The Child Thief 5: Ghost Towns

by Forrest, Bella

  Would they be who I expected them to be? Would I be who they expected me to be? Or did they even think about me at all?

  The records provided information, but they didn’t provide context. They were a blessing and a curse in that way. They also left me with as many questions as I had answers. I was redistributed to the Sylvones at two months old, but did that mean that I had spent two months in a holding center? Or had I spent longer with my birth parents? I didn’t have any information about those two months. And although I didn’t think they had any bearing on the person who I had grown into, I wanted to know my story. I wanted to know my whole story. The files just didn’t provide enough information.

  I was so lost in thought that when Jace came and sat down next to me, I jumped.

  “Ready to switch?” he asked.

  I was ready for a short break. I had been flying for a while, and the subtle steering was causing muscle fatigue in my forearms. We timed out the control switches perfectly (just like we had been trained) and then Jace was flying and I was taking a short rest in the passenger seats.

  “How are you feeling?” Jace asked.

  I realized I had probably been quiet and thin-lipped for too long. I had never had much of a poker face.

  “I’ve just been thinking about my parents and my file. The usual,” I replied. Jace and I had discussed the file so many times by now that I knew he probably had all of the details memorized.

  “What about them? If you don’t mind me asking,” Jace said.

  “It’s just…” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into it at that moment. My own thoughts weren’t clear on the matter, so how could I explain them to Jace? We still had another hour before we’d even be in Millville.

  “You can tell me,” Jace said, realizing I had gotten caught up in my thoughts again.

  “It’s just that I’m having kind of an identity crisis,” I finally said. It was the first time I had said it out loud.

  “How so?” Jace asked, beckoning me to continue.

  “Well, I have a pretty good understanding of who I am,” I began. “I’m Robin. I’ve answered to that name all of my life. And even though it’s not a name that was given to me by my parents, I still consider it my name.”

  Jace kept his eyes to the skies, but I knew he was listening intently, and continued.

  “I once had a concept of home. But when my father kicked me out and my mother let him do it, I didn’t just lose a family. I lost the only place that had ever felt like home. Now I’m going to this new place that was my real home and may have contained my real parents. And maybe I even went by a different name when I was in this town.”

  Deep down, that was my hope. I didn’t want to be some nameless baby in the arms of the CRAS. I wanted to be wanted and loved, even if it meant that my eventual redistribution would’ve been that much harder on my birth parents.

  “And I guess I’m worried that the more I find out about who I once was, the more confused I will feel about the person I am today. I’ve been trying to find out more about my history and my story, and that includes knowing more about Millville and my parents, but I worry that the more I know about this alternate person that I could’ve been, the more I’ll start to lose the person I think I am,” I spat out. It had been draining just formulating the thoughts and getting the words out, and my eyes had started to mist. When I was finally done speaking, it felt like I had just finished running a marathon.

  Jace was quiet for a while, making me wonder what he was thinking. Was he disappointed by my shallow concerns? Maybe I had shared too much.

  He flipped on autopilot and turned all the way around in his seat to look at me.

  “You,” he began, “are Robin.”

  I furrowed my brow while I considered what he was saying, but he continued before I could formulate an answer.

  “You are Robin. And you are one of the smartest, bravest, most loyal and loving people I have ever met.”

  I began to blush.

  “And it’s not your name that makes you that way. It’s not the place you were born. It’s not even the parents you had,” he said. “It’s the culmination of all of those things, of everything you have experienced or overcome in your life, that makes you the person you are. And that can never change. No matter what we find out here.”

  A tear rolled down my cheek. Jace stood and walked over to me. He knelt down until we were eyelevel with each other and pressed his forehead against mine. I pressed back.

  “Thank you for saying that,” I whispered.

  Jace swept the tear off my cheek with his thumb. “I’m saying it because it’s true,” he replied. Then he kissed my forehead and stood back up.

  “Just relax for a little while. Maybe have some lunch. We’ll be there before you know it,” he finished. Then he returned to the cockpit and switched off the autopilot.

  I walked to the back of the cabin and looked into our food stock. It was ample and would definitely last a week and maybe then some, but I wanted to be mindful of emergency situations. If we were somehow trapped in one place for too long, we would need to stretch our rations thin. So I grabbed an apple and left everything else untouched. I just needed something small anyway, to settle my stomach and make me feel less nervous about the mission.

  Jace was right. It wasn’t just about a name. It was about your whole life and all of the experiences you had had. It didn’t matter if I was Robin, or unnamed, or anything else. I was still me. And curiosity was a big part of who I was. So I would get to Millville and begin looking for clues about my past, as well as clues about the disappearances. And Jace would be there all the way.

  My stomach dropped slightly as the pressure in the cabin changed.

  “Come up here, Robin,” Jace said from the cockpit.

  I walked up and sat down beside him.

  “We’re about to start losing elevation so we can do some recon before we land. We need to find a place that’s not too hidden but not too far away from the town either, in case we need to get back to the airship in a hurry,” Jace said.

  I nodded. My heart was racing. The map in the control panel dash showed that we were very close now.

  “So let’s brush up on our landing together,” Jace added. “Get ready to switch out controls in 3… 2… 1…”

  15

  Millville was an unassuming factory town. Like most, it was an urban sore spot amid what may once have been a verdant forest. But as the pollution and refuse from urban life grew, the forest had become spoiled, and even the clouds overhead seemed to hang darker and thicker with soot. Rain in this type of factory town could be grayish and dangerous, with all of the pollution and grime.

  The most pollution-heavy factories tended to get restricted to factory towns like Millville, where there was no divide between the lower and middle classes. There was only the lower class here, and the government and the factory owners didn’t care how sick the pollution made these people. The poor were expendable. New workers could always be bussed in from even poorer regions.

  There was only one road that ran into the town. It was potholed and broken, like many of the buildings inside the town. But it was effective enough for its sole purpose: delivering raw supplies to the factory and transporting the goods they produced. The broken road connected Millville to one of the government’s pristine twenty-lane highways some fifty miles away. If Millville was like any of the other factory towns I knew, people very rarely traveled the roads for business or pleasure. Most factory workers were too poor to do anything but work, and too tired to do anything but sleep on their rare days off. The Burchard Regime had run on a campaign of fewer and more relaxed business regulations, ostensibly to allow factory owners to become more prosperous, which would in turn trickle down to the working class. In theory. In reality, factory owners got richer and workers got fewer protections. Wages actually went down as workloads went up. And unions were snuffed out by brute force before uprisings even began. The regime turned a blind eye to the pl
ight of working men and women.

  Unlike many of the factory towns I had seen, however, there was no train station in Millville. It may have been because the town was just too small to necessitate one. A train station might have been proposed but never built. Or the lack of one may have been a conscious act to isolate these workers and prevent them from looking for better wages and treatment somewhere else. Either way, it was a dark omen. Maybe if there had been a train station, or more roads out of the city, the townspeople wouldn’t have been able to just… disappear.

  “I hate seeing woods like these,” Jace said.

  We were flying low enough over the city now that we were able to get a good view of even the trees along the city line, and Jace was right; the pollution had stripped many of the trees closest to the grime of the city. Only sturdy weeds and choking vines were able to grow in this type of environment. The few oak trees that did appear to be surviving close to the city were far from green and strong. They looked sickly and gray, like the soil and the buildings and even what I imagined the people in the city would’ve looked like.

  “Keep an eye out for an inconspicuous clearing,” I answered. We could land in stealth mode, and then leave the ship itself hidden, but we’d need to make sure no one saw us actually appear out of it. And we couldn’t be too far from the city proper, just in case we weren’t alone down there and needed to make a quick escape.

  Jace and I scanned the woods around the city. Most of it was too thick with brush and undergrowth to allow for a safe landing. I also worried that flying into the broken tree-limbs and sharp vines could damage the hull of the ship, rendering the video screens ineffective and the stealth mode useless.

  “What about there?” I asked suddenly, pointing. There was a clearing, complete with a culvert, and it looked like the sewage had been strong enough to clear out a small portion of forest, not even allowing for the usual growth of weeds. The space was just dirt and muck. Definitely not an ideal landing place, but it was probably the closest we’d get to it in these woods.

  Jace and I began to hover over the spot. I had taken over the controls so that I could practice flying low, and so he could keep an eagle eye out for clearings, and now it looked like it was my turn to land the airship, too. It was definitely going to be trickier than the landings we had practiced back in Edgewood on a stable and flat tarmac. But I was dead set on doing it myself.

  “All right, Robin,” Jace said. “You’ve got this. Just bring her down easy right over the clearing.”

  If I hadn’t been so nervous about the landing, I might’ve smiled at Jace’s insistence on referring to the airship using female pronouns. It was definitely a manly thing to do. I just hoped he wouldn’t end up giving “her” a name.

  I slowed the thrust vectors to bring us down for our landing, and the dirt beneath us began to rise and swirl around as the airship grew closer to the ground.

  “Keep her straight and steady. Careful not to turn to the side. Gently, gently,” Jace coached softly. He kept his hands over mine as we got closer to the ground, but then, right before we were going to turn the airship off to land, he released his hands and left me to the controls. The airship briefly raised up, and then dipped too quickly back to the ground, but then I steadied us and brought the airship down more smoothly. The landing gear deployed and we touched down.

  Jace had a big smile on his face. “You’re great at this.”

  I nodded, but didn’t give my ego any time to take in his words. Instead, I looked closely at my GPS watch. Jace followed my lead.

  “Looks like we’re in the clear, from what the scouts and street cameras have seen,” Jace said. “I don’t see any agents.”

  “Yeah, but they won’t have a full picture out here in the woods. No cameras,” I replied. “And there might not be scouts in the area to keep an eye out for us.”

  Jace nodded. Nathan had promised to keep us as safe as he could, but there was only so much cover he could provide. The rest would be up to us. But we had come this far, and I was finally in my parents’ town. Nothing was going to stop me now.

  Jace checked to make sure that our stealth mode was still on and then walked to the back of the cabin.

  “All right. We should be fine without any rations, but we’ll definitely want to take some water. What do you think about the masks?” he asked, picking through our bushel of food and the trunk of gear and disguises.

  I walked to the back of the cabin with him. It was strange to consider needing a disguise in an abandoned town. After all, nobody was here. Right? And a town this small might not even have working street cameras that were being monitored. But we couldn’t rely on the city’s abandonment for our safety. After all, we were in Millville. It couldn’t be that unlikely that others were as well. What if someone had been left behind? What if Enforcers or Authority agents were in the area on patrol?

  At the same time, the masks were thick and uncomfortable, and the clouds over Millville were hanging thickly and grayly. If there was a rainstorm, we risked destruction of two of the four masks we’d been given for the mission.

  “I guess,” I began hesitantly. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  I picked up a latex disk. It wasn’t marked with the disguise it contained, so it would be a surprise when it was placed against the face and the seams of the hoods.

  The hoods.

  I had forgotten all about them. We would need to wear our second-skin suits and our hoods to be on the safe side. But we had boarded the ship in our civilian clothes, without the suits underneath. Which meant…

  “So… I can get dressed outside if you’d like me to,” Jace said, catching the drift. “And you can get dressed alone in here. Then you can meet me out there.”

  I half-smiled at him. It was a sweet sentiment, even if it was a little shortsighted. It would, after all, leave him completely exposed and vulnerable in a hostile environment.

  “That’s silly,” I said. “I don’t want you outside the ship without a disguise, a second skin-suit, or even your clothes on. We can both change in here. We’re adults.”

  Jace blushed slightly, and I could feel myself turning red as well.

  “Okay, you’re right,” he said, stumbling over his words slightly. “Well, I’ll… I’ll turn around and get dressed over here. Tell me when you’re… dressed, and I’ll know it’s safe to turn back toward you.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. I was trying to sound casual, but I felt anything but. I was used to feeling uncovered and vulnerable on these missions—with or without the suits. It was just a scary and naked feeling when you were exposed to danger and gunfire. But this felt different. Jace and I had been in close quarters before. I had slept in his apartment and we had shared a cave while we were on the run in the woods outside of my old house. But I hadn’t disrobed in front of him—especially not while we were alone.

  I turned toward the other side of the airship and exhaled slowly, my second-skin suit in my hands. Then I began to lift my shirt up over my head. The air in the cabin was cool against my bare skin, but I felt hot all over as I let my shirt drop onto the floor and then began to tug at my jeans. I was narrow-framed. My hips had always been bony and thin. Henry’s mother had once even guffawed that I didn’t have the “child-bearing” form. But my jeans were snug on my hips as I tried to urge them down. Might’ve been because I was feeling hot and sweaty at the moment.

  My jeans hit the floor in a puddle of fabric and I stepped out of them entirely, my entire body flushed with blood as I stood exposed in the cabin of the airship. I stumbled slightly before awkwardly shoving myself feet-first into the second-skin suit. I began to toddle and trip as I quickly pulled the skin-tight fabric over my slightly sticky legs, then up over my hips, then my chest. I shoved my arms through the sleeves and unintentionally sighed in relief as I reached behind myself and zipped the fabric up over my back.

  I turned to tell Jace that everything was clear.

  He had the suit just over his hips, le
aving his broad, naked back completely exposed in front of me. I didn’t remember ever seeing his bare back before, even when we were sleeping in the same bed, and my breath caught. I had always known Jace was strong, but this. He was built like an ancient marble carving of some mythological hero. The strong muscles in his back rippled as he pushed his arms into his sleeves one by one, the ends of his thick, wavy hair brushing the back of his neck delicately as he maneuvered himself into the suit. Then he reached behind himself and began to pull the zipper up.

  I suddenly became aware of myself and felt my face grow incredibly hot. I turned back around in a rush and cleared my throat.

  “Umm… all dressed now,” I said. “What about you?”

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Jace replied. “Just trying to get this zipper all the way up.”

  “I can help if you’d like,” I replied.

  Jace and I turned and made eye contact with each other. I hoped the shade of my face and the speed of my breathing wouldn’t give away my accidental staring.

  “If you don’t mind, that’d be great,” Jace said with a smile.

  I walked a few steps across the airship cabin to face him, and Jace looked down at me warmly. We were alone and far away from Edgewood. A part of me wanted nothing more than to wrap my arms around his neck and pull his face down to mine. And the glimmer in his honey irises indicated that he was feeling similarly.

  But we had more important things to do.

  “The zipper?” I asked.

  “Oh, right,” he said dumbly. He turned around and crouched a bit so that I would be able to easily reach his shoulders and neck.

  I grabbed the zipper—he had made it about halfway up his back—and pulled it up gently, letting one of my hands linger on his shoulder blade for support. His body felt warm and solid under my hand. When the zipper reached the base of his neck, I took my hand and swept his hair to the side so it wouldn’t be accidentally zipped up, my fingers brushing the back of his neck tenderly. Then it was over.