The Child Thief 4: Little Lies

by Bella Forrest

  As on previous days, Corona was waiting for us by the front door, Savannah with her.

  “Gabby. Nelson.” Corona gestured to Savannah. “You’ll be going with Savannah to get the details of what you’ll be doing once you reach the computer room and access the system.”

  “Let’s go and talk tech, shall we?” Savannah said, giving them a grin that didn’t quite hide the seriousness in her startling eyes.

  With a backward glance and slight wave, the two followed Savannah deeper into the Hall, leaving the rest of us with our fearless leader.

  “We’re going to be arming you with Authority and Ministry regulation weapons for this mission,” she said with no further preamble. “You’ll be posing as Authority soldiers. The employees at the holding center will expect you to be armed like Authority soldiers.” She put her hands up to hold off the questions. “Yes, the holding center will have scanners that would pick up such weapons. Yes, we’ve taken that into account and have a way to hide them. Come, we have an appointment at the Armory.”

  After a few quick looks at each other, we followed her down the steps of the Hall and then down the street toward the townhouses containing the various facilities we would be utilizing for this mission.

  Zion was waiting for us at the weapons building. Once inside, we were each handed a second-skin suit in quick succession, after which we were taken to the weaponry and munitions rooms. We weren’t going to get any of the larger weaponry, considering we were going into the building as a cleaning crew. We didn’t exactly have room to hide flame throwers or grenade launchers.

  We were, however, each given a handgun—two for Jace and Kory, presumably due to their pre-existing weapons training—along with a handheld electro-stunner, and a collection of smoke, stun, and explosive hand grenades. The latter, Zion insisted, were an absolute final emergency measure, given how much noise and mess they would make. He spent the next hour training us in the correct usage of the mini bombs, and then the two hours after that in detailed target practice with both the handguns and the electro-stunners. The second-skin suits we were already familiar with. I was glad to see them again, given what we were about to do.

  I very carefully avoided the thought of the gun I would be carrying and the responsibility that came with it. I also avoided the messy feelings associated with Little John asking me to potentially shoot someone.

  We had stun guns. If I had to use a weapon, that would be what I went for. The last thing I needed on my conscience was another death.

  In a pause between shooting rounds at various targets as Zion and Corona corrected our stance and grip of the guns, I asked, “Will Nelson and Gabby be getting these as well?”

  I remembered too well the last time we’d gone into a dangerous situation with only some of our team protected by the suits. It hadn’t ended well.

  “No,” Corona answered. “There have been some issues in previous tests and missions when the second-skin suits were taken too close to computers, and we can’t risk a system failure or interference on this mission. Your team is far more likely to come face-to-face with Authority soldiers, in which case we want you to be as prepared as possible.”

  “And what about Nathan?” I pushed. While I liked that we were going to have his leadership, I did not like that we were going to be responsible for his life.

  “Nathan has additional defenses built into his clothing,” she said, ushering me to a free slot on the shooting range. “It won’t be a problem.”

  That didn’t make me feel a whole lot better about having the head of our entire organization in such a dangerous situation. But her tone brooked no argument, and I put the issue to the side, moved into the slot, and brought my gun up to sight along the barrel at the target a hundred feet away.

  When Corona and Zion finally released us, we were all more than competent with the handguns and hand grenades. I hoped we wouldn’t have to use any of the weapons, but if we did, we would be prepared.

  The final excursion of the day was to find our way to the hospital to see Jackie. We were heading into our most dangerous mission yet, and it was very possible some of us would die. There was no question that we wanted to see Jackie before we left.

  “I can’t believe you’re out doing exciting stuff without me,” she said, pouting. “I can’t believe I’m stuck here when you get to see the city and shoot guns and stuff!”

  “I think what you mean is, you’re glad you get to lie around in bed while we do all the hard work and take all the risks,” I said with a smile, holding her hand.

  She was looking better than the last time I’d seen her. There was color in her cheeks and strength in her grip again. I was relieved to see her so healthy. Ant and Abe had said she was doing well, but I felt better seeing it for myself.

  “And you say Ant’s not going?” Jackie suddenly asked, turning to the twins. “And not Abe either?”

  “No, we’re leaving them here to act as your personal servants,” Nelson replied. “As long as you’re in bed, you need someone at your beck and call, right?”

  Jackie gave her a conspiratorial grin, but then turned big eyes brimming with concern toward Ant. “You’re not staying just because of me, are you? Because you know that doesn’t make you sexy.”

  Ant gave her a rueful shrug. “Wasn’t my call,” he said quietly.

  I didn’t have to ask to know it had hurt his feelings to be left out. I glanced toward Abe and saw he was wearing the same dejected look.

  “And would you actually want to go?” I asked. “You haven’t been into any of the holding centers. You don’t know what it’s like. The last thing I would want is for you to get in there, be faced with that, and freeze up. It’s not nice. Not nice at all.”

  I waited for a moment to see whether either of them would accept that, but Jackie stepped in before the twins could respond.

  “Robin’s right,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Besides, they probably don’t need you two softies in there. For all they know, you’d run to the nurseries and start trying to save the babies. Which, while it’s a noble endeavor, doesn’t sound like what they’re going in to do.”

  Ant glared at her, but I could see her words had hit a nerve in him, and a moment later the corner of his mouth started to twitch. “Get me into a place like that and you’d have to tie me down to keep me from saving a kid or two,” he finally admitted.

  Jackie motioned for him to come to her bed, and, when he lay down next to her, she pulled his head onto her chest. “Big dumb softie,” she murmured. “See why they can’t take you?”

  She turned her eyes to me, then, and gave me the most serious look I’d ever seen on her face. “You take care of the rest of them, Robin. If I’m not going to be there to watch after all of you, I’m putting you in charge. Get your mission done and then bring everyone back. If you don’t, I’m going to hunt you down and beat you. Got it?”

  I tried to blink the tears out of my eyes without making them fall. I failed miserably. Two of them streaked down my cheeks, but I didn’t try to wipe them away. I was glad Jackie wasn’t coming with us, really; it was what was best in this situation. But we’d been through so much over the last month that I’d started to feel like she and I were attached at the hip.

  Running a mission as big as this without her watching my back just felt wrong.

  Then again, taking her into this sort of danger wouldn’t have made me happy, either. I was already going to have Gabby to worry about.

  So, I just squeezed her hand one more time, and gave her what I could muster of a grin. “We’ll be back,” I said firmly. “And you better be out of bed by the time we are. I’m getting tired of having to do all the work around here while you laze around watching TV.”

  35

  The next day matched the previous day almost exactly, our morning spent with Nathan in the conference room with the 3-D rendering, going over the grounds, the building, and the plan again and again. We even spent an hour with each person going through the entire pla
n on their own, to make sure we all knew what the others were doing.

  By the time we got to our lunch break, my head was aching, and I was ready for some action. The importance of knowing our roles and timing was not lost on me, but I also wanted to get in there and get this done. On the other side of this we would have made a huge step toward taking down the Ministry’s kidnapping operation.

  I was so anxious to see it done that it was becoming difficult to sit still.

  After lunch we had more training with Zion and Corona on the guns and stunners, as well as some rudimentary physical combat training. We left the grenades out of this training session, as we were under orders to avoid using them unless absolutely necessary.

  “You’re a lot more likely to need your guns,” Zion told us, tone stern, but generally warmer than it had been in our previous interactions before Edgewood.

  One look at my face, which must have been pretty tense, and he added, “Luckily, the stunning devices work the same way. Training on one means training on both.”

  He gave me a wink, and I gave him a slight smile in return. I wasn’t accustomed to Zion being so friendly, but I hoped it stuck when we got back from the mission.

  If we got back from the mission.

  The morning of mission day, we took our time eating our fill at breakfast and spending a few hours loosening up in the gym and showering. We met various people we knew from the OH portal in various places, some in the kitchens, some at the gym. Many of them were on teams as well, and, while we didn’t share specific details of our respective missions, there was a feedback loop of grim excitement between us all that reminded me that we were all one big team in the end.

  The day tasted of tension, and the Hall had a buzz to it as the hours slid by, taking us closer to departure time.

  Finally, around three in the afternoon, Nelson and I began eyeing the skin-tight, black “steel-suits” we’d found hanging in our room when we returned from having visited Jackie.

  They’d had a note with them from the Armory about their purposes and benefits: an additional tracking device, and some further defenses against knives and electroshock weapons.

  Nelson and I had taken one look at each other, kept our mouths shut about both the explanation and the fact that the suits had just shown up in our room, and left the things where they were.

  Once we got into them, we found they were a lot more comfortable than they appeared. The second-skin suit, which I had and Nelson did not, was familiar to me at this point, and I had grown accustomed to the way it fit and felt on my body. The Little John steel-suit slid on naturally over the second-skin suit, making me wonder if they were, in fact, designed to go together. I assumed the second-skin suits had come from the military; it made sense to take that one step further and assume the steel-suits had as well.

  Put them in camouflage rather than black, and they could have been used in the jungle. Put them in khaki and brown and they could have been used in the desert. Put them in black and they were perfect for running nighttime missions into top-secret Ministry holding centers.

  “I hate that I actually like this,” Nelson muttered, turning back and forth in front of a mirror to get all the angles. “It looks good and will stop you from getting stabbed during secret missions.” She struck a parody of a model pose. “An essential for any woman’s wardrobe.”

  There was room in the concealed pockets for my phone, a few medical supplies, and a lockpick set Jace had given me with a grin the afternoon before.

  “Never a bad tool to have nearby,” he said. “And the lockpick is pretty useful, too.”

  It had been a moment of laughter in an otherwise tense day.

  Zion had assured us we would be given our weapons, the appropriate holsters, and a small safety bag of grenades when we changed into our first set of disguises on the airship.

  I stepped up to the mirror when Nelson was done and turned my eyes on my reflection. The result surprised me. With the fine chainmail hidden under the steel-suit, I appeared lean and dangerous, rather than too skinny and coltish, as I usually did. Risking another quick glance in the mirror, I smoothed the suit over the curve of my waist and turned toward Nelson, ready to go.

  “You look like you’re ready to go out and commit murder,” she said, sizing me up. “I love it. Why didn’t we get these before?”

  “Because Little John just loves surprises,” I replied, giving her a smile lacking any mirth. I knew I looked like I was ready to assassinate someone, because she looked exactly the same.

  We looked like Little John operatives. That thought brought a confidence unlike anything I’d ever known before.

  We nodded quickly to each other, indicating our readiness, and then strode through the door and into the hall to find Gabby, Jace, and Kory already gathered there. Gabby looked like a little kid wearing a grown-up’s clothing but was doing her best to carry it off with quite an application of black eyeliner, which made me sputter with stifled laughter. Kory looked heavily muscled and stocky as ever in his suit… and Jace looked like a superhero. He had his shaggy hair brushed back behind his ears and was scowling, hands on his hips. The suit was also tight enough for me to see every line of his body.

  I blushed at where that thought led and walked to his side.

  “You ready for this?” I asked.

  His face softened into a more affectionate look. “Do I have a choice? Are you?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, my voice firm. I’d been up for hours the night before thinking about it, and I’d come to one conclusion. Nathan was fighting the Burchard Regime, and he was starting with the centers where they stole and sold our children. His goals aligned with mine perfectly, on a scale I could never have achieved with my little team. I wasn’t positive we could pull off what we were about to attempt. But I was all in.

  Seeing what Edgewood was all about, how Nathan treated his people and the children he rescued, knowing this was important enough to him that he was risking himself to accomplish it, had inspired me.

  I still didn’t know what his full plan was, and I’d doubted him before. But things had changed. I was a part of Little John now, and we had a mission.

  The entryway was an anthill of activity when we arrived. There was a team going out to each of the fifty Ministry holding centers across the nation, taking advantage of the update, which meant Little John had one hundred teams ready to go, collected across their numerous bases of operation. Half of them, like Savannah and her crew, were made up of people who had been specially trained in tech and would be taking care of the computer systems. The other half were the firepower, teams being sent in to protect the tech teams from any security the Ministry might have in place and to secure the former execs for questioning. There were also backup tech operatives, like Nelson and Gabby, sprinkled through the firepower teams in case something happened to the main team.

  We only had twelve teams in Edgewood, as this was a less-populated Little John camp. But those twelve teams were milling around, everyone talking at once, people trading weapons tips and ideas, and some of them practicing how quickly they could draw their guns. The foyer had always seemed large to me, but with this many people, it was distinctly crowded. My team got to one of the walls and walked along it toward the door, keen to get out of the crush and to a place where we could talk.

  “Everyone else is coming from other Little John cities?” Nelson asked when we were outside.

  Alexy nodded. “There are a lot more people in the other cities, so it makes sense for the bulk of the teams to travel from there. Nathan also likes to keep his operatives spread out. That way if one city is attacked, the others can come to its aid.”

  Right. I hadn’t even considered that the government might detect Little John’s cities, given the amount of protection they maintained, but I guessed it did make sense to keep them separate in case one of them required saving.

  “And the cities are sending teams to the holding centers closest to them,” Nelson confirmed. “It’s
brilliant planning, really. I don’t think it could be any more streamlined.”

  She was right, and a part of me felt a shiver of delight at being involved in something this huge.

  Nathan had also been very careful to keep the people who were running the missions a secret from the government, which meant of all the agents involved, Jace, Nelson, Kory, Alexy, and I were some of the only operatives who would need disguises at all. Most of the operatives hadn’t been out in the government-controlled cities as much as we had, and almost none of them had been involved in hand-to-hand combat with Authority or Ministry agents. Their faces were unrecognizable. It was a remarkable feat.

  What that meant was no one else in Edgewood required a printed mask. And since we were traveling the farthest, and we did need masks, we were once again taking the printer with us. We’d also been awarded the largest airship to avoid having to refuel on the way to Chanley or on the way back.

  Refueling on the way there would mean a possibility of being detected. Refueling on the way back would mean the possibility of being caught.

  We hoped to get away without any trouble. But there was really no telling, and we’d had to run for our lives too many times to be willing to risk it.

  The distance to Smally also meant we needed to leave soon, however, and though all operatives had been told to report at the same time, it was most important for us. We were scheduled first at the tarmac and would be the first into the air.

  Corona appeared at our sides then, not wearing one of the steel-suits but dressed instead in a simple navy-blue dress and black knee boots, her hair in a ponytail.

  “Are you coming too?” I asked. I didn’t like the idea of both leaders being in the thick of it, but I also wouldn’t have argued with having another person there with us making sure we got out alive.

  She shook her head. “No. I’m in charge of monitoring and managing the teams involved across the country. If something goes wrong anywhere, I’ll know about it and update my people accordingly. I’ll be your eyes in the sky and on the ground.”