The Child Thief 4: Little Lies

by Bella Forrest

  When we got to the fifteenth door, we both stopped, waiting for agreement on when to move forward.

  “Well, this is just the conference room,” I finally said. “There’s no harm in going into this one. If anyone catches us in here, we just say we needed somewhere… private.”

  “You have a very interesting way of flirting,” Jace said, laughter in his voice.

  “Shut up,” I answered, and cracked open the door.

  27

  Unlike the hallway, the room was vaguely lit by a line of grayish light along the bottom of the wall on the far side of the room. The room was also empty, which was a relief, since the most paranoid part of me had been afraid we would find Corona and Nathan holding some midnight meeting with their closest allies. Or worse, Corona and Nathan had set a trap for us, my constant questioning arousing their suspicion.

  As we snuck into the room, I tried to remember the layout, recalling the screen set into the wall opposite the door, which would mean we were facing it right now. I could see the faint silhouettes of the conference table, stretching nearly the length of the room, and at least ten chairs.

  “The light is coming from the control room,” I whispered. “Do you think the door will be locked?”

  “Won’t know unless we try it,” he replied, just as quietly.

  We kept to the wall on the right-hand side of the room to avoid the table and chairs and were soon standing in front of the door to the control room.

  “Might as well get this over with, right?” I took the handle, turning it before I could second-guess myself.

  The handle stayed firmly in place. Locked, then.

  Jace pulled something from his pocket and dropped to his knees in front of the door. A moment later the door swung open, allowing a beam of fuzzy light to illuminate Jace. In his hand was his lock-picking device.

  He shrugged. “You never know when you might need to access a door that someone’s kept locked.”

  I laughed, moving past him into the room. Instead of my estimated ten screens, I saw twenty, stacked on top of each other along the wall. Each had a label written on masking tape, the lettering in black marker, leading me to assume it was a temporary measure.

  If that was true, it meant they changed these feeds often. How many different buildings were they recording? And why?

  Between us and the wall of screens were a row of computers, with a keyboard set in front of each monitor. I put the computers down as something to deal with later, and only if we had a reason to. They would inevitably require passwords, and neither of us was capable of that challenge.

  However, the filing cabinets on the wall to my left suggested there was plenty here to discover without bothering to try to get into their digital files.

  Jace rushed to the cabinets while I grabbed a pen and paper from the long desk in front of us and turned to the screens, the source of the gray light that bathed the entire room.

  Every screen showed a slightly different scene. The middle screen was still on Asus, showing nothing more than the front entryway where we’d originally met Myrna. I wondered whether they’d been able to see what happened inside after we set off the alarms, and if anyone on the Little John team could tell us whether the Authority soldiers had done anything about the breach… or if they’d just gone back to business as usual.

  Their lack of reaction still seemed unbelievable to me. Corona had been convinced they would attempt to follow us via the satellite systems, but something wasn’t adding up. If Little John had a camera feed, and that camera feed had picked something up, I wanted to see what it was.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time right now to figure out how to do that.

  I glanced at the next feed, labeled “Gem.” This one, unlike the Asus feed, was broken into four different views. One was the foyer and receptionist desk, same as with Asus. One was a shot of a nursery. One was the play yard, and one was the schoolroom.

  I frowned and looked at the next monitor. Smally. There was only one camera view here, and it was of the outside of the building. Why would Little John bother to have a camera watching the outside? What did they think they could learn from that? Unless… Unless they had more feeds from Gem because they had more operatives putting up cameras? They didn’t have many plants in Asus, which would explain why they’d only managed to get one camera in place there.

  If my logic was sound, it meant they only had an external view of Smally because they didn’t have any operatives inside. Which meant they were planning for us to break into a holding center where we would have no backup at all.

  I scanned the labels on other monitors. Sunshine, Yoke, Petal, Canton, Flip, and others I didn’t take the time to register. Whatever those names meant, they weren’t telling me anything.

  A couple of them displayed settings like the holding centers we’d been in, but a couple were schools, I was sure. There were shots that covered the front of the buildings, and then shots of hallways lined with lockers. A few also included what were obviously classrooms.

  That seemed strange. What did Little John want with schools?

  A couple of the monitors showed what I recognized immediately as Authority compounds, easy to identify because they were stamped with the holographic Authority logo. I saw one shot filled with the plastic boxes, this time holding people.

  There were feeds of factories, their campuses populated, judging by the number of lights in the windows and the silhouettes moving around. There were also feeds of factories that looked like the deserted ones we’d seen in Trenton and elsewhere, their windows dark, streets devoid of life.

  I looked from one screen to the next, confused and disturbed. Each screen had a picture, and a label. None of the names were familiar. But these were places Little John considered important. Important enough to be monitoring, at least.

  What did it all mean? Were these all places we were supposed to break into? And if so, what were we supposed to do there?

  “Robin!” Jace hissed from the other side of the room.

  I looked over to see that he had stacks of files in front of him on the table, many of them open, the papers inside spread out. He was going to have a devil of a time getting those back into the cabinets in whatever order they’d been in before.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He pointed to the files. “Look familiar?” he asked.

  I ducked down and started shuffling through them, my fingers shaking. There were children staring up at me from the pages. Babies, and very young toddlers. None looked over the age of three; most of them were far younger than that. Each file came with a number of categories, running from age to race to genetic lines and familial talents. What their parents did for a living. What talents the child was likely to have. Their current hair and eye color and what colors their hair and eyes would likely become. Many of the files even had age progression pictures, showing what the child might look like as a teenager, and then again as an adult.

  I’d seen files like this before. I’d handled them. “The warehouse,” I breathed, remembering the files we’d found in the basement room.

  They’d been printed directly from the Ministry’s archives. We’d seen them again upstairs when we got back to the group and saw what Austin was doing. He’d also found another spreadsheet—a distribution and tracking system. And it had been attached to the auction site Gabby had found, which had prompted our raid on that very warehouse.

  I looked up at Jace, my breath coming short and fast. “These are the kids from that auction site?” I asked, not sure whether I hoped he would confirm what I was thinking or not.

  “They must be,” he said, flipping over the page in front of me. “Look at this.”

  I dropped my eyes to the paper once again and saw another page attached to the back. On it were various fields of choice, from preferences about the gender and hair color of the baby to what they might become if they were raised in the family… applying for them.

  “The order form,” I said, disgusted. Y
es, we’d seen all of this before. And it had made me feel just as horrified then as it did now. “But what is Little John doing with all of this? Corona said they were trying to cripple the site.” I paused, not wanting to say the words. “Could they be stealing babies from the holding centers just so they can sell them themselves? What if that’s why they have operatives in the holding centers?”

  I shivered. What if we’d inadvertently been helping them to steal children from their real parents?

  But no. I might not know their reasons, but Little John was intent on subverting the Burchard Regime. I’d seen the expressions on Corona’s and Alexy’s faces when they came out of those holding centers. They’d both had children stolen from them by the Ministry. There was no way they’d be involved in any sort of kidnapping scheme.

  “There is a perfectly logical explanation for it, if you think about it,” Jace said suddenly. “Corona said they had control of the site for a while, and they took everything they could from it. If that warehouse was truly in Little John’s hands, these might be the same files we saw there.”

  “But it was raided by the Ministry. Or the Authority,” I said. “Little John wouldn’t have been able to get to the files.”

  “Maybe they made multiple copies,” Jace replied. “It’s what I would do, especially if I was trying to track the children.”

  It was a much more reasonable—and generous—explanation than the one I’d come up with, and I grabbed at it with a desperation that surprised me. I could admit to myself that I wanted desperately for Little John to be the hero. I wanted them to be fighting for right.

  I wanted to have finally, finally, found the organization that would help me do the right thing. The people who could help me find my Hope.

  Suddenly an alarm started going off. I didn’t know why it had taken so long, but it was time to get out.

  We were stuffing the files back into the filing cabinets, not caring about any order they might have been in, when the alarm grew even louder.

  At that point, the whole idea started to feel pretty stupid. To make things worse, we hadn’t discovered anything new. The files we’d already seen and couldn’t do anything with. Camera feeds to places we didn’t recognize. The knowledge that Little John was watching a range of different places… with no idea what they meant to do about it. No idea what it might have to do with us, or Little John’s larger goals.

  We were going to be caught breaking in, all for nothing.

  “Oh God, we have to get out of here,” Jace muttered. “Leave the rest of the files. Let’s just go.”

  We dropped everything and whirled around, poised to make a run for it.

  Standing in the doorway, watching us, were Corona and Nathan.

  Jace and I yelped in surprise, unable to form an excuse or question or accusation.

  Corona gave us a cool, contained stare, and then smiled slowly. “I think, Nathan dear, that perhaps it’s time for us to start answering some questions.”

  He nodded, one hand tucked into his pocket. “In time. But first I’d like to hear from the two of you about what exactly you’re doing in here.”

  28

  Jace and I stared at the joint heads of Little John.

  I didn’t know about Jace, but my mind was racing through potential reasons for us to have found our way in here. Anything that might sound reasonable and innocent.

  In the end, though, I realized our reasons weren’t going to matter. We’d broken into their control room to do some snooping; there was no way to make that look good. Particularly when Nathan had demonstrated, time and again, how paranoid he was about his privacy. Corona may have claimed to have a more open mind than Nathan about including people, but that didn’t mean she was going to be generous when it came to guests breaking into rooms they weren’t supposed to see.

  A split second later, I decided it was best to just be upfront about it.

  “What do you mean, it’s time for you to start answering some questions?” I asked, trying to inject some confidence into my words.

  Corona gave me a steely look and turned to the camera feeds at the front of the room. “You know, we have every right to throw you out,” she said, her voice quiet but unexpectedly menacing. “We don’t know the two of you, not really, though I suspect my husband will put forth a case for Jace’s honor.” She looked over at Nathan, but I could tell he was going to let her take point on this one.

  “You have no idea how hard we’ve worked to get to where we are,” she continued, her voice still quiet. “You have no idea how long it’s taken to get here, and how much we’ve had to sacrifice for it. No idea where we’re going… or what we plan to do when we get there.”

  I wasn’t sure she expected a response. I wasn’t even sure she was talking to us. For all I knew, she was only speaking to herself as she tried to wrap her head around what we’d done—and what she meant to do about it.

  But as long as she was talking, and as long as we were standing in this room where everything seemed to come together—albeit in a way I still didn’t understand—it meant I had the opportunity to start asking some of the questions that had been flying through my head for the last month or so.

  “So, tell us,” I said, my voice firm. “You’re right, we have no idea about any of it. We don’t know because you haven’t told us. You and your organization went out of your way to recruit us into the OH+ initiative, to bring us into a group where we would get to take action and make a difference, or so we were told. We were thrust into a mission we thought was of our own making but in reality was a test to see whether we were ready to do whatever it was you wanted us to do. And we were the ones who suffered when it went wrong. We nearly lost our lives, pointlessly, because of things you’d done but hadn’t bothered to warn us about!”

  I remembered the crushing panic as we all fled through the forest, the pain and horror of watching members of our team being beaten to the ground and captured by Authority forces. I brought my fist down on the table in front of me with a crash. Jace and Nathan started in surprise, and both took an instinctive step toward me. Nathan pulled himself up short, but Jace put his hand on my arm and squeezed, either to make sure I was okay or silently tell me to tread carefully.

  Corona, however, barely turned from the screens. She didn’t answer.

  “Our friends were arrested, our team was thrown into chaos, and I spent the next few days thinking one of my best friends was dead! That she and the others who were taken were being held by the Authority wasn’t much of an improvement. We had no resources, no allies, no idea what we were facing, and yet we risked everything to get them out.”

  I took a deep, heaving breath. These were things I’d been keeping inside for far too long, and now we were here, now Jace and I had broken into one of their control rooms and were probably going to be thrown out, never to see our friends again. It was time to get it all off my chest.

  To finally ask who the hell they were and what the hell they were doing. What it had to do with the holding centers and the government stealing children. Why we’d been caught up in it, and why they’d allowed things to go the way they had.

  “Your people saved us when the jailbreak went wrong, and don’t think we’re not grateful for that. But then you dropped us back into the middle of it and left us there by ourselves for days, with no explanation or communication. We were in that mess because of you, because the Ministry and the Authority thought we were your operatives, and yet you didn’t come for us!”

  Angry tears threatened but I swallowed them back, staring at Corona’s face. Her silence irritated me, but I was also grateful for it, in a sense. Yes, I wanted answers from her, but I also wanted to get this list of grievances out into the open. I wanted to make sure she understood what we’d been through.

  “I killed a man because you weren’t where you were supposed to be, Corona. You weren’t there, and I had to kill someone to save my friend. I still haven’t started to deal with how that makes me feel, or what it might
have done to my soul.” I knew Jace was looking at me, but I didn’t turn to meet his eyes. “And now we’re here, finally in Little John, a part of the team. Or, at least, that’s what we thought. But we’re still not being told the truth. We still only get part of the story. And I find that awfully hypocritical for someone who claims to believe her team should have the entire truth, so they can react safely when in a dangerous situation.”

  I split my attention between Corona and Nathan now. “You expect us to fight for you, to lay down our lives, to put ourselves and our friends in danger. But you don’t tell us what we’re fighting for, or even who you are. We’ve been through too much to keep doing that. So yes, I think it’s time you start answering some questions. It’s the only way we can decide whether we’re going to fight for you or not.”

  There was a long, tense silence.

  Then, to my surprise, Nathan answered me.

  “Girl, you should have been a politician,” he said in that slightly drawly voice of his. He swept a hand through his perfectly mussed hair and gave me the start of a smile. Just a tucking of the corners of his mouth, but still, something.

  Perhaps even more surprisingly, he looked… proud. A quick glance at Corona gave me the same impression, the smile on her face more pronounced.

  Had this been another… test? Another trap they’d laid for us, to see what we would do? To see whether we’d take the initiative and find our way in here, start to answer our own questions?

  The lack of security in the building, the fact that we’d been able to get in here so easily, and had been here for so long before anyone showed up to see who had broken in…

  Fury at having been manipulated again warred with relief that we seemed to have passed.

  “I don’t think she could lie well enough to be in politics,” Jace said from my side, finally speaking up. “But she’s right. Members of our team almost died. I still have no idea what you’ve done with my sister. We deserve the truth, Nathan.”