The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows Read online

  I ran it through my brain once and then again, trying to figure out whether I needed to grab the others and get out of there quickly. I realized, then, that the same things that had made the place safe before, with Nelson, made it safe now. It was a crowded joint, and the lunch crowd, no doubt tempted by Cianna’s famous pot roast, would hide our rather large party. With luck, we would look like just another group of friends there to enjoy our lunch breaks together. The Ministry shouldn’t know our faces or our names—at least, I hoped not—and if they entered, I was certain that we’d see them before they saw us.

  Plus, Nelson’s group was on good terms with the back exit of the place. We’d walked through it at least a hundred times, and I didn’t think it would take us more than thirty seconds to get there if we needed, even with the extra bodies.

  Besides, if we were already being watched by the Ministry or the enforcers, it wouldn’t matter where we were. We had called in sick at our jobs to meet in the middle of the day, in a rather large and easily targetable group. If they followed us here it would be because they knew who we were. If that was true, we’d be in enough trouble that no amount of cover would be enough.

  In fact, most of our group was already there.

  Zion was sitting with Allerra, speaking earnestly to her, and she was looking at him with her eyes wide, nodding enthusiastically, as if she was trying to take in everything he might give her. I couldn’t help but smile at the impassioned look on her face. I had to wonder again how someone so young had found herself here. At some point, I would have to ask her about her history. Just like anyone else, she had a tale, and it deserved to be heard.

  Alexy was speaking to Ant, Jackie, Julia, and Marco, the four of them wearing nearly identical expressions of frustrated disbelief. Which meant, I suspected, that Alexy had just said something outrageous and vaguely insulting but also true enough to keep them from arguing with her. I was glad to see that Ant was in attendance. That meant Jackie had been able to talk him out of any hare-brained schemes.

  I walked up to them, my heart skipping in relief to see them healthy and present, and dropped into a seat next to Alexy. She turned and gave me a look of mock surprise, then glanced over my shoulder with a question in her eyes.

  “Where’s your gruff, hairy sidekick?” she asked. “And his even hairier friend? They’re the only ones we’re waiting on, and I’d like to get this party started. The sooner we figure out our next move, the sooner we can get moving.”

  I agreed with that sentiment, though I took some issue with her calling Jace my sidekick.

  “He said he’d been called to some sort of emergency meeting with Nathan,” I told her. “I guess Boyd might have gone too?”

  Truthfully, I had no idea whether Cloyd was in the same group of insiders as Jace. I knew he wasn’t an admin, as I’d asked about that early on, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t some sort of consultant. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Cloyd didn’t seem any better with tech than Jace, so why would he be a consultant for a secret revolution portal? But who was I to judge?

  As far as I could see, though, they weren’t the only ones missing.

  “Where are the others? Alice, Ida, James, Samuel…” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “We told them not to bother,” Ant replied. “They’d have to travel too far to get here, and it’d be dangerous. Samuel gave me his phone number last night, so we texted them this morning to let them know that we’d just send them any relevant… plans.”

  He sort of stumbled over the last word and gave Alexy a look, and I realized immediately who had made that decision.

  It seemed like a good one, so I didn’t argue. We hadn’t wanted to involve anyone other than the teams that had gone into the raid, and cutting it down even further was a good idea. Hopefully it would lead to fewer complications. It would certainly mean fewer people arguing about what was bound to be a number of different ideas.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion at the front of the bar, and I whirled around in my chair, certain that the Ministry had found us. I poised to jump to my feet, grab the person closest to me, and dash toward the back exit. But before I could move, I saw Cloyd and Jace shoving their way through the crowd, taking little time to apologize to those they left in their wake. The two men were larger than almost anyone in the bar, and I wondered why they were being so rough. Surely they could have just walked through the clear spaces, or at least asked people to move to the side rather than using their muscle.

  Then I noticed that they were both wearing looks of consternation on their faces. I rose, concerned at the sudden change in Jace, but he motioned for me to sit again and smoothed his features out a bit, as if he could read my concern.

  “Okay, we’re here,” he said shortly as Cloyd took a seat next to Zion. “Let’s figure out what we’re going to do about this.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? We have to go after our friends. We have to get them out of there,” Ant said quickly. “That’s got to be our main priority.”

  “Too dangerous,” Zion said immediately. “We can’t just pretend that last night didn’t happen. We had our asses handed to us in terms of firepower and computer capabilities, and now we’re down two of our best techs in Nelson and Austin. We can’t just go running into another stupid situation. Not without a better plan.”

  No one answered him for several long seconds, because he was right. We’d been well and truly schooled when it came to hacking power during the raid. Now we were missing Nelson, who had made so many things possible. I was still holding out hope that she was okay, just hiding somewhere, but as long as we didn’t have access to her, we were missing not only a great deal of hacking power, but also one of our natural leaders. It made planning difficult.

  “Well, we can’t just sit around and do nothing!” Jackie retorted. “That’s stupid, first of all, because those are our friends in the Ministry’s clutches! We have to get them out of there!”

  Zion leveled her with an even look that started out as harsh and then shifted to gentle and sympathetic.

  “And what makes you think they’re even still alive?” he asked.

  She gave him a narrow-eyed look herself, then pointedly ignored him and turned to Alexy.

  “We have to get them out of there before they give anything up, anyhow. Shouldn’t we be thinking about security, here?”

  Alexy tossed Zion a look, followed by a grin, and nodded.

  “I see all my lecturing last night did you some good. Yes to the security, but no to the rescuing people before they can give anything up. We’ve been too careful with information for them to know anything, so unless you guys have been overly free with information in the past…” She glanced at me, Jackie, Ant, Julia, and Marco, and we all shook our heads.

  “Nelson was too paranoid to let us share anything personal,” I muttered. “We don’t even know each other’s real names.”

  Alexy sniffed dramatically. “A woman after my own heart. Good. Then our unfortunate friends don’t have anything to give up, so that argument doesn’t stand.” She glanced at Ant, who was about to argue, and held up a hand.

  “I didn’t say we’re not going to go after them,” she amended. “Just that now’s not the right time.”

  “Now’s not the right time?” he asked, shocked. “Now’s not the right time? The Ministry has them, woman! How long do you think they’re going to hold onto them?”

  “Longer than you might realize,” Cloyd said, breaking into the conversation for the first time. “Their endgame is to destroy their enemies. They won’t do anything until they think they’ve got us on the line. Our friends, as you keep calling them, are the bait. And a good fisherman doesn’t cut bait until they’ve got the fish on the hook.”

  I gulped, suddenly aware that this was a whole lot bigger than we’d ever meant for it to be. Sure, we’d set out to change the world, but I didn’t think any of us had expected to take the Ministry on with the first mission. We certainly hadn’t thought that we would be going h
ead to head with the government and making their list of enemies our first time out.

  Worst-case scenario, indeed.

  Which brought me rapidly to another point. Our friends might not have any information on us they could give the Ministry, but I knew someone who did.

  He’d already tried to sell us out once.

  “Oh my God. Marty,” I said with a gasp. “If the Ministry is looking for information, he knows so much. Our general plans for OH+. Our screennames. The OH+ portal’s location.” I could feel my panic building at the thought of it. True, none of our real names were stored there. We’d always been careful to mask our IPs whenever we accessed the site, but the previous night had made it painfully obvious that the Ministry was better at hacking things than we could have ever imagined.

  What if our IP masks weren’t good enough? What if the site’s anti-hacking security wasn’t up to snuff? What if the Ministry had already gotten in there and figured out who we all were, courtesy of the man we should never have trusted?

  “He’s already tried to sell us out once,” Jace agreed. He glanced at Cloyd. “Do you think it might have been—”

  Zion put a hand up to stop him, but my mind was already finishing the sentence.

  Do you think it might have been him who tipped the Ministry off to the raid? He’d had access to all of our plans, and we knew from our first big meeting that we couldn’t trust him. He’d blown that with his first betrayal. What would have stopped him from betraying us again, and this time directly to the Ministry?

  “Not an issue,” Zion said gruffly. “Marty is… no longer an issue.”

  Jace turned a cold amber glance on Zion.

  “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

  Zion shrugged.

  “He’s dead. I killed him shortly after the meeting, while he was within easy reach. Figured the same thing you guys are figuring right now—if he sold us out once, he’d do it again. And that’s not the sort of person any of us need hanging around.”

  Everyone else’s mouths dropped right open and hung that way for at least ten seconds. Dead? Dead? He’d just gone out and killed Marty, without talking to anyone about it, without even bringing it up in the group? At the time, he’d told us that he would figure out a way to “deal” with Marty, but I’d had no idea that would involve murder.

  Granted, I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. He was right: Marty had been a problem once and had been bound to become one again. This way we could cross that worry right off our list.

  Still, it seemed like an awfully final solution.

  Then something strange happened. I noticed that there was a sharing of looks going on between Jace, Cloyd, Zion, and Alexy. The rest of us weren’t involved in whatever subtext was happening there. In fact, it was like we were no longer even in the room.

  I was definitely running with a much rougher crowd than I’d ever run with before. I wasn’t sure how it had happened, but I did know one thing: that had never been my intention. I’d wanted to find a way to recover my baby girl, and maybe do some good deeds, but I’d never set out to change the world. Not really. I had just wanted my world to go back to being something resembling normal, peaceful enough to let me sleep at night. If that meant altering the government in some way or helping to start a revolution, that would be great, but my biggest focus had always been Hope.

  Not espionage.

  And certainly not murder.

  “And you don’t think that was a little bit dramatic?” I asked quietly. “Maybe slight overkill? When did we start killing people?”

  Zion gave me the same look he’d been giving Ant a moment earlier.

  “The moment the Ministry started trying to kill us, Robin.”

  Kill us. Right. My brain stuttered at the thought, terrified, then started going full speed again.

  We’d been lucky enough to escape the Ministry’s first attempt, but we had friends who hadn’t.

  “Nelson,” I said quickly. “She has to be our first priority. We have to figure out whether she’s still alive, and where she might be if she is. So much is depending on her.”

  It made complete sense. If we could find her, she could go through what we’d found in the warehouse back there and maybe use it to get into the archives. Maybe she could—

  That thought was stupid beyond belief, I realized a second later. We’d just been shown, without mercy, that we didn’t have the technological wizardry to get past the Ministry. Going into the archives now would be suicide.

  None of that changed the fact that Nelson was my friend. I didn’t want to leave her hanging out to dry. Besides, we might not be able to try hacking into the archives, but we did have another very good reason for needing a tech: we had to figure out where our friends were and how to get them back.

  “We have to find her,” I repeated in the face of the doubtful looks I was receiving from the others. “She’s one of our best techs and knows more about getting through the systems in the dark web than anyone else. We’ve already lost Austin. Surely OH+ is going to need all the techs it can get to keep things running and improve things, and that should include Nelson.”

  Jace gave me a long, sympathetic look. Then he shook his head.

  “We can’t do that, Robin. I’m sorry, but Nathan had a couple points on the schedule of the meeting I was called to this morning. And top of the list was that we’re forbidden from trying to find Nelson. We’re not allowed to go near her house or her office, and we’re absolutely not allowed to try to find her equipment or use it. She’s off limits, and that’s coming straight from Nathan.”

  I stared at him for several heartbeats, shocked—at both the idea that Jace would say such a thing, and that Nathan would dare to give us orders about anything. He might have started OH and then OH+, but that didn’t make him anything more than a talented admin. It certainly didn’t make him our boss.

  If he thought we were going to follow his orders about our friends just because he said so, he had another thing coming.

  “What do you mean, he’s forbidden us from going after her?” I asked quietly, corralling my anger into succinct, sharp words. I hoped that Jace had a good answer for me, something that would make it all more sensible. He looked like he was about to reach for me but stopped himself and sighed deeply.

  “You know I was called to a meeting with Nathan this morning, and I can tell you right now that it wasn’t exactly… pleasant.”

  Cloyd snorted at that.

  “‘Not exactly pleasant’ might actually be the understatement of the century,” he muttered, and I glanced at him, rapidly reevaluating his role in all of this. He had been at the meeting, but why? I knew he wasn’t an admin, and he also wasn’t technologically knowledgeable enough to be a tech. He didn’t seem to be overly motivated as far as leadership went. He definitely wasn’t a people person. Jace could at least interact with other people, courtesy of his charm, while Cloyd hadn’t bothered with anything more than three words at a time toward me—even when Jace introduced me as a friend.

  How exactly was he involved in all of this, and why? Why would Nathan have chosen someone so badly suited to leadership for what amounted to a leadership role?

  Jace distracted me by chuckling dryly and nodded once.

  “Yes, let’s amend that to ‘distinctly unpleasant.’ Nathan is displeased with how things went down last night, and I guess I can’t really blame him.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, my voice still quiet. “He’s displeased? He’s not the one who was out in the middle of nowhere, running for his life from men in murder suits with gigantic pincers large enough to swallow a person whole. He’s certainly not the one who had fire actually shot at him. And he didn’t have to watch any of his friends being captured by Ministry soldiers. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re a bit more displeased than he is.”

  There were mutters of agreement around the table, and I was glad to feel Ant scooting a bit closer to me in silent support.

  Jace ha
d the grace to look slightly abashed and gave me a half smile.

  “I brought those same points up to him, and he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, it got me into even more trouble, but it’s the truth. We were the ones with boots on the ground out there, risking our lives, not him. I think that gives us a right to be upset—but it doesn’t give us the right to keep risking our lives. Nathan is right about Nelson’s office and her house. We know she got into a tussle with a snare protocol during the raid, and we know—or at least we think we know—that she lost that particular battle. She didn’t detect it early enough, so she didn’t react to it as quickly as she should have. Then… well, obviously we can’t know how or why her transmission suddenly cut out, or what happened after that, but chances are the Ministry used the snare to track her physical location and went after her. If they did that, we have to assume that they caught her.”

  I let out an involuntary sob at that cold recitation of facts—at the idea that the Ministry might have my friend—and Jace shot me an apologetic glance. His tone, however, didn’t change.

  “I’m sorry, Robin, but it’s the truth. If we’re going to move forward, we have to do it based on facts rather than things that we hope for.” He gave another deep, heaving sigh, and closed his eyes for a moment. “With that in mind, Nathan doesn’t want us going near her office. If the Ministry did find her location, it means it’s too dangerous. Even if she did get away, and she might have”—he shot another, slightly more conciliatory, glance in my direction—“her office would still be a location that the Ministry knew about. And for all we know, they could have left agents there because they assumed that her friends would show up. They know she was working with someone—with us, given that they were actually chasing us outside that warehouse. They could be setting up a trap for us if we search for her. A snare protocol in the flesh, so to speak.”

  I looked down at the table, my heart racing. When I looked up again, I saw that his eyes were pleading with me, asking me to understand why he was saying what he was and perhaps even asking me to accept that he was right.