The Child Thief 6: Zero Hour

by Forrest, Bella

  I still didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. Robert wrinkled his nose in disgust and left me with one last parting shot.

  “Next time you want to ruin someone’s life, maybe try talking to them first,” he said coldly. Then he turned and walked away back toward the tents.

  I stood motionless as he walked off, lost in a fog of self-doubt. Had I let my personal dislike of Robert cloud my judgment to the point that I wasn’t seeing reason?

  And, even more importantly, if Robert wasn’t the mole . . . then who was?

  My phone buzzed in my pocket—probably Jace or Nelson, wondering where I had gone so early in the morning. I wasn’t looking forward to sharing the details of my Robert “investigation” with them.

  But when I pulled my phone out of my pocket and peered at the screen, the conversation I had just had with Robert completely left my mind.

  It was Nathan.

  Leader meeting NOW.

  My pulse began to race. It wasn’t even six in the morning yet. What could possibly be so urgent?

  I was close to the administrative building already, so it only took a few more minutes before I was pushing open the front door of Fiora’s office building. A familiar smell hit my nose as I walked in: hot coffee.

  I noticed that multiple half-drunk cups of coffee were sitting on the table in the kitchen to my left as I entered the building. Several of the glasses were sporting lipstick rings. It looked like someone had been up all night. But no one was around.

  I made my way up the creaking stairs. Before I entered Fiora’s office, I noticed the harsh sound of panicked voices from within and strained my ears to listen.

  “—could be killed, Nathan. What do you expect from me?” A woman’s voice was speaking in a tone that sounded like it came from between sobs. Corona.

  “We have to stay calm. I won’t let that happen,” Nathan replied.

  “We never should have put her in this position,” Corona said.

  She began to weep. I felt uncomfortable listening to such a raw expression of emotion, but I was also anxious to know what was being discussed. Who were they talking about?

  “I can’t do this meeting,” Corona said. She sniffled. “You’re going to have to do this.”

  “Go have a seat in the parlor, dear,” Fiora said. “We will handle it.”

  The parlor? Was Corona going to come through the office door and see me standing here eavesdropping? I didn’t want to risk it. I knocked gently to announce my presence.

  A second passed before Nathan’s voice rang out.

  “Come in!”

  I pushed open the heavy oak door to see Nathan and Fiora standing alone. Corona must’ve exited through the door to the left of the desk. But why did she leave?

  “Robin,” Nathan greeted me tersely. “Please have a seat.”

  I grabbed a chair in front of the desk while more people began to stream into the room. Nathan and Fiora were whispering to each other as people got settled. Jace walked in and took the seat beside me, looking relieved to see me.

  “Where were you this morning?” he asked as he sat.

  “Investigating,” I replied simply. I would have to explain that later.

  Nathan wasn’t wasting any time today. As soon as the base leaders entered the room, moving to take places at the head of the desk with Nathan and Fiora, he began to speak.

  “We’re going to keep this brief,” he began. “Votes were tallied, and the choice we’re moving forward with is to expand the organization.”

  A rush of murmurs rang out over the crowd. This was big news. Was Nathan just going to gloss over it? Why keep things brief? And what on earth had upset Corona so much?

  Nathan held up his hand, commanding silence.

  “We will need to discuss this in more detail later, but the plan for now is to try to get a broadcast out to the public with information about us and the truth about the government. It will then be in the public’s hands, and we will have to hope and pray that they make the choice to join us,” Nathan said. “We’re going to need them if we want any of this to work.”

  Nathan was speaking harshly and going through a lot of information very quickly. My heart was in my throat. Little John was going to go public? This was big news. How could Nathan not stop to discuss this a little more?

  “But before we can plan that, we need to discuss an emergency mission,” Nathan said. “A recovery mission.”

  I could feel my heart beating in my throat. Nathan’s words were almost drowned out by the sound of my blood rushing between my ears. Who were Nathan and Corona talking about? What had the government done to strike at Little John now?

  “Who was captured?” Jace asked.

  Nathan cast a sad glance toward Jace, his eyes and body looking tired. Betrayal and loss had weakened the Nathan we once knew. And now, something else was troubling him terribly.

  And it was going to be up to us and this mission to remedy it.

  “I had a feeling that our government agent was starting to arouse suspicion, so I had cut contact with her for her own protection,” Nathan said. “But I must’ve been too late. They’ve discovered that she’s working with us and have arrested her and charged her with treason.”

  I felt lightheaded and sank back farther in my seat.

  “Aurora is set to be executed,” Nathan finished darkly. “Unless we can save her.”

  18

  “We’re already weakened after losing Edgewood. And now you want us to risk another base and many more team members?” Luka asked. “For one girl?”

  Nathan’s sad countenance quickly changed to anger.

  “One girl?” he repeated incredulously. “That one girl was captured trying to communicate important news to us. That one girl has risked her life from within the government’s grasp for years to help further our mission! That one girl is worth hundreds of you!”

  The room was entirely silent after Nathan’s voice bellowed over us. Luka looked abashed and hung his head.

  But, to my surprise, Nathan also looked ashamed after his outburst.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “But Aurora is more than a team member to me. And she’s a lot more than just one girl. Aurora is one of our most dedicated assets, and she has been risking everything to help Little John for years because she believes in its end goals. Many of our most important missions, including the Artemis Protocol, would never have gotten off the ground without her help. On top of that, she is a dear friend, and I have lost enough dear friends for a lifetime. Surely you understand why I’ve made this decision.”

  The room was quiet. After Nathan’s flash of anger, no one else dared to question his motives.

  “We know how important Aurora has been. But we have to consider, Nathan, that maybe they’re—” Liza began from the front of the room.

  “Setting a trap?” Nathan finished for her. He turned around to face Liza, Evers, Arlo, and Fiora at the head of the desk.

  Liza stared back at Nathan, and then nodded. The base leaders looked as frightened and unsure as the rest of us.

  “Of course they’re setting a trap for us,” he replied. “But that isn’t going to stop us. We just have to be smarter than they are.”

  Nathan turned to look back at the rest of us. When he spoke again, his tone offered a shimmer of the personality and leadership that I had known before.

  “I’m afraid that I haven’t been much of a leader recently,” he said sadly. “I know this. I allowed my fears and my anger to control me.”

  I held my breath as he spoke. I hadn’t been anticipating so much honesty from him. Truth was, I hadn’t expected much from him at all after the past few days. I had truly worried that his ability to lead had been so damaged that it would never recover. But the more he spoke now, the stronger his voice became.

  “But this team, and this base, and everyone that came from Edgewood, knew better than I did. You stayed loyal, and you came here for Corona, prepared to fight. And fight we will.”

  His
voice was rising to a beautiful crescendo now as his strength came back to him. He had begun to walk closer to us and gesture using his hands again. I felt like I was watching the life come back to a man who had been on the brink of death.

  “This mission will be dangerous, and there is a good chance that not everyone who leaves for Chanley will return,” he continued.

  Chanley. We’d have to head into the capital city to take back Aurora. I knew she was an asset and that she had risked a lot for Little John, but so had the rest of us. Nathan never would’ve planned an entire mission like this if one of Team Hood’s members had been captured. And he was right; going into that city after Aurora—no matter who she was—was going to be incredibly dangerous. We had just lost Kory. Were we now going to lose more of our team members?

  “And so I will not command anyone to go. But if anyone will help me, if anyone feels that Aurora deserves to be rescued even with the risk it poses to us, please stand and let me know now.”

  I thought back to some of my experiences with Aurora. She had gotten the identities for Jace and me to explore Millville to find my mother. She had done the same dangerous task again when Kory and I needed to get into Helping Hands to discover what the regime was really doing to the evacuated factory town folk. And she had been a huge part of the Artemis Protocol, and without that mission I might never have found Hope.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how much I owed Aurora. She had risked so much to help all of us, and if we didn’t get to Chanley to save her, she was going to be killed for what she’d done. But now we had the chance to pay her back.

  I stood so quickly that my chair almost fell backward. Jace was right beside me, standing tall and proud and ready to go with me to Chanley to get Aurora back. I knew Jace would always make the brave and selfless choice, but he was probably as moved by how much Aurora had helped us personally as I was.

  Nathan’s eyes turned to us and softened with paternal affection. Maybe he hadn’t expected us to volunteer after the past few days of coldness and suspicion on his part. But if Nathan was ready to be a leader again, then I was ready to go with him to Chanley.

  Sy stood, then Zion, then Bridge, and then Luka. Soon the entire room was standing. We were all in this together.

  We were going to Chanley, and we were going to get Aurora.

  Nathan looked over all of us, and a smile spread slowly over his lips. Maybe something that had briefly been lost was coming back to him. Maybe his suspicion and hurt were melting away and he was remembering what having trust in us, in all of Little John, felt like. Or maybe he was just happy that we stood any chance at all of getting Aurora back. Either way, it was good to see him smile again.

  “I’m so happy to take all of you,” Nathan said. “I’m happy to have you all on my team.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Sy asked.

  “The plan has two parts,” Nathan replied. “We will have to start with our expansion mission first.”

  “Why is that?” Bridge asked.

  I was glad that he had asked. I was also curious. Wasn’t the situation with Aurora critical? Why were we waiting to go to Chanley?

  “Because Burchard doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to give me a worldwide platform to share the truth about his regime,” Nathan replied. “They’ve scheduled a public execution for Aurora, and that is happening tomorrow night. We’re going to be rescuing her directly from the executioner’s platform, so it will undoubtedly be televised. Just imagine: a primetime TV slot, and we will swoop in and save a life. The news will go across the entire country and probably the world. And we want the public to realize that we are the good guys. Even if they don’t join us outright, we’ll still benefit if they start speaking out against the regime, because it will be one more battle to stretch Burchard even thinner. And we need the public to stop working against us by assisting the government any further.”

  A public execution? It seemed to me that the government was overly fond of killing people while others watched, since they had threatened public executions against Operation Hood members in the past, before we had even known about Little John. Killing defectors for all to see was obviously a not-so-subtle threat against others.

  Wrong us and this will happen to you, too.

  The thought of rescuing Aurora from the execution was a sobering one. We had rescued friends from being executed before, but not while they were already on the chopping block. Whatever venue the government was planning to bloody with an execution would be packed to the brim with spectators and government agents. There would probably be an arsenal’s worth of weapons there, waiting for our arrival.

  “How are we planning on expanding?” I asked.

  Anything that was supposed to help us in our battle was welcome. But I couldn’t see how we’d be able to turn the tide of public opinion so quickly, and we had so much at stake.

  “We need to disseminate information before the execution. Let the public know just what the regime has been hiding,” Nathan replied. “If the public turns on Burchard then it will isolate them further and make them easier to defeat. It will also help draw international attention to our plight.”

  “What truths are we sharing?” Luka asked.

  “The truth about Helping Hands. The truth about the child sales. The truth about the misuse of funds. Every unsavory and illicit thing that we have access to so far,” Nathan said. “The public needs to know all of it.”

  I was shocked. Yes, the public needed to know. But what could we possibly do to convince an entire nation that the regime that they had elected and placed their faith in was a malevolent entity?

  “Why would they believe us?” I asked.

  “Because we have a smoking gun,” Nathan replied with a grin. “They won’t have a choice.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the sound of a door opening interrupted my thought. Corona had entered the room from the parlor to the side of the desk, her eyes red and watery as she looked over all of us. It was obvious that she had been crying, and it looked like maybe she had been crying for quite some time. I thought back to the lipstick-ringed coffee cups sitting in the kitchen. Had she been up all night?

  “It’s so good to see you all here,” she said, her voice weak and thin. “We’re counting on you to bring our Aurora back. I know you will succeed. There is no other option.”

  I was touched by Corona’s seeming affection for Aurora, but also confused. How close was she to Little John’s government agent? I couldn’t imagine Corona shedding those kinds of tears over me, even though I did think that she cared about me. What made Aurora so special?

  Corona opened her mouth as if she was going to say more, but then she became overcome with emotion, dropping her head into her hands and beginning to sob. I started to move forward to comfort her, but Nathan beat me there, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in close so that she could cry into his shoulder.

  When it was obvious that Corona wouldn’t be able to go on, Nathan spoke again instead.

  “I’ve had my connections working on phase one since late last night. I believe they’re putting the final touches on it now. It will begin today, very soon, and it will be big. You’ll know more when it happens.”

  I could tell from his tone that he was hastily wrapping up our meeting to go and support Corona in private, but now I was also wondering whether he had other things to tend to.

  And those things must’ve been really important if they were interrupting a meeting like this.

  “But how will we know?” I asked.

  “Trust me, Robin,” Nathan said. “You’ll know.”

  I wasn’t sure whether this statement was meant to be ominous or motivational.

  “We’ll adjourn for now. I recommend that all of you enjoy the beauty of Brightbirch and the comfort of friends and good food for the rest of the day. After losing so many recently, I can’t help but remember that you never know when it will be the last time you’re able to do so,” Nath
an said.

  The room was silent as the implication of his statement sank in. Some of us could be experiencing those joys for the last time.

  “We leave for Chanley tomorrow. You’ll have more details as they become available to us. Meeting adjourned,” he finished.

  Then he cradled Corona close to him and walked her out of the office and into the parlor. The base leaders followed them.

  * * *

  “How are we supposed to just know?” I asked Jace as we walked back to the tents.

  “I haven’t figured that part out, either,” Jace replied. “But if it’s that obvious, at least we won’t have to shield the rest of the team from it.”

  I nodded. Jace was right. If we would know as soon as the information got out, then it was safe to assume that everyone else would, too.

  “Do you think he means the news?” I asked. “Like we’ll all have access to this through news sites online?”

  That would’ve been a good medium for the middle and upper classes to see, and even some of the lower classes, but the poorest in the country would have no access at all. Which might be where paper flyers would come in handy.

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” Jace said. “But that doesn’t make sense. I never even go to news sites anymore because they’re so heavily skewed in the regime’s favor. Burchard himself might as well have been writing all of the stories.”

  That was what made the whole mission so confusing. How would we expand Little John with anti-government information if there were no channels available for us to disseminate that news? The regime controlled all of the broadcast stations and all of the websites. Even the print news that the poor had access to was regime-circulated. Those news sources weren’t going to be sharing any type of story that was critical of the regime.

  And how were we going to get them to even believe us?

  “Nathan said we would know when it happened. That it would be big,” I said slowly, trying to process my thoughts as I spoke.

  “He also said it would happen quickly. I guess we’ll know pretty soon,” Jace responded.