The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows

by Bella Forrest

  “Robin’s right,” Zion said quickly. “The Ministry is just in charge of shuffling kids from one place to another and tracking people in regard to their poverty level. No way they’ve got a private army. We’ve been foolish to think we were dealing with them.”

  “But we know it’s their site,” Jackie argued. “We know they’re the ones selling babies.”

  “But it’s not just them,” I said slowly. “It can’t be. I don’t know a lot about the government, but departments obviously don’t run completely independent of each other. If the Ministry is using another branch of the government to do their dirty work, then it means…”

  “That the entire government knows they’re stealing and selling babies,” Jace said, frowning. “Though, I think most of us already suspected that, and it’s a problem for another time. For right now, we have to figure out who or what this Authority is—and where they’ve got our friends.”

  At that, Ant leaned back pensively.

  “Well, that’s more like it,” he said. “So, what the hell are we going to do to get our people out of there?”

  “First things first,” Zion said. “We list what we know and what we don’t. We know they have some of our friends. We know we’re on a dangerously tight timeline in terms of getting them back, and that their lives are literally on the line. We know—at least, I think we’ll all agree—that we can’t just give ourselves up. That whole thing about being sent to live somewhere else? They must think we’re stupid. It’s obviously an outright lie. We know way too much for them to let us off that easily.”

  “But what if they’re telling the truth?” Allerra asked desperately. “Isn’t there a chance that they might send us somewhere far away, somewhere where we wouldn’t have to deal with this government anymore? Maybe out of the country, in Europe somewhere? I’ve always wanted to visit Europe.”

  The last sentence was delivered with such wistfulness, I wanted to cry for her. I hadn’t been planning on getting in this deep, but I was also an adult. Allerra was just a kid, who’d probably had no idea what the possible repercussions of her actions were.

  Of course, none of us had been expecting this. None of us really had a clue about what we were going to do next.

  “I agree with Zion,” I said. “We know too much, and we could make way too much trouble for this government. It wouldn’t matter where they sent us, because we could get in touch with the press or other governments and tell them what we know about the corruption going on behind the CRAS, about the hidden mail-order site we found.”

  I took a breath and looked at the others, one at a time.

  “And I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to turn myself in. I’ve just started fighting against this regime, and I don’t want to quit now.”

  Jace frowned.

  “You know,” he said, “I’m not in favor of turning myself in either, but if you think about it—”

  “Hux,” Zion interrupted. “I know what you’re going to say, and there’s a part of me that agrees with you, but I don’t know how we could guarantee anyone’s safety in that situation, and I don’t think now is the time to address it, if you get my drift?” His eyebrows rose, and he turned his eyes toward the other members of the group. Jace nodded.

  I narrowed my eyes, wondering what the heck Jace had been about to say, then turned back to the rest of the group when Gabby started talking.

  “As far as I can see,” she said quietly, “the biggest problem here is that we’re going to need a plan. If we’re not willing to turn ourselves in, then we need to know where they’re holding our friends, so we can rescue them. To do that, we need to do some hacking. I’m thinking that if I can get into some security cameras or the traffic cams that the government puts on intersections, then we can watch for suspicious activity since the raid. Maybe we’ll actually be able to see our friends being transported. If we get into the right cameras, there’s a chance that the Ministry’s—I mean the Authority’s—movements could lead us right to our friends. But to do that, we’ll need—”

  “The techs,” Julia said suddenly. She sat up and glanced around the circle. “Of course, the techs! Where are they? How can we get in touch with them? We’re going to need them to get to work on this immediately!”

  That was where we came to the end of their knowledge—and the start of ours. Most of the group didn’t have any idea what Jace, Ant, Jackie, and I had been doing all morning.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get in touch with them at all, actually,” I said quietly. “Considering we have the list of techs, and over half of them were in that video. One of them is already dead… that we know of.”

  Six sets of eyes swiveled on me, while Ant, Jackie, and Jace all dropped their gazes to stare at their hands.

  My story to tell, I guessed. Terrific. Just what I’d wanted to do to top this meeting off.

  “The Ministry—and the Authority—have a list of our techs,” I went on reluctantly, “and it looks like they’ve taken quite a few of them out by killing or arresting them. We were searching for them earlier, but I think we have to come to terms with the fact that Gabby is probably the only one left.”

  Dead silence met my announcement, and I steeled myself for the inevitable questions that would follow, once the others found their voices.

  28

  The silence lasted for long enough that I started getting nervous—not because I was afraid to tell them the story, but because I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with the number of questions that were about to come flying at me.

  I turned to Jace and gave him a look that said quite clearly that I wasn’t willing to deal with this on my own. After giving Ant and Jackie the same look, I got a nod from Jackie, and, after she gave him a well-placed elbow, another from Ant.

  Of course, it was Cloyd who asked the first question. He seemed to be taking the mission we had completed without his knowledge far too seriously.

  Which made me wonder who the hell had made him emperor of the group.

  “What?” he asked sharply. “What do you mean, all the techs are gone? What do you mean, Gabby’s the only one left? How would you know that? What are you talking about, saying the Ministry has a list of our techs? What—”

  Thankfully, Jace threw a hand up to stop him.

  “One question at a time, Boyd,” he said succinctly. “We can’t answer all of your questions at once. We mean exactly what she said. All the techs are gone, or at least we suspect they might be. We believe they’ve been either arrested or killed, and we don’t have much more than that. Obviously, we know which of the techs they’ve arrested—or at least some of them—based on the video we just saw. The others…”

  He shook his head.

  “As for how and why we think Gabby might be the only one left, she’s the only one who didn’t appear on the list that was sitting on OH+. We don’t know whether the Ministry learned the names of the techs by hacking Nelson’s system, or stealing it, or if they mined the documents in the OH+ portal after they hacked into it, but the fact remains that they found a list and hit everyone on it. We have nothing but their addresses, so we’re not able to try to get in touch with them via phone. Gabby has been safe up to this point because she’s been… out of reach.” He shot me a look at this, confirming that he was planning to keep her location secret, and I nodded in thanks. “After we confirmed that she was still free, we decided we should use her.”

  “Use her for what, exactly?” Zion asked, his tone more curious than Cloyd’s, and certainly friendlier. His eyes met mine, and I dropped my gaze to the table, feeling somehow guilty that we’d kept so many secrets from the rest of our core group. Even if it had been for their own safety.

  “Use her to hack into OH+,” I replied. “We knew that the portal was down and needed to know why.”

  “Seems to me it’s probably down because there are no techs left to run it,” Marco remarked.

  Jace nodded.

  “That’s true, bu
t there’s more to it than that. You know that Gabby got the video from where the portal used to be. When she hacked into the site, she found that someone else was indeed sitting inside of it, and in addition, they’d laid traps for any outsider who got in. In fact, they set it up specifically so that only a tech could get in. They’d manufactured a situation, meaning to trap a specific piece of our team.”

  “So, the trap was for the techs, but it didn’t matter,” Julia said, frowning. “They’re all gone?”

  Jace, Ant, Jackie, and I shrugged in unison.

  “That’s what we don’t know,” Ant said. “But I can tell you that when we went looking for the addresses that belonged to them, we didn’t find anything good. Burned-out houses, deserted buildings, bodies… and who we assumed was the Ministry, but I guess must have been Authority agents, just waiting for us to show up.”

  “You went to their addresses? Without approval? Just decided to act on your own?” Cloyd gasped.

  I turned on him, heartily tired of his ego. Whatever his problem was, it was not our fault, and I was sick of him interrupting our stories with whatever insecurity issue he had going on.

  “Because Nathan asked us to, Boyd,” I said sharply. “Nathan contacted us and asked us to find a way to break into OH+ to see what was going on—and to find the list he’d made of the techs, so he could contact them and use them to try to get the site up and running again. Once we had the list, our orders were quite clear: get to those addresses and find those techs. I might have gone to find Nelson without Nathan’s approval, but everything we did after that was specifically because he told us to. Now, if you don’t mind, I think we have some planning to do.”

  “The Authority is killing people?” Allerra asked in disbelief.

  I wanted to hug her, but she was on the other side of the table.

  “I’m afraid so. We know that at least some of them are in jail, thanks to that video. And we know…” I gulped, remembering the look on Jace’s face in Bobby’s high-rise. “We know that at least one of them is dead. That only covers twelve of them. The rest…”

  I shrugged. We were missing techs, and we had no real way of knowing where they were, or whether they were even still alive.

  Given the treatment of Bobby Jace had seen, I wasn’t positive that we could count on the government having been too gentle while making arrests. I also didn’t want to count out the fact that those techs might have escaped. Granted, Nelson hadn’t been so lucky, but I tended to be an optimist, and not even the events of the last couple days seemed to have taken that out of me.

  “Why would they have gone after the techs only?” Allerra asked, frowning. “Why wouldn’t they go after all of us?”

  “First of all, there wasn’t a handy list that said, ‘These are the members of OH+ and where to find them,’ while there was a list that said exactly that about the techs,” Ant offered. “There was a second list, of about five hundred unattached addresses, but we’re not positive that the government got that—or even who all the addresses belong to. We do recognize some of the addresses, but the fact that they’re unlabeled, and that we don’t know whether the government got that deep into the site, means that particular list is secondary, for now. There’s no doubt that they know about the raid on the warehouse. They sent soldiers to attack us, for God’s sake. We just haven’t figured out how long they’ve known about us, or how exactly it all went down, chronologically.”

  “You mean how long they’ve known about OH+,” Zion clarified, and I glanced at him, surprised. Of course, that was what we were talking about. What else would we have meant?

  “We don’t know when they figured out that we were even a thing,” I said slowly, wondering at his question. “We don’t know whether they picked up on Nelson and her team when they were initially probing the auction site, or whether they learned everything from the snare protocol she hit on the night of the mission and just moved amazingly fast. We don’t even know how long they were in OH+. We don’t know if they were watching all the conversations we were having about what we wanted to do, right from the very start.” I stopped talking, too near tears to continue. I bit down on my lower lip.

  That was the scariest part. We might have been stupid enough to break into a warehouse that housed a website that looked like it was selling children, but we hadn’t thought we were doing anything wrong. We’d just thought we were doing our best to keep the country safe by getting rid of a site like that.

  But if they’d been reading everything we’d been saying, if they’d known about OH+ right from the start, it would mean that they had us on a whole lot more than just trying to keep society safe from a bunch of guys who looked like they were auctioning off kids. They’d have us on attempting to undermine the government itself. Add to that the fact that we now knew that the Ministry was running a site where they sold off children…

  We would be in so much trouble that we’d never go free again once they got their hands on us. If they even let us live. And we hadn’t thought we were taking that risk. Not yet. So, we had no outline for how to deal with it.

  “We definitely can’t turn ourselves in,” I added, needing to voice that thought. “If there’s even a chance they’ve been watching us from the start, they’ll put us in jail for the rest of our lives for rebelling against the government, and for knowing what we know about them.”

  “Which brings us back to the fact that we’ve got to rescue our friends rather than turn ourselves in, and then find a way to hide,” Julia said, all business. “That’s going to be even more difficult because to do anything at all, we need the very techs they’ve arrested. It’s going to complicate our next step, because we need someone to help us sort out where our friends are and how to get them. The problem, then, is to figure out where we can come by people with enough hacking and programming experience to get that done. And we’re in fairly short supply of people like that. Am I reading you right?”

  I took a moment to appreciate her flat, logical take on the situation, and began to see exactly why Nelson had always treated the auburn-haired girl as the second-in-command in the group. I’d never noticed how rational she was until that moment, when my own emotions were running haywire.

  “Right, exactly,” I said, giving her a slight smile.

  “Is there any chance that they kidnapped the techs specifically, so we couldn’t rescue our friends?” Marco asked suddenly. “So we wouldn’t have any choice but to turn ourselves in?”

  Jace shook his head. “I don’t think so. Feels too simple to me.”

  “And there’s no chance that there might still be techs left out there?” Marco continued.

  “Again, given what we saw of the government agents at the last address we managed to make it to—and afterward—I would say that there’s a virtual guarantee that all of those addresses have been searched, and are now set up as traps,” Jace said. “They might not have found all of our techs, and some might have gotten away to safety, but we can’t go to those addresses to look for them. Not if we want to stay out of their clutches.”

  He cast a quick look toward Zion and Alexy, with a nod that I thought was probably a sort of thanks for having saved us from the exact situation we were discussing. Without those men in black, we would indeed have been in the Ministry’s clutches.

  “Besides,” I added, “we don’t exactly have a lot of time. Three days, that’s all we get. And then our friends are…”

  I couldn’t finish, because my throat closed up again, but I’d made my point.

  The others nodded quickly, and the meeting felt like it suddenly got down to business. The questions and arguments were over.

  “Well then, I suppose there’s only one thing to do,” Zion said, repeating the way he’d started the conversation. “We have to find a tech to sort this all out for us. We need them to figure out where our friends might have been taken and how we might get them back.”

  He looked up and met my eyes, and this time I held his gaze. I was in agreem
ent with what he said.

  “We get in there, rescue our friends, and get out again. From there, we do whatever we have to do to stay out of reach of the government… until we figure out what we’re going to do next. I have some thoughts in that regard, but it’s not going to matter much if we fail at rescuing our friends in the first place. Seems to me that we have a lot of planning to do. And I don’t think this is the safest place to do it. I don’t know about you, but talking about any of this in public is making me itch with nerves.”

  Everyone looked around the table and rose from their seats, waiting for someone to volunteer an idea of where to move the meeting. But then Julia put her hand up and started talking again.

  “None of that is going to matter if we don’t have techs,” she said, meeting Zion’s eyes. “The first question we have to ask—the one that’s going to influence everything else, and even whether we can pull any of this off—is where we’re going to get the technical support.”

  “From me,” a voice suddenly said, and I jumped and looked at my phone. It was still sitting on the table. I’d completely forgotten that Gabby was on the line, listening to everything we said.

  “I’m the only tech you have left except for Nathan, and we know that he doesn’t want to be involved because it’s too risky,” she said clearly. “So you don’t have to ask the question of who you’re going to use for technical support. I’m your only option, and I’m ready and willing. Give me my orders, and I’ll make sure it’s done.”

  I stifled a grin of both affection and pride. When I’d first met her, I’d thought that Gabby was just a kid who could use some friends and perhaps a mentor. I’d insisted that she get an invitation to OH+ because I’d thought she had some interesting ideas and had wanted to give her something to do.

  Getting her involved was probably one of the smartest things I’d ever done. She’d already proven to be more adept at functioning in this world than I ever could have imagined. If she could help us rescue our friends, I would be voting for her to have a seat at the grown-up table from that point on.