The Eden Conspiracy: Book 2 of The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

  “I know you have yours,” Will snapped.

  Ah. Ok. I weighed how to answer, my feet crunching on the ground after his. “Why don’t you just say what you have to say. It’ll save time.”

  He shot me a cold look over his shoulder. “Fine. I know you and Kate had a little rendezvous last night, and then she didn’t sleep all night. So something must have happened. Maybe you want to tell me what it was.”

  “She came to ask me for a favor,” I said carefully.

  “Oh yeah, and what favor was that?”

  “I don’t see why it should be a secret, but if it is, then it’s not mine to tell.”

  Will turned to glare at me, but then something in his expression relented. “Let me guess. She put you up to something for her while you’re on the grid?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s either got to do with the broadcast or those jammers of hers,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “And you can’t possibly do anything for the broadcast where we’re going, so she must want the materials to build the jammers, then. Am I right?”

  I blinked, impressed. “You know her well.”

  “Yeah well, I’ve known her a lot longer than you have,” he retorted, turning away from me again. I did notice, though, that his mood had improved somewhat. I assumed his imagination of what went on last night between Kate and me had been much worse than that. “Do you even know what you’re looking for?” Will asked me. “I thought you grew up in the boon docks in Iceland. Can’t see you being an electronics whiz.”

  “I did, and I’m not,” I admitted. “All I have to go on is the textbook she gave me. I was hoping I could figure it out.”

  Will sighed heavily, extending one hand behind him like a parent confiscating a forbidden toy. “Give it here. I’ll have a look.”

  I suppressed a smile and reached for it in my satchel, opening it to the appropriate page and handing it to him. Will stopped walking, furrowing his brow and skimming the items with his finger. “Batteries are easy. I assume even you will know where to find those.” He rolled his eyes, and came to the next item. “Ok, you’ll get a transmitter chip from an old radio… you know what those look like, right?”

  I decided to take that as rhetorical. He could insult me if it made him feel better.

  Will went on, “Once you break it open, you can recognize the transmitter chip from the picture here.” He frowned again as he came to the next item on the list. “I’m a software guy, not an electrical engineer. But I’m pretty sure you’re not going to find perfboards or breadboards in any household electronics. Those are only for building prototypes. You’re only going to find circuitboards, and those are going to be harder to use, since they’ll be soldered already. You’ll need something blank. It’s possible to get a circuitboard out of any old piece of electronics, like a netscreen or something. You’d scrape off the land components to get a clean board… but then you’d have to have a soldering iron and a drill to create a new circuit. You’d have to have those even with a breadboard, though.”

  I was trying to follow this. “Show me a picture of a circuitboard in there, so I know what I’m looking for.”

  “Oh, those are all over,” Will said, sticking his finger in the page we wanted but flipping through and pointing out photographs throughout the rest of the text. “There… and there… and there….” Then he flipped back to the list of items we’d need and kept skimming.

  “It calls for scrap metal to build a trimmer capacitor, but you don’t need to build one. You can get it out of a watch, or a keyless entry key. It looks like this.” He showed me the picture of a trimmer capacitor. The image meant nothing to me, but I hoped at least I’d be able to pick it out from the guts of a watch. “Toughest part will be getting the watch open if you don’t happen to have a tiny enough screwdriver, though,” Will told me, “but if you can’t find those, then just bring the watch and we can find a way to pry it open later if it comes to that.”

  He kept reading. “Paperclips aren’t gonna be too reliable for forming connections, if Kate intends to build something we can carry in our pockets. They’d get dislodged too easily. Like I said, we’ll need a soldering iron. The only homes that will have one of those are like her brother Charlie’s house, because he built circuits all the time.” Will shook his head. “I think that hoses the whole thing right there. If you can’t form solid connections, you ain’t got anything.”

  “What about the copper wire the group stole yesterday?” I asked. “If we have extra, that’s conductive and flexible enough that Kate and the others wove them into these ski masks of ours… can’t we just use that for the connections? If we drill holes in the right places and tighten them well enough?”

  Will paused. “That… might work,” he said, handing the book back to me. Then he added as he turned away, his voice clipped, “Just don’t come in bothering Jean or me with questions while we’re working. This isn’t the priority.”

  “We could be friends, you know,” I told him. “I appreciate your help.”

  Will snorted but didn’t reply.

  As we neared where Molly and the others ate their breakfast, Will stopped walking, and turned to me abruptly. “Kate told me last night that she thought we were growing apart. She wants to slow things down. She wants space, so she can ‘figure out who she is,’ or whatever.”

  I opened my mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. That was the last thing I’d expected.

  “I don’t know how much of that is because of you, but I’m guessing a lot of it. So I just want you to know, I’m not letting Kate go without a fight.”

  With that, Will turned his back, approaching Molly’s spread of nuts and berries for our breakfast.

  Well, I thought. That changes things.

  The group spoke very little on the way to the house they had earmarked. Nobody seemed disposed to conversation. I carried leftover bear meat in my satchel for each of us, along with my weapon, and Kate’s book. Jean stuck by my side as usual on the way, so I told her my intentions. She was excited, as apparently she’d thought Kate’s jammer idea was a great one as well.

  “I’ll come out and help you when I can!” she promised.

  “Only if Will doesn’t need you,” I told her. “Of course this isn’t top priority—”

  “He doesn’t really need me at all,” Jean murmured. “I’m not sure why I’m coming, to be honest.” She twisted her ski mask and pulled it away from her mouth. “Ugh, could these be any less comfortable? I feel like I’m suffocating!”

  They were pretty itchy, I had to admit. “All the more incentive to get in and get out, I guess,” I murmured.

  When we arrived at the edge of the forest and within sight of the house, Nick stopped us short. “All right. Alec, you’re the scout-slash-sniper. Stay back here, and alert us if anyone approaches. I’ll guard the outside of the house. Jackson, you’re inside with Jean and Will.”

  “Hold on, before we go in,” I said. “Describe the house to me. Anybody.”

  “Describe it?” Will scoffed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean these masks only block us from detection, but the control center signals can still get in. So tell me what you see. What does that house look like to you?”

  Silence. Finally Alec said, “I’m guessing, not a lovely split level suburban home?”

  “Not remotely. Look carefully, knowing what you know about the control centers. See through the lie.”

  At last, Nick said, “The top window is shattered. The siding is falling off.”

  “Yes, and?”

  Jean piped up, “Graffiti. And water stains. It looks like the whole thing is riddled with mold.”

  “Alec?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah, okay. I see it now.”

  “Will?”

  I couldn’t see the rest of Will’s expression through the mask, but he glared at me through its eye holes. “I see your point. Yes.”


  “All right,” said Nick. “Everybody keep the truth in mind, and consciously focus on seeing what’s really there. Let’s go.”

  The net screen was in an office, which left me the run of the rest of the house. I pulled out Kate’s textbook, and made a checklist in my mind based on the conversation with Will: A circuitboard from old electronics. A drill. A watch. Some tiny screwdrivers. A soldering iron if I can find one. A radio. Batteries.

  I found the batteries, the radio, the watch, and a circuitboard from an old television set within thirty minutes. Then I found the stash of tools—a drill, and tiny screwdrivers. No soldering iron, at least not that I recognized, but I didn’t really expect to find one of those anyway.

  “How’s it going?” Jean poked her ski mask-covered head into the living room, coughing a deep bronchitis-sounding cough.

  I looked up at her. “Yuck. That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s the mold,” she said, sniffling. “At least it makes it easy for me to remember that this place ought to be condemned, no matter how it looks.”

  “I think I’m gonna have to go next door and see if they have a soldering iron there,” I told her. “Nick isn’t gonna love that—”

  We both stopped. At first the sound was distant, but it grew closer very quickly before it passed overhead.

  I looked at Jean. “That sounds like a plane, doesn’t it?”

  “I was trying to place the sound,” Jean admitted, “but yeah, come to think of it… I haven’t heard a plane in decades, though. That’s ironic, because the Crone just talked about trying to hijack a plane for their escape plan… you don’t think that could be them, do you?”

  I shook my head, equally perplexed. “Too coincidental. Besides, they’d be going in the wrong direction.” I shrugged. “How’s it coming with you guys in there?”

  “He’s swearing under his breath every five minutes,” Jean murmured. “Our code is failing all over the place. I’m not sure this is going to work.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “You can go in there and ask him if you like, and I’ll have a look for your soldering iron. I’m no help to Will right now anyway.”

  The room where Will sat smelled dank. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the room. He glanced up at me, and I saw the worry in his eyes.

  “What was that noise outside?” he demanded.

  “Jean and I thought it sounded like a plane.”

  Will turned back to his screen abruptly, his shoulders hunched. “I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be good.”

  “Jean sent me in to see if I can help.”

  “No. You’ll just get in the way.”

  I sat down beside him anyway and waited. He glanced at me irritably. Then he sighed.

  “I’m trying to trouble-shoot our code. We wrote it on paper, but apparently there’s a bug somewhere, at least one, because it keeps crashing. Meanwhile I’m running the tests inside the portal—”

  “Oh, so you got in?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but that means if the guy whose credentials I used tries to sign in at any point while I’m in here, they’re gonna know I’m an imposter. And maybe trace my location. That’s why I’m worried about the plane.”

  As he said all this he kept backspacing and changing things on the screen, not looking at me.

  “So they might have traced us here already then?”

  “Yup.”

  “Any estimate of how long ago?”

  “How in the hell would I know that?” he snapped. He clicked execute at the bottom of the screen and I watched as a digital wheel spun while the computer thought about his command, and then the word failed appeared again, with a bunch of code beneath it. Will swore, and pounded an open palm on the grimy table.

  “I’ll go alert Nick that they might know where we are,” I said.

  “You do that,” Will scowled, still not looking at me.

  “You’re never gonna believe this! I found one!” Jean crowed, coughing again as she held up what must have been a soldering iron. “What are the odds?”

  “Excellent,” I murmured, brushing past her to the outside of the house.

  Nick’s head snapped around to face me. “What is it?”

  “We might have company soon,” I said, and told him what Will told me.

  “I was afraid of that,” Nick murmured. “I saw a plane, of all things, and had to ask myself if it was really there or not.”

  “It was real, I heard it,” I told him.

  “But why would the Potentate resurrect old planes? Why now?”

  I shook my head, and then froze. “Shh. We’re being watched.”

  “What?” Nick whispered. “Where?”

  I spun around slowly. Then I heard the gunshot.

  “Get down!” Nick yelled, and grabbed me, pulling me to the ground. I shook him off, and located the source: three agents, who now stood out in the open, weapons raised. Nick and I both pointed our guns back at them.

  “Lower your weapons,” called one of the agents. “There is a fugitive inside the house you are guarding.”

  “Their bullets are real, did you see that?” Nick hissed to me, still cowering on the ground. I glanced down at Nick pointedly, still standing in full view of the agents myself. “Truth or lie, Nick?”

  “What?”

  “There was no damage from their bullet. Keep checking in with yourself on what you really see.”

  The center agent called, “Lower your weapons, or we will fire!”

  “Would you get down?” Nick demanded, jamming his arm into the back of my knee so that my legs buckled, just as the agents fired where I’d been standing. Nick curled up with his arms over his head, just as if the glass from the windows had shattered—even though it hadn’t.

  “Truth or lie?” I demanded of Nick, prying his arms off of his head and pointing at the intact window.

  Nick blinked at it, as if seeing the window for the first time.

  “Lie,” he murmured at last.

  “You got it,” I affirmed. “Now stand up and let’s face them!”

  Nick stood up beside me very slowly, still with his knees bent so he could hit the ground again quickly if he needed to. The agents let out another burst of gunshot, and Nick cried out as he fell to the ground again.

  “I’m not hit!” he told me, his voice frantic as he pressed a hand against his chest and gasped. “I’m not hit! It’s a lie!”

  “Yes, it is a lie, because they are firing blanks,” I barked. “You are fine.” The agents let out another burst of fire, and I didn’t even glance up at them.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine…” Nick gasped, prying his hand off of his chest and staring at it. He looked up at me and declared, this time with amazement, “I’m… fine!”

  I grinned, though he couldn’t see me through the ski mask.

  The agents stopped firing. Then one of them shouted, “You are the rebel leader Jackson MacNamera. Aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. They probably knew that because I was the only one who had ever stood unscathed before agent bullets before, and they figured it had to be me this time, too. But if I admitted to them who I was, and the agents escaped, they would tell the Potentate I was here. And I didn’t want to kill them unless absolutely necessary.

  “Take off your mask! Show us your face!” the center agent demanded.

  “I can’t see how that would be in my best interest,” I called back.

  The three agents conferred with each other. Then the one in the middle put away his gun and pulled out something else: a knife that glinted in the sun. That one was real. The agent hesitated for a moment, but then began to move toward me.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I told him, but I didn’t move to defend myself. Not yet.

  The agent broke into a run when he was about twenty yards from me, and let out a cry as he raised the knife to strike. Still I didn’t move. I knew I didn’t
need to.

  Bang.

  The agent fell down dead, Alec’s bullet lodging into his back. I glanced up in the direction where the bullet had come from, and nodded my thanks. The other two agents turned and fled.

  Both Nick and Alec fired—Nick hit one of them in the shoulder, and Alec grazed the other one in the calf. The agents stumbled, but then they were out of sight.

  Nick swore, and told me, “They’ll bring reinforcements. This is not good.”

  “Will thinks he’ll need more time,” I said. “We should find out how much more.”

  Nick stared at me for a minute, eyes wide, and then nodded as he turned to reenter the house.

  I heard Alec racing up beside me, panting. He yanked off his ski mask.

  “We can never use these again,” he told me. “The Potentate will know it’s us just as surely as if they’d spotted our brainwaves.”

  “That’s okay. We have another plan for that now.”

  Nick emerged, Jean and Will in tow. Even through the mask, Will did not look happy.

  “We’re ready,” Nick announced. “Let’s get moving.”

  Chapter 11: Ben Voltolini

  Ben Voltolini stood facing the enormous window in his office, hands clasped behind his back, his feet spread wide beneath him.

  “Sir?”

  The voice belonged to Jefferson Collins of the Tribunal. It was simpering and tentative as ever.

  “Send them in,” said Voltolini, without turning around.

  He heard the quick, nervous footsteps scamper away, and a few minutes later, another knock at the door to his office. He turned to see two men he’d never laid eyes on before. Until now, they hadn’t been important enough.

  “Agents Murray and Youssef, Your Excellency,” murmured Collins, and bowed himself out of the room.

  Agents Murray and Youssef wore the usual dark gray suits, though one was on crutches, and the other’s right arm hung in a sling. They watched Voltolini with expressions of reverence.

  “Your Excellency, I cannot tell you what an honor—” began Murray.

  “I understand you told your supervisors a very interesting story,” Voltolini interjected. “I’ve heard the story second-hand thus far only and have brought you here so that I might hear it directly from the horse’s mouth.” His expression did not change as he spoke, but he fixed his dark eyes on the two men before him and raised his eyebrows.