The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  We turned up the next street, not having the time to care which direction we were heading in, and then hung a sharp right into an alleyway. I could hear the agent behind us, still screeching at us to stop in the name of the Authority—as if we were going to just give up and turn ourselves in—but his voice was far enough behind us that I thought if we could just get one or two corners ahead of him, it might work.

  If he was there alone, it might work. I started praying that he didn’t have any backup in the region. That he’d been out on his own, searching for us or going about his business, and that he wouldn’t radio for backup before we got away.

  This alley was a short one, and we sprinted over the dirty pavement and reached the other end of it within seconds, then turned left again and dashed up a wide-open street to another alley. A smaller, darker, dirtier one. Halfway through this one we ducked through an open door… and found ourselves in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant.

  The chefs and servers turned to stare at us, their mouths hanging open, and I took a moment to glance at the pots of sauce and pasta on their stoves, and the loaves of bread in the oven.

  My God was I hungry.

  But we weren’t there to eat, and we shot out of the kitchen and into the main dining room, then through the front doors to an entirely different neighborhood. This was all small markets and food stalls, and though the sidewalks were crowded, everyone here looked happy and satisfied, having either just come from dinner or making their way toward a restaurant.

  Jace slowed to a quick walk to match the rest of the traffic and threw a glance over his shoulder. I watched his eyes turning quickly back and forth and saw the moment when he decided that we hadn’t been followed.

  “Safe, I believe,” he murmured. “At least for now. I don’t think he saw us duck into that restaurant. I think… I think we lost him.”

  I turned around and limped backward, my eyes scanning the road behind us, my mind praying that he was right. After several moments of watching, I could confirm that I hadn’t seen the man who had been chasing us.

  It looked like we had, incredibly, gotten away.

  “The coffee shop is only about a block from here,” Jace said, taking my hand and turning me around to face front again. “Let’s get in there and see whether Allerra is still waiting for us. And whether she has the information we’ve been searching for. We’ll just have to pray that Ant and the others show up soon—and that we’re the only ones who ran into an agent from the Authority.”

  8

  We rushed into the coffee shop right over Jace’s house, and I immediately breathed a sigh of relief at having arrived. Jace had told me that the owner of the shop was a friend of Nathan’s, and that Nathan had secured a promise from the guy to protect Jace. I didn’t know Nathan, so I had no idea how much faith to put in his friend or the loyalty of the relationship, but Jace had seemed sure of the arrangement. Which, for now, had to be good enough for me.

  The first thing I did was glance toward the table in the corner—the one where I’d last seen Allerra, when we dropped her off here on our way to our date with the Authority jail. I wanted to see her here, safe. I wanted to rush over to her, ask whether she’d known about any escape route, and hear that she knew exactly where we were supposed to go and what we were supposed to do.

  Maybe even hear that she knew how to get in touch with Nathan and Little John. Where to reach Zion. How to get us to safety.

  But the table was empty.

  “She’s not here,” I murmured, gesturing with my chin.

  Jace looked at the table, then scanned the entire seating area, frantic at this additional disappearance.

  “Maybe she’s locked herself in the bathroom?” Jackie asked hopefully, then rushed over to the restroom and darted inside.

  She returned a few moments later with a grim look, and I exhaled.

  “Dammit,” Jace said.

  I nodded at the comment, but had to admit I didn’t feel completely surprised. Nothing had gone right since we’d woken up in that meadow, so why would we have found her here? Zion and Alexy were missing; Cloyd and Nathan were ignoring our calls; no one was answering texts…

  And now we had confirmation that the Authority was after not just the people we’d broken out of prison, but us, too. And they evidently had photographs.

  I put that thought away immediately, not yet feeling ready to process all the implications of it, and glanced around the place. It looked like a normal day in a normal coffee shop, with patrons sipping their coffee while reading books, looking at magazines and their phones, and even playing chess. It didn’t look like anything special. Hopefully the Authority agents wouldn’t think to search for us here.

  We made our way quickly to a table in the back, and I passed my gaze over the place again. I also didn’t see Ant or the others. I hoped they were in the library making prints, and not in some van on the way to prison.

  I was frowning and about to say something about the others when they walked right through the doors, large stacks of paper in their hands. I sat up straight and waved at them, and they approached and fell into chairs, looking as relieved to see us as I felt about seeing them. And given the large amount of paper in their hands, I was guessing they’d been successful with printing out the timeline. Which meant we at least had a start on our next step.

  Ant walked right to Jackie, pulled her up out of her seat, and wrapped her in his arms.

  “I’ve never been so happy to see you,” he murmured. “When you didn’t show up at the library, I just knew I was going to have to break into another jail to rescue you.”

  I couldn’t see Jackie’s face, but I could imagine the grin she was wearing, and the way she was feeling inside.

  “So?” Kory asked, dropping into a seat next to Jace. “We did our job. We have the timeline. But you guys just disappeared. What happened? Have you found Allerra? Did she know anything?”

  “Not quite,” Jace replied, his voice low and tense. “We were about two blocks away from the place when we ran into an Authority agent.”

  Kory sat up straighter and stared at Jace. “What?”

  Jace nodded. “Yeah. And he knew who we were. He kept looking at his phone like he was matching our faces to pictures he had there. Even pulled out a badge and shouted that we were under arrest.”

  “And can I just note how insanely scary that badge was?” Jackie cut in. “It was 3-D, reached right out toward us like it was going to grab us and take us to jail itself.” So that hadn’t been my imagination.

  “But you guys got away,” Kory said.

  “So it would seem,” Jace muttered. “But I don’t think we have much time to hang around in the city anymore. The public might not be looking for us, but the Authority agents definitely are, and this one wasn’t even dressed in the usual blue jumpsuit. He looked like some businessman just out for a walk.”

  “That means they’ve got people under cover as well,” Kory said. “That’s fun.”

  “Exactly,” Jace continued, giving Kory a pointed look. “And I’m willing to bet that they have spies as well. Which means we can’t know who’s harmless and who’s not. I don’t think anyone followed us here, but it’s only a matter of time before we see another one of them. We’re going to have to think of something better. Allerra isn’t here, which means we’re officially out of people to search for, and people who might know about any plans Zion or Alexy had for us after the jailbreak. We have to figure out how to move on by ourselves. But we can’t stay in the city. It’s too dangerous.”

  At that moment, the volume on the coffee shop’s TV was turned way up, and we all whirled toward the counter where it sat. To my utter horror, it was a news program—and it was talking about the jailbreak from the night before.

  “The group calls themselves OH+,” the newscaster was saying in a monotone voice, “which we believe stands for Operation Hood. Not all of the group was involved in the jailbreak, but certain members were, and those members are now conside
red to be enemies of the state. The Authority has requested that the public help bring them in for questioning regarding a possible terrorist plot.”

  “Oh my God,” I breathed. “They’re calling us terrorists.”

  “Surest way to get the public to turn you in,” Jace returned. “Make them think they’re in danger, and they’ll become your best officers.”

  We all put hands up over our faces in whatever way we could and stared at the TV in shock.

  “We do have photographs of almost all the criminals,” the newscaster continued. “Those who escaped from Authority prison are lined up along the bottom of the screen now…”

  My eyes dropped to the bottom of the screen, and there I saw pictures of my friends—stills taken from the video the Authority had sent us. They were right there on TV, for all the world to see.

  We weren’t going to be safe in public at all. Not unless we wore disguises at all times. They were making sure of that.

  “And these are the men and women who perpetrated the crime,” the newscaster continued.

  And there, sitting right in between Jace’s picture and Jackie’s, was my own face. It was in black and white, and had obviously been shot at night, but there had been a neon sign over me at the time and my features were well lit. I remembered exactly where I’d been at that moment, and even how the air had smelled. We’d thought that we had put on our masks early enough, that we had been careful.

  My God, had we been stupid.

  “Holy crap,” Ant breathed, staring at the screen. “They got us on the traffic cams. We never even thought to disguise ourselves against them at the time, and we had used the things! We were such idiots.”

  He was right. We hadn’t considered that we were on camera twenty-four hours a day, if the government cared to look. And that we’d been on more cameras during the jailbreak than we ever would have been during regular life.

  We just hadn’t thought about the fact that there would have been cameras on the streets too. Although, even if we had, what would we have done about it? We’d approached the compound’s gates thinking that we might be able to go through in disguise as two agents and their group of prisoners, and we couldn’t have worn our masks at that point. They would have immediately identified us as suspicious.

  We hadn’t bothered with masks until we’d known we couldn’t go with plan A and had found a different way into the compound.

  “Right, well, we can’t go out in public, then,” Jackie said, her voice cracking a bit. “Jace, any suggestions?”

  “My apartment,” he said firmly, already standing. “I have better security than anyone else, and we can get food from the coffee shop. It might not be ideal in terms of space, but it’ll give us a safe place to hide until we can figure out how to get out of Trenton.”

  We all turned toward him, listening, and at that minute, I heard from behind the bar, “Yes, they’re sitting in my coffee shop right now. One of them has been living below me for months. I never suspected a thing.” There was a pause as we all swung around to stare at the man who was calling the cops on us.

  “Walter?” Jace asked, stunned.

  The man simply gave him a cold look that said Jace belonged in jail and then turned his back on us.

  “Yes, I’ll try to keep them here,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” Jace breathed, and I felt a twinge of sorrow for him. He’d trusted Nathan so much, and though I never had, I’d stayed quiet, not wanting to disturb Jace’s respect for the man.

  It seemed, though, that we’d come to the edge of Nathan’s powers. This man was supposed to be beholden to Nathan, loyal beyond compare. Yet he’d just called the enforcers to turn us in.

  9

  “On my God, we’ve got to get out of here,” Jackie gasped.

  I cast my gaze around the room, trying desperately to catalog our position, but I already knew the coffee shop—which meant I knew exactly how stuck we were. This wasn’t a large shop, and though it wasn’t crowded with furniture, we’d also fallen right into this guy’s hands by taking the table farthest from the front door. There were bathrooms in the back corner, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think any of them had a convenient back-door exit we could use.

  “Hux, what do we do?” I asked, turning my gaze on him and finding his face tenser than I’d ever seen it. Even when we were in the midst of the raid on the warehouse, he’d looked mostly in control of his emotions. Right now, though, his face looked… fragile. Or maybe too intensely affected. I wasn’t sure, but it was an expression I’d never seen him wear before.

  He wasn’t used to being betrayed, I suddenly realized. Jace had grown up with family and a close community, and I was willing to bet he’d rarely experienced people selling him out or betraying him for their own purposes. He’d probably never experienced one of Nathan’s people turning on him like this. Every time I’d asked, he’d made it seem like he thought Nathan was infallible. For someone who valued trust and loyalty so deeply, this had to be an extremely deep wound.

  But we didn’t have time for sensitivity. Not now. My hand shot out and clenched his wrist, and I squeezed hard.

  “Hux. We need a way out of here!”

  I could feel everyone else leaning in toward him, and in the background, could hear the man named Walter still on the phone, giving our physical descriptions.

  As if the Authority even needed them. They had us on camera, for God’s sake. They knew exactly what we looked like. And probably our names, and definitely our addresses, and, for all I knew, the names of all our siblings and where we worked, as well. This clinched it—we were absolutely never going back to our old lives, now. Nowhere to go from here but straight forward. As quickly as possible.

  “Hux!” I hissed.

  Finally, he turned to me, and I saw the mists of doubt and betrayal quickly clearing from his eyes. “Right,” he said, snapping out of whatever daze he’d been in. “I-I do have a backup plan. Nathan had warned me in the beginning that something like this might happen at some point. We have to get downstairs to my apartment, though, to get the things I need. The Authority is clearly on their way, and I’m under orders not to leave anything behind that could identify either myself or Nathan.”

  “Go down to your apartment, are you crazy?” Ant hissed. “That’s an even bigger trap than this place! We have to get out of here, pronto, and get somewhere far away from town!”

  Jace glanced at him. “Out of here, yes, but I absolutely cannot leave without the things I have down there. Particularly now that we know Zion and Alexy are gone. It will go faster if I have help, but if the rest of you want to leave ahead of me and meet me somewhere later, be my guest.”

  “I’m staying with you,” I said immediately.

  “Me too.” Jackie said, arching an eyebrow at Ant in expectation.

  After a second of hesitation, Ant nodded. “If she stays, I stay. You guys?”

  “He doesn’t even have to ask,” Kory replied, his face gone dark and serious. He turned to Abe and Nelson. “And as for you two, you’re too beat up and lost to be allowed to go anywhere on your own. So we’re all staying.” He widened his eyes at Jace. “How are we going to do this, Hux?”

  Jace jerked his head in a nod, his body tense. “Okay, I’m not sure what Walter thinks he’s going to do, but he can’t stop all of us if we’re running at him at the same time. He’s only one guy, after all, and I don’t think anyone else in here is going to step in to help him…”

  He looked around the room, his eyes ending up on the front door.

  “Just follow me.” He stood up and rushed for the door.

  None of us needed to be told twice. We were already halfway to our feet from tension and darted after him, knocking over chairs and customers, pushing and shoving when people got in our way. Behind us, we left a trail of broken coffee cups, chairs on their sides, and shouting people.

  Walter screamed into the phone, “They’re getting away! They’re running right out the door!” His voice cracked o
n the high points, and I could hear the rabid need to chase after us in his tone.

  It just made me run faster. My leg hurt, and every time I ran into something I seemed to be hitting the bruised part again, but nothing would be worse than being caught by the Authority. I skirted past a chair with an old lady in it, turning sideways so I would fit between her and the wall, and then darted forward, around another table and in between a couple standing near it. Beside me, Ant hurdled a table—followed closely by Abe—and Jackie ducked down and pumped her arms as she ran like a tiny bull for the door in front of us.

  I hit the open door a split second before I heard Walter slam the phone down and scream even more loudly. “Get them! Don’t just sit around, those are terrorists! Stop them!”

  I knew he’d be coming after us, but some part of me also realized that no one else was even trying to stop us. It would have taken little more than an outstretched leg or hand to have tripped or grabbed any one of us, but the people were letting us go. They might not be helping us, exactly, but they also weren’t hindering us.

  I shot through the door to find Jace already turning right and rushing for the stairs down to his apartment. Ant, Jackie, and I flew down the steps after him, leaving the others to follow as quickly as they could. By the time I got there, Jace already had the door unlocked and was rushing into the apartment.

  “Last person in, close and lock the door!” he shouted.

  He ran into the apartment, grabbed some things from the kitchen, and then ran back and set them next to the doorway. Gas bombs, I saw when I glanced down. He’d been keeping gas bombs in his kitchen?

  “But not until you throw these out! Pull the firing pins, toss them up onto the sidewalk, and then slam the door and lock it!”

  Nelson and Abe had appeared by this point, and when Kory came running through the door, I grabbed the gas bombs myself, yanked all three pins out, and lobbed them up to the sidewalk above me—and right at Walter, who had appeared there, his face red from screaming. He stared in surprise at the bombs dropping at his feet, and I slammed the door just as they went off.