The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  I dropped into the nearest chair to rest my leg and glared at him. “So, you were saying?” I asked. “There’s supposedly a good reason that Corona didn’t take us with her right now?”

  He nodded. “Right. The refuge, wherever it is, probably hasn’t seen any action since Nathan set it up. We haven’t exactly had time to go around checking all the hiding places and making sure they’re dust-free or anything like that. Now that we’re trying to get out of sight, Corona, as a senior member, is responsible for getting there and making sure it’s secure before she brings in anyone else.”

  I stared at him. It had made sense when Corona said it, but now that we were sitting in the house she’d been so anxious to get out of, I was feeling a lot less optimistic about it.

  “But she could be walking right into a trap,” Jackie said. “And she’s a senior member of the organization. Why would she put herself at risk like that? And why couldn’t she risk us all? It’s a lot safer for us to be going to a place that we at least think might be safe than staying on the outside!”

  Jace sighed heavily. “I had that same conversation with Nathan when he told me about the protocol, but he was set on the point. He was certain that it would be safer for one person to investigate a hiding place—less chance of being followed, less chance of being caught. And it does make sense up to a point. I just never thought it would mean we were left out in the cold while Corona fled by herself. If we’d been thinking, we would have had the agents in charge of the exit points checking them earlier, instead of just sitting around waiting. Honestly, I don’t think Nathan thought it would come to this, either. I suspect that his organization had managed to stay out of the Authority’s clutches for so long that he’d started taking it for granted. He must be just as surprised at all of this as the rest of us.”

  I stood quickly from the chair and started toward the wall to get my phone, which was at least somewhat charged by now. I ducked down, yanked it off the charger, and motioned for someone else to plug theirs in.

  “Be that as it may,” I said firmly, “he’s also not the one stuck in an impossible position right now. So his opinion doesn’t get to be part of the decision. What do we do next?”

  Ant, who had jumped up to put his phone on the charger, looked up at me. “Do we have a choice? We can’t stay in the city. It’s only a matter of time before the Authority is here at the house. If Corona was told that they were going to be here, I trust that they’re going to be here.”

  “And they could be here at any second,” Jace agreed, nodding. Then he frowned. “They shouldn’t have even known about Corona, though. She was always kept outside of our physical missions, never part of our meetings. Nathan was very careful about that because he wanted to make sure she was safe—and that she’d be available to get us out if we needed to. How would they have—”

  He was cut off by someone hammering on the door below us, and we all jumped into action, then darted for various hiding places. I ran toward the bed and dropped to my hip, sliding under it with only half an inch to spare, and watched from underneath as Jackie, Abe, and Ant, who grabbed his phone and the charger from the wall, darted toward the closet. Nelson ducked behind Corona’s desk. Within seconds, Jace and Kory were under the bed with me, cramming me against the wall with their large bodies, and we were all breathing as quietly as we could, our ears pricked to hear any further sounds from down below.

  The front door was right under this room, more or less, and that meant that the windows straight ahead of me looked out onto the driveway. The sound coming from below us wasn’t precisely clear, but it was also hard to mistake officers of the law shouting for whoever was here to surrender.

  “Open up in the name of the Compliance Authority!” someone shouted. “Corona Luther, we know you’re in there! We have questions for you, and it won’t do you any good to try to avoid us any longer!”

  I held my breath, wondering what the hell we were supposed to do now. I was positive that there were back exits to this place—probably about twenty of them, given how large the house was—but our scooters were in the driveway, and we needed those if we were going to get away. I was also terrified that the Authority agents had already seen them, which would mean that they would know there were others in here besides Corona. And if they’d gotten the reports, they might have matched those scooters up to the ones we’d been seen with, or were assumed to be using, in the forest.

  If all that happened, it would mean that they’d know we were the ones in here. And I didn’t think they had orders to handle us gently. We’d been labeled terrorists. We’d already been chased by one Authority officer who’d recognized us in Trenton. We had to assume that the ones downstairs would do the same.

  “Well, this is bad,” Kory murmured from right next to me.

  “I think this blows right past bad to worst-possible-case scenario,” I answered. “We’re effectively trapped in the house of someone the Authority is trying to arrest. If we’re found in here, we’re done for.”

  “Which is exactly why we can’t be found,” Jace said sharply.

  I would have laughed if I could have done it quietly. “I agree. So how the hell do we get out of here?”

  Jace turned to look at me, his face deadly serious. “If Corona has been following the rules, and she was telling us the truth, it means that we’ll find a means of escape in the basement. Any house connected to Nathan was built—or modified—to contain several escape routes and… devices. We just have to get down there.”

  He started to move, then, as if he was going to shimmy out from under the bed, but Kory’s hand shot out and stopped him.

  “Forgive me for my doubt, brother, but I think we’re all going to need more to go on than that. You’ve dragged us to the house of some woman who was supposed to save us and then didn’t, and now we’re trapped upstairs in that same house, with Authority agents below us. Enough with the vague statements. Give it to us straight. I’m not getting out from under this bed until we know exactly where we’re going and what we hope to find there.”

  My eyes grew big at his tone, and though I felt bad for Jace—a little—I completely agreed with Kory.

  “I concur,” I hissed. “Jace, enough with protecting Nathan. His cover’s blown with all of us. Just tell us what we’ve got to do and how we’re going to get out of here alive.”

  I glanced across the room and saw Nelson peeking out from under the desk at me, listening, and she nodded as well.

  “I second—or third—that,” she whispered.

  Jace exhaled, but we were right, and he must have known it. There was no reason to try to keep Nathan’s secrets and hidden protocols at this point. Not when they’d started to fail us. Our lives were in danger, and that meant we needed to know the whole story.

  A moment later he nodded. “You’re right. Nathan never expected any of this to happen, but now that it has, we have to assume that his cover is blown. No point in keeping him secret any longer. All of our houses were built with high security and escape routes. As a member of the absolute inner circle, and one of the contacts for extraction, Corona should have even more than that here.”

  “Like what?” I asked, unsure whether to be excited or worried. How did you get more security than Zion? What more could she possibly have? “She said transportation. What does that mean? Like a time machine or a secret tunnel or…?”

  Jace glanced at me, and the corner of his mouth twitched in what might have been a smile of assurance.

  “Beyond security is escape,” he said bluntly. “According to the message I decoded last night, her basement will come stocked with vehicles for us. And she basically told us as much before she left, so I believe it to be true. If we can get down there without the Authority catching us, we won’t have to worry about the scooters. We should have something even better.”

  Anything else was cut off by the sound of the door being blown open below us. That confirmed it: the Authority was tired of waiting, and the agents were coming i
nto the house.

  I had no idea whether we would find anything useful in that basement, but we didn’t have any other options. And we were now out of time.

  27

  “Let’s go!” Kory hissed, grabbing my hand and scooting out from under the bed.

  I scooted out after him, and saw Jace emerging from under the bed on Kory’s other side. In front of us, Nelson was appearing again from behind the desk, and Abe, Ant, and Jackie were already standing near the door, bouncing on their toes as they waited for us.

  “How are we going to get down into the basement without the Authority catching us?” I hissed, coming to a stop right up against the wall that bordered the door.

  Jace came to a stop next to me, his breath coming fast, and gave me a quick shake of his head. “I don’t know the layout of this place. Never been here before. I’ve never been in a house this big at all. I have no idea how they operate or where stuff is.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, making a mental note to have a talk with him later about rushing into places without adequate planning, and then realized that I was probably the only one of us who had been in a house this big before. Jackie had been born poor, and though Ant and Abe had grown up in a well-to-do house, their adoptive father had just been a doctor. They wouldn’t have been able to afford anything in this sort of neighborhood, no matter how many kids they’d had. Nelson’s family was middle class, and Jace and Kory were legitimately no more than cavemen.

  My father had worked for the government. We’d lived in a mansion. It hadn’t been as large as this one, but I figured all of the large houses were probably built along the same basic lines, and if that was true…

  “The basement will probably sit right below the kitchen,” I said, remembering. “It might not be as big as the whole house, but it will definitely be connected to the kitchen in one way or another. They were meant for storing things, originally, and were cold enough to store food, back in the day. We have to get to the kitchen. From there we’ll find a door into the basement.”

  “And how do we get to the kitchen?” Jackie asked. “That’s great to know where the basement might be, but I’m sort of more concerned about the steps we have to take to get there.”

  I nodded, thinking furiously about the layout of the house in which I’d grown up.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that this house is laid out in the same basic manner as the one my parents owned,” I murmured, one ear still on the crashing and banging coming from below. The soldiers had evidently decided to sweep the first floor before they came upstairs—which might actually work in our favor. If we could manage to avoid them when we went down and they came up…

  “In our house, the kitchen was toward the back of the house,” I remembered. “And if the government is in charge of all construction…”

  “Then it makes sense that they’re reusing the same design,” Jace said. He slid over to the door and peeked around the corner, then turned his eyes back to me. “No one up here yet. I think they’re searching the first floor right now, and I’m betting most of them will come up to the second floor at the same time. They might leave one or two people downstairs, but they’ll be guarding the doors. Which should give us a window of time when we can be on the first floor without getting caught. As long as we get there without passing any of the doors that lead out of the house. Robin, how do we get down there?”

  There would be multiple staircases, I realized, especially in a place this big. Hell, our house had been half this size, and we’d still had three staircases leading up and down between the stories. In a house this big, where they must have expected there to be housecleaning crews and maids…

  “There will be a back staircase,” I breathed. “At least one of them, probably more than that. We have to find them before any of those soldiers get to this floor. They might not know about them, and they might not be able to cover them all.”

  I moved toward the door and slid my head out far enough that I could look one way down the hall, and then the other. I saw exactly what we’d seen before: long hallway, big bay windows on both ends, lots of gorgeous artwork, lots of doors.

  No soldiers. Not yet.

  I didn’t even stop to tell the others what I was doing. I just ducked through the door, turned right, and ran for the end of the hall, praying that the soldiers didn’t choose that moment to come up the main staircase.

  The hall was impossibly long, and I was positive that we were going to be caught before we got to the other end. I was also positive that we were going to be in big trouble if we got there and I’d been wrong. There should be another staircase there, though, and I kept my mind on that. The houses had been built with the assumption that there would be maids in them, and the rich didn’t like to see the help. They’d insisted on—or at least taken advantage of—a setup where the maids could come and go by different routes than the people who actually lived in the house. In our house, the kids had used those staircases as hiding places during hide-and-seek.

  I’d used them when I was coming home after curfew and didn’t want to be caught by my parents.

  Now I needed to find one for a much bigger and more important reason.

  I slid to a stop right up against the window, my heart hammering in my chest, and turned to my left. Nothing there but a blank wall, and I frowned. That couldn’t be right. Then I whirled in the other direction and saw… not a staircase at all. Not even a room where we could hide. But a door, nonetheless. It was just a lot smaller than I’d been expecting.

  “The laundry chute!” I exclaimed. “Perfect!”

  I turned to the others and began speaking quickly. “This will lead right to the laundry room, which should sit right off the kitchen, or at least be close to it. And neither of those rooms should have a door to the outside in them. It just wouldn’t make sense. It’s going to be straight down, though, a sheer drop, so use your hands and feet—or even better, your feet and back—to brace against the sides of it on your way down, or you’re going to fall, and I can’t guarantee a soft landing. I’ll go first.”

  I held out a commanding hand, palm up.

  “Ant, gun,” I hissed. I’d handed mine back to Jace earlier, and now I needed to remedy that problem.

  He didn’t even stop to ask me why, and a second later the gun was in my hand, the handle nestled comfortably against my palm. I felt a thrill of sudden confidence run through me but didn’t stop to appreciate it. The gun slid easily into the waistband of my shorts, and I nodded to the others.

  “Wait for my signal, then give me about five seconds,” I told them. “I don’t care who comes first, but we’ve got to move quickly. Let me get into the laundry room and look around. If it’s safe, I’ll give you some sort of new signal. If it’s not, I guess you’ll hear shooting. Or me screaming. In that case, stay in the chute and try to get back up.”

  That was going to be an impossible chore, and I hoped they wouldn’t have to try it, partially because if they were going up, it meant I’d been captured or shot. Worst-case scenario, indeed. I turned, threw the door of the laundry chute up, and reached in to grab the support bar I knew would sit at the top of the chute. I didn’t know much about construction, but this chute would lead all the way up to the top floor, and they’d put these bars across the tunnel right above each door, presumably for support.

  Thank God we were only on the second floor. We would never have been able to get past them if we were any higher up.

  A moment later I’d grabbed the bar and pulled myself through the door, and was dangling over the sheer drop of the chute. Below my hanging feet, I could see only dim light. Corona hadn’t turned on the lights in the laundry room, then. Not that big a deal, I told myself. I didn’t need to see what was down there. I just needed to get there.

  I moved my feet to the wall in front of me and pressed the balls of my feet against it, my toes pointing upward at an extreme angle, and cringed. I’d spent large amounts of time in this position in my youth—
either hiding to get some peace from the household or reading a favorite book—and had been able to maintain this pose for some time. But I’d been younger then, and I hadn’t had an enormous bruise on my thigh. Right now, I was glad that I wouldn’t be here for more than the thirty or so seconds it would take me to creep down the chute to the bottom floor.

  I pressed against the wall and moved my body backward until my back was against the other wall—only about a two-foot space between my feet and my back—and waited until I thought I had everything set, then slowly let go of the bar above me, barely daring to breathe.

  My weight held, and I sat there for a split second, wedged between the two walls, then realized that we didn’t have time for me to be taking so long.

  “I’m good!” I whispered. “Lowering myself now!”

  I grabbed the gun out of my waistband, checked that the safety was still on, and started to scoot down, shuffling my feet downward and allowing gravity to move my body for me, the gun held right above my knees. Once I started moving, I remembered how easy it was, and I started going more quickly. Above me, I heard someone moving into the chute, and looked up.

  It was Jackie, and she was looking down at me with panic.

  “Grab the bar over your head!” I hissed. “Use it to swing yourself in!”

  She looked up, saw the bar, and nodded, and I looked back down below me. I didn’t have time to help her. I had to figure out what I was going to find down there, and how I was going to take care of it.

  I started scooting again, allowing my body to move even more quickly now that I was getting closer to the bottom, and heard someone else entering the chute above me. I didn’t look up. Around me, I was starting to hear the sounds of the soldiers searching the house, and it didn’t sound as if they were being gentle about it. There were bangs and breaking glass, and they were shouting at each other, calling out that they still hadn’t found anything.

  I took a moment to feel sorry about what the house was going through. If the artwork on the walls above was any indication, Corona had filled her house with beautiful and valuable things. And the Authority soldiers were breaking them without a thought.