The Child Thief 4: Little Lies

by Bella Forrest

  The center itself looked very much like the jail in Trenton we’d broken our friends out of. It was a stark white building, with no external decorative touches, and bore only the words “Ministry of Welfare” across the front in big black letters, the Ministry’s logo sitting at the end of the title. A row of cars lined the sidewalk out front, and I could see a parking lot around the side. Just outside the front door was a large white van, the Ministry’s logo on the side.

  I’d seen vans of that sort in the poor neighborhoods of Trenton before. I knew what it meant. That was a van the Ministry agents drove when they went out to collect children. They were a regular feature in my nightmares.

  We parked across the street from the building, and then Corona turned to face us.

  “Alright, team. We’re going into this holding center. The story is, you’re all here as my entourage. A mixture of family and personal assistants. Look around, observe everything you can, and take notes. Our job is to come out of this as experts on the layout and what the people in here are doing. Other than that, all you need to do is act like you know what you’re doing.”

  I stared at her as she got out of the vehicle, my heart pounding. But I didn’t have long to process her words. Everyone started bundling out after her, and then we were striding up to the front door.

  I kept my mouth clamped shut and my fists balled as we walked through the front door to the reception desk. Assistants. Act like we knew what we were doing.

  I had a feeling that would be easier said than done.

  “I’m looking for Layna Williams,” Corona said clearly. “We’re here for a tour of the facility.”

  She flashed some sort of credentials, and the woman on the other side of the desk grew wide-eyed and nervous.

  “Of course, ma’am,” she said. “Let me just get Layna up here.”

  She picked up her phone and started speaking into it in a low, urgent voice.

  I took the opportunity to look around. The place was too visually similar to the jail for comfort. It was all white, with black accents here and there, and looked grimly institutional. There was too much glass and too much white concrete. The lack of color was like a lack of smiles in a large crowd. Nothing about this place looked like it should house children.

  I brushed my hand against the material coating my face, praying the disguises were as good as we thought they were. If they didn’t work, we were going to find ourselves in another place that looked too much like this one. And I didn’t think we’d get out of there alive.

  A girl with strawberry-blond hair, wearing scrubs, appeared in the hallway behind the desk, caught sight of Corona, and smiled in welcome. She walked forward with her hand held out.

  “Helena?” she asked. “I’m Layna, thank you so much for visiting. We’re so grateful for your patronage, and I’m happy to give you a tour of the facility.”

  “One of our people,” Alexy breathed into my ear, having caught a glimpse of the confusion on my face. “She’s been expecting us. Corona is posing as a financial donor and has asked for a tour. You know, to see where her money’s going, that sort of thing.”

  “One of our people?” I asked blankly, watching as Corona nodded and answered some of Layna’s questions.

  “Our people,” Alexy confirmed. “This place is crawling with them. We’ve got at least twenty agents in here, doing everything from cleaning the bathrooms to taking care of the babies, each of them doing as much research as they can on the inside. Problem is, none of them have access to the computers yet. They’ve only got access to the kids. Which means no matter how many people we get in, they don’t get us the information we need. They just… prepare.”

  She took off after Corona before I could ask what the hell any of that meant, and I rushed to follow her, trying not to touch my face and not to clench my fists. Jace fell in behind me, his hand whispering against my lower back. I leaned into it just a little, appreciating the comfort.

  Everything about this place made me nervous, but it might hold the secret to finding Hope again. She might even have been here once. But it currently held an unknown number of children whose parents were going through the same thing I’d once experienced. The idea made me feel like I was going to throw up.

  This was a lot more personal than I’d expected.

  It got even worse when our first stop was one of the nurseries. Only, “nursery” seemed far too small a word for this place. It was more like a warehouse, one we were viewing from a suspended walkway hanging from the ceiling that ran down the middle of the room. Below us stretched a sea of plastic boxes large enough to hold ten babies in their cribs. Most of the infants seemed to be no more than a couple weeks old, and some were even younger than that. I saw a few that were older, maybe several months old, but none over a year in age.

  These were the youngest ones. I knew for a fact that the Ministry also took older kids, if the situation presented itself, but they evidently didn’t keep them here. At least not in this room.

  People I assumed were nurses and doctors, but who might have just been trained handlers, moved between the beds and boxes, lifting babies up if they were crying, adjusting blankets, and handing out bottles as if they were working factory lines.

  Every compartment had a smaller box attached to the outside, where I could see a number of file folders. Every compartment also had a number of stickers attached outside the door. Labels for the children, I guessed, since those stickers seemed to be repeated on the clear plastic cribs.

  There was also, I saw, a locking mechanism on each door. Even in this highly secure building, surrounded by faithful Ministry employees (or at least the Ministry thought so), they locked the doors of the smaller nurseries. That made me feel even sicker.

  Even if some heartbroken, desperate parent managed to somehow figure out where their baby had been taken and snuck into the building itself, they’d have to run a gauntlet of clear walls and locks, and no doubt scanners and heat-seeking alarms, to find their baby again.

  Even if they managed to get their hands on the child, there was no way they’d do it without being seen. There was certainly no way they’d get back out of the building. Not with their lives intact.

  In every dream I’d ever had of rescuing Hope, it had been an easy process of hacking into the Ministry Archives and figuring out where they’d taken her, then going and breaking her out. Looking at the amount of security the government had in place for these kids, though, I felt those foolish dreams turn to dust.

  Then we were off the suspended walkway and moving through a hall toward another large room. This one wasn’t quite as big and was filled with desks instead of beds. Sitting at the desks were kids who looked like they ranged in age from five to maybe eight or so, all writing something on single sheets of paper, their heads bent to their work as if nothing else mattered.

  I stopped and stared, then quickly started walking again. I was supposed to be acting as some sort of personal assistant for Corona. As such, I probably shouldn’t be stopping in surprise.

  Even when I saw kids who were at least two years older than any kids the Ministry was supposed to have. They were supposed to stop collecting children at the age of three. That was what we’d always been told. So what were they doing with kids old enough to go to school?

  Were they kids who had been here long enough to age that much? Or was the Ministry taking kids a lot older than they let on?

  If so, why?

  A single woman stood at the head of the room, her mouth moving as she gave them instructions. Behind her I could see a chalkboard with writing across it.

  “The school for this center,” Layna said. “We make sure any child old enough to learn does so. We don’t want our future citizens suffering when it comes to their education.”

  She turned to Corona and widened her eyes, and I realized she was giving the “official” version of the tour, despite secretly belonging to Little John. It made sense. There were probably cameras all over this place; the Little Jo
hn operatives couldn’t take any time off from their roles. Even when one of the Little John leaders was there to visit.

  We went through the next room more quickly, Layna seeming disinterested in it.

  It was a room that housed nothing but computers. Large stacks of computers, way more than they would have needed for the relatively simple job of maintaining records for this single center, and I saw both Nelson and Gabby looking around with big eyes and studying the machines carefully. I could practically hear Nelson taking mental notes and making guesses at what sorts of computers those were and what they were used for.

  When I caught a glimpse of the old face containing my sixteen-year-old friend, I saw that her eyes were screaming in distress at what she was seeing… but they were also telling another story. She was already trying to figure out how she could get into those computers from the outside. Because we were all going to come out of this tour with one thing on our minds: finding a way to stop these monsters from doing what they were doing. I’d never paused to consider how many children they were handling, but we must have seen at least five hundred babies and one hundred older children, and we’d only seen two rooms of a center containing many, many nurseries and schoolrooms.

  How many children were housed in this one building? How many buildings like this existed in our country? And how many kids were being distributed through them every single day, as the Burchard Regime worked to sell our children to the highest bidders, and with them, our identity as people?

  The rest of the tour went pretty quickly. We saw one very small playroom, which looked far too tidy to have ever seen any children at all, and then walked close to a set of windows. Outside, a small playground sat on a patch of unnaturally green grass.

  “Synthetic grass,” Layna said knowledgeably. “It’s easier to clean after the children have been on it.”

  I pressed my lips together to halt the gag I could feel rising in my throat. Synthetic grass. Easier to keep clean. Because God forbid anything get dirty. God forbid these children feel real grass.

  Before I knew it, we were back at reception and Corona was checking us out, thanking Layna kindly for the tour.

  “I can see that our money is being well-spent,” she said. “And I’m glad to see future members of our society being brought up in such a clean, safe environment. So much better than what they might have had otherwise.”

  Layna agreed wholeheartedly, then saw us to the door and held it for us as we filed out. She waved goodbye and turned back toward the building, disappearing a few moments later.

  Next to me, I felt a quick vibration run through Corona’s body, and looked up to see her mouth pinched and her skin pale and sweaty.

  “Every time I go in there it makes me want to punch someone,” she breathed.

  Then she snapped her attention back to the real world, glanced at the rest of us, and nodded toward our vehicle.

  “Come,” she said, starting to walk. “I hope you were all paying very close attention. I want to hear everything you saw once we’re seated. Nelson, you’re in charge of getting it all down on paper. If we’re going to get a team into one of those centers and take control of the computer room, we’re going to need to know their layout like the backs of our hands.”

  We followed her, doing our best to keep our strides as slow and measured as possible, while our hearts raced at what we’d just seen, and what she’d just said.

  18

  The moment we were back in the car, we all started talking, relating everything we could remember of the trip, ignoring the fact that no one had anything like a pad and pen out yet.

  Nelson was the one who went for her bag. “Quiet!” she snapped.

  She made a show of pulling out her pen and paper, opening them, and getting settled. She looked up at the rest of us, meeting our eyes one at a time. Then she looked to Corona, who was fumbling with her keys, trying to get them into the ignition.

  Her hands were shaking. I could feel the rage radiating from her, the horror at what we’d just seen bleeding out of her pores.

  But she wasn’t crying. She wasn’t fading or pulling back. She was seething. More furious than I’d ever seen anyone before, all of it directed into a sharp point, as if she could use it as a weapon.

  I’d known a lot of women in my life, and I’d seen them in a lot of different emotional states. I’d known women who cried when they got upset or angry. Women who retreated into themselves, keeping a blank face turned out to the world until they had dealt with their feelings in private. I’d even known women who went on living as if nothing had happened to upset them, ignoring it all. I’d always wondered how much damage that last group did to themselves with their denial.

  But I had never known a woman who became her anger. I didn’t make the mistake of thinking Corona would do anything stupid with it, either. She wasn’t going to start screaming or kicking or pushing us into foolish action. No, she was letting the anger feed her drive, her passion, her power, using it to sharpen her edges, like a sword against a whetstone.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Corona’s rage filled the car with a kind of hum, like the air just before a lightening strike.

  Nelson watched Corona for a long moment, waiting for a safe time to speak to her. Corona paused in her fumbling and took a long breath, her bloodless hands locked around the steering wheel. Only when she opened her eyes, her rage tamped down for now, did Nelson finally speak.

  “Corona? I’m writing down everything I can recall about the computer rooms, although I assume you’ve already got some amount of information from your people on the inside. Do you want us to do the same with what we saw in the whole place, or are the computer rooms more important?”

  Corona brought the vehicle roaring to life, whipping out onto the road, and if she hadn’t driven like such a maniac to get here, I would have said she was taking her aggression out on the road in front of us. As it was, I just put it down to her normal driving habits. At least this time I knew to get a good grip on Jace before she really hit the gas and sent the car squealing forward.

  “The computer rooms are the most important,” she said, voice level, if somewhat sharp. “The people we have planted in the holding centers have never been able to get us information about the computer rooms. They’re heavily guarded, and only the techs and execs have access. So we don’t know as much about the inner workings of the centers as we’d like, despite having so many people in there. We know a little, and we’ll know more once we extract a few more operatives and debrief them. Anything you can remember will be vital. Knowledge of the computer rooms is just going to be the most delicate.”

  “What do you mean once the operatives are extracted? You don’t have access to them when they’re in there?” I asked.

  “No, Robin,” Corona said. “The Ministry has all of their employees under constant surveillance. Once we have people in there, they’re out of reach until they’re extracted. Little John trying to contact our people while they’re active in the holding centers could go wrong in many ways. One traced message, one document drop that gets discovered, and everything would go to pieces. The operatives could be caught, which would possibly lead back to Little John and get everyone caught. The long game has been working for us so far, but, with our current timeline, we need more information, and fast.”

  “If we need information on the computer rooms, that means you’re first, Gabby,” Nelson said, bringing her pen down on the paper. “Give me what you saw, and what you think we can do with it. Everyone else, work on organizing everything you noticed in your head, and don’t listen to what anyone else says. I’ll get to you all as quickly as I can.”

  I didn’t know much about computers, and I certainly didn’t know enough to be of any use to Gabby and Nelson in that regard. So I went on to the other things I’d seen.

  The boxes full of children.

  The labels at every door.

  The locks.

  The classroom.

  The older ki
ds. Kids who were way over the age limit of what the Ministry was supposed to take.

  The false grass.

  The tiny playrooms.

  All of these things told me a lot about how they handled the children. They told me a lot about how Hope herself might have been handled.

  As much as I hated to think about it or even admit it to myself, because it was a horrible train of thought, I hoped she hadn’t spent much time in one of those places. Even if it meant she’d been passed to some other family within days of having left me.

  Some other house. Some other mother.

  That was how we drove home: maintaining our focus on our thoughts and impressions of the place until Nelson called on us, then each of us telling her everything we could remember. We had no idea what Corona was going to do with the information, or what part we might have to play in any future missions. She’d already told us an awful lot, but she’d likely only told us the surface details of the plan. We weren’t yet cleared to know much more than that, and wouldn’t be until Corona or Nathan decided it was time.

  But each of us knew we’d just seen one of the most evil parts of the Burchard Regime in action. Looking around at my team, I knew we were all going forward with the same thought in mind: we’d do whatever we had to do to make sure it was stopped.

  We returned to the garage in Edgewood before our faces would start to melt, according to Corona’s timeline, and I was glad for that, at least. Watching the faces around me start to droop and slide around would have made the entire day even more bizarre, and I wasn’t certain I could deal with that at this point.

  Once we were parked, Corona ushered us away from the elevator and through another door. This one led downward and, to my surprise, into a tunnel. It was a strange, dark place, though even this dank pathway didn’t feel nearly as sinister as the holding center.