The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  None of which explained why he wasn’t telling us. We were his team—and we were the ones running for our lives from the Authority. If anyone had the right to know about a plan B, it was us.

  I put it out of my mind and turned to my friends. Jace wasn’t the only one with a plan. Ours might not be a sure bet—in fact, it might be a long shot—but at least it was something.

  I dropped down next to Nelson and eyed the stack of papers on the floor of the cave.

  “Everything the Authority knows about Little John,” Ant said quietly. “Or at least, everything they thought they knew. Everything they thought important enough for a timeline… This is real live spy stuff. Right out of a novel.”

  Jackie gave him a wry glance. “And if we don’t hurry up and start figuring it out, instead of sitting here staring at it like a bunch of idiots, we’re going to be the characters that end up going to jail for the rest of their lives in that novel,” she said. “Let’s get started.”

  Her words spurred the rest of us to action, and within seconds, six pairs of hands were rifling through the stack of papers, grabbing as many as they could, and then starting to fit them together. It was like doing a puzzle, but along a single line—and one where the stakes were a lot higher than just a game you played on rainy afternoons.

  We focused on the dates over anything else and moved the papers as necessary to put them in the right order. While we worked, I scanned the events, wondering what it was we were about to see. I’d looked at them when we were in that office, but I hadn’t committed many of them to memory. We’d had slightly bigger things to think about at the time. Like getting out of there with our lives intact. The one thing I remembered with clarity was the event that now caught my eye, right under my fingertips.

  Warehouse raid, Belmore, it read. OH+ somehow involved here as well. Reverse hack, arrests made. Could they be part of Little J.O.H.N.?

  That was the real question. Were we part of this Little J.O.H.N.? (And why did the Authority spell it with the periods? Was that Little John’s official preference? How would the Authority know something like that?)

  But if we were part of Little John, why hadn’t we been told? Why hadn’t we been warned? And why hadn’t they taken us to their headquarters when they had us in their airship after the jailbreak?

  I turned to the rest of the timeline as it started taking shape and scanned through it for other mentions of our name. Only one, I saw, and this was another event I recognized as something in which I’d been involved.

  Call about possible large gathering of rebels, it said. Neighbors saw a large group of people, accompanied by carrier trucks, meeting in a warehouse. Definitely OH+, motivation unknown.

  The city attached to the note was one I recognized. It was the place where we’d held our first OH+ event, and where one man had almost turned everyone in, in some bizarre plot to steal our exo-suits and get some sort of bounty from the local law enforcement agencies.

  A man whom Zion had promptly killed, though he hadn’t told us about that until later. Now I figured I knew why. If Zion was part of Little John, it meant he was into something a lot bigger than we’d realized, which meant the stakes were a lot higher. They were messing with the government and didn’t have any patience for anyone who might turn them in. The idea of someone potentially handing them over to the enforcers had been more than enough to earn that man a death sentence.

  Serious business indeed.

  Nelson leaned back from the completed timeline, grabbing my attention, and shook her head. “Well, to start with, it seems they’ve been tracking this Little John for the last twenty years,” she said, her eyes on the timeline’s first date.

  “And pretty efficiently, at least for the first ten years,” Jackie said, leaning over the papers. She put her finger down close to the starting date. “Look at this, at the start. It looks like they’ve got something once a week on them.” She frowned. “But such small crimes, really. Hacking computers? Stealing tech from small stores?” She looked up at me, the frown still creasing her forehead. “Those crimes aren’t big enough for the government to even care about them. If anything, they would have been handled by the local enforcers. Definitely not some super-secret government enforcement agency.”

  I looked down at the timeline and saw what she was talking about. “January 1, local library’s files are hacked, specifically in regard to city plans,” I read. “Firewall down at the time due to damage in the wires after New Year’s fireworks.” I looked up at everyone else, frowning. “New Year’s fireworks? When did we ever get fireworks for New Year’s?”

  “A long time ago. Before some of you were even born,” Nelson said. She was already on my tablet, her fingers a blur over the keyboard. She looked up to meet my eyes. “Something happened and the government outlawed them. Said they were a waste of taxpayer money.”

  I glanced at the timeline again, wondering if that decision had anything to do with what we were looking at. More likely, I thought, Little John had used those fireworks events for their own purposes.

  Much like they’d used explosions to help us get into the prison.

  “You don’t suppose…”

  “That the fireworks that damaged those lines weren’t actually fireworks?” she asked, reading my mind. “I suppose it’s a possibility, yeah. And that the government outlawed fireworks right after that because they suspected as much. Fireworks do, after all, provide pretty good cover for actual explosions. Though, that would depend on whether this timeline is factual or not, and whether Little John was actually responsible for that. Whether they could pull it off?” She shrugged. “There are explosives that mimic fireworks; that’s not the question. The question is how well funded Little John was at that time. If we’re to believe this, and believe that the government has all the facts, it would mean that Little John would have been brand new at that point. Would they have had the money for that sort of thing?”

  I shrugged, then moved on to the next point. We had an entire timeline to go through, and it would take us all night if we dwelled too long on one particular event.

  The next event was a robbery of a computer goods store, and a list of the things that had been taken.

  “Nelson, what is all that stuff?” I asked, pointing at the list.

  She leaned over and read through it, then shrugged. “Standard computer hardware. Stuff that anyone would need if they were setting up a home office. Nothing to tell us who they might have been, or what they might have been doing.”

  “So how would they even know that Little John did it?” Ant asked. He scanned through the timeline with his finger, his frown growing deeper and deeper. “I mean, it’s all well and good to have this list of things that happened, but what good does it do if we don’t know how they came to their conclusion that it was Little John at all?”

  Jackie pushed his finger away. “Well, they must be sure, right? I mean, they’re the government, and they have unending resources. If they put it all down on a timeline they must be pretty damn sure. The question is, how does it help us? What we need right now is shelter, and to get that, we have to find Little John. So, what on this timeline is going to help us with that?”

  I glanced through the timeline again, desperate for anything that might help us—addresses, even vague locations—and then slowed down and looked again, focusing more intently on the timing.

  “The government might have unending resources, but they’re not actually making much progress,” I said. I pointed to the start of the timeline, and then ran my finger along it. “Look. There are dates every few days at the start, with specifics for each hit. But later…” I ran my finger farther, where the timeline became more modern—and the dates became less common—then looked up at my friends. “More and more time is passing between dates. The government isn’t catching them as often. Little John is getting better at hiding what they’re doing. They’re getting smarter.”

  “Or they’re using other people to do their dirty work,” Kory s
aid suddenly, bringing his finger down on the first OH+ note. The one from that first meeting in the warehouse. Then he lifted his eyes up to meet mine. “Maybe it’s not that they’re getting better at hiding. Maybe they’re just using people and techniques the government won’t recognize as theirs.”

  I pulled back, my mind racing.

  Well, that was a thought. It matched almost exactly with my earlier thoughts, from when we’d first found out that Little John had rescued us, and that they’d known who we were, and how the mission would have gone, but hadn’t known what we were going to see inside the prison. I’d sensed at the time that we’d been used and that it had been some sort of research mission. Except that we’d never had a chance to report back to Little John about what we’d found. We hadn’t even known that we were supposed to report back—heck, Zion and Alexy were probably supposed to be the “reporters.” We also hadn’t known what they’d been looking for, if there had been a specific target.

  Instead, they’d dropped us in a meadow and left us there, to escape the Authority on our own. And our contacts who had known about Little John—Alexy and Zion, and perhaps Allerra—had disappeared without a word.

  “Well, a couple things that we do know,” Nelson said. “Little John has been around for twenty years, according to this timeline. That’s a lot older than Operation Hood. So there seems to be a very good chance that Operation Hood was an offshoot of Little John. A younger sibling? Something to maybe take the heat off the main office, so to speak? There are also notes here about raids on Little John offices, or what the government thought were Little John offices. None of them successful.”

  She pointed to three different dates on the line, and I leaned over to see that she was correct. At some point, the government had thought they knew enough about Little John to raid a specific location. But each raid was marked with one word: Failure. They might have thought they’d known where to find Little John, but they’d been unsuccessful. Either they’d had the wrong spot, or all the members of Little John had gotten out of there before the Authority showed up.

  “But how much of a failure?” I wondered aloud. “Does that mean they didn’t find anything? Or just that they didn’t find the leader?”

  “And then the final operation,” Ant noted, putting his finger on the last date of the timeline. The raid on the warehouse, which was marked as our doing. “The warehouse raid. But…” He leaned closer, squinting at the timeline, and then sat up again. “This is labeled as a reverse hack. What does that mean? Isn’t that…” He looked up at Nelson, seeking confirmation for whatever he was thinking, and she nodded.

  “It means they followed a line to that warehouse. Someone in that warehouse had… hacked them,” she said slowly.

  I shook my head. “But that warehouse was holding the server for that mail order and auction site. And we know that site belongs to the Ministry. Or at least, we think we know…”

  I stopped talking, wondering whether we’d gotten it all wrong. But surely we hadn’t. That place had been chock full of things that were Ministry-level documents. The files on all those kids. The applications for adoption. The physical folders with all that information. It was all specific to the CRAS. Who else would have had any of that but the Ministry?

  “No,” I said firmly. “That had to be a Ministry site and a Ministry building. There was way too much Ministry stuff in there for anyone else to own it. So why would they label it a reverse hack? That isn’t what they did to you, is it?”

  Nelson shook her head. “No. What they did was set a trap for me. That didn’t have anything to do with hacking. They set a trap, and once I tripped it, it told them where I was. A reverse hack can only mean one thing,” she said. “It means someone hacked into them, and then they reverse hacked the hacker, and then followed the trail. They weren’t… prepared for the hackings, so they didn’t have time or warning enough to set a snare protocol. They probably did that later. The first time, they must have figured out they’d been hacked, and then done whatever they could to trace it back to where it came from. The warehouse, though…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. That warehouse showed as the location that housed the IP that ran the site, so the warehouse must belong to the Ministry. Why would they be watching a warehouse that was theirs, just on the off chance that someone broke in?”

  My mind raced through the implications, and then came to a screeching halt.

  “What if the warehouse itself was a trap?” I whispered, understanding dawning suddenly. “Little John is clearly a major thorn in the government’s side. Hell, they’ve been trying to get rid of them for twenty years! What if the warehouse was a trap they’d set up for Little John… and we walked right into it? It would make sense. The Ministry set it up, knowing that Little John would bite, and then had the Authority standing by, ready to make arrests. Then we happen across this site, and we find where we think it’s housed, and…”

  “And we walk right into the trap,” Kory finished for me. “Oh my God.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense either,” Jackie said, crossing her arms. “It doesn’t explain the reverse hack. If that warehouse belonged to the Ministry—or the government, at least, because who knows if it’s actually the Ministry or some other secret department we don’t know about yet—why would there be a reverse hack associated with it? And secondly, if it was something Little John already knew about, why would Zion and Alexy have gone along without saying anything to us about it?”

  “What if they were raiding it at the same time as us, and using us as… I don’t know, involuntary backup? Or a decoy?” Abe offered.

  I shook my head. “It just doesn’t make sense. If that was true, why not coordinate with us? And how were we the only ones who ended up being caught?”

  “We weren’t,” Jace said suddenly from behind me. “Those two men we gassed down in the camera room were also caught and taken to jail. And we never found out who they were. They disappeared after we rescued them.”

  “Either way, the conclusion seems clear,” Nelson said. “That raid should have been something between Little John and the government. And we were arrested because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “And after that, they started researching who we were,” I said, quickly coming to some conclusions of my own. “Then we up and raided their jail to save our friends. And now we’re on the Most Wanted list with Little John. Who I’m starting to really distrust.”

  “So how exactly are we supposed to trust them to help us find a safe location?” Ant asked. “If they’ve gotten us into this much trouble, why would we ever go to them voluntarily?”

  “Because we don’t have much choice,” Jace said, dropping to sit down next to us, Nelson’s phone and his address book in his lap. “And because they’ve gotten us out of trouble in the past. We know that they’re fighting the same government we’re fighting, and that makes us unintentional allies. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that. And finally, because I suspect that Nathan is in charge of Little John, and I’d trust him with my life,” he finished.

  Several of us shook our heads, unconvinced. Whoever Little John was, and whether or not Nathan was involved with them, the picture we were putting together was less than complimentary. Sure, they seemed to be fighting the government, and if the government’s obsession with them was anything to go by, they were getting a lot closer than the government liked. But they also seemed to have thrown us into the mix, and I didn’t appreciate being used in that way.

  Not without having a say in it myself.

  “Nathan isn’t infallible, either,” I reminded Jace. “Remember what happened at the coffee shop?”

  He brought his hand down in a chopping motion and shook his head. “That wasn’t Nathan’s fault. He trusted the wrong person, and I think we’ve all done that once or twice.”

  I guessed I couldn’t argue with that, given my experience with Henry… and my adoptive parents.

  “Besides,” he cont
inued, “if we’re going to get out of this, we have to trust someone. We don’t have a choice. I don’t know how much longer we can stay here, and we know that we don’t have Zion or Alexy to lean on. Nathan… Well, he left me a getaway option. And I didn’t know for sure that it would work—I never even thought to check it before, because I never thought I’d be in this position—but I’ve just done some… research, and I think it will give us a way out. So, unless any of you have a better option, I say we trust him one more time. It might be our only shot at getting out of here alive.”

  “He gave you a getaway option?” Jackie asked, her voice harsh with shock. “Why did you get one? And what about the rest of us?”

  I reached out and took Jace’s hand, feeling that he needed someone to back him up right now, and that Jackie was looking at this the wrong way. The timeline hadn’t told us anything. All it had done was open up new questions. Which meant we still didn’t have a plan. If Jace was offering one…

  “If you have a plan, I say we take it,” I said firmly. “Because the timeline is a complete bust. There might be a lot of information in there, but it’s not going to do us any good right now. There’s no helpful address, and we don’t have any way of finding one that I can see.”

  I looked around the circle, daring anyone else to disagree—and hoping they’d see the logic in what I was saying—and saw a range of expressions, from shock to frustration to anger. Gradually, though, they melted into acceptance, and then agreement, until Ant finally spoke up.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly. “And we can’t stay here. If there’s a chance at finding a way out, I say we take it. So, what’s the move?”