The Child Thief 5: Ghost Towns

by Forrest, Bella

  “All done,” I said.

  He turned back around and stared intensely down at me. One of his hands lifted to wrap around the back of one of my shoulders, like he was about to start pulling me closer to him. I swallowed hard.

  “We’d better get going,” I said abruptly.

  Jace’s eyes seemed to fall a little. I wanted to tell him that I wished I could stay in this airship cabin with him forever, pulled close to him and wrapping my thin arms around his strong frame until we were joined together as one body. But now wasn’t the time for that. We were on a mission from Little John headquarters. And I was in my hometown looking for my parents. We had no idea how long we had before an enemy would spot us or bump into our airship. And with every passing second, more kids were being snatched away from their parents. Things like romance would just have to wait. I hoped Jace would understand why.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  He turned to grab the hoods, and when he faced me again, it was with a good-natured grin and a latex disk in his hand.

  “You might end up being an old man in a minute here. They’re not labeled, so we’ll just have to see,” he said.

  We zipped our hoods onto our suits, pulled them over our heads, and placed the disks to our faces. Once the process of transformation was complete, I realized we had each managed to pick the right gender of mask on our first try.

  Jace wasn’t Jace anymore. Now he was an older, rounder man with some scarring and a bulbous nose. “Maybe picking the right masks is a good sign,” he said. “I was sure I was about to be a very tall and strong woman.”

  I sure hoped it was a good sign. We were about to step out of a suspicious mini-airship on the outskirts of an abandoned factory town. We were wanted terrorists in less-than-perfect disguises. And I was on a mission to learn more about the birth parents I had never known—and what an organization called Helping Hands might have done with them. We were going to need all the luck we could get.

  I walked to the control panel, hit a button, and the airship hatch popped open with a light hiss. It was time. Jace and I stepped forward together and out into the woods.

  16

  The air in Millville was different than what we had been used to in Edgewood. It was thick and almost grimy, and clung to your exposed skin, even leaving a taste in your mouth. My lungs felt heavy before we had even made it out of the woods and to the city line.

  Jace seemed to have similar problems. He spit a couple of times as we walked toward Millville proper.

  “Man,” he said, “I can’t imagine growing up like this.”

  “You probably get used to it after a while,” I said.

  I wondered if I would have, if I’d been left to grow up here. Instead, I had grown up in the lap of luxury. We wore fine clothes and went to great schools and got to enjoy hobbies like painting and horseback riding and learning how to play musical instruments. But when I got kicked out, I realized that those things weren’t even important. What was important were the things I’d never even been grateful for: clean drinking water, fresh air, and enough food to eat. When I was on my own, I realized how hard those things were to come across in poorer areas. I had struggled with hunger, poverty, and backbreaking factory work for years.

  So I wasn’t unfamiliar with pollution, though I’d worked in a larger city, and a less toxic factory. I’d known poverty, but this… this was a different level.

  “I’m sorry,” Jace said, abashed. “I forgot.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I spent seventeen years in a mansion. I’m lucky I didn’t have to grow up like this as a kid.”

  We were quiet for a while as what I said sunk in. I could’ve grown up like this, in a world without the CRAS. And would it really have been worse? I would’ve had my parents, at least.

  And I would’ve been able to keep my daughter.

  Slowly, the dry tufts of weeds became more and more sparse and the ground got rockier. The forest (if you could call it that) gave way to a long stretch of dirt that eventually led onto the cracked and dilapidated streets of Millville.

  Jace and I passed a few empty huts and lean-tos on the outskirts of the town. My heart dropped at the sight. Employed citizens would’ve been given access to the apartments in the town (forced to have an unreasonable “rent” collected from their checks, but at least having protection from the rain and cold). But unemployed citizens probably would’ve lived out here in this shantytown. It was likely that the only people to risk living out here were those who didn’t have a choice. People who were unemployed, even by the factory. They may have been terminated due to demanding better wages, or sleeping on the job out of sheer exhaustion, or any other small, innocent mistake. After all, workers were expendable. And more could be bussed in if needed. But these people might’ve also been disabled or elderly. It broke my heart to imagine an older person with no family being resigned to this treatment at the end of their life.

  “Maybe we should look inside of these shacks,” Jace said.

  He was right. We’d come all of this way to look for clues as to why these towns were being emptied and what Helping Hands had to do with any of it, and we had no idea where we might find those clues. We should be looking everywhere, and we should be doing it as efficiently and as quickly as possible. I was just ready to get into the town itself to look for any clues about my parents, as well as signs of what might have happened here.

  Unless my parents had lived in one of these broken, drafty huts. What if they had gotten injured on the job and were no longer able to work? What if they had been homeless and destitute, beyond even the normal level in this type of town? What if one of these shacks had been theirs?

  I tried to push the thought out of my mind. It hurt to imagine my parents suffering like this. But ignoring the possibility meant ignoring possible clues.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  We entered the next shack that we approached. The inside was humble, with a wet, mildewy pile of straw in one corner. A bed, I realized sadly. A few empty bottles of Nurmeal were scattered on the dirt floor. A pile of ash sat in the middle of the hut where maybe coals had burned to keep the inhabitants inside warm.

  There was also a small pot that was black with burned-on food and a couple of dirty drinking glasses on the floor, and a dirty piece of cloth that looked like it had been a shawl at one point. These people had been even more disposable to the factory owners than the employees. It was horrible to think about the type of life they had once led.

  But whoever they’d been, they were long gone.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find much here,” I told Jace.

  “Robin,” Jace said softly.

  I turned back to him. He had pulled a faded piece of paper from beneath a corner of the straw bed and was looking at it intently. There was a frown on his face.

  “What is it?” I asked, coming closer.

  Jace passed me the paper. It was an old-fashioned photograph and looked like it had been taken in a hospital. A woman was holding a bundle of blankets, lying in a hospital bed. She was red-faced and crying, but it looked like she was trying to smile for the photograph. A tiny, round face peeked out, pink and fresh, from the blankets she held. It was a woman holding her newborn.

  “She must’ve wanted a picture to remember the baby by,” I said quietly. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. The woman didn’t look happy in the photo. She looked miserable, knowing that the sweet baby she had just given birth to was about to be ripped from her arms. But somehow this photograph must’ve given her comfort out here in this cold, damp shack.

  Jace placed a hand on my back.

  “Maybe one day she’ll still have the chance to be reunited,” he offered.

  It was a sweet thought, but we both knew better. The picture was so old. And no person living in this hovel could’ve been in pristine health. No, that baby had been stolen from her forever. And she probably knew that. And then she disappeared.

  “Let’s go,” Jace
said, keeping his hand on my back.

  Before we turned and left, I slipped the photo back beneath the straw. Just in case the person who lived here ever came back for it, as unlikely as that was. I didn’t want to take this sole item of comfort.

  We stepped out of the hut and started passing the other makeshift homes, the soles of our shoes becoming caked with the black mud that permeated these woods. I scraped the mud off as well as I could when we finally stepped onto one of the paved roads of Millville. The road looked like it wound up to the abandoned factory—the smokestacks now still and silent—toward a food store and a row of concrete apartments.

  “Let’s start in the apartments,” I said.

  Jace nodded, and we trudged up the broken road a few hundred feet. The potholes in the concrete collected black puddles of brackish water that put off a deeply unpleasant smell, trash and broken glasses littering the rest of the path. When we got to the apartment complex, I looked up and studied it carefully. It was a nondescript building with foundational issues and a sagging roof. The dirty air had turned its once-white paint gray.

  I drew in a sharp breath and steadied myself on my feet. This was probably the place my parents had lived, maybe up until just three weeks ago, when the town was abandoned. Their things might all still be inside. And now we were going in. I pushed hard against the heavy metal door and stepped into the dark apartment entryway.

  Water dripped through a few cracks in the apartment ceiling, and the hallways were cramped and gray, but still, the apartments were much better than the shacks we had seen outside. Long concrete hallways stretched before Jace and me, doors lining the hallway on both sides.

  “People probably locked their doors before they left,” Jace said, trying a couple of doors as we walked past. Sure enough, they were locked.

  “If they left in enough of a hurry, though,” I said, trying doors on the other side of the hall, “then maybe…”

  I didn’t have the chance to finish my thought. The last door handle I had tried creaked and opened, and a dark room stretched out in front of me. My heart lurched in fear. What would we find here? Death? Enemies? An answer to what Helping Hands had done with these people?

  Jace and I looked at each other, and then I stepped forward to enter the room. But a strong hand came down on my shoulder and kept me from proceeding.

  “Let me go first,” Jace said.

  He stepped in front of me and entered the room before I could respond, and I followed quietly.

  It was too dark to see much when we got in. I tried the light switch in vain, but all of the utilities had been shut off, possibly when the factory closed. No use wasting money and power on a city that was going to be empty of inhabitants, after all.

  Then I had a thought. “There’s a flashlight on your wrist,” I whispered to Jace.

  I pressed a button on my GPS watch, and a bright light shot forward from the base of my hand. Jace lit his as well, and we traced the inside of the room together with our lights. No one was there. I saw a small kitchen to our left and a cramped sleeping area to our right. The entire apartment was just the one cramped room. The bathrooms were probably communal and spaced out one to every floor, like they had been when I lived with Henry and his parents. I shuddered at the memory. I had trudged to the bathroom hundreds of times while heavily pregnant with Hope, afraid and uncomfortable in my new environment. I had slept on the floor beside Henry while my daughter kicked inside of me, ticking down to the inevitable moment that she would be snatched away.

  It hurt to remember those months.

  We walked farther into the room, the light reflecting eerily off of random objects: spotty drinking glasses, silver pots, and even, I noticed with alarm, a pair of spectacles left by the bed. I walked over and picked them up, and Jace came to stand beside me, aiming his flashlight at the object in my hand.

  “People must’ve really left in a hurry if they didn’t even have time to grab their glasses,” he said nervously.

  It was true. It looked like all of the personal effects of these people had been left behind. There were clothes hanging in the closet and dishes sitting out in the kitchen. The sheets on the bed were wrinkled, as if it had been slept in and then left unmade. A few picture frames sat on the nightstand.

  I shot my light at the pictures. Through the glare, I could see the grim faces of several working-class people. There were older people and middle-aged people and at least one teenager. But there were no pictures of young children. My heart sank for the person or people who had had to leave these mementos behind. Maybe they weren’t much, but they might’ve been the only things of any value to them.

  I looked at the people in the photos in depth. Did any of them have my nose? My eyes? My chin? I couldn’t help but wonder if the people who had lived in this apartment were my birth parents, Juno and Culver. The odds were against it, but I would probably be wondering that of every room we walked into.

  “Let’s try another one,” Jace suddenly whispered.

  All of the rooms we were able to access had the same basic layout: one room with a sleeping area and a kitchen. The kitchens weren’t particularly well equipped to handle cooking, though. There was a one-burner stove and a small, shallow sink in every apartment. Still, most of the apartments had the requisite pots and pans for a meager homecooked meal. Small iceboxes in each room contained trace amounts of spoiled food. But the food was scarce, and it was obvious that no one had a stockpile to leave behind.

  In many of the apartments, glasses half-full of water were sitting on nightstands or tables. At least one apartment still had food on the table. It looked like boiled greens and some sort of cheese, though it was nearly decomposed and moldy. Medicines and canes and other important things had also been left behind. No one seemed to have been given time to pack their things. I opened a small wooden box in one apartment and found a small silver ring. I picked it up and looked it over in the light of my watch, but respectfully replaced it before we left.

  “I don’t know how far we’re going to get in here,” Jace said after some time.

  I knew he was right. I could’ve spent the next few days picking through the apartments, honestly, since it still meant possibly finding some clue as to who my parents were and where they had lived. But we weren’t getting anywhere. We had already stumbled upon the biggest clue: people had left in a hurry, without the chance to pack their things. We probably weren’t going to learn anything beyond that, no matter how many apartments we searched. No one had written down what was going on. And none of the people were left to answer our questions.

  I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We stepped back outside and stared anxiously up at the sky. The clouds were looking darker and heavier as the day wore on, and I glanced at Jace nervously. We were here for information, and didn’t have a deadline for finding it, but it looked like Mother Nature was going to give us a deadline of her own. If it rained, he and I would be forced to take shelter until the storm abated. We couldn’t risk ruining one of the two disguises we each had with water damage.

  And if the storm lasted more than a few hours, we would run the risk of bumping into enemies—or having our airship discovered.

  “Let’s hope for the best,” Jace said, holding his hand up to make sure no droplets had started to fall. “If we’re lucky, we have about an hour or so until the rain starts.”

  We walked quickly back out into the street and started following it up to the factory. The filth in the air was starting to weigh down my clothes and skin, feeling like a grime that I couldn’t brush off. It sank into my pores and deposited itself into the fabric of my clothing. I wondered how my parents had fared here. Did they get sick from all of this pollution? Had they even still been alive when the city was emptied?

  Where were they now?

  The gates of the factory were open and unlocked when we got to them, and Jace and I stepped through them warily as they creaked in the wind. Then we walked up a short set of concre
te steps to reach the front door of the building.

  “Locked,” Jace said with disappointment as he tugged in vain.

  I looked around. I didn’t see any other good way to get in; other doors had been dead-bolted or even wrapped in chains.

  “We can’t turn back now,” I said. We had come all this way and hadn’t found anything related to the disappearance or Helping Hands yet, and the name of that organization—and their participation in the emptying of the cities—was the only insight we had gotten from Artemis so far. We needed to get into this factory. We needed to leave this place with more information than we had.

  “Yeah, and we have other problems now,” Jace said worriedly. He held up his hand to the sky. I didn’t have to duplicate the gesture. I felt a fat rain droplet hit the top of my head, even through the fake hair and the hood.

  We were running out of time. An incoming rainstorm would ruin the masks, and once that happened, we would be out in the open with no disguise. Enemies had been in Millville only yesterday, according to the team back in Edgewood. They could be back at any moment. Or they might have never left. I looked frantically around us for a way in. All I could see were crumbling and dirty stone walls, padlocked doors, and the dilapidated road back to the city. Then I saw it.

  “Stand back,” I told Jace. I picked up a loose brick from the ground and took aim at a window.

  “Robin!” Jace hissed.

  But the brick was already soaring through the air. It collided with the window in a sharp cacophony, and the window shattered and fell away, revealing an open passage into the building.

  We didn’t have time to think. Rain had started to tumble down now, and we were in serious danger of being unmasked. We darted toward the window and crawled through, Jace right on my heels, careful to avoid the sharp glass. I braced myself for a blaring alarm, or a swarm of previously unseen security guards. But after a few seconds of being in the factory, there was nothing.