The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  I couldn’t help but hope that one of them had somehow damaged his legs. The gas should put him to sleep immediately, but if his legs were out of commission it would be a guarantee that he couldn’t come after us. Maybe an injured man lying on the sidewalk would even slow down whatever enforcers were on their way.

  He deserved it for betraying Jace—and Nathan—the way he had.

  When I turned around, chest heaving, I was momentarily distracted by the deep, earthy smell of Jace’s apartment. That smell of wet soil and wood, closed into an indoor space, was something I’d come to associate with warmth and safety, and being here under such tense circumstances made my mind reel.

  But this wasn’t a time to start having a panic attack. We had to get whatever it was Jace needed and get the hell out.

  That sleeping gas would only last for so long, and I was positive the enforcers—or Authority agents with them—would come with gas masks. The fumes might not slow them down at all.

  I looked around the apartment for Jace and panicked when I suddenly couldn’t see him. He had come in right in front of me, and then run back with the bombs. Where on earth could he have gone after that?

  A door I’d never noticed over by the kitchen part of the studio shot open—right into Ant, who had been standing in front of it. He jumped, his arms wind-milling and the stacks of paper he’d been carrying flying all over the place, and then whirled around and glared at Jace, who had ducked out of what looked like a closet.

  “What were you doing in there?” I asked, shocked.

  “Getting our escape route ready and making sure it’s clear,” Jace replied, slamming the door and moving toward the kitchen.

  He flipped open one of the cupboards and pressed a switch inside, and the inner surface of the door turned into a monitor. The view was split into five different windows, each of them showing what I assumed was a different perspective of the sidewalks outside the coffee shop.

  “I told you I had security on this place, didn’t I?” he asked, grabbing my arm and hauling me toward the cupboard. “I might not believe in alarms, like Zion, but I’m a firm believer in knowing what’s coming for you—and how it’s approaching. Watch the monitor. Shout if you see anything that looks suspicious.”

  I stared at the monitor, horribly aware that I might not know an Authority agent if they approached, given the fact that the man who had tried to arrest us before we got to the library had been dressed in normal business clothing. Evidently, they didn’t all wear the blue jumpsuits.

  “They’ll send officers in uniform,” Jace said from right behind me, and I jumped and turned to glare at him. “They’ll want to make a big impression on anyone watching,” he clarified.

  He already had two duffel bags out on the table and was stuffing personal items and electronics into them, not bothering to pack efficiently.

  “What is all that?” I asked.

  “Eyes on the cameras, if you please,” he returned, though there was no anger in it. He darted to another cabinet and threw it open, then began rifling through the things inside. Once he’d found what he was looking for—some sort of address book, I figured—he heaved a sigh of relief and turned back to me. “This is everything that I don’t want to leave behind, and anything that might get me identified,” he said. “Anything that could be traced back to Nathan. Anything that has sign-in credentials on it. We don’t want to leave OH+ stuff lying around. I realize the Ministry and Authority already know about us, but there’s no point in helping them.”

  “What else do you need?” Jackie asked, coming toward the kitchen and looking around. “What can I help with?”

  The others appeared behind her, each of their expressions asking the same question.

  “Gather up anything that looks like it might be important,” Jace said. “Anything technological that I might be missing. Anything that has my personal writing on it. Not the plants. Not the candles. We’ll leave those for the Authority.”

  I heard the hitch in his voice and thought that it cost him more than he was willing to admit, having to leave those plants behind. I’d seen how much he cared for them. Maybe because they’d earned his loyalty, or maybe just because they reminded him of home. Either way, I made a silent promise to him that we’d come back for them if we could. It was stupid, and everyone would have laughed at me if I’d said it out loud, but it felt… important.

  We were all in the midst of losing an awful lot of personal property, thanks to this idea that our homes were no longer safe. If I could save something of Jace’s history, I was going to do it.

  “Is this why you’ve always kept this place so empty?” I asked, staring intently at the monitor on the cupboard door. Nothing that looked out of place yet. There were several bodies on the sidewalk, though, courtesy of Jace’s gas bombs. “So you could pack in a hurry?”

  “Are you asking why I haven’t decorated the way Zion did?” he teased, his voice breathless with his hurry. He darted to another cupboard, yanked it open, and started pulling stuff out and tossing it at his bags. “The answer is no. We always assumed that these houses were safe, with all the security and the people we had watching our backs, so although I knew that I might have to leave in a hurry at any time, I didn’t design with that eventuality in mind. If we’d been prepping for running, I can’t imagine that either Zion or Alexy would have put as much time into their apartments as they did.”

  “Well, if you all assumed they were safe…” Ant said. Then he suddenly stopped and turned to me.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed, coming to the same conclusion. Jace, Zion, and Alexy had all been told their apartments were safe by Nathan. And we’d just seen how quickly and easily those security measures could go awry, if they depended on human error or prejudice.

  “The others,” Kory snapped. “Hux, how secure are those other apartments?”

  Jace turned around, his mouth open to answer, but I was already dialing Julia’s number, my fingers shaking. We’d thought Jace’s apartment was safe, but we might have been wrong. What if we’d made the same mistake with Zion’s place—and left our friends in a trap that had been set off by that public newscast?

  I swung the phone up to my ear and listened. Ringing. More ringing. Further ringing.

  And then the line went dead. No voicemail. No busy signal. Just a dead line.

  I hit the end call button and then redialed, almost in tears at this point. Why would the line just have gone dead? That wasn’t how phones worked. When I brought the phone to my ear, though, I heard the same thing. Five rings, then one more, and then… silence.

  “She’s not picking up,” I murmured. “And there’s no voicemail. The line just goes dead.”

  I hung up and swung toward Ant, who was still rushing around the apartment with the others, all tearing the place apart in their hurry to find things that might be important. “What does that mean when the line just goes dead? Why wouldn’t her voicemail have picked up? Her voicemail always picks up!”

  Ant shook his head, his mouth working silently. “It means the line’s been cut,” he said. “The phone’s been turned off.”

  What? What did that mean? I yanked my phone up to my face and started searching through my contacts to get to Marco’s number, but then Jace was next to me, bringing his hand down abruptly on my wrist.

  “We don’t have time,” he breathed, motioning toward the cameras on the inside of the cupboard.

  I looked up to see that there were additional people in the frames, now. People on their feet and in uniforms. They weren’t looking at Jace’s door yet, and I breathed a quick prayer of thanks that Walter was passed out on the sidewalk. It meant he couldn’t point the enforcers toward it.

  But it wouldn’t be long before they found it. And we had to be gone before that happened.

  Kory and Nelson started rushing through the apartment again, gathering up the papers Ant had sent flying around the room, while Jackie and Ant helped Jace in the kitchen. He didn’t have much in the way of f
urniture in his apartment, which meant that he didn’t have many hiding places, and within moments we were finished and he was throwing the duffel bags over his shoulders and turning back to us.

  “Okay,” he said. “Where are we going? Now that the Authority has authorized a manhunt, we can’t be sure that we’re going to be safe at all if we’re in town. Even at Zion’s or Alexy’s, because I can’t guarantee that those apartments are safe, either. We can’t be seen on the streets. The Authority obviously has undercover agents as well, and spies, and we need to avoid them at all costs. I have… another possibility, but it’s going to take some research to figure it out. I need a safe place to do that. Where do we go? Who do we know who’s actually outside of town, and away from anyone who might recognize us?”

  My hand shot into the air. “Me,” I said quickly. “My cabin is in the middle of nowhere, up north of town. Literally surrounded by forest.” I’d rented the place because it was dirt cheap, and I enjoyed not having to deal with neighbors, and now it seemed that being so far outside of city limits might actually save us, at least for the moment.

  Granted, we thought the Authority might have the address. It had been on the larger list of five hundred addresses they might have stolen from the OH+ portal. But if we were lucky, then they hadn’t reached mine yet. If we were lucky, we could get into that house and back out of it before they did.

  He nodded. “Perfect. The plan is to get to Robin’s, though we can’t stay there for long either, since we know they might have the address. They know your name and that you’re one of the people who broke into the jail, and it’s not going to take them long to put two and two together and get up there as well. But it will give us somewhere to head from here, which is all that matters right now.”

  10

  Jace turned and started walking toward the closet I’d seen him come out of when I first arrived in his apartment.

  “Getting out of here won’t be the problem,” he explained. “It’s what we’re going to do once we’re on the other side that has me concerned.”

  “Wait, what?” Jackie asked, her face screwed up in confusion. Confusion that I, quite frankly, shared.

  Jace opened the door to the closet and threw it wide. “We’re going to escape through this tunnel that Nathan had built for me,” he announced.

  I stared past him, hardly daring to believe what he was saying, and saw something so unexpected that it took my words away for a moment. It was a tunnel dug right out of the earth, so that it gave off a wet-soil smell that was almost overpowering. And I realized, quite suddenly, that this was the smell that was permeating Jace’s apartment. True, the plants and their potting soil had probably added to it, but if I’d been thinking, I would have come to the conclusion that the smell was too big, too powerful, to come from plants that were in pots.

  “This place actually is a cave,” I murmured, impressed despite myself.

  Jace grinned. “I guess you could say that,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”

  He turned and darted into the cave, Kory directly after him. I lurched forward, too, and a moment later felt an arm around my waist, supporting me.

  “I’m not willing to take the chance of you stumbling again during an escape, like you did back in that forest,” Ant murmured. “Move it!” he shouted to the others.

  I grinned in spite of myself, feeling grateful for the extra support. Nelson, Abe, and Jackie all rushed into the tunnel ahead of us, while Ant and I brought up the rear. He paused to shut the door behind us before we went, and threw first one bolt, and then a second.

  The passage had been fitted with light fixtures every ten feet or so, so it was brighter in here than it had been in the apartment itself, which was lucky, because the ground was uneven soil rather than concrete or pavement or even brick. I could see rocks and roots strewn across it, and Ant, ironically, tripped twice and almost went down.

  “You’d think that with all the money Nathan evidently has, he could have poured concrete down here or something,” he huffed, getting his feet back under him after the second near-fall.

  “Unless he didn’t want to draw that much attention to it,” I replied. “After all, guys with shovels are a lot more subtle than a cement truck.”

  Ant grunted in reply, and then we sped up until we were right behind Jackie, who was running directly in front of us.

  “How you doin’, JK?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m fine, what’s it to you?” she snapped.

  “Don’t get grouchy with me just ‘cause you’re getting tired,” he answered. Then he turned his face toward the tunnel ahead of us. “Jack, I’ve got a situation back here!” he called, his voice echoing through the space. “Any chance I can get a hand?”

  Another grunt sounded out from the tunnel ahead, and a second later Kory had jogged back toward us, his face full of questions. “What’s going on?”

  Ant pushed me quickly toward the burlier man. “Take her. I don’t think she needs a lot of help, but I also don’t want us getting caught because one of us has legs that aren’t working perfectly.”

  “Says the guy who just tripped twice,” I muttered.

  Ant ignored me and motioned to Jackie. “This little one is getting tired,” he said, then turned and grabbed the girl to him, settling her against his chest. “Good thing you’re small,” he noted, as she moved to punch him—though I didn’t miss the flush spreading across her cheeks at the valor of his actions.

  I would have laughed, but Kory had already turned and shot forward again, and I was busy trying to adjust to his stride. He was shorter than Jace, but also wider, which meant I had less trouble keeping up with him and more trouble fitting myself into the tunnel with him.

  “How you holding up?” he asked breathlessly.

  “Hoping this journey is almost over,” I said firmly. “I want to get to my cabin and sit down for more than thirty seconds. And I want to stop feeling like a hunted animal.”

  I looked up from the ground to stare at where we were going, hoping that the tunnel didn’t stretch much farther. It already felt like we’d been running forever, and though it made sense to have set the tunnel on a gentle grade, since we were on foot, I also didn’t like the fact that we were stuck underground and didn’t know what was going on up on the surface—or where we were going to come out. I was also starting to panic at the thought that there could be miles of earth above our heads.

  “I expect Jace had the mouth of this thing put some ways away from his apartment,” Kory said, watching my movements and guessing at my thoughts. “It’s what I would have done. That way anyone who discovered it would put it down as something unconnected to where he lived. That sort of thing is important for people like us.”

  I nodded, accepting that as logical, and tried to curb my impatience.

  In the end, we ran for what felt like at least fifteen minutes, but could have been five. It was impossible to tell, stuck as we were in a tunnel where everything looked exactly the same. After the first short span, the tunnel started to curve steadily upward, and then, just as I was starting to think that it might actually lead us out of the city entirely (as unlikely as that was), Jace stopped ahead of us at a normal-looking door.

  A door that ended the tunnel, thank God.

  Once everyone had arrived, Jace cracked the door open, took a small hand mirror out of his pocket, and held it through the crack. He turned it this way and that, then shifted and repeated the process. After a full minute of looking around, he pulled his hand back in and turned to us.

  “The coast is clear,” he said quietly. “We’re quite a distance from my apartment, and if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to get a ride out of town immediately.”

  Before anyone could ask any questions, he stepped through the door and into the light, and we all followed.

  When Kory and I got through the door—last—I found that we were in… a parking garage. A parking garage full of scooters. I looked around, confused, and then saw that all the scooters wer
e sporting “for sale” signs. They certainly weren’t new, and some of them looked like they’d been pretty badly beaten up, but we were definitely on a sales lot. A lot that specialized in scooters, evidently.

  “Scooters?” Kory asked. “What is this, your second job or something?”

  Jace shot him a murderous glance. “Do you actually think I’d be any good as a salesman?” he asked. “Stop clowning, Jack. We need to get some of these up and running and get out of here.”

  “Up and running?” Ant sputtered. “In that case, I hope you have keys for them. Because I don’t think the owner of the lot just left them running for us.”

  There was a crash from somewhere behind us, and my heart leapt into my throat. Ant slammed the door shut behind us, and then we all darted farther away from it. Jace ducked behind one of the pillars that supported the ceiling, motioning madly for the rest of us to do the same. Kory got on the other side of the closest pillar, and I went with him. He inched his head around the structure to stare back into the parking lot, then turned to look at Jace, who was behind the pillar next to us.

  “How exactly do you expect to pull this off?” he hissed. “Do you have the keys for these?”

  Jace shook his head roughly. “No, but I assumed…” He held up the lockpicking device he’d been using up to this point, and I almost cried.

  Of course he thought that would work. Of course. Jace was probably the most technologically challenged person I’d ever met, courtesy of his caveman upbringing, and that must include mechanical stuff. After all, I doubted his schooling had included a shop class, and I knew they hadn’t had mechanical devices in the commune where he grew up. Hell, one of the first times I dealt with him, he’d had to call someone else to tell him how to fix someone’s problem with the OH+ portal, and he was supposed to be a full-fledged admin.

  “Oh, buddy, are you lucky we all love you,” Ant murmured. “Because if we didn’t, that would be enough teasing material for the rest of your life.”