The Phoenix Project (The Liberty Box Book 3)

by C. A. Gray

Dumbfounded, Charlie looked from Joe to me. “So… why do we want him with us?”

  “So that Voltolini can’t have him anymore,” I hissed.

  Charlie closed his eyes for a long second like he was hitting a reset button. “Okay, I’ll let you fill me in on that later. But right now—” He pointed at the palace.

  “We’re not going after your parents,” I told him firmly. “Even if everything goes perfectly, we couldn’t make your mom run, and your dad won’t come without her.”

  Charlie swore under his breath, still staring at the palace. “I knew she was gonna be a pain to bring along, but I never, ever thought…” He shook his head. “She’s my mom, you know? I never thought she could be capable of something like this!”

  “The control center signals are very powerful,” Joe murmured, still breathing hard. “I wouldn’t judge her too harshly.”

  “Yeah, but she had a jammer! She’s not even brainwashed anymore!”

  “A jammer?” asked Joe, confused. He looked at me. “Is that the same thing as a signal disruptor?”

  “Yes, and can we discuss this later?” I hissed. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Yeah, just—gimme a minute! I’m thinking!” Charlie snapped.

  I wanted to respect Charlie’s process, but we really needed to follow Kate and Will before their trail got too cold to follow.

  Kate and Will. Will has a signal disruptor, I thought. That meant Kate would be herself again soon, assuming she hadn’t been ‘damaged’ like Joe had implied.

  How will she react when she realizes she betrayed me?

  How will I react, when I know that she knows?

  I’d forgiven her already, but there was so much water under the bridge now that we’d almost have to get to know each other again on the other side of it. I had no idea what kind of relationship we’d have going forward. An awkward one probably, I thought. At least at first.

  Besides, Will clearly still loved her, if he left the rest of the group and braved all this just to come and get her.

  I thought of the question Grandfather usually asked me on occasions like this one: “Ask yourself, Jackson, whether the thoughts and emotions you are having right now help or hinder your current situation?”

  Hinder, of course. If he had to ask the question, that was always the answer. I could think about all of this later, once it was part of my reality instead of hypothetical.

  Dogs began to bark on the other side of the property—no doubt to help the agents locate the fugitives’ trail.

  “Time’s up,” I announced to Charlie, pointing at the dead agent whose body had now been abandoned while the others explored the property. “Joe and I are gonna split that guy’s uniform to blend in a little better, and then we’re gonna go find Kate and Will.” And hopefully Joe won’t slow me down enough to get us both captured, I added to myself silently. “You coming, or are you gonna go back in the palace to die for a lost cause?”

  Charlie glared at me. “I hate you.”

  That meant he was in. I shrugged, and said, “I’m comfortable with that. Come on.”

  Chapter 17: Kate

  I could hear dogs barking in the distance, throughout the grounds. I stumbled more than once as Will pulled me along faster than I could go. Agents shouted to one another in the distance, but they were too far away to make out the words.

  Finally I fell, catching myself with my free hand. An edge of Parisian silk caught a branch as I went down, and it ripped. I had a flash of déjà vu.

  Last time I ran, I was barefoot, in a silk dress, and ended up in the woods, just like this, I thought… only then, Will hadn’t been beside me. I’d thought he was dead.

  Just like I’d thought before he showed up on the palace grounds tonight. I looked up at him as he reached down to help me to my feet, and felt a rush of gratitude for my former fiancé.

  “Yeah, okay,” Will huffed as he pulled me up, as if I’d made an argument of some sort, “running isn’t gonna work. There’s too many of them. We’re gonna have to hide.”

  Will never needed me to weigh in on these speculations of his. I knew he’d verbalize both the problem and the solution, with or without my input.

  “We’re gonna hide in plain sight,” he announced.

  Not what I’d expected. “In plain sight?” I echoed.

  “Trust me. After hanging out with those guys in the Potentate’s military for a few weeks, I can tell you, they’re mostly automatons. They’re only gonna be thinking of the most obvious options for hiding or fleeing, and that’ll be enclosed spaces and fast-moving vehicles. But if we’re up there—” he pointed to the top of a nearby tree, “—ain’t a one of ’em gonna think of looking up.”

  “Um,” I stared where he pointed. “That’s because that tree isn’t climbable.”

  “‘Oh ye of little faith,’” Will shot me a sidelong smile. “Come here. I’ll give you a boost, and you should be able to get to the first branch. After that, just shimmy up the bark until you reach the next one.”

  I felt a wave of terror just thinking about it. What if I slipped? What if I looked down and lost my footing? What if a branch broke? There had to be a better plan than this… but the dogs roamed throughout the grounds, and we were making no progress.

  While I was still formulating my protest, Will grabbed my hand and pulled me as he ran toward the tree. When we reached it, he crouched down to let me step first on his thigh, and then on his hand. The next thing I knew, I was grabbing a branch, pulling myself up, and praying.

  After that, my conscious brain focused obsessively on the climb, and on not dying. I glanced at the forest floor, too far below me, and a wave of vertigo made me stop climbing and cling to the bark. My chest began to constrict again.

  “Climb!” Will ordered.

  “Give me a second,” I gasped.

  “We don’t have a second, Kate, if they come upon us now, we’re done for. Go!”

  No panicking, I ordered myself, not now. I gripped the trunk with my bare thighs, the gown hiked up well above my knees. The only branches in grabbing distance were too thin to hold my weight, but if I distributed it and let some of the pieces of bark along the trunk hold me up, maybe I could get a little higher…

  Once I got past that bare section of the tree, I could breathe again—provided I didn’t look down. The branches higher up were more substantial, and somehow seemed less symbolic of my own fragile spine.

  I didn’t have the upper body strength to pull myself even close to all the way up from one branch to the next, but I made up for it by finding edges of bark to use as footholds. Some of the branches higher up looked much too precarious to support my weight, yet somehow they all held anyway, save one. It snapped under my foot just as I’d propelled myself to the next branch above it.

  “Sorry!” I whispered at Will, who had to dodge the branch as it fell. I wondered how he’d get up to where I was without that branch.

  “S’fine,” he panted. “You can probably—stop and sit on the one right above you. I think—we’re good here.”

  Obediently I pulled myself up on the branch he’d indicated, gasping to catch my own breath. “Not exactly dressed for this,” I wheezed, looking at my now dirty and torn nightgown.

  “We’ll find something else for you—as soon as we get out of here,” he promised, reaching up and squeezing my foot. Then he peered down at the ground. I purposely didn’t follow his gaze. “Yeah, I think we’re high enough if they don’t look up. And if they do—we’re screwed anyway.”

  “I thought you said they wouldn’t look up?”

  “They won’t,” he reassured me. “If one of them does, it’s either a fluke because he’s really looking for something else, or else he’s free-thinking enough already that we might be able to bring him to our side.”

  I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the bark of the trunk. At last I opened my eyes and looked at him, visually tracing the lines of the face I
knew so well: the blond hair, the sharp cheekbones, the mouth perpetually set in a firm hard line.

  “I thought you were dead,” I whispered at last.

  “I thought you were dead,” he returned. “Last time I’d seen you, you were in Beckenshire, asleep. Or pretending to be asleep, as it turned out.”

  I gave a hollow laugh. I was pretending, he was right. Shortly after he and the hunters left for Friedrichsburg, I’d followed them.

  I also noticed, as I thought of this, how easy it was for me to pull up that memory. While in the palace, it had seemed like everything that had happened from the time of my flight from the Republic onward had been hidden under a kind of mental veil. I could still remember if I really tried, but it had taken a monumental effort to do so. But now, the memory just popped into my head, as clear as if it had happened yesterday.

  Then it dawned on me, as I looked at Will: He has a signal disruptor. I clung to the branch a little tighter, breathing in slowly and steadily. I tried not to think about the implications that had on everything that had happened from the time of my broadcast until now…

  Not right now, I thought. I can’t deal with any of that right now.

  Will didn’t seem to notice my distance. He was pouring out his heart to me. I forced myself back to the present moment, forced myself to listen. “I went a little crazy both times, I think,” he was saying, “when I saw Beckenshire leveled on the news broadcast and I thought I’d lost you. Then again when I saw you on screen, telling the people the truth, but Voltolini interrupted your broadcast—I knew he was after you, and I had to get to you first. I see I was too late though.” He reached up and fingered the silk edge of my nightgown. He grimaced and asked, “What did he do to you, Kate?”

  “Nothing!” I protested automatically, “he’s been nothing but kind to me. He—” I stopped.

  Is this true?

  I replayed the memories of being in the palace. The fancy meals. The elegant manners. Ben’s roving eyes, and the revealing outfits he kept putting me in—but he never touched me inappropriately. He’d wanted something from me, certainly, or he wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble, but… had it been that, surely he’d have made a move on me already.

  But why bother to wine and dine me, if that had been his motive? He was the Potentate. Surely he could have had any woman in the Republic for the taking, no extra effort required. Probably he did have as many as he wanted.

  Then my own words to Jackson came back to me, unbidden:“They want me to be the one to kill you, you know. Not actually pull the trigger, but give the order. Do the voice-over for it. Like I used to for high profile executions.”

  That’s what I’d said to him, just to be mean. Was I right, after all? I felt a swooping sensation in my stomach that I couldn’t immediately place, and I remembered Charlie handing me the butt end of a pistol. “Kate will go in and get him with me, won’t you?” he’d asked.

  And I’d said, “Are you sure he’s not dangerous? He killed all those Tribunal members… and guards…”

  I felt my body start to shake, and it took me a moment to identify the emotion. It was anger. I was furious.

  “Hey. Earth to Kate?” Will said, gently shaking my heel. I realized I’d stopped talking for awhile now. “You look like you’re having an internal wrestling match.”

  “They…brainwashed me!” I gasped, wishing I could scream with fury. “Again! I can’t… I can’t believe it…” The hatred pulsed through my veins with every beat of my heart. After all I’d seen and done, Voltolini stole my own mind from me a second time.

  But how did I fall for it again?

  A second emotion crashed in upon me, as powerful as the first, and it sat on my chest, preventing me from inhaling all the way. But it wasn’t like the panic I’d felt in the palace. This felt more like… grief. Or perhaps self-loathing, so palpable I felt it physically. I blinked away tears of mingled sadness and rage, surprised to find them on my cheeks.

  “I’ll kill him,” I wheezed, gripping the bark of the trunk with my fingers so tightly I thought I might draw blood from my palms. I wanted to draw blood. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”

  Will let go of my foot. “You most certainly will not,” he commanded. “You will stay by my side, and you will stay safe, and we will get out of here alive!”

  I didn’t reply to this. Will knew Voltolini was evil, but he didn’t understand. He couldn’t know how helpless it felt to wake up and find you’d been a puppet. It was a violation so intimate and personal that in a way, it almost seemed worse than rape.

  If I’d been physically overpowered, that would have been one thing. But even after seeing the caves destroyed and most of the refugees gunned down, and then Beckenshire blown up…even after Jackson’s training to see truth, I’d still fallen right back under the Republic’s spell the second the signal disruptor left the broadcasting studio.

  Am I that weak?

  “Have you ever felt like you were your own worst enemy?” I whispered to Will at last. “Like you couldn’t trust your own mind?”

  Will reached up higher until he could just brush my fingers. He stroked them, and held the tips for a moment. “I was wondering if they’d damaged you mentally somehow. I came here expecting to find you in prison, not dressed up like a geisha.”

  I pulled my hand away. “How dare you!”

  “I know it’s not your fault,” Will added quickly, as if that made it better. He never apologized for anything he said that was offensive, as long as he thought it was true. “You couldn’t help what that creep made you wear. I’m just saying, you’re wearing lingerie, you’re not in the dungeons, and you seemed super disoriented when we found you. Charlie told me he thought the government sent you targeted brainwaves during your broadcast, too. That’s unprecedented technology, and I just wasn’t sure what the fallout might be. You’re starting to seem like yourself again now, though, so I hope that means whatever they did wasn’t permanent.”

  I blinked at him. Targeted brainwaves? But before I could reply, I heard the guards’ voices draw nearer.

  “…the hell could she be?” one of them said.

  Dogs barked, and another said, “No way they’re still on the grounds by now.”

  “Glad I’m not Garcia,” said another, with a low whistle.

  “It wasn’t his fault.”

  Bark bark bark. The agent’s dog stood right at the foot of our tree, barking for all it was worth. I begged it mentally to go elsewhere, but it persisted, staring up at us and attempting to jump up the trunk, like we were raccoons.

  This is it, I thought.

  But remarkably, the agents were still too engrossed in their own conversation to notice. The one who held the dog’s leash tugged on it to get him to quiet down. “He walked into MacNamera’s cell with no backup! How stupid could you be?” the first agent returned. “And now French is dead and Brandeis is gone.”

  Bark bark bark. I listened to the conversation below more intently now.

  “Well, wouldn’t you have gone in, if you thought he was dead? If he’d killed himself in prison, the Potentate would have had Garcia’s head.”

  “You think he won’t for letting him escape and taking Brandeis with him?” the first one snorted. “Plus that guy Joe in the cell next to him—I dunno who he is, but they’ve never executed him, so he must matter for some reason.”

  My breath, already shallow, caught in my throat. Jackson escaped too?

  They think he was the one who killed that guard. And they think I’m with him.

  Bark bark bark.

  The agents below us moved on, as one of them said, “Somebody’s gonna die for this. That’s all I’m saying. And I’m glad it ain’t me. I don’t never want no responsibility, no thank you…”

  The dogs reluctantly trotted after their masters, who were thankfully every bit as dim as Will had said they were.

  When they were gone, Will reached up and squeezed my finge
rs again, and we both let out the breath we’d been holding.

  “Jackson broke out of prison,” I murmured.

  “So I heard. Charlie’s doing, I assume.”

  “I don’t want to run into them,” I blurted.

  Will’s eyebrows shot up. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to be around Jackson. At least… not for awhile. Not until I get my head on straight.”

  I thought Will looked a little pleased at this. “Still not sure if you can trust him, huh?”

  I nodded. “I’m… still trying to work out what’s real and what isn’t. That’s all.”

  But I knew that was a lie. The truth was, I didn’t want to face him after what I’d done to him.

  I couldn’t face him.

  “Hey,” said Will. “If you’re ever not sure if something is true or not, you can just ask me. I’ll tell you.”

  I blinked at him, and nodded. “Thanks.” I thought about asking Will if Jackson was really dangerous, but as I formulated the question, I thought better of it. I already knew the answer.

  “I think they’re gone now,” Will announced, with a deep breath that signaled a subject change. “We should climb down and get off the grounds. If we wait too long, the agents will come back and find us in the daylight.” He began to climb down without waiting for my response, and I shifted on the branch to follow him, scraping my bare leg on the bark. But at this point I was so scratched up I barely noticed.

  “Foot here,” Will said below me, and he actually grabbed my heel and moved it to the part of the tree where he could see a foothold even as he climbed down himself. With each step, he readjusted me until I felt secure. Authoritative as always.

  He reached the ground, and then looked up at me. “Jump,” he ordered.

  “Uhh…” I looked down. The ground was at least seven feet away. If he didn’t catch me, I might break my leg.

  “It’ll be faster,” he assured me, “that last section of trunk is a bear, especially barefoot. I’ll catch you, go on.”

  I looked at the ground again. “I’ll… take my chances the old fashioned way, thanks.”