The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  Abe and Kory, I knew, would do the same, though it would be slightly more difficult for Abe, since he was on his own. I just hoped he was clever enough to figure it out.

  From there we sped through the city individually, keeping to the outskirts as much as we could to try to avoid the traffic, and diverting to side streets and alleyways whenever we saw people up ahead who looked like they might be troublesome. It wasn’t too difficult, thanks to Ant and Jackie being in the lead, using the comm to warn the rest of us about anything to watch out for. Evidently one of Jackie’s other hidden talents was rerouting the GPS at the drop of a hat to give us alternative routes to wherever we wanted to go.

  Before I knew it, we were in a section of the city I recognized. The area where the factory workers were housed. I wasn’t sure why Jackie had taken us through this area, as it was a very indirect way to get to my house, but I trusted her to get us there eventually.

  The high-rise buildings soared up into the sky around us, their tiny, crowded windows staring out over the horizon, and I cringed the way I’d always cringed when I was here. I’d always thought the place looked like a graveyard, the buildings rising above the streets like tombstones, just waiting for the people to die, beaten down by the world into which they were born.

  The only difference was that this area was usually horribly congested with people who were alive. In fact, it was one of the most crowded areas I’d ever been in, which was one of the reasons I’d chosen not to live here.

  And that made it all the more odd that, right now, the place actually looked like a ghost town. There wasn’t a soul on the streets, and as we shot past the buildings, I could see that the windows and doorways were empty as well. No one crouching in the alleys, trying to avoid factory managers; no children playing in the shadows of the one or two trees on the street.

  After the crowds we’d just come through, it was downright eerie.

  Granted, it was the middle of the day, and all the able-bodied adults were probably in the factories, shuffling pieces of merchandise from one conveyer belt to another, or some other mentally stimulating sort of job, and that might account for some of the emptiness. But there should still be people here. People who had called in sick for the day. Children who weren’t yet old enough to work and had somehow managed to stay with their parents. People who had retired but still lived in this low-income housing, unable to afford to move to a nicer area.

  There should have been life here. Instead all I saw was emptiness. Scooters parked on the sidewalks as if their owners had just gotten up and left them. Cars sitting in the street with their doors open. Apartment doors standing ajar, radios still on… and not a soul to hear them.

  “Where is everybody?” I whispered, mystified.

  “Gone,” Jace murmured, his head turned so that he could speak to me over his shoulder.

  I turned back to the buildings, frowning. It made no sense for this neighborhood to be completely deserted like this, and it frightened me in a way I couldn’t explain, making me feel hollow and afraid.

  Then Jace put a hand to his ear, and the comm, and veered suddenly left—toward the edge of town and the end of this neighborhood—and I put the strangeness behind me, remembering that we had plenty to think through without worrying about the fates of the workers from one neighborhood. For all I knew, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the absence.

  Stop with the conspiracy theories, Robin, I told myself firmly.

  Only, the command didn’t hold much weight. Because after everything that had happened over the past week, I was starting to realize that the conspiracy theories were truer than anyone had ever known before. And that there was way more going on behind the curtain than we common citizens had ever thought there might be.

  I just wasn’t positive that knowing about it actually did us any good. Knowing was, after all, the reason we were currently running for our lives.

  We zipped through the narrow streets, the high-rises towering over us, and then into the neighborhood that catered to the working class, where stripped-down versions of grocery stores and other services did business.

  It was a poor neighborhood, nothing like the area where Jace had lived, and I cringed again as we drove along the streets. There was no one here, either, but I could remember what it had looked like the last time I’d been here. Hungry children had crouched on the sidewalks, and people had been haggling with the owners of the grocery store I was in, trying to get an extra scoop of rice. It had been horrible. Even worse because I hadn’t been in any shape to help them. I’d been just as pathetic, honestly, on my lunch break from the factory and trying to find the cheapest sandwich in the cooler.

  I might have thought that I wanted to go back to my old life… but it actually wasn’t true. I never wanted to go back to that life. Never wanted to feel that shadow of desperation hanging over my head again. I didn’t like that the Authority was after us, or that we were facing prison, or that we were being publicly touted as terrorists, but at least we were doing something. At least we were fighting, rather than caving in to a government that was working so hard to knock us down.

  A moment later we were free of the shops and businesses and moving onto wider streets and then the highway that led out of town—and right to my bit of forest.

  Jackie and Ant had slowed down to wait for us, and Jace slowed as well. Once Kory and Abe caught up, we all leaned forward to streamline ourselves, and I shifted a little to try to take some weight off my leg. Finding a position that worked, I closed my eyes and reveled in the feeling of the wind on my face and the fresh air in my lungs. I rested my face up against Jace’s back, breathing in the warmth and safety of his presence, and prayed that leaving the city behind also meant we were out of danger. At least for a short while.

  Jackie’s mapping system stopped working about ten minutes from my house, at the start of the trees, as I’d expected. Modern mapping systems were extensive, but they were also efficient, and they didn’t really bother with areas that didn’t contain buildings to track.

  “There’s not much to it,” I called. “We’re on the one and only road in the forest. Just take it straight up. It literally ends at my house.”

  We started up what I’d always thought of as the driveway, and I took a deep breath of the pine-scented air, realizing how long it had been since I’d been home. It felt like years, though it had actually been less than a week, and the thought that clean clothes and some of my own things lay at the end of this track brought a sudden smile to my face.

  Then the realization that we might find nothing but rubble and a burnt-out foundation erased it, and after about five minutes of driving, I poked Jace in the ribs.

  “Don’t you think we’d better leave the scooters here and walk the rest of the way?” I asked, leaning closer to his ear. “What if there are Authority agents at the house?”

  He gave me a quick nod and revved the engine to catch Ant, who was only a foot or two in front of us.

  “Pulling over!” he called, motioning to the side of the road.

  Ant nodded and obeyed, and we were followed to the shoulder by Kory and Abe a moment later.

  “What’s going on?” Kory asked.

  “We’re walking into what could be a trap,” Jace replied. “Based on some of the experiences we had while you were in prison, it’s better to do it on foot rather than via noisy scooters. At least that way we have a prayer of going undetected if there are Authority soldiers in there.”

  Kory’s eyes grew wider, but he nodded. “Makes sense,” he said.

  Jace hopped off the scooter, then gathered the backpack and duffel bags he’d had attached to the back of the vehicle. He tossed one of the bags to Kory, and one to Ant, and motioned for us to roll the scooters into the forest.

  “We’ve got to at least get them off the road,” he said.

  I nodded, grabbed the handlebars of our scooter, and strode into the trees, leading the others. I got about ten feet off the path before I found
a spot where the underbrush grew heavier.

  “Perfect,” I murmured, shoving the scooter into the middle of a bush. I took a moment to arrange the branches around the back of it, wishing like crazy that we’d chosen any color other than red, and finally stood back to let the others do the same.

  A moment later we were back on the road and walking toward my house.

  I followed, along with Ant, Jackie, Kory, and Abe, and we crept down the road, everyone doing their best not to make too much noise.

  The forest around us was ringing with bird cries and the chirping of insects, and I breathed out, trying to take comfort in that. If there were dangerous characters or guns in the forest, surely the birds wouldn’t have been singing as loudly and cheerfully as they were. Still, we walked as slowly as possible, each of us casting our gaze around as far as it could go in search of blue jumpsuits or the flash of sunlight off a gun or sunglasses.

  Before long we were at the edge of the copse of trees I recognized as standing directly in front of the cabin, and I whispered for Jace to stop.

  We stood there for a long moment, listening carefully. I didn’t hear anything that sounded like it was manmade, just the continued chirping of birds, the buzz of insects, and far away, the howl of a wolf. Odd for them to be out during the day, I thought, but maybe they’d somehow sensed that I’d come home…

  “I think it’s safe,” I whispered softly in Jace’s direction, and he nodded.

  “I think you’re right,” he replied. “I don’t feel anything but nature here.”

  Given that he’d grown up in the wild, his affirmation was enough for me. “Then let’s go,” I whispered.

  If my cabin was still standing, we needed to get there sooner rather than later, so we could gather supplies and get out of there. I had no idea where we were going to go after this, or whether any place would even be safe, but I knew we couldn’t stay. Not when the Authority might have the address and was searching for us.

  We stepped into the trees and strode forward, Jace’s head swiveling as he looked left and right for any sign of soldiers. My head turned too, my gaze darting through the woods that surrounded my home, my heart racing along with it.

  If there were soldiers, I figured this was where they would be—here in the woods, watching the front door of the house. Just waiting for me to be stupid enough to come home.

  If they had that list of five hundred addresses. If they’d gotten to this part of it yet. And especially if they’d done their research and used facial recognition software to connect a name to my face. It would have been short work to figure out which address on the list belonged to that name.

  There was no one in the trees, however, and a second later we’d come within ten feet of the clearing that surrounded my little house.

  I looked up, terrified of what I might see.

  And then exhaled in relief.

  The house was still standing there, the way it always had. Completely whole, and devoid of soldiers.

  I suddenly relaxed, abruptly letting go of the idea that we were going to arrive here only to be caught.

  Home was still home, and it still meant safety, at least for the moment. After what we’d been through, that thought was a bright, shining beacon of hope—although, I wasn’t stupid enough to think it would last.

  13

  I stared at the house for several seconds, trying to collect my thoughts and figure out my next move.

  Then I gave in to instinct and started running toward it. Home. It represented so many things that I hadn’t truly realized I’d been missing until that moment. My own things. My clothes, my journals, my computer, and everything I had of my history. I’d been living in someone else’s world for the last week, facing things I didn’t know how to deal with or didn’t even truly understand, but here, right in front of me, was the world I knew.

  Before I’d gone five steps, however, a hand grasped me around the upper arm and yanked me back.

  “Are you crazy?” Jace hissed in my ear. “For all we know there are soldiers inside that place, just waiting for you to barge in!”

  I grimaced. He had a point. I’d just been too excited to see my house to think about it.

  “What do you suggest we do?” I murmured, looking up at him. I hadn’t come this far just to stand here staring at my house. I wanted to be inside it, wanted to touch my own things so badly that my fingertips were itching.

  Jace stared at the cabin for a moment, and then glanced behind us at the others. “Everyone else is going to stay right here,” he finally said. “Jack and I will get to the cabin and check inside and around it to make sure it’s safe.”

  “Wait, what?” Abe asked. “Why you two? What are you trying to do, pick the biggest people we have? Of all of us, you’ll have the most trouble hiding!”

  I hid my grin at that. Abe didn’t know who Jace and Kory had been in their previous lives, so of course he didn’t know that they were in fact the best options when it came to sneaking through the woods without being seen. I knew, though, and gave Jace a quick nod of agreement. The others, having seen him in action, agreed as well, and a moment later Jace and Kory were sneaking through the trees, somehow making themselves look like part of the forest itself. It was amazing, and I would never have believed it if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes, but it was as if the shadows of the trees grew larger to accommodate their forms, making it so difficult to see them at times that I had to blink and squint to remind myself that they were actually there. They moved incredibly quickly, and then became completely and utterly still a second later, when they hit a sheltered place. Before I could count to ten, they were at the end of the copse of trees and staring out into the clearing that surrounded the house.

  They both paused, considering the ten feet of open space between them and the small cabin. Then they began moving in opposite directions at the same time. They melted through the shadows and around the trees in the circle of woods that surrounded the cabin, and I remembered suddenly that the woods came closer to the cabin on the other side. So close that they sometimes scratched at the roof, if the wind was right—a sound that had woken me with a scream on my lips more than once. I glanced at the cabin, wondering whether they’d known that they’d be able to get closer on the other side, or were just searching for soldiers, and when I looked back to where Jace had been, he was gone.

  It was the first time I’d been away from him in more days than I cared to count, and though it was stupid, my stomach plummeted at his sudden absence, my fingers aching for the warmth of him.

  I gave myself a mental shake and turned my head to stare at the cabin, trying to figure out whether there was anyone inside. It was a tiny place, so even if there were Authority agents in there, there couldn’t be many of them. Still, it only took one of them with a gun to kill us, and there was no telling how many of them might be in the woods around the place.

  I held my breath, my hands clenched, as we waited for any sign that Kory and Jace had been caught or had found that the place was safe.

  Around me, I could hear the deep silence of four other people holding their breath as well and knew that my friends were just as tense as I was. Nelson and Abe might not have spent the last week running and hiding from Authority agents, but they’d actually been in their jail, and had no doubt experienced enough of them to know that the Authority didn’t mess around when it came to dealing with anyone they saw as their enemy.

  Suddenly, Kory and Jace returned, striding boldly past the cabin and through the open space toward us.

  “Everything looks clear,” Jace said when he reached us. “There’s no sign of anyone having been in the woods around the house, and you left the curtains open on the window on the other side, so we could see into it. Not much space in there for anyone to hide, is there?” he asked, grinning.

  I gave him a soft punch. “You try affording a place all by yourself on a factory worker’s salary,” I said. Then I thought about what he was saying, and grinned back. “So
it’s safe, then. There’s no one around, and all my stuff is still there?”

  He shrugged. “As far as I can see. Of course, I don’t know how much you had before. Half of it could be missing, for all I know.”

  I gave him a narrow-eyed look, half pleased and half annoyed at his teasing, and then started quickly toward the house, my mind already making a list of the things we needed to do once we were in there. Gather supplies. Food. Medical stuff. Clean clothes. Maybe even a chance to wash my face with my own soap…

  Once I was there, though, I realized that I had a problem.

  Since the last time I’d been here, I’d worn several different suits, run from Authority soldiers at least three times—four if you counted the man we’d met outside of Nelson’s house, who I was sure was with the Authority— showered a number of times at someone else’s house, slept at someone else’s house, and invaded a prison to break out my friends. I had no idea where my keys were. I didn’t even remember the last time I’d seen them.

  But before I could turn around and ask for help, Kory dropped to his knees next to me, the lockpicking device in his hands.

  He looked up and gave me a quick, infectious grin. “I saw the pause,” he said. “Didn’t take much to guess that you’d misplaced your keys.”

  I grinned back at that, and when the lock clicked and the door swung inward, I stepped over the threshold, back into my home.

  It had been a week since I’d seen it, but as far as I could tell, it was just as I’d left it. My tablet computer was on the table, probably drained of battery, and a cereal bowl sat next to it—courtesy of me having been in too much of a hurry to put it in the sink after I finished breakfast. Last time I’d been here, I’d been in a rush to get out and get to Nelson’s office, to start the raid on the warehouse. Doing the dishes or charging my computer had been the last things on my mind.