The Child Thief

by Bella Forrest

  I returned to the room and nodded at my colleagues, and then we sank down to the floor to be level with the woman. It just felt wrong to be towering over her when she wanted to tell us something.

  “Okay, we’re listening,” Jace said finally, setting her with a stern look. “Go ahead.”

  She nestled deeper into her corner, slipping her legs between the folds of the sleeping bag, then leaned back against the cold stone wall, her rheumy blue eyes glistening in the candlelight. “Let me tell you a story,” she said after a moment, her voice deep, calmer. “There was once a young girl… let’s call her Mella… and she fell in love with a young boy. Let’s call him Sammy. She was sixteen and he was seventeen.”

  She paused and took a swig from her bottle, and a shiver crept up my spine at the way her story had started.

  “Sweet sixteen,” she crooned, smacking her lips together as she set her bottle between her legs. “They lived in the same fancy neighborhood and went to the same fancy private school, and they’d known each other since kindergarten. Close friends all through junior high, and then lovers through high school. They were the perfect match, everyone said. Even their parents adored little Mella and Sammy as a couple.”

  I let out a breath at the slight diversion the story had taken compared to mine, having been afraid for a crazy second that it might have been some kind of setup—that by some bizarre twist, she somehow knew my story and was going to out me or something here—and then I brushed all thoughts of my own history aside and refocused on the woman.

  Her eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment as she stared at the wall, before she gave a hacking cough, and then continued, “So, they did what everyone expected them to do, as soon as they hit the legal age. They got married. They had a gorgeous wedding, surrounded by their friends and family. Mella looked like a princess in her frilly white gown, and Sammy looked like a freakin’ stud in his shiny black tux. Everyone rained down gifts and cards, wishing them a long and healthy life.

  “After that, they went on their honeymoon. A three-week skiing trip up in the mountains, courtesy of their parents. And then, woohoo, before you knew it, the girl was growing a friggin’ bump. Funny what happens when you put a boy and girl together, huh?” She guffawed, then hiccupped, brushing at a bead of spit that had fallen onto her chin.

  Then her smile faded suddenly. “Only, it wasn’t so funny once the baby was born.” Her breathing grew slow, belabored. “You wanna know why?”

  I pressed my lips together, already guessing the answer. Assuming the story she was telling us was true, somehow, the baby had probably been confiscated, like mine had. Maybe her family had fallen out of fortune, or something, and her reason for wanting to be involved with OH+ was the same as mine: to act out against a system that had hurt her.

  Though, she hardly appeared to be in a position to help us; I didn’t even know how she got access to a computer or the internet, and by the looks of her, she could barely help herself. I guessed this chapel couldn’t be her full-time base, and she probably just wanted to feel useful, somehow.

  None of us answered her question in the affirmative—especially not me, who didn’t want to hear another traumatic tale of a child being prized from their birthmother, as it only ever reminded me of my own history—but the woman continued anyway.

  “Because he had severe medical problems that not even the specialist doctors could fix.” Her voice dropped to barely a whisper, her eyes growing haunted.

  And I suddenly realized that I had probably gotten the wrong end of the stick. In fact, I didn’t know where this story was going now.

  “You wanna know why?” she went on, and I found myself holding my breath at the sheer look of pain flickering in her irises.

  A pin-drop silence fell about the room, stretching out for several long moments as she rose slowly to her feet, her hands balling into fists.

  “Because little Mella and Sammy never should’ve been a mommy and daddy,” she whispered finally. “Little Mella and Sammy shared the same mommy and daddy.”

  Before I could even process her words, her hand shot out for one of the candles and she threw it across the room, missing Jace’s head by less than an inch as it smashed into the wall behind him. A shriek of anguish tore from her throat, and she bent down for the metal stove, picking it up and hurling it blindly.

  Jackie shot to her feet just in time to avoid being crushed by it, and then the three of us were racing from the room. She wasn’t trying to hurt us, I was sure, but the girl had clearly lost her mind.

  And I realized that I couldn’t blame her.

  My stomach roiled as we fled the church, a deep sickness settling there and threatening to overwhelm me as I processed what must have happened, her reason for hating the CRAS. She had found a long-lost family member, in the worst possible way. It made my own reasons pale in comparison. We pounded down the pathway toward the gate, her howling following us out into the night, her pleas for us to come back ringing in my ears and making my hands tremble.

  We kept running, picking up the twins on our way back to the main road. Even though I wanted to go back and help her, I didn’t know how. None of us were qualified to deal with her level of problems, and certainly not tonight. She needed professional help. Though, if she came from a wealthy family, as her story had indicated, then something told me her parents would have already gotten her that.

  No, what she needed was for that to never, ever have happened, I told myself, an angry fire burning through my veins. What had happened to her and her brother was a rarity, something I had never even considered before, but something I was sure as hell adding to my list now. It was an additional reason we could draw on if ever we needed to persuade others to help us end the CRAS. Because this was inexcusable.

  Something like this never needed to happen. All Ella and her brother had needed was an open archive, so they could’ve known who the hell they were, and where the hell they’d come from.

  The anger remained burning within me long after her cries had faded into the distance, drowning out all coherent thought and conversation. Until there was nothing but eight words repeating in my mind, in rhythm with the pounding of my feet:

  We have to end this. We have to.

  24

  We were all feeling shaken the next day, so much so that Jace suggested he push our final appointment to Friday, to give us all a bit of breathing space to recover. And I was grateful for it. My sleep had been fitful that night, the vision of that poor woman darting in and out of my dreams, and the following day I barely had an appetite.

  The next evening, we met up at a station a couple of towns away from where I lived. None of us spoke of Pamella, though her story still glimmered in all of our eyes, haunting us.

  We walked in mostly silence along several residential streets with lower-middle-class dwellings, donning our masks as we moved. We stopped when we reached a small laundromat, closed at this hour, and crossed to the other side of the road, eyeing it cautiously. It was our destination, according to Jace, where we were due to meet a group who claimed they could offer us some other kind of equipment that would be of use—details to be revealed once we arrived. But after our experience in the chapel, I was feeling extra nervous about who they might actually be.

  “I think we need to take the side door,” Jace said quietly, moving along the sidewalk to get an angle on the side of the building, where there was another entrance farther back.

  “If you and Robin wanna stay back this time, we’ll go in with Hux,” Abe spoke up, looking between Jackie and me without a single trace of humor in his eyes. He seemed to genuinely want to give us a break after yesterday’s scene, and while they’d witnessed it too, in a way, over the comms, it hadn’t been nearly as intense or disturbing for them as it had been for us, face-to-face with the woman’s raw emotions.

  So Jackie and I accepted the boys’ offer, and Jace quickly distributed the necessary gear. “We can wait around the side of that building,” she said softly, poi
nting to a narrow alleyway that cut through the blocks on this side. It would be a good option, as it was almost opposite the laundromat and would provide us with a good view of the side entrance.

  Jace nodded firmly, and before I could ask them to be careful, he and the twins were heading off across the road. Honestly, I felt a little guilty about staying back, when Jace was still going in, given that he’d been through exactly what we had the other night in the chapel. Still, none of us knew how this was going to go down; for all we knew, Jackie and I would end up going in anyway.

  So I might have been feeling guilty too soon.

  Jackie and I walked to the alley and crouched down, keeping close to the wall of the corner building, and set our focus on listening. The men were still within view, just reaching the door, and I could hear their heavy breathing on the line. Their nerves stretched my own, even though I wasn’t the one potentially walking into imminent danger this time.

  Jace rang a doorbell fixed to the wall on one side, and then the three of them took a step back and waited.

  Nothing happened for a minute. No sound of anyone scurrying to reach the door on the other side, just the men’s continued uneven breathing. A minute stretched into two, then three, and Jace tried again.

  But still nobody answered.

  “You sure they definitely got your message about shifting the meeting to today?” one of the twins mumbled.

  “Yes,” Jace whispered. “The contact confirmed with me and said it was all right.”

  “Then why aren’t they answering?” the second twin muttered.

  They waited another minute, and then Ant’s hand moved to the door handle, as if on impulse. He gripped it, and to my surprise, there was an immediate creaking sound and the door gave way.

  “Whoa,” he breathed. “They left it off the latch. In fact, it looks like the lock’s broken.”

  The three men paused for a long moment, staring at the now-ajar door as if wondering whether to trust it.

  “I’m not sure,” Jace replied, his voice pitched low and a touch tight. “But I suggest we go in with our guns ready.”

  The twins looked at Jace and nodded, and then all three men were reaching for their weapons, clicking the safeties off, and holding them at their sides. They moved in, Jace taking point, with Ant at the rear, and a couple seconds later, all three were gone from sight.

  I gave Jackie a nervous look, which she returned. Then I hunkered down lower and closed my eyes, needing to block out all external distractions and focus only on the noises in my ears. For now, it was just their increasingly tight breathing, and slow footsteps on what sounded like some kind of sleek flooring. I imagined them in my mind’s eye, walking down a corridor, stopping at the junction of each off-shooting room and looking inside. It probably wasn’t far off, given that I could make out the low groan of a door opening every now and then.

  They kept moving in silence, and then suddenly, Jace cursed.

  Fear bristled through me at the alarm in his voice, and the twins quickly joined him in cursing. They hadn’t gone in with earpieces, per protocol—it could set potential allies on edge if they thought we’d arrived with an elaborate setup—so we couldn’t talk to the men, only hear what was going on.

  I looked to Jackie, my heart quivering. There were no gunshots, and none of the men were shouting, or even running yet, from what I could tell. But their reaction to whatever they had just seen wasn’t sitting well with me.

  “You think we should—?” I began to ask.

  “Search those other two rooms,” Jace said suddenly, cutting me off midsentence.

  I pursed my lips and continued listening as the footsteps sped up, and I heard a couple more doors opening, followed by what sounded like shuffling papers and the gliding of drawers.

  “Empty,” one of the twins said finally, his voice uncharacteristically shaky.

  The other twin confirmed the same a moment later.

  “Jackie, Robin,” Jace said. “In case you’re wondering, we’re okay. The place is clear, but… Well, maybe you want to see this for yourselves. Then again, maybe you don’t.”

  I was already springing to my feet, unable to stay in the dark any longer. Jackie followed quickly behind me, and we crossed the road, racing along the side of the building and slipping through the side entrance.

  We arrived at the beginning of a long, dark corridor, not unlike what I had pictured in my head. Except it was more of a dump than I had imagined, the paint on the walls and doors peeling, the ceiling patchy with mold. We passed several rooms on either side of us, filled with shelves and office furniture, as we went toward Jace and the twins, who were standing outside a room at the opposite end of the corridor.

  They were frozen in place, staring at whatever lay beyond, and barely even registered us as we pushed past them to get a look.

  And when I got one, I understood why Jace had said I might not want it.

  This end room was larger than the others, and it felt like I’d just stepped onto the set of a gangster movie. Tables and chairs had been upturned, shelves knocked over, hundreds of pieces of paper scattered about the floor… and the pale green walls were absolutely splattered with crimson. As though someone had been shot multiple times, from multiple directions.

  Or multiple people had died in here.

  The floor and furniture had been sprayed with blood too, puddles still moist and glistening beneath the beam of Jace’s flashlight. The place was bereft of bodies, but the scent of death hung heavy, making my stomach churn, my throat gag.

  I stepped back, exhaling sharply and bracing myself against the corridor wall. Then fear gripped me. The scene was so fresh, it meant that whoever was responsible might still be in the area.

  “We should get out of here,” I managed.

  “But what the hell happened?” Jackie whispered, clutching her stomach.

  “We don’t know,” Ant replied. “Maybe they were involved in some kind of gang feud. Maybe someone else wanted what they were offering us. Maybe—”

  “Enforcers were here,” Jace said suddenly, and our eyes all shot to him in alarm.

  He dropped to a crouch by the door’s threshold and scooped something up from the floor. Rising to his feet, he turned the object over in his palm, and my blood froze.

  It was indeed the badge of a law enforcer, its smooth silver surface engraved with the flag of our country, a unique officer number etched into the base of it. The fastener at the back of it looked slightly bent, damaged enough to slip from a uniform.

  “Let’s go!” Jackie hissed before my brain could even fully process the sight.

  Jace dropped the badge, and we turned and ran back down the corridor, slipping out into the night. I was the last outside and closed the door behind us, before we took off at a fast jog back along the street toward the station.

  Whoever those OH contacts had been, and whatever they’d been doing or had to offer us, they’d been sniffed out. They must have taken a misstep, become lax in their security or skipped a protocol or two, somewhere along the way. Because I was positive that it was more likely to be their blood on the walls than the cops’.

  A chill settled into my core as I realized we were a day too late. But then again, maybe someone somewhere up above was looking out for us. Because if we’d gone ahead with yesterday’s meeting as planned, our blood could have very well been splattered there, too.

  25

  The vision of the crimson-smeared office bled into my dreams that night, much like the crazed woman had two nights before, and I woke up the next morning in a cold sweat, convinced that enforcers were closing in on my cabin. I’d heard them picking at the lock of my front door in my nightmare, but as I fully rose to consciousness, I realized that what I’d heard was less the sound of picking and more of scratching, accompanied by a familiar whining noise.

  I breathed out heavily, brushing the sheen of sweat from my forehead with the sleeve of my pajama top. It’s okay, I assured myself as I climbed out of b
ed. You’re fine. I headed straight to the door before doing anything else all the same and peered through the peephole, just needing to convince my subconscious beyond any doubt that it wasn’t the police.

  Spying my semi-regular wolf visitors through the hole, I opened the door and walked out, trailing my fingers through their soft fur while they jumped up at me. I sank down on the small bench that lined my porch and gazed off into the distance, continuing to pet the animals absentmindedly.

  We’d had two meetings go wrong in a row now, which was starting to feel like a bad omen, after all the positive, easy meetings I’d been in on at the start. And last night had been a visceral reminder that none of us were ever far from death on this tightrope of a life we’d chosen to lead. It brought me a renewed wave of respect for Nelson’s protocols, and an increased determination to abide by the training she had given me.

  We couldn’t take our safety for granted, couldn’t afford to become lax even in the slightest. Because once you became loose about one thing, it could easily spill into another area, until soon, you were making reckless mistakes and painting a bright red target on your back.

  It also triggered a fresh spike of guilt about knowing Jace’s and his sister’s names, as well as some regret for sharing mine.

  But what was done was done. All I could do was be more careful about what I overheard in the future. Regardless of the fact that I trusted Jace and he trusted me, we should have followed protocol. Because the government had very little patience when it came to criminals these days. Enforcers weren’t supposed to shoot us outright without a trial, of course. Most likely, whoever had been shot back there hadn’t cooperated, or had done something to prompt the officers to react with violence. But the fact remained: even if we weren’t shot onsite, it wouldn’t take long for the judicial system to get to the bottom of our crimes and put us to death if we didn’t keep our trail clean after they tried to get information out of us.