The Vault (A Farm Novel) by Emily McKay Read Free Book Online

here who was sending messages to the other Farms, by now the guy could have told every Farm within a hundred miles that the rebellion had taken over here. Then our problems might be a hell of a lot worse.
    “We secured the room right after you left to go get Lily,” Zeke told me. “I didn’t even know about the radios until after you’d left. Apparently the Dean didn’t want us talking to other Farms and comparing notes.”
    That made sense. The entire Farm system was built on isolating people and controlling them with fear. “If you take me to the radio room, I might be able to figure it out. If not, we get Tech Taylor in here to help. I’m sure he remembers more about the radios than I do.”
    “No need,” Zeke said, gesturing for me to follow him down the hall. “The Collab who was operating the radio is still here. Joe thought it was better to have someone at the radio. That way if one of the other Farms tried to contact this one, there’d be someone to answer.”
    Zeke led me past the reception area outside the Dean’s office and down a narrow hallway to the radio room. Desks set up with several computers lined one wall. On the back wall, by the windows, were a pair of chunky-looking radios. An old-fashioned typewriter sat in front of the radio. A girl leaned against the counter picking at her nail polish.
    I stopped short at the door. “You’re the Collab?” Every Collab I’d ever met had been a guy, and they were all brute force and muscle. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be female Collabs, too.
    Her lips curved down at the term and her gaze darted warily to Zeke, who stood just behind me. “Who’s this guy?” she asked.
    “He needs to talk to some of the other Farms. Maybe even without the Deans of those Farms finding out. You think we can do that?”
    Zeke was right. The quieter we kept this, the better. I stepped farther into the room. “Actually, I can probably figure out how to use the radio myself.”
    The girl stepped up to me, waving a hand in my face. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop right there. This is my radio room. You have any idea how long it took me to learn to use all this equipment?”
    “But I can—”
    “You want to send a message, it goes through me.”
    I glanced at Zeke. “You sure we can trust her?”
    She answered before he could. “You think I don’t know that the Dean abandoned this Farm and everyone in it? You think I don’t know we’d all be toast if you guys hadn’t gotten here to keep the electric fences up? Yeah. You can trust me.”
    I guess that was the good thing about Collabs—they would always act in their own best interest. “Okay,” I said. “What’s your name?”
    “Charla.”
    “Okay, Charla, here’s the deal.” Then I summed up what I needed her to do.
    Only a few seconds in, she was frowning. Again she stopped me with a wave of her hand. “I don’t know if it’s the helicopter you’re looking for or not, but an SOS went out yesterday about a helicopter crash.”
    My stomach dropped through the floor. “What helicopter?”
    She moved toward me. “Are you okay?”
    Shoving a hand through my hair, I tried to slow my racing thoughts. “Tell me about the helicopter.”
    “They had some kind of engine problem. They had crashed.”
    “Where?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “There’s no way to tell where the message came from?”
    “No. He said they were fifty miles from a Farm, but I don’t think it was this one, because he sounded farther away than that.”
    “You can hear how far away someone is?”
    “The radios only transmit within line of sight. Then there are repeater stations set up at intervals between the Farms. There’s a slight degradation of the signal every time it repeats. The farther away they are, the more static you hear.”
    “But there’s no way to tell for sure how far away it was?”
    She shook her head, dropping her gaze.
    Great. Well, that effing narrowed it down, didn’t it?
    “It might not have been