The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows

by Bella Forrest

  We stared at him, all of us quiet. True, there had always been the idea that we’d be discovered and arrested, but I didn’t think any of us had ever actually thought it would happen. It had been one of those theoretical possibilities, like the idea of a meteor striking and taking out the earth one day. Sure, we all knew it could happen, but we didn’t plan it into our everyday lives. We thought we were being so careful, but we’d never taken it seriously enough.

  “Oh my God, I’m in,” Gabby suddenly breathed, breaking in on our useless musings. “Oh my God, it actually worked. It actually worked.”

  “What?” I asked, feeling distinctly antsy about having to sit here twiddling our thumbs while she was doing something so dangerous. “What do you mean, it worked? You didn’t know that it would?”

  “Well, one never really knows, Robin,” she said, adopting her condescending tone once again. “Just because something should work doesn’t mean it will.”

  Her voice grew more rushed.

  “But that doesn’t matter right now. I’ve got Pandora’s Box running for safety, and I’ve got about fifty firewalls between me and the site, so I think I’m safe. I don’t want to keep this open any longer than I have to. It was really weird getting it open, let me tell you. Something’s definitely wrong with the portal. It’s been frozen, like someone took a picture of it and put the image up in the true portal’s place. Except that it’s still the real thing because I could still get into it. There’s a trap on the sign-in. I don’t know what that means, but it looks like anyone who successfully signs in will be somehow… tracked. Or something.”

  I reached out and turned the phone to face me, as if that would make it easier for me to understand what she was saying. Even if I could see her monitor, I knew, it wouldn’t help. When it came to programming language, it was all Greek to me.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked. “Was it hard to get in? Could you have been seen?”

  “It was actually easier than I expected,” she said. “Whatever they did to the site, it eliminated a bunch of the security. I don’t know if that was done purposely, but it’s like they’re daring someone to hack it. They took a bunch of the controls down, so it was almost too easy to get in.”

  Too easy was dangerous. My stomach jumped.

  “Stop bragging, Gabby. Just get in and get whatever it is you need, then get back out again.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” she grumbled. “There are definitely snares set up in here. All over the place, in fact. Pandora is highlighting them for me so that I can block them, but if someone came in here without knowing that they were here…”

  She paused, and I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.

  “If they were triggered, they would lead right back to the person who had gotten into the system. If anyone had managed to sign in, they would have immediately triggered one of these and been caught.”

  My mind flew through the possibilities. They’d set the entire site up as a booby trap. It was all a trip wire, but only if you got in.

  “Why did they freeze it, then?” I asked quickly. “Why not allow sign-ins? It would have been the quickest, easiest way to catch us all.”

  Nathan had been right. If he’d gone in with Gabby and without Pandora’s Box, he would have inevitably set off one of the snare protocols and been immediately trapped. They would have had our leader almost the moment they started searching.

  But why? What exactly were they doing, and how did they know who we were?

  At that thought, I grew more nervous.

  “Gabby, I’ve got a really bad feeling about this, and I’m not willing to let you get hurt,” I said quietly. “Find that file and get the hell out of there! Hux?”

  I turned to him, pleading with my eyes for him to give her the directions she needed, and he nodded.

  “Gab, you ready?” he asked quickly. At her confirmation, he said, “Go to the upper right-hand corner and click on the icon for my account. From there, hit the link labeled ‘MD.’ That will be the main background database—the one only the admins had access to. You got it?”

  A moment later, she said, “I’ve got it. Wow. This is a lot of stuff. Are all these files important?”

  “No,” he snapped. “Most of them are just old conversations. Ignore everything but find the folder called NathanM. Click on it, get inside, and that’s where you’ll find the file. Remember, it’s called TechNoTouch. You there yet? Did you find it?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” she said, but I could hear a note of tension creeping into her voice. Something was wrong. “Something is slowing me down, and I’m not sure what it is. It’s like I’ve got a tail or something. Give me a…”

  A sudden, loud rapping through the phone made us all jump. A voice yelled, “Gabby, what are you doing in there? You’re slowing the internet down! Are you playing one of those games again?”

  “Dad, GO AWAY!” she screamed. “Give me like two minutes, and I swear I won’t use the net for the next week, but right now I don’t have time!”

  I slammed my hand against my forehead, unsure whether to laugh or cry. I refocused on the words she’d spoken before her father’s interruption.

  A tail?

  “Gab, is everything okay?” I asked. I glanced at my watch and saw that four minutes had already passed. I wasn’t sure when we’d landed on five minutes as the safe zone, but we were almost through it already. “We’re running short on time. Are you going to be able to pull this off?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” she said. “I’m grabbing a bunch of other files, too. There’s a ton of stuff in here, Robin, and it’s not all just old conversations. And one of these documents looks like a second list, separate from the list of techs. It’s made up of pages and pages of addresses. Like, at least five hundred of them. No names, just addresses. Hux, why would Nathan be keeping addresses with no names attached to them?”

  I glanced at Jace, who looked just as mystified as I felt. I tried to swallow my heart back down into its normal position.

  “Those… Those aren’t our addresses, are they?” I whispered. Could he have figured out a way to detect our IPs, in spite of our encryption?

  If he had, and if the Ministry had been in the OH+ system, it meant they might have found that second list. They might have found a list made up of our addresses.

  It was getting scarier the longer it took, and I was suddenly sure that there was a lot more going on there than we’d realized.

  “Gabby, grab everything and get out,” I snapped for the third time. “This whole thing feels like a trap, and I want you out of there right now.”

  “Right,” she said. “Let me just—Oh God, oh God, oh God… No. No, no, no, no,” she suddenly muttered. I could hear her fingers clicking madly against the keys of the keyboard in the background, the sounds coming so quickly that it was one continuous clacking—accompanied by Gabby’s panicked murmuring.

  And then the line abruptly went dead.

  I was staring at the phone, echoes of Nelson’s last words to me running madly through my head, when the phone suddenly rang again.

  “Sorry about that. These satellite calls never want to keep a line open for that long,” Gabby said, her voice annoyingly casual.

  “Gabby, what on earth was that?” I shouted. “What happened?”

  “Something grabbed me,” she said simply. “Right as I was trying to get out, something grabbed me from behind and was trying to pull me back in. They had another trap set—one that I didn’t see. It was like…like there was some sort of electronic membrane around the site. I didn’t trip it coming in, but I certainly hit it going out. I have no idea what it was, and Pandora definitely didn’t see it coming.”

  Well. That didn’t sound good.

  “Did it get anything from you?” I asked, trying hard not to panic. “Did it track back to where you were located?”

  She laughed.

  “Good luck to it if it tried,” she muttered. “Like I said, they’d have a hard time rev
erse-hacking me to any real location—through satellite feeds, no less. No, it didn’t get anything from me, just gave me a good scare. I wasn’t expecting to be grabbed at like that. Definitely wasn’t expecting something to come at me without warning. But I’m sure I got away clean, and I’m sure I didn’t bring anything back with me.”

  “Do they know you were in there?” Jace asked. “Will they know we’ve been into the site?”

  “I don’t think so,” she answered slowly. “I erased every trace of myself from the source file and just slid the entire thing back into place. With luck, they were looking the other way at the time. Even if they noticed that something happened, chances are good that they won’t know what it was. It’s not their site, after all. They’ve inevitably damaged the site by hacking into it in the first place, and I doubt they were gentle with their searches. The portal itself is probably damaged beyond repair. So even if they saw it, they’ll probably put it down to just a site issue.”

  “And?” I asked finally. “Did you get what we need?”

  I could hear the smile in her voice when she started talking again.

  “If you’re asking whether I got the file with the names and addresses of the techs, then the answer is a resounding yes. Looks like there are around twenty of them here, and some of them I’ve never heard of before. There’s Robert, of course, and Naomi, and—”

  “And what about the lists of addresses with no names?” Jackie asked. “You get those too?”

  “I did,” Gabby answered. “Grabbed everything I could on the way out, so it’ll take me some time to catalogue it all, but I grabbed that list first. So… yeah.”

  I nodded. We had the lists, and it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what, or whose, they were. If there were as many addresses as she claimed, it had to mean that they were people from both OH+ and OH. Surely that would take the Ministry a while to unpack. That was as far as I was going to think about that. I had enough trouble on my plate. I didn’t need to borrow more.

  “Gabby, do me a favor and start researching those addresses. See if you can find who’s attached to them.” Then, as an afterthought, I added, “I’ll text you my personal address, and the addresses for everyone here. Check the entire list for those first. It should give you a good idea of whether they belong to members of OH+ or OH—or not.”

  I didn’t know how Nathan would have had so much personal information, but I knew that he was a talented hacker. Nelson had told me that he’d have run circles around her when it came to tech, if they ever went head to head. She’d said he must have been that good to have set up the portals we were playing in. I wasn’t going to put it past him to have acquired our information, at some point.

  If he had, he’d just put us in a world of trouble. Based on what Gabby had said, there was no doubt that the Ministry was in OH+. They had access to a whole lot of our personal information.

  “Got it,” she said. “In the meantime, Robin, I’m texting you the list of techs right now. Pass it to the others, will you? Something tells me this is important, which means you should all have it, not just me. And… what are you guys going to be doing?”

  Jace gave me a long, loaded look.

  “Come morning, we start tracking those techs down. I want to know how to get our friends back, and getting to those techs is the first step.”

  “I just don’t understand why we can’t start searching tonight,” I said, frustrated. Jace and I were back in his cavernous underground apartment, the candles and the fire lit. He’d insisted that the four of us split up for the night, making it more difficult for anyone to track us. Then he’d dragged me back to his place for supplies.

  Truth be told, I hadn’t fought him hard on the issue. I was exhausted, both mentally and physically. It was hard to deny that there was something about the basement that made me feel relaxed and safe. Secure in a way I hadn’t experienced since I lived at home with my family. And even different than that—because at that point in time, I hadn’t known what true danger was. These days, I did… which made the sense of peace in this apartment even more important.

  That didn’t mean I was willing to let this go, though, because if the Ministry did have our addresses, no place was truly secure.

  “They can’t possibly know what those addresses are for,” he’d told me when I said what I was thinking. “There are no names or labels attached to them. They’re just anonymous addresses. The Ministry isn’t going to move on them until—and unless—they know what they are.”

  “You don’t think them being stored in a portal that belongs to a group who just tried to hack a Ministry site is enough of a red flag?” I asked archly.

  He thought about it for a moment but then shook his head.

  “The government is trying to keep their public face clean at this point,” he said. “They’re not going to just attack random addresses. I don’t think it’s something we can relax about, by any means, but until we give them a reason to look there…” He shrugged, and I blew out a breath.

  I supposed it made sense. My gut didn’t feel like it was the safest answer, but my brain said it was the rational one. My brain also told me that my gut was overreacting. They might have addresses, but until they knew what those addresses actually were, I didn’t think they’d do anything with them. They couldn’t just go rounding up five hundred random citizens without any real evidence. They might be harsh, but I doubted they would stoop that low. The government still wanted to maintain an air of respect among its people.

  I couldn’t help but wonder how long they’d keep that particular mask in place.

  “Well, I’m starting to think you’re on to something with this whole candlelight, thinking around the fire, plants growing thing,” I said, forcing myself to lie back on the blankets and stretch. If I was going to have to stay still for the night, I could think of worse places to do it. “This place is definitely more relaxing than Ant’s apartment.”

  Jace chuckled, turned on his stomach, and pushed the plate of cheese and fruit toward me. He’d fixed it up as soon as we got here, saying that we needed to keep our energy up, and though we’d devoured almost everything on it, there were still a few grapes and several wedges of brie left. I grabbed one of the pieces and started the frustrating process of peeling the wax away, my mouth already watering at the thought of the buttery smoothness inside.

  Cheese had always been one of my weaknesses. It was a wonder I didn’t weigh three hundred pounds with how much I’d eaten when I was younger. Of course, I hadn’t been able to afford decent cheese in two years—which was what made Jace’s offering even more delicious.

  I finally got the wax crust off the cheese, took a bite, and glanced at Jace.

  “So, what’s the real story?” I asked. “Why aren’t we looking for techs right now? I’m tired, and I know Ant and Jackie are too, but we’re in a lot of trouble. I don’t think any of us would have argued about starting that particular search tonight.”

  Jace sighed and brushed his dark, curling hair out of his face.

  “There are a lot of reasons, though I’m not sure any of them are going to be good enough for you. The first and most important is that we do need to rest. It’s been an… eventful couple of days, and though you might feel like you could keep going forever, that’s just a lie your body is telling you. The truth is, you’re burning through your resources quickly in order to keep going, and we might need those resources in the coming days.”

  I opened my mouth, ready to argue, but he put out a hand to brush a strand of hair off my forehead, and all thought of speech flew from my mind. His fingers had just barely brushed my skin—just barely—but they’d lit a path of flame where they’d made contact, and my heart was doing strange things in my chest.

  I took another bite of cheese, devouring a slice of wax in my haste, and tried to focus my thoughts again.

  Techs. We had to find the techs. The list. Right.

  “I think we’d be fine,” I said quickly, my eyes on the wal
l. “We have to find those techs soon, before something bad happens to our friends.”

  “There are several steps between finding the techs and finding our friends, but I agree with you on that point,” he said, drawing his hand back to his own side of the blanket. “But that brings me to my next point: what we’re going to be doing is more than a little bit dangerous. You saw what they did to Nelson’s place, and I know you ran into a Ministry agent while you were there. Things got so hairy that you guys actually had to jump out a window to escape. Something tells me that was just the start.”

  I stared at him.

  “Back up. How do you know we jumped out a window?” I’d told him about the burnt-out building, and about the man who had asked too many questions. But I definitely hadn’t told him about jumping out that window.

  He gave me one of those half smiles—the ones that meant trouble—and shrugged.

  “You didn’t really think I was going to let you go walking into a situation like that without keeping an eye on you, did you?”

  I gaped at him, unsure of how to feel about that. Happy that he’d been there—or frustrated that he hadn’t trusted me to do it on my own. Then he glanced up at me through his eyelashes, and I decided to be happy that he’d been there.

  Not that he’d been much help.

  “You were watching us,” I muttered.

  He nodded.

  “I was afraid it was a trap and that you guys were going to go rushing into it without being prepared, so I followed you. I stayed out of the way because I was worried that if I appeared it would surprise you enough that you would get sloppy, and I didn’t get to stay the entire time. I ran into someone on his way into the house and got into a bit of a fight with him. Had to get out of there before I could see you guys home safely. Still, I was… there.” He finished it abruptly, as if it embarrassed him, and I aimed a soft blow at his shoulder.

  “You followed us? And here I thought you were obeying Nathan’s orders!”

  He blushed.

  “I made sure I wasn’t followed,” he said defensively. “But I didn’t feel right letting you go on your own. I believed in what you were doing. Nelson is one of our best techs, and if we’d been able to get her on this case…” Then he frowned. “And I meant what I said. Something tells me that we’ll run into other traps like that one. We all need to be on our toes. And for that to happen, we need to be rested.”