The Phoenix Project (The Liberty Box Book 3) Read online

  The Phoenix Project

  Book 3 of The Liberty Box Trilogy

  C.A. Gray

  www.authorcagray.com

  Copyright and Disclaimers

  The Phoenix Project

  By C.A. Gray

  Copyright 2017, C.A. Gray

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No Portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, audio recordings, facsimiles, photocopying, or information storage and retrieval systems without explicit written permission from the author or publisher.

  Published By:

  Wanderlust Publishing

  Tucson, AZ

  Cover Art By:

  Nathalia Suellen, Copyright 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  WWW.NATHALIASUELLEN.COM

  INTANGIBLE (Book 1: Piercing The Veil)

  Peter Stewart grew up on a unique version of the Arthurian legends taught him by his father, a harebrained quantum physicist who asserts that anything is possible. But Peter disbelieves anything which cannot be scientifically explained, despite a nagging sense that there is more to the world than meets the eye.

  Lily Portman is an orphan with a secret: she can see creatures that are invisible to everyone else. These creatures control every human being she has ever met to varying degrees… until she meets Peter and his father.

  When a mysterious stranger stages an accident which nearly costs Peter and Lily their lives, suddenly Lily learns that she is not crazy after all, and Peter discovers the truth of his father’s stories… including the existence of Arthur’s ancient nemesis, one who calls himself the Shadow Lord, and a prophecy with implications so profound that it will alter not only the course of their lives, but potentially the fate of the world.

  In The Liberty Box…

  Kate Brandeis, former “it” girl and reporter for the Republic, discovers with the help of her fiancé, hacker Will Anderson, that the Republic is not what it seems. She learns that the Potentate, Ben Voltolini, released a virus encased in the vaccinia vector upon the population in order to render them docile, and then forced all citizens to submit to brainwave identification via stations called Liberty Boxes. He used their brainwave signatures to track their whereabouts, and broadcast signals via control centers to brainwash the citizens into believing they are healthy and prosperous. In reality, Kate finally realizes, many of them are on the brink of starvation and disease.

  No sooner does Kate learn this, she hears that Will has been killed, and she knows that she is next. She flees for her life, and comes upon a community of refugees living in caves outside the Republic and struggling to survive off the land. Some of the refugees, the Council, desire a quiet existence. Others, the hunters, hope to awaken citizens of the Republic to the truth and fuel a revolution.

  While there, Kate meets Jackson MacNamera. Raised in Iceland, Jackson possesses extraordinary skills of perception which enable him to remain untouched by the control center signals. Using information Will discovered before his death, Jackson and the hunters go back on the grid to locate several citizens slated for slaughter as rebels. Jackson realizes that the “Deep Impact” bullets used by the agents on the grid are in fact blanks. Yet they still can kill, if the mind believes they are real. He shares this with the hunters, who dismiss the idea with anger. He later shares it with Kate as well. Moved by his passion to help set others free, Kate kisses him. Jackson pushes her away gently, even though he is falling for her too, because he knows she is still grieving the loss of her fiancé.

  The hunters’ activity on the grid draws the attention of the Potentate, who manages to track them to the caves. He sends a company of soldiers to destroy the caves. One of the soldiers manages to save about eighty of the several hundred refugees, and leads them to safety.

  The soldier, it turns out, is Kate’s supposedly deceased fiancé, Will Anderson.

  In The Eden Conspiracy…

  The refugees Will manages to rescue include both factions: the hunters, and the Council. The Council, headed by the Crone, assumes authoritarian rule, demanding that the refugees escape to the world superpower called New Estonia. The hunters, including Kate and Jackson, sharply oppose abandoning the citizens of the Republic to Voltolini’s rule. Only a show of superior force enables them to escape the Crone and set off on their own.

  The twenty remaining rebels flee to Beckenshire, once a thriving city of the Republic, and now a ghost town due to a nuclear reactor meltdown. Will believes it is now habitable but not covered by control centers, and that is the reason why the Republic still claims that it is not safe.

  Along the way, Kate and Will attempt to get to know one another again. Their separation lasted only a few weeks, but during that time, absent the control center signals, Kate began to come into her own. She doubts that Will knows or understands her as she is now. She tells him that she wants to use her fame as a reporter to tell the people of the Republic the truth about Voltolini. Will refuses to allow this: she would need his help and protection, he says, and he will be too busy helping the rebels with their own plans. Privately, Kate decides that she will do it anyway, with or without his consent.

  Meanwhile, Jackson teaches Kate to fish, to hunt, to shoot, and to train her mind. Jackson can tell that Kate is falling for him, but he doesn’t want to get in the way of her relationship with Will. He keeps his emotional distance from her, which Kate interprets as lack of interest. Even so, once she admits to herself that she has feelings for Jackson, she realizes she needs to end her relationship with Will out of fairness to them both. Will changes his tune after this, attempting to win her back.

  Once the rebels arrive in Beckenshire, they build signal disruptors, or jammers, in order to block the control center signals. The hunters meanwhile determine that the best way for them to disrupt the control center signals throughout the Republic is to destroy the repeaters, the stations that propagate the signals to the outer reaches of each district. These are largely unguarded, unlike the control centers themselves.

  While a few of the hunters, including Jackson and Will, head to the nearby city of Friedrichsburg in order to learn the locations of the repeaters, Kate decides to go back onto the grid and attempt to convince her tech-savvy brother Charlie to help her send her broadcast. Jackson, aware of Kate’s plan, follows her from Friedrichsburg. Kate does manage to rescue Charlie from the control center influence, but her parents report her to the agents. Both Charlie and Kate are arrested and taken to the palace to await trial.

  Voltolini is aware that Kate has been with the rebels from the time of her disappearance, so she will know their new location after their flight from the caves. He attempts to coerce her to betray them by holding her parents hostage. Jackson rescues all four of them, and because the guards at the palace still use Deep Impact bullets only, they manage to escape unscathed.

  As they flee, the Potentate broadcasts the execution of several members of the Council, caught in their flight to New Estonia. Before his death, Uruguay Stone, one of the Council members, betrays the rebels in Beckenshire. Kate, Jackson, and Kate’s family watch in horror as the camera pans to the rubble in Beckenshire. They realize this likely means that all the other rebels are dead.

  Voltolini’s agents attempt to recover Kate, Charlie, and Jackson, but cannot find them, because of the signal disruptors. Voltolini decides to try another approach. Since he knows
that the usual control center signals aren’t strong enough to influence Kate or Jackson, he commissions his Chief Technology Officer to create targeted signals against their specific brainwaves, programming them to turn against one another.

  Kate determines that since they are on the grid already, and she has Charlie with her, she might as well send her broadcast now. It will mean disabling the signal disruptors, and therefore within a few hours, the agents will find them again. It’s a suicide mission, and they know it. The night before the broadcast, Jackson kisses Kate. Until that moment he’d been suppressing his own feelings because of Will. But, he reasons, Will most likely died in the Beckenshire blast—and he and Kate aren’t likely to survive much longer anyway. Kate tells Jackson she loves him. He does not say it back.

  The following morning, Kate, her family, and Jackson drive to a smaller broadcasting station in the city of Greensborough. Because of their signal disruptors, some of the staffers there see the truth, believe their story, and stay to help them with the broadcast. Kate then gives their only signal disruptor to her parents, who leave the station shortly before they go live.

  Voltolini’s targeted signals against her work quickly. Even as she delivers her message, she wonders whether any of it is true. Voltolini interrupts her broadcast with his own, addressing Kate directly. He tells her that Jackson kidnapped her, brainwashed her, and forced her to say everything she just said. The broadcast team and Kate’s family flee, knowing the agents will arrive at any minute. Jackson stays behind to try to convince Kate to come with them, but Kate refuses to go. When the agents arrive, Kate allows Jackson to be captured.

  As they drag him away, Jackson urges Kate to remember she’d said she loved him, and he pleads with her to fight.

  Prologue: Will Anderson

  I dropped to my knees, a pair of wire cutters in my hands, and went to work. Most of the wires were thick, black, and very well insulated, so it took the combined strength of both of my hands to clamp down. At the first repeater in Crystal City, I’d been careful to find just the critical cable that would disable its ability to amplify the control center signaling to the nearby district of the Republic. I’d even frayed the edges of the wires a little bit and put the corpse of a dead rat beside them, to make it look like it hadn’t been an act of sabotage.

  But then I’d seen the broadcast.

  Beckenshire bombed into oblivion. And along with it, all the rest of the refugees.

  Including Kate.

  The last time I’d seen her, she’d been sleeping under moth-eaten blankets on the concrete not ten yards away from me. I’d only half glanced back at her as we crept off into the forest, not knowing it would be the last time I’d see her alive.

  Now in Pensington, I wasn’t careful anymore. I cut every wire I saw, and didn’t bother making it look like an accident. Snapping through wires acted as a surrogate for snapping through necks, which is what I really wanted to do right now.

  I’d kill Stone for betraying us all, if he wasn’t dead already. If I could bomb the palace and take down the Potentate and the entire Tribunal in one fell swoop in retribution for what they’d done, I would—but even that would be too good for them, I thought savagely. I’d much rather snap Ben Voltolini in half with my bare hands, if I could ever get close enough.

  Since I couldn’t, though, I’d have to settle for starting a revolution. The more people we could wake up at once, the better. The twenty-seven control centers across the Republic were too heavily guarded, but we now had a map of all eighty-one repeaters, thanks to our successful mission in Friedrichsburg.

  The problem was, there were now only three of us left to destroy those eighty-one repeaters.

  Nick, too grief-stricken to see reason after the broadcast, had insisted on going back to Beckenshire to find Molly, even though there was little hope that anybody had survived that blast. Jacob and Roger volunteered to go with him because it was clear he was out of his mind and needed someone to keep him from doing anything rash. And that damn Jackson had disappeared as soon as we arrived in Friedrichsburg—none of us had a clue where he was going or why. We’d never see him again now.

  We really could have used his help, too. What a bastard. Maybe I’d snap his neck too, if I ever got the chance.

  “Think you got ‘em all,” said Alec, bemused. He stood over me with his arms crossed over his chest. I’d almost forgotten his presence until he spoke, only then realizing I’d cut every wire in the building and left nothing for him to do but stand there and watch.

  I looked up at him, wiping the sweat from my brow, and gave him a curt nod. This little shoebox of a building was barely large enough to house the repeater itself—no windows, no ventilation whatsoever.

  “Fine. Let’s hit the next one,” I said.

  Jean waited for us outside, beside the idling car. Alec had hot-wired it like an expert—apparently when he and Kate’s former roommate Maggie had been on the run, he’d acquired a lot of subversive skills that were coming in handy now.

  I climbed in the shotgun seat while Jean took the back and Alec drove. We hadn’t gotten a mile down the road toward the next repeater when we came to an intersection with a blank silver screen in the middle of a town square. It crackled and lit up. My heart stopped.

  It was Kate.

  Jean gasped and Alec swore. I could do nothing but stare at her. She looked cleaner than I’d seen her since before the caves, but for the first few seconds of air time, she froze.

  I couldn’t comprehend it. I was elated she was alive, but—how? My mind raced for possible explanations. Is she a hostage? Where is she? Am I dreaming?

  At last she smiled, as if she’d won some sort of internal battle with herself. “Hi, friends. I know you’ve been told a lot of things about me since I’ve been gone, most recently that I’m a terrorist and that I am your enemy. I imagine that for a lot of you, that’s been very confusing. You know in your hearts that I am devoted to you. I’m your Voice of Truth, the face you’ve come to trust. I want to honor that trust today, by telling you what I know is true.”

  I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.

  This was the broadcast. The one she’d been talking about from the beginning. The one I told her not to do because she’d need me there both to put her on the air, and to protect her, and I wouldn’t go because I also needed to be in Friedrichsburg and I couldn’t be in two places at once.

  She went anyway. Suddenly I remembered that when I’d glanced back at her just before we’d left Beckenshire for Friedrichsburg, she’d seemed unnaturally still. When she slept normally, she didn’t snore, but her breathing was rhythmic and loud. I’d had a brief suspicion then that she wasn’t actually sleeping, but thought nothing of it, having no idea why she’d bother to fake it.

  She followed us into Friedrichsburg. She must’ve gone to find Charlie after all.

  Jackson. He knew she’d followed us, and he went after her. Of course he did. She had to have someone to protect her, and since I wouldn’t do it, the damn white knight rode off to her rescue instead. He was probably in the studio with her right now. Oh, I could kill him…

  Kate was saying, “When I began to realize all of this, my fiancé at the time, Will Anderson, started to help me with my investigations.” I started at my name, and despite everything, it stung to hear her say, my fiancé at the time. “He was a computer hacker, and he began to uncover information that confirmed and fleshed out my own memories and realizations.”

  She thinks I’m dead too, I realized. And why wouldn’t she? She knew we’d gone to Friedrichsburg, but for all she knew, we went right back to Beckenshire afterwards. We might’ve been there when the bombs dropped.

  “New Estonia, if you are listening,” Kate said, “we need your help. You are next. As we speak, Ben Voltolini is building control centers on your own soil, disguising them as benign construction projects of which you would take little notice.”

  Jean whooped out loud, and in the rear
view mirror I saw her pump her fist in the air. “Go Kate! Yes!”

  But there was something off about Kate. She had a certain wild, frantic look in her eyes, and beads of sweat dotted her forehead. Maybe it was just the adrenaline of a forbidden broadcast, but I didn’t think so. It looked like she was getting sick.

  She went on, “The old United States had a Declaration of Independence that said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Liberty is one of our unalienable rights. You and I have the right to be free—”

  The screen cut out suddenly, replaced by the face of Ben Voltolini. It took me a moment to register what had happened. He wore a sympathetic expression which made him even more eminently despicable than outright malice might have done.

  “Miss Brandeis,” he cooed. “Like the rest of the Republic, I’ve been listening to your broadcast with great interest. While it is obviously well rehearsed and quite articulate, at this point I really must interrupt. You have indeed been brainwashed, my dear, but not by us.”

  My intestines curled into one big knot. I understood Kate’s fevered expression now. She isn’t using the signal disruptors right now; she can’t while sending a broadcast.

  The control center signals are getting to her again.

  The Potentate shook his head. “Look around you, Kate. What do you see? Is it the dystopian world you have described to the people of the Republic just now? Or is it the world of freedom and affluence you’ve grown up in?”