The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  “And something that didn’t work out so well,” Abe reminded him, his words blunt. “Something that ended up getting Jackie hurt. So now we’re going to be attempting that four-hour trip with a wounded girl on our hands. While still trying to hide from the Authority.”

  Right, that was enough of the Ant and Abe show for the moment. Them blaming Jace was going to get us precisely nowhere.

  “Enough of the whining,” I said sharply. When Abe rounded on me, I put a hand up to stop him. “Cut it out, Abe. It’s not helping. We’ve got a wounded Jackie, and we know that we can’t stay here much longer. We know that the Authority is on our tail, and that we’ve got a long distance to travel. So how about you put your mental energy into figuring out how we’re going to take care of all that, rather than blaming Jace for having made a perfectly reasonable decision at the time?”

  Ant shot me a betrayed look—and Jace shot me a thankful one—and the entire group felt like it got right down to business with the problem at hand.

  We had a destination in mind, and the fact that we were guaranteed safety in that destination made me feel a whole lot more secure. We just needed to solve the issue of transportation.

  “So, we all agree that we can’t take public transport,” Kory said, cutting right to the chase and giving each of us a steady, even look.

  “What if we took the bikes?” Ant asked, sounding as if he’d suddenly happened across the best idea possible. “We already have them, and we know they’ll make the trip. They’re all in great shape. I mean, except Jackie’s. And maybe Robin’s.”

  I exhaled, having already written off the idea. “Do you want to drive that far trying to support Jackie?”

  He shrugged. “We could split up that responsibility. I take her for a while, you take her for a while—”

  “And do you think it’s a good idea to transport her in such an exposed manner? The bikes are great, but they don’t exactly offer a lot of protection when it comes to someone shooting at us,” I said, cutting him off.

  “Especially when we don’t all have the fancy suits,” Nelson added. “No, we need something else. Something better. Something that gives us more protection, and a quicker trip. Hopefully a gentler trip, too, so we’re not damaging Jackie more than we need to. And something the Authority will never expect or think to look for.”

  We all sat for a moment in the glow of the firelight, our minds moving through the problem. We were already restricted in our movements, thanks to the Authority swarming this whole area, and we had no money to make any kind of purchase. We also couldn’t afford to travel too far with Jackie’s injury. Where could we get something that the Authority wouldn’t expect? My first thought was to steal a car or something, but then I realized that we would never be able to take it all the way to the convent. If we stole anything, the enforcers would be notified and would know to search for it—and they’d notify the Authority.

  No, we needed something that the enforcers and Authority couldn’t trace.

  “The airship!” Ant suddenly exclaimed, his face gleaming. “It’s perfect! It’s smooth, so it won’t be tough on Jackie, and we know exactly where it is—and it’s far enough away from here that the Authority might not have found it yet.”

  “That’s the obvious answer, but it’s far enough away that it’s going to be difficult to get to it,” Nelson said. “Plus, it’s out of gas. Marco and Julia said as much when we met them in the meadow.”

  “And we don’t even know if it’s still there,” Jace added.

  “Hmm. But Marco and Julia did hide it, remember?” I said. “It was covered in brush when we walked past it, and in the middle of a wooded area. There’s a chance the Authority didn’t find it. Why would they have been looking for it right there, anyhow? It might…” I paused, my thoughts flashing by and forming themselves into a highly unlikely—but not impossible—plan. “It might work.”

  Ant snorted, his optimism evidently tamped down at the reminders of the problems with the airship idea. “Oh, sure. No problem at all. We can’t go anywhere or do anything without the Authority latching onto us immediately, but that won’t stop us from getting an airship’s worth of gasoline from someplace.”

  I stared at him, my grin widening at his sudden swing from hopeful to pessimistic—and the fact that I had the perfect answer. “Actually… I think that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  Half an hour later, it had gotten colder and darker outside of the tree’s shelter, but we’d had a quick dinner of Nurmeal, and I’d used the time to further formulate my idea. We were seated once again in a circle around the fire—with one change: Kory had gone outside of the tree’s branches to walk the perimeter of the small grove, as lookout.

  He was our designated alarm system and had two of the three guns with him, just in case.

  “What I’m thinking,” I said, leaning forward and stretching my hands toward the flames, “is that we actually just find a fuel tanker. It’s the easiest and most logical source of moveable fuel.”

  Nelson stared at me, frowning, but then nodded. “And it might not be as difficult to come by as you would think,” she said.

  She grabbed my tablet computer from the ground next to her and started typing something in. A moment later she held it up to the rest of us.

  All I could see was a weird graph, though, with a bunch of red lines and icons on it, and I shook my head in confusion.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Words, Nelson. We’re not living in your brain.”

  She snorted. “This is a map of Trenton. All those little signs are locations that require fuel. Any gas station, obviously. Any large building that runs on gas power. The large distribution centers that fuel the gas mains that power all the houses…”

  “And?” I asked, wishing she’d get to the point.

  “And,” she said, giving me a narrow look, “that gas has to get into the city somehow. It’s not just piped in from some big gas manufacturer. Trenton is far too isolated for that to be an option. There’s only one way to move enough gas to power an entire city, and that’s by tanker.”

  “Meaning that there should be a line of tankers coming into the city at least every couple of days,” I said, catching on to her train of thought.

  “And those tankers would be… open for new drivers, if we caught them in the right situation,” Ant said, grinning. “But where do we catch them?”

  “Simple,” Nelson answered. “I do some research on the trucking companies, what their routes are, and when they make scheduled deliveries to Trenton. Robin and Jace, you two get to work on their possible routes, any distribution centers, and a map to where we left the airship. A little research and we’ll figure out where we go for the gas. Then we just have to sort out the small detail of how we’re going to get the truck itself into our possession.”

  “And what about us?” Ant protested. “What are we supposed to do, sit here twiddling our thumbs?”

  “You’re going to get Jackie awake, give her some water and some food, if she’ll take it, and ask her… I don’t know, if anything is getting any worse,” I said. “We need to keep her as comfortable as we can for as long as we can, but we also need to know how she’s holding up. Abe…” I turned to him, trying to think of something for him to do, but he was already on his feet.

  “I’m going out to help Kory,” he said. “The last thing we need right now is for the Authority to catch us sleeping.”

  I was shocked at this willingness to leave the inner circle, which the Abe I remembered would have fought against, tooth and nail, but nodded to him solemnly. Abe, it seemed, was catching up with his brother in terms of sudden-onset maturity.

  And at exactly the right time.

  I watched Ant moving toward Jackie, spared a glance for the girl, who was starting to look a little blue around the edges, and turned quickly away from them. I was terrified about her condition, but thinking about it wasn’t going to do me or her an ounce of good right now. I couldn’t do anything for
her, as much as that killed me, without any medical knowledge or experience.

  The best thing I could do was to find a truck full of gas and figure out a way to steal it, so that we could get to the airship and get it into the air.

  Once we did that, I was positive that we’d be free. Positive that we’d be set. It was just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

  39

  I stood on my toes and stared through the row of bushes in front of me, my heart hammering in my ears at what we were about to try to do—and my brain asking me how the hell we thought we were going to pull it off, and why we’d thought it was a good idea in the first place.

  Ahead of us lay twenty square acres of asphalt surrounded by a huge swath of gravel, to form two squares, one wrapping around the other. And on that asphalt, I counted at least thirty trucks, each of them attached to an enormous silver canister of fuel.

  There were other structures, of course: gassing stations, and a couple of buildings around the perimeter where the truckers could get food and drink and use the bathrooms and showers. Trucking, I’d learned during our research the night before, was a somewhat strange occupation, full of people who hadn’t quite fit into regular society and had decided to live their lives on the road instead, without a home base. They didn’t have houses, many of them, and so took their food and bathroom breaks wherever they could. They also spent way too much time awake and counted on places like the one in front of us as safe spots, where they could climb into the mini-bedrooms they had in the backs of their trucks and sleep.

  It sounded like a horrible way to live, in my opinion. Which, I guessed, was probably why a lot of trucking companies had been turning to self-driving trucks, of late. In fact, it seemed that truck drivers themselves were a dying breed.

  But we had to hope with every ounce of our beings that there were real live truck drivers here. Because we needed human error if we were going to manage to steal a truck. If we got one that knew how to drive itself, it would probably undermine us the second we were in it.

  I took a deep breath and slid closer to Jace, taking some comfort in the fact that we would be doing this as a group. At least with the seven of us—five, I amended, as we’d left Ant back in the trees with Jackie—we would have a lot of brainpower going for us.

  The plan was relatively simple. “Simple” meaning that there weren’t a lot of steps involved. Those steps, though, were fairly… complicated. And success was going to require more than our fair share of luck.

  “Maybe our lack of luck over the last week means that our luck was saved up in some universal savings account to be used today,” Ant had joked when I’d said so this morning.

  I closed my eyes in prayer that he was right.

  “Stop thinking about it,” Jace suddenly murmured from beside me. “You’re shaking like a leaf, and you’re not going to be any good to us if you’re too nervous to do what you need to do.”

  What I needed to do. Right. Of course, it wasn’t just going to be me, but if any member of the team screwed this up, it would take us all down.

  We’d spent half the night researching the things that Nelson had outlined in her short speech and had managed to come up with a pretty straightforward plan. To our surprise, we’d found that there was a distribution center/truck wash/truck stop location just outside of Trenton, which meant we hadn’t had to go into the city at all. Which had been terrific news, since the city was basically a giant hornets’ nest as far as we were concerned. Of course, we’d known that getting to the distribution center might be a problem—the Authority had to know that we were on motorcycles of a certain description by this time—so we’d decided immediately to cut down on the number of bikes, to avoid the picture of five or six motorcycles traveling together.

  Instead we’d come on two motorcycles. And boy, had it been difficult. I’d been sandwiched between Nelson and Abe, while Jace had somehow managed to ride with Kory. The other bikes were still back in the forest, with Ant and Jackie.

  And with a little bit of that aforementioned luck, we would never need to use them again. Though, it broke my heart a little to think of them being left behind. I’d never owned anything that nice in my adult life, and if I could have held onto mine, I would have.

  Eyes forward, Robin, I lectured myself. I could get a new motorcycle when this was all done. If I managed to live through it.

  I felt in my pocket for the set of instructions I’d written down—the directions from our forest to a rough guess at where we’d left the airship, near the small town of Starkston. We would need these once we had the truck and had gotten to the forest to pick up Ant and Jackie.

  I stared ahead of us, watching the people moving back and forth across the huge asphalt parking lot, going about their business of getting food and gas, visiting with old friends, discussing the best routes, and no doubt checking their own delivery schedules. We just had to find a truck that wasn’t being guarded by an alert driver. A truck whose driver was, preferably, asleep in their bunk in the back of their cab.

  A truck that was far enough away from anyone else for our coming actions to be hidden. Because if anyone caught us, we’d be sent right to the place we never wanted to see: an Authority jail.

  But it was the only way to do this. The only way to get enough gas for the airship, while securing a source of transportation to the airship itself. The Authority might be looking for a group of bikes, but they almost certainly were not looking for a fuel tanker.

  “See any likely options?” I asked of no one in particular.

  Around me, Kory, Abe, and Jace were towering over my head, each of them able to look above the bush rather than through it, while Nelson and I were stuck spreading the branches with our hands.

  “There are a couple of trucks on the outer edges,” Jace murmured. “Those are going to be the best, I think. If we just all walk up to a truck in the middle of the parking lot, people are going to start asking questions.”

  “Oh come on, we’re just a group of kids strolling through a fuel tanker distribution center and… truck-wash thing,” Abe said. “That’s got to happen all the time around here.”

  “Maybe so,” Jace replied fairly. “But I doubt the kids who do that have been labeled terrorists by the Authority. We have to assume that our pictures are plastered up inside every one of those buildings, to catch the attention of people who travel often. I don’t know how closely truck drivers will be looking at them, but…”

  “One of the outside trucks it is,” I cut in, already tired of all the waiting. I was nervous as hell about this, but I also wanted to get it over with, already. Sitting around having a stupid conversation wasn’t going to save Jackie or get us to the convent. “Which one are we trying first?”

  We stared for a moment longer before Ant finally said, “Why not the one right in front of us? It seems like the easiest, right? Just get out of the bushes and go for it.”

  I stared at the one he was talking about. It was a big, cherry-red number, the tank behind it an enormous oval of bright chrome, rather than one shaped more like a cylinder. The truck itself was certainly large enough to have one of the mini-bedrooms in the back, and in this entire time of standing here—maybe half an hour, give or take—we hadn’t seen anyone getting in or out of that truck.

  It could mean that the guy was asleep in the back.

  It could also be exactly the sort of truck we needed.

  “Agreed,” I said. “You guys ready?”

  Everyone crouched down a bit, flexing their muscles in preparation for the sprint we were about to have, and I glanced out across the space once again.

  “Okay, if we get there and the situation’s not right, we turn to the left and go up to the next truck. That blue one,” I said, pointing. “If that one isn’t right, let’s get back here and regroup before we move to another.”

  It would give us two shots at finding the truck we needed, but also keep us from running around out there without a plan. At least this way we only w
ould have tried the trucks that would keep us hidden. I really didn’t want to get out into the open space unless we had to.

  “Agreed,” Kory said. “Seems like a solid plan.”

  I nodded. It was a solid plan. I just hoped it worked.

  “Okay,” Jace said. “Enough talking. Let’s go.”

  He turned and darted to the left, toward the opening in the bushes we’d spotted earlier, and the rest of us fell in quickly after him, all of us sprinting at top speed to get this over with as quickly as possible. We hit the opening, turned and darted into the parking lot, and then hurried toward the red truck.

  We reached it within a few seconds, and I jumped up on the sideboard and threw the truck’s door open, then crawled up into the driver’s seat. A quick pat-down of the underside of the seat, and then the turned-up sun visor, and I found the keys. Of course, I thought, why would a truck driver leave them anywhere else but in the truck? We’d hoped they’d be there, but there had been a lot of back and forth about how stupid the drivers would have to be to actually leave them there.

  It looked like when it came to truck stops like this, the drivers assumed that everything was safe. Either that or we’d happened across a truck that belonged to the laziest driver in the entire world.

  I whirled around, my mind jumping to the next step in the plan, and scooted out of the driver’s seat, heading for the bedroom at the back. This truck had a wall between the driver’s cockpit and the room, which I found sort of silly—what a waste of space—but I didn’t take any time to admire it. Instead, I threw the door open and charged through it, my gun out and at the ready.

  I walked right into the smallest, most compact bedroom I’d ever seen. To the right was a bathroom so minuscule it looked like it would barely fit me, and against the left-hand wall was a tiny pilot seat made of bright red leather, presumably to match the truck itself. Dead ahead of me, against the back wall, was a set of bunk beds, built so close to each other and the ceiling of the space that no reasonable human being would have been able to sit up in either one of them.