ENGINES OF LIBERTY: SERIES RECAP
A series many years in the making!
The 2000s really were an explosive time for youth literature, thanks in no small part to series like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and Fablehaven, to name a few. While I was past the age of the target audience, I still had a great time reading in this genre and found myself wanting to write something for it with my own flair.
And so the seed was planted that eventually grew into Engines of Liberty, my debut trilogy from 2014-2016, featuring a young American rebel named Calvin Adler. Set in an alternate 1984, Adler lives in Baltimore under the oppressive thumb of a regime fueled by magic, and he wants a better life for himself. When he’s recruited into a secret army, he’s ready to fight, but soon learns the issue is more complicated than “British mages bad, American rebels good.”
I also illustrated the series to the best of my abilities, with some pieces turning out better than others, knowing that undertaking a project of that size could only make me better. As the years have passed and I’ve gained more experience in crafting stories, there are a million things I’d do differently, but I’m still proud of that series.
I certainly haven’t run out of ideas for that world, either. In fact, in the decade since that first book came out, I’ve mapped a sprawling, epic saga for the timeline that I think you’re all really going to enjoy, and later in 2024, the fourth Engines of Liberty novel will hit the market.
HOWLING WILDERNESS takes place 50 years after the end of PATRIOT’S GAME, which was a pretty straightforward, earnest, and wholesome series if I may say so myself. In order to grasp the importance of certain events in this fourth book, you’ll need to be familiar with the major events of the first three. I understand that’s a big ask of my audience, most of whom have come along because of my YouTube videos, so here’s a summary of Engines of Liberty books one through three. This same summary will be available in the print edition of the fourth book; I want new readers to be able to jump right in with the fourth book as a standalone, then hopefully go back and read the first three in their entirety.
Book 1: REBEL HEART
Baltimore, Maryland, 1984: Calvin Adler is the only son of a poor wool merchant, living in the American colonies. The British Empire has maintained steady control of its territory through powerful magic, and the local enforcers like to throw their weight around with the colonists. When a trio of mages comes through town to hassle Calvin’s neighbor, Calvin stands up to them, earning his father’s ire but also the admiration of rebel recruiters who are watching nearby.
The recruiters contact him in secret and tell him of an army training in Virginia, with plans to attack the mages in the next few months. They have an arsenal of machines and black powder weapons, built in the distant ruins of Ohio, and all they need now is manpower. Calvin travels with them to Mount Vernon to train with other “technomancers,” making friends and enemies in the process.
When he takes a liking to the commodore’s daughter, Amelia, he unknowingly ends up on a shortlist for sacrificial troops. During his time in training, he and the other recruits learn how to handle firearms, along with other useful skills like machine maintenance, chemistry, lockpicking, and field medicine. Calvin shows aptitude with most of the necessary skills and ends up building a rivalry with some of his peers.
When it comes time to graduate from training, the commodore gives Calvin a courier mission to head to Ohio on a flying machine. En route, Calvin is attacked by three mages—the same three who used to live in Baltimore, like he did. Using the skills he learned at Mount Vernon, Calvin stands toe-to-toe with the mages and kills two of them, wounding a third, before completing his mission to the Ohio country.
Little does he know that he’s not carrying a message, but his own transfer orders, and is now under the ruthless command of Major Sam Tyler, who’s set to lead the main attack against the mages, and soon. The technomancers do indeed have an army, mostly one that is there against their will. Calvin gets assigned to the 7th Mimic Brigade, the “Rebel Hearts,” and finds himself wondering if there is a right side in this war…
Book 2: SUICIDE RUN
Godfrey Norrington, the only survivor of the fight with Calvin Adler, is out for revenge. He may only be only 14 but he’s cunning and ambitious, born to a very high station in London but laid low by his stern father. Godfrey hates the colonies and the people in them, and decides that if he can capture the technomancer who tried to kill him, he can punch his ticket home. Using information from his late comrade, Godfrey heads to the swamps down south and soon makes an uneasy alliance with a voodoo priest named Kalfu LeVeau. Kalfu takes an interest in Godfrey’s mission, but Godfrey is unsure as to why.
Meanwhile Calvin is anxious to escape Camp Liberty in Ohio, insisting that his assignment there was a mistake. The other Rebel Hearts tell him to keep his protests quiet, and especially not to mention anything about Amelia to the violent Captain Hamilton, who plans to marry the commodore’s daughter after the war. At his wits’ end, Calvin breaks into the radio room to contact Mount Vernon in hopes of reaching Amelia. He instead finds the commodore at the other end and knows he has been set up to fail.
Using guidance from Kalfu as well as some magical instruments, Godfrey tracks Calvin to the Ohio country and learns that the technomancers have a massive underground complex buried beneath the toxic ruins of Youngstown, which the mages destroyed years ago. Summoning reinforcements from the main garrison at New Jersey, Godfrey calls for an assault on Camp Liberty. The technomancer military replies in force, and a violent battle ensues.
In the chaos, Calvin and Godfrey find each other. The other Rebel Hearts come to Calvin’s aid and they’re able to overwhelm Godfrey. For the second time they fight and depart, their conflict unresolved. Calvin is taken into custody by Captain Hamilton, who is given leave by Major Tyler to punish Calvin however he sees fit. Hamilton, the sadist, hammers a device into Calvin’s chest that will kill him if he tries to remove it. He then tells Calvin to report for duty to a smaller technomancer cap far away, and if he doesn’t get there in time, the device will kill him.
Having survived Youngstown, Godfrey returns to Kalfu, who enlists the help of some other magicians to hunt Calvin. Kalfu is highly interested in Calvin and Godfrey still doesn’t know why.
Thoroughly distraught, Calvin instead decides to run back to Mount Vernon—a distance of 250 miles—with only ten days on the clock, trusting that Amelia can remove the device from his chest. En route he crosses paths with a mythical thunderbird, thought to have been poached to extinction. The birds have potent magic and are flawless judges of character, though they are also proud. Calvin frees the bird, who later comes to his rescue when Kalfu and Godfrey trap him in the woods. The thunderbird kills Kalfu, and Calvin kills Godfrey. Calvin then steals a mimic (a technomancer flying machine) from a nearby encampment and uses it to fly the rest of the way to Mount Vernon.
A short time later, Godfrey comes back from the dead, having been charmed with a spell that Kalfu put on him, using necromancy and blood magic. Kalfu can’t resurrect himself but he can pull puppet strings on Godfrey as the two of them struggle toward the same goal: stopping Calvin and the technomancers from assaulting the mages’ stronghold. As they track Calvin, Godfrey comes across a mass grave deep in the earth, full of soldiers from the original American Revolution in the 1770s. Using Kalfu’s necromancy, Godfrey pulls the skeletons to the surface and uses them as his army to attack Mount Vernon.
Calvin and Godfrey arrive at Mount Vernon within hours of each other. Godfrey’s thralls lay siege to the grounds. Most of the technomancer students and staff are able to escape, but the Commodore dies trying to fend off the possessed skeletons. Calvin finds Amelia and she takes him into the woods where her father’s personal escape craft is hiding, and they use it to flee, however they have to land quickly so that Amelia can get the device out of Calvin’s chest. She does so right before it triggers a shock that would have fried his heart.
As Mount Vernon burns to the ground, Godfrey summons the magic back out of his thralls and starts to sort through the ashes, trying to determine his next move. Kalfu’s spirit urges him to hunt down Calvin, but Godfrey learns that the technomancers might be after something even more valuable: the source of all magic in North America.
Book 3: PATRIOT’S GAME
Short on options, Calvin and Amelia fly to Harrisburg to meet up with the technomancer army, which would have moved there after Youngstown was destroyed. They first run into a scout team consisting of other Rebel Hearts, who are surprised to see Calvin alive. He doesn’t want to trust the technomancer army, but Amelia doesn’t know who else to trust, and thinks he might be misrepresenting them. To prove his case, he asks her to fly the Commodore’s mimic to an old fuel refinery called Monongahela; that’s where the Commodore used to send soldiers who rebelled, using them for forced labor.
When they reach Monongahela, it’s clear that the “inmates” have taken over and are packing their bags to punch out west, despite the hazards from Indians and other settlers. Amelia is shocked to know this place exists because she didn’t think her father had it in him. The inmates have no desire to help beyond refueling the mimic—they don’t think the technomancer offensive will work anyhow. Still not eager to meet up with the main detachment, Calvin persuades Amelia to fly to Baltimore and pick up his parents, as he suspects that things are getting worse out there.
They arrive under cover of night, as Baltimore is occupied by a strong mage presence. While there, Calvin and the others are detected by security charms, and the mages attack their house. Members of a local underground rebellion attack the mages so Calvin and Amelia can escape with his parents. Shortly thereafter, Calvin gets into a verbal fight with his father and ends up wishing he had died in the house. This greatly upsets Amelia, as the Adler home was burned to the ground, just like Mount Vernon.
Amelia drops Calvin and the others off at Camp Winchester, then flies away to Harrisburg before Calvin can patch things over. Once at Harrisburg, Amelia runs into Captain Hamilton, and she confronts him about the device he put in Calvin’s chest. Not wanting the news to spread during a time of tension, Hamilton has Amelia thrown into the brig of the rebellion’s main battleship, the Saint George. Some of the Rebel Hearts overheard her interaction and they try to free her, only to end up in the brig alongside her.
When the technomancer army attacks New York, they learn they have bad intel and were led into a trap. Much of the army is neutralized, though the Rebel Hearts break out of the brig and seize control of the Saint George, taking it instead to New Jersey. The smaller army at Camp Winchester makes the same move, and both forces converge on the city of Port Atlantis. The mages open a portal to England where they summon the king’s dragons, along with an army of mages. At the same time an entire flock of thunderbirds arrives to help the technomancers, bringing the Monongahela inmates with them, turning the tide of the battle.
The main conflict is centered on a powerful artifact called the lodestone—a special rock with a magical blade embedded in it; Calvin is sent to neutralize it, and thus destroy British magic in the Americas. Godfrey anticipates this and lays a trap for him, then draws some of Calvin’s blood for a spell. It’s revealed that Calvin is a direct patrilineal descendant of the Arthurian bloodline and that Kalfu sensed this in him, wishing to collect his blood for his own power. Kalfu’s ghost appears and fights with Godfrey for control of the power; in the confusion, Calvin falls onto the lodestone and pulls the blade free, charging his body with unimaginable power. He finally defeats Godfrey and Kalfu, and the Americans win their freedom.
One year after the Battle of Port Atlantis, Calvin gathers with his surviving friends to reflect on what they did. He shows them the sword he pulled from the lodestone and throws it off a cliff into the ocean, where it’s reclaimed by a fae spirit. Nobody wants magic to influence their futures.
All the same, he studies everything he can find on the subject, so that he can counter it when it comes back, as he fully suspects it will…
THE END
This should give you everything you need to know for HOWLING WILDERNESS, coming in August of 2024.