The idea became so palpable in my mind, my eyes prickled with tears from just how badly I wanted it. I could finally step off this crazy tightrope. Go back to normal. With the missing piece of my life restored.
I glanced anxiously at the clock hanging on the wall and watched the seconds tick by, while wringing my metal hands. I counted one minute, then two, before Nelson’s voice finally returned.
“Oh,” she said softly. “This is… odd.” Her tone had shifted from pensive to mildly nervous.
“What?” I asked, along with several others, anxiety twisting my stomach.
“I’m looking at an offline backup of their shadow site. I finally stumbled across a full database. And it’s… it’s not an auction site, like we thought.”
“Huh?” Jackie said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Then what is it?” Winter demanded.
In response, the image of the child disappeared from the screen, and a webpage flashed up in its place. I shifted closer to the monitor to get a better look… and realized that it was a long submission form, requesting the visitor to input details ranging from “Age (in months)” to “Ethnicity” to “Eye Color.”
“There seems to be no system in place to make actual bids,” Nelson went on. “Looks like they’re running more of a fulfillment service than anything else.”
“Meaning interested parties fill in the sort of kid they’re looking for and then the gang goes to find some family to rob?” Kory whispered, his voice thick with disgust.
“Well, they clearly take orders using this form,” Nelson replied. “And I’m guessing whatever intel they’ve managed to pull from the archives is helping them narrow in on the right kind of kid.”
“But Gabby and I saw a list,” I said, confused. “We saw a page of listings, which indicated they had ‘inventory’ already.”
“That’s true, but I haven’t seen a lot of pages like that,” Nelson replied. “Maybe they do have some kids on hand, or within easy reach. But there’s clearly a major ‘to-order’ component to this, too. It seems to be the main feature of the site.”
“And how come you didn’t realize this earlier?” Zion wondered.
“The IT team didn’t dig this deep into the site; once we managed to scrape the IP, we decided not to risk breaching the servers further in case someone detected a probe and it blew our cover for the big day…”
She trailed off again, and although I was curious to learn about the ins and outs of how this group worked, I really hoped she was just going to focus on the archive data now. I was pretty sure we had ample evidence to bust these criminals already, and I needed to get something from this excursion. Anything that could push me one step closer in my search for Hope. It felt like we were so near to something, it was maddening.
If she didn’t find something on the system soon, I was going to need to reconsider going back downstairs and asking Jace for help with one of the—
Nelson’s sharp cuss sliced through my train of thought like a knife.
“Look at this,” she breathed, and the next thing I knew, the submission form on the screen had vanished, to be replaced with a spreadsheet populated by names and addresses.
“What is it?” Jackie asked, popping the visor of her suit open and squinting at the small font that formed the entries on the sheet.
“I found it in a folder marked ‘Orders Fulfilled.’ Look at the addresses,” Nelson hissed.
I frowned, feeling both confused and shaken by the urgency in her tone, then took a leaf out of Jackie’s book and popped my visor open too, so I could see more clearly. Though I only needed to do a brief sweep to realize that all the addresses belonged to wealthy neighborhoods.
“And?” I asked, still feeling pretty confused. I mean, the idea of wealthy people ordering these kids was disturbing, but it didn’t exactly come as that much of a shock to me, given that only rich individuals could afford to buy kids in the first place, and—
“Lena’s listed there,” Nelson said hoarsely.
A pin-drop silence followed her statement, and then several of us whispered at once, “Lena?”
“Lena Dunton. My friend’s baby, who was confiscated by the Ministry. Nine rows down. Note the ‘Date of Collection.’”
My eyes scanned the rows and columns and came to rest on the girl’s name, and then the date: May 7, 2105. “It’s the same day the Ministry came for her,” I breathed, my mind scanning back to the date Nelson had told me about the kid being taken. She’d said it had happened the night before we talked, and that matched this very date. The implication took several moments to sink into my brain, but when it did, it hit me so hard it knocked the air from my lungs.
The gang and the Ministry had supposedly “collected” this girl on exactly the same day. Which meant that…
“So wha-what are you saying, Nell?” Abe asked, his voice shaky.
“That the Ministry could be behind this whole operation?” Ant whispered. “That we could actually be looking at the Ministry’s archives, rather than someone who hacked into them?”
Just him voicing the question made me want to shake my head, shoot the notion down outright, even though it had been on the tip of my own tongue. It just seemed… so far-fetched. So crazy. So impossible.
Nelson sucked in a breath. “I don’t know. And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get all alarmist on you here. All I’m saying is, look at what’s in front of you. I guess there are other explanations, but it struck me as a disturbing coincidence. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”
“But how could the Ministry be behind this?” Austin blurted out. “I mean, even theoretically. If they were, for starters, there’s no way we would have gotten into this system so easily. Just think of how tight the security is around the archives. You can barely even poke at it without risking a squad team coming down on you!”
Nelson suddenly let out a sharp breath. “Unless…” she whispered, then trailed off once more. She went completely silent for ten agonizing heartbeats, and when she spoke again, her voice was laced with sheer terror. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Guys. You need to run. Get out of there. NOW!” She practically screamed the last word, and my heart jumped into my throat.
“What?” I gasped, panic already jerking my limbs into motion.
“Get back to the aircraft and get the hell out of there!”
“Nelson? What the hell is going on?” Zion barked as we all leapt to our feet at once and raced toward the door, several of us almost bumping into each other as we clustered to get through it. Zion’s voice was firm, but there was a tremor to it that betrayed his fear.
“The freaking Ministry is behind this, because what I just discovered is a snare protocol!” Nelson panted, sounding as if she were scrambling around her office in preparation to evacuate as well. “Proprietary government software that’s designed to trap brazen hackers. It detects attacks and allows the unsuspecting intruder entry in order to infect their connection with a virus that reveals their location—and will also send out an alert regarding the nature of the breach. Which will most probably include details like whether a system has been tampered with physically. And pinpoint the exact system’s locale.” She swore again, her words making it hard for me to even breathe. “The snares are set up around the archives too, which is how I know about them. But I know to expect them there!” she went on. “It’s why I’ve never attempted to brute-force the archives. God, I should’ve been more alert. I’d recognize the coding any day, but I had no reason to look out for it! No reason for it to even be on my radar!”
“Wait,” I stammered, desperately trying not to give in to full-blown panic. “But you were using encryption, right? Sure, the system may have sent out an alert that it’s been breached locally, but how could you be at risk, Nelson?” Just the thought of her being in danger sent my heart racing a hundred miles a minute. She couldn’t be. She was far too important. To all of us.
“I didn’t have adequate security to prevent a v
irus of that kind,” she breathed back. “Hell, I didn’t even have my usual layers in place. It would have slowed me down too much in breaching the system, and we had to be fast. I had no idea I’d need all of them. I didn’t think we were dealing with the friggin’ government!” Her voice rose to a hysterical pitch that made the hairs on my body stand on end.
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Jackie shot back as we pounded along the corridor toward the attic entrance. “You already probed their shadow website, days ago. If the government really is behind this, how come a squad didn’t come down on you right then and there?”
“Maybe because we didn’t dig aggressively enough to trigger it,” Nelson panted. “Like I said, none of us attempted a brute-force attack. And given how deep the site’s hidden in the shadows, it’s possible security is less sensitive there than usual. It was a complete fluke that we even came across it in the first place… But whatever the case, you’d better believe they’re coming for us. You guys and me.”
Panic finally claimed me, and the slew of curses that had been on the tip of my tongue since laying eyes on the spreadsheet escaped my lips.
The government was coming for us. Enforcers were coming for us. Or someone even worse.
“No, no, no,” I gasped as we bundled back up the ladder to the attic. This couldn’t be happening. How could it be happening? What was the Ministry doing running a site like this?
The Ministry’s primary purpose was to enforce the CRAS. And the CRAS was only instituted to solve the country’s economic problems. Not to become a mail-order system designed to serve the rich.
If that was what this was.
Right now I couldn’t think of another explanation, and the pit of my stomach hollowed out, giving way to a feeling of deep sickness. How many kids were being taken from their birthparents in this way? How many other sites might the Ministry have like this, floating around the shadow web?
And more importantly, were all of these kids being targeted with just reason?
I couldn’t help but think back to Lena and her parents. How Nelson had been so confident they’d been in the safe zone. Heck, even the parents had thought so. And yet the Audit Office had disagreed. The Audit Office, who refused to make their records public.
Could it be that Lena had just happened to match some wealthy couple’s criteria? That her parents might not have been part of the 20 percent of the population that was deemed to be a net drain to the country?
That the Ministry had just been looking for an excuse to rob them of their child?
They’d still been lower middle class, which meant, on the surface, they appeared to be within a safe level per the scope of the system. And, like I said, nobody could know for sure, because the Audit Office didn’t make their records public. I guessed, in reality, they could have been part of the bottom 50 percent, and we wouldn’t actually know.
But, even if all this was somehow true—that the Ministry had become a servant of the rich rather than of the people—the question remained: why? It was a question that had been bugging me for a long time. Why did the rich want so many kids? Why had Mr. and Mrs. Sylvone not been satisfied with two, three, or heck, even four? Why did the wealthy seem so obsessed with the idea of increasing their number of adoptions?
I needed to know. But trying to figure it out while attempting to flee the imminent arrival of a government death squad probably wasn’t the best idea.
“How long d’you think we have?” Ant managed as we pounded across the attic floor toward the broken skylight.
“They would have gotten an alert a few seconds after I breached the system,” Nelson replied. She was panting more heavily now, and it sounded as if she were running, too. “Which was, what, fifteen minutes ago, give or take? Which means it won’t be—”
Whatever she’d been about to say was overtaken by a strangled cry, and a second later, her line went dead.
“Nelson?” I croaked. “NELSON?!” I stalled in my tracks, my whole body shaking. “NELSON?!” I screamed.
But the line remained silent.
My heart skipped a beat as a wave of panic crashed over me. Goosebumps prickled my skin like electricity, and tears stung my eyes. But before I could fully process what could have just happened to her, another line crackled to life in my ear and Julia was screaming at us.
“STAY AWAY FROM THE ROOF! THEY’RE HERE! YOU ALL GOTTA GET OUT ANOTHER W—”
The line cut out.
“Julia?!” I shouted, as we all came to an abrupt halt.
“Government stealth aircraft!” Zion hissed. He’d gotten closest to the skylight, his gaze angled toward the dark sky through the open window. “Several of them. They’re closing in!”
Adrenaline shot through me like a bolt of lightning and I whirled on my heel, almost slamming into Jace, who’d come to a stop a foot behind me. “Go!” I gasped, and then he was turning too, his legs pumping across the dusty floor as he raced back to the trapdoor.
We flung ourselves down the ladder, skipping rungs and jumping most of the way to the floor, then sprinted along the hallway to the stairs. Any thought of maintaining quiet flew out of the window as we pounded down them, our heavy footsteps as loud as thunder as they echoed off the walls.
Jace stopped at the ground floor, just before the fourth flight of stairs that would lead us to the basement, and when we diverged from the staircase, my eyes lighted on the exit at the end of the hallway. The door was open, thanks to whoever had left the building earlier to investigate the noises in the parking lot.
“Ventilations off!” I shouted, realizing that the gas would still be out there. The last thing any of us needed right now was to inhale that sedative mist.
Snapping my visor back down, I realized my suit was still in non-ventilation mode after our entry into the basement office, so I charged ahead, the sound of low clicking surrounding me as the rest of my team made the switch.
Only, Austin couldn’t, I suddenly realized.
I swore, stalling at the exit just as Jace and I reached it. I whirled to face the rest of my team, who caught up with us seconds later. “The gas. What about Austin?” I panted.
“I’ll carry him!” Zion grated out. “Just keep the hell moving!”
Before Austin could get a word in, either of objection or approval, the tall man grabbed him by the middle and flung him over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift. “Grip’s too tight!” Austin yelped.
“Sorry,” Zion grunted, loosening his metal fingers around him some. I heaved a quick sigh, grateful that Zion would carry Austin to safety, even if he did pass out.
Assuming we could get to safety.
“We gotta make it across the parking lot, then across the field to the forest,” Winter panted from the back of the group.
We all nodded hastily, knowing it was our best option. There was a wooded area on the other side of the field, which would give us coverage, and beyond it was a clearing where we’d agreed to regroup after the mission, or if anything went seriously wrong. Marco, Julia, and Alexy were clearly preoccupied right now and unable to scoop us up immediately, but if we got to the shelter of the trees we at least had a chance of escaping the squad, especially in the dark. And maybe our aircraft could circle back and pick us up later.
I had no idea what was happening to our decoy team at this point, but they should have had the same idea.
Jace and I turned back to face the exit and raced out, straining our suits for speed in a way we’d never done before. We shot out through the open compound gate and spilled into the smoke-choked parking lot, and I prayed the rest of our team had gotten Julia’s warning, too. Because it was too late for me to double check. I couldn’t open my visor to switch channels until we were out of range of the gas, and—
My thoughts froze at the sound of boots hitting the ground. Boots that didn’t belong to my team. It sounded like they were some twenty feet behind us, but when I threw a glance back over my shoulder, I couldn’t see the source thanks to the smog. I c
ould barely even see Jace, who was running a handful of feet beside me.
“Squad’s landed!” Kory shouted.
An explosion of bullets pierced the night, and I heard the terrifying ping-ping of the gunfire colliding with metal. Terror gripped me at the sound of Winter’s surprised cry ringing out from behind, but I couldn’t afford to look back. I had so little visibility ahead of me, and it took all the concentration I could muster just to avoid smashing into cars. If any of us slowed now, capture or death was guaranteed.
But as another round of gunfire resounded through the parking lot, I felt two sharp pings in my back, and was forced to swerve off course. I ducked and darted at a crouch for a car a few feet to my left, hoping to get a few seconds of coverage. But then my right foot collided with something thick and heavy, and I lost balance. I spotted the unconscious man lying in my path a moment too late, and I tripped and fell, landing hard against my side.
“Robin?!” I heard Jace’s anxious voice in my ears but didn’t have the breath to respond. It was the first time I’d experienced falling over properly in one of these suits, and it was worse than I’d imagined. Pain blossomed along the entire right side of my body, which had borne the brunt of my impact with the metal frame, and my forehead throbbed where the edge of the visor had smacked it.
Clearly, you really weren’t supposed to fall over in these things. Especially not at the speed at which I’d been running. And I also realized, as I dragged in a breath and my lungs burned, that non-ventilation mode likely wasn’t supposed to be paired with frantic respiration. I was running out of oxygen. Fast.
Gritting my teeth against the pain, and the white spots dancing before my eyes, I forced myself back up. But before I could continue running, something flew at me from behind and caught me around the lower back, knocking me to the ground again. A fresh wave of pain coursed through my body as this time I landed facedown. And it was quickly followed by panic when I realized what had slammed into me.
The Child Thief Page 33
