The Eden Conspiracy: Book 2 of The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

  “She probably couldn’t get there,” said Nick. “The international trading stopped, so it wasn’t like there were ships coming in or going out. Until things calmed down, she was stuck. And by then, the cave community had sprung into existence, and she’d essentially re-created her former situation—just without the family and cultural connection she’d had before.”

  “You said most of her family died,” I said. “But some didn’t?”

  “Some of them stayed in the Republic and got brainwashed,” said Molly. “She disowned them. But I’m pretty sure those bodyguards that follow her around are related to her in some way.”

  “Ah,” I murmured. “I’d wondered.” After a long pause, where the only sound was the crunching of our collective feet on the ground, I said, “Do you think she’ll really sell us out?”

  “Not if she somehow manages to survive and not get caught,” said Molly. “She won’t risk her own life or those of the group to get revenge. She’s much too practical for that. But if she’s going down anyway, you can bet she’s gonna take us with her if she can.”

  “Not a woman you want to cross,” Nick said with a bitter smile.

  I felt guilty about this, but couldn’t decide whether it had really been my fault or not. I wished I could ask Grandfather… although I smiled as soon as I thought this, because I knew what he’d say. Even if it was your fault, what can you do about it now? No sense dwelling on the past.

  He’d be right, of course. Like always. Guilt was not productive. But I knew it would be easier for me to reject it if I had a logical reason to do so, so I rehearsed what I knew one more time.

  Fact: The Crone had become a dictator and was using violence and even the threat of execution against those who opposed her.

  Fact: Most of the refugees still trusted her to lead them to safety, crazy as her scheme may be. And frankly, the path she chose was far more treacherous than it needed to be. Had she chosen to go through the forest on foot and avoid the Republic altogether until the very end, they likely wouldn’t have needed my training to survive at all.

  Well, not true. Even in that scenario, many of them would probably die in the last leg of the journey before boarding the cargo ship overseas to New Estonia. They’d still encounter agents at that point, and those agents would still be armed, real bullets or no.

  So ultimately that meant that yes, the other group of refugees would likely die because their minds were still untrained. Because I chose to abandon them.

  But they could have come with us. Every one of them had that choice.

  And what if I’d abandoned the group I was with now? The hunters weren’t fully trained either, and whatever we had planned would no doubt involve them going back onto the grid frequently.

  Besides, fundamentally I believed that the right thing to do was not to flee for safety, but to stay and fight—for those of us who were able.

  Had I gone with the Crone, it would not have been a free choice, but manipulation. The Crone made her choice. The people with her made theirs. But I could not allow them to make my choice for me. I simply could not have lived with myself.

  I took a deep breath of fresh night air, closing my eyes as I did so. For the first time since we’d left, I felt free.

  Nick cast a sidelong glance at me. “Work something out?”

  I nodded slowly and smiled.

  “So Will told me he has an idea,” Nick changed the subject. “Remember our speculation that the reason Brenda and Nelson and the others started waking up was because the control center signals got interrupted? Turns out we were right. Will wrote the program that did it.”

  “He—?”

  “Wrote the program,” Nick confirmed. “While on the Potentate’s watch, no less. He says it only interrupted the signals for about a minute, because he wanted to test the idea out without getting discovered. But he plans to disrupt the signals for longer and longer intervals, until they stop altogether. I want him and Jean to sit down and work on it as soon as we get to a stopping place and get some rest.”

  “So…do we have to get to anywhere special for him to be able to do that?”

  “I got the impression he thought he could do it from any net screen,” Nick told me.

  I fell silent for a few moments, pondering this and glancing at Will once over my shoulder, walking side by side with Kate.

  Some part of me didn’t particularly want to like Will—but the more I learned about him, the more impressed I was.

  “Pretty resourceful guy,” I said at last. “So we basically repeat the run we did with Jean, and get a team to protect him while he does his thing?”

  “Once he and Jean have worked out what the code should be, yeah.”

  “And how are they going to do that?”

  “In Beckenshire, there should be all kinds of abandoned houses that have never been touched in any raids or riots,” said Nick. “I doubt they’ll have any working net screens, but they should at least have pencils and paper. He said that’s all he’d need for now.”

  I’d have to take their word for it.

  Judging by the position of the moon, it was around three in the morning when we finally left detailed descriptions of each Council member’s location under a rock beside the cliff. They were written on the last of the parchment made from animals the hunters had skinned and cured themselves, and with the ink from wild huckleberries on the point of a twig.

  While I dictated the instructions for Molly to write, most of our party sat or lay down, closing their eyes. Nick looked around, frowned, and announced, “Don’t get comfortable. I know you’re all tired, but we have another hour to go before we make camp.”

  “Yes, Madam,” said Brian sarcastically.

  “Hey!” said Nick so sharply that everyone woke back up again to see him pointing a bony finger in Brian’s face. “Never compare me to her again, do you hear me? I’m trying to keep us safe!”

  “That’s what she said too,” Brian muttered sullenly, clutching his wounded arm to his chest.

  “And for how long?” put in Violet, Sam’s pregnant wife. “You said we’d all most likely die anyway, no matter what you do!”

  The group started to mutter at this. Nick tried to quiet the protests, but I could see that he was losing control. I straightened, and shouted, “Listen!”

  It worked, better than I’d anticipated. Everyone fell silent at once, looking at me. I didn’t intend to say anything else, but now that I had their attention, the words just came out.

  “All of you chose to come with us because you value truth and freedom, and you believe that every human being has a right to those things. Right? What’s happening in the Republic, and what was happening under the Crone, are both a violation of those principles. We must fight against them—not only for ourselves, but for anyone who wishes to be free! That’s why Nick said coming with us may cost you your lives: because we’re not planning to just find another place to settle and stay out of sight. We are going to fight, any way we can. But if we go down, we don’t want it to be from ambush before we’ve even done anything important—I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I die in this war, I want to do it setting as many captives free as I possibly can. To do that, we’ve got to listen to Nick and give him our allegiance, even when he tells us to do something we don’t like.”

  Nobody spoke for a long time after I finished. Brian and Violet both looked a little sheepish. Kate’s blue eyes shone at me in the moonlight. I looked away.

  Will finally broke the silence. “But all of us won’t be fighting.” I saw him glance at Kate, and she stiffened. “Some of us will have to stay behind.”

  Nick answered, calmer now as he faced Will. “I would love to keep Molly safe too,” he told him, glancing back at his wife, who had finished writing the instructions. “I never intended for everyone to come with us on our actual raids. But in all honesty, survival requires community out here. If most of us die in the Republic, those who stay
behind will eventually die of starvation.” He pursed his lips, his gaze now lingering on Molly, even as he spoke to Will. “If there’s a way around that, I’d love to hear it.”

  “I’m willing to make that sacrifice,” Molly whispered, loud enough that we could all hear. “If you are, I am.”

  For a moment it felt to me like we were all intruding on Nick and his wife. Abruptly, Nick tore his gaze away from her, and looked around at the rest of us. “I had assumed, when we all left together, that every one of you made a similar commitment. But I see now that I cannot assume. So, do each and every one of you pledge to do whatever you can to help our cause—donating your labor, sacrificing personal comforts, and even laying down your life, if it comes to that?”

  “I do,” said Kate, releasing Will’s hand with a fierce look in her eyes.

  Will clenched his jaw and crossed his arms over his chest, but he too said through gritted teeth, “I do.”

  Nick slowly turned, pointing at each member of our party as they, willingly or not, pronounced their agreement. Rachel, Brian, and Violet mumbled, I noticed, but most of the others were enthusiastic, or at least spoke loudly and clearly. He came to me last.

  “Absolutely,” I told him.

  “Good. We keep moving for another hour, back into the thicket,” Nick said, pointing into the forest. “As Molly said, I seriously doubt anyone from the Crone’s party will keep looking for us after they come upon the instructions, but on the off chance that they might, we don’t want to be vulnerable or easy to spot.”

  For the next ten or fifteen minutes, the only sound was the crunch of our feet upon the soft earth and fallen twigs. We made a racket, but it didn’t matter, because we weren’t hunting and we weren’t being tracked, not yet. I could tell that much.

  I felt eyes upon me at last and turned. Kate had fallen into step beside me. It was the first time since the explosions in the caves that I’d seen her close-up, and hadn’t realized how haggard she really looked.

  “That was a great speech you gave back there,” she said.

  I gave her a half-smile. “I didn’t get the impression Will liked it much.”

  “Yeah, well.” She fell silent and looked away, which told me she had more to say on that subject but chose to hold her tongue. “I wanted to ask you—since Nick said those who stay behind are likely to die of starvation… I don’t know the exact timeline, but Will and Jean think it’ll take them a few days to a week to figure out how to redeploy the code he wrote. It successfully interrupted the control center broadcasts during his short test but he’s not sure how to repeat it. Will said he expects security to be tighter now.” She lowered her eyes. “But while we wait on them, maybe you can teach me how to—um, well, to hunt?”

  Something about this request felt disingenuous. I glanced at her and narrowed my eyes. “So you can help feed those who stay behind?”

  She nodded, but continued to avoid my gaze.

  I heard Grandfather’s voice in my head.“My son, if you want to find out if a person is lying, watch very closely for the first few seconds of his answer. If he stutters, if he refuses to meet your gaze, or if he over-stares when he does not do so as a rule, be on your guard.”

  “That’s what you want to use it for?” I pressed.

  “It seems logical to me,” said Kate, with growing confidence. “Also, Jacob told me how you started training him to do what you do, tuning into the little cues around you. He said that’s how you hunt as well as you do. Maybe you could teach me that too?”

  Now I understood. She may want to hunt—but really she wanted to learn to resist the control centers, and to shoot. Probably not animals, either.

  “What does Will think of this?” I asked carefully.

  “Will doesn’t have to approve of my every move,” she snapped.

  I pursed my lips and lowered my voice. “What are you planning, Kate?”

  “I just want to learn how to protect and feed myself, that’s all!” With a huff, she added, “Are you going to tell me I’m not allowed to do that, either?”

  I laughed. If I said yes, I automatically became a controlling jerk, and if I said no, then I’d be obligated to acquiesce to her request. She’s good, I thought.

  But, it wasn’t a bad idea. Of those remaining behind, not one of them knew how to hunt, and if for any reason they did need to go back on the grid, they’d be sitting ducks for the agents’ Internal Damage guns. Knowing they were not real was not enough to overcome the evidence of their senses. They had to believe it, and that took training. Kate may have ulterior motives for learning these skills, but that didn’t make the skills themselves bad. I did want her to be able to survive, if anything should happen to us.

  “All right,” I told her. “We can begin training when we get time. But it would take months, perhaps years, to train you completely. A week won’t be near enough.”

  She beamed. “Thank you. I’ll take every opportunity I can get!”

  I nodded, and added, “But do me a favor, all right? Explain to your fiancé what we’re doing so he doesn’t think I’m taking you out into the forest in an attempt to seduce you.”

  Even in the moonlight, I could see her blush. “He’s not going to like it no matter how I spin it.”

  “Because he doesn’t want you learning to hunt and shoot, or because he doesn’t want you learning with me?”

  “Both. I mean, neither.” She opened her mouth, almost said something, and walked back to Will’s side without another word.

  Chapter 7: Kate

  My brother Charlie was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was happy—but his face looked like that of a skeleton.

  Behind his back, one of the Crone’s bodyguards, the one Nick had killed, entered the room. He pulled a gun on Charlie, but Charlie grinned on, oblivious and emaciated, as the guard clicked the safety off of his weapon.

  I woke with a start, gasping.

  Would the nightmares never stop?

  Through the trees, the sunrise streaked pink clouds and orange rays across the sky. It was the most magnificent sunrise I think I’d ever seen in my life. I overheard Sam tell Violet that this could be due to the residual radiation as we approached Beckenshire.

  I’d slept on the forest floor as usual, using Will’s arm as a blanket. It was our third day on the trek to Beckenshire, which was still another week or two away. Nobody knew for sure how long it would take to get there, nor how much longer we’d have forest cover. We weren’t moving constantly either—sometimes we had to stop and rest, mostly for Violet, who was very pregnant and her ankles swollen. Rachel complained a lot, too. I almost hated Rachel for what she’d tried to do to Jackson anyway, so I had no patience for this. Neither did anyone else, it seemed.

  Will was already gone, and when I stretched and looked around, I saw that Jean and several of the hunters had also risen early. About a hundred yards away, I knew I’d find Molly at our little campfire, cooking bits of deer meat on a stick over a fire. This and some assorted nuts and berries served as our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  I got up and went to see if I could offer her any help. She smiled as she saw me approach, and the smile was genuine—not terse like it had been for days.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Morning. Where is everybody?”

  “Nick, Will, Jean, and most of the hunters are off strategizing,” she told me. “They keep arguing about how to safely get back on the grid, and what to do when they get there.”

  “I know, Will was telling me.”

  “How did you sleep?” Molly asked.

  “Fitfully,” I confessed, rubbing the back of my neck where it had rested on the concrete.

  “Nightmares?”

  I nodded. “You too?”

  She nodded back, her smile vanishing as she focused intently on her cooking. “But you’re the only one of us who’s had any good news lately. Will found you.” She looked up agai
n, and gave me a weak smile. “Most of us lost those we loved to death that day. But you got someone back from the dead.”

  I nodded, looking away. “I know. I’m very fortunate.”

  Molly gave me a queer look, probing me.

  “I’ve been dreaming about my family,” I confessed. “My parents, but especially my brother.”

  She looked sympathetic. “It’s hard, knowing they’re stuck in captivity, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “The last time I saw them was weeks before I even came to the caves, before I knew anything was wrong. I thought they were fine then, but were they? Or were they on the brink of death, and I just didn’t know any better? And even if they’re not, they're slaves. I was never close to them or anything, but still. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

  Molly nodded again, still stirring.

  “Will and my brother Charlie got on really well,” I went on, staring off at the sunrise. “My brother is kind of geeky, like Will. He doesn’t program as much as Will, but he’s into building electronics and circuits and things. He’d probably be useful to Will and Jean if he were here.”

  There didn’t seem to be much to say to this. “I wish he was here, too,” Molly said.

  “What about the rest of your family?” I asked, just making conversation.

  She didn’t answer for a long time. Then, her lower lip trembling, she murmured, “Nick and I had a daughter.”

  Oh. She didn’t even have to tell me the rest of the story.

  “She was fourteen. As we fled from the riots, a piece of debris slashed her leg open. Before the Crash it would have been a minor wound. But we had no access to antibiotics anymore, and the wound got infected.”

  “I’m so sorry, Molly,” I whispered.

  Molly waved off my sympathy, and took a deep breath before continuing, “My parents and my sister died of what I now know was starvation, in the early days after the Potentate took power. If anyone in my extended family or Nick’s survived beyond them, we don’t know about it. So,” she continued, “if you know you have relatives on the grid who are still alive, I can understand your fixation.”