The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows

by Bella Forrest

  “If I can get into OH+, she might have left one of us a message,” he said quietly. “Think about it. It would have been the smart thing to do. If she figured out she was in trouble and didn’t know if the comm line we were on was secure, she would have left us a message where the Ministry wouldn’t know to look for it. A place that we’d see it almost immediately. Right?”

  “Oh, maybe you’re right,” I gasped, dropping to my knees next to him. “Only none of us have bothered to check the portal since last night.”

  “Hey, hold on,” Jackie interrupted. “Are you sure it’s safe to go on there? If the Ministry hacked Nelson, don’t you think it’s possible they found mention of OH+ on her machine? Maybe they know about it. Maybe they’ve hacked it too.”

  Ant shushed her with a quick palm-out gesture. “Already thought of that, and solved it,” he said. “I’m using the highest level of encryption I have on this server. Nelson herself tried to hack through it once and wasn’t able to. I’m not scared. If she left us something, we have to know about it.”

  He frowned suddenly and stopped typing. He hit one key, then another, and stopped again.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, staring at the screen. It was the same login prompt I’d seen a million times before.

  “I can’t get in,” he said slowly. He typed something out key by key, taking his time on each one. When he hit enter, I turned back to the screen.

  The cursor was still blinking at the sign-in box, as if he hadn’t typed anything at all. No “error” message, no “forgot your password?” prompt.

  Nothing.

  “It’s… not responding?” I asked, confused. “Is your keyboard broken or something?”

  He glared at me like I had lost my mind.

  “Robin. You just saw me enter a password multiple times to get into those stupid hard drives. Nothing’s wrong with my keyboard. It’s the site. It’s nonresponsive.”

  I had no idea what that meant, and said so.

  Ant shook his head, mystified. “It’s like the site can’t hear me. Like it’s forgotten how to respond.” He turned and looked at me, frowning. “Something is very wrong. The site itself is frozen.”

  A look of horror came over his face, and he jabbed at several keys, clearing out of the site entirely.

  “What is it?” I asked, bewildered, feeling like I was ten steps behind him.

  When he turned to look at me again, his eyes were filled with terror. “It’s like the site has been hacked,” he murmured. “Like it’s been hacked and is answering to someone else now. I’ve seen the back door of that site. It’s virtually impregnable. If someone got in, it means they have a lot more firepower than us. A lot more money and intelligence.”

  “The Ministry,” I murmured, finally understanding why he was so upset. “You think they did get into OH+?”

  He shook his head, his mouth working soundlessly.

  And at that moment, someone pounded on the door.

  17

  We stared at the door, unmoving.

  I couldn’t be sure what the others were thinking, but it wasn’t hard to guess. We’d just tried to sign in to a portal that the Ministry appeared to have hacked. No matter how much encryption Ant had been using, it might not have been enough to protect us. We’d also run into a Ministry agent that very day, and he had seen our disguised, but still recognizable, faces.

  It didn’t take a lot of imagination to conclude that the Ministry had tracked us down, and that we were trapped.

  “Oh hell,” Jackie whispered. “I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready for this.”

  Ant stood up and went to stand directly in front of the two of us. He put his hands on his hips and spread his legs to widen his stance protectively.

  “They’re going to have to go through me to get to the two of you,” he said quietly. “If you can, get away while they’re messing with me. Go under the beds and through their feet. I’ve done it before.”

  I appreciated his chivalry, but I got to my feet and went to stand by him.

  “I’m not going to let you go up against them alone, Ant,” I said, my voice just as quiet. “You’re crazy if you think I’d let you do that.”

  I could see the glance of appreciation he threw at me from the corner of my eye, but he didn’t answer. Instead, a voice hissed through the door.

  “Robin, it’s me, Jace,” it said, echoing weirdly in the hall. “Let me in. I have something important I have to tell you.”

  “Who the hell is Jace?” Jackie asked.

  I wasn’t listening to her. I moved toward the door, relieved beyond words to have him here. He might not know how to fix the mess that we managed to make of things, being hopeless when it came to tech, but he would make everything feel solid.

  He always did.

  I threw open the door and pulled him in without even bothering to look down the hall, and he stumbled over the stoop, sprawling into the room. I threw my arms around him and laughed.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you,” I said. “We’ve had a real night of it, and now we’ve just—”

  “How the hell do you know where I live?” Ant interrupted, glaring at Jace like he’d just caught him spying.

  “Followed you,” Jace said shortly. “I wanted to know where Robin was going to be staying. Did you find Nelson?” he went on quickly, looking around the room like he was hoping to see her sitting on one of the beds.

  “No,” I said, frowning. “What we did find was a burned-out office that had practically been melted, on top of a building that looked like it had been blown up. That was after we ran into a guy who asked pretty bizarre questions, but before we were chased out of that same building by someone else.”

  Jace looked at me, his eyes wide, and I held up a hand.

  “We did manage to get some of Nelson’s hard drives, which she’d hidden in a safe under her floor. We can’t get them open because they were damaged by the heat.”

  “All her work is gone?” he asked, the shock clear in his voice.

  “Except for one hard drive, which is mysteriously missing,” I confirmed. “We tried to sign into OH+, but—”

  “But it’s down, and unresponsive, yes,” Jace said, finishing my sentence for me. “I’ve heard. That’s actually why I’m here.”

  I stared at him, afraid to ask, but we needed to know.

  “Has it been hacked?” I asked quietly. “Is the Ministry in OH+?”

  If they were, it would be trouble for all of us. I didn’t think any of our personal information was stored there—at least, I hoped not. I didn’t know how it would be, considering we used encryption to mask our IP addresses. But if it was somehow there, the Ministry could find out everything: our addresses, our names, where we worked.

  Jace gave me a quick shake of his head.

  “We don’t know. That’s part of the problem. The site crashed, and Nathan can’t get it back up. Not by himself. We’ve lost Austin and Nelson. They were two of our best techs. Without access to anyone else…”

  “What do you mean, without access to anyone else?” Ant asked, his face blank. “There were at least ten techs involved in OH+, and those are just the ones I knew about. We’ve lost Nelson and Austin, but that leaves eight others, plus Nathan, who’s got to be good if he started OH and then OH+. Getting the site back up and running should be no problem. So… what’s the problem?”

  Jace gave him a look that I couldn’t read.

  “The problem, Ant, is that without that site, Nathan can’t get in touch with any of the other techs. He doesn’t have their personal phone numbers. When we needed to be in contact for any length of time, we used burner phones, which we got rid of within a few days. And he doesn’t just keep a list of addresses in his personal binder. It would be too dangerous to have that sort of information on his person. What if he got caught, and the Ministry got them? Even the admins are people that he contacted only through OH+, or… well, through a portal like that. The encryption is strong e
nough that he trusted it more than he trusted any phone. So anything he has is stored within the sites themselves. We thought about trying OH, but if the Ministry has truly hacked OH+, we think there’s a good chance that they’re in OH as well, and we don’t want to risk it. Without them…”

  “Without the sites, he can’t get in touch with the techs to fix the site,” I finished. “Without the techs, we don’t have any way to make progress on trying to find our friends. We’re going to need techs to sort out where they are and how to get them, if we even can. We don’t have any way to reach the rest of the group. Even worse, we don’t know if the OH+ portal has been hacked by the Ministry. They could be mining all of our information right now. Not only do we have no way to stop them, we’re also completely isolated.”

  I gulped, hoping that at least some of my conclusions were incorrect, but Jace dipped his chin and briefly closed his eyes.

  “Correct on all points,” he murmured. “We’re both trapped and vulnerable—unless we can find a way to get into that site and figure out how to get in touch with the techs from there.”

  “That seems like an ideal time for Nathan to step up and do some computer voodoo,” Ant noted. “Doesn’t it? Isn’t he the one who started this whole thing?”

  Jace gave him another long look, and I closed my eyes, trying to untie the knot and figure a way out of this. Surely there was something there, something that we weren’t seeing.

  “Unfortunately, Nathan can’t do it by himself.”

  “What do you mean, Nathan can’t do it by himself?” Ant asked sharply. “I thought he was this big tech guy, capable of anything!”

  Jace sighed, and I could tell that he was having trouble trying to maintain his patience. We were in more trouble now than we’d been in before, and we needed to move forward, but Ant asking the same questions over and over was slowing us down. It was also making it difficult to think.

  “Nathan is only one man, Ant,” Jace said. “He’s more valuable than most of the other people in the organization. He’s leading this whole thing, for goodness’ sake. He can’t risk himself by doing it alone. What if he gets in there and the site is indeed hacked, and he’s by himself, without any backup, and they figure out where he is? What would we all do?”

  “Probably go back to life as usual,” Jackie grumbled. “Seems to me we were all doing a lot better before OH+ came around. You ever thought of that?”

  She cast me a pointed glance, and I had to admit that she was right.

  Though OH+ had seemed like it would open new horizons, it had only brought us trouble so far.

  First the situation with Marty, then the raid, followed by Nelson’s disappearance. Now the idea that the Ministry might be tracking us down at any moment. It was all making me sort of nostalgic for the simple days of tracking kidnapped children and dreaming of finding my own baby.

  “Ant, you know we’re doing something important here, and you know a lot of that is because Nathan has gathered us all in the same place at the same time. Regardless of how he’s done it,” he added in a statement that made no sense to me but must have meant something to him, given the look on Ant’s face. “Now that we’re all in this together, don’t you think it’s our job to protect each other? What if the Ministry is after all of us right now? What if they’ve got your brother in a cell somewhere? Don’t you think it’s our job to get into that site, so we can do something about it?”

  Ant opened his mouth to keep arguing, but he seemed to realize that Jace was right. His open mouth shut with a snap.

  That didn’t mean I was done with the questions. I still saw quite a few holes in the plan. I didn’t know Nathan personally. I knew only that he seemed to have left us all high and dry when it came to the mission—and had then tried to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to go after Nelson or her research.

  Overall, I didn’t have a very high opinion of him. The idea that he had gotten us into a dangerous situation and he wasn’t willing to resolve it himself left me feeling distinctly betrayed.

  And less than generous in terms of offering help.

  I knew we were in trouble, and I knew that helping Nathan would be the only way to resolve that, but I wanted a few more questions answered before I agreed to help him again. Jace referring to Nathan as our leader wasn’t quite enough to sway me.

  Not yet.

  If he was a leader, he was doing an only slightly better job than me, and that wasn’t saying much.

  “So, he’s not willing to go in there by himself because he’s worried that it will be dangerous, but he is willing to drag someone else with him and potentially put them in danger?” I asked suspiciously.

  Jace looked at me like I’d betrayed him, and I shrugged.

  “Just because you trust him doesn’t mean I do, Jace. Jackie’s right. At this point he’s gotten us into an awful lot of trouble, and I’m not going to volunteer one of my friends to help him hack into a site over which he has no control. You’ve admitted he thinks it might be dangerous, and unless you can convince me that he’s going to take better care of them than he has of us…”

  “Robin, you know I don’t know anything about tech,” he said bluntly. “I can’t tell you how he’ll keep the person safe. If I tried, you’d know I was lying. You’ve seen me trying to navigate the site or fix problems for other people.”

  I smiled slightly at that, having seen him call in for help to answer a simple question for someone we’d recruited into OH+. He was right: if he’d tried to tell me exactly how Nathan was going to keep someone else safe, I wouldn’t have believed him. I’d have known he was just feeding me a line, and I appreciated that he wasn’t doing it.

  I lifted my eyebrows, waiting for him to do something to convince me.

  He shrugged and looked both embarrassed and stubborn as he gave me his final answer.

  “All I can tell you is that I trust him. I’ve trusted him with my life and with the life of my sister. Surely you know how much that takes, how much danger I’m putting myself in with that trust. Do you really think I’d do that if I didn’t think he was doing the right thing?”

  I sighed, but I could see his point. The man held Jace’s fate in his hands, and Jace had stood up for Nathan and his decisions back at the Roundhouse. Nathan also had all the information on Rhea, Jace’s sister, and Jace would never have put her in danger. He certainly wouldn’t have allowed Nathan to have any control over her fate if he didn’t trust Nathan to keep her safe.

  I supposed that meant I could do the same thing. For someone who wasn’t quite my sister but was certainly starting to feel like the younger sibling I’d never had. Now that I was allowing my brain to get past the distrust and think rationally, her name was right there in front of me. She wasn’t the most experienced hacker on the team, but I knew that one of the members of Nelson’s team had taken her under his wing and taught her everything he could in the short time they’d been working together. The last time I’d spoken to her, she hadn’t been able to shut up about him—or about how much he’d shown her how to do.

  Which meant she’d have even more tricks up her sleeve than she had the first time I met her, on a ship in the middle of nowhere. On that day, without any training at all, she’d impressed me with her clear thinking and creativity for solving problems. I suspected she had grown even more skillful since we had last seen one another.

  I also figured she’d be more than up to the challenge. And if Nathan put her in any danger, I’d kill him myself.

  “Gabby,” I said clearly. “She’s smart, she’s talented, and I know she’s still free. The Ministry doesn’t even know she exists, and they’ll never see her coming.”

  Jace’s face cleared, and he grinned so widely that I thought his cheeks might crack. “And you can contact her?” he asked.

  I tipped my head and grinned back at him.

  “Of course I can. We exchanged phone numbers. In fact, she called me earlier today, wanting to make sure I was okay—she asked when we’d be runnin
g another mission. Something tells me she’ll be excited to see some more action. And you can assure Nathan that if he lets anything happen to her, he’ll have me to answer to.”

  18

  I picked up my phone from where I’d thrown it on the bed and brought up the calls I’d received, as it was the quickest way to find Gabby’s phone number. It was the most recent, because Gabby had in fact called me earlier in the day to ask whether I was okay and what had happened. (I hadn’t answered—I’d been slightly busy with the whole figuring-out-how-to-rescue-Nelson thing—but she’d left a voicemail.) I’d been glad that she was on her ship, probably in her tiny closet bedroom, tucked up against the desk that she’d somehow managed to fit in there. I was grateful that she’d been far away from all of this, and safe.

  Now I was about to bring her right into the center of the mess, but I didn’t know what else to do. We had to get into the OH+ portal. It was necessary, not only to find the techs, but also to see what might have happened to the portal itself, and whether the government had accessed it. Gabby was the only person we had left with that capability.

  Unfortunately, she was also only sixteen, and self-taught. Additionally, she was working on the oldest computer I’d ever seen. So saying that she had the ability to do it was… pushing things a bit. She was our best hope. Our only hope. I just didn’t know how much stock we could actually put in it.

  “Robin?” Her young voice gasped through the phone on the second ring. “Oh my God, are you okay? What happened? Some of the chat rooms I’m in are blasted with people saying something big went down last night, and they’ve got the address of the—”

  “Gabby, slow down,” I interrupted, raising a hand even though I knew she couldn’t see me. “Yes, I’m fine. Well, mostly. I’m alive and in one piece, at least, but we’ve got problems. Things didn’t exactly go according to plan.” I put the phone on speaker and laid it on the bed so that everyone could hear her.