The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows

by Bella Forrest

“What happened?” she asked. “Does this have anything to do with the fact that OH+ went down late last night?”

  I frowned and cast a glance at Jace. That was interesting. I hadn’t known when the portal actually went down. I wondered if Jace (or Nathan) did. What could it mean? The only logical conclusion was that the Ministry had run several missions at the same time. One against us, one against Nelson, and one against the portal. How would they have known exactly when to do it?

  Jace shrugged and gave me a look that indicated that he didn’t know anything, which answered my next question as if he could hear me thinking. Jace hadn’t known… but had Nathan been aware?

  “The site went down last night?” I asked slowly.

  “Yes, around midnight,” Gabby said, her voice tight with tension. “I was actually logged in at the time, trying to keep track of what you guys were doing and asking around to see if anyone knew anything. I’d just sent Nelson a message about it when the whole thing sort of… crashed.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Robin, what exactly happened last night? Are we in trouble?”

  “Well, the portal went down around the time things went sideways on us,” I said. “I’m going to give you the short version here because we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Okay,” Gabby said, her voice shaking slightly. “What happened? Why can’t I get in touch with Nelson or… or anyone else from the IT team?”

  I bit my lip, desperately wanting to protect her from having to know what had happened. But she had to know so that she could help us.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, regretting down to the soles of my boots what I was about to do to her quiet world, and opened my eyes when I felt fingers threading through my own. I glanced down, confused, and saw that there was a hand in mine. When I ran my eyes up the arm attached to it, I saw Jace. He was staring at me with those light amber eyes, his face a mask of both sorrow and sympathy. I nearly sobbed aloud at the unfairness of it all. The horror of living in a world where they stole our children and gave them away, the even larger horror of knowing that the very government that did that might be searching for us because we dared stand up against the injustice.

  Beyond that, the deep sadness of knowing that I finally had people I cared for again… but I might lose them at any second. I’d already lost several and had no idea whether I’d ever get them back.

  Jace squeezed my hand in support, and my stomach flipped, suddenly reminding me that I was sitting here holding hands with a guy I found incredibly attractive. I gulped, shot him a glance through my eyelashes, and turned back to the phone.

  I did not let go of Jace’s hand, and he didn’t let go of mine. It seemed we both needed some support at this particular moment, and I wasn’t going to be the one to break the fragile bond we’d found.

  “You can’t get in touch with Nelson because she’s missing,” I answered quietly, trying to control the shaking of my voice at having to say it out loud. I ignored the gasp from Gabby and continued. “We got to the warehouse as planned and dropped the decoy team off with no problem. The main team made it down onto the roof of the warehouse and managed to get inside quickly. We went in through the roof, and it didn’t take us long to find a room that housed some of their computer equipment. Julia and Marco stayed in the ship with Alexy, to watch over the outside, and it all—”

  “Robin,” Gabby interrupted. “I don’t need to know the details. I want to know what went wrong and what we’re supposed to do about it.”

  I almost laughed, because she was right. I was dragging out the events because I didn’t want to get to the end. Getting to the end made it seem too… real.

  “Right. Well, Austin got into their system pretty easily, and we found that the auction site was a lot more than we’d thought. They had everything, Gabby. Birth records, birth places, lists of babies—in both physical and digital formats. And we found something even worse than that. It was some sort of order form, like this was a mail-order business. For babies.”

  “What?” she gasped.

  “Even worse than taking bids on babies that are up for grabs,” Ant added quietly. “Taking personal orders and selling them like they’re a pair of shoes or something. And confiscating babies from families who probably aren’t even below the minimum income threshold.”

  I waved at him to be quiet. We didn’t have time for everyone to start talking, or we’d never get this done.

  “And that was where we got in trouble. Austin called Nelson in to do some of the heavy lifting. We were on the phone with her when she figured out that the Ministry had actually set a trap—for us or someone else, though I guess we’ll never know. There was some sort of trip switch in the system we hacked. Something that grabbed her info and led right back to where she was, and then set off a lot of alarms at the physical location.”

  A short pause, and then:

  “A snare protocol?” Gabby asked in a choked voice. “Did she tell you there was a snare protocol?”

  I nodded, not bothering to ask how she knew that.

  “Yes, that’s the one. It told the Ministry exactly where she was. Plus, they were notified that there were people in their warehouse. She told us we had to get out of there quick, or we’d be found. She was packing up her own place when…” My voice disappeared, and I couldn’t finish the sentence. I still couldn’t believe that she was gone.

  “When she disappeared,” Jace finished for me, moving closer to my side. “We heard a cry, and then she was gone. Moments after that, Julia was in our ears, telling us that we had to get out of there because they’d spotted Ministry aircraft. We had a hard time doing so, and in the end only some of us escaped. Ant, Jackie, Alexy, Zion, Allerra, Cloyd, Samuel, Ida, Alice, Julia, Marco, Robin, and I. We’re the only ones who got out.”

  “And Nelson?” she asked in a small voice.

  I hesitated, hoping that Jace would continue the story, but he glanced at me and lifted a brow.

  Okay then. It was my story to tell.

  “We just went to her office, and it’s been demolished.” I recited the words quickly, hoping they would hurt less that way, and bit down on the last syllable. “We did get some of her hardware, but it’s too badly burnt to be usable. When we got back here, we realized we’d been locked out of OH+.”

  “Not locked out,” Gabby said, and I could already hear the change in her voice. Instead of remaining shocked, she was taking charge, her voice clearing and becoming more direct, controlled. “The portal itself is down. Frozen, somehow. They must have taken it out at the same time they found you guys in the warehouse. They must have known you were coming.” I could almost see her narrowing her eyes as she spoke, because I was doing the same thing.

  “But how?” I asked. “We didn’t talk about this with anyone outside of OH+. We never put it on paper and only discussed it on secure lines.”

  “Secure lines that are attached to a portal that’s now been frozen by someone else,” she pointed out.

  I turned to stare at the others and saw three sets of eyes that were as large as mine. None of us had thought of it that way before.

  If the Ministry was actually in OH+ right now, and that was why we couldn’t get in, then it begged the question, how long had they been there? How long had they been watching us plan our mission?

  Or had they just found OH+ when they got to Nelson’s computer through the snare protocol, and worked quickly enough that it had seemed that the portal went down at the same time as the raid happened? Were they so good that it had been nearly instantaneous? It shouldn’t have seemed so outlandish, I realized a split second later. I’d seen their combat suits and how much better they were than ours. It was common sense that their hackers would have been head and shoulders above ours, too.

  I bet it hadn’t even taken them ten minutes to get in, not if their techs were as good as their mechanical engineers evidently were.

  “Could they be that fast?” I breathed, watching Jace come to the same co
nclusion I was coming to. “Could they be that good?”

  I leaned a bit closer to him, suddenly desperate to feel his warmth and solidity next to me.

  “It doesn’t matter, really,” Gabby replied through the phone. “None of that matters. What matters is that they’re probably in OH+, and we can’t get in. So what do we do? What aren’t you telling me, here?”

  I snorted. The girl had certainly grown in confidence over the last week.

  “The problem is that we’ve lost Nelson and Austin, and we don’t have any other techs available,” I told her. “We’ve been in touch with Nathan, though, and he’s confirmed that something is wrong with the portal. We need someone to get in there and figure it out. Nathan’s going to do it, but he needs someone with him to watch his back.”

  “Me,” Gabby said immediately. “You’re saying I’m the only one left. But where’s the rest of the IT team?”

  Again, there was a waver in her voice at the end of that question, and I frowned.

  “We don’t know,” I told her. “Nathan doesn’t keep phone numbers, and without that portal as a means of communication…”

  “You can’t find them,” she finished. “I guess that includes Robert.”

  I had been about to ask her another question but now snapped my mouth shut. Robert had been one of the other techs, I remembered, but I hadn’t known much about him other than the fact that he and Gabby were working on the same IT team under Nelson. Was this… were they closer than I’d realized?

  I cringed at the idea that they might be—and that I’d just broken this news so harshly. If I’d known, I would have tried to be a little bit more careful.

  “That would indeed include Robert,” Jace said, also frowning. “Is that important in some way?”

  I heard the distinct echo of a sniffle, followed by what sounded like a deep breath, before I heard Gabby back on the phone.

  “It’s important because he was teaching me how to be better at my job,” she said, her voice somewhat hoarse. “He was… teaching me.”

  I widened my eyes at Jackie, who snorted, but it wasn’t the time for mockery.

  “Did he give you his phone number?” I asked, my mind working rapidly through the possibilities. If she had his phone number, the mission we were planning might be moot.

  “No,” she answered quickly. “He said phones weren’t a safe way to communicate, not about this sort of thing. He claimed that the portal was more secure, but even that wasn’t as secure as it could have been. He said—”

  “Well, that won’t help us, then,” Jace said, cutting her off. “What we need, Gabby, is to go into that portal and find some documents. Nathan says there’s a list in there, in some hidden file, that contains the addresses of the techs. And we need those contact details if we’re going to get in touch with the techs so that they can either fix OH+ or give us another way to communicate.”

  “We need a way to communicate if we’re going to save our friends,” I added, because Jace seemed to be missing that rather important step. We would never be able to get the information we needed without techs to break into systems and find it.

  He gave me a look out of the corner of his eye and grinned, making my heart leap.

  “And maybe figure out what the government is up to,” Jackie added suddenly. “I mean, we can’t just let them get away with this, can we?”

  I stared at her. I hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest, but I agreed. Whatever the Ministry was doing, it was bad, and at this point we seemed to be the only ones who knew about it. We were the only ones who might stop them. I sighed and mentally added it to the list.

  Gabby, bless her little sixteen-year-old heart, didn’t even pause.

  “Seems simple enough. What can I do?”

  I took a deep breath and gave myself a short lecture. Wasn’t that why I’d called her? That was the entire reason I’d contacted her in the first place! It was just that now that it was there…

  They have Nelson, a voice in my head said. They have Abe and Kory, and they’ll have you if you don’t do something about it. Stop dragging your feet.

  I scowled but couldn’t argue with the voice. They had our friends, and we needed to do whatever was necessary to get them back. That started with getting back into OH+, and if Gabby was sure she could do it safely, then I had to let her.

  “Your face has changed about ten times in the last ten seconds,” Jace murmured. “That usually means you’re having some sort of conversation with yourself. What’s going on?”

  I gave him a quick glance, surprised but not shocked that he knew me so well already. I turned back to the phone.

  “Gabby, how safe are you?” I asked. “How secure is your line? Nelson was one of our best, and they still trapped her and got to her. I don’t want to put you in danger.”

  There was a quick snort on the other end of the line.

  “Robin, I’m in the middle of the ocean, and I’m using satellite signals here on both my phone and my WiFi. Not lines, like you guys have on land. Obviously, there’s always a chance that they might figure it out. I have no idea how good they are. But signals from satellites are bounced all over the place and get lost more often than not. I’ve been doing a lot of research on this, and I don’t think they’ll be able to track me. Even if they somehow managed to do it, they’re not exactly going to show up at my door with a set of handcuffs. Unless they happen to have a submarine in the area, which I doubt. I think it’ll be fine. Besides, it’s not like this is going to take long. With luck, I’ll be in and out before anyone notices anything. And our friends are in danger. Do we really have a choice, here?”

  I smiled. “I guess that’s a good point. You know how to keep yourself safe when you go in there? If they set up a trip wire once—”

  This time there was a distinct huff, and her voice became almost arrogant.

  “Yes, about that. Robert warned Nelson time and again that we weren’t taking enough precautions regarding the Ministry’s tracking devices. Of course, she thought we were hacking someone else’s site, some low-level sales group or something. We knew they’d been clever with how they built the site, but even I could see that it wasn’t the most sophisticated thing around. I’d been working on getting in myself, long before I met you. So we didn’t… well, Nelson didn’t think there was anything to worry about. We had the standard security measures in place whenever we went into it, of course—firewalls like you wouldn’t believe, but…”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Let me guess. Robert didn’t think it was enough.”

  “Well, he didn’t,” she said, defensively. “They got in a big fight over it, and that was why he started teaching me in the first place. We thought Nelson might listen to me, because she sure wasn’t listening to him. He even showed me software he developed that provides better protection against what you’re calling trip wires. Which is completely incorrect, by the way.”

  “He built software specifically for this?” Jace asked, frowning. “Why would he do that? Was he planning to start hacking the Ministry or something?”

  I heard the pause and could sense that she didn’t want to tell us. I jumped in.

  “Gabby, we need to know. Our friends are in trouble—and they’re your friends, too.”

  A sigh was the only response for a moment. Finally, she spoke again.

  “He’d heard that the Ministry liked to lay that sort of trap. You know, the snare protocol. He figured that if he had an answer for it, it might help us get into the archives easier. But he never told anyone else. If Nelson had known…”

  It didn’t take much to follow that through to the natural conclusion. Gabby was either going to blame herself or Robert for not having protected Nelson appropriately.

  “Stop that right now,” I snapped. “She might not have used it in the end, regardless. She told us she’d cut out most of her security, so she could move through the database more quickly during the raid. She might have been worried about snare proto
cols, but by the time she got in there, she was pretty sure the place was clean. You couldn’t have saved her by telling her, Gabby. Stop thinking that you could have.”

  A long pause followed, and for a moment I thought we’d lost her. After a choked sound, her voice came back, thick with the sound of tears she wasn’t letting herself cry.

  “So, Nathan and I are going in together? When? What do I need to have ready?”

  I turned to Jace because this was officially the end of my duties. I’d secured a tech. In turn, he needed to talk to his boss and sort out the next step. Jace glanced at his phone and tipped his head as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at—the way he did when he didn’t want to say something.

  “Hux?” I asked. “Gabby has a question that I can’t answer.”

  He looked up at me, then Ant, and finally Jackie.

  “Well, it turns out Nathan isn’t going to be taking part in this activity after all,” he said, gesturing to his phone. “He just texted me that he thinks it’ll be safer and quicker for one hacker to go in by themselves. Fewer people making waves… that sort of thing.”

  I opened my mouth, too shocked for a moment to respond, and tried to make sense of what he’d just said.

  “You mean Nathan just used us to find another tech?” I finally asked, my voice dangerously quiet.

  Jace squirmed, and I had the sense to tell myself that it wasn’t his fault and that I shouldn’t take it out on him.

  “Hux,” I said, my voice softer this time. “What’s going on?”

  He gave me a frustrated look and then glanced at the phone.

  “Gabby, why don’t you start getting together whatever you’ll need to go into the portal and find what we’re looking for? We’re going to call you right back.”

  He disconnected the call before she could reply.

  19

  I sat back, releasing Jace’s hand as I crossed my arms over my chest. In my peripheral vision, I saw that Ant and Jackie were doing the same thing, though I couldn’t imagine why. Neither of them had even met Gabby in person. They couldn’t pretend to be too attached to her. Then it occurred to me that they were acting in solidarity.