The Child Thief 5: Ghost Towns

by Forrest, Bella

  “Guess this is it, huh?” Kory said softly beside me.

  I looked over at him. His casual goofiness had slowly been replaced by a pensive and nervous demeanor over the past hour.

  “At least we’ll be in there together,” I said, trying to swallow down the lump in my throat.

  “Remember your name?” Kory asked.

  “I’m Nora White,” I replied confidently. “And who are you?”

  “Silas Miller,” Kory said. “The poor factory chump who is about to be scooped up by evil philanthropists.”

  I managed a chuckle. His happy-go-lucky attitude had worried me at first, but now I was grateful for it. It helped loosen the knot in my stomach a fraction.

  “What do you think we’re going to find in there?” he asked, his tone darker.

  I sighed. I had been pushing that question around in my mind as well. I couldn’t even guess at an answer. What would we find? Were townspeople being killed? Were they being enslaved? Or were we all wrong? Was it actually what Helping Hands said it was: a temporary shelter before factory and apartment repairs could be completed? But if so, why were those woods so heavily shielded from outside view and interference?

  “I honestly don’t know,” I finally replied.

  I spotted Nathan walking back to us from the front of the ship. My breath caught as I wondered if the trucks had been spotted, and whether it was time for us to get disguised and out the door. But everyone else was still outside the ship, and Nathan was moving at a leisurely pace, so it didn’t seem likely.

  “You guys ready?” he asked when he got close enough to us.

  Kory and I nodded stiffly in unison.

  “I’ve already got the printer programmed, so we’ll be quick once we get word. When you exit the ship, jump on the road visible through the tree line. It’s a straight shot to Dry River,” Nathan said. “If you’re seen entering the town and run into any trouble, make something up. Whatever it takes to get on those trucks.”

  I noticed that he seemed a little antsy and nervous as well. It was no wonder. Nathan had a lot riding on this mission. And if anything went wrong, he could lose a large portion of Edgewood’s resources and compromise Aurora’s important position. I realized suddenly how much trust he was putting into us. Little John was truly relying on the information we could provide. Not to mention us surviving this mission to get that intel back to the base.

  He opened his mouth as if he was going to continue, but a sudden rush of noise cut him off. We all turned to the front of the airship to see that the teams were hurrying back from outside the ship. Bridge, who was in the front of the group, spoke first.

  “Trucks sighted,” he said breathlessly.

  Kory and I leapt to our feet. Nathan missed only a beat before he nodded curtly at Bridge and turned to the printer.

  “Kory, get on the line,” he said flatly.

  Kory stepped forward, where a white strip of tape marked a line on the airship floor a few feet away from the printer. He positioned both his feet on it and stared straight ahead at the printing mechanism.

  I watched in awe as a grid of bright blue laser shot over his face. The mask began to print at his temple, adding an imperceptible extra layer of skin as it moved down to his chin.

  Within seconds, he was a different person. Kory had become Silas Miller.

  “Robin!” Nathan called.

  Kory stepped off the line and to the side, and I took his place in front of the printer, closing my eyes just before the bright blue light hit me. There was a familiar and discomforting warmth all over my face as the printer worked. But it was over in just seconds, and then, although I couldn’t see it, I knew I was also a different person: Nora White.

  I barely had time to think or register what was happening before Kory and I were ushered toward the front of the airship and out of the hatch.

  Jace, Nelson, Jackie, Ant, Abe, and Gabby watched us as we left, their eyes wide and concerned as we were pushed past them. Jace’s face was almost a caricature of sorrow. I wanted to call out to them. I wanted to tell them that I believed in them, that I was proud to call them my team members, that I really considered them my family.

  But it was happening too fast, and before I knew it, Kory and I were outside of the airship and the hatch was closing.

  “Good luck!” Nathan called out before the door closed. And then there was silence.

  Kory and I paused for just a second after the tumult of our exit. The airship was still grounded beside us, obviously waiting for the cargo trucks to pass before taking off, so I didn’t feel completely alone yet. But I knew I wouldn’t see the rest of my team until five hours from now. And that was if we were lucky.

  I took a deep breath, and Kory and I started scanning our horizon. It was still gray and humid outside, but the worst of the rain seemed to have abated. The same thick, grimy feel in the air was starting to collect in my lungs, similar to what Jace and I had felt in Millville. The woods were sparse and gray and, just like Nathan said, I could easily see a road through a smattering of bare trees and thorny brush ahead of us.

  “Let’s go,” Kory said. He began to step through the clearing and toward the tree line and the road beyond it.

  The countdown had officially begun. And now we were walking right into what might be the enemy’s grasp.

  I caught up to Kory and walked beside him, focusing on the sound of my breathing, the crunch of dead grass beneath our feet, and the far-off rumble of the trucks. They would probably be making it into Dry River soon, and Kory and I needed to get on one of them as quickly as possible. If there was any delay, we risked losing our disguises before we made it to our destination. Then we would be risking our lives.

  We stepped through the trees and made it onto the road, and Nathan was right. I could see the still smokestacks of the factory over a bend in the road ahead, so it was easy to determine the direction in which we needed to walk.

  “Nervous?” Kory asked.

  It was a silly question, but I understood why he asked it. The silence amplified our anxieties. It was nice to talk normally.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “You?”

  “Honestly, I’m more nervous than I’ve been in a long time,” Kory replied. I looked over at him, but he was staring down at the road as we walked.

  “Me too,” I murmured.

  We walked in silence for a while longer. We were making good time, and I didn’t think it would take longer than ten minutes for us to get into the town. But I had no idea what we’d find when we got there.

  “This is the feeling I felt when we got raided,” Kory continued softly. “Like the world was about to end.”

  My heart twinged at the words. I had heard Jace’s story personally, but I didn’t know what it had been like for Cloyd, Denver, Alf, and Kory. Who had Kory lost? What was the raid like for him?

  “I’m sorry,” I replied simply. I didn’t know if he wanted to talk about it further or not, but I didn’t want to press him on a sensitive matter right before we walked into something so dangerous.

  “Thank you,” he said gently.

  My lungs felt heavy and gross. The black mist around us wasn’t exactly rain, but it still clung to our clothes and skin and weighed down the strands of our hair with wetness. I could no longer hear the trucks in the distance, so they had either passed beyond our earshot or reached their destination and cut the engines. Judging by how close we were to the smokestacks now, I assumed the latter.

  Suddenly Kory’s eyes widened and he jerked to a stop. I stopped, too.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I can hear people,” he replied.

  I strained my ears, and then I began to hear a distant din of voices as well. It sounded like the people of Dry River were congregating together in a group. They were probably starting the roundup.

  “We need to hurry,” I told Kory.

  We both quickened our pace to a jog as we headed up the road to Dry River. It looked like there was one final bend in t
he road before we’d be able to see the town—and the town would be able to see us as well.

  “Do you think we’re going to look suspicious?” Kory asked in panting breaths. The quick walk in the grimy air was taking its toll on us.

  I considered the thought. It might look strange for the two of us to walk up together from the road that led out of town. We didn’t know who we’d run into first, hungry and apathetic townspeople or suspicious Helping Hands volunteers. What if they questioned what we were doing outside of the city? What if our identities hadn’t gotten onto the Helping Hands registry like Aurora claimed? Nathan had told us to make something up, but that suddenly seemed like the stupidest possible option.

  “Let’s cut into the woods,” I replied.

  The bend in the road curved right, but the smokestacks were straight ahead of us. So the road probably bent back toward the left, I figured. If we went straight, we should hit the road again right where it opened up into the city itself. And we’d have the shade of the trees to get an eye on our surroundings instead of walking up blind.

  I walked straight, off the road and into the brush ahead of us, Kory close behind me. Dried husks of birches and pines provided us scanty cover as we peered ahead in the grayness.

  The voices were becoming clearer now. I could hear a multitude of men and women speaking at once. It sounded like a large group of people talking amongst themselves, so I hoped that meant they hadn’t started loading onto the cargo trucks yet. Kory and I needed to get to the front of that line so we’d have a chance to leave first.

  After a minute of walking, the trees in front of us started to thin and we were able to see the road again and, beyond it, the city proper. I could see hundreds of figures moving in the city now. The road the cargo trucks came down must’ve been the main street of Dry River, and, from the looks of it, it opened into an open plaza just ahead.

  A single, louder voice now rose over the murmurings of the large crowd.

  “No entry without registration. Stay in your family units to be scanned together. Prepare to form orderly lines.”

  It was the monotonous voice of a middle-aged woman on a speakerphone. We inched closer to the road, nearing the edge of the tree cover, and peered through. I could see the woman standing on a makeshift platform in the middle of the plaza, six or seven idling trucks directly behind her. She was wearing a red shirt emblazoned with a white logo: outstretched hands, cupped together and holding a miniature cornucopia. It was the Helping Hands logo from the poster in Millville.

  People were walking close to us on the road as they milled around. There were no children, but I did see some older teenagers and young adults among them. But many of the people were stooped over and middle aged. There were very few elderly people. The harsh conditions of the factory towns didn’t allow for most to reach that age.

  “Nora!” Kory hissed at a level just above a whisper. He was pointing to something in the plaza.

  My eyes followed the direction of his finger. A tall man in blue was walking along the edge of the road, looking closely at townspeople as they passed. He had a weapon holstered at his side.

  An Authority agent.

  So Helping Hands was relying on some outside aid to make sure these people were complying. It also made it seem more likely that the organization would be scanning IDs like the government did. In fact, Helping Hands didn’t seem very different from the government at all anymore. Why else would they have uniformed government agents present for their operations?

  We needed to get out of the woods and into the plaza to join the other townspeople, but the agent’s presence complicated things. Still, people were walking so close to us. If the agent turned his back, Kory and I would have a good chance to slip out of the woods and onto the street undetected.

  Kory looked over at me, and we seemed to share the same thought. We looked back at the agent and waited. His eyes were scanning the crowd in front of him and to his left, which was our direction. But as soon as he turned his head to the right…

  “Now!” I whispered hard. And with that, Kory and I stepped high over the last tufts of dry grass on the edge of the thin woods and strolled out onto Dry River’s broken road.

  29

  We walked swiftly onto the road just as the agent turned back to look in our direction.

  My breath caught as I made brief eye contact with him. He was only about a hundred feet away from us. It was the first time in a long time that I was voluntarily so close to a government agent, and I tried to steady my breathing as I diverted my gaze. I was Nora White, the Dry River factory worker, not Robin Sylvone the terrorist. I had to keep that in mind.

  I could see the agent looking us over in my peripheral vision, but then he lost interest and looked ahead again. I exhaled. We had made it into the Dry River crowd without too much trouble. But now we needed to get past Helping Hands volunteers and into those trucks. And it was obvious that they were relying heavily on a registry that we had no real proof we were even on.

  But since our identities had been successfully reassigned, judging by Nathan’s ID scanner, it seemed like we could trust Aurora’s ability to change things in the government systems. I felt like our chances of getting onto those trucks were good. As long as we didn’t screw it up some other way.

  Kory and I tried to blend in as we walked toward the heavy crowd of people in the middle of the plaza. Townspeople were already gathering tightly around the Helping Hands woman as they prepared to get onto the trucks. The backs of the trucks were open, a flimsy ramp leading into the cargo hold, and there was a red-shirted volunteer beside every truck ramp.

  They were going to load us all into the backs of the trucks like cattle, I realized. All the pieces were there. All they were missing was the electronic cattle prods.

  There was a sudden crackling as the woman switched her speakerphone back on and brought it up to her lips.

  “Hot food and dry shelter await. We want everyone well fed and cared for before factory work commences after refurbishing. Please begin lining up. Please remain in your family units.”

  The crowd lurched together like a wave of water, the townspeople all clamoring to form a line at the first truck. Kory and I were briefly swept up before we could regain our footing and begin to push past people to get to the front of the line. It felt cruel and exploitative to elbow past these hungry, tired, poor townspeople to that first truck. They needed the food and shelter that was promised to them a lot more than we did. But these masks wouldn’t last past five hours, and the diversion would come even sooner.

  We just didn’t have the time to wait.

  Kory and I quickly found ourselves ahead of the majority of the crowd, and I began to notice more and more agents as we pressed farther into the plaza. All of them were dressed in the same crisp blue uniform, and all of them were armed. They were watching the crowd closely, some of them with their hands resting on the butt of their weapons.

  Then, as the crowd pressed toward the first truck, I started to feel pressure from all sides. The line wasn’t forming properly. People were still crowding around and trying to push past one another. I grabbed hold of Kory to try to stay near him and hold our spots by the front, but I could already tell that was going to be more difficult than we’d thought.

  The woman was yelling into her speakerphone now, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I was starting to feel like I was drowning in the crowd. As more and more people squeezed against us it was getting harder to breathe, and I began to panic. We were going to be crushed here.

  But then a terrifyingly loud crack rang out. The squeezing stopped and the crowd grew silent. I whipped my head around in the direction of the noise and saw an agent standing to the side of us with his gun still pointed in the air. A wisp of smoke was rising off the barrel and into the damp air.

  “Straight line!” he yelled. Then he started walking toward us. He stopped within ten feet of Kory and me. “Starting here!”

  The crowd began to press ag
ain, but this time it moved quickly and efficiently until we had snaked out into one long line. Kory and I were fifty or sixty people behind the first person in the line. I hoped that meant we’d make it onto the first truck.

  The gunshot had changed the general atmosphere around us. People were quieter now, as well as noticeably tenser. But the woman on the loudspeaker droned on as if everything was normal.

  “Please prepare for scanning and loading.”

  I looked over to Kory. They would be scanning our IDs before we boarded the trucks. I suddenly felt very nervous again. Would anything about the IDs tip the volunteers off? What if our masks weren’t close enough replicas? What if one of us forgot our name?

  Kory was obviously thinking similarly,

  “Don’t be nervous, Nora,” he said to me in a strangely flat voice.

  “I’m not nervous, Silas,” I replied knowingly.

  I let out a breath. We knew our names. We were going to be okay.

  The line thinned until it was a more orderly single file, and then began to coil back into the plaza a long way. I looked back at the number of people. It didn’t look like we would all fit on the trucks, but I had a feeling that we were going to be crammed in until we did.

  And then my attention was pulled back to the front of the line. We had started moving forward. It was a slow process, but I could see the first few people in line being scanned and then corralled into the first truck.

  Kory and I inched along silently and nervously as the line moved forward. Agents strolled up and down both sides of the line to keep us orderly and compliant. But judging from the people around me, we wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight anyway. The townspeople were pallid and malnourished. A man behind us was coughing incessantly into a blackened handkerchief. Factory work made for hard living, and none of the people around us looked like they were physically or emotionally capable of going against the flow. I remembered those horrible conditions from back in Trenton. If I hadn’t had a place far away from the cold, concrete sadness of the town itself, I would’ve lost my mind.