The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  They were empty.

  “Dammit,” I breathed.

  I whirled around and dashed back out of the area, hurtling myself into the driver’s seat again and then almost falling out of the cab itself.

  “Nobody there?” Jace asked, glancing beyond me into the truck.

  “Nobody,” I confirmed. “The keys were there—oh.” I turned and threw them back into the driver’s seat, having completely forgotten that I’d grabbed them. “But no driver. So unless we want to sit here and wait for him to come back from wherever he is, we’ve got to move on. I’m not attached enough to this truck to want to wait. Anyone else?”

  Around me a range of heads shook in the negative, and we turned toward the blue truck that we’d chosen as our backup.

  “But walk this time!” I hissed before anyone started sprinting. “Running makes us look suspicious!”

  Jace cast a surprised look in my direction, but everyone nodded, and a second later we were walking oh-so-naturally across the pavement, staring at anything but the truck we were making for, our minds centered on what we would find inside.

  With luck, we’d find the driver. The longer we were here, the better chance we had of getting caught. But if we had a truck with a driver, we could just take them both—and avoid the possibility of any driver reporting to the authorities that his truck had been stolen.

  We’d come here thinking that I could maybe try hotwiring one, and that we could steal it that way. It had only taken me one glance at the size of the engines to know that would never happen, and we’d quickly adjusted our plan to take an entire partnership: truck and driver.

  It took us a full minute to get to the next truck at the slower pace, and by the time we got there my skin was humming with nerves. We followed the same process on this truck—mostly because if we were actually going to steal a truck, I was the one who was going to be driving it.

  I had no idea how to drive a rig this large. But as it turned out, among the five of us here, I was the only one who had a driver’s license. And though I obviously wasn’t going to be showing that to anyone—and if I did, that would be the end of me, and not because I had been caught speeding or driving a rig that I wasn’t licensed to drive—it also meant that I had the most hands-on experience with operating a moving vehicle of the four-wheeled variety.

  I’d agreed to that part of the plan extremely reluctantly. Though, it had also been a distant possibility at the time, as we’d still had to actually get to the distribution center and then find a truck.

  Now that we were here, and I could see the size of these things, I was starting to really rethink how cooperative I’d been.

  I threw open the blue truck’s door and hurled myself up into the seat, then started digging around for the keys. On the floorboard beneath the seat. No. Up above me, tucked into the visor. No. I threw myself across to the other seat and tugged at the handle of the glove compartment, trying desperately to think of where else someone might hide keys. But there was nothing in there but a bunch of paperwork, which I pulled out in a rush and then left all over the floor.

  I jumped to my feet and turned toward the back of the cab, wondering desperately if the driver, smarter than the guy who owned the red truck, had kept the keys on him rather than leaving them lying around.

  I rushed into the back compartment—no wall this time—and looked quickly around, my gaze rushing over more bunk beds, also empty, and another tiny bathroom. No one here. Well, that solved the key problem, then. Without the driver, this truck was a no-go.

  I was just turning to get back out of the truck when I heard a scuffle going on outside, along with several shouts—and then Jace calling my name, his voice hoarse with something that sounded an awful lot like panic.

  I rushed out of the back compartment of the truck, horrified at the idea that something had gone wrong and we were caught, and then came skidding to a halt in the space between the two seats.

  There, standing on the ground outside the truck and staring up at me, his soft brown eyes wide with shock, surprise, and horror… was Henry.

  40

  “Robin?” he gasped, his forehead suddenly creasing into a frown. “What on earth are you doing in my truck? And who are these people?”

  He gestured to my friends, who were standing behind him with their mouths open—either from the shock of the truck’s driver suddenly showing up… or the shock of him knowing my name. I couldn’t tell which. Jace, I saw, had his gun out and was pointing it directly at the back of Henry’s head.

  Crap.

  I stepped quickly past the driver’s seat of the truck and onto the sideboard, and then jumped down to the ground. Jace and Henry both immediately put hands out to catch me, then glanced at the other and dropped their hands awkwardly.

  I felt about the same, and looked from one of them to the other, my mouth opening and closing like a gaping fish’s. Of all the gin joints in all the world, I suddenly thought, the line from some old movie coming rapidly into my mind. This didn’t make any sense whatsoever. The last time I’d seen Henry, he’d been on his way out the door, having just told me that he’d taken a transfer to another factory far away from me—and that he was leaving me there with his parents, my life ruined, my own family nothing but a memory, all my schooling gone to waste.

  And my daughter gone, too, courtesy of the Ministry and the poverty-stricken life I’d managed to get myself into.

  I never thought I’d see him again. Not in a million years. Particularly not now, when we were in the middle of something so important.

  And that was the thought that suddenly got me moving again. I didn’t have time to stand around gaping at him.

  “Henry, what the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “What am I doing here? What are you doing here? And what are you doing in my truck?”

  He looked past me and up into the cab, as if he was suspicious that I’d done something to it, and I almost laughed. Because there was no way in hell that I could tell him what I’d been doing in his truck. Unless…

  Suddenly, I realized that there might be an easy way to tell him what I’d been doing, and a way to solve the problem we were currently in.

  We’d been planning to kidnap a driver… So now it turned out that my ex-boyfriend was the driver of the truck in question. Why not just kidnap Henry?

  I stared at him, wondering how much we could trust him.

  “This is your truck?” I asked, turning around to look back up into it. “You drive trucks now?”

  “I do,” he said shortly. “And I’m not telling you anything else until you tell me what the hell is going on. And you should know that your face, and your friends’ faces”—he gestured to the people standing behind him—“are all over the inside of the truck stop over there. They’re labeling you a… a terrorist.”

  He ended the sentence weakly, almost as a question, and I stared at him for a minute, then gave him a nod. Right. Well, the whole story it was, then. I didn’t see any way around it. This boy had been my first love, and he’d loved me once. Or at least he’d come close. He’d been shot trying to defend me, for goodness’ sake.

  Surely he still had a little bit of feeling for me. I’d trusted him with my life, once.

  “Yes,” I said, not bothering to look at the others. I reached forward and took Henry’s hand, summoning all the emotion I could find, and wishing I could cry on command, the way some of my friends had been able to do when we were young. “You have to understand, when they took Hope, something inside me broke. It was… I know you lost her too, and I know how much that upset you. But for me, it was even bigger. She was a part of me, Henry, and they just tore her out of my arms. I never got to hear her speak, will never get to see how she grows up! She’ll never know that I even existed!” My voice broke, and the tears did start, then, and I swallowed heavily. These weren’t things I often said out loud, and somehow hearing them as I spoke them made it seem even more terrible.

  But there was no time f
or me to break down now.

  I cleared my throat and continued. “And then after you left, I lost hope completely. But then I… I found a way to fight back, but it led to trouble, and the government… Well, you know how they feel about people who don’t live up to their standards.”

  He gave me a long, considering look, and I swallowed again, hoping that he remembered how much he’d cared about me when we were younger. Hoping he still had that big, beating heart that he’d once showed me.

  “You remember how you used to say that the only way to live was to rebel?” I asked, recalling something he’d told me during our summer of freedom. “I guess I took you at your word. And it’s gotten me into trouble, and now I have to get out of here. But I can’t do it alone. I need help.” I looked up at where my friends were standing with their mouths hanging open and added, “We all need help.”

  They were probably going to kill me later for telling him so much. But they didn’t know Henry as well as I did. They didn’t know how to reach his conscience.

  Suddenly, Henry smiled and pulled me into a hug, and just for a moment, I was that teenager again, the one who thought she’d fallen in love with him. He smelled exactly the same, and the smell went rushing right up to my head and had me melting into his arms before I could remember that we were in completely different circumstances now. I stiffened, but then realized that he would be more likely to help us if he was feeling affectionate toward me, and let him tighten the hug.

  “It’s so good to see you,” he breathed into my hair. “You don’t know how many times I’ve dreamed about finding you again. Never under these circumstances, of course, but I’ll take what I can get.” He leaned back and gave me a quick grin. “You’re right about the rebelling thing. It’s the only way to fight those bastards in the government. I’m in. What do you need?”

  I actually gasped with shock at how quickly and easily he gave in—and then I remembered that this was why I’d fallen for him in the first place. He’d been the most adventurous and spontaneous person I’d ever met, and being with him after living in my parents’ house had been like suddenly being able to fly.

  “Really?” I asked quickly. “Are you sure? It’s… I don’t want to get you into any danger.”

  He cast that aside with a wave of his hand. “I don’t care about danger. I’ve been living by the rules for far too long. What’s your plan?”

  Well, that was unexpected. Granted, he’d always been overly eager to break the rules, but I’d never thought he was actually brave. Maybe he didn’t realize exactly what I was talking about here.

  “Henry, I mean that the actual government is after me,” I said quietly. “If you help me, they’ll be after you, too.”

  Still, he waved off the warning, as if I was just talking about sneaking into a movie or something.

  “Robin, you are involved in some of my best memories, and I’ve never been able to forgive myself for walking out on you the way I did,” he said, taking my hands in his. “I mean, yeah, I was upset about what had happened and didn’t know what to do or how to make it right. I could see how much you were hurting, and I didn’t know how to take care of you. But running away wasn’t the right choice. I’ve been… I’ve been hoping I would get a chance to apologize one day. I just didn’t know how I would find you. But now you’re here, and this feels like fate. Don’t you think?”

  I didn’t know whether to punch him in the nose for being so stupid or kiss him for being such a romantic, and the ensuing confusion made my stomach flip several times, leaving me sick—but also elated.

  He’d just agreed to help us. I didn’t really understand why, and I didn’t think I would have done the same thing in his shoes, but that wasn’t what mattered here. What mattered was that he’d just said he’d help.

  And that was really all the encouragement I needed.

  “Thank you, Henry. Truly. From the bottom of my heart. What we need is your truck. We have a plan, but it doesn’t work without fuel, and we need a vehicle that will get us away from here and to… to a spot where we’ve got better transportation hidden. But I need a truck that won’t be reported as stolen. I can’t have the enforcers coming after us when we’re trying to escape.”

  I gestured to the others, indicating that they would be coming with me, and had a split second to notice that Jace was wearing a truly thunderous expression before Henry spoke again.

  “Okay,” he said firmly. “That all makes sense.” He reached into his pocket, grabbed his keys, and then motioned up into the truck in a gesture of invitation. “Everyone in. There’s not a ton of room, but if you sit on the floor in the back you should be okay. This thing doesn’t exactly make tight turns, so seatbelts are kind of unnecessary.”

  At that moment, I realized that we’d had a pretty severe miscommunication. He was speaking as if he was coming with us.

  “Wait,” I stuttered, trying to figure out why he would have thought that. “You’re not coming with us. I mean, we need to take your truck, and for you not to tell anyone about us. But we don’t need to take you with us!”

  He turned back from the truck and grabbed my arms. “And if you think I’m going to send you out onto the road by yourself when you’re in danger, you’re crazy. Besides”—he gave me the boyish grin that had once sent butterflies racing through my stomach—“I’m bored out of my mind in my current life, and I’ve been looking for an adventure. This seems as good as any other.”

  At that point I remembered the thing that I had hated about him: his inability to settle down and be a reasonable or responsible person. He’d always been looking for the next adventure, the next rebellion, and he’d been flighty enough that he’d do just about anything if he thought it would be a good time.

  Going up against the government must have seemed like the perfect adventure. Bigger than anything he’d ever done before. And it was also completely not going to happen. Not only because I didn’t want the awkwardness of having him and Jace in the same place, but also because I truly didn’t want to see him in danger.

  The idea of him getting hurt because of me was uncomfortable enough that I shied away from it immediately, without giving myself time to consider why it hurt so much.

  “No, Henry,” I said firmly. “I’m not putting you in danger like that. I’m not risking you, because I would never be able to forgive myself if anything happened to you. You can’t come with us. We just need the truck.”

  “And we need to hurry,” Nelson cut in, looking away from us and toward the restaurant about two hundred feet away. “Because people are starting to notice us. And we can’t take the chance that they’re people who have also seen the posters in there.” She turned her eyes to me, her face deadly serious. “We’ve got to go, Robin.”

  I bit my lip, my entire list of priorities suddenly shifting gears, and turned back toward Henry. He was, to my consternation, grinning widely.

  “If you have to go, you have to go,” he said triumphantly. “And I guess that means you don’t have time to argue with me. I’m coming with you. I left you once. I’m not doing it again.”

  I glared at him, seeing the ruse for what it was, and then also saw people running toward us from the restaurant. I whirled to look at them and saw that they were just truck drivers, but the fact that they were running toward us in that manner could only mean one thing: they’d recognized us.

  Nelson was right. We had to go.

  “Fine!” I snapped, realizing that I was quite possibly sealing a contract for a guaranteed headache until we could get rid of this boy again. “But you’re driving! And don’t think this means you get to try to take over this mission and make it some crazy adventure of your own!”

  I jumped up into the cab without a backward glance and sank into the passenger seat. I was the one with the directions to the airship. I would be in the front, where I could do the directing.

  And I didn’t want to take the chance of Jace interacting with Henry any more than I could help it. I hadn’t mis
sed the anger and confusion in his eyes when I glanced his way.

  The rest of my team jumped up into the cab and scuttled toward the back of the truck, and Henry leapt in after them, turning the key of the ignition before they were even seated. It seemed like it took forever for the truck to fully start up, and even longer for him to adjust the many gear sticks it took to get it moving, but we were jerking into movement before the people who’d run out of the restaurant had reached us. Henry pulled the truck into a slow, ponderous U-turn, the vehicle creaking and groaning like it was being put through torture and bouncing like nothing I’d ever felt before, and then he hit the gas.

  It wasn’t a fast acceleration, but it was powerful. By the time we got to the gate of the parking lot, he was lumbering quickly along and people were jumping out of the way. I could see up ahead that whoever owned the lot had closed the gates to the place, evidently in an attempt to stop us.

  Henry busted right through them, hit the highway, and started taking my directions to the forest.

  41

  By the time we arrived at the spot I’d indicated on the highway that passed the forest, my eyes felt like they were going to fall out of my head, they were so tired of staring into the extended side mirrors.

  No vans had showed up behind us yet, and between keeping a look out and dancing around Henry’s rapid-fire questions about what exactly was going on, the drive went more quickly than I could have imagined. But I was still terrified that I would see an Authority vehicle at any moment—or worse, a whole herd of them.

  We also had to hope that they weren’t approaching us from the sky, where we couldn’t see them.

  “Nelson, you called Ant, right?” I asked tensely, my eyes flitting to the sky and scanning as much of it as I could from my angle in the seat.