The Child Thief 4: Little Lies
Bella Forrest
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Read More by Bella Forrest
Copyright © 2018 Bella Forrest
Nightlight Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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1
Zion? That didn’t make any sense. Where had he come from? Had he been hiding out here by himself?
We were in the middle of nowhere, at a convent few outsiders knew about. A convent which, last time I’d seen it, had been teeming with life, both animal and human. Now, it looked as if the campus had been hit by a plague. The buildings were empty, the windows unlit by the lights that should have been burning at this time of day. There were no footsteps on the pathways, no chattering voices of children or nuns. No laughter. No ringing bells. Not even the soft echo of prayer I remembered hearing in the chapel during my last visit.
All that remained was a horrible, echoing quietness.
Something was wrong. The kind of wrong that cut a hole where my stomach was supposed to be. So yes, Zion appearing out of thin air was more than a little unexpected.
I’d never trusted the guy much to begin with. But finding him here alone, in the empty silence, made the whole thing feel distinctly off balance.
Where had he been when we were in so much trouble I wasn’t sure we’d make it out alive? When we were cornered, without any place else to go? When we’d been trapped by the Authority? When Jackie had been shot at…
Based on the expressions my friends wore, they weren’t feeling friendly toward him, either. Ant was next to me, shuffling backward as fast as he could, Jackie hunched up in his arms. On my other side, Nelson was doing the same, one arm gripping a wide-eyed Henry and pulling him along, her other linked through mine in solidarity. Granted, she didn’t know Zion as well as I did in the first place, since she’d been in jail for the whole of last week, but she’d also known me for longer than she’d known Zion or the rest of the OH+ squad. My panic was evidently enough to convince her something was amiss.
Jace and Kory drew together to stand side by side, in front of the rest of us. They were planted firmly, broad as trees, legs spread wide and arms crossed—the picture of warriors defending their clan.
“What’s up, Zion?” Jace asked, his voice deceptively mellow. “Long time no see.”
Zion snorted and made a chopping motion with his hand, as if trying to cut through the delay. “There’s no time for that, Jace, we’ve got to get out of here,” he snapped.
I was just imagining Jace’s casual lifting of an eyebrow in response when I backed into the solid body of the airship. I grunted in frustration and stepped to the left, motioning with a tip of my head.
Ant caught the gesture, nodded, and started to move in that direction. On his other side, Abe was crab-walking toward the end of the airship ahead of us. Behind me, I could feel Nelson moving as well, and I focused on Ant’s back.
I was suddenly starting to feel less than confident about who Zion worked for. Granted, he’d always seemed like one of Nathan’s most trusted people, but his out-of-the-blue appearance was bizarre, and why was this place empty? With everything I’d seen of the government’s operations, I wouldn’t have put it past the Authority to have a mole in our organization… one they yanked back home at the last second.
“Where are you going?” Zion’s voice snapped out after us. “We have to get out of here!”
The panic in his voice made me halt, and I whirled around, coming to face him.
“Have to get out of here?” I asked, hearing the sharp note in my voice and not caring. “We’ve been getting out of one place or another for the last three days with zero help from you! We woke up in a meadow, alone, with no cover, and we’ve been running for our lives ever since. You and the rest of your crew fell off the freaking map, and stayed gone, and now we find you here in a deserted convent that should have hundreds of people living in it! Forgive me if I don’t feel like trusting you at the moment.”
He somehow dodged Jace and Kory and reached my side quicker than I thought possible. He grabbed my arm and leaned in uncomfortably close.
“Don’t you think we were searching for you?” he asked, his voice dropping low enough that it seemed he was just talking to me. “We’ve been tearing our hair out, trying to figure out where you went and how to get you back.”
“And you just conveniently forgot to answer your phones or even look at your messages?” I replied, furious. “You just happened to not be taking texts anymore? We tried to get in touch with you for hours, Zion! We got receipts that our messages were being delivered, and even read! And then nothing! Where were you? Where were you?”
He scoffed and shook me a bit, then glared at Jace. When he turned back to me, he was obviously trying to control his frustration.
“Burner phones, girl,” he hissed. “Surely Jace told you we all use burner phones. We got rid of them as soon as everything went to hell! Pulled the cards from them and threw them out of the airship, in case someone was using them to track us. Allerra, the fool, looked at her messages before we could stop her.”
“And you never thought about the fact that those phones were the only way we had of communicating with you?” I snarled.
He took a step back and pressed his lips into a thin line. “We thought we would be able to contact you through Jace’s phone,” he said, the words clipped.
I yanked my arm back and scowled at him, while Jace came to stand next to me in solidarity.
“How do we know any of that is true?” I asked. “How do I know you were searching for us to save us and not arrest us? If you are on our side, why the hell did you leave us to start with, and why did you leave us out there for so long? For all I know, you’re working for the Authority! Did you know we’ve been branded as terrorists? Did you know the man who was supposed to watch over Jace’s apartment and keep it safe ended up turning us in? Did you know we—”
Jace put a hand on me before I could continue, and I shut my mouth just to keep from biting my tongue. Yes, I was panic
king. I’d been running for my life for days, and in the middle of that I’d shot someone, killed someone—something I still hadn’t had a chance to fully process. Yes, I’d done it to save Jackie’s life, and that was a damn good reason, but the fact remained that I had taken a life.
Swallowing the rising hysteria, I stared up at Zion, summoning a glare of my own to match his. Daring him to give me an answer that wasn’t good enough.
“If that’s what you honestly think, nothing I can say will make you trust me,” he said. “And you know it. I can’t give you all the answers, but leaving you in the meadow was… a mistake. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Nathan was furious when he found out. He sent people after you immediately, but we found your airship and nothing more. We tracked you back to Trenton, sent some agents in to find you, but they were intercepted and had to get themselves out of there.” He paused. “We saw the public bulletins about your new status as terrorists. And we did know about Walter. He’s been… dealt with.”
I saw Jace’s shudder out of the corner of my eye, and a shiver ran through me too as I remembered Marty. He’d started within our ranks but then defected, trying to turn OH+ in to the enforcers at our first meeting. Zion had shot him for it. It was likely Walter was no longer with the living.
I narrowed my eyes. “If you were working with Little John, why couldn’t you find us?” I asked. “I thought Little John was bigger and better than anything else, with all the tools and contacts and fancy toys. Why was it so hard for you?”
He gave a rueful shrug, and then half a grin. “You guys were way too good at hiding yourselves,” he replied. “We had a bug on Jace’s phone, but then something fried it. By the time we realized the signal had stayed in one place for too long to be him, you’d disappeared.” His face became stern again, but with a hint of pleading. “Look, we don’t have time to stand around talking about this. We’ve got to get out of here or we might bring trouble into the convent.”
“Where are they?” Jace asked Zion quietly. His voice held a mixture of fear and anger as he gazed around the empty convent. “Where are the nuns? Where are the kids?”
When Zion didn’t immediately reply, he continued in a sharper tone. “If you want us to trust you, if you want us to believe you’re still with Nathan, and you did try to save us but couldn’t find us, you’re going to have to prove it. Let me talk to the nuns.”
And his sister, I filled in silently. Because this was where she lived.
Zion looked as if he wanted to argue, but then he cast a glance at the rest of the group—including Jackie, who was now worryingly pale—and nodded.
“I’ll take you to them,” he muttered. “But I can’t give you long with them. We’re in a delicate position here and staying will make it even riskier for all of us.” His eyes flickered over to Jackie again. “Especially your friend. She looks like she needs urgent treatment.”
I nodded, accepting the terms, and so did Jace.
Zion turned on his heel and began striding toward the convent itself, the rest of us hustling after him. His rush was contagious, and I found myself checking the sky, positive something bad was about to happen.
“What are we running from?” I huffed, doubling my pace to keep up with Zion as we passed through the gates of the convent and into the courtyard proper. It was a wide, open space, lined by gray stone buildings with generous avenues threading between them. On one side, I glimpsed the park and garden areas where they grew their fruits and vegetables and allowed the children to play. Beyond were the bungalows where they housed and taught the children.
Where Rhea had been the last time we were here.
“Zion?” I pressed. “Why the hurry? What have we missed?”
He looked at me over his shoulder, and I caught the gleam of his eye before he faced forward again.
“You’ve missed a lot, but here isn’t the place to go into it,” he replied, brushing the question off with one of his trademark vagaries. “As for our rush, we don’t know who might have followed you here.”
I frowned. “We weren’t followed. We destroyed the Authority’s choppers and the drone they sent after us. Then we were in cloud cover.”
Zion strode ahead of us, throwing open the heavy wooden doors to the main church and walking through them.
“You’re under the assumption they’ve only tried to follow you with aircraft,” he said. “We know they have far greater capabilities.”
He continued down the main aisle of the church, leaving us to trail along after him. I took the lead in our group, my friends evidently leaving me to be the spokesperson for the moment. It was an odd change and my mind stuttered on it for a second. Since when had I been the one who asked the questions and got the hard answers? Wasn’t this supposed to be Jace’s job?
But why not me? I straightened my shoulders and lifted my chin in response to the thought. I had as much right as anyone else to demand information for myself and my friends.
On top of that, one glance at Jace told me that he was focused on only one thing: finding Rhea. He’d never looked so afraid, in the entire time I’d known him. As long as I was forcing Zion to take us to where he said the nuns were, Jace would go right along with it.
“What do you mean?” I asked, turning back to Zion. “We were constantly watching the sky… Do you think they bugged the airship itself? If they’d found the ship, wouldn’t they have just destroyed it?”
Zion reached the altar at the front of the sanctuary—an enormous, elevated platform set against a backdrop of a glittering sunrise done in gold and copper so bright it made my eyes water a bit—and whirled around to look at me.
“They wouldn’t have to put anything on the ship to trace it, Robin. You know that GPS mapping you’re always using on your phone? The one getting its information from satellites constantly scanning the earth and recording everything they see? Who the hell do you think controls the system, and has it never occurred to you they could use it for more than giving convenient directions?”
I stopped abruptly, my insides going cold.
The satellite imaging systems.
Of course.
They tracked everything, and Zion was saying that the government had access to those images. That they might have used them to see, not only what was happening on the roads below, but what was happening in the air.
Which meant all the hard work we’d put into destroying their helicopters and their drone might have been for nothing. For all we knew, they had their eyes on our aircraft—sitting just outside the convent—right now.
2
Zion didn’t appear to notice my sudden silence, instead sliding back a portion of the sunrise background to reveal a wooden door set deep within the wall.
I hurried behind him onto the dais, mind whirring through what he’d just said.
“So you think the government is using the satellites to spy on us. But I thought the satellite companies—”
Zion paused in the doorway. “You’re assuming again, Robin. Assuming industry and the government are separate entities. And you know what they say about assuming.”
“Do you know for a fact they’re not?” I asked.
He looked at me with a serious expression. “It’s a strong possibility.”
He then started forward again, disappearing into the dim hole in the wall. I forced my legs to start moving and rushed after him.
A moment later I was in a tunnel built of old, rough stone carved out of the earth and then transported here without the benefit of any finishing or shaping. The path traveled sharply downward, my footsteps moving more quickly as gravity pushed me on.
I swallowed heavily; it was one of the creepiest places I’d ever seen. The gloom was reduced somewhat by electric lights embedded in wall torches every ten feet or so, each one giving off a dull yellowish glow. But the glow didn’t touch the shadows along the ground… and it didn’t make me feel any better about where we were going.
A deep, breath-stealing cold sank into my
skin, all the way down to my bones. It was like a tomb. Cold and deep and still.
A hand slipped into mine, making me jump, and I looked up to see Jace beside me. His face was drawn in firm and determined lines, his hand warm and solid in my own, and I squeezed gently, letting my shoulders relax. I’d been so caught up in Zion’s revelation that I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone here.
The reminder that I was part of a larger group was a welcome one, because I still didn’t trust Zion, or where he was leading us.
I squeezed Jace’s hand again, earning an affectionate look, and gave him half a grin.
There was a sharp cough from behind us, and I looked back, locking eyes with Henry for an uncomfortable moment. I was going to have to deal with him at some point. Figure out how he fit into this, what to do with him, and how to do it. But not right now.
Zion reached the end of the tunnel, which was marked by another door. It was huge, made of ancient, dark wood, crossed in three places by broad bands of slightly rusted metal, and sporting a hefty brass keyhole and doorknob. It reminded me of a door from one of those ancient castles in Europe I’d seen in my adoptive parents’ photograph albums of their travels.
Zion took out a large key made of what looked like the same metal as the bands and handle and unlocked the door, gesturing for us to enter.
I hesitated, still unsure, but Jace strode forward to pull the door open toward him. I took a deep breath and steeled myself, forcing my feet to move inside.
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