The Child Thief 4: Little Lies

by Bella Forrest

  I didn’t think they’d agree. Who were we, after all? Just two young people standing in front of them and making demands. Two people who had survived and been led into something much larger than they’d expected.

  But still, just two young people of no real importance.

  Nathan leaned against the doorframe and gave us a piercing look. “If we’re going to tell you what we’re doing, it means showing you what we believe in,” he said. “You’re right about the truth. I’ve always maintained that sharing information, with anyone, is dangerous. But it’s possible we’ve become too used to hiding, become too paranoid. And it doesn’t work if it’s breeding distrust among our allies, leading to situations like this. Compartmentalizing is no longer the defense it once was.”

  He paused and shared a long look with his wife, who gave him one of the best I’ve-already-told-you-this looks I’d ever seen.

  “When you’ve spent twenty years, or longer, having to hide so much from the people you call friends, it takes a toll on you,” he continued quietly, almost to himself. Then he stepped farther into the room, took Corona’s hand, and turned to us. “But we are on the edge of a knife, now, and we will not be able to move forward if we don’t have the full trust of our people. Your team might, if we’re lucky, be the final piece to make it work.” He moved toward the door, Corona beside him. “I cannot guarantee we’ll show you everything, but I can at least show you what we’re trying to build. And, perhaps, tell you how we expect to do it.”

  The two of them exited the room, Corona with her arm tucked into Nathan’s, leaving us to follow.

  The streets of Edgewood were different at night. What was bright and clean and cheery by day took on a more weary appearance during the darker hours, as if the city had run out of energy to keep up its glamorous façade.

  Now, in the darkness, lit only by street lamps every fifteen feet or so, I could see the ghost of the city as it had been before it was Edgewood: the darker places where Nathan and his crew had patched walls and sidewalks, missing shingles on some roofs, the dips and cracks in the streets, how some of the larger townhouses leaned against smaller ones, their walls bowing.

  This wasn’t a place Nathan and his organization had built from scratch. It was a city they had rehabilitated.

  “What was this place before it was Edgewood?” I asked softly.

  “A factory campus,” Corona answered, her voice even, though I could see she was limping from the gash in her foot. “It was once exactly what it still claims to be.”

  I started to look around as we walked, seeing the bones now. The townhouses must have once been the row houses of the neighborhood, while the larger buildings that now housed the garage and the Armory could, if I squinted, become the apartment blocks. The streets were similar to every city I’d ever been in, and the old-fashioned streetlights were the same as I’d seen in the poorer areas of Trenton.

  In the distance, I could see more large buildings, which must have been the factories attached to this neighborhood at one time. We’d seen the outskirts of Edgewood, courtesy of our trip to the airfield before we went to Asus. This would have been a relatively small factory campus, but it had evidently been large enough to breed a small village of its own.

  Things made a little more sense now. Not the force field, of course, but that the government believed this was a factory. If it had been a factory campus before, it would have been registered as such. If whoever owned it was still making the payments and maintaining that facade, the government would have no reason to question it. The place had obviously been set off from larger cities and areas of civilization before, so it would have been easy to maintain its isolation—and the secrecy that went with it. It would have been easy to transition it into a hiding place in plain sight.

  “Brilliant,” I breathed. “Want a secret hideout, a city where you can keep your recruits? Use a factory and a town which already exists, and just adapt it to your needs. But who’s paying for it? Who owns all this?”

  “Little John does, now,” Nathan said, his words clipped. “And that’s all the time we have for questions, I’m afraid. We’re here.”

  I looked in the direction he was pointing, surprised. It was another townhouse, almost exactly the same as the Armory, the garage, and the Theater, with one very big difference.

  The front yard, from where it bordered the street to the house itself, was a playground, complete with multiple swing sets, a merry-go-round, a large paved area with hopscotch markings on it, and even a basketball hoop.

  “A school?” I asked, too confused to come up with anything more.

  Corona nodded. “A school. You said you wanted to know what was going on, and Nathan was right. The best place to start is at the beginning, because that’s where change begins. Come. The children will be asleep, but it will provide a place for us to explain. Perhaps give you the reasons you need to stay.”

  She opened the gate and walked through the swing sets and the balls littering the ground. Nathan followed her, leaving us to either follow and get our answers, or not.

  Jace and I looked at one another. My hand found his, and then we stepped forward.

  29

  Inside, there was a gentle glow, though not like the eerie lighting in the hallway outside our room. Instead, it came from small globe-shaped nightlights plugged into the wall every ten feet or so.

  Even just standing in the entryway, with no children around, it felt different. I could tell it was bright and welcoming, the walls a lemon yellow in the halo of the nightlights. The floor was a checkerboard of colors, spilling into the classrooms at the sides of the hall where I could see a number of large beanbags. A row of teddy bears sat on the desk in the middle of the foyer.

  It didn’t take light to tell me this place was full of laughter. It somehow even smelled welcoming, like they’d managed to bottle the scent of safe childhood and pour it into candles.

  Safety. It was something the kids in the holding centers wouldn’t know until they were sent to their new families. Depending, of course, on whether they remembered their old families or not. Because if they did remember their birthparents, the new family was going to feel wrong. And even if it felt right for a while, that version of safety could be something without foundation, something that could be taken away the moment they screwed up. I’d been safe, once. Until I suddenly wasn’t.

  It was an unnatural way to grow up. And the process was tearing people apart, piece by piece. Which was why, I hoped, we were here. Because that needed to stop.

  In front of us, Nathan had paused and was looking around, his face glowing with pride and accomplishment. He shared a quick, affectionate glance with Corona. Then he turned to us.

  “Robin and Jace, may I present to you one of our schools?” he said. “None of the children are awake, of course, but this… this is an example of what we’re fighting for. I know how much you two have lost, and what it will mean to you to see how we want to change things.”

  He walked away before saying anything else, and Jace and I scuttled after him, trying to keep our footsteps as quiet as possible. We filed through a wide hallway lit like the entry with nightlights, its walls the same pale yellow. The tiles became carpet that was a soft shade of blue. Around us, hundreds and hundreds of hand-drawn or painted pictures plastered the walls. They were obviously the work of children, and children of many different ages. Some of the drawings were mere stick figures, and many of them were little more than scribbles on the pages. Some, though, were extremely precise pencil drawings, the figures jumping off the pages with their artistry. There were what looked like oil paintings and watercolor pieces, and a couple I could have sworn were done with charcoal.

  “The work of some of our little artists,” Nathan said proudly. “We have an entire class devoted to art, and the children move through it in age groups. We don’t have many children at Edgewood, since the city is reserved mostly for our new recruits, but we do have some, and those that are here take great joy in th
e artwork they create.”

  I stared at the pictures, more than somewhat surprised. As a child, I’d had brothers and sisters who loved to draw, and they’d gone to classes which encouraged it. But none of the poor public schools had classes like that. And, from what I’d seen of holding centers, allowing the children to create something of beauty would never have occurred to them.

  The Ministry would have hated all the color, to start with.

  Then we were through the hall and walking through a lunchroom, which looked almost exactly like the cafeteria where I’d eaten lunch when I went to school, back when I’d been a Sylvone. Lines and lines of tables with benches, and a variety of artworks and chalkboards on the walls.

  “Who are the children who go to school here?” I asked. “Are they rescued, or…?”

  “These are the children of the people who live in Edgewood,” Nathan said. “They’re allowed to stay with their parents and only come to school for the day, but many do sleep here. We’re not going out and collecting them for nefarious purposes, I assure you.”

  He shot me a grin over his shoulder, and I found myself grinning back.

  “We recruit people from all walks of life,” he continued. “As you’ve seen in your own group. Many of them have children already. Many of them join our organization because they want to keep those children. Because they’ve fallen below the poverty line and know what’s at stake.”

  I shivered.

  I’d known going into the hospital that I was going to lose Hope. I would have done anything to keep it from happening. Anything. If I’d known there was something like Little John out there, where I could go for help to keep Hope and myself safe, I would have jumped at it, consequences be damned.

  “They’re not here on their own, of course,” Corona continued, pushing open the door at the end of the cafeteria and holding it for us, her eyes dark holes in the dim room. “We have an entire room for adults above them; the teachers, and those who watch over the children during the school’s off hours. There are adult care takers on duty 24 hours a day. Many of the children are also orphans. The children of Little John operatives who didn’t come back. The children of people we were recruiting who disappeared. The children of people who died on the outside and had nowhere to go.”

  “The lost,” I said quietly. There were thousands of children in that situation out there: kids whose parents died or disappeared, and who were left out in the cold by themselves. They were most often grabbed by the Ministry, of course, but I’d always thought that depended on how old they were when they were orphaned—and who they were. Given what I now knew about the auction site, I wondered whether children were judged, based on their appearance and potential, before they were taken.

  Was it possible certain children were left out in the streets, on their own, rather than being taken by the Ministry and put into new, rich households?

  When I asked as much, Nathan gave me a nod.

  “Jace told me you were sharp,” he said. “I see he wasn’t exaggerating.”

  Jace shuffled beside me, a little embarrassed, but I squeezed his hand.

  “The Ministry is more likely to take certain children, regardless of their parents’ economic status,” Nathan continued. “You’ve seen the auction site. They look specifically for children who fit the requirements given to them by the bidders. We also know they prefer certain types of children for their usual distribution process. The children we save who have been orphaned, they’re often the ones who have been passed over by the Ministry. The ones the government doesn’t think have a right to a better life.”

  We’d entered another long hallway lined with doors, and as Nathan was speaking, he slowly opened one. Inside, I saw two rows of beds, one against each wall, the room slightly lit by the same type of nightlights as the hall was. A child-sized lump was in each, covered with blankets or in various states of sleepy dishevelment. The room was quiet but for the occasional snort of sleep, and I smiled.

  It was the picture of contentment and safety, and it called to me somewhere deep in my soul.

  We went to another door, and the room beyond it showed us the same picture. Another door. And another. Beds of all shapes and sizes, from the smallest of cribs to beds large enough to hold teenagers, and they were teeming with children, some beds holding more than one of them. I saw tiny babies and toddlers, as well as children on the cusp of moving from babyhood into true childhood.

  Even from the doorway and in the low light, I could see that many of the children had a strong resemblance to the children I’d seen living on the streets of Trenton and other large cities. Some were scarred, a few had physical defects, and some others had prominent birthmarks. All had a sharp, stubborn, vibrant energy to them, even while sleeping.

  “They leave the children that don’t live up to their standards on the streets?” I whispered.

  Nathan nodded, wordless for a moment, his face turning cold and hard despite the peacefulness of the room before us. “We’re not sure, of course,” he said finally. “But given what we see when we go into the cities to save children, and what the government has done in the past, we do believe they select certain children to move up into the upper classes and leave the children that don’t meet their criteria to the streets. To the poor. To their real parents.”

  “And you bring them here as recruits. To save them,” I replied. I’d held a lot of opinions about Nathan, a few of them not overly generous, and I’d thought I’d known who he was.

  The idea that he was saving children off the street, and bringing them here, changed everything.

  “We bring them here,” he agreed, coming to stand next to me as I stared through the doorway, taking in the peaceful faces. “To save them. To educate them. To train them. The Burchard Regime has done everything it can to manipulate the way the public sees it and what the public knows. But keeping the people ignorant is nothing more than an authoritarian and elitist scheme to maintain control. It keeps one class in control, and throws the others into the gutters, giving them no choice… and no chance. That, my friends, is what we mean to change.”

  I paused on that. “Educate?” I finally asked. “Train?”

  Nathan glanced at me and gave me a sly grin. “You didn’t think we ran around hacking computers for no reason, did you?” he asked. “We’re going to change the country, Robin, but change always has to start with the education of the young. That’s why we have the schools. So we can teach people a better way to do things, and show them what we’re fighting for.”

  We peppered Nathan and Corona with questions the entire way back to the Hall, including what exactly their philosophy was, what they were teaching those children—and what, therefore, we were expected to be fighting for—what they knew of the country and the Burchard Regime, what they were doing, and, because I was also incredibly curious, who was paying for all of their operations. The only thing we got out of them was more about their history.

  “I grew up in a rich household, and I knew how the rich lived,” Nathan told us as we stepped out of the school’s doors. “I knew all the things I’d been given, all the opportunities I had. And I, naïvely, thought that was how the world worked. My father owned a construction company, and when I was old enough, he started teaching me to work there, with the intention that I would one day take over from him.”

  “So, the exo-suits you gave us that you said were from a construction company?” I asked.

  Nathan smiled and nodded. “That was the truth,” he confirmed. “So was this.”

  He drew his shirt up just past his navel, and I gasped, having forgotten about the scar from his chest down to his waist. It was puckered and pale, obviously old, but whatever had caused it must have nearly killed him.

  “You told us you got that during a protest against the government,” I remembered.

  “And that was the truth,” Corona said. “What he didn’t tell you was that the protest in question was also Little John’s first real mission.”

&nb
sp; “I’d met Corona,” Nathan said, taking over the story once again. “She was not from a rich family, and we’d fallen in love. She was starting to introduce me to the way the other half, so to speak, lived their lives. I was appalled by what I saw. The unfairness of it all, the arbitrary division between rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. It was more than I could stand. I’d had such an easy life, never knowing of the people who were facing death and starvation, doing grueling work in the factories. And the worst of it all was the theft of their children, thanks to a program the government said helped society.”

  He paused, and I could see his eyes narrowing, his face growing grimmer in the dim streetlights. “Better for society? The Burchard Regime was killing the people. And it’s the people who make a country. I knew something had to change, and Corona was right there with me.”

  He reached out and took her hand, and they smiled fondly at each other. It was a smile that spoke of years of hard work, and too many losses to name. But a shared goal had kept them going through it all.

  “And so we built Little John,” she said simply. “We built a way to fight.”

  “Of course, Little John was very small at first,” Nathan said wryly. “Much, much smaller than now. But I had contacts, both because of my wealth and because of my father’s company. It didn’t take long to figure out that there were others in the wealthy classes who had seen the lack of equality and wanted to change it. Others who had studied their history and knew the United Nation of America had once been something bigger. Something better. We agreed to fight for that. And we failed. Many times.”

  This last part was said with a sly grin and a shake of the head. “I received this scar during a mishap with a set of explosives. But we got better. More effective. When we did, the government realized what we were doing and started to fight back.”

  “What do you mean, the wealthy classes?” I asked when he paused. He’d said it twice now, and I wanted to know what it meant. As far as I knew, there were only three classes: wealthy, middle, and lower. Why was he dividing the upper class into multiples?