The Child Thief

by Bella Forrest

  She returned to her seat in front of the long desk, where a large, dimmed monitor was set up, a myriad of wires attached to half a dozen hard drives sticking out the back of it. I seated myself at a respectful angle, from which I couldn’t see the screen directly. I didn’t know what she had been in the middle of doing—it might have been personal or private—so instead of looking at the monitor, I watched her fingers dance over the keyboard as she continued to work.

  I then blew out softly, my eyes doing another brief sweep of the small room. Now that we had a moment alone, there was something I needed to talk about. It had been over a month since I’d asked her about her progress on cracking the archives (again, out of respect, because I knew she was juggling a lot of things), but I really wanted an update now. I felt a decent amount of time had passed since I last pressed her about it.

  I waited for her to take a pause in typing before shifting in my seat and asking, “Any progress at all on the archives?”

  She gave me a canny look, adjusting her spectacles, and then leaned back in her chair. Reaching for her coffee, she took a sip, then replied, “Maybe.”

  I blinked, hardly daring to believe my ears. Every time I’d asked her so far, the answer had been a clear no.

  “Meaning?” I asked, suddenly leaning forward, anxious.

  She gave me a wan smile. “Well, I don’t want to raise your spirits too high yet, but I think I might, and I repeat might, have finally stumbled onto a potentially exploitable loophole. It’s still kind of a long shot and will probably take at least another month of trial and error before I can know for sure, but yeah. I do think I’ve reached a point of progress that I’ve been waiting months for. Possibly even years.”

  “Oh, that’s amazing,” I said, unable to stop the relieved smile from breaking out onto my face, even though I knew nothing was certain yet. It was just the most optimistic I’d seen Nelson about this since I’d first met her, and I couldn’t tamp down the surge of hopefulness, in spite of her realism.

  “Also,” she added, then paused, glancing at the hard drives scattered around her desk. She set her cup down and rose to her feet, picking up three orange-colored ones that were strapped together with a black cord. “Now that you’re here and we’re on the subject, there is something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

  I watched her tentatively as she unplugged the hard drives from her mainframe, then sat down again, placing them on her lap and folding her hands over them.

  “These three hard drives are identical backups of basically all the work I’ve done on the archives project since I first started to access them, three years ago. I’ve kept a record of every trial and error, every thought and finding. Basically every step that has gotten me to this point. I’m going to tell Jackie and the twins about them, too, but I wanted you to know about them, just in case something… Well, you know, something happens to me.”

  The very thought made my heart palpitate, and I wanted to dismiss the idea outright, even though I knew that would be foolish. With the type of life that we led, none of our futures were certain. Still, I didn’t know where we’d be without Nelson, not to mention her contacts.

  “Jackie’s lost younger siblings, and the twins have lost… Actually, I don’t think they ever told me who they’re looking for, but I’m pretty sure they all have a vested interest in the archives,” she went on. “Of course, even with the information on the hard drives, there’s nothing a non-hacker would understand. But at least you could stand a chance of finding a replacement for me, someone who could decipher my notes and build on my work. Now that I feel I might be close, it’s really time I let you know about them. I’ve already told Julia.”

  “Okay,” I murmured, nodding and watching her closely as she stood up again, then moved to one corner of the room.

  “Come here,” she said, bending down to a bare patch of floorboards.

  I walked up and leaned over her crouching form to see her pulling a floorboard loose and revealing a small metal safe with a combination lock.

  “Cliché, I know.” She smirked. “But it’s the best hiding place I’ve got right now.” She pulled the safe out and set it on the floor next to her. “The combination’s 8936, and it’s the same code to access the drives, to make things simple.”

  She input the numbers and the safe clicked open, revealing an empty space in which she placed the drives. Then she closed the safe and put it underneath the floorboard again.

  “It’s where the drives live most of the time,” she explained, straightening.

  “Okay, thanks,” I breathed, focusing on committing the numbers to memory. They were way too important to forget.

  A knock at the door drew our attention, then. Nelson moved toward it after hearing the signature six raps, and opened it, revealing Jackie and Julia standing in the doorway. The auburn-haired girl looked just as tired as Nelson, like she’d stayed up all night, while Jackie looked a little more spritely, probably having taken the morning off to rest, like me. She had a fresh Band-Aid over her cut, but it seemed to have gotten quite a bit better already, as it was a thin bandage compared to the one last night.

  “Hey, you arrived at the same time,” Nelson remarked.

  Jackie nodded. “Yup.”

  “That means we can leave now,” Nelson said. She moved back into her room to assemble her phone, keys, and backpack. “I’ll show Jackie another time,” she mumbled in an undertone, as if more to herself than to me, and then we headed for the door and stepped outside.

  It was a good thing we left when we did, because there were several delays in our train connections. We arrived at Samsfield town station with barely fifteen minutes to leg it to the bridge. But we made it on time, even through the rain that had started to pour.

  As we approached the long bridge that ran over the wide, swelling river, we saw that it was thankfully devoid of pedestrians, due to the foul weather, and took the opportunity to slip on our masks, pulling our coat hoods low over our foreheads to cast shadow and prevent ourselves from looking too sketchy to oncoming vehicles. It was important to have the masks for this meeting, to be safe.

  The cars whizzed past us, wheels cutting through puddles and splashing us every few moments, and by the time we reached the center of the bridge, one thing was clear: we were still the only pedestrians around. We paused and leaned against the chunky metal railing, waiting and looking in either direction.

  And in that moment, the fear returned to my mind that maybe, just maybe, this was some kind of trap after all—even though I knew it wouldn’t make much sense—and my throat tightened. Then, a couple minutes later, Nelson’s phone rang. She fished it out of her pocket, and I glanced at the screen to see an unidentified caller notification flash up.

  “Yes?” Nelson said, answering it. “We’re on the bridge. Where are you?”

  She put the phone on loudspeaker for the rest of us to listen in, though it was difficult with the cars roaring past us.

  “Take the ladder down,” came a deep male voice.

  We all frowned, gazing around the bridge for something we’d missed—and then Julia spotted it: a rusty service ladder on the opposite sidewalk.

  “Okay, heading there—”

  The caller hung up before Nelson could finish.

  We quickly looked left and right, waiting for an opening in the traffic, then hurried across the road and lowered ourselves down the ladder as inconspicuously as possible. Jackie went first, then me, Julia, and Nelson. We touched down on a wide catwalk that ran the width of the bridge, its base speckled with tiny metal holes that did nothing to make me feel better about the height. I could see the water roiling and gushing beneath us, even as the rain continued to pound down on either side of the bridge.

  “Well, this is discreet, I guess,” Julia murmured, her gray eyes wide and darting about behind her mask.

  Jackie slipped a hand beneath her coat, resting it on her gun, and I did the same, though neither of us drew yet. The place seemed empt
y…

  Until something caught my attention near a column at the other end of the catwalk. A shadow moved out from behind the thick post, and we all stalled and stared as the silhouette of a large male came into view. Very large. He had to be at least six foot four, and he was bulky, too. An unzipped army-green overcoat hung over his broad chest and shoulders, which looked like they held plenty of muscle tone.

  He definitely didn’t belong to the computer geek stereotype that I had imagined for all admins.

  As he closed the distance between us, I saw, to my surprise, that he wasn’t wearing a mask, giving us instead a full view of his face as he stopped a few feet away from us, under one of the white lights that were fixed at intervals beneath the bridge.

  My first thought was that he was younger than I’d assumed—maybe just a year or two older than me—and my second was that he looked like he belonged in the wild. His features were rugged, his irises the color of raw honey, fading into burnt umber at the edges, and deep-set beneath a strong brow, while his jaw was angular and shadowed with dark stubble. His lips were a little uneven, tugged upward slightly on one side, and there were two fine indentations in the skin at the edges of his mouth. His midnight-brown hair looked windswept in the damp weather and was long enough for tousled locks to graze his eyes and jawline.

  I also realized then that he looked about as suited to the black shirt and pants he was wearing as a grizzly bear. Even beneath his coat, they looked too small for his broad, muscular frame. The seams strained around his chest, and the pants stopped just a touch too high above his shoes.

  I frowned, altogether bemused by his appearance. My colleagues appeared to be confused, too, since they were momentarily speechless as they looked him over.

  But hey, maybe we were all just being narrow-minded. Who said geeks couldn’t work out?

  “So you’re Mr. X?” Nelson said finally.

  He nodded. “Nelson, I take it,” he replied, his voice baritone, as he reached out a large hand.

  Nelson nodded and took it in a firm shake. “I’m here with Juicy1, JK007, and RobinHood21,” she said, gesturing to each of us in turn. “All of whom are linked to my online circle.”

  His eyes roamed over us and met mine last, lingering on my face for a moment, as if trying to analyze what little he could see of me, before switching back to Nelson as she said, “Don’t mind that we came with masks. I’m sure you can understand.”

  He cleared his throat. “Of course. It’s only wise.”

  “Why didn’t you come wearing a mask yourself?” Jackie asked.

  He shrugged. “My boss is confident that you’re among the top tier of groups and can be trusted, based on your ringleader’s activity on the platform and the independent recommendations people have made for her. I would like you to trust me, too, so I figured it was a courteous gesture.”

  “Well, there’s a couple of things to unpack there,” Nelson said, gazing at him curiously. “First of all, who’s your boss?”

  “The founder of Operation Hood,” he replied.

  “Oh, I see,” Nelson murmured, and I could tell she was thinking the same thing as me: So the network has a single founder. I had kind of assumed that it was founded by a collective of people, who probably belonged to the team of admins, so it was interesting to hear that there was only one man or woman behind it.

  “Is the founder one of the admins?” I wondered.

  Mr. X’s eyes returned to me, and he nodded slowly.

  “I’m guessing you can’t tell us which one?” I asked.

  “Your guess is correct,” he replied stoically. “As you can imagine, they want to stay as anonymous as humanly possible.”

  “Okay, so why have you called us here?” Nelson asked, bringing the conversation back on track. “Why do you want to gain our trust?”

  Mr. X glanced around briefly, then nodded toward the opposite end of the catwalk. We followed him over to it, slinking into the darkness of the shadows out of which he had stepped, until there was nothing but a thin sheet of metal railing separating us from the churning river.

  I tried to ignore the height and focus on the man who was leaning against the railing, his torso twisted to face us head-on.

  “We’re planning to restructure things slightly on the network in the coming months, in order to create a safer and more productive environment for our real, most serious members,” he began. “A team of admins, including myself, has begun reaching out to members the founder believes best fit into this category, based on scans of every data point we have on them since they joined the platform. Our job is to vet them in person—meet them to make sure they are real and to get a feel for them—before inviting them to be part of this new initiative.”

  He paused, looking between us, and at Nelson in particular, as if wanting to gauge our reactions.

  She nodded slowly. “Go on.”

  “OH’s founder… for the sake of simplicity, let’s say they’re male and call them Nathan… initially established the platform to give victims of the CRAS a voice. To facilitate dialogue. Provide them with somewhere they could go that was private and safe. Somewhere they could seek solace and share experiences.

  “Nathan never imagined how things would develop over the years. That his network would grow into the community of 100,000 members that it is today. His hope was that the network would spur people to start doing things, but he hadn’t actually expected them to have the courage to.

  “As you know, you’re just one of many groups who are using the platform to organize themselves and take action against what we all believe is an unfair system.” His face darkened then, and I couldn’t help but wonder what his own story was. “Nathan has been watching this trend for a while, and it’s reached the point where he believes the platform needs to take its ‘facilitating’ to the next level,” he went on. “Before, OH’s focus was on encouraging conversation; hence all the forum, message, and chat modules that have been there since the beginning. Now, however, we want to shift the focus into encouraging action. Hence the network’s recent name and mission statement tweak.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t realized that the name and slogan had been changed. It had been titled Operation Hood, with steal from the rich and return to the poor as the subtext, since I’d joined. Though, that was barely seven months ago. So I supposed they had been updated sometime before then. I wondered what it was previously.

  “All the conversation OH has facilitated has already led to action,” Mr. X continued. “But Nathan believes there’s a lot more we can do to support people like you who are actually doing things, in smart, organized, and effective ways. Because like most of us, he wants to see an end to the CRAS. It was his frustration with it that drove him to found the network in the first place.”

  He paused again, giving us all a moment to absorb his words, and we exchanged glances, our eyes wide with the same intrigue.

  “This is very interesting,” Nelson said. “So, if I’m catching your drift, you’re looking to sift out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Identify your real and most capable members, and provide some other kind of safer facility for us all to… band together?”

  Mr. X nodded. “Nathan is working on a closed, invite-only portal, separate from the main OH network, that only those we have screened will be allowed to join.”

  “And then what?” Jackie asked.

  “At this stage, think of the portal as an incubator,” Mr. X replied. “We bring people together and see what comes out of it. More has sprung from dialogue than Nathan could have ever anticipated. Who’s to say what could result from a focused, active group of people like you?”

  I saw his point, and to be honest, the whole idea sent a burst of excitement through me. Who knew what could be accomplished if everyone united, pooling together all their various skills and resources? The government was strong, but if Nelson had undercover contacts in high places who didn’t support the CRAS, I was betting that at least some other groups did, too.

&
nbsp; Who was to say that we couldn’t cause a dent in the system, if we organized ourselves under one unified banner? Or at the very least, effect a change in the public’s consciousness? I, for one, was convinced that if more people knew about the existence of OH, more people would find the courage to take action like us, and the government could start feeling some serious pushback for policy change. Especially if a subsection of the wealthier rungs of society got involved. If enough people stopped agreeing to take our children, then the CRAS would fizzle out.

  The network was currently dotted with lots of little groups, all doing their own thing around the country, and rarely merging due to trust issues. We were united under the OH network, and yet divided within it, which really made no sense. If we could come together…

  Still, there were a number of security concerns I had about the idea, which I knew my colleagues would share.

  “This seems pretty risky, though,” Jackie said, voicing my thoughts before I could. “I mean, I know you have a vetting process, but it’s not bulletproof. You can’t ever be completely sure that you’re only inviting well-intentioned people into the portal. And it would only take one mole to bring us all down.”

  Mr. X nodded, running his tongue over his lower lip. “That’s a valid concern. Of course, we can never be 100 percent sure, just as you can never be 100 percent sure of the new members you accept into your own little groups. Although we’ll do everything we can to keep moles out, the risk will always be there. It’s up to you if you want to take it.

  “We’ll advise all of our members to be as cautious within the private portal as they would be within the main network. Maintain your anonymity, wear masks when meeting in the flesh, and so on, until you have built up trust. The point is, it’ll still be a big step forward from where we are now, with everyone scattered across one big, disjointed network.”