Nelson, who knew about the fact that I had lost my child, reached out for me and took my hand. “Oh my God, that’s how it happened?”
I nodded. “The CRAS took the baby within days of her birth, and her father left pretty soon after that. I ended up in the factories… and then I found Nelson.” I gave her a fond grin, thinking about how that first connection had changed everything for me. How she’d taken such a chance to meet me and invite me into her group, giving me another shot at a family. “And that led me here.” I looked around at the rest of the team, surprised and fascinated by how close I suddenly felt to them.
I’d spent two years obsessed with privacy, terrified of anyone knowing my real name because of what they might give up if they were ever arrested. And then the worst had happened, and my friends had been arrested—and had not given up my name, because they hadn’t known it—and I’d come out the other side knowing that privacy wasn’t the most important thing.
Friendship and family were.
And those were exactly what this government was trying to take away from us.
“Nelly, I think you’re the only one left,” Ant said, lifting an eyebrow in her direction.
She gave us all a soft smile. “I guess I must be the only one here with the background I have,” she said. “Born into the middle class. I actually grew up with my real parents, and a younger brother. We were a happy family, for the most part, and I don’t have any complaints about my childhood. But my dad… didn’t agree with the Burchard Regime. He didn’t agree with CRAS, the Ministry, any of that. He didn’t know about the Authority, I don’t think, but if he had, he would have hated them. He was a schoolteacher by trade, but at night he was a revolutionary. Always coming up with ways to fight the man, going to secret meetings. He had an entire office that I wasn’t even supposed to know about, and the one time he caught me in there, he grounded me for six months. Then one night the enforcers showed up at the house.” She stopped talking suddenly and closed her eyes. “I grabbed my brother, and we ran. I knew enough to know that my dad wasn’t going to survive it if the enforcers ever showed up. I was surprised when they involved my mother, too.”
After a long pause, she went on. “When my brother and I got back, my father was gone, and my mother was lying in the entryway, dying. The enforcers had shot her trying to get my dad to tell them what they wanted to hear. She wouldn’t let us take her to the doctor—said she couldn’t allow us to endanger ourselves. She sent us into the closet in her bedroom, and behind it we found a hidden safe. There was new paperwork for us in there, along with the addresses of people we were to go find. I took my brother to one of the addresses, dropped him off, and haven’t seen him since. Too afraid to get him in trouble by showing up there again. Never saw my dad again, but I’m sure he’s dead. And I became Nelson Peters. Nelly to my friends. Had a baby, but she was taken three years ago. I’ve been fighting to find her ever since.”
I bit my lip. I’d never even known there were people fighting the government until I met Nelson. No wonder she’d been so wrapped up in it—it ran in her blood. “Real name?” I finally asked.
“My parents called me Natasha,” she said. “But I prefer Nelson. Natasha… I’m not that girl anymore. It’s been a long time since I’ve answered to that name.”
A long silence followed this announcement, and I gazed around the circle, wondering exactly where we were supposed to go from here. A group of wounded soldiers, each with our own twisted and damaged background… each with a vendetta against the government that had destroyed our childhood.
But then I shook myself. We didn’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. We all had baggage, yes, but that was all the more reason for us to keep fighting. To take down the government that had done this.
“So what next?” I asked, after a moment. “How do we make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else? That is what we’re doing here, right?”
Jace shook himself back into the real world as well and glanced around the circle of faces. “Samsfield,” he said simply. “That’s the only answer we have to those questions right now. As for the people we’ve already lost… Have we all still not heard back from the rest of the team?”
Everyone pulled out phones and started checking various communication routes, but there was a unanimous shaking of heads. I was sure we’d probably all expected it, honestly, because we would have heard our phones go off. I’d taken a moment to type a quick text to Gabby after we finished with the timeline, and had sent her all the pictures to get started on researching whether there was news of those raids in the papers, and I’d received a confirmation of receipt—and a note to be careful because she was evidently “going out of her head,” whatever that meant.
But she was the only one who had been answering me.
“Nothing,” I muttered. “And we’re going to have a bigger problem soon. My phone is running out of battery, and there’s not exactly a plug out here for charging. Not to mention a coverage problem. Before long we’re not going to have any way of contacting the outside world. We’re going to be legitimately underground.”
Then I looked up, frowning. “Hold on, Jace, you have Nathan’s personal number, and he has yours. If you’re so important to him, why isn’t he trying to find you? And why hasn’t Little John sent someone after us? I’m not saying they’re related, but they’ve never failed to save you before.”
Jace held up his shattered phone. “Even if he is—even if they were planning on it—I’m not traceable anymore,” he said quietly. “I suspect that some of the phones had bugs on them, which is how Little John found us so easily, but if mine did, it’s toast. I’m sorry, Robin, but we’re not going to be able to count on any help from that quarter.”
A chill settled into my bones as I gazed back at him, the only answer to his statement a chorus of howls from outside.
22
Moments after the wolves stopped howling, Jace rose to his feet.
“Start gathering the supplies we won’t need in the morning,” he announced.
“Huh? What?” I asked, thoroughly confused.
He heaved a deep sigh, as if he’d come to a conclusion that he very much disliked, and looked around the cave. “As convenient as this place is and as much as I hope we find Corona tomorrow and she solves everything, we can’t count on it. And I don’t want to be coming back here again if we can help it. We know the Authority is searching the area, and we know they may have found the rock face below. If they find their way up, it only leads to one place.”
“Our valley,” I finished. He was right, though I never would have admitted it if he hadn’t brought it up.
This place felt safe because it was so far removed from the forest below, where my house sat. But the truth was, the Authority was searching the entire area, and they knew we were here somewhere. They weren’t going to let any stone go unturned.
Or unclimbed.
The rest of us groaned, got to our feet, and started moving around gathering what we thought we could do without for the night. But it was more difficult than it had originally sounded. What did we keep and what did we leave? What was actually necessary?
“Keep enough food for the morning,” Jace said, seeing my hands hovering over our small store of Nurmeal. “One bottle for each person. And keep the vegetables. They won’t travel, so we’ll eat them in the morning. Pack the medical supplies. Pack the timeline. Keep the blankets because we’ll need those tonight.”
“And where exactly do you think you’re going to leave all this stuff we’re packing up?” Kory asked.
“In the trees by the ledge,” Jace answered, sounding as if this was the most logical thing in the world, and like Kory should have known the answer already.
Kory gave him a long look, then started laughing. “In the branches?” he asked, shaking his head. “You think the Authority won’t notice that?”
Jace gave him a quick grin. “Our parents never did.”
“Except something t
ells me the Authority is going to be looking more closely for us than your parents would have looked for anything,” Abe noted.
Kory snorted. “If you think that, it’s obvious you never met Jace’s mother. You never saw how seriously she took it when he stole her things and hid them to get back at her for not letting him do what he wanted. Hiding things in the trees was one of his favorite tricks. But it did always work.” He shook his head, and then started moving quickly through the cave, gathering things and putting them into a pile, or shoving them into the boxes.
I watched him moving, then turned my eyes to Jace, unsure whether to laugh or cry at this sudden glimpse into what must have been a truly unique childhood.
Then, shaking my head, I started packing things into the box in front of me.
If we were going to stay in the forest, moving to another location was the only smart choice, and having our supplies out of this cave would make for easier collection. We couldn’t leave them here for the Authority to find.
With that thought, I started gathering up any trash we’d left around the place, including pieces of the vegetables and scraps of cloth.
Jace put a hand on mine quite suddenly, and I stilled.
“Leave the trash,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, confused.
He smiled a bit. “If they find the place and find trash in it, maybe they’ll think we’re coming back to it. And if they think that, they might spend less time searching the rest of the forest.”
I slept badly, partially because I was incapable of lying on the leg with the bruise, and partially because I was intent on listening to the wolves outside (and making sure they stayed outside, rather than coming into the cave, questing for the food that I’d sometimes given them before).
I was also listening for a change in the tone of their howls, because I figured that might mean there were intruders in the area. I doubted the Authority would find the rock face we’d climbed, and even if they did, I didn’t think they’d assume that we had climbed it. That narrow ledge wasn’t immediately obvious. But if they did somehow find their way up that rock face, and then into the chasm we’d walked through to get here, then they’d be in the wolves’ territory, and the wolves should react.
The final and somewhat most pressing reason I was having trouble sleeping, though, was the large male sleeping right behind me. It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong. In fact, he was deliciously warm, and by the time he’d finally appeared again, after having spent an hour shifting and hiding the supplies with Kory, the night had turned chilly, and I’d moved instinctively toward him, sucking up the warmth as quickly as I could. No, the problem was that he was there at all—and that I still had no idea what I was supposed to do with him. He’d spent much of the previous day taking care of me, taking care of all of us, and I hadn’t had a chance to thank him. I didn’t even know how to thank him, or what kind of thanks would be appropriate. In our situation—
“If you don’t stop squirming around, you’re going to wake up even stiffer in the morning than you will believe possible,” a sleepy voice murmured in my ear.
I grew still, my heart hammering, and tried to act like I was actually asleep. Like I’d been squirming in my sleep, because of a dream. That was right, I’d just been dreaming.
“Hmmm?” I asked, stretching and doing my best impression of a person who’d just woken up.
A soft snort was the first answer. “And don’t act like you’ve been asleep. I’ve been mostly asleep myself, but I’ve felt you lying there stiff as a board all night, and that’s when you’re not acting like there are ants in your blanket or something. That’s not the way a sleeping person acts.”
He took me by the shoulder and rolled me over onto my back, then propped himself up on his elbow and leaned over me. The fire, which he’d banked into mere coals earlier, was still glowing, and the orange of it glinted off the natural amber of his eyes, playing havoc with my insides.
Talk about a set-up. The middle of a summer night, a firelit scene, us under the same sheet…
“What’s wrong?” he asked, reaching to brush my cheek with the tips of his fingers. “You’re shaking, and I know you’re not cold. I’ve been lying as close to you as I could all night just to keep you warm.”
What was wrong? It was a good question, and there were a lot of answers. If I was being honest with myself, though, none of them mattered as much as the question around our safety.
“I’m worried,” I admitted. “Worried that the Authority is going to somehow find us. Worried that everything is going to go wrong with getting into Samsfield tomorrow. Worried that we’re not going to be able to find this secret agent person, and that she won’t be able to give us what we need. Or that she’ll end up being someone we can’t trust, like Walter. Worried that the Authority has found our friends and they’re in jail, or dead. Worried that we’re all by ourselves, and there’s no Nathan or Little John to tell us what to do…” I paused, surprised at the flood of words, and stopped to actually consider what I’d said. It was more than I’d meant to say, and with that acknowledgement came even more fear.
I bit my lip, trying not to let it show on my face, and Jace chuckled softly.
“That’s a whole lot to be thinking about in the middle of the night,” he chided. “Especially on a night like this.”
He meant a night where we were lying in a cave together under a sheet, the fire glowing softly next to us, everyone else in the cave safely asleep. Oh God, I thought, terrified and embarrassed—and elated—all at once. This was it. This was the moment we’d been dancing around basically since I met him and made that stupid joke about a “sew job.” He was going to kiss me. I knew it.
And with Ant right there across the cave. How horrifying.
“On a night like this?” I asked, my lips trembling.
He frowned. “Well, yeah,” he said. “Tomorrow we’re going to be taking our lives into our hands—intentionally this time. I mean, I hope for the best, but it’s not the safest thing I’ve ever done. Going into any sort of civilization is dangerous, even if it’s not the town where the Authority is searching for us. We’ll all do better if we’ve had a full night’s rest. Really, you should be sleeping. I should be making you sleep.”
The night around me shattered into a million pieces, and I could have died of embarrassment and frustration. What was I thinking, to let him get to me this way? Of course he was just talking about going to sleep, and I was stupid to have expected anything more.
I nearly flopped over away from him, too mortified and frustrated to care about how it looked, and honestly angry—at both him and myself—for the way this was going. Had I been crazy to think there was more happening here? Maybe so, but the way he’d touched me before had made me think…
He leaned toward me until our faces were only inches apart, and whispered, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to sleep right now. Even if it would be the smarter thing to be doing.”
I gulped and nodded, unable to find my voice, and finally replied, “I don’t want to sleep, either.”
A squeal suddenly sounded out from the other side of the cave, and we both jumped, and then quickly put space between us as if we’d been caught doing something wrong. I glanced across the cave, wondering what had happened, or who had caught us, but only found Ant sitting up and looking around, horrified.
“Was that you?” he asked me, his eyes enormous.
“Nooo,” I said, trying to figure out exactly what had happened. Had that been Ant squeaking in his sleep?
He looked around dazedly, as if he was trying to get his bearings again, and then lay back down and went immediately back to sleep next to Jackie—who, I noticed, hadn’t moved through the entire ordeal. I frowned at that, wondering if it was something I should be concerned about, but then Jace scooted downward and rested his head on my shoulder, taking a deep, stuttering sort of breath.
“Tell me what you’ll do when this is all over,” he said. “Wher
e will you go? What do you want to be once you’re finished being an outlaw?”
I almost laughed. Such a simple-sounding question, and yet there were so many layers to it. It certainly wasn’t a question with one simple answer. I reached up to run my fingers through his long hair, and though it was gritty now with dirt, I didn’t stop. I dug my fingers into his scalp and began to massage him, and he groaned deeply.
“God, don’t stop doing that,” he said. “But answer the question. Just keep rubbing my head while you do.”
I grinned. “The only thing I’ve wanted for the last two years is to find my daughter,” I told him, starting at the beginning. “That’s why I began working with Nelson in the first place. I was hoping she might be able to help me. And then I realized what we were doing, and what it meant, and I guess… I guess I started splitting my time between wanting to find Hope and wanting to fight the government that had taken her. The government who had taken a lot of babies. A lot of the time those two things have really been the same goal, you know? After all, the government is why I don’t have her anymore. And now…”
He shifted his head so he could look directly at me. “And now we’re on the run from that same government, and you’re worried that you might never find her. And that she might never even know about you,” he finished for me.
The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines Page 18