Freedom/Hate (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 1)

by Kyle Andrews

  “Things will never change unless we're willing to put everything on the line.”

  Sophia turned away from him and put a hand over her mouth. She walked to the other side of the room and faced a wall rather than look at him. Collin didn't know whether she was angry or crying. Maybe it was both, but she wasn't yelling at him. She was thinking about what he was saying.

  Collin took a step toward her and said, “You told me about how all of this started. You said that the idea of taking away books sounded absurd to the first generation. By the second, it was just the way things were. People handed over the books that their parents guarded with their lives. Today, nobody even thinks about it anymore. Nobody questions it, because we're never taught how.

  “Freedom needs to start with an idea. And maybe it'll sound crazy to the people who are hearing it for the first time. But if we plant that seed and play the game the same way they did, then little by little, we change the world. We can't do that by hiding in the closet.”

  Sophia shook her head and told him, “We tried planting the seed. They took the idea and bastardized it.”

  “Then we bastardize what they're pushing. They want to hunt me down and drag me away kicking and screaming. They think that it will make for great TV. So, I'm not going to kick and scream.”

  Sophia turned around and looked at Collin with concern in her eyes. She told him, “You have to fight back.”

  “I mean to. But not the way they taught me. Not like a rabid animal that they can heroically put down. When they come to get me, the world will see who we are.”

  She took a moment to think about what he was saying. She walked back to the kitchen table where her Coffite was sitting and sat in one of the chairs, putting her hand on her cup but not picking it up. She was staring at the box of cereal, but her thoughts were a thousand miles away. Collin could see her trying to disagree with what he was saying, but she couldn't.

  “They're going to get me,” he told her, sitting down with her at the table. “We can't hide me away in your apartment anymore. If we try, they will kill us both and burn this entire building to the ground. There are no hidden spaces where they can't find me. You know it as well as I do. There is no getting out of this for me. I'm not taking you down too.”

  “We have to think about this,” Sophia replied, in a soft and quiet voice.

  “We don't have time to think of another way.”

  “I'm not talking about another way,” she said, putting a hand on top of his and looking him in the eyes with sadness. “I'm talking about making this count.”

  34

  “Libby, I need you to tell us why they want you,” Marti's father said to her in a soothing tone while he walked toward her front and Marti's mother moved to her back. If they were trying to be subtle about it, they failed.

  Libby had barely spoken to Marti's parents before they locked themselves away in their room for the night. She'd heard the muffled sounds of conversation from behind their door. They'd spent the night debating and plotting out what would be done with her. She had no idea what had been decided. Now they were circling her like wild animals, preparing to pounce.

  “What are you doing?” Justin asked them as he moved toward the man, but Marti put a hand on his arm and stopped him.

  Marti's father put up a hand and said, “I'm not doing anything. I'm just saying that there must be some reason why they want you. There has to be a reason why they don't want the rest of the world to know about it.”

  He was speaking calmly, but the way he was looking at her gave Libby the impression that he was trying to burn a hole through her skull with nothing more than the power of his will.

  “And you expect me to know the answer?” Libby responded, trying to figure out some way of making them believe that she was as clueless as she really was.

  “Do you?” Marti asked her.

  Libby couldn't tell whether Marti was asking with her usual coldness, or if she'd gotten so accustomed to hearing that cold tone from Marti that she would never be able to hear her speak without feeling a chill.

  A smile formed on Libby's mouth. She didn't know where it came from. The idea that she knew more than anyone else in that room—Ammo included—was just about the most insane thing that she'd ever heard.

  “Libby, I need you to think. Maybe you don't even realize what you know,” Marti's father pushed. “Did Uly say something to you? Did he do anything that might have been abnormal?”

  “You mean, besides joining a terrorist faction and spray painting their slogans all over town?” Libby answered before she could even think about the question.

  “She doesn't know anything,” Justin told Marti's parents. “Uly made sure that she was kept out of this.”

  “Why?” Marti's mother asked. Libby couldn't tell whether she was addressing the question to her or Justin.

  Libby looked over to Justin, wondering the same thing. If he'd discovered some truth about the world they lived in, why would he want her to remain in the dark? If he was standing up for a righteous cause, why would he keep it a secret from his own family?

  The thought of the word family seemed funny to Libby, even as she thought it. What was that word supposed to mean? It was an archaic idea that supposedly bonded people together, but if that had ever been true, it certainly wasn't anymore. Families weren't colonizing the great frontier, relying on each other for their very survival anymore. They were roommates, housed together because that's how the assignments came down. Libby could have just as easily been sent to live with her father as her mother, just like Sim lived with his. And Sim had siblings that he barely even knew, so was there supposed to be some primal connection between him and those people, just because they were related?

  If Libby had learned anything in the previous twenty-four hours, it was that there was no such thing as family. She had known her cousin for as long as she'd been alive, and he was nothing but another stranger to her when all was said and done.

  She looked at Justin and waited for him to answer that question from Marti's mother. When he didn't say anything, Libby repeated the question to him, “Why?”

  Justin looked Libby in the eyes and opened his mouth as though to respond to her, but he didn't get any words out before Marti jumped in and said, “Because he didn't think she had what it took to know the truth.”

  As her eyes moved to meet Marti's, Libby grew angry. She'd never liked Marti and now the girl was going to start lecturing her about how stupid she was. Libby was all set to have it out with her, but as she looked to Marti she saw that the girl's eyes weren't even on her. Marti was looking toward the ground as though she didn't want to say what she was saying. This wasn't her talking. It was Uly.

  Marti continued, “He thought she was weak. He thought that she was comfortable with the status quo. He thought that if he ever even hinted about what he believed in front of her... He didn't trust her.”

  Libby suddenly felt like the stupidest person in the world. She felt like she was the joke of the room. Like everyone was staring at her, waiting for her to realize that she was the punchline and her entire life was nothing but a prank.

  She wasn't going to give them what they wanted. She wasn't going to crumble, because she knew the truth. Uly never cared about her. Justin never cared about her. Her father never cared. Her mother never cared. She couldn't be sure that Sim ever really cared about her. At this point, she wasn't even sure that she cared.

  “I don't know why they want me,” Libby told Marti's father, looking him straight in the eye. “I don't know anything that would make a difference to them. I am just a very stupid girl who somehow stumbled into something far too complicated for me to understand.”

  A tear fell down her face and she wiped it away, cursing herself for losing whatever small amount of strength she had hoped to project to them as she spoke.

  She turned toward the door as she said, “I'd like to leave now. But I can't, can I?”

  “If you leave here, they'll kill you,” Mar
ti's father told her.

  Libby couldn't help but smile, “Or they'll take me in and ask me what I know about Freedom, and all of its members. All of you.”

  “We can't take that risk.”

  “So I can choose to be a prisoner of theirs or a prisoner of yours,” Libby concluded. “Doesn't sound like freedom to me.”

  “Freedom isn't something that we have. It's something that we aspire to,” Marti told her, in a tone that sounded neither threatening nor condescending.

  Libby turned and faced the others as she said, “Before long, HAND officers will be knocking on that door and demanding to search this apartment. If I'm not allowed to leave here, how are you going to stop them from killing us all?”

  When she asked the question, Marti's parents looked at each other. Justin looked toward the ground. Marti kept her eyes on Libby and they both knew the answer to the question. Nobody in that room had any idea what they were doing.

  35

  Sophia was pacing back and forth between the kitchen table and the window. Each time she approached the window, she would push aside the curtain and look to see how far away the search team was.

  “I still don't see them,” she told Collin, dropping the curtain and turning to walk back to the table. “But I can feel them out there. They're getting closer. Maybe a block over. Maybe two. But they're coming.”

  Collin was listening to what she was saying, but his mind was on other things. In front of him, he had a pad of paper. He was scribbling notes and ideas as quickly as he could, trying to think of what he could do to make a difference out there.

  “I'm not going to have time for big statements. If they put the cameras on me at all, they will make sure that anything I say doesn't make it on the air,” he said. He was thinking out loud more than he was talking to Sophia.

  “They'll tell people that you're a monster, just like they did with Uly Jacobs. He tried to get a message out, but they turned it into something else. They said he was trying to kill children,” Sophia added.

  Collin nodded and told her, “Uly Jacobs ran into the crowd, screaming. The people around him had terror in their eyes. It was easy for them to play him up as a lunatic, because that's how he looked.”

  “How can you make sure that they won't be able to do the same thing with you?”

  “I have to make sure they don't have the opportunity.”

  “How?”

  “That's the question of the day. I will have a couple of seconds at most. I have to make sure that those seconds mean something.”

  Sophia turned and walked toward the window again. When she reached it, she lifted the curtain and looked outside. She lingered at the window this time before saying, “The sun is shining. The sky is blue and beautiful. Looks like there's a nice breeze too. Such a beautiful day, and yet the sidewalks are empty. I don't remember ever seeing anything like this.”

  To be honest, Collin was only half listening to her by this point. His focus was still on the plan—or the need to develop a plan. He needed a bold message that would convey the ugliness of the system and the lies of the authorities. He needed something powerful.

  Sophia gasped and pulled away from the window, letting the curtain to fall back into its normal position. This caught Collin's attention and he looked up at her. She was standing with one hand over her heart, feeling it pound in her chest.

  “Sophia?” he asked, standing from his chair and ready to rush toward her.

  Putting a hand up to stop him, she said, “It's nothing. I just looked at the other windows for the first time.”

  “What did you see?”

  Sophia walked toward the table once again and said, “I saw people in all of the other buildings, looking back at me.”

  Collin stood where he was but looked toward the window. He wanted to see it for himself. Something about the thought of those people watching from their windows meant something to him. It meant that no matter what they showed on TV that night, he could still get a message to the people who were trapped inside, peeking out at the world from behind their curtains.

  An idea was sparked inside of Collin, and it began to grow into a fire in his belly. With luck, that fire would soon ignite the world.

  36

  “They're getting closer,” Marti reported from the window. “They're a few buildings down.”

  “We still have some time then. It'll take them a while to search buildings this size,” her mother responded.

  Libby was sitting on the couch with Ammo at her feet. Justin was sitting in his chair, never saying a word and never looking in her direction. She was staring at him though, wondering whether he was told to guard her or if he just decided to sit.

  Marti's father was on the phone in his bedroom, but Libby could hear what he was saying. He was speaking to someone about a missing dog poster that he found somewhere, like this was really the time or place for such things. She hadn't seen any dogs other than Ammo in the apartment. What he was saying made no sense, but nothing did anymore.

  At this moment, she was on the run from her own government. She wasn't a criminal or an extremist. She was just a girl, pulled into some stupid movement by people who never even thought that she was smart enough to know the truth. And now those people were deciding her fate. She had never even met Marti's parents before she was dragged into their apartment, and now they were taking it upon themselves to make decisions for her.

  The more she thought about the situation, the more angry she became. She had been dealing with a lot of responsibility before all of this happened. There was undoubtedly a note in her school records, saying that she needed to loosen up a little. She was not irresponsible or stupid. She wanted to smack Uly across the face for thinking those things about her.

  Realizing that she was upset about not being invited to join the group of crazed constitutional extremists who were wanted by the government only made her more angry.

  “He loved you,” Justin finally said to her, still not looking directly at her. He must have sensed her anger though, because he was responding to it.

  “I don't care,” she replied.

  “He wanted to protect you.”

  “He got my home blown up.”

  There was a long silence. Justin seemed to be letting go of the subject, but Libby wasn't ready to do that. She leaned forward and looked at him as she asked, “So, did all of you just sit around and talk about how stupid I am? Did you laugh about how foolish I was? Was this the running joke of your little club?”

  Justin still refused to meet her stare. He said, “No.”

  “Well, don't tell me that he loved me. We both know that's a lie. You can't love someone that you don't respect.”

  “He respected you,” Justin replied. He finally looked toward her and said, “He saw what you were dealing with—your mother. He saw how much it was wearing on you, but you never stopped pushing yourself.”

  “I didn't really have a choice.”

  “Yes, you did. The fact that you don't even realize that... It's why he thought so highly of you.”

  “You guys really need to start hammering out your story before you try to convince me. 'Cause this... You can't even agree on how you want to play it,” Libby told Justin. “You say he loved me. He respected me. She says he didn't trust me. That I'm just some stupid girl that he thought he had to put up with. He thought I was content with the status quo, or whatever. He thought that I would have turned him in.”

  “Wouldn't you have?” Justin asked, sounding more firm than he had all morning. He quickly softened up again and took his eyes off of her.

  Libby stood up and stepped over the dog, which made her wounded arm hurt more for some reason. She walked across the room, wanting to get out of there and deal with her situation on her own, but that wasn't an option. She never seemed to have a say in anything that happened in her life, and it was starting to piss her off.

  Marti's mother crossed the room and joined her husband in their bedroom. She closed the door behin
d her, never so much as glancing in Libby's direction as she went to whisper and deliberate.

  Libby turned her back to Justin. She wanted to scream at him for telling her what she would have done to Uly, as though he even really knew her anymore. What made her even more upset was knowing that he was probably right. Maybe she would have turned Uly in if he'd ever just come out and told her. At the very least, she wasn't sure that she wouldn't have.

  Finally, she turned toward the muted TV and stared at the picture of Collin Powers that they'd been showing all morning.

  She said, “I don't care anymore. Uly was just a lunatic with fanatical ideas. You all are.”

  “Libby, don't,” Justin told her, with a tone that sounded almost sympathetic.

  “I am sick and tired of being led around by people who believe that they're better than everyone else. People who look down their noses at anyone who isn't like them. People who want others to suffer because it makes you feel better about yourselves.”

  “Those are lies. You know those are lies.”

  Turning back to Justin, Libby asked, “And I'm supposed to believe that you're telling me the truth? When have you ever told me the truth, Justin? When did Uly ever tell me the truth? When did either of you earn my trust?”

  Justin could barely look at her by this point. He was once again deciding to remain small and quiet, and she wasn't about to let him retreat into his shell. So she decided to burn whatever bridge existed between the two of them once and for all.

  She could feel herself shaking as she said, “What I know for a fact was that Uly was a liar. Maybe... Maybe he deserved to die. And now because of him, Amanda is going to die. And I'll probably die too. You can try to defend him, but your words mean nothing. All I need are the facts right in front of me. Uly just killed us all. So, yeah. Maybe he deserved what he got.”

  As the words left her mouth, Libby's gut twisted. Her head started pounding. Her body went numb. She felt as though she were going to throw up. But she didn't have the chance to linger on that any of that, because she realized that while Justin wasn't reacting at all to what she'd said, Marti was.