The Liberty Box Read online

  The first few lines beside Maggie’s photo was biographical data: her date of birth and age at death (26), the date she began at McCormick Reform School, and the date she disappeared from school and was considered a fugitive.

  I vaguely remembered that day.

  Executed for treason against the government, it read. Collaborated with known EOS. Enemies of State. The next of kin line was blank.

  I stared at the screen in disbelief for a second. Then I shook my head to clear it, took another sip of cappuccino and shoved a chunk of croissant into my mouth that was much bigger than I could chew. I shook my head, staring wide-eyed at the face of my former roommate and swallowed painfully.

  “Maggie,” I murmured, “what in the world did you do?”

  I wasn’t even sure where to start, without a next of kin recommendation and with nothing more to go on than “collaborated with known EOS.” When we were in school together, neither of us knew the other’s family, and if Maggie had had friends, I couldn’t now remember who they were. Come to think of it, I could barely remember her either—I hadn’t thought about her in so many years, I’d nearly forgotten her existence.

  I sent my fiancé Will a comm: “Can you research deceased EOS Margaret Jensen, executed two days ago, if you get a chance? Need her back story. xo Kate.”

  Most of the time I did my own research, and I knew Will was busy today. Will and I were celebrating our two year anniversary this weekend, and we were supposed to be headed to the mountains for a holiday. He’d just proposed two weeks earlier (probably to catch me off guard; he didn’t want to do it on the day)—and I was looking forward to spending a long weekend relaxing and planning our wedding. But he got called into work on some kind of urgent government business, so we’d agreed to postpone the trip for a few days until his crisis ended.

  In a pinch, though, Will was a very convenient fiancé for a reporter to have. As a teenager Will exhibited technical skills so formidable that he drew government attention. They recruited him to become a hacker to gain information against existential threats to the Republic, and I knew he was the best of the best. He had plenty of his own work to do, but something like this shouldn’t take him very long. He could do it on a coffee break.

  My screen lit up with two words: “On it.” Will didn’t like to communicate via comm—he said it distracted him, broke his concentration. Most days I wouldn’t hear from him at all until he was off. I’d long since stopped getting offended about it.

  I closed the comm and sighed, looking at Maggie’s picture again. It seemed odd that I barely remembered her, since we’d lived together for two years… but I was only ten years old then.

  Still. How could she have gone so wrong?

  Will knocked on my door that night bearing a pizza in one hand and the case for his net screen in the other. He kissed me hello and I took the pizza box from him and headed to the kitchen for some plates.

  “So,” he said. There was something in just that one word that made me wary. I turned around to look at him, and he went on, “Anything you want to tell me about Margaret Jensen?”

  I sighed. “Can we talk about something uncomplicated first? How was your day?”

  “My day was complicated, mostly because of the research I was doing for you.”

  There was a sharpness in his voice that made me recoil. “What do you mean?”

  He sat down on the black leather couch in the living room, stretching out his long limbs as he waited for me to join him with the pizza and plates. I returned bearing a pitcher of hard cider and balanced the plates on top of the box. Will helped me to ease the box onto the mahogany coffee table. I had a feeling this was going to be a long night.

  “I’ll just repeat my question,” Will told me, his blue eyes boring into mine with a hard look. “Anything you want to tell me about her?”

  I bit my lip, feeling interrogated. “She used to be my roommate.”

  He nodded. Clearly he’d already found that out. “Where, exactly?”

  “McCormick Reform School. Is that what you’re driving at?”

  Will sat back, folding his arms over his chest. “You failed to mention that little episode in your life, Kate,” he said pointedly. “What am I supposed to think about that?”

  “I wasn’t hiding it from you, it just didn’t seem important. I was ten!”

  “A ten-year-old traitor to the government, apparently,” Will tilted his head down to meet my eyes on level. “I looked up your file too.”

  The truth was, I had almost entirely forgotten about McCormick. That was why I’d never told him about it. It all seemed like a fuzzy memory to me, like another lifetime. But I was too irritated to articulate this well, and I knew from experience that the smartest thing to do was not to address the issue head-on until I could calm down. Despite the fact that I was the writer, Will could always best me in a verbal sparring match.

  Will went on, “It said that you were hallucinating, hearing voices and seeing things that weren’t there. You were rebellious throughout your first year at McCormick, speaking slander against the Tribunal and even against the Potentate. When you couldn’t pass the examination at the end of the first year to graduate, you accused the teachers of wanting to kill you.”

  “I did?” My anger melted away in the wake of my amazement.

  Apparently it had been the right thing to say, because I saw the hard edge melt out of Will’s eyes, and he reached over and took my hand. “You really don’t remember any of this?”

  I seized the opportunity to diffuse the fight and shook my head, wide-eyed. “Well, when you say that stuff it does come back a little bit. It’s not like I have amnesia or anything… but I honestly just haven’t thought about any of it in so many years… I guess I forgot.” I trailed off, and turned to look out the sculpted window overlooking the vast city lights. “Come to think of it, I don’t remember almost anything of my life before I was twelve.”

  “Well, then tell me what you do remember. Any details.”

  I narrowed my eyes again. “Why? What did you find out about Maggie?”

  He bit his lip. “I found… a database.” He didn’t elaborate right away, so I raised my eyebrows. “A database of citizens who are disloyal, or who were disloyal at some point. It… certainly appears to track their every move.”

  “And?” Kate asked eagerly.

  “And it didn’t make much sense,” Will admitted. “Your roommate never seemed to do anything much besides try to evade detection, beginning with her disappearance from McCormick when she was fourteen and you were twelve. Apparently at that time she managed to escape for a period of seven years, and was believed to be living overseas in New Estonia. How she got there, nobody knows. She returned in her early twenties, but then periodically disappeared again just before she could be captured. The notes in the database list that she is dangerous because she is hard to control, and must be disposed of as a potential threat to the Republic.”

  I shook my head. “But… that makes no sense. The Potentate would never eliminate a citizen who was not a known criminal.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Will. “I mean, yes, she should be punished for failing to do her part toward the betterment of society. But I don’t yet understand why they felt the need to dispose of her. That seems… extreme.”

  “I’m sure there’s a reason,” I said firmly. “They can’t possibly put an entire back story in a database. She must really have been dangerous. We just don’t know enough yet to see how she was a threat.”

  Will nodded slowly, sinking his teeth into a slice of pizza and chasing it with a swig of cider. “So same question,” he repeated once he’d swallowed. “Tell me anything you remember about Maggie, McCormick… any of it.”

  Chapter 2: Kate

  I looked out the window over the lights of the city but didn’t really see them. I screwed up my face, mentally grasping at vague memories before they could elude me. “It was a boarding school. That’s why Maggie and I were roommates
.”

  “What kind of stuff did they teach you?” asked Will.

  I shook my head. “I—can’t remember. I just remember that it was hard. Really, really hard.” I paused, and added, “All I remember is studying. But I don’t remember what I studied.”

  “What was Maggie like? Did you two get along?”

  I thought. “No,” I said at last. “She was… difficult. Subversive.”

  “How so?”

  I took another bite of pizza, and chewed for a long time before I answered him. I couldn’t really remember specifics, just an impression. Finally a flash of insight came. “She tried to convince me that the government brainwashed the public.”

  Will’s eyebrows shot up. “Really!”

  I nodded, not totally sure of myself. “And there was something about… a virus…”

  He laughed out loud. “A virus! You mean she said the government infected all of us on purpose?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not all of us. Only the kids who got sent to McCormick, I think.” I paused. “Also, she said something about… government control centers? Something about how they tracked us using our brain waves…” I trailed off, my memory becoming fuzzy.

  “The part about having all our brain waves on file is true,” Will conceded, “but that’s not to track us the way she meant. It’s for our protection.”

  “Right, I know that,” I said, a little defensively. “You asked me what she thought, so I’m telling you.”

  Will bit his lip and pulled out his net screen. He typed a few things on the keypad, and I watched as the corners of his mouth turned down.

  “What?” I asked.

  But he shook his head. “Nothing, keep going. What else?”

  I shrugged, and confessed, “I really can’t remember anything else. I think I blocked out most of what Maggie told me, once I realized she was nuts.” I kept watching Will’s face. He was frowning with that furrow between his brows that suggested something unpleasant. My heart started to beat faster. “Will you please tell me what you found?”

  “In a minute,” he murmured, his eyes still glued to the screen. Then he looked up at me and said, “Something isn’t adding up. Keep going, what else do you remember?”

  “I just told you everything,” I said again, disconcerted. “Come on, your turn. What doesn’t add up?”

  He took a deep breath. “Well… I searched the net on control centers. Nothing on the net, of course. But if I hack into the Republic government’s intranet, it looks like there are twenty-seven databases much bigger than the one where I found Maggie profiled. Each one tracks a million people, and they’re each called Control Center one, two, three, four… through twenty-seven.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “How many citizens are in the Republic?” he asked me. “Roughly.”

  “Twenty-seven million,” I began, and then it dawned on me. “One million per station?”

  Will nodded, and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Pull up any one entry and you get a profile much like what I found on Maggie: biographical data, brain wave signature, and control center location, apparently relative to the person’s home address. After that, tracking data, showing what certainly appears to be where they were around every two hours of every day.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. “You mean even ordinary citizens? Like us? Even the ones who aren’t considered a threat? But… why? What’s the point?”

  Will shook his head slowly. “I can’t say for sure,” he murmured, “but it sure looks like they catalog people.” He looked up at me with a pained expression. “So they can keep tabs on them.”

  “That can’t be,” I murmured. The pit of my stomach curled itself into a knot. “It must be something else. It’s got to be for a different reason. Maybe the Potentate wants to… anticipate our needs.” The thought occurred to me suddenly, and I lit up, suddenly certain this had to be the reason. “That must be how the government agents find out about things like kids who need a surgery they can’t pay for, and that sort of thing! They’re watching over us, like guardian angels!”

  Will frowned. “It’s possible.” He didn’t seem convinced, and gave me a hard look. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Even what I just told you…” I shook my head, trying to find the words. “It has an odd quality to it. Like it feels more like a dream than a real memory somehow.”

  “Tell me more about this virus Maggie mentioned,” Will said. “What was it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  Will leaned forward with that eager look on his pale face I knew so well. “Come on, Kate,” he urged. “Was it just contagious, or did they contaminate your food, or—”

  I gasped, and Will stopped talking. A sudden flash invaded my memory, of a thin, swarthy-looking man, and a syringe.

  “Injection,” I whispered. “It was an injection.”

  “You just remembered something. Tell me what it was,” Will ordered.

  ***

  “Come now, Kathryn,” I heard Mr. Santiago say calmly, but he sounded far away. I tried to hit him, but he grabbed my arm as I flailed and held it fast. His grip tightened on my wrist, and then I felt him force my elbow to straighten. “Hold still or this will hurt,” he said, and I felt a prick in the crook of my elbow.

  I stopped screaming abruptly and looked down to see that Mr. Santiago had stuck a syringe directly into my vein. The contents of the syringe was already almost gone by the time I looked, but I glimpsed a vaguely yellow liquid, and suddenly the inside of my vein felt like it was burning. I began to thrash.

  “Stop it this instant!” he shouted angrily. “See, you made me miss the vein. This serum can scar! This is your fault, young lady!”

  The syringe was now empty. Mr. Santiago extracted the needle, capped it, and covered my small wound with a cotton ball. I snatched my arm away from him as fast as I could; not that it would help now.

  ***

  “Who was Mr. Santiago?” Will demanded when I’d told him the memory.

  “It… must have been a nightmare or something,” I said, trembling. “I don’t have a scar, see?” I held out my arm so he could see the crook of the elbow.

  Will closed his eyes and breathed deeply and deliberately, like he was trying to calm himself down. “What did he inject you with, Kate?”

  “It was just a dream!” I said again.

  “Then remember the rest of the dream.”

  “I can’t just remember on command! I—” I stopped, and gasped again. I had a flash of Mr. Santiago nearly dislocating my arm as he dragged me to a shiny black sedan.

  Will pounced on it. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I answered weakly, but he was having none of it. Even as I spoke, something else occurred to me. “It kills red blood cells. I think. That’s what Maggie said…”

  “What does?”

  “The virus. That’s what he injected me with.” I paused and said, almost pleading with him, “But I’m not anemic now, so it couldn’t have been real…”

  Will bit his lip and typed in a few keystrokes. After a very long pause, he looked up at me. “No, you’re not now. But you were.”

  “When?” I gasped.

  He peered at his net screen and read, “When you were ten. You went back to visit your parents for holiday and they took you to see the physician for fatigue. He noted that you were anemic. At the following six-month check up you were back to normal. But this is funny… it happened again when you were eleven.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long moment, trying to process what that meant. I felt weak; I held up a hand and saw that it was trembling. Suddenly my eyes flashed, and I shook my head vehemently. “No, Will.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “No, what?”

  “No to all of it! You cannot seriously be suggesting, based on a few things you’ve found on a database, that I’ve been brainwashed since I was eleven? Do… do
you hear what you’re implying?” I tried to catch my breath but I still felt the blood flooding my cheeks. “You are implying… treason! That’s what this is!”

  “Okay, okay,” he soothed, reaching across the couch to put a hand on my knee.

  “It’s treason!” I bleated weakly.

  “Babe, look at me.” I did, and I knew my expression was desperate. “You’ve done this before, plenty of times. You get a story, you gather information, and you follow the evidence. No matter where it leads you. You’re objective. Right?”

  “I’m objective,” I repeated, but the inflection in my voice went up at the end, like it was a question.

  “It doesn’t matter whether the evidence is what you think it’s going to be or not, or whether it’s what you want it to be or not. Whatever it tells you, you follow that.”

  I nodded, and swallowed hard.

  “Okay then.” He moved his hand from my knee to my wrist, and set his net screen down on the coffee table so he could pull me onto the couch beside him. “So what we have here is a database with some suspicious evidence, and some memories of yours that we can’t explain—”

  “Dreams of mine,” I corrected, but he ignored me. He was stroking my back, trying to calm me down.

  “We don’t know what it means yet, but we’ll figure it out together. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I breathed. “Okay…”

  Will sighed, leaned toward me and kissed the top of my forehead. I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. “Look, I’ve got to get home if I’ll have any chance of making it to work on time,” he murmured. “Send me a comm if you think of anything else, but be cryptic about it, would you? I don’t think anybody’s looking at our comms, but it still wouldn’t be smart to let this stuff leak out before we know what it means.”

  I nodded, and stood up to walk him to the door. He pulled me close, kissing me more deeply than I had expected, given how bleary he looked and I felt. When we broke apart, he added earnestly, “Kate, I want you to promise me you’ll be careful how you pursue this. Don’t say anything to anybody who doesn’t absolutely need to know. Not Nancy, not anyone.”