Stealing Liberty Read online

  Stealing Liberty

  Jennifer Froelich

  Contents

  The House

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  The Heist

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Coming Soon

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Untitled

  Stealing Liberty

  By Jennifer Froelich

  Published by Clean Reads

  www.cleanreads.com

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  STEALING LIBERTY

  Copyright © 2017 JENNIFER FROELICH

  ISBN 978-1-62135-667-7

  Cover Art Designed by AM DESIGNS STUDIO

  For Mom,

  When your memories stretch thin and disappear,

  I will hold your hand and tell you stories

  of my wonderful mother and what an

  amazing woman she has always been.

  The House

  Chapter One

  Reed

  * * *

  Mom dies again in my dream tonight. Only the ending is different.

  We run like always. Out the door, down the stairs. My legs buckle when I see Dad, already still and covered in blood, but we can’t stop. If we get to the back gate, we can disappear forever. I try to shield Mom, but the bullet finds her anyway. It always finds her. She falls to the grass, reaching for me. Men in black uniforms surround us. I scream as blood blooms like a flower on her chest.

  My head jerks from the stained mattress, my eyes wide. Panic boils in my throat. I am awake now, but the dream is still with me.

  So are the uniformed men.

  One of them covers my mouth with a gloved hand, mashing my lips against my teeth until I taste blood. The cold muzzle of his gun digs into my forehead.

  “Not a sound. Got it?”

  He yanks me from the mattress and pushes me toward the door while Lonnie and Chet sleep like coma patients across the room. They wouldn’t help, even if they were awake.

  Earlier that night, Lonnie had shoved me against the wall after I got between them and the newbie at dinner. "You better watch your back," he said. He's sure not going to watch mine now.

  The men drag me through the doorway, down the hallway. I stumble barefoot between them in my nightclothes. Lights are dim, but I see enough. Unmarked uniforms. No badges, ID, or rank. These men are SS officers.

  I figured I would be transferred from the state home soon, I didn’t know it would happen like this.

  Outside, Pacific wind sweeps under my shirt. I try not to shiver, to slow my thudding heart. One of the men scans my wrist. My nanochip must warn him I am a flight risk — maybe even my family history — because his grip on my arm tightens.

  “Go ahead and try something, Reed.” He taps his weapon with two fingers. “Give me a reason.”

  An unmarked transport idles by the curb — dark, sleek, and silent. They shove me inside, and I swipe my palm over the door, searching for a handle. Nothing’s there but slick paneling. The officers climb in on either side, boxing me in. Doors close without sound. Blackout windows blind us to the city.

  “Drive,” one of them says. The transport responds, gliding forward along a programmed route I can’t follow. I try for a while — two lefts, a right, another left, two rights — then I give up. No other transports, citizens, or barking dogs interrupt the silence. Even the distant whine of the bullet train is missing.

  Of course. It’s too late for the train and breaking curfew is an expensive violation.

  It takes forty minutes to reach our destination: an airport. One of the men pulls me from the transport and escorts me to an ancient cargo jet. Oily asphalt spreads toward nondescript hangars in the distance. No other person is in sight. The other officer returns to the transport and drives away, maybe to snatch others like me tonight.

  “Inside.” My escort prods me up the stairs and through an oval doorway. He points to a seat near the front.

  “Where are we going?”

  He ignores my question and straps on his seatbelt. When the jet begins to rumble along the runway, I buckle up too, gripping my knees as we lift off. I have never been on a plane.

  Our flight lasts one hour and nineteen minutes. We land at a small airport riddled with bullet holes and half destroyed by bombs. Weeds grow through the pockmarked asphalt — this wasn’t a recent act of rebellion. I scan the horizon for signs or landmarks, but learn nothing. Bitter wind cuts through my nightclothes and my breath vapes out in a white cloud. The smell of the ocean is gone.

  My escort pushes me. “Pick up the pace, kid.”

  I stumble on a sharp rock and cut my toe. It hurts more than it should and I pull up to face him, fists curled at my side. I’ve grown about a foot since my sixteenth birthday, which means I can stare him down, eye to eye. He just smirks.

  How about I smash your nose?

  For a minute the urge is so powerful, my pulse pounds against my throat and red spots blur my vision.

  Don’t do anything stupid, Reed. Pick your battles.

  The voice in my head is my dad’s, so I listen.

  We climb aboard a rusty hybrid bus parked in front of the bombed-out terminal.

  “Welcome,” says the autopilot. It’s one of the retro models, formed like a human, with LED eyes and everything. When magnetic tracks were first installed, citizens didn’t trust computers to maneuver vehicles safely along roadways. At least that’s what my grandmother told me. Humanoid pilots were designed to make them feel safer.

  Pretty soon, people had more important things to worry about.

  My escort takes a seat behind the pilot, but I keep going. Only one other passenger is on the bus — a girl with long blond hair who sits in the fifth row, pressed against the window. Bruises swell on her left cheekbone and along her jaw. Her lip is crusted with blood and her right eyelid is swollen shut. Nausea washes over me, along with fresh anger.

  “Sit!” our escort barks.

  The girl flinches. I take a seat across from her
and shift toward the window. The door squeaks closed and the bus lurches forward.

  We travel on an old freeway so desolate, we don’t encounter a single other transport. I wish I was calm enough to sleep — so numb to the government’s strong-arm tactics, they no longer get to me. Instead I stare past the landscape and try not to shake. Try not to relive my nightmare or think about how it felt to wake up with a gun to my head. I imagine a different outcome. Fighting back or breaking out of the state home before they showed up.

  If only.

  Rumors will surface in the morning when the others wake and find me gone. I just hope they think I’m AWOL for good this time.

  No one speaks on the bus, but I listen to Luna, my personalized electronic knowledge navigator, who tones the hour through the tragus implant in my ear. Her familiar voice comforts me, but when I ask her to track our route, she says “Information restricted.”

  All the road signs have been removed, but we must be deep in the Dirt — the part of our country between the eastern and western Sands. I’ve heard stories of its desolation. Being here is something else. I’m used to cities running into more cities, all along the Pacific Coast. Out here there’s nothing but rolling hills and prairies. I give up trying to figure out where we are, instead staring past my reflection to observe the girl, wondering how she stays so still.

  After an hour of gliding along, the autopilot emits a series of warning beeps and the bus groans to a stop. I stand up, craning my neck to peer through the windshield. The headlights shine about two meters beyond the bus, where a wide crater buckles the asphalt. It must have destroyed the mag track.

  People tell stories about marauding rebels out here in the Dirt, blowing up roads, hijacking transports. I study the hills on either side of us, wondering if someone’s out there now, watching us.

  Our escort swears under his breath and disconnects the autopilot. Shoving it in a storage compartment behind the driver’s seat, he mutters something about outdated equipment and accesses the bus’s control panel. For the next fifteen minutes, he curses and grumbles, swiping through screen after screen of instructions, trying to figure out how to engage the tires.

  I examine the emergency door while he’s distracted. Ten seconds and I could be gone, hidden by the night. What’s he going to do? Chase me down?

  Tensing my legs, I grip the safety bar in front of me, ready to see what’s beyond the door.

  Rebels, pirates. Squads of soldiers and pockets of contagion not yet contained.

  I shake off my doubt. It might be worth it, depending on where this bus is headed.

  Are you sure?

  The girl in the next seat shifts and I notice her arms for the first time, crisscrossed with scratches and bruises, just like her face.

  What’s he going to do to her if I escape?

  I sit back down.

  The girl glances my way, but stays pressed against the window with her knees drawn to her chest. She seems so fragile, reminding me of the antique books my mom used to collect. When I was about ten, I snuck one out of the box hidden under her bed, curious what all the fuss was about. She cried when she found the remnants of a page crumbling between my fingers. “Why couldn’t you just leave them alone?” she asked.

  Thinking about my mom crying is a bad idea. I bite my nails, pushing the memory away. It pushes back.

  Finally the bus rattles to life. As soon as we move forward again, I curse myself for staying put — for worrying about a girl I don’t even know. There’s no telling when I’ll get another chance.

  It’s a rough ride for the next two hours, bouncing along the pockmarked asphalt on rubber tires. We travel slowly, circling more craters where rebels have dropped their homemade bombs. I count twenty-nine of them and my temper improves.

  Clouds move in and the night grows darker. Beyond the edge of the road I see deep blackness — the kind I used to create during my first year at core academy. Dark pixels on every screen, heavy lines obliterating the picture I was supposed to color.

  Nothing. They will see nothing.

  I swear, that’s what I see now.

  When the bus leaves the highway the tires crunch on gravel, bouncing us so violently, my teeth rattle. How did people travel like this, back in the day?

  Another hour passes, another highway. At least this one’s in decent shape. Our escort reengages the autopilot and kicks back in the front row, arms crossed over his chest. Rain spits at the bus and wind tries to knock us off the mag track as the temperature plummets. I grip my seat and clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

  The bus slows again, crossing a river, then passing through a nameless town. We pass house after abandoned house, all of them leaning with the wind. I squint through the darkness. Nothing is lit up but a recharging station and a dirt-colored building with Dinah’s Place flashing in the window. Two neon signs blink OPEN, but no transports are parked in front. For the next five minutes we drive past streets piled with charred rubble — what’s left of bombed-out buildings and houses.

  Light glows beyond the hills in front of us. We rattle closer.

  When we reach the top of the hill, the light takes shape. A compound at least two kilometers wide spreads toward the horizon — a mixture of buildings and open spaces, all surrounded by chain link fences topped with razor wire. At regular intervals, towers rise above the fences, manned with humanoid figures just like our bus pilot, but with guns where their arms should be.

  Sentribots.

  A chill runs along my spine.

  We pass the gatehouse. No sign identifies the compound, but our national flag whips in the wind above us — broad bands of blue and yellow, representing peaceful skies. Pressure builds in my ears as we cross through an electromagnetic gate, but it passes quickly. I rub my wrist, guessing my nanochip is already transmitting my arrival to someone inside.

  In the seat across from me, the girl begins to shake. Our eyes lock. The bus lumbers along a curved driveway, passing a sign almost obscured by ivy. COLLEGE is the single word I can make out. We stop in front of a two-story brick building. An insane desire to laugh gurgles in my throat. I fight it off.

  “Off,” says our escort.

  I rise first but wait for the girl to walk in front of me. The bus’s door folds shut as my foot leaves the last step and it lurches away. We stand by the curb and wait. My teeth rattle, so I clench my jaw.

  Minutes pass. We don’t speak or move. Finally, a girl wearing a brown uniform pushes open the front door and holds it, staring at us impatiently. I start to climb the steps but stop when I realize the girl from the bus is still rooted in place.

  “Come on.” I reach out my hand. “It’ll be all right.”

  She hesitates, then follows me toward the door.

  I don’t even know her name and already I’ve lied to her.

  Inside, the school is dark and smells of mold and ammonia. Frigid air surrounds us, not much better than outside. The girl in the uniform leads us up a flight of stairs. My feet are numb and I stumble on several steps. On the second floor, familiar posters line the walls. Some announce our nation’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary celebration, others flash vids of uniformed teenagers talking to friendly teachers, frowning over tablets or kneeling side by side, planting a garden. “Positive direction for our brightest future” scrolls across the bottom of each screen. My lip curls.

  At the end of the corridor, we reach a pair of double doors labeled SCHOOL DIRECTOR. We pause while the security system scans our escort’s nanochip. The doors unlock with a click and she steps aside to let us pass.

  The office we enter is warm and smells of evergreen. My feet sink into a rug so thick, I almost groan with relief. Wood paneling covers the walls and a fire crackles in the marble fireplace opposite the door. A large window reveals a courtyard below surrounded by more brick buildings, but I’m more focused on the woman in front of the window. She’s too young and beautiful to be a school director, with auburn hair and eyes a startling shade of turquoise.
Her lips are painted red and her dress is expensive — like something a movie star would wear.

  She glances at us briefly, then back at the surface of her desk. Swiping with painted fingertips, she changes the display above the fireplace from a hunting scene to images and data — both mine and the girl’s.

  “Reed Paine. Xoey Stone. Fresh from the Western Sand, both of you.”

  Next to me, Xoey is shaking again. I almost grab her hand, but quell the urge.

  The woman rises from her chair. “I’m Director Kino. Welcome to Windmill Bay.”

  Vomit rises in my throat. I choke it back and let it burn a path toward my gut.

  No. This can’t be Windmill Bay.

  My parents argued about this place just days before the Secret Service broke down our front door. Someone got paid off, just to learn its name, but my dad worried they would get caught. It was worth it, Mom said. Then they spent the night poring over maps, whispering about some kind of extraction.

  Dad’s caution was justified. Someone found out, or maybe someone couldn’t keep quiet. My dream reminds me of the result. I can still see the blood pooling around my dad’s head. I can still hear the bullet striking my mom, bringing her down just inches from his outstretched arm.

  Windmill Bay. This is the place that killed my parents.

  Director Kino either hasn’t picked up on my reaction or chooses to ignore it.

  “This is a maximum-security facility dedicated to the moral training of students like you, the offspring of our most dangerous enemies of state,” she says. “You are here because your parents have abused you in the worst way possible: teaching you to hate the society that feeds you, clothes you, and shelters you. The society keeping you safe from the same terrorists your parents revere.”

  She studies our data. “Despite all our efforts at reeducating you in a familiar, inclusive environment, your evaluations show resistance — even gross rejection of the state, your true parent. The United Democratic Republic, in all its benevolence, is still determined to save you from yourselves. This school is your last opportunity to prove you are worth saving. It is not like your core academies. Funding for our program is minimal and most of it goes toward security. Our tech is old, our facilities are older. Punishment is severe. Whether your parents are now incarcerated, dead, or hiding in some pathetic hole in the ground, they are not contributing to the good of society. For this reason, you will work to offset the health, food, and housing debts you incur.