kate. Is it truth, or a lie?

  The thought was that the reason I needed to risk my life to go get my brother was because I wasn’t smart enough to follow the step-by-step instructions in the textbook I held. I needed someone else to do it for me.

  That’s a lie.

  I was smart enough. Just because Will didn’t think I could do it… just because he didn’t take me seriously didn’t mean I wasn’t capable. I just needed a strong enough motivation to figure it out. And I had one.

  I took a deep breath. Okay. Okay. I can get the supplies myself.

  I flipped the textbook open to the diagram, and the supplies list beside it. I read, Batteries, scrap aluminum to build a trimmer capacitor, a transmitter chip, some plastic or perfboard, solder or paperclips. I had no idea what a trimmer capacitor or a transmitter chip were, and the only reason I knew what a perf board was was because I’d seen Charlie use them so many times. But there were pictures of all of the items. Surely, then, I could find them all within my two hour window. I only needed to build one jammer at first, after all—just as a proof of concept. Then the others would want to go back with me and get all the stuff we needed to make more.

  You can do this, Kate, I told myself again.

  Suddenly my heart sank: how would I know where to find a house that was safe to raid? I didn’t even know which direction to go for the city the others had been in, and if I ran into anybody who might recognize me, it could be disaster. The hunters had scoped out a part of the periphery that they’d deemed practically abandoned, but if I went to the same place they went, even if I followed far enough behind them, Jackson would still know I was following them.

  Of course he’d know. He’s Jackson.

  He’d catch me long before I could reach the grid, and then Will would blow up at me, and that would be the end of it.

  I sat and stared at the water for a long moment, trying to puzzle my way out of that one. I could only think of one possible solution.

  I had to tell Jackson in advance. He was going to find out anyway. It was my only chance.

  I made my way back to the camp and rejoined the others. Nick passed around supplies; Will showed us how to unravel the copper wire, and just thread it along with the yarn so that our needles picked up both at the same time. I showed Molly, Violet, Rachel, Sam, Brenda, Nelson, Brian, and Pete how to knit, and we all got to work. Since we only needed five ski masks, most of them took shifts, passing their work to one another when they got too exhausted to continue.

  At probably one in the morning, I finished my second ski mask. I tucked one of them into my waistband to hide it, and held the other, deciding to use it as an excuse for the conversation I needed to have.

  I’d expected Jackson to be sleeping, but somehow I still wasn’t surprised to find him sitting with his back to a tree, staring off into the night. His face looked so peaceful that I had to stop and watch him for a moment. I wondered what it would feel like to be so serene.

  “Hi,” he said, without turning around.

  I jumped, and stepped out of the shadows. “Hi.” I tossed the ski mask into his lap, still clutching the textbook under my arm with my finger tucked into the page with the diagrams.

  He looked down at the ski mask and smiled, glancing at me for the first time. “Thank you. Nice job.”

  I nodded. Then I just stood there awkwardly, waiting for an opening. He didn’t say anything either. I had a feeling he was waiting me out.

  At last, he said, “I’m listening.”

  I untucked the book, opening it to the appropriate page and crouching down beside him to show him the diagram. “I’m going to try to make this.”

  Jackson looked up at me, eyebrows raised. “From what?”

  The question felt rhetorical. He already knew what I was going to say, I just knew it. Still, I took a deep breath. “From the materials I’m going to steal tomorrow.”

  “Is that right?”

  I gritted my teeth and nodded, feeling more confident. “I’m not asking permission. I’m going to do it. I’m only asking you not to stop me, and not to tell Will when you notice you’re being followed tomorrow.”

  He watched me for a long moment, the mirth fading. Then he said at last, “You’re asking me to let you go onto the grid, unprotected and totally by yourself, and not tell anybody?”

  I stared him right in the eye, and nodded.

  “Kate, do you know me at all?”

  It took a moment for the meaning of this statement to sink in. When it did, I almost cried, or screamed with frustration—the only reason I did neither was because I couldn’t decide which to do. Before I could muster up any words harsh enough to rebut this, Jackson interjected, “Okay, look, there’s another possibility here, and it’s really simple. I’ll just get the materials you need for you.”

  My mouth fell open. “You would do that?”

  “Why not? Nick, Alec and I are b
asically just going to be standing around for hours and hours anyway, and we’ll be right where we need to be to get all this stuff.” He glanced at the page, and skimmed the list of supplies with his finger. “I don’t see why you have to be the one to do it.”

  “But… Nick and Will both said no…”

  “I thought you weren’t asking for permission.” His eyes danced at me, and a lump rose in my throat. “Look, Kate, it’s a good idea, and frankly as you pointed out, even if these cages work perfectly in terms of blocking us from detection by the control centers, they’re not exactly inconspicuous. It sounds to me like any future plans we have will involve more public ventures, in which case we’ll need an alternative. I agree, we should at least try to make these jammers of yours. I’ll help you. There’s no reason for us both to go.”

  I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just nodded, embarrassed when I felt the wetness on my cheeks. I brushed away the tears hastily.

  “Thanks for the ski mask. Good night, Kate.”

  “Good night,” I whispered.

  As I stumbled through the forest back to my makeshift bed beside Will for the night, I tried very hard not to name the thing I couldn’t help feeling.

  Chapter 10: Jackson

  “Jackson!”

  I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, bewildered. Will’s face peered down at me as he shook my shoulders. He didn’t look happy.

  “Nick wants us to get going. Come on.”

  I must’ve slept only three hours, judging by the position of the moon. I still felt groggy, but I brushed the earth off my clothes, grabbed my satchel containing the ski mask and Kate’s book inside, and followed him.

  Once I regained my bearings, I asked, “Why were you the one to come and get me?”

  “Because the others are eating,” he said shortly, not turning around.

  The subsequent silence felt hostile. I tried to think of something to say that didn’t feel like smalltalk. “Do we have enough ski masks?” Still smalltalk, but the best I could do.