The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows

by Bella Forrest

  “So that there wouldn’t be any evidence and so that we couldn’t get her electronics back,” Jackie finished, standing as still as I was.

  And to set an example, I added mentally. An example of exactly what would happen to anyone who crossed them. It was at the forefront of my mind—but I didn’t think anyone needed the reminder of what we were up against.

  Suddenly a shout erupted from the street outside, and we all dropped to the floor. I hadn’t understood what the person had said, but I brought my mind quickly back into the game. I realized that we’d taken far too long staring at the place.

  “God, we have to get moving,” I hissed. “What are we doing, standing around like a bunch of idiots?”

  “Um, trying to figure out what to do with all of this?” Ant hissed back. “Robin, this place is decimated! What are we supposed to do up here, sweep up the ashes and take them home for scientific research?”

  I bit my lip. As far as he knew, he was right. Because as far as he knew, there seemed to be no chance of recovering anything from Nelson up here. The computer she’d had on her desk was either melted or gone. I cringed at the idea that the Ministry might have taken it to go through, but we didn’t have time to worry about that. We’d made it up to Nelson’s office, which had been our entire plan. She obviously wasn’t here (I shoved aside the thought that any of the ashes might be her remains), and that left us with the need to grab what we could and get back.

  “Her hard drives,” I replied. “She put everything she’d ever done on those hard drives, and then hid them just in case something like this happened.”

  Those hard drives would be the only thing left. If we were lucky, they would lead us somewhere. She’d thought she was close to figuring something out regarding the archives, and if that was true, it could mean that she’d found ways into the Ministry’s systems.

  Ways that she’d never told anyone in OH+ about.

  Maybe there would be something in her records somewhere about what to expect if the Ministry ever got hold of us. Maybe we would even find some clue about where they might take the people they captured, and how to get them out again.

  “Hard drives?” Jackie asked, confused. “Are you crazy? Everything in here is melted into puddles!”

  I turned, scanning the floor and trying desperately to remember exactly where Nelson had put them.

  Under the floorboards, I remembered. And in a spot… in the corner.

  I whirled toward it and saw that the corner I needed was just as charred as everything else, but not so badly that I didn’t think we could manage it.

  “Because she stored them in a safe,” I said, grinning. It meant they would be untouched or hopefully usable. I had no idea how fireproof the safe was, or even whether the flamethrowers utilized normal flames, but those drives must have been at least somewhat protected. More than they would have been if they were just sitting in her desk.

  I shuffled toward the corner on my hands and knees, my mind frozen with expectation. If we could get those hard drives, we would at least have her work. If she’d been thinking ahead, maybe she would have left something else in the safe with them. Some indicator of where she would go if she ever had to hide out or something like that.

  Something.

  I reached the corner and slid my fingers rapidly along the floor, looking for the seam she used to pull the floorboards up. The floor had been damaged by the fire, granted, and the seam might have been entirely demolished, but surely somewhere… And then I found it. Tiny, but I could feel that it was bigger than any of the other cracks the floor should have had. I slipped one nail into the seam, and then two. Slowly, painfully, it lifted.

  “How did you know that was there?” Jackie asked, mystified.

  “Nelson showed me right before we went to meet up with, um, Hux,” I said quickly. “She said she was on to something big. Said she’d also documented everything she’d ever done in regard to trying to get into the archives. She copied it three times and put it on three separate hard drives, which she kept in a safe.”

  I finally got the floorboard to fully raise, and threw it back.

  There, sitting as if it had been waiting for us, was the safe.

  With the combination lock.

  Dammit.

  The combination. But what was the number? Nelson had told me, and I’d been so sure I would remember…

  Suddenly, there was another shout from outside, and there was no doubt that this one was closer. The voice was distinctly unfriendly. Something was happening out there, and I didn’t think it meant anything good for us.

  “Um, Robin, I’m starting to think we should probably get out of here,” Ant murmured. “That voice doesn’t sound happy, and it’s closer this time than it was before.”

  “I know, I know,” I growled. “But there’s a combination on this safe, and I can’t remember what it is.”

  I reached down and started spinning the lock, hoping that it would somehow tell me what I was supposed to be remembering. There were no magic clicks or lights going off, and I groaned to myself. We needed what was in that safe. I wasn’t going to leave without it.

  But we were running out of time. I could now hear someone walking around downstairs. Someone with heavy footsteps.

  “Dammit, what was the code?” I breathed, my heart hammering in my chest.

  And then, just like magic, I could see the numbers in front of my eyes, hear Nelson reciting them to me.

  “…8936,” she’d said. “And it’s the same code to access the drives, to make things simple.”

  I quickly spun the dial right, then left, then right, and then left again, landing on the numbers as they came up. With a click, the safe popped open and revealed its bounty.

  There was no secret treasure map to reveal where Nelson might have headed in case of emergency, but there were two orange hard drives, wrapped up and fastened to each other with a piece of twine.

  Nelson’s notes.

  A way to rebuild what she had done in case we ever lost her.

  I hoped against hope there would be a loophole that might help get us into the government’s system and tell us where our friends were.

  Then I paused, frowning. There had been three before. When she’d showed them to me before we met Jace for the first time, there had been three. I was sure of it. She said they all held the same information. But why was one missing?

  Had the Ministry found them after all, and taken one of them? But if they had, why would they have left the other two?

  It doesn’t matter, I told myself.

  It didn’t matter—one of them would be enough. We could worry about the missing hard drive later.

  I reached in to grab them, hearing the footsteps below us getting closer, and then recoiled when I realized how crispy and fragile the plastic felt to my touch. It meant the safe wasn’t heatproof and the drives had been touched by the temperature. Though, with luck, that was only the outer casing. With luck, the innards were still just fine. I grabbed them, then shoved them down my jumpsuit and into my bra to keep them safe. Then I whirled around to Ant and Jackie.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I hissed. “Ant, if memory serves, there should be a small garden right underneath that window, where the grocer’s kids grew vegetables and stuff. We’re only a story up. Think we can jump out the window without getting too hurt?”

  Never mind the fact that I was already sporting an injured ankle. Because yeah, it was feeling better, but I didn’t think jumping out a second-story window was necessarily the smartest thing.

  He laughed, scooted toward the window, and leaned out. “Yup, it’s right there, and the dirt looks plenty fluffy to me. I’m betting that’ll hurt less than whatever the guy downstairs is willing to do to us. I’ll go first. That way I can do my best to catch you lightweights.”

  Before I could discuss the matter with him further, he climbed through the window and dropped. My heart clenched, but I didn’t hear any screaming outside, so I figured he p
robably hadn’t broken anything. I hurried to the window and glanced out, needing to be sure.

  Ant was right below us, looking up and gesticulating madly at us and then the building in front of him. Whatever he was trying to tell us was lost in the flurry of hand gestures, but I didn’t think it mattered anyhow. The only thing that mattered was getting out of this building.

  I threw one leg over the windowsill and pulled the other through so that I was sitting on it. Then, taking a deep breath, I pushed off, tried to figure out how to avoid landing on my injured foot, and prepared to hit the ground.

  16

  Ant, Jackie, and I sat side by side on a bed in Ant’s apartment, staring at the wall in shock.

  The trip home had been a mad dash down an alley, followed by a hurried walk. We had tried to look normal, but probably failed completely as we made our way to the nearest train station. Then waiting had been sheer terror. I’d been certain the entire time that we were going to turn around to see the same Ministry agent striding toward us with handcuffs in one hand and a flamethrower in the other.

  When the train finally arrived, we’d all three tried to get in the door at once and had gotten stuck. I didn’t think any of us breathed again until we untangled ourselves and found seats. And I didn’t think we’d truly let go of our fear until we were safely ensconced in Ant’s apartment, the trash collector uniforms in a heap by the door.

  “I never want to do anything like that again,” Jackie murmured. “Never. I am not cut out for this sort of thing, and I’m not sorry about that.”

  Ant put an arm slowly around her shoulders and squeezed, and for a second, I was jealous of the easy camaraderie they’d built. I needed that. I needed someone to put an arm around me and tell me it would be okay.

  “I don’t think any of us are cut out for this, JK,” Ant answered quietly. “And I don’t think that’s anything to apologize for. We didn’t exactly see this coming.” He looked over her head at me, his face expressionless. “So, what do we do now, oh fearless leader?”

  I stared back at him, my face slack. I’d been wondering the same thing, and I hadn’t come up with any answers.

  As far as options went, ours were depressingly few, and I didn’t think they were going to be getting much better from here on out. We were working outside of Nathan’s influence, at least for the moment. That meant we were working without backup or protection. I didn’t even have Jace there to swoop in and save the day if I got in trouble. We had failed to find Nelson, and though I wasn’t sure what she would have done to help us move forward, at least she would have been another brain on the job. Besides, she was used to leading people. I definitely was not.

  I had a feeling that we were in deeper trouble now than we had been before. If that had truly been a Ministry agent at Nelson’s, he’d seen our faces—even if they were covered in charcoal dust. And if it had been him on the ground floor of the building and he’d seen us running away, the outfits we’d been wearing would have been a giveaway to who we were and that he’d talked to us.

  That was a lot of ifs. But the end result? He might be able to identify us as people of interest in the future.

  So far, I’d suggested an OH+ mission that had failed miserably. Then, I’d led two of my closest friends on a so-called rescue operation that had ended with us showing our faces to the enemy. My record as a leader was looking pretty dismal.

  And now Ant wanted me to decide on the next move.

  Terrific.

  A set of fingers snapped in front of my face, and I turned to see Jackie staring at me as if she was waiting for an answer to a question that she’d asked multiple times.

  “Huh?” I asked stupidly. “What? Did you say something?”

  “I asked,” she said pointedly, “if we should try to get something off those hard drives. That was one of the reasons we went up there, right? To get the hard drives? To figure out if Nelson knew anything that would help us?”

  I jerked to attention.

  The hard drives.

  Of course.

  We hadn’t found Nelson, but that didn’t change the fact that we had to find a way to save our friends. Nelson might be with them, in the Ministry’s cells. We just had to figure out how to find them and then how to get them out. The answer might be right there on the hard drives, sitting on the other bed.

  Doing my best to shake off the shock and fear of the evening, I got up and grabbed them, whirling back to my friends.

  “Ant, you’re the best with a computer here. I’m okay with them, but I’m mostly useless when it comes to things like this, and I don’t think Jackie’s much better.” I tossed Jackie an apologetic look. “Sorry, JK, but you know it’s true.”

  She shrugged as if she didn’t care, and I handed Ant one of the drives.

  “They’re both supposed to have exactly the same information on them. There were three of them originally. I don’t know why we only found two, but it shouldn’t matter. Nelson duplicated all of the notes she’d ever taken on her movements as she hacked the archives. It should have everything that worked, every step she took, and what she thought she might do next. When she told me about them, she did it because she thought she’d found something important. A potential loophole, she said. She thought she’d be able to use it, and told me about it so that I knew where the drives were in case anything ever happened to her.”

  “Why didn’t she tell the rest of us?” Ant asked, pouting.

  I shrugged. “She meant to. I know she told Julia, but then we were meeting Hux and getting involved in OH+. Maybe she just forgot. It doesn’t matter. You know about them now. Ant, we have to get into them. She might have something that we can use on there. She might have even left us a message.”

  Ant glared at me as if it were my fault that Nelson hadn’t told him about the drives first, but then tipped his head in acquiescence and hurried over to the desktop computer. I took one of the drives to him, watching as he performed the magic of connecting it to his computer via the exposed wires in the back.

  “Why don’t they have plugs like normal drives?” Jackie asked, watching.

  “Too easy to hack that way,” Ant answered, working quickly. “This is a more organic sort of connection, which makes the… well, it makes the walls around the connection more solid, I guess you could say. It’s something that very few people know about, but Nelson showed it to me once. She told me I might need it at some point in the future. I guess this is probably what she meant. She gave me the hardware to put on my computer soon after that.” He threw me a triumphant glance. “Guess that means I have something you don’t have, after all.”

  I snorted. “Awesome, Ant, you win the contest of who Nell liked the best. Congratulations. Now, can you get into that drive or what?”

  I leaned over his shoulder, watching the screen intently as he clicked madly at the buttons. He logged in to his system, locating the drive on his desktop, and then clicked twice. A login screen appeared, and he glanced at me.

  “You don’t happen to have the password to get in, do you?” he asked meekly.

  I grinned at him. “And here I thought Nelson loved you best. It’s 8936,” I told him quickly.

  He tapped the numbers in and waited. A second later, the screen filled with numbers, letters, and symbols, bright white against a deep blue background, and then the entire thing disappeared. Ant frowned and stared at the screen for a moment. Then he rebooted his system and tried again.

  He typed in the password and waited ten seconds, and the same thing happened. Hundreds of numbers and symbols… then nothing.

  One more attempt and he sat back, scratching his head. “It’s fried,” he finally said. “It’s the only explanation.”

  I sighed, somehow still shocked. “Fried?”

  He shrugged.

  “More or less. Just because it’s intact doesn’t mean it’s any good. If you got in hot enough temperatures, your organs would boil right up, even if your outer”—he gestured up and down at me, at a l
oss for words—“structure would be unaffected. Same thing here. The safe might have been fireproof, but it wasn’t heatproof. The inside wiring boiled. It’s fried. No good.”

  I stared at him, trying to understand what he was saying and what it meant to our mission.

  And Nelson.

  And our friends.

  No hard drive meant no secrets; it meant no loophole; it meant no potential way into the Ministry.

  That meant no saving our friends.

  I rushed back to the bed and grabbed the other drive, darting back to him. I shoved it in his face.

  “Try this one,” I said, panicking. “Maybe this one was more protected somehow.”

  He gave me a sympathetic look, as if he felt sorry for me that I had that much optimism, but he took the drive and obligingly hooked it up to the exposed wiring on the back of his computer. He clicked the computer on, touched the icon for the drive, and entered the set of numbers again.

  This time the drive didn’t even give us any numbers or letters. It just shorted out immediately. Ant tried the same set of steps again, unhooking the drive, then hooking it back up and turning it on.

  The same thing happened again.

  He looked up at me, but he didn’t need to say anything. I knew that there was nothing he could do about what I was seeing.

  “The drives are fried,” I said disbelievingly. “All that work, all that danger, and we brought back drives that we can’t even get into. All of Nelson’s work, gone.”

  “Maybe not,” Jackie said. “You said that there were three, and we only have two. Maybe she put the other one someplace safe just in case something like this happened.”

  I laughed, but there was no humor behind it. “Unless she left us a treasure map for how to find it, I don’t see how that helps us right now,” I said. “We’re back at square one.”

  “Maybe not,” Ant said, tapping at his keyboard again. “Maybe I can…”

  “Can what?” I asked, confused. “What else can you do for those drives that you haven’t already done?”