The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines

by Bella Forrest

  And I certainly hadn’t asked Henry to come with us. That had just been another sticky situation the universe had thrown us into. It had nothing to do with Jace, or my relationship with him. Granted, I obviously still had leftover feelings for Henry, but that didn’t change how I felt about Jace.

  Henry’d had his chance. He’d run. That was all I needed to know.

  But there was a small corner of my heart that dug its feet firmly into the sand at that thought and shouted that I was being stupid and naïve if I actually believed it. It seemed irrational, but we’d brought a child into this world together, after all…

  Henry suddenly swerved to the left and began crashing through the bushes and grasses surrounding the forest, and I tore myself from my thoughts and spared a moment to worry about the tank of fuel behind us, wondering if it would survive the journey at all, or if we’d find ourselves blown up courtesy of rough driving. But a second later the way smoothed out, and then Henry was turning right at the edge of the forest and rumbling up toward the large meadow that I could now see in the distance. There the bushes and taller grasses suddenly stopped and gave way to short grass and flowers. I would have recognized the area no matter how long it had been.

  “That’s it!” I breathed, my heart starting to race. Surely if we could see the meadow, that was a good sign. We’d just have to turn into it and find where the airship was parked…

  “Uh, guys, I think we’ve got company,” Jace suddenly said.

  I turned and saw that he was pointing up into the sky… directly at a drone. A round, sleek, eerily black object that looked almost beetle-like. It was hovering right over us, and it didn’t take a genius to see that its cameras were trained right on us. Right on the semi-truck that was barreling through a grassy field, in a place where no semi-truck should have been.

  “Oh no,” I said. The Authority had found us, then. And it didn’t matter whether this drone was a new addition, set to watch over a certain place, or something that had been following us since the road. More likely something that had found us on the reckless and rapid drive here. The only thing that mattered was that it had us now.

  And I had no doubt that it had already transmitted information back to the Authority’s HQ.

  We weren’t going to be on our own much longer.

  “Henry, can this thing go any faster?” I snapped, my mind flying ahead to the airship we were hoping still existed.

  Because I’d had one other quick thought about the drone. If it had been sitting here in this spot waiting for us, it meant that the Authority had found the airship. And if they had, then they would have been stupid to leave it in one piece.

  We might be heading right for what we thought would be our salvation, and find nothing but a burnt-out shell of what had once been our air support.

  Henry shoved the gear sticks into different positions, and we shot forward, hitting the meadow and turning right again, and then we were all staring desperately into the forest, trying to find the place where Marco and Julia might have hidden an airship. Praying that said airship was still there.

  And that we could still get it into the air at all.

  “There!” I shouted, shoving my arm out, pointer finger extended.

  The shape of the ship was clear as day. If the Authority had actually been looking for it, they would have been able to spot it.

  “I guess this means the Authority didn’t get around to figuring out that we’d hidden an airship in the area,” Jace muttered. “Thank heavens. Though, that does mean that the drone above us has been following us for some time. Let’s move it, guys. We can’t count on being alone for much longer!”

  I frowned at that. He wasn’t completely right. The Authority might have been here and left the airship. If that was the case, though, I was guessing that the engine was gone, or at least not working.

  It didn’t seem like their style. They always seemed to prefer burning things or blowing them up. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a possibility.

  Jace was already on his feet and ready to get out of the truck. The minute Henry rolled to a stop, I threw open the door and we all started piling out, jumping to the ground without even trying for the step. Henry had done the same, and I could hear him running back toward the end of the truck, calling for us.

  “I’m going to need some help with the hose!” he shouted. “Someone big!”

  Jace turned and darted toward Henry while the rest of us moved toward the airship, one eye on the ship and the other on the sky. If there was a drone, there was bound to be other air support soon. And I was betting they’d have stealth technology, which meant we wouldn’t hear them coming.

  “Watch the skies, guys!” I shouted, my heart pounding. “The Authority is going to have planes or choppers on their way here, you can count on it, and we might not be able to hear them before they arrive!”

  “Might not be able to see them, either,” Abe huffed, striding along next to me. “Depending on what sort of camouflage tech they’re running.”

  Oh, God. I hadn’t even thought of that. The idea that they might be able to stay completely invisible terrified me even more, and my pace doubled.

  When we reached the airship, we started pulling the branches and grass from around it, brushing it off and trying to figure out whether it was still in one piece or not.

  “Seems whole on this side!” Ant called from the other side of the ship. He’d put Jackie gently on the ground at the nose of the aircraft, her back propped up against a tree, and had sped to the other side with his brother, leaving Nelson, Kory, and me to clear this side, brushing our hands madly over the metal wall as we looked for holes or problems.

  I didn’t see anything wrong with the ship on this side, either. It was still whole, and it didn’t look like the Authority agents had ripped off the wings or filled the sides with bullets. It looked airworthy. We were going to have a time maneuvering it out of the forest, but we also had Nelson, who was a more than capable pilot.

  “Robin, get inside and make sure the thing still turns on,” she muttered. “We don’t have time to gas it up if it’s not going to work.”

  I frowned. “Wait. If it’s out of gas, will it even turn on?”

  She exhaled. “Yes. Just try it.”

  She then turned and darted forward toward the nose, where I saw her throw open the door that led to the engine. She grabbed at the bag of tools we’d always kept right inside the door and jammed her hand into it, already reaching forward into the engine’s compartment.

  I nodded, praying that she didn’t find anything amiss in there, and jumped for the handle on the side of the cockpit. I’d never flown the thing by myself, but Nelson had forced me to take lessons when I first joined her crew, and I at least knew how to turn it on. I climbed into the pilot’s seat and stared around me at the range of dials and screens on the ship’s dashboard.

  “Thank the stars I’ve never had to fly this,” I said, knowing that I’d immediately be overwhelmed.

  That said, turning it on was easy. I reached out and jammed my finger into the bright green ignition button, and the engine… coughed slightly.

  Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no. Not now.

  I jammed my finger onto the button again, holding it for a second this time, and the engine coughed again.

  “You have to hold the button down longer, girl!” Nelson shouted from outside.

  I nearly slapped my palm to my forehead. Of course I did! I knew that, but was forgetting in my stress over the situation.

  I shoved my finger firmly up against the button again and kept it there, holding my breath, until the engine finally turned over and roared to life. I took a moment to grin at that, and then hit the button again.

  I was guessing it was probably a bad idea to have the engine on while they were refueling. Definitely a bad idea to have it on while Nelson was inside that compartment, even though it had been her idea.

  I jumped out of the cockpit and ran toward the rear of the ship, where I knew th
e cap for the fuel tank was, in case Jace and Henry needed help.

  When I got there, though, I found that they’d already fit the hose to the tank. Henry was using some sort of handheld pump to urge the gas from one place to another, since we couldn’t count on gravity, and Jace was standing to the side of him, bouncing with the need to be out of here.

  “How many gallons have you pumped?” he asked.

  Henry glanced at the pump in his hand. “About fifty,” he huffed, breathless from the effort required to make the handheld device work.

  “Nelson, is fifty gallons enough to take us for a few hours?” Jace shouted.

  “Not quite!” Nelson answered from the other side of the ship. “I’d be happier with seventy-five!”

  “Got that?” Jace asked, whirling back to Henry.

  “Got it. We’re almost there. Just a second more, and…”

  The sound of blades slicing the air made our heads snap up to the sky. Three choppers, I saw, scanning the air rapidly. Three full-sized military choppers, each a shiny, malevolent black, as if to match the drone. Their engines roared out over the quiet forest, and my heart shrank into a tiny, painful ball in my chest.

  “Guess they didn’t even bother with the silencing tech,” Abe shouted, skidding up from the other side of the ship. “What do we do, guys? I’m guessing they’ve got guns on those things, and I don’t want to find out what their range is!”

  Henry yanked the hose out of the airship, no longer bothering to count how much fuel he’d put in, and dropped it. Jace quickly put the cap back on the opening in the side of the ship.

  “Everyone on the ship!” he yelled. “Those choppers are about one thousand feet away, and they’re coming in quick!” He spared a glance for Nelson, who had appeared, her face covered in smears of grease. “Nelson, the engine all good?”

  “As good as it’s going to get,” she shot back. “We’re ready to go.”

  He nodded. “I’m guessing you’re our captain. Get into the cockpit and get us in the air.”

  He turned and darted after Henry, and I watched for only long enough to see them bend their heads together and start gesticulating madly over something, then whirled around to see Nelson, Abe, and Kory leaping into the ship. Ant was heading for the front of the aircraft to pick up Jackie, and I dashed after him, knowing that he would be the one in most need of help.

  The engine turned over and roared to life a split second before I reached Ant and Jackie, and he popped up, her body in his arms, and sprinted toward me.

  I turned and ran as well, around the other side of the ship, arriving at the door three steps ahead of him so that I could throw it open.

  The helicopters started shooting at us five seconds later.

  The explosive sound made my ears sting, and a tremble ran through my whole body as I jerked and turned, wondering what the hell was taking Jace and Henry so long. What was so important about that stupid fuel hose that they needed to be seeing to it while we were in the middle of a damned escape?! This was no time to become environmentally responsible!

  I exhaled in relief when I spotted the two of them sprinting toward me—but was confused by the looks on their faces. They were dashing haphazardly through the forest, trying to make themselves less visible to the choppers above us, and were stuttering back and forth as bullets slammed into the ground. But the looks on their faces went beyond the intense, focused look of someone running for their life, and right to… panicked. As if they were running from something a lot bigger than just the helicopters.

  Just the helicopters. I could have laughed at myself. The noise around us had become almost unbearable, and I didn’t think it would be long before we saw different weapons from the Authority.

  More dangerous weapons.

  We were going to have one hell of a time getting out of here at all. Even with an airship in our hands.

  “Let’s go!” I screamed, leaning out of the ship and holding out a hand. Jace jumped and grabbed my hand, and I pulled myself and him back into the ship and let go of him, sending him flying into the belly while I ducked quickly back out. My hand shot forward just as Henry jumped, and I yanked him in as well, not even bothering to ask what he thought he was doing.

  “Get us out of here!” I yelled, letting go of Henry’s hand. “We’re all on board!”

  Nelson was at the controls, Abe flying copilot, and we were good to go. With luck, we could fly through the trees and reach the cloud cover to get away from the helicopters. I was just darting forward to look up into the sky and try to help them with some directions when Jace’s voice shot through the ship.

  “No! We wait until each of those choppers is on the ground and the agents start piling out of them!”

  I whirled around to stare at him, both confused and, for some reason, angry. What was he doing? Was he trying to get us caught?

  “What? Are you crazy?!” Nelson and I shouted at the same time.

  “He’s right!” Henry added. “We want them to think there’s something wrong with our aircraft and we can’t take flight. We need to stay on the ground as long as possible, at least for another—”

  “They’re already on the ground!” Kory bellowed. He’d been at the back of the ship, keeping a lookout through the rear windows, and was now gesticulating madly in that direction, his face red with tension.

  “Agents are coming around the truck right now!” he yelled. He turned to stare right at Jace, and then quickly turned his eyes to Nelson. “Nelson, we’ve got to go. I don’t care what Jace says, get this thing in the air! I am not going back to prison today!”

  I agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment and was just turning back toward the front of the ship, my eyes on the sky in search of more aircraft, when I saw a strange look pass between Jace and Henry. A look that was obviously speaking volumes.

  Volumes about something that only the two of them seemed to know about.

  A split second later, Nelson was revving the engine and lifting us right into the air, and I darted toward the back of the ship to stand next to Kory, my eyes on the agents rushing through the meadow behind us. Kory was right: they were streaming around the truck now, their helicopters surrounding it, and there had to be dozens of them.

  They must have been following us during the drive. I kicked myself for having been so stupid as to even hope we might have been disguised—and then gasped as I realized that something else was going on in the forest behind us.

  The hose Henry had left on the ground was… on fire. And the fire was streaking quickly back toward the other end of the hose.

  A hose that was attached directly to a driving bomb. The truck. And the agents.

  Kory and I started backing quickly away from the window at the same time, having both seen the fire in the hose.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I muttered.

  I whirled around and dashed toward Nelson, screaming, “Get this thing into the air, Nelson! NOW! Hit the turbo or whatever you have! We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”

  She gave me a quick glance, her brow creased in confusion, but then hit the gas on the ship without asking questions. We shot forward and then up into the sky, bullets flying after us from the Authority agents below.

  We must have been about five hundred feet up when the flames in the hose got to Henry’s truck.

  The ensuing explosion almost blew us out of the sky. We were all thrown to one side as the airship turned abruptly and started to stutter. I grasped at one of the seats, my eyes on Nelson’s hands, and watched her flying through the motions of trying to straighten it, her hands a blur on the controls, her feet working the several different pedals under the dashboard.

  Abe was doing the same thing on his side of the cockpit, and they were shouting back and forth to each other—though I knew that only because I could see their mouths moving. I couldn’t hear anything; my ears were ringing severely after the horrendous noise of the explosion. I glanced to the left and right of me, saw that Ant was on
the floor, sheltering Jackie, and realized that we had both doors open.

  Both doors open while people were firing at us was about the stupidest thing possible.

  I rushed to the one on my side, grappled with the handle while fighting to keep my balance, and managed to yank it shut. I threw the bolt, then turned and staggered to the other side of the swaying ship to do the same, sparing a glance at the forest below us, which was now engulfed in flames. The truck itself was just a memory, and the helicopters that had surrounded it didn’t seem much better off. Not all of those three choppers might have landed—my recollection of the last few seconds before the truck blew was fuzzy—but I couldn’t see any airborne ship through the smoke right now, and though it probably made me a bad person, I prayed that the explosion had killed them all.

  Taking a deep breath, I pulled myself back into the ship and yanked the door shut before turning directly toward Jace and Henry. Those two had some explaining to do.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked, caught between being angry at them and grinning outright at what they’d just managed to pull off. “You guys set up an explosion and didn’t think it would be a good idea to tell us first?”

  Henry did grin at that. “Sure did. I had a lighter in my pocket, and when Jace and I realized that we needed some sort of distraction, preferably one that would take out anyone who was coming after us…” He shrugged as if it had been the most natural thing in the world, and I almost laughed.

  “Jace?” I asked, turning to him.

  “Well, it worked, didn’t it?” he asked, one corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.

  “And it was incredibly dangerous,” Nelson said grimly. “We could have all been killed!”

  “But we weren’t,” I noted, knowing that Jace and Henry—a completely unlikely pairing—had probably just saved us from arrest. Or death. “But we also can’t count on that being the end of the Authority. What else is in the sky? Anyone see anything?”

  “The drone’s still there,” Abe said, his voice cold and serious. “Dead ahead. And I’m betting it’s relaying updates back to home base.”